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…)