Christ and Pop Culture
Yesterday marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of Arthur Machen (1863-1947), an author who penned several influential works of supernatural horror and fantasy in his almost fifty-year writing career. While hardly a household name today, Machen can count among his past and present admirers H. P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, Ray Bradbury, former British Poet Laureate John Betjeman, and popular movie director Guillermo del Toro. It is possible that his star may finally be on the rise; well-known publisher Penguin Classics authorized an edition of his works in 2011, complete with a preface by del Toro. We at Christ and Pop Culture have joined other Christian genre aficionados in calling for a reevaluation of his work. Whether for his examination of the horrors of a godless consciousness or his depiction of the ecstasy of a lived religious experience, Arthur Machen’s work merits wider acclaim.
Though he published works in the 1880s, Machen (pronounced MACK-en) received his first big literary break with the 1894 publication of his novella The Great God Pan, which was followed the next year by his novel The Three Impostors. The first work established his notoriety, as it was published by John Lane’s Keynotes series, a publisher associated with the “art for art’s sake” Decadent Movement. The Three Impostors was also published in the Keynotes series; unfortunately for Machen, it appeared just as England’s most visible Decadent, Oscar Wilde, was going on trial for sodomy, and perhaps as a result, it sold poorly.
These early works by Machen are filled with the kind of gnawing horror that inhabited much great literature in the late nineteenth century. Machen was the son of an Anglican clergyman, but The Great God Pan and The Three Impostors (along with his other works from this time) emphasize the terrors of degeneration, the fear that if humanity had evolved from lower orders of life, it could de-evolve back into something primitive, even primordial. It was a fear that many intellectual Victorians felt, born out of implications of growing skepticism toward religious belief. It is these works that have made him popular with writers and genre connoisseurs like Lovecraft, King, Barker, Gaiman, and del Toro.
After the failure of The Three Impostors, however, Machen went about revising his writing style, leading to his works Ornaments in Jade and the semi-autobiographical The Hill of Dreams; neither work was published until after the 1890s, though if anything, their style and themes are even more decadent than his earlier work.
At the end of the century, however, from 1899-1900, as his wife Amy was dying of cancer, Machen’s writing changed to a new phase, a phase that is perhaps his most interesting for the Christian reader. He took a renewed interest in the Christian faith, though it was now his own custom blend of Celtic mystical Christianity derived from the history of his native Wales, as opposed to his father’s more passive, warmed over Anglicanism. Increasingly, he saw his faith as the answer to the emptiness of the modern world, and in his writings from the twentieth century, his stylistic emphasis is one of juxtaposition: mystical experience occurs as an occasional burst in his narratives.
Perhaps the first of his works to attempt this style is also one of my favorites, a novella entitled A Fragment of Life (what I believe to be his first truly Christian work). This piece’s four chapters follow a London resident named Edward Darnell as he gradually goes from existing in a humdrum ordinary life to becoming a full-on mystic and persuading his wife to join him. Large segments of A Fragment of Life consist of quotidian debates about the Darnell’s bland middle-class existence; but because of that very tedium, when the moments of poetic ecstasy break through, they are all the more dramatic and exquisite for the contrast.
In his novel The Secret Glory—also begun around the same time but not published until 1922—the style is sharply satirical, largely attacking British public schools, but interweaving its protagonist’s search for nothing less than the Holy Grail itself. In the 1910s, Machen began writing for the Evening News, and at this point he penned stories in which the mystic experience is tucked away in the midst of a cold reporter’s voice. His most infamous of these tales was “The Bowmen,” a brief tale about supernatural archers fighting in World War I in which the reportorial voice was compelling enough that many apparently believed it had actually happened. Better written (though not as influential) was The Great Return, about a reporter who investigates accounts of the Holy Grail appearing in a small Welsh town. He continued to write well into the 1930s, and though critics often dismiss his later work, there are many neglected gems tucked away across his career.
I discovered Arthur Machen as a college student sometime around 1999-2000, almost exactly a century from the time he began writing more explicitly Christian work in earnest. Finally, through a roundabout set of circumstances that I think Machen himself would have appreciated, I ended up writing my doctoral dissertation on him a decade later. He is, in my estimation, an unjustly neglected writer for Christians. His earlier work effectively manifests the horrific implications that undergird an existence without God; his later work displays compelling (and often beautiful) ways in which God’s presence might break through the barriers that our bland, materialistic modern world place to try to keep Him at bay. One hundred fifty years after his birth, Arthur Machen still deserves our attention.
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