And yet, Machen himself was struggling along as a journalist for a variety of British magazines and newspapers, making ends meet only by writing with unrelenting regularity for such papers as the London Graphic, John O’London’s Weekly, the Lyons Mail, and the Observer; toward the end of the decade he had lapsed into such poverty that an extraordinary effort was made by British writers—T. S. Eliot among them—to garner a Civil List pension for him; the effort succeeded in 1931. Thereafter Machen had an annual income of £100 from the British government, and this allowed him to live in comfort at his home in Old Amersham, Buckinghamshire, for the remaining sixteen years of his life.

Scarcely a year in the 1920s passed without some significant publication of Machen’s work, but in the great majority of instances these presented stories, novels, or essays that he had written years or decades before. His major original works of the period were his three sensitive autobiographies, Far Off Things (1922), Things Near and Far (1923), and The London Adventure (1924), which paint a bittersweet portrait of the poverty he endured when he left his native Wales in the early 1880s to work as a Grub Street hack during the day while spending the evenings writing those imperishable works of fantasy and terror that have earned him a small but choice readership. Alfred A. Knopf began issuing a multivolume edition of his major works in the United States in 1922, and those volumes, with their familiar yellow covers, are still highly soughtafter items for the book collector.

One wonders whether Machen gained a sense of being posthumous in his own time. He was being hailed for works he had written as a young man in the 1890s, and little of his new work found either critical esteem or popular favor. He wrote relatively few actual works of fiction in the 1920s, aside from some stories for various anthologies edited by Cynthia Asquith. In the 1930s he resumed somewhat greater productivity in fiction writing and issued two late collections, The Cosy Room and The Children of the Pool, both published in 1936. The former volume contains stories written over a wide period, but the latter is an original collection of previously unpublished tales. They are, however, a sadly uneven mix. Machen’s wife of many years, Purefoy, died on March 30, 1947, and he himself died several months later, on December 15, 1947.

Like many writers, Machen wrote too much, and wrote too often under the stress of economic necessity rather than aesthetic inspiration, but he should be judged by his best work, not his worst. In a career that spanned more than six decades, he produced some of the most evocative weird fiction in all literary history. Written with impeccably mellifluous prose, infused with a powerful mystical vision, and imbued with a wonder and terror that their author felt with every fiber of his being, his novels and tales will survive when works of far greater technical accomplishment fall by the wayside. Flawed as some of them are by certain crotchets—especially a furious hostility to science and secularism—that disfigure Machen’s own philosophy, they are nonetheless as effective as they are because they echo the sincere beliefs of their author, whose eternal quest to preserve the mystery of the universe in an age of materialism is one to which we can all respond.

S. T. JOSHI

Suggestions for Further Reading

PRIMARY SOURCES

Machen’s short stories were collected in his lifetime in the volumes The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light (John Lane/ Roberts Brothers, 1894), The House of Souls (Grant Richards, 1906; abridged ed. Knopf, 1922), The Angels of Mons: The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War (Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1915), Ornaments in Jade (Knopf, 1924), The Shining Pyramid (Martin Secker, 1925), The Children of the Pool and Other Stories (Hutchinson, 1936), and The Cosy Room and Other Stories (Rich & Cowan, 1936). After his death, Philip Van Doren Stern assembled Tales of Horror and the Supernatural (Knopf, 1948), which has stayed in print to the present day from various publishers, most recently Tartarus Press (1997). Successive editions of Ritual and Other Stories (Tartarus Press, 1992, 1997, 2004) gather the stories not included in Tales of Horror and the Supernatural. S. T. Joshi has assembled three volumes of Machen’s stories that contain nearly the totality of his short fiction: The Three Impostors and Other Stories (Chaosium, 2001), The White People and Other Stories (Chaosium, 2003), and The Terror and Other Stories (Chaosium, 2005).

Novel-length works of fiction include The Chronicle of Clemendy (Society of Pantagruelists, 1888), a picaresque novel; The Three Impostors (John Lane/Roberts Brothers, 1895); The Hill of Dreams (Grant Richards, 1907), a powerful study of artistic expression; The Terror (Duckworth, 1917); The Secret Glory (Martin Secker, 1922), a satire of the British school system; and The Green Round (Ernest Benn, 1933), a slight weird novel.

Machen’s nonfiction writing is voluminous and largely uncollected. Important book-length works are The Anatomy of Tobacco (Redway, 1884), a tongue-in-cheek study of types of tobacco; Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in Literature (Grant Richards, 1902), a significant statement of Machen’s aesthetic principles ; and The Canning Wonder (Chatto & Windus, 1925), an account of a mysterious disappearance in the eighteenth century. In a class by themselves are Machen’s three autobiographies, Far Off Things (Martin Secker, 1922), Things Near and Far (Martin Secker, 1923), and The London Adventure (Martin Secker, 1924); the first two were reprinted as The Autobiography of Arthur Machen (Richards Press, 1951). His periodical essays were gathered in Dog and Duck (Knopf, 1924), Dreads and Drolls (Martin Secker, 1926), Notes and Queries (Spurr & Swift, 1926), and in two volumes assembled by Vincent Starrett, The Shining Pyramid (Covici-McGee, 1923) and The Glorious Mystery (Covici-McGee, 1924), but the great majority—especially his hundreds of articles for the London Evening News (1910–21)—remain uncollected. An important recent volume of essays is The Secret of the Sangraal, edited by R. B. Russell (Tartarus Press, 1995). Russell has also edited an expanded edition of Dreads and Drolls (Tartarus Press, 2007).

A slim collection of letters—A Few Letters from Arthur Machen (Rowfant Club, 1932)—appeared in Machen’s lifetime.