Last week I travelled to Broadcasting House (the BBC’s London studio) to record a short essay about Weird: A Life of Arthur Machen in Six Unearthly Books, which was broadcast on Halloween morning on the BBC World Service weekend programme. You can listen to it here at the 48-minute mark, or read the transcript of the essay below:
Born in Wales in 1863, Arthur Machen has been described as the last romantic, the last Victorian, and the last of the London visionaries. Machen felt at home in the past and disliked the modern world for its noise and its busyness. Characters in his stories of supernatural horror stumble upon very old things that have survived into the present day: sinister fairies, occult conspiracies, angelic guardians and strange rituals.
But I wrote this new biography of Machen because I think he was also the first of many things. He looked backwards and forwards at the same time. Machen was one of the earliest writers of what we now call weird fiction, a style of horror that disconcerts us and forces us to question the very nature of our place in the world. Many of his best weird stories were written in the Decadent 1890s, most famously The Great God Pan, in which to ‘see the God Pan’ is to catch a terrifying glimpse of the spiritual beyond. Machen was also very experimental in his style. Listen to this, from a story called ‘The White People’, about a young girl venturing deep into a fairy world:
*Here followed an actor performing an extract from ‘The White People’*
What motivated him to write in this way? As a child Machen was awed by the sense of mystery and terror in the landscape around his home in South Wales. The names of the wild hills and rivers, Usk, Lansoar, the holy mountain Twyn Barlwm, the old forest of Wentwood with its Roman road running through it, were like magic spells to his ears. When he moved to London in the 1880s he took with him this feeling of awe and began to try and render it in fiction.
I find Machen so interesting not only because he wrote about some very unusual subjects, but because of how he saw himself as a writer. Popular authors like H. G. Wells or Arthur Conan Doyle just got on and wrote book after book, but for Machen the very act of writing could be agonising. Sometimes he did not even seem to care whether people bought his books. He often threw things away and once spent two years writing a romance about the Holy Grail that he knew publishers would not want. Bad reviews were a source of great enjoyment for him, so much so that he collected them into a little book called Precious Balms which included an introduction advising his readers how to write them. But his work, originally so distasteful to reviewers, was discovered by American book collectors in the 1920s and praised as a rare and subtle art.
Now, like the fairies and folklore of his weird tales, Machen’s work has survived to the present day, to mystify and unnerve new audiences.