Carl Van Vechten – Magic Arts

Arthur Machen in The Reviewer (1921-24)

The literary periodical The Reviewer was founded in Richmond, Virginia, in 1921 by Emily Tapscott Clark, Hunter Stagg, Mary Dallas Street and Margaret Freeman, and ran for 35 issues until its demise in 1925. Early contributors included H. L. Mencken, James Branch Cabell, Carl Van Vechten and Joseph Hergesheimer (whom Clark dubbed the magazine’s four ‘godfathers’). Clark aimed at promoting the writers of the Southern literary renaissance, the new ‘Southern consciousness’, as she put it. Mencken, the acerbic Baltimore journalist, approved of the periodical’s aims and declared as much in the inaugural issue: ‘The editors know what sort of stuff they need to break down the old Southern tradition and prepare the path for better things’.

H. L. Mencken by Djuna Barnes (public domain)

For a writer who had never tried very hard to cultivate a reputation in America, Arthur Machen’s name cropped up surprisingly often. Hunter Stagg, in his article ‘Some Literary Curiosities’, singles out Machen’s The Three Impostors as a work of ‘strangeness and fantasy’ that outperforms Robert Louis Stevenson’s More New Arabian Nights, from which Machen borrowed his book’s structure and caperish energy. ‘Mr Machen’s tales not only deal with the mysterious, but frequently make horrible excursions into the occult, our modern substitute for Afrit and wizard law of old’. In January 1924, Carl Van Vechten reviewed Ornaments in Jade, Machen’s collection of vignettes written in the mid-1890s but not published together until 1924. Characteristically, Van Vechten casts Machen as a hermetic writer whose work can only be fully understood by the initiated: ‘A few readers will divine the orphic secrets; all readers will appreciate the suavity of the prose’. In July of the same year The Reviewer reprinted Machen’s essay ‘The Ten Thousand and One Nights’, which had been written for the Evening News in 1913 to celebrate its 10,000th issue. A copy had been given to The Reviewer by collector Charles Parsons. The fanatical New York businessman and correspondent of Machen’s Frederick Eddy (Clark privately thought him annoying) reviewed The Secret Glory in a 1922 issue.

Carl Van Vechten, self portrait (public domain)

Machen’s star had been rising in America for a number of years. By 1923 his books were commanding high prices at auction houses and his memoirs were being published by the New York firm Alfred A. Knopf. The Reviewer’s chief editor Emily Tapscott Clark, born in Richmond in 1892, did not herself appear particularly interested in Machen’s work at the time, but some of her associates certainly did. Hunter Stagg was particularly enthusiastic and visited Machen in London in the summer of 1923 with Montgomery Evans (‘they seem to have all got very drunk together’, reported Clark). James Branch Cabell was another early admirer, as was Van Vechten. Perhaps inevitably, H. L. Mencken was the odd one out; he considered Machen to be a failure whose revival was unearned, and roasted the Welshman in an article for his own magazine The Smart Set.

Clark also seems to have asked Machen for pieces to publish, as she did with British writers John Galsworthy, Ronald Firbank and Aleister Crowley (who provided an article on Cabell). The Reviewer could not afford to pay its contributors, and so freebies from established authors were seen as a way to lure regional Southern writers into submitting their work without financial reward. It was Frederick Eddy who managed to get Machen to send over his ‘Notes on The Secret Glory’, published as ‘The Treasure of the Humble’ in January 1923. A version of this was later included in Henry Danielson’s Arthur Machen: A Bibliography that same year.

Clark resigned the editorship in 1924 after her marriage to the philanthropic Edwin Balch (who had financed several issues himself), and the journal folded soon after. But this did not end her association with Machen. Clark travelled to London in July 1926 with the poet and notorious beauty Elinor Wylie. Wylie (‘She spent money’, Clark remembered, ‘always, magnificently and inconsiderately’) darted about the city paying calls to notable writers of the day, including Virginia Woolf. One of these writers was Machen, who Wylie visited ‘unintroduced’ at his home in St John’s Wood to drink his famed Dog and Duck punch. Clark seems not to have been present on this occasion, for her brief account of Wylie’s visit is written in the third person (unlike their earlier meeting with Walter de la Mare), but she may have called in later years — Machen certainly mentions her visiting in summer 1938. Clark wrote about the London trip, and her experiences of editing The Reviewer in her book of anecdotes Innocence Abroad (1931); it included reminiscences of old friends such as Carl Van Vechten, whom she used to meet for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel, New York. She sent a copy to Machen, who read it with interest: ‘Most entertaining; but I don’t think I should have been at ease in the little circle at the Algonquin’.

Elinor Wylie in 1928, around the time she visited Machen (public domain)

Sources referred to:

Ingenue Among the Lions: The Letters of Emily Clark to Joseph Hergesheimer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965).
Emily Clark, Innocence Abroad (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931). Available online.
The Reviewer, volumes 1-4. Available online.
James Branch Cabell website, the Virginia Commonwealth University.

Arthur Machen in America (#3)

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Arthur Machen’s Ars Magna of London (‘an adventure into the unknown’) can just about be applied to Manhattan’s street grid; getting lost is admittedly much harder, given that every avenue/street intersection offers a coordinate, but I was mostly without map or guidebook. Machen advises the walker to lay aside all historical associations; again, hard to do when every skyscraper is a landmark with its own cultural baggage. At least there were some surprises, such as encountering Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, its ground floor a gilded shopping mall open to the public. Or witnessing a naked man being ushered into a police car in Times Square. Aiding me in my practice was the intense July heat which had followed me from Austin, providing the creeping delirium needed for glimpsing Machen’s ‘Great Magisterium’. I was grateful when, at the end of the day, I could retreat to an air-conditioned hostel room, albeit the same size and style as a prison cell.

NYC’s holy mysteries – a typical street view (author’s photo)

Machen was of course never in New York City – the second stop on my American archive tour – and never expressed any interest in being there. But it was the epicentre of the Machen ‘boom’, home to the offices of Alfred A. Knopf who published the majority of Machen’s American editions in the 1920s. A handful of devoted New Yorkers kept up a voluminous correspondence with Machen. One such was Alfred F. Goldsmith, owner of a bookshop at 42 Lexington Avenue, ‘At the Sign of the Sparrow’. Goldsmith seemed to have cultivated a faux-Gothic exclusivity in his shop, unswept and accessed via a staircase leading below street level. It was also supposedly the setting for two mystery novels. Stockbroker and book collector Edward Naumburg remembered the Sparrow as ‘dimly lighted, warmed by a gas stove, lined of course with bookshelves, and divided by a flimsy partition beyond which was the inner sanctum where rarities were kept. The average customer was not invited to enter’. Presumably beyond the partition (or penetrable veil) a row of Machen rarities lay waiting.

Another correspondent was Carl Van Vechten, novelist, dance critic, socialite, promotor of the Harlem Renaissance and African American culture more generally. It was Van Vechten who recommended Machen’s work to Knopf while an assistant there and wrote some of the earliest appreciations of Machen in American newspapers (one of which was collected in his book Excavations). It’s a wonder he had any time to write to Machen, who was then in his sixties and completely at odds with Van Vechten’s lifestyle; Machen himself did not seem particularly aware of Van Vechten’s wider cultural pursuits, and would have been uneasy to learn of his bisexual proclivities. For the most part, their correspondence remained safely on the topic of Machen’s books, which Van Vechten valued for their ‘rarified’ aesthetic qualities, hoping that The Hill of Dreams and The Secret Glory might counteract the current vogue for realism (take that, Dreiser).

The New York Public Library holds around two dozen letters Machen wrote to Van Vechten, not to mention fifty to the Irish novelist Norah Hoult. Hoult visited New York and various points, relying on Machen’s letters of introduction for bed and board. It is from her that Machen received a picture of East coast literary society and came quickly to the conclusion that he was no glad not to be part of it. Machen’s letters to Hoult are arguably of far more interest than Van Vechten’s for their informal tone, details of daily life, and the fact that the pair corresponded well into the 1940s.

So having spent a cool yet siren-filled night (from the NYPD station across the street), I set out for the Library’s Main Branch. Its neoclassical exterior is not unlike the British Museum, but its innards were designed in the then-fashionable ‘Beaux-Arts’ style, similar to nearby Grand Central Station, opened around the same time (early 1910s). Passing through the airport-style security check, I made my way first to complete my registration, and then to a separate desk in the famous sky-vaulted Rose Main Reading Room to collect my library card. Then up a floor or two to a wooden door. Either a class was being held, or the library team were in a meeting. I turned back to see the corridor-full of visitors staring at me, more interested in why I had tried to enter this mysterious room than the ‘Century of the New Yorker’ exhibition on display. Clutching laptop and notebook, I passed the time peering at the old magazine covers lining the walls. Machen was sometimes reviewed in The New Yorker during the 1930s, and over a hundred of his niece Sylvia Townsend Warner’s short stories were published in its pages. There is always a Machen connection if you look hard enough. (To dig a bit deeper, it was also the centenary year of the Library’s Walt Whitman exhibition, curated by Alfred Goldsmith).

Finally, I was beckoned into the room. I had requested everything, which kept me occupied for the morning. Outside I sat blinking in Bryant Park, eyeing the chess boards but feeling too frazzled to make a challenge. I idled off instead to buy honey-roasted peanuts and go in search of the Strand bookshop. Tomorrow, the promise of Penn Station and the Amtrak to New Haven, Connecticut, and what I imagined to be the cool leafy avenues of Yale University and the Beinecke Library, home to the discarded final chapters of The Secret Glory…

Inner workings of The Strand Bookshop (author’s photo)

References / further reading

Arthur Machen, Things Near and Far (London: Martin Secker, 1923)
See Carl Van Vechten’s Wikipedia entry for a good selection of his portrait photography.
Brotmanblog is a fantastic resource for Alfred Goldsmith and bookselling in early twentieth-century New York City.

Arthur Machen in America (#1)

Big Machen fries please (author’s photo)

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, the Vodrey Collection at Princeton, and Yale University. Small archives are also kept at 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.

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