"The Shining Pyramid" Centenary

    The 1923 Covici-McGee cover

The Shining Pyramid, by Arthur Machen, edited from Machen’s previously uncollected journalism by Vincent Starrett and published in May 1923 in Chicago by Covici-McGee, is a landmark book, both for good and bad reasons. Of the good reasons, it was important in the development of Machen’s popularity in America. Of the bad reasons, it precipitated the end of the friendship between the author and the editor. And as a title, it is easily confused with Machen’s own selection titled The Shining Pyramid and published by Martin Secker of London in 1925, which has very different contents, as is discussed below.

A detailed account of this complicated history can be found in the small press volume Starrett versus Machen: A Record of Discovery and Correspondence (St. Louis: Autolycus Press, 1977), which was limited to 500 numbered copies. (An overview appears online as “Vincent Starrett: Disciple or Thief?” here.) But let me recount here only the burying of the hachet.

After The Shining Pyramid appeared in May 1923 in an edition limited to  875 copies,  for which neither Machen nor Starrett were paid, a second volume, The Glorious Mystery, came out in Chicago from Covici-McGee in April 1924, again composed of similar Machen matieral collected by Starrett.

The burying of the hatchet occurred later in 1924 when Starrett visited England, and Machen left this account of their meeting:

 Mr. Vincent Starrett called on me in London a few weeks ago. I submitted to him three propositions:

1) It was very silly of me to say in 1918: ‘You may do what you like with my old stuff.’

2) It was wrong of me not to recollect this saying in 1924.

3) It was very wrong of you to make two books of this ‘old stuff’ without consulting me as to the contents.

Upon seeing this account, which was an inscription Machen wrote in a copy of The Shining Pyramid, Starrett noted that it was “an accurate statement of what occurred between Machen and me when I visited him in 1924. He added at that time one word: ‘Curtain!’, and we shook hands and drank to the conclusion of our quarrel.” But the two men went their separate ways afterwards, and Machen later expressed some lingering hostility.  

 1923 Wallace Smith illustration

But what of the contents of the book itself?  The Shining Pyramid consists of some twenty-two tales and essays, several of which date from late 1880s and early 1890s, and a few come from the late 1910s. Thirteen essays come from 1907-08, when Machen wrote regularly for The Academy, then edited by Lord Alfred Douglas. One essay (“The Capital Levy”) was even unpublished—it was printed from a manuscript that Machen gave to Starrett. Wallace Smith contributed an interior illustration.

The short stories and fiction are probably the most significant items. These include “The Shining Pyramid” (1895), “Out of the Earth” (1915), “The Lost Club” (1890), “The Wonderful Woman” (1890), and three pieces (1907-08) —“In Convertendo,” “The Hidden Mysery” and “The Martyr” — all  being salvaged from the original ending of The Secret Glory (published in 1922 but written in 1907) and not used in the published book (Machen described such pieces as “wreckage”).  

Starrett’s second volume, The Glorious Mystery, contains twenty-eight pieces, one written not by Machen but by Alfred Nutt, in reply to something by Machen (which also appears herein, along with Machen’s rebuttal to Nutt). Only two items are fiction: “The Iron Maid,” an 1890 version of what became a section in some editions of The Three Imposters (1895), notably omitted from the 1923 U.S. edition; and “The Rose Garden,” a stray 1908 publication collected in Ornaments in Jade (1924), Four essays come from periodicals from 1910-1920, but the bulk of the essays, some twenty in total, come from The Academy, 1907-08, as described above. 

After Starrett’s second compilation was published, Machen made a one-volume selection published by Martin Secker in London under the title The Shining Pyramid, confusing things bibliographically. It was published in an edition limited to 250 signed copies in December 1924, and in a trade edition in February 1925. (A U.S. edition, made from sheets printed in Great Britain, published in April 1925 by Alfred A. Knopf of New York further confuses bibliographical matters.) Machen’s selection amounts to only eight items from Starrett’s two books. The fiction includes “The Shining Pyramid”; “Out of the Earth”; “The Happy Children”; and two of the three pieces aborted from the original ending of The Secret Glory (“In Convertendo” and “The Martyr” but not “The Hidden Mystery”). “The Secret of the Sangraal” is expanded from the version in The Glorious Mystery (itself reprinted from The Academy, 1907). “The Mystic Speech” is a retitling of “A Secret Language” in The Glorious Mystery. The final item (“Educated and the Uneducated”) came from The Shining Pyramid.

So, in the end, we are left to celebrate here Machen’s writings in the context of a confusing controversy from one hundred years ago. The controversy is long dead, but the writings live.

The Centenary of 'Not in Our Stars'

I first looked into the books of Michael Maurice because I had read a description of his The Last House (1933) in a publisher’s catalogue at the back of a book which said it was about a semi-independent enclave in Britain. This sounded as if it might be like two books I enjoyed with a similar theme, The King of Lamrock (1921) by V Y Hewson and Old King Cole (1936) by Edward Shanks.

There are points in common: all three involve temperamental squires possessive of their traditions and rights, in remote corners of the country. But Maurice’s novel is predominantly a conventional social comedy, even to the extent of involving a nurse-and-patient romance.

There are picturesque aspects: the protagonist is a speechwriter and ghost-writer, both for eminent personages and for eccentrics, and the author has some fun with this; but essentially this is a whimsical satire. It was praised by J B Priestley and is very much in his style. The theme presages the Powell & Pressburger film A Canterbury Tale (1944), also with an old-fashioned and domineering squire.

Maurice’s first novel, Not in Our Stars (1923), which celebrates its centenary this month, starts interestingly enough. The tone is that of the society novel, but the content rather Wellsian, an odd mix. Menzies, a saturnine clubman, has second sight, though he cannot use it at will: it occurs seemingly randomly and lasts about an hour or so.

He is convinced by this that we are all predestined: that we simply follow a thread of fate already wound out for us. At a dinner party there is discussion of a recent meteor strike in the Andes, and an earlier one on the coast of Greenland: Menzies predicts even more dramatic collisions to come, which may shift the Earth off its axis.

We soon witness just such a great upheaval and a descent of darkness, and after this Menzies wakes up in a new scene entirely, and a rather desperate one. He is, in fact, now living backwards, his days preceding, not succeeding, each other. Though this is a neat idea, and Maurice handles it very capably, he unfortunately plays it out through a conventional and melodramatic plot that rather undermines his earlier inventiveness.

Not in Our Stars was published in the Fisher Unwin First Novel series, and it looks as though Maurice was trying to make his book as winningly commercial as possible, to get the attention of the publisher. The time-twisting element is bold and interestingly speculative but the use of it a bit too garish. 

My copy of the book (once priced at half a crown) bears the ownership rubber stamp mark of Wyndham’s Theatre Box Office Manager, with a signature, and on the fixed front endpaper a playbill is pasted in, showing that a dramatisation of the book by Dorothy Massingham was performed ‘On Monday Evening, February 24^th, 1924, at 8.30’. The cast included Gerald du Maurier (as Menzies), Eric Maturin and Nigel Bruce.

Michael Maurice was the pen-name of Conrad Arthur Skinner (1889-1975), a Methodist minister and for many years the chaplain at the Leys School, Cambridge: he had been a cox in the university boating team. He was the author of ten novels in all, including others with supernatural content, but those that I have read so far all seem to have this somewhat overly-calculated commercial slant.

This is odd, because Maurice himself praised the work of J.D. Beresford, whose novels are quite the opposite: thoughtful, steady, slow-burning, almost too subdued. I am therefore hoping that there might turn out to be one or two of Maurice’s books that allow his unusual ideas to prevail rather more.

(Mark Valentine)