Magic Arts – Journal of writer Felix John Taylor

Arthur Machen in America (#2)

Attention: storage of handguns is not allowed in these lockers or areas.

Another example of the incongruous nature of my visit. Surely this would imply that enough handguns had been stored in the lockers for staff at the Harry Ransom Centre to put up the sign? It was preferable to bringing them into the reading room. Once inside, however, the idea of guns in a library vanished from my thoughts. Neither was the Texas heat an issue here. I began to forget about it: in fact, the walk into the city that morning hadn’t even been that bad. I could move with ease inside the temperature-controlled, air-conditioned space. On the shelf directly above where the Machen boxes had been brought out, I noticed R. A. Gilbert’s bibliography of scholar-mystic A. E. Waite. Goldstone and Sweetser’s Machen bibliography was not far off. This was familiar ground. Machen’s eye-catching titles prompted the librarian to go back to the desk and look him up on Wikipedia.

The Harry Ransom Centre has links with Joyce (again propitious – Machen read an early version of Dubliners for the publisher Grant Richards), and his bust is one of five or six modernists who greet the reader on their way up to the first floor. The original Ransom Centre was founded partly on oil money. Ransom himself, known as the ‘Great Acquisitor’, had to resign in 1971 because he was spending too much. He died five years later. One of his predecessors was Thomas F. Stanley, who was canny about persuading potential sellers to part with their archives. Since the last quarter of the twentieth century it became common for British critics to lament the fact that the papers of British authors were slowly being spirited away to Austin. Julian Barnes sold his archive in 2002, Ian McEwan in 2014, Kazao Ishiguro the year after. Some do it for legacy reasons, others for the welcome cash at the end of a difficult career. Penelope Fitzgerald finally sold her papers to Texas in 1988, ‘which gives me enough room to put my shoes’ (Letters, p. 316).

There can be no doubt that, had something like the Ransom Centre existed in the 1920s and 30s, Machen would have sold his own papers in a snap. In fact, a wholesale archival purchase may have saved him and his wife from many years of near poverty. Perpetually in need of money just to scrape by, Machen appeared more than happy to sell individual items to fans and collectors, and particular to those in America. He had even begun to ask for money before he signed anything (as many letters in his HRC collection attest). The actual Machen collection at the HRC was begun as far back as 1959, when the New York rare book dealer Lew D. Feldman sold them 575 letters Machen had written to Oliver Stonor. Feldman was instrumental in building up the main collections of HRC and the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. After the Feldman purchase, regular donations by the collector and bibliographer Adrian Goldstone helped swell the archive and went on until the late 1980s until the whole thing occupied 8.4 linear feet of shelf space.

So what’s actually in there? Of greatest interest is probably Machen’s notebook dating from the second half of the 1890s, full of jotting for stories and drafts of The Garden of Avallaunius (though this had been usefully transcribed and annotated by Tartarus Press several years ago). More jewels of the collection, mostly unplumbed by Machen scholars, are the letters Machen composed to a handful of recipients during the last few decades of his life, amounting to over 1,000 separate items. There are the letters to Stonor, but also to New York bookseller Alfred Goldsmith, Colin Summerford, Harvard academic Robert Hillyer, and superfan John Gawsworth. The Gawsworth material itself is immense, and far too extensive for the short time I had. Reams of bibliographic questions for Machen to answer (On what date was X published? How did you get to know so and so?), on top of drafts of his unpublished biography, Man of Letters, running to many hundreds of pages. Gawsworth was an early Machen obsessive who amassed a strong set of Machenalia over the years. His failure to get the book published must have seemed a bitter reward for a project that had taken him years of research and pestering. Even after Machen’s death in 1947 attempts to secure publishing contracts fell through and Gawsworth was left to reminisce and to manage the estate of his other hero – M. P. Shiel.

And so two days passed quickly. The evenings were spent trying hard to melt through the tarmac into a nether-Austin, its frozen and less sweaty opposite. This meant I had little time for traditional site seeing. I did, however, get to the Museum of the Weird – south of the capitol building, a block away from Joe Rogan’s comedy club (another incongruity). Three unbeatable floors of a American-style cabinet of curiosities, topped off with a wax museum devoted to the owner’s particular obsession: Lon Chaney. Then after Jackalopes and wolf boys it was back to the accommodation to prepare for the 5am flight to JFK… The bulk of Machen was already over. But what would be waiting for me in the city of his correspondents? At least I now had a Big Foot t-shirt.

Arthur Machen in America (#1)

Sweat ran cold down the backs of my legs, though not out of fear. Texas felt tropical, the evening heat trapped under a sky permanently overcast. There were grackles outside the airport, long-necked birds that fell onto the verge and froze in position, fixing me with their dead stares. A woman in an Echo & the Bunnymen t-shirt cheerfully explained the city’s bus system (I had just been listening to John Higgs narrating his KLF book and knew that the Bunnymen were occultly significant). It felt appropriately otherworldly; but at the same time, I couldn’t help but feel I was in the wrong place. Arthur Machen wrote about the domed hills of old Gwent and London’s labyrinthine byways. True, one of his tales is set partly in the mid-West, but he lifted the details from his beloved Robert Louis Stevenson. This was not the place to go looking for him.

Why was I halfway across the world on the trail of an Anglo-Welsh writer of the supernatural? Machen was never in America – and certainly never set foot in Austin, Texas. But he received welcome praise from a great many Americans during the 1920s when he was in dear need of it; and he gleaned a lot about the country from his correspondence with people like Professor Robert Hillyer and the writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten (Hillyer remembered how Machen prided himself on his knowledge of American ways). It is due to these US-based enthusiasts and collectors of Machen’s work that the bulk of his papers now resides in several libraries across the Atlantic Ocean: chiefly the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, the New York Public Library, and Yale University. Small archives are also kept at Princeton, Syracuse, and Brigham Young University in Utah, though not more than a folder or two in each.

So there was no way around it: I needed to hit the three major collections in one fell swoop, just to see what was there. I had research to do. I had been awarded a small travel grant earlier in the year, and in a single afternoon had spent it all on flights and accommodation. First stop on this grand Machen tour was Austin (via Newark). The city’s unofficial slogan, ‘Keep Austin Weird’, seemed in keeping with the theme of my trip, but I had not been prepared for the scale or the heat of Texas in July – yes I had been warned, but I hadn’t paid much attention. Weird was the right word for the empty suburbs cast in eerie half-light, the relentless hiss of cicadas and the steam room humidity that slowed me down to a crawl. As I dragged my suitcase to the connecting bus stop, I passed an actual bindle (surely an anachronism at this point) balanced on a stained cushion on the sidewalk. Its owner was nowhere in sight. I didn’t feel like being in a horror film at that moment; I wanted only to find the room I had rented and begin to convince my body that it was not the 1:00am it thought it was. Arthur Machen was only a distant notion and of little concern – I would deal with him in the morning.

(To be continued…)

The Order of the Golden Dawn’s pseudo-membership

Currently available to stream on Apple TV is a six-part documentary series – Secret Societies: In the Shadows – exploring the history of clandestine brotherhoods from the Knights Templar to the Freemasons. The subject of its final episode is the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, described as: ‘A society that included Bram Stoker, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. P. Lovecraft as a members [sic]’. What do these three names have in common? All were writers known for supernatural themes. All were responsible for popularising certain kinds of genre fiction and for the invention of characters now embedded in pop culture (Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, and, well, Cthulhu?). But far more crucial to the subject of the documentary, there is no evidence whatsoever that any of them were members of the Golden Dawn.

The Order of the Golden Dawn was a society of ritual magic operating in its original form in Britain during the 1890s. Ruled by a triad of Secret Chiefs, members studied a synthetic blend of alchemical symbolism, Kabbalah, tarot, astrology, and Egyptian magic. Women were permitted to join (unlike Freemasonry) and its membership was generally middle class, many of them doctors, lawyers, clergymen (one or two), and bored theosophists. But part of the GD’s reputation as an exotic Victorian undergrowth can be pinned down to the writers and artists who entered its ranks. W. B. Yeats was initiated into the Isis-Urania Temple in 1891 and remained within the society for over twenty-five years. The ‘wickedest man in the world’ Aleister Crowley joined in 1898 but was expelled during the rift of 1900 for very bad behaviour. The society’s brief and explosive existence, attracting rumour and scandal, has meant that the idea of the GD has become a magnet for falsities and fictions. Surely it was a secret society, and theoretically anyone could have been a member? Surely it makes sense for a writer of gothic fiction – if others such as Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood were known members – to have ties to such a group? But the society kept detailed records of the names and addresses of its students. William W. Westcott, a London coroner and freemason, seemed even to have enjoyed the administrative labour. It is therefore possible to know with a great deal of certainty who was in the GD, where they lived, and to which Temple they belonged.

Which is why, as perfectly coherent as the intermingling of Dracula and an occult society might sound, Bram Stoker was unlikely to have been a student of the GD. It is true that he knew several members quite well: the artist Pamela Colman Smith (who illustrated Stoker’s Lair of the White Worm in 1911), the Irish writer Constance Wilde (wife of Oscar, and a very early initiate), and the lawyer John Brodie-Innes, head of the Amen-Ra Temple in Edinburgh for most of the 1890s. Brodie-Innes dedicated his novel The Devil’s Mistress to Stoker in 1915. Conceivably Stoker might have been privy to the GD’s activities – he may even have been asked to join – but even if he was exposed to its inner workings he never sought, or was granted, membership.

Arthur Conan Doyle, writer, spiritualist, and psychic investigator almost was a member. Medical doctor Henry B. Pullen Burry tried to recruit him in 1898, an episode Conan Doyle related in an article for Pearson’s Magazine over twenty years later:

Pullen Bury was the name. He was a student of the occult, and my curiosity was aroused by learning that he had one room in his house which no one entered except himself, as it was reserved for mystic and philosophic purposes … Finding that I was interested in such subjects, Dr. Bury suggested one day that I should join a secret society of esoteric students. The dialogue between us ran somewhat thus : –-
‘What shall I get from it?’
‘In time, you will get powers.’
‘What sort of powers?’
‘They are powers which people would call supernatural. They are perfectly natural, but they are got by knowledge of deeper forces of nature.’
‘If they are good, why should not everyone know of them?’
‘They would be capable of great abuse in the wrong hands.’

Conan Doyle was eventually satisfied with Pullen Burry’s answers because he allowed the doctor to ‘go ahead with the next step, whatever it may be’. He was awakened in the early morning a few days later by a ‘queer and disagreeable’ tingling like an electric shock. Pullen Burry then visited him with the news that he had passed examination: ‘Now you must say definitely whether you will go on with it. You can’t take it up and drop it’. Realising that the GD would actually require serious study and dedication from him, Conan Doyle politely declined the offer.

‘Early Psychic Experiences’ in Pearson’s Magazine, March 1924

As for the writer of weird tales H. P. Lovecraft, he was born in 1890 and lived most of his life in Providence, Rhode Island. Any knowledge of the GD would have come to him obliquely from the pages of Arthur Machen’s Things Near and Far (1923) in which Machen briefly recalls his time in ‘the Twilight Star’, but Lovecraft cannot have known what society was being described. He valued the supernatural stories of Algernon Blackwood, whose novel The Human Chord made use of genuine occult practices. Of course Lovecraft’s own fiction is populated by cults subservient to his pantheon of Elder Gods (the Esoteric Order of Dagon in ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, for example), and later occultists such as Kenneth Grant reckoned that Lovecraft had himself been initiated into a New England witch cult (again, without a shred of real evidence), which may be why his name is here associated with the GD. By the 1920s there were several US-based Temples, but Lovecraft was not the type to know about these, let alone make contact with them. At this point, given that HPL documented his life meticulously in journals and multi-page letters to friends and family, it is a lazy assertion to claim him as a member of the Golden Dawn.

Several other ‘pseudo-members’ appear now and again – creatives who were active during the 1890s and early 1900s and who often moved in the same circles as GD students. These include Sax Rohmer (creator of the supervillain Fu Manchu) and Edith Nesbit (children’s author and Fabian). The latter especially is an example of how a rumour can evolve into the guise of established fact; now that Alex Owen, in her magisterial survey of the British occult revival The Place of Enchantment (2004), has Nesbit as a member, this rumour has become impossible to dispel. Their names often crop up in asides or as part of biographical entries. For historians of the GD (I suppose that includes me in a roundabout way), these unresearched slips are annoyances, but I’ve come to enjoy spotting these shadow recruits, these spurious spagyrists. Besides, the society itself was founded on fiction, its origin story partly inspired by Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1842 novel Zanoni. Isn’t it kind of appropriate for the Golden Dawn to continue generating its own myth?

Reading list:

R. A. Gilbert, The Golden Dawn Companion (Thoth Publications, 2021)
Barbara Belford, Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula (New York: Knopf, 1996)
Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘Early Psychic Experiences’, Pearson’s Magazine (March 1924), 203-210
Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (University of Chicago Press, 2004)
Kenneth Grant, The Magical Revival (Muller, 1972)
A good investigation into Edith Nesbit and the Golden Dawn by Phil Hine

A little-known decadent novel

The Tides Ebb Out to the Night; Being the Journal of Young Man – Basil Brooke – Edited by his Friend Hugh Langley was published in July 1896 by H. Henry & Co., long after public interest in decadent themes had tapered out. I can find no information about Hugh Langley, the book’s true author, but H. Henry was best known as the publisher of The Pageant, a literary and arts annual featuring work by Yeats, John Gray, Maeterlinck, Beerbohm, and reprints of the Pre-Raphaelites. They sold avant-garde sensationalism to a dwindling readership who had remained interested in decadent culture even after the Wilde trials and the resulting censorship. Edgar Jepson, whose Passion for Romance was published by H. Henry, recalled their final years succinctly: ‘I derived from it kudos as the time but no money, for the firm could not find readers enough for the books of the quality it was set on publishing, and failed’.

The Tides Ebb Out to the Night was one of these books without an audience, and feels now like a decadent novel written after the fact, a checklist of familiar characters and fin-de-siecle affectation. It is impossible to work out if the book is meant to be a send-up. The decadent pose was always ironic, languid, at a remove from the commonplace in language as much as in life. Was it even possible in 1896 to write sincerely as an aesthete without appearing self-mocking?

Presented as the edited journal (‘without a single omission or alteration’) of a young writer, it begins in 1889 with a potted history of Basil Brooke’s solitary, sensitive youth at Eton and then at Oxford as a student who worshipped at the feet of Walter Pater. His aesthetic mission is to follow the French ‘cult of the self’:

And now I had better hasten to explain at once, that in the following record I am going to concern myself wholly and solely with the portrayal of me – with the moi; the exquisite, the perennial, the precious and comforting moi-même of the French.

The narrative processes into the 1890s where Langley is revealed as a character in his own book, a sculptor (‘and, I regret to add, an idealist’) who acts as a mentor to young Basil. Basil publishes a small poetry collection called The Dreams of a Boyhood, and a novel of pagan revelry, The Sicilian. He discovers fellow aesthetes and fashionable drug culture, spending years in Europe writing despondently from hotel rooms about friends, lovers, and literature.

While The Academy refused to take it seriously, the reviewer for the Atheneum was more forgiving: ‘The thing speaks for itself and for what it is … We seem to hear echoes, if not first-hand opinions and beliefs, and especially disbeliefs, of a certain coterie of young men not unknown to fame of a kind. But the book has inelegancies of diction and expression into which an exponent of “art for art’s sake” should not have been betrayed.’

Arthur Machen read the novel in December 1896 when writing The Hill of Dreams, though did not record his opinion of it. Did Basil Brooke’s eventual death inspire the tragic fate of Machen’s own Lucian Taylor, who dies at his desk after a frenzied laudanum addiction? As the journal nears its end, Basil contemplates suicide, which ‘may not be in the fashion, yet one may at last grow so susceptible to one’s environment of impressions that continued life becomes almost impossible’. Even in his final letter to Langley Basil tries to distance himself from ‘the common suicide’. The book is cut short by an editorial note revealing that Basil was last seen pacing the deck of a ship bound for Alexandria.

‘It is believed that he must have fallen overboard with a sudden lurch of the vessel; for next morning his place was empty. It will always be empty now’.

The myth of Vigo Street

In writing about the British publishing scene in the 1890s, I arrive time and again at the doorstep of no. 9 Vigo Street, the premises of John Lane and Elkin Mathews’ Bodley Head. In 1887, Lane had been at an exhibition at the Rembrandt Head Gallery in Vigo Street and had asked the owner, a Mr Dunthorne, whether he knew of a ‘cosy little corner’ out of which he could sell his books. Dunthorne gladly showed him to a small shop a few doors down where the Rembrandt Head had originally begun life. Lane made an offer on the spot, and switched ‘Bodley’ for Rembrandt. ‘Bodley, the most pious of founders!’ Lane later explained his choice. ‘Who could so fittingly be enshrined as a patron?’ Thomas Bodley had of course been the founder of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and, like Lane, had come from Devon.

The illustration above is by the English artist Edmund Hort New (1871-1931), who worked with Lane on new editions of classics such as The Compleat Angler and The Natural History of Selbourne. New’s Arts and Crafts style and his preference for sequestered, unpopulated scenes gives his cover for the Bodley Head’s catalogue, which he drew while staying with Lane in July 1895, a quaint and respectable appeal. It is like something out of a children’s book with its neat brickwork, the doorway built snugly under its curved lintel, and the famous Sign of the Bodley Head hanging proudly over the dark glass. To think that this is the place that published The Yellow Book, Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, and books by Arthur Machen, M. P. Shiel and Aubrey Beardsley, all of which were attacked at one point or another by the philistine press for moral indecency.

The myth of Vigo Street comes down to pitched stones and shattered glass. After Wilde’s arrest in April 1895 a small riot was said to have taken place outside the shop. It was the the writer J. Lewis May who originated the rumour in his John Lane and the Nineties, published in 1936: ‘They threw stones at John Lane’s windows, and clamoured for the head of Bodley on a charger’. But no evidence has ever been produced to support this, no newspaper headlines, as Simon Casmir Wilson notes in The Wildean (January 2021). But whatever the case, Lane must have been glad of New’s catalogue illustration following Wilde’s sentencing and the denouncement of all things avant-garde – an image of the Bodley Head reborn, unattached to its decadent past.