Arthur Machen

Arthur Machen was born Arthur Llewellyn Jones on 3 March 1863 in Caerleon, Monmouthshire, a small town on the river Usk with a Roman amphitheatre and an old association with the court of King Arthur. His father was a clergyman in a poor rural parish nearby, and Machen, an only child, grew up wandering the hills and ruined Roman roads of Gwent. That landscape stayed at the centre of his imagination for the rest of his life; it is where he set “The Great God Pan” and the hills of Novel of the Black Seal.

He went to London at seventeen and spent years in poverty, cataloguing occult books and doing translations, including a version of Casanova’s memoirs. His breakthrough was The Great God Pan (1894), published with The Inmost Light by John Lane in his fashionable Keynotes series. It caused a scandal, with reviewers calling it disgusting and decadent, and it sold well. The Three Impostors (1895), an interlocking set of tales that includes Novel of the Black Seal and Novel of the White Powder, followed the next year. Then the Oscar Wilde trials of 1895 turned the literary world against “decadent” writing, and Machen struggled for years to publish what he wrote. His novel The Hill of Dreams was finished in the 1890s but did not appear until 1907.

His wife Amy died of cancer in 1899, and in his grief he drifted into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and then into a touring theatre company, where he worked as an actor for nearly a decade. In 1910 he joined the London Evening News as a reporter. There, in September 1914, he published The Bowmen, a short piece of fiction about ghostly English archers of Agincourt saving British troops at Mons. Readers and preachers began repeating it as fact, it grew into the “Angels of Mons” legend, and Machen spent much of the war trying, without success, to explain that he had made it up. He died in Buckinghamshire on 15 December 1947.

Machen’s horror comes from a belief that the visible world is a veil over something older and stranger. In his stories that something is usually both sacred and appalling. His masterpiece is The White People, mostly told through a young girl’s secret notebook, an early and still unsettling use of the found-document form. For a first read, though, start with The Bowmen, then The Great God Pan.