Among My Books (August 1912)

The Weekly Machen

This week, Machen offers another quartet of obscure books while adding insights to his personal reading habits. Incredibly, he leaves the best book for last, but leaves the reader hanging! Appended to this article is an unhappy correspondence from Keighley Snowden, whose book had received a review from Machen the previous week. As with Algernon Blackwood’s “The Man Whom the Trees Loved,” Machen criticized Snowden’s “Bright Shame” on its approach to Nature. That article is available for reading.

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Among My Books
by
Arthur Machen
August 3, 1912

Up to a few years ago there were two publishing seasons. Books were issued in the spring, and still more books were issued in the autumn; and the summer was the dead time. And of all hopeless seasons for book publishing the two months between the month of July and the 15th of September were the most hopeless.

All this has been changed. Five or six years ago, or earlier still perhaps, some of the leading firms discovered that the “bestsellers” sold well whenever they were put on the market; and many bad but highly successful novels were issued in August.

Now another change has come. To my surprise some of the best stories of the year have come to my desk in the last week or ten days. I have been wondering since last February what had become—not of the masterpieces of fiction—but of the well written, well constructed tale, the book that showed cleverness at all events, if not genius.

The months went by bringing dulness in fiction, with small and rare relief, the “spring season” passed without anything approaching a portent in novel-writing; and then at the end of July and beginning of August I find myself considering a row of half-a-dozen books, each of which is worth reading and worth talking about.

None of these books is written by a “bestseller,” none of them, so far as I know, has at its back a name good for an issue of 100,000 copies; still here they come in the heart of the dead season, and I hope the experiment will be justified.

I have already dealt in this column with Mr. Algernon Blackwood’s short stories and Mr. Keighley Snowden’s novel with a moral. Now we are to talk of “The Rat Trap,” by Daniel Woodroffe (Laurie); “The New Humpty Dumpty,” by Daniel Chaucer (Lane); “Golden Vanity,” by Maisie Bennett (Mills and Boon); and “The Woman Between,” by Edmund Bosanquet (John Long).

The Woman Between

Mr. Bosanquet’s novel offers the fewest problems, so it may be taken first. It may be said, indeed, that “The Woman Between” offers no problems at all—save to the absorbed reader who wants to know what will happen, who feels as he comes to the middle of the book that he must turn to the last page and so assure himself that everything comes right in the end.

The author, that is to say, has set himself the task of inventing a tale that will hold the attention from the first page to the last, and he has succeeded very well. Here and there there is a hint of melodrama; the Squire’s silver dinner service, the wealthy Aungier’s wealth, and the Irish accent of the Irishman are all a thought too much underlined and insisted on. Still I, who am of an impatient and scornful skipping habit where novels are concerned, read “The Women Between” from beginning to end and liked doing so: and what higher praise can the contriver of plots desire?

Golden Vanity

Paradoxically, Miss Maisie Bennett’s “Golden Vanity” is a much better book than Mr. Bosanquet’s—and also a much worse book. The first part, dealing with the orphaned Jeanette, the orphanage which trained her to be a tenant and savagely ill-treated her in the process, her companions behind the horrid walls, notably little ’Randy, the boy Don whom she met of afternoons after she had discovered an exit by the walnut-tree; all this is of very high merit indeed; I would say boldly, of rare and extraordinary merit.

Indeed, I have not the slightest hesitation in declaring that the “orphanage” section of “Golden Vanity” is by a long way superior to the somewhat similar convent school section of the excellent though over-praised “Marie Claire.”

Miss Bennett has etched in her picture of the miseries of oppressed and tortured children in a fierce dry point; the stylus has dug deep and black into the plate, and you know that there is truth behind every word of it. I have read the story of the hanged puppy once; but I could not read it again.

And then when Jeannette leaves the orphanage and “goes into service” in the suburbs; this is admirable also; I do not think Gissing would have been ashamed of these chapters.

And then we get to Part II. The characters have grown up! Jeannette is on the stage—and by some unholy and unlucky magic which I do not understand, the book becomes entirely impossible. It is written, this second part, in the worst manner of the worst feuilletonist, and after a couple of chapters I put it down unfinished.

“Golden Vanity” to me is a puzzle and a problem; and as such I leave it.

The New Humpty-Dumpty

I wish Daniel Chaucer—the name, I understand, ought to be distinguished by quotation marks—had paid no attention whatever to the advice of his publisher, Mr. John. Lane. {Ed. Note- Daniel Chaucer is a pseudonym of Ford Mattox Ford.}

The author wanted to call his book “The Dark Forest.” “Mr. Lane, however,” he says in his preface, “insists on rechristening it ‘The New Humpty Dumpty.” Mr. Lane was quite wrong. “The Dark Forest” is a beautiful title, and an expressive and appropriate title, for it is the phrase that was ever on the lips of the wonderful hero, Sergius Mihailovitch to express the strangeness and mystery of the Russian mind. The publisher’s title may be very clever, but though I have read the book carefully I don’t know what it means, or who the Humpty Dumpty of the story was.

The book is a brilliant and convincing piece of work, a quite fascinating combination of curious character-drawing and a most exciting and unexpected plot.

It was Stevenson, if I remember, who dwelt on the marvels that might be accomplished by the skilful invention of incident, and he took the first part of “Monte Cristo” as an example of this truth. The characters, he pointed out, were mere puppets, lay figures jerked into various attitudes by the manipulator, Dumas. And yet, as Stevenson truly declared, these chapters are wholly enchanting; Dantes in the Château d’If, the Abbé Faria, and all his contraptions and contrivances remain delightful in the memory.

Now Daniel Chancer is by no means in the superb rank of story-tellers where Dumas sits, but his tale as a tale is a very good one.

And then all the people are alive and entirely convincing from the wretched little converted Socialist doctrinaire to the Grand Duke. Indeed, I cannot praise this Grand Duke too highly; he is magnificent, terrific—and most amusing. Here is an account of the wedding of the hero and heroine, celebrated according to the rite of the Orthodox Eastern Church:—

The only hitch in the ceremony itself came from Mr. Dexter [an American gentleman]. He strolled into the small back room that had been turned into a chapel with his hands in his pockets, and an immense cigar in his mouth . . . . His cigar very much irritated the Archbishop of Nicomesia, who interrupted his extremely beautiful intoning to say, in a harsh voice, that this was the House of God, and not a place for a man to make a beast of himself in.

And as Mr Dexter did not understand him, the Grand Duke pulled the enormous cigar from his mouth, and threw it into the Holy Water font. After that it all went very quietly.

And through all the humours and adventures and tragedies of the tale moves Sergius Mihailovitch Macdonald, the modern Quixote, whose soul was as a dark forest.

I have left myself but wholly inadequate space to deal with “The Rat Trap,” by Daniel Woodroffe. I must be brief; but I will be emphatic. I think that it is certainly the best novel of the year.

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THE FALSE IDEA OF NATURE
To the Editor of “The Evening News.”

Sir.—I am aware that Mr. Arthur Machen’s attitude towards Nature is very different from my own, but I do not believe that he would willingly misrepresent any man’s. However, he misrepresents mine surprisingly. It is not the fact that “Mr. Snowden tells us that the cure for all our ills is to follow Nature.” It is gratuitous and mistaken to imply that, even in one respect, I would have Nature followed unintelligently; and, far from being a disciple of “the idiot philosophy of the eighteenth century,’’ I am not much concerned to defend it.

Your courtesy will at once allow me to make these disclaimers, and to say that Mr. Machen’s comment on the rationale of “Bright Shame” goes over my head. I do not know that I have any right to ask for space in which to make this evident, or to answer him on the question between us; but 1 am very ready to do so.

Keighley Snowden
London, July 30, 1912

[I am sorry if I have misrepresented Mr. Snowden’s view of Nature. I have not got a copy of “Bright Shame” to refer to: but, unless I am mistaken, Mr. Snowden states that our chief fault is that we do not sufficiently follow “the hint of Nature.’’ My point is that Nature hints to one man the expediency of committing murder, to another the necessity of suffering martyrdom; and so, to repeat my own phrase, the word Nature cancels itself out. — Arthur Machen.]

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