“For a long time, as it seems to me, I have been talking of discoveries of books . . .”
That goes for me too,
including the book from which I take that passage – the first volume of Arthur
Machen’s autobiography, Far Off Things (1922). It’s the first book by Machen I
have read, and probably the last. A reader recommended it because Machen was a
lifelong book collector and ambitious reader. He is best known as a writer of
horror fiction. If the author isn’t named Henry James or Isaac Bashevis Singer
(or Shakespeare), I’m unlikely to read a ghost story or anything from the
fantasy and supernatural genres.
I share some aspects of
Machen’s childhood: “[A]s soon as I could read I had the run of a thoroughly
ill-selected library; or, rather, of a library that had not been selected at
all. My father’s collection, if that serious word may be applied to a
hugger-mugger of books, had grown up anyhow and nohow, and in it the most
revered stocks had mingled with the most frivolous.”
That sounds like the
assortment of books kept by my mother: Anthony Adverse, Green Dolphin
Street, The Grapes of Wrath – bestselling junk from the 30s and 40s.
My father contributed a history of World War II published by the Department of
Defense. Except for fugitive volumes from a Dickens set (Vol. 2 of Martin
Chuzzlewit), that was it.
Machen doesn’t devote
separate, freestanding chapters to books. Rather, his life and the books he
reads are interleaved. Of his boyhood he writes:
“I have read curious and perplexed
commentaries of that place in Sir Thomas Browne in which he declares his life up
to the period of the Religio Medici to have been ‘a miracle of thirty
years, which to relate were not a history, but a piece of poetry.’”
Machen refers to a sublime
passage in Part II, Section 12 of Religio Medici: “Now for my life, it
is a miracle of thirty yeares, which to relate, were not a History, but a peece
of Poetry, and would sound to common eares like a fable; for the world, I count
it not an Inne, but an Hospitall, and a place, not to live, but to die in. The
world that I regard is my selfe, it is the Microcosme of mine owne frame . . .”
Machen continues: “Dr. Johnson, summing up the known events of Browne’s early life, finds therein nothing in the least miraculous; Southey says the miracle was the great writer’s preservation from atheism; Leslie Stephen considers that the strangeness ‘consists rather in Browne’s view of his own history than in any unusual phenomena. . . . Of my private opinion. I think there can be little doubt that when Sir Thomas Browne used the word ‘miraculous’ he was thinking not of miracles in the accepted sense as things done contrary to the generally observed laws of nature, but rather of his vision of the world, of his sense of a constant wonder latent in all things.”
4 comments:
Don't let the "horror" label put you off. Machen's short story "The White people" is simply an extraordinary piece of writing. (He also translated Casanova's memoirs in six volumes - I can turn my head and see my set as I write.)
Arthur Machen (1863-1947), the Welsh writer, was not related to another well-known person of the same name: John Gresham Machen (1881-1937), the American Presbyterian New Testament scholar, author, and churchman. Their names were pronounced differently, also. The latter's was pronounced with a long "a" and the "ch" pronounced as in "cheese." (And "Gresham" is pronounced with the "h" being silent.)
In the 1920s and 1930s, the latter man was at least as well-known in the US as the former, in their respective circles.
I second Thomas Parker's comment. Machen was not what one usually thinks of as a horror or fantasy writer. And his translation of Cassanova's memoirs is the best (although I've only been able to round up stray volumes). He's no Henry James, but he has an engaging sensibility.
I wonder what comments you’d have on Machen’s short book about books and reading called Hieroglyphics, if you should happen to peruse it.
Dale Nelson
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