Celebrating the Life and Work of Welsh writer Arthur Machen (3 March 1863 - 15 December 1947)

Arthur Llewelyn Jones better known by his pen-name, Arthur Machen, was an influential Welsh writer of supernatural, occult and mystical stories. Born in the tiny but historically important town of Caerleon, Monmouthshire on 3 March 1863 , Machen was the son of a Anglican clergyman John Edward Jones and his wife, Janet. The shortened form of Machen, which Arthur used for most of his life, was a surname from his mother’s side of the family. He grew up in Llanddewi Fach, a rural parish outside of Caerleon, where his father was vicar. The area had a rich history intertwined with Welsh myth and folklore. The earliest legends of King Arthur placed the seat of his kingdom not in Camelot but in Caerleon. The landscape would influence Machen’s future work in fantasy and weird fiction.

He was a great enthusiast for literature that expressed the "rapture, beauty, adoration, wonder, awe, mystery, sense of the unknown, desire for the unknown" that he summed up in the word ecstasy.

His main passions were for writers and writing he felt achieved this, an idiosyncratic list which included the Mabinogion and other medieval romances, François Rabelais, Miguel de Cervantes, William Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, Thomas de Quincey, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Those writers who failed to achieve this, or far worse did not even attempt it, received short shrift from Machen.

Machen's strong opposition to a materialistic viewpoint is obvious in many of his works, marking him as part of neo-romanticism. He was deeply suspicious of science, materialism, commerce, and Puritanism, all of which were anathema to Machen's conservative, bohemian,mystical, and ritualistic temperament.

Machen moved to London in the early 1880s. He did not immediately attempt to establish himself in Fleet Street. Instead he lived on little and spent his time wandering and exploring the city. He observed the strange juxtaposition of old and new, as Victorian development encroached upon the often dilapidated remains of ancient London.

In 1881, shortly before moving to London, he published Eleusinia, a poetic treatment of the Greco-Roman mystery cult. He published his second book, The Anatomy of Tobacco, in 1884. This was a whimsical appreciation of pipe-smoking. Through his publisher, George Redway, Machen was hired as an editor at the magazine Walford’s Antiquarian. During this period he undertook several translations from French literature, including a multi-volume edition of Casanova’s Memoirs, and produced his first novel, The Chronicle of Clemendy.

Although he came from a middle-class background his career was never less than difficult, and in a long life he was invariably troubled with economic problems, sometimes being one step ahead of poverty.

In 1887, at the age of twenty-four, Machen married a young music teacher named Amy Hogg. His father died the same year, leaving an inheritance that allowed Machen to write full time. He had developed a mature style of prose by the end of the decade. His writing reflected a sense of nostalgia and an interest in supernatural and occult themes.Most of his life was spent in London and the south-east of England, but Monmouthshire, or Gwent, remained a psychological presence, and was an important part of his imaginative vision. This remained for him ‘the enchanted land’ (Far Off Things 8). 

The landscape of Gwent he regarded not only as the place of his boyhood dreaming, but also a means by which the universe beyond the obscuring veil of our perceived ‘real’ world might be glimpsed – one in which Keats’ notion that ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ was an objective and eternal law.

In the 1870s, archaeologists began to uncover remnants of Roman settlements in the region: stonework and pagan idols, As a boy, Machen was intelligent, reserved, and solitary. Fred Hando, in his volume of local history, The Pleasant Land of Gwent, attributes Machen’s interest in the occult to an article about alchemy that he read in an old issue of Charles Dickens’s magazine, Household Words, when he was eight years old. Hando elaborates on Machen’s youthful reading habits: “He bought De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater at Pontypool Road Railway Station, The Arabian Nights at Hereford Railway Station, and borrowed Don Quixote from Mrs. Gwyn, of Llanfrechfa Rectory. In his father’s library he found also the Waverley Novels, a three-volume edition of the Glossary of Gothic Architecture, and an early volume of Tennyson.”

By the time he was sent to study at Hereford Cathedral School at the age of eleven, he showed an interest in history and literature. His family wanted ro send him on to Oxford, where his father had studied, but they lacked the resources. Instead, he decided to pursue a career in journalism.

Machen’s own grandfather, who had been the vicar of Caerleon, was a well-regarded local antiquary, who had discovered Roman stones in his own churchyard. The sense that strangeness and the supernatural permeated the very land would remain with Machen. That countryside with its Roman ruins and fairy glens would reoccur often in his fiction.

Machen’s style is of a uniquely Welsh variety. His works frequently cite those of his fellow countrymen, including George Herbert, who published a book of religious poems in 1633. The storied and ominously beautiful Welsh landscape is a frequent setting for Machen’s writing, particularly his childhood home in Monmouthshire, a county in southeastern Wales of significance to Celtic, Roman, and medieval history.

Gwent was of much greater importance to Machen than an imaginative playground that he could populate with reincarnations of long-dead apocryphal creatures and ghostly spirits. From his earliest days, he was haunted by an apprehension that nature was supremely indifferent to human fate. So while the landscape of Gwent remained a site of great beauty for Machen, it also evoked within him tremendous terror and an overwhelming sense of his insignificance. 

The first and last chapters of his Far Off Things detail a series of long walks the young Machen frequently undertook from Caerleon out to Wentwood, or to the hills just north of Newport, or out towards Usk or Caerwent (we might debate whether or not he was a ‘great’ writer but he was most certainly a great walker) during which he recalls falling into ecstasies of joy and awe at his surroundings. Here Machen recalls one such walk:

I saw everything in something of the spirit in which the first explorers gazed on the tropical luxuriance and strangeness of the South American forests, on the rock cities of Peru, on the unconjectured seas that burst upon them from the peak of Darien, on the wholly unimagined splendours of the Mexican monarchy. 

This brief excerpt evidences the hypnotic rhythms of Machen’s prose, his incantatory invocation of place names that possess their individual magic and mystery, and his immense imaginative power. While nature might have been indeed indifferent to Machen, his responses to Gwent were of an intense engagement that verged on the religious in its passionate intensity. Reconciling the natural beauty of his native Gwent with the terrors it also inspired in him formed the dialectic that would shape almost all of Machen’s fiction, as he notes in Far Off Things, his work ’had all been the expression of one formula, one endeavour. What I had been doing is this; I had been inventing tales in which and by which I had tried to realise my boyish impressions of that wonderful magic Gwent’.

In a letter Machen describes his obsession with the eerie scenery behind the rectory where he lived: “From the windows one looked across a strangely beautiful country to the forest of Wentwood, above the valley of the Usk. Beneath this forest, on the slope of the hill there is a lonely house called Bertholly, and to my eyes and imagination this house was a symbol of awe and mystery and dread.” 

Machen paints a similar picture—one “written to fit Bertholly”—in the opening scene of “The Great God Pan,” which describes the view from a rogue surgeon’s unsettling house-turned-laboratory: “A sweet breath came from the great wood on the hillside above, and with it, at intervals, the soft murmuring call of the wild doves. Below, in the long lovely valley, the river wound in and out between the lonely hills.”

It was in the 1890's that Machen found his true voice in the form of a series of weird tales – notably The Great God Pan (1894) and The Three Imposters (1895), along with a variety of unsettling short stories. These texts established his reputation,

Like Thomas Hardy, Machen responded to the spiritual power and antiquity of the British countryside. His fantasies are often set in medeival England or Wales.Machen’s life was a grind for economic survival, a struggle with the material world, but his writing was a reverse proposition, an engagement not with dull facts but with the world of the imagination and the liminal spaces where reality intersects with the unknown. Machen’s project was to reach through or beyond what is known to postulate a series of encounters with that hidden otherness. As Guillermo de Torro remarks in acknowledgment of the author’s influence on his films, Machen was a fabulist who tried to show a ‘reality invisible’ (The White People viii). and paid the Gwent mystic this tribute: 

 ‘Machen knew that to accept our cosmic insignificance is to achieve a spiritual perspective and ultimately realise that, yes, all is permitted. And that no matter how wicked or perverse we can be, somewhere in the long forgotten realm a mad God awaits, leering – and ready to embrace us all’.

The visionary reality he found was dichotomized: sometimes he imagines a mystical landscape, a weird psycho-geography based on the intense natural beauty of Monmouthshire and the Vale of Usk, which is the source of spiritual sustenance; and sometimes he makes contact with an ancient and threatening evil inspired by a malign Celticism or Classicism. The first of these recalls the visionary Romanticism of William Blake and Samuel  Palmer, while the second is concerned with the workings of paganism and its capacity to disrupt the everyday working of what is accepted as reality, a notion heavily influenced by the supernatural stories of Edgar Allan Poe and R.L Stevenson.

Machen, brought up as the son of a Church of England clergyman, always held Christian beliefs, though accompanied by a fascination with sensual mysticism; his interests in paganism and the occult were especially prominent in his earliest works. Machen was well read on such matters as alchemy, the kabbalah, and Hermeticism, and these occult interests formed part of his close friendship with A. E. Waite. Machen, however, was always very down to earth, requiring substantial proof that a supernatural event had occurred, and was thus highly sceptical of Spiritualism. Unlike many of his contemporaries, such as Oscar Wilde and Alfred Douglas, his disapproval of the Reformation and his admiration for the medieval world and its Roman Catholic ritualism did not fully tempt him away from Anglicanism—though he never fitted comfortably into the Victorian Anglo-Catholic world.

Much of Machen’s work was produced after the end of Victoria’s reign and is outside the scope of the Victorian Web. However, some of the author’s best writing was done in the 1890s and is often linked to the Decadence and developments in occultism such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; his treatment of sexuality and what at the time were considered depraved states of mind also link his work to the late Victorian notion of Degeneracy. Inspired by Roman paganism and Celtic magic – with the evidences of Romano-British culture existing in the form of ruins in his home town – Machen was popularly understood to be one of subversive writers of the time.

His place within the Decadence is most clearly expressed in the publication of his first success, The Great God Pan (1894), which was issued in John Lane’s ‘Keynote’ series in a binding and with a pictorial title-page designed by Aubrey Beardsley. Associated with Lane, the publisher of The Yellow Book and the foremost publisher of the avant-garde, and with Beardsley, the most challenging artist of the Nineties, Machen has been placed by some critics a proto-modernist, stretching the limits of Victorian propriety.

 

The Beardsley title-page for The Great God Pan 

A version of the story was published in the magazine The Whirlwind in 1890, and Machen revised and extended it for its book publication (together with "The Inmost Light") in 1894. On publication it was widely denounced by the press as degenerate and horrific, because of its decadent style and sexual content; but it has since garnered a reputation as a classic of horror. Machen’s story was only one of many at the time to focus on the Greek God Pan as a useful symbol for the power of nature and paganism. The title was possibly inspired by the poem "A Musical Instrument" published in 1862 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in which the first line of every stanza ends "... the great god Pan" 

His novella The Great God  Pan developed the panic and lust traditionally associated with Pan into existential and sexual horror. creating a truly terrifying vision of the god Pan. He presents the strange investigations of Dr Raymond, who performs brain surgery on a young girl, Mary, somehow releasing Pan into the modern world; later, it is revealed that the debauched Helen is Mary’s daughter, and is fathered by the god. Machen writes Helen’s body as a conduit which, in acting as the interface between mystical evil and the material world, is dissolved into an amorphous shapelessness, the sign of mental and spiritual collapse. The narrator is transfixed with horror as he watches her death throes: 

The blackened face, the hideous form upon the bed, changing and melting before your eyes from woman to man, from man to beast, and from beast to worse than beast, all the strange horror that you witness …Though horror and revolting nausea rose up within me, and an odour of corruption choked my breath, I remained firm. I was then privileged or accursed, I dare not say which, to see that which was on the bed, lying there black like ink, transformed before my eyes. The skin, and the flesh, and the muscles, and the bones, and the firm structure of the human body that I had thought to be unchangeable, and permanent as adamant, began to melt and dissolve.

Machen’s The Great God Pan is more generally a text of Decadent uncertainties as the Victorian age entered its transition into the twentieth century. HP Lovecraft, a contemporary of Machen’s, lauded “The Great God Pan” in his 1926 essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” saying: “No one could begin to describe the cumulative suspense and ultimate horror with which every paragraph abounds.” Machen’s amazing writing is emblematic of the collapse of certainties and the blurring of identities to create an epistemological confusion. The effects are destructive and unsettling.The main opponent Pan is never seen, but his influence looms over the events incomprehensible and undefeatable except in the short term. And that, in the end, leaves the readers with nothing but an inexorably growing sense of panic. The story scandalised the Manchester Guardian when it was published in the late 19th century.

This terrifying tale of occult miscegenation was recently, declared by Stephen King to be “one of the best horror stories ever written. Maybe the best in the English language.”

 The Inmost Light' is one of Arthur Machen's most disturbing stories. The plot involves a doctor's scientific experiments into occultism, and the vampiric force instigated by his unrelenting curiosity regarding the unseen elements. A large and glorious gem-stone is the vampiric mediator; soaking up the soul of the doctor's wife; in the place of her spirit a demonic energy too-terrible-to-believe enters, transmuting her brain into that of something "not human".

The White People is another Machen great story, with a young girl’s diary leading us deeper and deeper into a world of strange pagan cults and ritual magic. It’s this story where we get some incredibly evocative language as the young narrator crawls through the wild countryside into a land of faerie hill where she undergoes a proto-Lovecraftian exposure to mind-warping forces.

Yet Machen’s engagement with an imagined world projected some positive messages too. Essentially a visionary Romantic, the author invokes a dream-world of idealized landscapes, largely modelled on his memories of Monmouthshire/Gwent converted into a version of paradise. Though sometimes threatening – as in the ‘The White People’ (1899) – Machen is at his most profound when he constructs an alternative to the mundanity of everyday life.

This approach is exemplified by ‘A Fragment of Life’ (1899). In this suggestive text Machen traces the dull lives of the Darnells’ petit-bourgeois life in London, only relieved by Mr Darnell’s discovery of a sort of transcendent countryside that ultimately leads the couple to regeneration in the landscapes of ‘Caermon’, a thinly disguised version of Caerleon, and the site of the character’s childhood. The conclusion embodies Machen’s belief that literature should not be realistic but invoke ‘ecstacy’ and ecstatic states (Hieroglyphics) with the aim of re-engaging the wearied urban soul with the spiritual sustenance of nature and the purity of a pre-industrial, ancient world. Drawing on his own experience in routine employment, Machen creates a complex balance between the ordinary details of metropolitan life and the poetic visions of a new life. His writing is transformed into prose poetry when he describes the landscapes of the new home:

they were in the heart of a wilderness of hills and valleys that had never been looked upon,and they were going down a wild, steep hillside, where the narrow path wound in and out amidst gorse and towering bracken, and the sun gleaming out for a moment, there was a gleam of white water far below in the narrow valley, where a little brook poured and rippled from stone to stone. [‘A Fragment of Life,’ The White People 219]

This sacramental lyricism stands in stark contrast to the gruesome details of Helen’s shimmering metamorphoses, and the contrast between the two encapsulates the range of Machen’s achievement as he strove to re-capture the mystical meanings obscured by Victorian materialism, or distorted by the pretentions of science.

Throughout the First World War Machen was a patriot giving his full support to the war in Europe, believing that the Allied forces were fighting a just war against the evil German Empire.His most famous piece was wriiten during this time ‘The Bowmen’ (1914), in which he imagined the archers of Agincourt rising up to protect British troops in the trenches; in an age of deep anxiety, and with unrest growing even before the first year of conflict had come to an end, some believed it to be a true account based on soldiers’ testimony, and it was the source of the legend of the Angels of Mons. sparking a whole series of myths  and giving hope to thousands of soldiers in battle.

The story caused a sensation and was published in a collection of wartime fiction, which sold very well. Machen was encouraged to turn his attention back to creative writing, publishing a series of stories capitalizing on this success, most of which were morale-boosting propaganda, but the most notable, "The Great Return" (1915) and the novella The Terror (1917), were more accomplished. He also published a series of autobiographical articles during the war, later reprinted in book form as Far Off Things. During the war years Machen also met and championed the work of a fellow Welshman, Caradog Evans.

Machen’s synthesis of mythology, horror and fantasy was popular, and he enjoyed some benefits from the rise of spiritualism and occultism in the aftermath of the Great War, with much of his fiction being reprinted; but his later years could barely be described as any more secure than his early ones.

Machen’s rise in the literary world was cut short by a scandal that did not really involve him. The Decadent Movement was widely repudiated in the mid-1890s when Oscar Wilde was put on trial for sodomy and gross indecency.In 1921 he published an obituary of his former editor at The Academy, Lord Alfred Douglas. In the obituary he alluded to the homosexual affair between Lord Alfred and Oscar Wilde, which had been the cause of Wilde’s trial and disgrace. Awkwardly for Machen, Lord Alfred was not, in fact, dead. He sued The Evening News. Machen was fired. He responded to his exile from Fleet Street with a quotation from the Psalms in Latin: “Eduxit me de lacu miseriae, et de luto faecis” (“He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay,” in the King James Version). 

One has to wonder whether he sabotaged his own career intentionally, or at least subconsciously. Machen continued to write over the next decade but did not publish. Fortunately, he still had his inheritance to live upon. He also gained a basic income from journalism and from work as a publisher’s reader.

From all I've read, Machen was a fairly reserved man, but also one who liked people. He especially liked observing all different kinds of folks out in the streets of his beloved London and, especially, in pubs. Arthur was also a man who, while able to live quite frugally when circumstances required it, liked good food and drink when he could afford it.

As the turn of the twentieth century approached however, Machen suffered a terrible loss. After a long illness, his wife, Amy, died of cancer in 1899. Machen was overwhelmed with grief and it plunged Machen into the depths of despair and like Dickens before him he took to making long and rambling walks through the city at any hour of the day or night.

During these walks he would stare at buildings and streets, conscious that there were hidden lives and meanings lurking behind what were seemingly ordinary places and façades. Looking beyond the ordinary was a practice that informed many of his stories, in many ways the beginnings of psycho-geography as a concept in writing.

Psychogeography originated in 1950’s Paris with Guy Debord, the creator of the avant-garde group, the Lettrist International. Debord’s own definition is as follows:  “The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.”  Debord himself said that the definition had a “ had a “pleasing vagueness” which is rather convenient considering the wide range of situations the term has been applied to. which is rather convenient considering the wide range of situations the term has been applied to. He attributes the invention of the term to “an illiterate Kabyle” in his essay Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.

While the term originated in the 1950’s, figures such as Blake, de Quincey, Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Machen were all responsible for an imagining of a city that had a spirit of place, and looked for ways to experience what were familiar surroundings in new and insightful ways.

The term "psychogeography" is used to illustrate an array of ideas, from ley lines and the occult to urban walking and political radicalism. At its heart it unveils the story of a place by wandering through it and looking for clues and connections that will tell its history. Machen was a pioneer of this before it was ever given a name: He explores the by-ways of London where things happen that you can't explain.

Friends encouraged Machen to recover from his devastating loss by cultivating his spiritual life. Through Arthur Edward Waite, he joined the occult society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Though Machen shared the group’s interest in the Western Mystery Tradition his own spiritual awakening was leading him in a different direction.

Machen was a lifelong Anglican Christian. Following the death of his wife, he experienced a religious epiphany. He would later write that during the “autumn of 1899-1900 . . . the two worlds of sense and spirit were admirably and wonderfully mingled, so that it was difficult, or rather impossible, to distinguish the outward and sensible glow from the inward and spiritual grace.” He was a high churchman who favored the catholic inheritance of the Church of England over the reformed inheritance. But he identified the catholicity of Anglicanism with a Celtic Christianity that predated the arrival of missionaries from the Church of Rome.

He found other ways to work through the heartbreak of Amy’s death as well. In 1901, he made the perhaps unexpected—but to anyone who knows the healing potential of theater, not surprising—decision to become an actor. He joined Frederick Benson’s theater company. Touring and performing gave Machen a source of optimism and confidence, which spilled over into the rest of his life. Though previously extremely reserved, he now became more outgoing and gregarious.

Four years after Amy’s death, Machen married for the second time, to Dorothie Purefoy Hudleston. Purefoy, as she was called, was a fellow member of Benson’s company. The couple frequently toured with the troupe and enjoyed a rather bohemian lifestyle. It was a long and happy union and the couple went on to have a son and daughter. Hilary and Janet.

He travelled all over the country, acting but also picking up snippets of fact and fantasy to turn into stories. His acting career came to an end in 1909 and his series of autobiographical writings began with what was probably his masterpiece, Far Off Things, in the final years of the Great War.

Purefoy encouraged Machen in both his faith and his writing. In 1906, at last, he published a collection of old and new pieces, The House of Souls. The following year, he published his masterwork  The Hill of Dreams in which a young man recalls a childhood in rural Wales filled with sensual visions from earlier times,and a quest for beauty through literature, love and dreams. It is widely regarded as Machen's finest lyrical work.

The eponymous Hill of Dreams is a ruined Roman fortress where the young Lucian Taylor saw visions of an erotically pagan otherworld. As he moves to London the visions become an uncomfortable force, a web drawing him in as a spirit dwelling within him gains more and more power. 

How much The Hill of Dreams is spiritual autobiography is disputable, there can be no doubt however that Lucian’s experience in some way mirrored Machen’s. His precarious early life in London became the template for his stories; characters are frequently a hair’s breadth from death by starvation, the streets and modern inns, and the monotonous suburbs and labyrinthine rookeries that Machen endlessly patrolled were the settings for his abominations. Industrial smog and petroleum naphtha street lamps light the path to Hell, and the keys to Its gates are held by unwitting drunkards, prostitutes, street artists and tramps.

In other words it is not just the nature of the horror that makes it so effective, but where it takes place:

‘As I glanced up I had looked straight towards the last house in the row before me and in an upper window of that house I had seen for some short fraction of a second a face. It was the face of a woman and yet it was not human…. as I saw that face at the window, with the blue sky above me and the warm air playing in gusts about me, I knew that I had looked into another world – looked through the window of a commonplace, brand new house, and seen hell open before me. ‘

Unlike Dickens, Machen specialised in the unexaggerated mundane; Machen’s descriptions do not enliven what is seen, as in Dickens, rather they deaden it, in this lies the fear. The otherwise rather unsuccessful Novel of the Iron Maid perfectly evokes the mood:

‘Before me was the long suburban street, its dreary distance marked by rows of twinkling lamps, and the air was poisoned by the faint, sickly smell of burning bricks; it was not a cheerful prospect by any means, and I had to walk through nine miles of such streets, deserted as those of Pompeii. I knew pretty well what direction to take, so I set out wearily, looking at the stretch of lamps vanishing in perspective: and as I walked street after street branched off to right and left, some far reaching, to distances that seemed endless, communicating with other systems of thoroughfare, and some mere protoplasmic streets, and ending suddenly in waste, and pits, and rubbish heaps, and fields whence the magic had departed. I have spoken of systems of thoroughfare, and I assure you that walking alone through these silent places I felt fantasy growing on me, and some glamour of the infinite. ‘

This is the spiritual location of Machen’s adventure. In infinite streets anything can happen – anything must happen eventually. Those who criticise Machen’s overuse of coincidence proceed from a fundamental error; trying to interpret his writings according to a theory of realism that Machen despised. The events in his works progress as in a nightmare. There is a sense that when his characters wander aimlessly they are part of a hidden process. That whether they choose streets left or right, secluded courtyard or crowded pub, they are progressing down an unalterable path to the heart of the mystery. In an infinite labyrinth everywhere is the centre; Machen’s London as a whole partakes of the mysteries that occur within it.

A new purpose appeared in his writings from the early 1900s onward. His interest in Celtic Christianity and mysticism came to define his work. He began to write for The Academy, a conservative literary journal, run by Lord Alfred Douglas, in which Machen explored the legends of King Arthur and the Holy Grail, placing them in the context of Celtic Christianity. Machen’s writings on religion emphasized ritual and the imagination. During this time, he translated his interest in the Holy Grail to fiction in the novel, The Secret Glory, about a young orphan who achieves salvation and martyrdom on a modern quest for the Grail.

In 1937 he was asked about his views on the Spanish Civil War by the editors of Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War. The vast majority took the side of the Popular Front government but Machen, was only one of five authors who supported the fascist leader, General Francisco Franco. He wrote that "Arthur Machen begs to inform you that he is, and always has been, entirely for Franco." 

This opinion reflected how much Machen was out of touch with political life. In all, 131 writers opposed the fascists. This included those writers who dominated cultural life at that time such as W.H. Auden, Cyril Connolly, Stephen Spender, Aldous Huxley, Ford Madox Ford, Hugh Macdiarmid, Arthur Koestler, Rebecca West, Ethel Mannin, Rose Macaulay, Edgell Rickword, Laurence Housman, Victor Gollancz, Cecil Day-Lewis and A. E. Coppard. 

Anthony Powell, the future novelist, often saw Machen during this period. Powell wrote about it thirty years later: "When I was a boy I used sometimes to catch a glimpse of Arthur Machen in St John's Wood, with his longish white hair and Inverness cape, every inch a nineteenth century literary man... a type, I think it would be true to say, now entirely extinct."

The novelist, Frank Baker, was a regular visitor to the Machen home: "This exuberant and always jovial pair ... never seemed old; and although with beautiful courtesy they were always able to make us feel we were their contemporaries, they were completely at ease with our own years. In his outward person Arthur presented both the great man of letters and the actor-manager of bygone times: a black topcoat with an ulster cape over his broad shoulders; black wide-brimmed hat; a round and very solid head with brilliant blue eyes, and a tonsure fringed by the silky white hair... Everyone who knew Machen is agreed that he was one of the last great conversationalists... And Mr Machen's views were always strong; or, if he had no views, he would lead into an anecdote, the laughter would be fine, another round of drinks would be called for, tobacco reliit, and you were ready for the next act... the tenderness, the all-enfolding gusty humour, the Rabelaisian rumbustiouness which made up the greater part of him very soon came bubbling out." 

In 1943 an Appeal Fund, supported by George Bernard Shaw, Siegfried Sassoon, Max Beerholm, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Frank Baker, T. S. Eliot and Water de la Mare, raised enough money to keep the Machens in reasonable comfort for the remainder of their years.In old age he was regarded as something of a personality; bridging Victorianism and the new age.

His wife was buried on April 3, 1947 and he was interred on the 17th of December of the same year, two days after he died at St. Joseph's Nursing Home aged 84.in Amersham, Buckinghamshire,  a final destination in sharp contrast to his origins in rural South Wales.The Latin text carved in the shape of a cross on Arthur’s grave:  “Omnia exeunt in mysterium” means  “All things pass into mystery” 

An almost-forgotten and neglected  figure for too long, Machen rich body of work has received increasing attention in recent years  as readers discover him through writers he inspired. Machen is often reduced by many critics as a mere peddler of arcane mythology and occultist fantasy, but if you look closer at his best work it is clear that his ambition was to write novels that would reify those same joys, terrors and awe he had experienced on his childhood walks along the lanes and hillside pathways of Gwent. His stories disturb and perturb us long after we have read them not only because they feature Gothic staples, such as ancient curses and satanic evil, but because they reawaken our suspicion that reality is something that we dimly perceive and always fail to understand. He engages his readers on an emotional level.

The great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges observed:  ‘Literature is a game played with words – words are the stock elements – but we should not forget that in the case of masters, and Machen is one of them, this game of algebra and chess reflects an emotion’. 

Arthur Conan Doyle called Machen a genus, Oscar Wilde, WB Yeats  and H,G, Wells admired him. Fascinating mystical and artistic practically everything Machen wrote in the 1890s had the touch of genius, and this even applies to his non-fiction, Machen is a significant writer whose work has  had a considerable impact on the development of horror and supernatural fiction.

S. T. Joshi sums up his influence, noting how he was ‘a harbinger of a kind of golden age of weird writing’ and offered exemplars for the writing of Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, Walter de la Mare and H. P, Lovecraft . All of these authors built on Machen’s interaction of setting and character, developing the psycho-geography that is central to his fantastical merging of landscape and psyche. Machen has been equally influential in the development of the more visceral physicality and body-horror of twentieth century horror; his descriptions of fluxing bodies and grotesque encounters has become a mainstay of the genre, and his work admired by modern practitioners such as Stephen King. Film too has responded to his dream-worlds. As noted earlier, Guillermo del Torro pays homage to the Welsh writer’s dislocating effects, and there is undoubtedly an echo of Machen’s grotesqueness in the bizarre body-horror of del Toro’s acclaimed fantasy film Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)   which was influenced by Machen’s tale ‘The White People’.

As one of the genuine voices of Anglo-Welsh literature, Machen deserves to have a more visible profile and to be remembered as a master of occult horror alongside those who came after him (though it is worth noting that he would have strenuously, and with justice, resisted the idea that he was simply or solely a horror writer). 

Alongside others mentioned Machen admirers have included the film director Michael Powell, Jorge Luis Borges, Hitchcock’s regular composer Bernard Herrmann, J.B Preistly, Mick Jagger, Stand-up comedian Stewart Lee, plus the comic genius that is Barry Humphries and the sadly missed Mark E Smith, of the Fall  who named their 2000 album The Unutterable ,from the master and said: “The real occult’s in the pubs of the East End. In the stinking boats of the Thames, not in Egypt. It’s on your doorstep basically.”

Machen's disturbing stories have also had a far-reaching influence on generations of post-war writers, such as Paul Bowles.Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Clive Barker and Alan Moore, who have all drawn upon Machen for inspiration in their own novels, stories,which their fans have been content to enjoy without necessarily feeling compelled to pursue Machen’s distinctive note of weirdness back to the source.

It has always amazed me that Machen's work is so undervalued here in Wales. Although Machen was known by serious horror buffs and students of London's occult literature, his work had sunk into relative obscurity compared with horror writers such as H P Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe.
The problem with Machen for Welsh critics is that he doesn't fit comfortably into the realism-dominated, Welsh writing (in English) canon. He is a one-off, an outsider. Add to this a snooty attitude from academia towards genre fiction in general (horror stories aren't real writing are they?) and you begin to understand why Machen's work has slipped into the margins in Wales.

It's a shame because he has written some of the best short stories in the English language. I personally think his work is incredible.  At least with the surge of interest in psychogeography over the past years, Machen seems at last to be getting the attention he deserves. Machen's belief that the British landscape retains the imprint of those who live in it has inspired writers such as Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd to explore London's psychogeography too.

Machen's legacy is protected by the Friends of Arthur Machen, an organization with an international membership and the source of modern scholarship on this unusual and challenging writer. The society publishes a journal, Faunus, and a regular newsletter, Machenalia, and in 2005 issued John Gawsworth’s biography of Machen, written in the 1930s.Within the fellowship you will encounter interest in mysticism, in the occult, in both paganism and Christianity, in the decadence of the 1890s, in the mysterious landscapes of Gwent and London.

If you’d like to read something by Machen, project Gutenberg has a number of his stories for free,you can't go wrong with any of them.Many years after his death Arthur  Machen still deserves our attention.https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/389

Given the length and breadth of his career it is somewhat surprising that almost no recordings of him exist. In 1934 he wrote to friend Montgomery Evans, “nor do I imagine that the B.B.C. has heard of me.”

He did eventually record at least one program for the BBC in March of 1937. A three-and-a-half minute fragment of the broadcast survives. It may be the only surviving record of Machen’s voice. On the program he discusses Charles Dickens, of whom he was a great admirer. It is a remarkable treasure for anyone who loves Machen as I do. Listen below..

 

 

 Bibliography and sources

Machen, Arthur. The Angels of Mons: The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War. London: Simpkin Marshall, 1915.

Machen, Arthur. Far Off Things. London: Martin Secker, 1922.

Machen, Arthur. The Great God Pan. Online version published by Project Gutenberg.

Machen, Arthur. Hieroglyphics: A Note Upon Ecstacy in Literature. London: Grant Richards, 1902.

Machen, Arthur. The White People and Other Weird Stories. Edited with an introduction by S. T. Joshi and with a Foreword by Guillermo Del Torro. London: Penguin, 2011.

 Machen, Arthur. (1924) The London Adventure, or The Art of Wandering. London: Martin Secker.

Sweetster, Wesley; Goldstone, Adrian. (1960) Arthur Machen. Llandeilo: St Albert’s Press.

Valentine, Mark. (1995) Arthur Machen. Bridgend: Seren Books.

Wilson, A.N. (June 6, 2005) “Angels were on his side,” The Telegraph. London. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3617433/World-of-books.html

“The Life of Arthur Machen.” http://www.arthurmachen.org.uk/machbiog.html

“Arthur Machen’s Writings: Annotated Bibliography.” http://www.arthurmachen.org.uk/machwork.html

The Friends of Arthur Machen .://www.arthurmachen.org.uk/machfriends.html