Forefathers of Sword and Sorcery: Arthur Machen
"...after a close study of Poe's technique, I am forced to give as my personal opinion, that his horror tales have been surpassed by Arthur Machen…”
"If you can get Machen's address from Mr. Derleth, I'll see what I can do. If Machen answers my inquire at all, his reply should be very interesting. I have always been fascinated by his work…” *
— Excerpts from letters sent by Robert E. Howard to H.P. Lovecraft
Today marks the seventy-second anniversary of Arthur Machen’s death.
I wrote my last post on Arthur Machen months before I began my “Forefathers” series. It’s high time for an update.
Machen’s influence upon REH is patent. Yarns like “Worms of the Earth” would not exist without the fiction of Arthur Machen. Clark Ashton Smith, the other co-founder of Sword and Sorcery, was also a huge Machen fan, citing “The White Powder” as one of his ten favorite weird tales. In a strange turn of events, Machen reviewed an early collection of CAS’ verse, which review Smith seems to have disliked, due to Machen noting CAS’ youth.
Robert Bloch, who wrote a few S&S tales in spite of his own inclinations, was a Machen fan, as was C.L. Moore.
L. Sprague de Camp, the founder of the third and weakest branch of S&S, never had much to say about Machen—which is exactly what I would expect.
In the 1970s, Ramsey Campbell—with his ground-breaking tales of Ryre—was and is a huge fan of Machen, as was Karl Edward Wagner. Wagner’s “.220 Swift” is an obvious homage to Machen. Fritz Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness —which mentions Machen and his fiction several times—would be a far lesser novel without the inspiration provided by Machen’s tales of cityscapes suffused with dark magic.
Get out there and read some Machen. Much of his work is in the public domain. As I stated in my previous post, Machen basically brought cosmic horror out into the mainstream—Poe beat him to the punch, but obliquely—which laid the foundations for REH and CAS to layer Haggardesque/Burroughsian/Merrittesque adventure over that, which produced Sword and Sorcery as we know it.
Requiescat in pace, Arthur.
*Just imagine if Machen had replied to REH’s (hypothetical) letter.