Anecdotage: Arthur Machen, Ernest Benn, A. L. Greening and the Stage

In discussing the two publishers Greening & Co. and Ernest Benn in recent posts, memories of Arthur Machen were aroused. Arthur Machen was a "reader" for Ernest Benn in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and upon being let go of this position at age 70, Benn commissioned a short novel from him for 50 pounds. Machen was not a young man, and yet he managed to finish the novel called The Green Round for this rather lukewarm-hearted commission and it was eventually published in 1933. Benn wanted it for his Ninepenny Novelist series. In a letter to his friend Colin Summerford, Machen wrote:


"Poor Uncle Ernest. What he will say to The Green Round, I do not know. Gollancz told me that Sir Ernest was a man absolutely without religion; but I trust that this is not the case. He will want consolation." (quoted on page 149 of Arthur Machen: a Biography by Aidan Reynolds and William Charlton).


The book did not sell well. This was not unusual for Machen. For another commission for The Faith Press, he wrote The Great Return which was published in 1915. This too did not sell at all well. A few years later, Machen was browsing in a bookshop and came across a large dusty stack of the title. Reynolds and Charlton in their biography relate that: "The bookseller had not sold one for a long time, but when Machen told him who he was, he had not the heart to charge him for a copy." (ibid., p. 116).

The trial of Oscar Wilde created a backlash among publishers towards any type of literature which could possibly be considered decadent, and though Machen's works were not, he suffered from this reluctance, making the last half-decade of the 1890s a rather challenging period. Machen eventually tried his hand as an actor. He made his debut in 1901 and became a strolling player with Sir Frank Benson's company. An interesting crossover, writing to acting. Arthur Greening, the publisher, had been involved with light theatre, variety, musicals, and he switched over to publishing. I have yet to find if Machen ever met Greening but I rather doubt they would have gotten along. Different fish altogether. The only connection I have found so far, is the journalist and hack writer, T. W. H. Crossland who was involved with Greening and edited an edition of Hudibras for the publisher. Crossland reviewed books for various periodicals, and was a rather malicious enemy of Machen. He always referred to him as "MacHen".

Like anyone involved with the theatre, there are stories and anecdotes galore. Arthur Machen had his store as well. Reynolds and Charlton quote from O. B. Clarence's autobiography No Complaints, where he describes Machen's initial steps as a strolling player: "It pleased him [Machen] later on to make one of the crowd in several of the productions. I remember him among the rioters in Coriolanus. We were all brandishing clubs and shouting ourselves hoarse--'Down with him. Traitor', etc., and there at the back stood Machen muttering softly in mild disapproval of Coriolanus--'Down with him. Traitor. Oh, yes, distinctly traitor, oh impossible fellow.' Before long, however, he was shouting with the best." (ibid., p. 84).

Machen seems to have found his footing--and possessed natural talent--for in 1907 playing Sir Daniel Ridgeley in Pinero's His House in Order, in such small venues as Market Driffield, Hexham, and Ledbury, he was quite a comic turn. Reynolds and Charlton write: "Whenever Machen appeared, there were howls of mirth--'by the end of the show there was an old fellow in the front row who was reduced to nothing but a rattle and a wheeze and an agony in the region of the ribs'. There must have lived about Ledbury then a dreary long-winded, long-bearded bore ejecting moral sentiments in a pompous voice. Years later members of the company were still calling Machen 'The Ledbury Pet.' " (ibid., p.93).

Wells's William Clissold, or the dusty penumbra of pen wielders (not to mention Benn's T'ang Horse)

I found this publisher's advertising ephemera resting between the leaves of a 1923 Doubleday Page & Company book of one of Wells's contemporary writers. I've had the book for thirty years but have never read the edition, having read Penguin and Pan paperback copies of the title. This advert which mimics the leaf of a book in size and paper type, and possibly made to be tipped into other books, had been sitting there undisturbed for perhaps over 70 years. When I was younger I actively sought out books by Wells but I never got as far as his later works. The World of William Clissold seems a world away. When this three decker novel--an anachronism by the 1920s surely--came out in 1926 on three successive months, September through November, it was the book of the season, much discussed and commented on. (Makes me wonder how the British Lending Libraries dealt with this three-decker; could a patron take all three at the same time, all 885 pages of it, or only one volume?) The critical views by the likes of J. M. Keynes and Conrad Aiken among others were not good, though H. L. Mencken's critical opinion was not unfavourable. Considering the supposed autobiographical nature of much of the book, it didn't keep this protean force from later writing his autobiography proper, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866) in two volumes (414 pages) and published by Victor Gollancz and The Cresset Press in 1934.

Time, it seems, has swept much of Mr. Wells's work into the dusty penumbra of pen wielders, for it is unlikely that many people read this or most of his later works these days. I can't say I have. (Although I have to admit the advert does create a small frisson of interest--who could resist that puff of "Great" by the Daily Chronicle.) Not a novel that immediately comes to mind when asked to name a few of his works. It is his early books, the scientific romances and short stories and some of the novels like Kipps, Tono-Bungay, Ann Veronica and The History of Mr. Polly and perhaps through Colin Wilson's influence, that late work The Mind at the End of Its Tether, which still hold some interest.

The publisher of this work, Ernest Benn Ltd., had its roots in trade journal publishing. Ernest Benn's father's J. W. Benn and Brothers publishing company was later registered in 1897 as Benn Brothers Limited, and in the 1920s, they decided to develop a separate book department which eventually became Ernest Benn Limited. Their publisher's device, was a stylised T'ang Horse, supposedly influenced by their publishing of The Catalogue of the George Eumorfopoulos Collection (there is the limited edition 11 volume set presently listed on ABE at more than $27,000 US) which had many illustrations of art from the Far East. Ernest Benn Ltd, with managing director Victor Gollancz, purchased T. Fisher Unwin in 1926 which brought a wonderful assortment of authors and their backlists, including H. G. Wells. His new novel, The World of William Clissold was the first original Wells they issued. A hefty debut that was heavily promoted. If they lost money on Clissold, they no doubt recovered it from the sales of their edition of his short stories and their small 24 volume edition of his works.

Victor Gollancz left the company in 1927 to start his own publishing business. Sir Ernest Benn was an individualist capitalist of the right, while Gollancz was decidedly more to the left. With H. G. Wells and his views on world society and the future, an after dinner conversation between the three of them would have been an occasion to eavesdrop. Might make a good play by the likes of Tom Stoppard. Then again, it does seem like so much water under the bridge what with our modern world a swirl with a superabundance of fresh-minted words.

The World of William Clissold having been published in 1926, seems to be on the cusp of copyright freedom so it may not be too long before we can peruse it digitally--all 885 pages of it.

Ernest Benn Ltd. was acquired by the old British firm, A. & C. Black Publishers in 1984, which was in turn acquired by the Bloomsbury group in 2000. But another big fish little fish story of the modern publishing world.