Arthur Machen – Page 12 – { feuilleton }

The Willows by Algernon Blackwood

Light play on the river Thame by net_efekt.

…the major products of Mr. Blackwood attain a genuinely classic level, and evoke as does nothing else in literature an awed convinced sense of the imminence of strange spiritual spheres of entities.

The well-nigh endless array of Mr. Blackwood’s fiction includes both novels and shorter tales, the latter sometimes independent and sometimes arrayed in series. Foremost of all must be reckoned The Willows, in which the nameless presences on a desolate Danube island are horribly felt and recognised by a pair of idle voyagers. Here art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a single strained passage or a single false note.

Thus HP Lovecraft in 1927 from his lengthy overview of horror fiction, Supernatural Horror in Literature. Lovecraft was enthusiastic about many of Blackwood’s weird tales, rating him as one of the contemporary masters along with Arthur Machen. A year before his essay he prefaced The Call of Cthulhu with a Blackwood quote and regularly referred to The Willows as one of his favourite stories. Blackwood’s tale continues to find enthusiasts today, among them the Ghost Box music collective whose Belbury Poly CD titled after the story manages to reference in the space of 44 minutes Blackwood, Machen, CS Lewis and The Morning of the Magicians.

If your curiosity is sufficiently piqued by this point, you can read the story online at Wikisource or Project Gutenberg. Or you can listen to a reading in a new posting at LibriVox. The perfect thing for autumn and the month of Halloween.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Horror in the shadows
• Wanna see something really scary?
• Ghost Box
• The Absolute Elsewhere

Arthur Machen book covers

The House of Souls (1923).

Well, a handful anyway. The late RT Gault put a page of Machen cover scans on his book site which also included the excellent Absolute Elsewhere catalogue of “Fantastic, Visionary, and Esoteric Literature in the 1960s and 1970s”. The cover for The House of Souls is a very odd piece by Sidney Sime and going by some of Sime’s Dunsany illustrations I think this was how he thought souls actually looked. The Three Imposters (below) was part of John Lane’s Keynotes series which also included Machen’s The Great God Pan among the titles, all of which sported covers designed by Aubrey Beardsley.

The Three Imposters (1895).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

February sunset

Today at 17:21. This kind of view always reminds me of the opening
line from The Hill of Dreams (1907) by Arthur Machen:

“There was a glow in the sky as if great furnace doors were opened.”

The art of Hubert Stowitts, 1892–1953

Left: Stowitts photgraphed by Nickolas Muray, 1922.

Hubert Julian Stowitts had a number of careers, including dancer, film actor, painter, designer and metaphysician. As a dancer he worked with Anna Pavlova, who discovered him in California in 1915 and took him on tour around the world. His statuesque figure was used by Rex Ingram for the infernal scenes in The Magician (1926), an adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s rather limp roman-à-clef based on the exploits of Aleister Crowley. The scene with Stowitts as a satyr owed nothing to the book, however, being more inspired by the director’s fondness for the tales of Arthur Machen. Most photos that turn up from this film show Stowitts rather than Paul Wegener who played the sinister alchemist of the title.

Stowitt’s painting developed in the 1930s and included a series of 55 paintings of nude (male) athletes for the 1936 Olympics (see Ewoud Broeksma’s contemporary equivalents at originalolympics.com). Other paintings depicted dance scenes, costume designs, people encountered during travels in the Far East and, in the 1950s, a series of ten Theosophist pictures entitled The Atomic Age Suite.

Prince Suwarno in Mahabarata role (1928).

Briggs Hunt and William Golden (1936).

The Crucifixion in Space (1950).

• The Stowitts Museum and Library
• Stowitts at the Queer Arts Resource

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Nicholas Kalmakoff, 1873–1955

The art of John Atkinson Grimshaw, 1836–1893

Spirit of the Night (1879).

Few people recognise the name of John Atkinson Grimshaw today but anyone who’s bought a birthday or greeting card in Britain will have seen his Spirit of the Night fairy painting, one of a generic series he produced in the 1870s that remains very popular despite the painter’s obscurity. Grimshaw would probably be surprised by this, the fairies were a brief diversion (I like the camp Classicism of Endymion on Mount Latmus), his real enthusiasm was for depicting the gold and amber tints of an English autumn. When he wasn’t painting fallen leaves in quiet streets he was capturing the moonrise or a smoky Victorian twilight in pictures of such spectral delicacy they could easily be used as illustrations for stories by Arthur Machen. This site devoted to the artist has many more, including the fairy paintings; perfect viewing for damp and gloomy evenings.

Autumn Morning.

A Golden Beam.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 1781–1841