Machen's weird tales of the creepy and fantastic finally come to Penguin Classics. With an introduction from S.T. Joshi, editor of American Supernatural Tales, The White People and Other Weird Stories is the perfect introduction to the father of weird fiction. The title story "The White People" is an exercise in the bizarre leaving the reader disoriented and on edge. From the first page, Machen turns even fundamental truths upside-down, as his character Ambrose explains, "there have been those who have sounded the very depths of sin, who all their lives have never done an 'ill deed'" setting the stage for a tale entirely without logic.
Introduction
Arthur Machen’s own life is perhaps his greatest creation; for it is
exactly the life we might expect a poet and a visionary to have
lived. Born in 1863 in the village of Caerleon-on-Usk in Wales
(the site, two millennia earlier, of the Roman town of Isca Silurum
and the base of the Second Augustan Legion), Machen was
fascinated since youth by the Roman antiquities in his region as
well as the rural Welsh countryside. He attended Hereford Cathedral
School, but in 1880 he failed an examination for the Royal
College of Surgeons; he felt he had no option but to go to London
to look for work, where he hoped that his ardent enthusiasm for
books might land him some literary work.
But only poverty and loneliness were his portion. Dragging out
a meager existence as a translator (his translation of the Heptameron
of Marguerite de Navarre [1886] long remained standard,
as did his later translation of Casanova’s memoirs), tutor, and
cataloger, he knew at first hand the spiritual isolation that his
alter ego, Lucian Taylor, would depict so poignantly in The Hill
of Dreams (1907). In his first autobiography, Far Off Things
(1922), he speaks of this period with a wistfulness that scarcely
conceals his anguish. Consider the description of his attic garret
on Clarendon Road:
It was, of course, at the top of the house, and it was much smaller than
any monastic “cell” that I have ever seen. From recollection I should
estimate its dimensions as ten feet by five. It held a bed, a washstand, a
small table, and one chair; and so it was very fortunate that I had few
visitors. Outside, on the landing, I kept my big wooden box with all my
possessions— and these not many— in it. And there was a very notable
circumstance about this landing. On the wall was suspended, lengthwise,
a step- ladder by which one could climb through a trap door to
the roof in case of fire, and so between the rungs or steps of this ladder
I disposed my library. For anything I know, the books tasted as well
thus housed as they did at a later period when I kept them in an
eighteenth- century bookcase of noble dark mahogany, behind glass
doors. There was no fireplace in my room, and I was often very cold. I
would sit in my shabby old great- coat, reading or writing, and if I were
writing I would every now and then stand up and warm my hands over
the gas- jet, to prevent my fingers getting numb.
Although Machen published a few works during this period—
The Anatomy of Tobacco (1884), an owlishly learned disquisition
on various types of tobacco, and the picaresque novel The
Chronicle of Clemendy (1886)— they were commercially unsuccessful
and today are not highly regarded.
But the death of Machen’s father in 1887 suddenly gave him, for
the next fourteen years, the economic independence he required to
write whatever he chose, without thought of markets or sales. And
yet, one of his first works of fiction of this period— “The Great
God Pan” (1890)— created a sensation, especially when it appeared
in book form in 1894. It shocked the moral guardians of an enfeebled
Victorian culture as the diseased outpourings of a decadent
mind; but the reviewers who condemned it as sexually offensive
could not know that Machen shared the very inhibitions he seemed
to be defying. This tale— as well as the infinitely superior “The
White People” (1899)— succeeds largely because Machen himself,
as a rigidly orthodox Anglo- Catholic, crystallized his horror of
aberrant sexuality by giving it a supernatural dimension.
That Machen chose to work in the literature of the supernatural—
one branch of what has come to be called weird fiction,
which also encompasses fantasy and psychological suspense— is of
interest in itself. Canonically, the supernatural in literature commenced
with Horace Walpole’s short novel The Castle of Otranto
(1764), which ultimately ushered in the age of the Gothic novel,
whose most notable exponents were Ann Radcliffe, Matthew
Gregory Lewis, and Charles Robert Maturin. It is not paradoxical
that this literature emerged in a century typified by the rationalism
of Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson, for the supernatural
can only manifest itself in literature when a relatively stable and
coherent idea of the natural has been arrived at. In this sense, the
supernatural must keep pace with science: Although it draws upon
myth and folklore in its exhibition of ghosts, vampires, werewolves,
haunted houses, and other such elements, it can only do so at a time
when these elements are generally believed to defy what are commonly
understood to be the laws of nature; for only in this manner
can they constitute the imaginative liberation that many writers
and readers seek. At the same time, the best weird writers understood
that supernatural motifs could serve as metaphors for the
expression of truths about the human condition (the vampire as
social outsider, for example) in a more vivid and pungent manner
than in conventional mimetic realism.
Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from the introduction of The White People And Other Weird Stories by Arthur Machen. Introduction and notes Copyright © S.T. Joshi 2011
Foreword by Guillermo del Toro: The Ecstasy of St. Arthur
Introduction by S.T. Joshi
Suggestions for Further Reading
A Note on the Texts
THE WHITE PEOPLE AND OTHER WEIRD STORIES
The Inmost Light
Novel of the Black Seal
Novel of the White Powder
The Red Hand
The White People
A Fragment of Life
The Bowmen
The Soldiers’ Rest
The Great Return
Out of the Earth
The Terror
Explanatory Notes
