The Centenary of 'Dreads and Drolls' by Arthur Machen: A Guest Post by John Howard

Arthur Machen regularly contributed short stories, vignettes, and articles to literary periodicals from early in his career. Never able to make a good and reliable living by journalism – let alone his books – after the death of his first wife Machen went on the stage, joining Frank Benson’s touring company. He continued to publish articles and reviews in numerous London literary magazines, but still found it necessary to seek steady employment to gain the regular income only that could provide.

In 1910 Machen became a full-time journalist, joining the London Evening News and settling to write what was assigned to him, in its required style and to its length. However, he was also allowed something of a ‘roving commission’ and the newspaper would publish his story “The Bowmen” and serialise the original versions of The Great Return and The Terror. It also serialised “Confessions of a Literary Man”, published in book form as Far-Off Things (1922). Machen worked at the Evening News until 1921 when he had to resign over an obituary of Lord Alfred Douglas, who, as he lived to 1945, had been in a position to sue Machen’s employer for a large sum in damages. Machen made no secret of his loathing of his time on the newspaper, referring to it in The London Adventure as ‘a prostitution of the soul’. But he still needed to earn a living, and continued to write for newspapers and magazines.

During the 1920s, when his work was finally but rather fleetingly in demand from trade book publishers, Machen was able to reprint some of the essays that he had published over the years. Two selections were included by Vincent Starrett in his American compilations The Shining Pyramid (1923) and The Glorious Mystery (1924). In the UK Machen collected 27 essays in Dog and Duck (1924) and there was a revised edition of The Shining Pyramid. There were two collections in 1926: Notes and Queries appeared late in the year, having been preceded by Dreads and Drolls a century ago this month.

Dreads and Drolls collected 29 articles that Machen had published in The Graphic, a weekly newspaper which had been founded in 1869 to compete with The Illustrated London News. While he was preparing the book Machen was still contributing to The Graphic – this came to an end at about the time Dreads and Drolls was published, with 60 articles written in total (all of which were finally collected in the expanded edition published by Tartarus Press in 2007). In a prefatory Note Machen wrote that his ‘“Dreads” and “Drolls” were gathered from all sorts of sources. Most of them are strictly veridical, but it may be confessed that here and there imagination plays a small part.’ That was certainly quite a get-out clause.

In “The Man With the Silver Staff” Machen wrote of the clown Joe Grimaldi and how he fell foul of Old Lucas, the notoriously corrupt Parish Constable of Clerkenwell, whose perjuries against the innocent had never been successfully challenged. But the mere appearance in the police office of a mysterious stranger brandishing a silver staff made Lucas retract his accusations against Grimaldi. Machen gave no explanation or theory: he seemingly did no more than recount a strange, old, story.

It was at the beginning of “The Mystery of Mr Haddock” that Machen stated what was in effect his manifesto for the type of work he preferred to write, not only in the series for The Graphic, but for most of his contributions to the periodicals: ‘Everything that is old is dear to me, but more especially the old which is ramshackle, disreputable, up a court or down an alley. […] I cannot define this curious joy of the down-at-heel hidden in a dark place…’ Machen took his readers along such a route to recount some possibly inexplicable events at “7B Coney Court”. Set in a favourite region of London, he went for the verisimilitude of sense of place – but declared that all names and places were fictitious. However – ‘assuming for the moment that names and places are as true as the tale’ Curzon’s Inn lies ‘somewhere between Fleet Street and Holborn. It is approached by a maze of crooked courts and paved alleys, guarded by iron posts…’ Coney Court itself is ‘of a dim red of ancient brickwork; the entrances are enriched with Corinthian pilasters, in the manner of the older doorways in King’s Bench Walk in the Temple; and the carved wooden penthouses over these doorways have been attributed to Grinling Gibbons…’ The story is told at one remove at least, and is a remarkable piece that has the characteristics of what might now be called an urban myth – if it was not an outright piece of fiction. 

He returned to favoured subjects. “Casanova in London” describes some amusing (and possibly not so amusing) things that happened to him during his visit, which ended with Casanova's departure, as he ‘wisely posted away with all speed on the Dover Road.’ In  “The Little People” Machen described the Asiki or ‘Little Beings’ who lived in the French Congo – finding similarities with the ‘fairies’ of Welsh and Irish folklore, and theories of the small dark indigenous inhabitants of the land who had retreated from the invading Celts. There were essays that reported on topical and current issues, if only so Machen could use them as reasons to reminisce or recount anecdotes gathered from wide reading and innumerable encounters. He could never keep away from the eighteenth century and the London that Dr Johnson knew. For example, although Machen began “Before Wembley” with the British Empire Exhibition of 1924-25, he gave most of his space to London’s vanished pleasure gardens, declaring that he was ‘for a return to Vauxhall’.

The years Machen spent as a newspaper journalist covering stories in all parts of London and throughout the country, much as he hated them, had provided him with the ability to write, apparently at least, with an easy facility – although, to some extent, at a cost to his earlier style. Even so, his articles and essays possessed a vivid and distinctive quality that only a thoughtful and accomplished writer – one with a deep ‘hinterland’ – could have given them. Their hearty individuality shone through and engaged the reader as Machen expressed his opinions and prejudices in a combative yet usually good-humoured manner. With their alluring and evocative titles, Machen’s best essays were discursive and leisurely as they developed their themes along wandering paths that could end far from the beginning and in unexpected places. ‘This is a great gift: to be able so to tell the bare truth that it seems a magnificent lie. To many of us it is rather given to invent elaborate fictions which are plainer (and duller) than the plainest facts.’

(John Howard)

Faunus 51

The latest issue of the journal of The Friends of Arthur Machen has just been published and is on its way to members. Faunus 51, edited by Samuel B Kunkel, includes an essay by Alan Moore about his interest in Machen and his writing about the Welsh mage, while R B Russell reviews Alan’s Machen-inspired novel The Great When.

Arfan Iqbal writes about ‘Good and Evil in Machen and Huysmans’; Nick Wagstaff discusses Machen’s noted sleuth of the singular in ‘Mr Dyson: Mystery Man”’; David Neil Lee explores ‘Arthur Machen’s Prima Materia, Quatermass and the Goblin Universe'; and there is a further selection from Machen’s translation of The Way to Attain.

The first edition of the journal is now out of print but a second run is on the way.

The mailing also includes the newsletter Machenalia, edited by Jon Preece, which reports on the Friends’ 2025 AGM near Hay-on-Wye and gives news of the next AGM, in Stratford-upon-Avon. As well as society business, there are also reviews.

Faunus 50 - and a new Faunus Archive

 

The Friends of Arthur Machen has just reached a milestone with the publication of issue 50 of its journal Faunus. This is also the final issue to be edited by James Machin and Tim Jarvis, who hand over to Sam Kunkel, who has also been co-editing recent issues with them. Many thanks to them for their inspired work in editing the journal for the past dozen years.

In this issue, John Harris writes about Machen’s links to Gwyn Jones and the Anglo-Welsh writers of the mid 20th century; Sophie Sleigh-Johnson discusses the tavern in the work of Machen and occult artist Austin Osman Spare; and Felix Taylor considers Machen in Ithell Colquohoun’s Sword of Wisdom. There is also a transcript of a radio talk by Machen in 1937, discussing Chesterton, Shakespeare, and much else, and enlivened as ever by his trenchant views and rolling prose.

The mailing to members has just started and copies of Faunus 50 are on the way, together with the Friends’ newsletter Machenalia, edited by Jon Preece.

The Friends have also announced that all back issues of Faunus will shortly be available to members to download in PDF format for the first time, in a new Friends’ Area. They say: ‘In an exciting expansion of member benefits, every issue - dating all the way back to the very first edition published in 1998 — will be accessible through a brand-new members-only section of this website, allowing Friends to explore the full archive at their leisure.’

This has come about through new digital services editor John Galantini’s redesign of the website and work by Ray Russell and John Ricketts to recover, redesign and proof-read the early issues. Members will receive an email shortly with details on how to access this new section of the website. The idea is that the Friends’ Area ‘will not only house the Faunus archive but will also serve as a platform for digital exclusives, including essays, videos, and audio recordings.’

Machen: At a Man's Table

During 1928, Arthur Machen had a short-lived column in The Sunday Express entitled At a Man's Table, covering the subject of food. Darkly Bright Press has collected these thirteen essays (plus a few more from the same paper, including one missed by Machen's bibliographers), while adding several more of Machen's related writings, most preceding his column in time, but one dates from after it. 

Thus you have a one-hundred-plus paged assembly, curated nicely by Christopher Tompkins, and including Tompkin's introduction which gives context to everything. 

The essays open with Machen's introduction to a centenary edition of  The Physiology of Taste, translated into English for the first time. In the essays themselves, Machen's devotion to curry is well exemplified (including his recipe), and he often reflects on a food's relevance to literature. The pieces from The Sunday Express also include the illustrations by Stuart Parker which originally accompanied the column.

Darkly Bright Press has issued it presently as a limited hardcover. Ordering details can be found here.

The Centenary of 'The Shining Pyramid' (UK edition): A Guest Post by John Howard

The early 1920s were fruitful years for Arthur Machen. Fuelled by a heightened interest in the United States his work was in demand, with publishers scrambling to bring out new books and reprint old ones. Machen provided introductions and prefaces for these editions, some of which were limited and signed, aimed at collectors and priced accordingly. An American edition of The Shining Pyramid appeared in 1923; the British version (Martin Secker), with greatly altered contents, was published one hundred years ago in February 1925.

The new edition reprinted eight pieces. The mixture was as before, fiction and articles originally published in various magazines and newspapers over some thirty years. It was a varied assortment – but came with underlying connections too. Machen wants to show the ‘pattern in the carpet’: that there is a distinction to be made between seeing and perceiving; between mere sight and the perception of meaning and significance. In the essay “The Mystic Speech” Machen particularly amplifies his thesis that ‘great things can be and are before the eyes of men for countless ages, and yet are not perceived’ with lively and vivid examples. For example: ‘From 1620 to 1820, one may say, nobody had seen Gothic at all. It is interesting to look at eighteenth century prints of cathedrals…you might almost say that the artist had been gazing not at Peterboro’ or Lincoln Cathedral, but at a clever model made by a boy with wooden bricks and bits of wire’ (130, 134).

In the stories, things and events, although seen, may not be truly perceived except after thought and study, and through insight and understanding apparently not given to all. In “The Shining Pyramid” Vaughan invites his friend Dyson to visit him at his peaceful home in Wales. At first Dyson resists: “London in September is hard to leave. Doré could not have designed anything more wonderful than Oxford Street as I saw it the other evening; the sunset flaming, the blue haze transmuting the plain street into a road ‘far in the spiritual city’” (14). But an account of a young woman vanishing and some mysterious signs found on a wall convince Dyson to go after all. Vaughan’s quiet district proves to mask a dreadful reality as Dyson uncovers the meaning of the symbols and so the reason for the disappearance.

“Out of the Earth” (1915) is thematically connected to The Terror (1917) and the Great War pieces collected in The Bowmen (1915). Machen – enjoying himself – begins with a recitation of what we might now call the misinformation concerning the ‘Angels of Mons’ and his original authorship of “The Bowmen”. Machen explains that what many regarded as fact was really fiction, while revisiting his journalistic voice in a further fiction presenting as fact something else that humanity was not able to see for what it truly is, and thus perceive. “In Convertendo” (1908) is straightforward. An episode in the life of Ambrose Meyrink, it chronicles his ecstatic liberation from public school and journey to the West. As Meyrink glimpses a certain house from the train he ‘felt as though a voice cried to him from that place; the Cup seemed to summon him to kneel once more and to behold new visions’ (161). The piece was one of several incorporated in The Secret Glory (1922).

In his introduction Machen did not simply discuss The Shining Pyramid and explain that its contents differed from those of the American edition – even though some overlap was acknowledged by reuse of the title. He also revealed something of the reason for the changes: hinting at the tangled international saga of misunderstanding that had led to the appearance of the new work. And as was so often characteristic of Machen, still more lay behind the account he gave: something to be sensed but which had been left unsaid. Our view seems a partial one. We see but cannot perceive.

Machen stated that The Shining Pyramid was the result of a collaboration with an ‘American Gentleman’ who he did not identify. This was journalist and bibliophile Vincent Starrett (1886-1974) who had ‘full of industry, rummaged in old papers, magazines and manuscripts’ which had resulted in the publication of two books by Covici-McGee in the US: The Shining Pyramid and The Glorious Mystery (1924). Machen continues: ‘At length I thought I ought to take a hand in the business. […] I went through the two volumes, and reflecting a good deal, have made them into one’ (7).

Alfred A. Knopf, who had published several books by Machen and considered himself to be his main American publisher, wrote an open letter to the Trade complaining that the two books published by Covici-McGee had been pirated. Machen went along with this interpretation, disowning Starrett and claiming that he had not known about the books or given permission for them (Gawsworth, The Life of Arthur Machen 309-10). However, Starrett defended himself in a pamphlet and showed that in a letter from 1918 Machen had given him permission to ‘lift whatever you like from the “Academy” and “T.P.’s Weekly”’.

The two were reconciled when Starrett visited London in the autumn of 1924. Machen admitted that he had been foolish to give permission and wrong to have forgotten doing so. It had been wrong of Starrett to have gone ahead and arranged publication without first submitting a table of contents to Machen (Arthur Machen: Selected Letters 231-32). Machen’s new version of The Shining Pyramid became the ‘authorised’ one, not only appearing from his main publisher in the UK, Martin Secker, but also in the US through Knopf. Transatlantic and other harmonies had been restored.

(John Howard)