wwhateley (August 24, 2000)[Mencken on Machen]Not that I want to stir up the Joshi debate again, but for those who think that his review of ARKHAM'S MASTER OF HORROR, or his comments on M. R. James and H. R. Wakefield, walks away with the prize for most egregious lack of understanding by a critic of his subject, I would respectfully submit the following remarks by H. L. Mencken that I recently uncovered while doing some research in SMART SET:
Always, in these remote colonies of the Empire, there is a new neglected genius on the mat, vociferously whooped up by a small band of earnest partisans. His shabby first editions are eagerly unearthed and sold at high prices; some enterprising publisher or other begins reprinting him in a formidable uniform edition; all sorts of curious authorities are put up to testify to his rare and precious talents; to read about him becomes a mark of lofty and esoteric distinction, like being a Christian or not belonging to the Legion d'honneur. I proceed at once to the case of Arthur Machen, the English lifter of goose-flesh. For months past all the more passionate and bankrupt literary journals, both in London itself and in the colonies, have been full of encomiums upon him--some hymning his pellucid and insinuating style, others celebrating his adept evocations of the occult and horrible, yet others denouncing the human race bitterly for letting him slave away for years as a sub-editor, i.e., a copy-reader, in Fleet Street. He becomes the Leo Ornstein, the Picasso of literature, the Gertrude Stein of prose. To admit that one finds him dull is as grave an offense as to let it be known, in Greenwich Village, that one believes in monogamy and belongs to the Elks. Literary Chicago is with him to a man–-that is, all save the minority of literati who actually sell their literature. He begins to be mentioned in the same breath with Ronald Firbank, Edgar Saltus, Walter de la Mare, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Joris Karl Huysmans, George Grosz, L. Pearsall Smith, all the other current objects of dark and ecstatic devotion. Nevertheless, I have to confess shamelessly that this Machen entertains me only indifferently--that he seems to me, indeed, to be very positively a third-rater, both when he tries to charm with his rhetoric and when he tries to alarm with his cabbalism--that he is, in the main, a quite hollow and obvious fellow. In witness whereof, I point to three volumes of his tales, just issued: "The House of Souls" (Knopf), "The Hill of Dreams" (Knopf), and "The Shining Pyramid" (Covici-McGee); above all, I point to his autobiography, "Things Near and Far" (Knopf).
This autobiography is an embarrassing give-away of the author, and must make very unhappy reading for the more reflective of his admirers. What it reveals is simply a life of letters full of vacillations and false starts, with occasional descents to the lower varieties of journalism, and even to the stage. Machen seems, in youth, to have been one of a numerous company, great pests to editors and publishers everywhere --youngsters with a hot desire to write something lovely and startling, and no ideas in their heads. He was turned into occultism by the merest chance. A second-hand bookseller employed him to catalogue a collection of books on magic, and going through them filled him with vague notions about alchemy, witchcraft, astrology, and all the rest of that archaic bilge. The result was a long series of fantastic and, often incomprehensible tales, all of them apparently failures. Machen says that his total income from his books, in forty years, came to only £635, which he figures out to have been £15 and a few shillings a year. Then, during the war, he made a sudden and cheap newspaper success with the now celebrated story of the angels of Mons--a piece of childish and obvious nonsense, taken quite seriously by the hysterical British public of the time. There ensued the discovery that he was a neglected genius, and presently the news got to America, with the consequences just described. But are there any signs of genius in this somewhat solemn and pretentious autobiography? I can find none. The author says absolutely nothing, from the first chapter to the last, that is worth hearing. His story is completely pointless and stupid. If he shows any sagacity at all, it is in his apparent judgment of his own books: he seems to be considerably less proud of them than he is of the fact that he was once a second-rate provincial actor, and that F. R. Benson praised him.
Well, what is in his books? In spots, I am glad to say, there is very smooth and agreeable writing. It is not everywhere, but it is here and there. "The Shining Pyramid" is full of the ornate guff of a university professor of rhetonc and composition; the two men who are its main characters talk to each other like chautauqua orators. But in "A Fragment of Life," the Darnells, husband and wife, are done capitally, both by description and by representation--that is, until Darnell begins to see things, and the whole story goes to pieces. Again, in "The Hill of Dreams" there are signs of an extremely graceful style--a style still showing some of the laborious cerebration that the author himself says went into it, but nevertheless very smooth and musical at its high points. The trouble with it is that it is monotonous--that it grows cloying before one has got to the end of the book. But this effect, perhaps, is produced less by the style than by the story itself. It is far too long-winded and repetitious. The central idea is surely not bad. A romantic and imaginative boy, Lucian Taylor, growing up in a part of England where a Roman city once stood, gradually works himself into such a state of illusion that he can see the ancient town as it was two thousand years ago, and mingle himself with its people. Here is a notion that Walter Pater might have made a lot of. But Machen is too infertile in invention to get much beyond what is obvious in it. He seems to be unable to visualize the Roman city clearly; he develops his portrait of the boy without ingenuity; he gets rid of the story in the end by taking refuge in the crassest banality. The poetry in the picture has a pumped-up effect. One has no need to be told, as one is told by the author in his preface, that the story came near stumping him--that he got through it only after weary effort, and by dint of heroic strength. It is the story of a man with great feeling but with very feeble ideas. There is absent from it that sense of sheer competence, that visible mastery over materials and means, which one always finds in the work of a truly first-rate imaginative writer.
In nearly all of Machen's other stories the same faltering may be detected. Consider, for example, "A Fragment of Life," the first and longest tale in "The House of Souls." It is actually two stories, almost unrelated; its back is broken in the middle; its ending is puerile and without logical relation to what has gone before. First we have an elaborate picture of the life of the Darnells in their London suburb--a picture overladen with irrelevant detail (for example, the long episode of the housemaid and the clash with her fiancé's mother), but none the less one full of sound observation and good writing. Then, of a sudden, the prosaic City clerk, Edward Darnell, develops into a mystic and begins to write occult Latin verses. How? Why? The reasons given by Machen would scarcely convince a Christian Scientist. The thing simply happens; its causes are identical with their effects. Nor does this incomprehensible efflorescence of mysticism lead anywhere; Darnell simply writes his bad Latin, and then fades from the scene. Just what is the story about? I confess, again shamelessly, that I don't know. "The Shining Pyramid" is even worse. Here a vast and complex machinery is employed to recount a trivial and highly unconvincing anecdote; there is actually a feeble and mirthless parodying of the manner of Conan Doyle in "Sherlock Holmes." So in "The White People," a pointless fairy tale tricked out with gaudy and incongruous trappings--the best writing, perhaps, that Machen has ever done, but all the same a story without sense. So, even, in "The Great God Pan," apparently the favorite of most of the author's more voluptuous admirers. On the slip-cover of "The House of Souls" is the news that John Masefield thinks that two of the stories in the book are "the most remarkable written in this generation." All I can get out of this amazing judgment, considering "Falk," "Heart of Darkness," "Youth," "At the End of the Tether," and "Typhoon," is the uneasy suspicion that a bartender makes a very unreliable critic, even after he turns poet.
It would probably be unjust to blame Machen for "The Shining Pryramid," for there is no evidence in the introduction by Vincent Starrett, who edits the volume, that the author had any hand in putting it together. It consists of stories and articles rescued from old newspaper and magazine fiies, with a couple of hack prefaces to book catalogues added--a ghoulish collection, indeed. Nevertheless, Machen wrote them, and now one of his principal American worshippers presents
them with a magificent flourish, as new proofs of his genius. They prove only that he is incompetent, even within the narrow field of occult romance. Compare, for example, his story, "The Lost Club" with Lord Dunsany's "The Exile's Club," printed in this magazine five or six years ago. Dunsany is adept and ingenious; he gets his thrill surely: his writing is extraordinarily musical and charming. But Machen, attempting almost precisely the same trick, is as heavy-handed as a longshoreman. His story simply fails to come off; it would be rejected as amateurish and flabby by the editor of any cheap fiction magazine. To offer it as the first work of a genius, as Mr. Starrett does with all solemnity, is to reduce criticism to a childish imbecility. Machen's own critical writings, which follow the stories in this volume, are bad enough, but it is only fair to him to say that they are not that bad.
Phew! Hey folks, Mencken's already dead, so unless you want to sic Pickman on him it's a little late. The funny thing is that old H. L. had some nice things to say about Blackwood, and was genuinely enthusiastic about Lord Dunsany; he also printed several poems and poems in prose by Clark Ashton Smith, and of course was close friends with Smith's mentor George Sterling. Anyway, enjoy! Even Joshi is aghast at this one. Best, ScottoOo
Jim Rockhill (August 24, 2000)
Thanks for sending this one along, Scott.Jim
oOo
rbadac (August 26, 2000)
[rbadac on Mencken]wwhateley wrote:
(an interesting Mencken article on Machen. Thanks, Scott!)
I've been going after dead people ever since I got here, and I see no reason to stop now. I prefer 'em dead, actually-- that way I know they won't take back anything they've said.
"...He is, first and last, simply trying to express himself. He is trying (a) to arrest and challenge a sufficient body of readers, to make them pay attention to him, to impress them with the charm and novelty of his ideas, to provoke them into an enchanted awareness of him, and (b) to achieve thereby for his own inner ego that agreeable feeling of a function performed, a tension relieved, a katharsis <sic?> attained which Beethoven achieved when he wrote the Fifth Symphony, and a hen achieves every time she lays an egg..."-H.L. Mencken, "The Motive Of The Critic" in *The New Republic*;
Oct. 26, 1921
Ah, Mencken. He does at least follow his own critical credo, and it is what makes him such entertaining reading, though sometimes I can't distinguish him from Edmund Wilson, who is also entertaining for many of the same reasons. Both gentlemen are plainly well-read and not inclined to have their time wasted by less than the best. Both have plenty to say about the things they like, and even more about the things they do not like. And both are peculiarly mean-spirited in regard to opinions other than their own. This makes them entertaining; whether or not it makes them critics seems to be an issue blurred by emotion.They are, of course, critics, whether they are offering cogent analyses of worthy material or stamping their feet in irritation that so many do not agree with them. That's okay; if they didn't take themselves seriously, how could they expect anyone else to? Mencken especially is a man not to be trifled with; his intelligence is of the first water, his experience vast, his enthusiasms genuine-- my God, they'd better be. For when he levels his lance at the windmills of popular acclaim, well... it's still enthusiasm, but it is that of the surgeon who uses neither sponge nor anaesthetic, operating on a patient who may not even be sick.
It must have irked him that Machen's execrable cult following dared to resurrect his halting efforts in his presence, he who trod the slopes of Parnassus with the sharpest cleats he could find; but he was good enough to descend from those heights long enough to pronounce judgement upon another overrated dabbler, with his characteristic fairness and charity. And he's honest: he finds Machen dull, and he tells us why. Machen is hollow and obvious. He is waterlogged with archaic bilge. His life story is pointless and stupid. On the rare occasions when Machen manages fine writing he spoils it by introducing the random fantastic element, producing "pointless fairy tales" and stories that "go to pieces." A backhand at John Masefield, whose critical praise of Machen lacks veracity in light of a few of Mencken's favorite Joseph Conrad works (comparing a naturalistic author with a romantic one is surely so apple/orange that it requires no comment), a snide comment about bartenders turned poets (but not a word about bartender's customers turned writers and critics), and Mencken can finish this Machen mess just in time to catch another cuppa joe and the Nite-Owl Special at Schlogl's.
But while Mencken arm-wrestles the general public for the list price of the honorarium of "genius", Machen himself quietly acknowledges that what Mencken says is largely true. He is not a genius. He has missed his mark in his writing, his best work done during the only time in his life when he did not have to earn a living with hackwork, financed by an inheritance; a life which has been, by conventional standards, a failure. No one is more aware of this than Machen, who admitted it so often that it made him querulous in essay and autobiography alike. Imagine his surprise when, upon his rediscovery through the efforts of literary friends like Starrett who sought to aid him in his poverty, he found that a succeeding generation actually liked what he did, or if he could have known that future ones would continue to do so, in certain towns of the heart where Mencken himself couldn't even get arrested. For it is heart and soul, dark romance and beatific vision Machen had in abundances which Mencken could not embrace or even understand, the poor tragedy of a life freely admitted lost on an intolerant spirit who did not care to countenance another's failure; the rich and supernal arabesque of a mind in its early years (and its loss regretted in later ones) all nothing but a waste of time to one who shows no evidence of having pursued any like Grails under like circumstances in any year of his own life.
Later in "The Motive Of The Critic" (even here Mencken is unable to shut up about Conrad, a great writer, but by no means the only one of his time, nor the best), Mencken notes that Carlyle, Macaulay, Arnold, Saint-Beuve, and Goethe, in their critical capacities, far from being fair and sound in their judgements, were full of "prejudices, biles, naiveties, humors", then goes on to say:
"...What saved Carlyle, Macaulay and company is as plain as day: They were first-rate artists. They could make the thing charming, and that is always a million times more important than making it true..."
An admirable bit of sleight-of-hand that at once elevates criticism to fine art and dispenses with the need for truth. Mencken lays his eggs well, and is doubtless satisfied with the function performed. Yet one man's poison remains the meat of others on the sprawling stage of human experience, where a certain quality of the shadowed ethereal sometimes becomes the truth of the soul's enrichment, and laying an egg on that stage only gets you the much-deserved hook.rbadac
oOo
paghat (August 26, 2000)
Somehow I found myself singing to Lewis Carroll's willya-wontya:"Mencken Machen
Mencken Machen
Will You Won't You Be Mine."oOo
rbadac (August 27, 2000)
Oh my God, I did too.rbadac, who hesitates to dance with lobsters
oOo
wwhateley (August 27, 2000)
rbadac wrote:
> (an interesting Mencken article on Machen. Thanks, Scott!)You are most welcome, sir. And thank you for your most excellent and insightful response, but considering the quality of your "White People" post some time ago it was only what I expected from you.
Best, ScottooOoo