Arthur Machen, Decadent and Occult Works, ed. by Dennis Denisoff (Cambridge: MHRA, 2018)

Abstract

Arthur Machen (‘rhymes with blacken,’ as he used to say) is one of the most intriguing writers and personalities of the fin de siècle. A major reason for this is that he seems to at once embody and yet stand apart from so many of its defining characteristics. A cigarette may have been Oscar Wilde’s ‘perfect pleasure’ but Machen preferred the less exquisite, more richly satisfying briar, hymning the joys of languorous nicotine consumption in The Anatomy of Tobacco (1886). While Decadents from Charles Baudelaire onwards have been devout ailurophiles, Machen stalked the backstreets of Bloomsbury in the company of Juggernaut, a bulldog fierce enough to frighten even George Egerton. He loved France but preferred the vineyards of Touraine to the fleshpots and cabarets of gay Paris. He was a Celt, but his Welshness gave him a perspective on the world quite different from that of Irish nationalists such as W. B. Yeats.