"Ordeal by Beauty" by Ralph Adams Cram

Ralph Adams Cram (1863-1942) is a name familiar to readers of older weird fiction primarily for his single volume of ghostly stories, Black Spirits and White (1895), published early in his career, after which he abandoned the writing of fiction for his profession as an architect, specifically of the gothic type. He still wrote, and Darkly Bright Press has just reprinted his 1921 lecture (the Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard University) titled "Ordeal of Beauty"--which was published in a volume of lectures and essays, Convictions and Controversies (1935). 

Cram's lecture begins:

Staggered by the shattering of our hopes for the civilization in which we had taken such pride of ownership, and bewildered by its failure to avoid the old pitfalls of war and its apparent inability to lift itself from the chaos that followed thereon, we fall to a searching of conscience for the finding of the reason of it all, and to a scanning of history in the hope that there we may discover some assurance against its happening again. 

The sentiment expressed still reverberates today. From there Cram narrows his consideration and turns anti-modernist and spiritual:

Gothic is not a passing phase of the building art already completed and dead, it is the voicing of an eternal spirit in man, that may now and then withdraw into silence, but must reappear with power when, after long disuse, the energy emerges again. Gothic is the fully developed expression of Christianity, but it is even more the manifestation of Christianity applied to life, that is to say Christian civilization.  

One suspects Cram's contemporary, Arthur Machen, would agree with a lot of this. Today, however, some of these views seem long out of fashion.

The lecture makes for a slim book, and as with many Darkly Bright Press titles, it has a small limitation. Interested readers should act quickly. Details here. 

Machen: At a Man's Table

During 1928, Arthur Machen had a short-lived column in The Sunday Express entitled At a Man's Table, covering the subject of food. Darkly Bright Press has collected these thirteen essays (plus a few more from the same paper, including one missed by Machen's bibliographers), while adding several more of Machen's related writings, most preceding his column in time, but one dates from after it. 

Thus you have a one-hundred-plus paged assembly, curated nicely by Christopher Tompkins, and including Tompkin's introduction which gives context to everything. 

The essays open with Machen's introduction to a centenary edition of  The Physiology of Taste, translated into English for the first time. In the essays themselves, Machen's devotion to curry is well exemplified (including his recipe), and he often reflects on a food's relevance to literature. The pieces from The Sunday Express also include the illustrations by Stuart Parker which originally accompanied the column.

Darkly Bright Press has issued it presently as a limited hardcover. Ordering details can be found here.

Arthur Machen's The Terror: A New Critical Edition

Darkly Bright Press is open for pre-ordering their limited hardcover edition of  Arthur Machen's The Terror. This "New Critical Edition of the Mythopoeic Classic"includes the original Daily News serial of the text ("The Great Terror" October 1916), that of the first hardcover edition of the novel (Duckworth, February 1917), and the condensed version for the American periodical The Century Magazine ("The Coming of the Terror" October 1917). There are additional essays by Dale Nelson, Thomas Kent Miller, David Llewellyn Dodds, Fr. John Bethancourt, and myself (part of my contribution appeared in a recent issue of Faunus, though I've added a new section to it for this book version). Also considered is Machen's revised edition of 1927, with its unfortunate addition of one paragraph near the end, and a discussion of Emlyn Williams's unproduced screenplay, based on the novel. Plus lots of annotations (by editor Christopher Tompkins) and other associated items of interest. 

A flier is copied below, but do check out the publisher's pre-order page  which can be found here.

Dreamt in Fire: The Dreadful Ecstacy of Athur Machen

In 2021, a first edition of this compilation, limited to small number of copies*, was published as a kind of exemplar to accompany a lecture introducing Machen by the compiler, Christopher Tompkins, to the audience at the seventh annual Inklings Oktoberfest in Kansas. Now a much expanded second edition has appeared in trade paperback (with a small number of hardcovers), serving not as a typical anthology of Machen but more as a sampler of texts beyond Machen’s most familiar writings. It comprises some five main sections, not counting the introductions and the bibliography at the end.

The first section, “Fiction”, contains nine stories, plus the whole of the slim 1924 collection Ornaments in Jade. It begins with “The Inmost Light” (1894) and ends, chronologically speaking, with “Change” and “N” (both 1936). The second section comprises ten essays, ranging from “Cidermass” (1889) through “A Note on Poetry” (1943).

Section three, “Journalism”, contains five items from 1913-1917; while section four, “Apologetics”, contains only one item, “War and the Christian Faith” (1918); and the final section, “Memoirs”, has extracts from Machen’s three volumes of autobiography, Far-Off Things (1922), Things Near and Far (1923), and The London Adventure (1924)

The full contents plus ordering and other information can be found at the catalog page at the Darkly Bright website, here. (You have to scroll down a bit to get to the trade paperback edition.)

* The first edition was limited to 50 numbered copies: the first 10 were hardcover and the remaining 40 were softcover. That edition is out of print.The second edition hardcover is limited to 25 numbered copies. The softcover is "unlimited."

Young Machen: A Reader of Curious Books

In 2020, Darkly Bright Press published a collection of early essays by Arthur Machen, dating to 1887 when he served as (uncredited) editor of Walford's Antiquarian Magazine and Bibliographical Review. Last year, an expanded reset edition of this book came out from the same press, adding about forty pages worth of material to the one-hundred-plus pages of the earlier edition.  Plus it sports a new cover.  

The contents is not as wide-ranging as the same publisher's other Machen volumes, but it is interesting, especially to bibliophiles.  Plus we get to read Machen's journalism from the age of 24. 

Here is how Christopher Tompkins, editor and publisher of the book, closes his Introduction.

For the certified bibliophile, a lover of literary exploration or the merely curious, a collection of this sort justifies itself. The archaic dispatches are both entertaining for the quality of the prose and interesting for the array of arcane subjects covered. For the modern reader, the forgotten books become living characters with each title owing its existence to the simple suggestion that it does exist. An obtuse debate upon the effect of ancient geographers upon the mind of Roderick Usher only adds to the obscure proceedings, Certainly, it would be possible for a dedicated enthusiast to hunt down each of these tomes. But the mystery would then be dispelled. In a sense, this lost bookshelf functions best as does the library of Don Quijote—a dusty chamber of the possibly dangerous, perhaps banal books which feed the imagination of man . . . that mad mammal.

Details and ordering information can be found here. 

What Do We Know? Observations of the Strange & Unusual by Arthur Machen

Newly available in paperback from the publisher. See here (scroll down for ordering link). 

From the publisher's blurb:

Throughout the 1920s, Arthur Machen worked his sense of mystery as a contributor for many daily and weekly newspapers, including a stint as columnist at The Observer. Every Sunday, readers discovered delightful and curious investigations into the strange and the unusual. Though it lasted only a year, Machen’s column found a lively and interactive audience as he discussed Grail legends, fairy stories, psychic phenomena, myth-making, and among other queer things, his own experience with a ghost. As with the previous volumes in this informal series, this installment will grant Machen enthusiasts and scholars access to a body of fine work which has been largely inaccessible for nearly a century.

The column reads very much like a weekly blog, covering whatever happened to catch Machen's attention that week.  Here are a few samples.

So the explanation of the Marie Celeste mystery will not stand. The Marie Celeste, it will be remembered, which was the ship which was so strangely found on the high seas with all things in perfect order, with a meal prepared, with no trace of affray or struggle, and yet derelict, without a man on board, with never a word to declare what strange fate had come upon the crew. A recent article in "Chambers's Journal" declared that the mystery resolved itself into an elaborate salvage swindle, and the information was said to have been taken from the confession of John Pemberton, on board the Dei Gratia, the ship which discovered the Marie Celeste. ¶  But "Lloyd's List" has taken the explanation in hand. And "Lloyd's List" is not to be trifled with as to clearings and dates of sailings. "Lloyd's List" knows when the Dei Gratia cleared, when the Marie Celeste sailed; and it declared that the Pemberton story cannot be true. I am glad of it. I do not want to have the words and music (original notation) of the song that the syrens sing. The more mysteries the better. [25 July 1926]

I was noting the other day that, in Celtic traditions at all events, the fairies are rather beings of ill will than of good. It is hard to find any link between them and the gracious following of Oberon and Titania. And I have just lit on a curious confirmation of their ill character in Miss Somerville's "Wheel-Tracks." Miss Somerville relates how her brother and herself were reading "Alice in Wonderland" one sunny morning in the 'sixties. The two children were in their grandmother's sitting room. "It was high summer, and the three windows of the room were wide open; from one of them one can see out over the harbour to the open sea, the other two look on the croquet ground and towards the avenue. Suddenly, we heard from, as it seemed, the avenue, a rushing outbreak of music, richer and more delicious--as I remember it--than any music that I have heard before or since." ¶ The children thought it was a German band playing, and rushed to ask for more. But there was no band to be seen and nobody but themselves had heard any music at all, and they were pooh-poohed and derided.  . . .  ¶ Miss Somerville says that she never heard the fairy music again; but that her sister has heard it twice, the second time in December, 1922.  [7 November 1926]

The story of Edith Somerville as related by Machen was interesting enough that I looked it up, where I found Machen didn't give some very interesting parts.  I copy the pages from Wheel-Tracks below.