WEIRD TALES OF SIN AND ECSTASY:
ARTHUR MACHEN IN JAZZ AGE CHICAGO

By Gwilym Games, Editor of Machenalia

Part II –
Pan’s Progeny:
Chicago gives birth to Weird Tales

It is highly appropriate that Wildclaw Theatre should host an adaptation of the "The Great God Pan" in Chicago in March 2008 given there is a very important connection between events in that city, the later career of Arthur Machen (1863-1947) and the development of modern horror.

Machen's life was at a low point at the beginning of the 1920s after he had been more or less forced from his job as a journalist on the London Evening News in 1921 for amongst other things writing a “slanderous” obituary for Lord Alfred Douglas (Oscar Wilde's Bosie). Machen had worked for Douglas and they had parted on very bad terms. The report of Douglas’s death was mistaken and Douglas, who was very much alive immediately sued the paper successfully much to the disgust of Machen’s employers. Machen did his best to find new journalistic work but he had a wife and two children to support and no real money coming in.

Then as the twenties began to boom, salvation arrived for Machen from the United States, and it was Chicago which started it all. Machen’s works had been available in the United States since the 1890s but he had never been a major name there. The famous legend of the Angels of Mons from 1915, when Machen’s story “The Bowmen” inspired strange tales of Angels striking down Germans in battle, was widely reported in the United States as it was across the world. Indeed Cecil B. de Mille’s, Hollywood smash Joan the Woman (1917) included similar visions of medieval warriors above the trenches. American editions of The Bowmen were issued and sold well but Machen made no money from them as he did not own the copyright and this brief fame did not really enhance his appeal.

It was not “The Bowman” or other wartime tales but Machen’s tales of horror, despair and his bejewelled prose from the 1890s which was to win him popularity amongst his American admirers. Chief amongst them was a young Chicago Daily News reporter Vincent Starrett. Starrett found a copy of Machen’s The Three Impostors in a book store on North Clark Street, near Washington Square, around 1914. He was impressed and started buying Machen’s books, and reading them he began to think Machen was a neglected genius. In 1915 he started a long friendly correspondence with Machen and letters between London and Chicago were soon crossing the Atlantic. In 1917 he published an article in a popular magazine Reedy’s Mirror on Machen, this article formed the basis of Starrett’s first book Arthur Machen: a Novelist of Sin and Ecstasy, published ninety years ago in 1918 by Walter M. Hill of Chicago. It was the only a short book but it was the first study of Machen ever to be published and it praised Machen in no uncertain terms as these extracts show:

“Of course, it is exactly because he does not write books of the ordinary kind that Arthur Machen's reputation as a writer was not made long ago... More than Hawthorne or Tolstoy: Machen is a novelist of the soul. He writes of a strange borderland, lying somewhere between Dreams and Death, peopled with shades, beings, spirits, ghosts, men, women, souls - what shall we call them? - the very notion of whom stops vaguely just short of thought. He writes of the life Satyr-ic. For him Pan is not dead; his votaries still whirl through woodland windings to the mad pipe that was Syrinx, and carouse fiercely in enchanted forest grottoes (hidden somewhere, perhaps, in the fourth dimension!)...

Perhaps his most remarkable story - certainly I think his most terrible story, is "The Great God Pan," at first published separately with "The Inmost Light"; now occurring in "The House of Souls." It is the story of an experiment upon a girl, as a result of which, for a moment, she is permitted a sight of the Great God, beyond the veil, with shocking consequences. Yet it is told with exquisite reticence and grace, and with a plausibility that is as extraordinary as it is immoral... There is the very quintessence of horror in the unutterable suggestion of such passages...

Among other things, posterity is going to demand of us why, when the opportunity was ours, we did not open our hearts to Arthur Machen and name him among the very great.”

Starrett’s monograph was the beginning of a growing trend which made Machen fashionable in the Twenties as Starrett communicated his discovery with other influential men who became dedicated Machen enthusiasts like New York writer Carl van Vechten, who had attended the University of Chicago, and the noted American fantasist James Branch Cabell. As the trend spread Machen’s works suddenly became intensely collectable and demand for republication grew. Starrett edited two collections of Machen’s works The Shining Pyramid (Chicago: Covici-McGee 1923) and The Glorious Mystery (Chicago: Covici-McGee 1924). These books sadly led to an unfortunate falling out between Machen and Starrett over publication rights. Machen had been approached by other publishers in the United States and had forgotten the terms of his earlier agreements with Starrett, who in turn had neglected to keep Machen informed of his plans. Their differences were patched up later when Starrett met Machen in person on a visit to London. Starrett later became honorary President of the Arthur Machen Society, and a distinguished writer and critic in his own right, who was given the first ever Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America in 1958.

Starrett’s role had been a vital one in kickstarting the Machen revival as the leader of a crowd of Chicago acolytes. While Chicago gangsters were busy pushing hard drink in speakeasies literary Chicago was busy pushing Machen’s fine prose. At the time the hostile critic Howard Mencken wrote with irritation on the growth of the Machen cult: “Literary Chicago is with him to a man–-that is, all save the minority of literati who actually sell their literature.”

Perhaps the most influential name amongst these enthusiasts was Ben Hecht, "the Shakespeare of Hollywood", a man who did much to immortalize the spirit of Jazz Age Chicago in film. Hecht, ace reporter, novelist and screenwriter, was the winner of two Oscars, and his work on seventy screenplays included Hitchcock's Spellbound and Notorious, as well as FrontPage/His Girl Friday, Gone With the Wind, The Thing from Another World, Some Like It Hot, Scarface and Roxie Hart, the basis for the musical Chicago. It was Starrett, a fellow reporter, who introduced Hecht to Machen’s work and Hecht interviewed Machen in London for the Chicago Daily News in 1919 saying: “A curious, tolerant hermit-like Machen, who clings to an era that overlooked him, moves in an era that ignores him, and in his bookcase repose four of as beautiful books as are to be found in London.” Hecht included Machen’s The Hill of Dreams amongst his favourite books and Hecht’s early novels were all Machenesque decadent fantasies.

Considering all this no wonder on March 1st, St David’s Day, the patron saint of Wales, 2008, The Friends of Arthur Machen on gathering in Shakespeare’s Stratford Upon Avon to remember Machen’s time upon the stage, toasted not only the critical success of Wildclaw Theatre’s The Great God Pan, but also the ninetieth anniversary of the publication in Chicago of Vincent Starrett’s Arthur Machen, a Novelist of Sin and Ecstasy which did so much for Machen’s later career.


Part II – Pan’s Progeny: Chicago gives birth to Weird Tales

March 2008 also sees the 85th anniversary of the birth in Chicago of what Stephen King called the “Golden Age of Weird Fiction”, through the establishment of the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1923. While other cities provided pulps dominated by science fiction, crime, and the cliff-hanging heroics of Doc Savage and The Shadow, Weird Tales made Jazz Age Chicago the bizarre birthplace for the next thirty years of the dark, exotic stories which led onto modern horror and fantasy. Weird Tales: The Unique Magazine, the first pulp devoted to such tales was founded by Chicago business and newspaperman J.C. Henneberger to cover the field of "Poe-Machen Shudders". Henneberger wanted to specialize in the sort of stories of horror and morbidity he enjoyed himself and he used a Chicago novelist Edwin Baird as his first editor. It seems likely that the excitement about Machen in literary Chicago and the weird tale at the time contributed to Henneberger’s decision to set up the magazine. It is interesting to note that one early contributor was Vincent Starrett and Ben Hecht promised a story too but never delivered.

In October 1923 Weird Tales published the first professional publication of HP Lovecraft the story “Dagon”. Soon Lovecraft was a regular contributor and in 1924 he almost became editor but could not face leaving the East Coast. Weird Tales went on to publish Lovecraft’s greatest stories as his worked matured such as “The Call of Cthulhu”, stories that would change face of modern horror. Lovecraft was not alone in his impact it was for Weird Tales that Texan R. E. Howard created the grim barbarian, Conan the Cimmerian, helping lead to an entire genre of sword and sorcery tales today. Meanwhile unique stories of baroque fantasy came from Clark Ashton Smith, and Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin stories of an occult detective while Weird Tales kept nurturing new talent publishing early stories by Frank Belknap Long, August Derleth, Fritz Leiber jnr and Robert Bloch, creator of Psycho amongst others. All these writers knew each other and exchanged correspondence and they were also all great admirers of Arthur Machen. Just as Machen was inspired in his stories by his idols Poe and Stevenson so Machen’s stories now inspired a new generation of writers of weird fiction.

Machen was certainly a profound influence on Weird Tales writers through his use of urban landscapes for horror and his themes of the return of ancient terrible gods and beings, especially for Lovecraft who regarded Machen as a “Titan – perhaps the greatest living author”. Lovecraft first read Machen in 1923 and was electrified by his style and stories. It was to inspire him in a new direction resulting in his Cthulhu Mythos stories which started being published a few years later in Weird Tales. One example is “The Dunwich Horror” (1927), in which ancient extraterrestrial beings return to Earth by horrific means in a plot line which in many respects is a homage to The Great God Pan, it even name checks Machen’s story in the text. Meanwhile RE Howard thought Machen greater than Poe and wrote some horror tales which mingled elements from Machen and Lovecraft into his own savage storytelling the most notable being “The Worms of Earth” a tale of horror set in Roman Britain, according to some Howard’s greatest story.

 

Thus Wildclaw Theatre by putting on Machen’s The Great God Pan is making an appropriate tribute to the birth of Chicago’s Weird Tales in this anniversary year. Without Weird Tales and Machen’s influence on those who wrote for it, modern horror and fantasy would be very different place.

-- Gwilym Games

 

 

 

 

 

 

© 2008 Gwilym Games -Printed with kind permission from Gwilym Games

 

 

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