The following snippet was published in the December 31, 1915 edition of the Daily Mail. Likely, this excerpt comes from Machen’s article, “Thou Shalt Not Eat,” (The New Witness, Vol. VII, December 30, 1915).
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The following snippet was published in the December 31, 1915 edition of the Daily Mail. Likely, this excerpt comes from Machen’s article, “Thou Shalt Not Eat,” (The New Witness, Vol. VII, December 30, 1915).
Back to Machen Miscellanea
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Thanks for this!
I wonder if “Grape Guts” is a wordplay on Grape-Nuts – a breakfast cereal Wikipedia says was introduced in 1897, and has a nicely pretentious ad from August 1900 about “Proper Food” – which also specifies “Use no meat for the hot weather breakfast. Let meat appear but once a day during this season of the year.” It also recommends “Grape-Nut Butter, which is a different article than Grape-Nuts, proper”, though it does not rule out the possibility of “a very little butter” on “a slice or two of entire wheat bread”. I’ve always enjoyed Grape-Nuts, but was quite happy today with corned beef, two different kinds of salami, and smoked chicken as part of my August breakfast.
I had not realized that Machen wrote for The New Witness (as, for example, Charles Williams started doing some three years after this). Interesting to read of “those who […] jeered at the mass” in this context: it makes me realize I know too little about The New Witness.
The idea of a sort of solipsistic spherical “ass” is striking – a play with paradoxical images of God as circle or sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere, and/or the point in Flatland?
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I see that the only other article of his in The New Witness which Goldstone lists in the 1973 edition of his Bibliography is “Hallucinations and the Angels. Vol. VI, September 9, 1915, pp. 444-445″. Have I missed your reprinting of it somewhere? If not, would it be something to add to the splendid things regularly appearing on this website?
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Thanks, David. I would love to read and print Machen’s The New Witness articles. However, I not have located those issues in print or in a digital archive. This short blurb is all I have found at present.
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I’m no copyright expert, but the Wikipedia article, “G.K.’s Weekly“, gives me the idea that the whole sequence of “The Eye-Witness (1911–1912) → The New Witness (1912–1923) → G. K.’s Weekly (1925–1936) → The Weekly Review (1936/37 – 1948, when it became a short-lived monthly)” is probably out of copyright as a ‘thing’, though the copyrights of some contributors may not be. I also see there that Lyle Dorsett edited G. K.’s Weekly, a Sampler (1986). Maybe he would know how to proceed – or maybe someone in the UK, like Michael Ward, could get copies from a Deposit Library like the Bodleian.
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