Arthur Machen: Man Is Made a Mystery 3: Fragment of Life, Secret Glory, Great Return, Bowmen, etc.

Extollager

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See the two earlier discussions for the first two chapters of Dr. Geoffrey Reiter's dissertation, discussing such well-known horror stories as "The Great God Pan" and "The Novel of the Black Seal"

Arthur Machen: Man Is Made a Mystery 1: Great God Pan, White Powder, Inmost Light, Black Seal

and the third chapter of Dr. Reiter's paper, discussing "The White People," The Hill of Dreams, etc.

Arthur Machen: Man Is Made a Mystery 2: Ornaments in Jade, Hill of Dreams, White People

This series is intended for discussion of Machen's life and writings specifically with reference to Dr. Reiter's dissertation, which is available for free download here (and is not written in academese):

https://baylor-ir.tdl.org/baylor-ir...eoffrey_Reiter_phd.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Reiter contends that critics of Machen tend to see all of his fiction through the lens of the critical theory Machen provided, relatively early in his career, in Hieroglyphics, but that it is productive to see his beliefs, emphases, and manner as changing. To oversimplify, the famous horror stories ("The Great God Pan" etc.) seem to proceed from a pre-Lovecraftian "scientific" attitude, involving evolutionary "survivals" or "atavism, while the phase ("White People" etc.) explores themes of Decadence, what I've suggested as a sort of Gnostic sensibility, etc.

The present discussion thread will consider some of Machen's writing that shows the most interest in characterization. During this time, too, Machen became a journalist, and inadvertently set off a nationwide rumor.

The biographical approach to reading Machen's fiction is hampered, in my view, because we just don't have very much about his life, even though he wrote three enjoyable volumes of autobiography,
 
A mild glow of sexual love seems to me evident even from the start in “A Fragment of Life” (so I differ a bit when Reiter says “Despite their relative youth and recent marriage, the Darnells hardly seem in love with one another,” p. 127). The sense I think I get is, first, that they are indeed in love, and are faithful to one another and to the meaning of sex as Machen’s preface describes it. His words could be applied to the Darnells: “these two have partaken together of the great mystery, of the great sacrament of nature, of the source of all that is magical in the wide world.” But, second, the contemporary way of life, with its banality, materialism, prudery, cheapening of sex, etc. provides no help for (again from the preface) “discern[ing] the mystery.”

So consider the bathos in the following sequence. The Darnells have been talking about whether they can afford to buy some furniture. Early in the story, evening comes, and Edward “slipped off his clothes and slid gently into bed, putting out the candle on the table. …it was a June night, and beyond the walls, beyond that desolate world and wilderness of Shepherd’s Bush [in London], a great golden moon has floated up through magic films of cloud, above the hill, and the wearth was filled with a wonderful light … Darnell seemed to see some reflection of that wizard brightness in the room; the pale walls and the white bed and his wife’s face lying amidst brown hair upon the pillow…. There was nothing that he could say, but he slowly stole his arm under his wife’s neck, and played with the ringlets of brown hair. She never moved, she lay there gently breathing, looking up at the blank ceiling of the room with her beautiful eyes, thinking also, no doubt, thoughts that she could not utter, kissing her husband obediently when he asked her to do so, and he stammered and hesitated as he spoke. [paragraph break] They were nearly asleep, indeed Darnell was on the very eve of dreaming, when she said very softly – ‘I am afraid, darling, that we could never afford it,’” etc.

The implication seems clear to me: the Darnells are in love; they experience the holiness of sexual intimacy, but their thoughts are apt to be banal because that’s how people live. However, led by the husband, they will extricate themselves from this dullness by continuing and deepening their love, by Edward’s receptiveness to impressions, his dreams, his recovery of some important memories that he shares with Mary, and by his reading of some old family manuscripts. This movement towards beauty and wholeness has been prepared for even before their marriage. We learn, for example, that when he was a boy, Edward had a fantasy of meeting a lovely girl who would come out of the woods to him, and later that bachelor Edward took a fancy to a carved tobacco-pipe whose bowl was in the form of the head and bare bust of a woman and that his digs were decorated with photographs of pretty actresses. When Mary came into his life he discarded these things. When the real thing – real love of a real woman – comes, such childish things are to be done away with (compare the famous chapter on love, 1 Corinthians 13, especially verse 11). I don’t think it’s too much to perceive here a hint of the two sides of the mystical way. There is the via negativa, in which the false, inadequate images or counterfeits of the great wonder need to be set aside, and the via positiva, in which invisible and unimaginable beauty, truth, and goodness are manifested to the mind and to the senses by earthly things, even quite “ordinary” ones. Mary loves her husband, she is prudent rather than having bought into competitiveness as regards acquiring the trappings of respectability and success, and she is faithful to the light she has.

(Incidentally, a discussion evening for Mythopoeic Society-type folks could be devoted to Machen’s story of the Darnells, to the marriage of Mark and Jane Studdock in C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, to the lovers in Charles Williams’s The Place of the Lion, etc. Edward loves to hear Mary’s voice as they sit in the twilight. I was reminded of the husband in Williams’s All Hallows’ Eve who used to telephone his wife from his office so that he could hear her voice. Earlier writers of value on romantic love of this type include Dante and Coventry Patmore.)

The wholesome eroticism of this married couple seems to promote their readiness for further phases of a discovery, or recovery, of a wider, deeper, richer life. Mary is deeply responsive when Edward tries to tell her his memories of his boyhood in Wales (“’Oh, my dear, why have you waited so long to tell me these wonderful things?’” The answer seems to be that he himself needed time, living with her in a trusting, loving intimacy permeated by the unearned grace of her femininity, to become more attuned to things of value, so that they could come up into consciousness). At the time Machen leaves his story – it doesn’t attempt a great moment or wrapping-up – Mary continues to attend what I take to be the Anglican parish church, but Edward has stopped lounging around at home on Sunday morning and participates in what I surmise is meant to be a small Anglo-Catholic church that keeps alive ancient British Christian traditions. There’s just a hint of the Holy Grail (“Graal” in the spelling Machen uses). Darnell’s growing spiritual maturity is also indicated by his recognition that becoming more attuned to spiritual reality is not without perils, since there is a wickedness outside the familiar forms of wrongdoing. He now remembers as a boy being taken by his uncle to a remote country house where, it seems, there is a woman upstairs who had become involved in a witch-cult. My impression is that the boy’s uncle had come to exorcise her.

It is this 1899-1904 story that supplied Dr. Reiter’s title. Machen wrote, “man is made a mystery for mysteries and visions, for the realization in his consciousness of ineffable bliss, for a great joy that transmutes the whole world, for a joy that surpasses all joys and overcomes all sorrows.” Reiter says, “from A Fragment of Life on, the target of Machen’s attacks is not the evil of supernaturally heightened wickedness but the evil of average middle-class existence. It was one of the most marked distinctions of Machen’s Christian phase, and among the reasons his twentieth-century work is so often ignored by weird scholarship – gone are the shocking horrors of ‘transcendent evil,’ replaced by horrors that Machen seems to portray as equally heinous, the horrors of the ordinary” way of life blind to, even hostile towards the idea of, spiritual truth and life.

I recommend Reiter’s discussion of this story, agreeing with him that it shows careful artistry (p. 135).
 
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After glancing at Dr. Stiggins -- I wonder how many people are alive today who have read this obscure book in Machen's ouevre; I haven't and I'm not at all sure Dr. Reiter has -- Reiter discusses The Secret Glory (written 1907/8, published 1922). I've read it two or three times, and remember it as seeming self-pitying and self-indulgent. The youthful hero Ambrose Meyrick gets to score off his bullying school enemies, have a London escapade with a pretty servant girl, write fine literature, and be the appointed guardian of the Holy Grail. It won't do. ...Reiter's comments sound reasonable but they don't move me to take up the novel again.

Reiter discusses "The Bowmen" (Machen's famous "angels of Mons" story from the Great War), perhaps getting a bit sidetracked from his chief theme when he discusses whether or not the story qualifies as a hoax; it seems it was taken as a true account by many people; did Machen or his publisher or editor intend that? What might have been more to the point would be a discussion of other wartime short stories by Machen -- including "The Soldiers' Rest," "The Monstrance," "The Dazzling Light," "Dr. Duthoit's Vision" / "The Little Nations" -- with reference to the paper's thesis. However, I don't think anyone regards those stories are very consequential. It seems "The Bowmen" is largely remembered because it was by Machen and because, like Orson Welles' radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, it is an interesting incident in social history.

Far better -- one of my favorite Machen works -- is "The Great Return." I make it optional reading for my students when we tackle Malory's Morte d'Arthur. It is one of Machen's most "religious" stories and yet the atheist Lovecraft praised it as "of utmost delicacy, and passing from mere horror [!] into true mysticism" (my italics, quoting Lovecraft as qtd. by Reiter). here again, though, I think Reiter is in danger of letting his thesis slip a little. It would be appropriate for him to explore some nonfiction that Machen wrote on the Grail and on churchmanship, collected by Vincent Starrett in The Glorious Mystery.

"The Terror" seems to provoke Dr. Reiter to more examination than some of the stories that I might have thought could be mined for his thesis. I refer the reader to those pages (pp. 173-188). The story seems to me clever, scary, and thought-provoking (see link below). Incidentally Douglas Anderson has reprinted an abridged version, which I haven't read yet, in Tales Before Tolkien.

I have written on "Dr. Duthoit's Vision" (mentioned above) and on "The Great Return" and "The Terror" earlier this year:

Wormwoodiana: Guest Post: Arthur Machen: Ants and Abysses by Dale Nelson

Wormwoodiana: Guest Post: "Arthur Machen: The Railer’s Failure in THE GREAT RETURN" by Dale Nelson

Wormwoodiana: Guest Post: Arthur Machen’s Secret History Tale THE TERROR by Dale Nelson
 
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I'm glad your latest post bumped this thread; I meant to work my way through all your links and so on a long time ago but got sidetracked and forgot about it (and I'm an inordinately slow reader, I'm afraid), so I've bookmarked it. Esp looking forward to The Terror and White People.

pH
 
Here's a new Wormwoodiana column by me, on "The Great Return" again. I discuss a little-known book that mattered to Machen and to Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams.


It talkes about a book Perlesvaus . ive never heard of this book at all. :unsure:
 
I'm a big one for tracking down things that my favorite authors read & relished. One of the nice things is that, often, these books were not rarities in their lifetimes, and are available to us inexpensively.


If I were looking to buy, though, I'd want to check with the seller to see if I were getting the complete work. I *think* all of the editions of the High History are complete in one volume except the original 1898 edition published by Dent.
 
I'm a big one for tracking down things that my favorite authors read & relished. One of the nice things is that, often, these books were not rarities in their lifetimes, and are available to us inexpensively.


If I were looking to buy, though, I'd want to check with the seller to see if I were getting the complete work. I *think* all of the editions of the High History are complete in one volume except the original 1898 edition published by Dent.

I read the first few pages of volume One. Its beatifically written.:cool:

I was digging thug. my books and found

The Quest of the Holy Grail translated by P . M Matarasso

Parzival by Wofram Von Eschenbach translation Helen M. Mustard a nd Chales E. Passage


Both predate Mallory by a century.
 
Yep! Major Arthurian texts. But I'm glad to just read this Sebastian Evans translation, since it mattered to four of my favorite authors. One doesn't often make a discovery like that!
 
Here's something by Machen that was new to me.


I commend it to the attention of anyone with a serious interest in Machen and/or "romanticism."
 

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