Introduction to

The Three Impostors (1972),

By

Lin Carter

    In the field of science fiction, fantasy, and horror the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series holds a special place. Under the editorship of Lin Carter, the series began in May of 1969 with the publication of The Blue Star by Fletcher Pratt, and continued for the next four or five years until it died in the editorial changes brought on by the sale of Ballantine Books to Random House.
    In June of 1972, Arthur Machen's The Three Impostors was published in the series with a startling wrap-around cover by Bob LoGrippo, and an introduction by the series editor.   Carter's edition is more of a "restored edition" of The Three Impostors, than simply a reprint. Carter went back to the original 1895 edition for the text, restoring several stories which were dropped from later editions, and added an additional Mr. Dyson story, "The Red Hand."
    The Ballantine Adult Fantasy edition was the only edition of The Three Impostors available in the years between 1972 and the Everyman edition of 1995, and became one of the most difficult to find for collectors and readers alike. To my knowledge Carter's introduction has never been republished anywhere, and I am happy to archive it here (*Disclaimer, below). I have also added Carter's short notes preceeding the text of both The Three Impostors and "The Red Hook." The original pagination is retained in brackets.
    -----R. T. Gault.

About THE THREE IMPOSTERS and Arthur Machen:

Baghdad-on-the Thames

by Lin Carter

     Like everyone who loves the kingdom of books, and whose life has been devoted to adventuring within the all-but-limitless borders of that kingdom, I have found my way to certain books which seem to have been written for my pleasure alone.
    It is a common experience. I read about four hundred books every year; most of them are quite forgettable, but a few stay with me; and each year I discover a book or two or maybe three, to which I find myself returning, year after year.
    But then there is that rare, precious book that becomes a lifelong companion, a book to which I am constantly referring, a book which I will reread perhaps twenty times in my life, each time with the fresh feeling of discovery, and with new excitement, finding therein some sparkling new marvel I had never noticed before.
    You do not find many such books, even in a lifetime devoted to reading -- perhaps twenty, or, if you are very lucky, twenty-five. But they remain in your mind and supply you with a host of names and scenes and characters and symbols which form a sort of private mythology, a personal iconography wherewith to interpret the people and events in your life.
    Every book lover will have a different, very personal list. My own list includes T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone, Gustave Flaubert's Salammbo, James Branch [vii] Cabell's The Cream of the Jest, William Beckford's Vathek, Milton's Paradise Lost, the Romances of Voltaire, Thomas B. Costain's The Black Rose, A. Merritt's The Face in the Abyss, John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, the Cantos of Ezra Pound, Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring, and Andrew Lang's Prince Prigio, and a few others.
    The list, you will notice, is heterogeneous in the extreme. I t includes a bestseller-type historical novel very popular in my teens and Flaubert's masterpiece, one of the most supurb examples of sheer style ever crafted. The range extends from the noblest epic poem in the English language,written a decade after the death of Oliver Cromwell to a modernist epic, quirky, elitist, dissociative, and largely incomprehensible to most readers. The list includes the work of a pulp magazine adventure story writer, and one of the lesser novels of a modern Pulitzer Prize winner. The list is hardly to be construed as my personal choice of the "best" novels ever written: it is, simply, those novels I have encountered along the way which speak to my own character and personality with an intimate voice.
     Somewhere on that list belongs The Three Impostors. I can neither justify its position on my shelf of lifelong favorites, nor explain why the book appeals to me so powerfully. Indeed, I find myself floundering helplessly at the task of simply describing it.
    The Three Impostors is a novel: then again, it is not a novel at all, but a string of episodes tied together by a very thin narrative thread. It is a work of fantasy, then again, it is a work of Gothic horror. Lastly it is a picaresque and weirdly comic satire of London life.
    Of all the books that come to my mind, The Three Impostors most completely defies description. Like Don Quixote or Lolita, it has almost everything in it: adventure, comedy, romance, horror, satire, dream, nightmare, and idyll. The book is an almost inexhaustible source of excitement and pleasure; perhaps that is why I find myself returning to it again and again, finding therin each time some new delight I had never before noticed.
    Most readers will recognize the name of Arthur Machen as one of the finest modern craftsmen in the rich [viii] field of supernatural horror. Many will know him for such tales as The Novel of the White Powder, or The Novel of the Black Seal -- gems of weird fiction frequently anthologized and both, oddly, found within the crowded pages of The Three Impostors. But Machen was very much more than just a writer of weird fiction: he was a poet, a journalist, a mystic, an essayist, a translator (of Casanova's Memoirs and of the Heptameron of Marguerite, Queen of Navarre), an occultist (belonging, with Yeats and Aleister Crowley, to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn), a serious critic of literature (for which see his Hieroglyphics, a fascinating treatise on the theory of literature as "ecstacy"), and more.
    He was one of the noblest stylistic masters of the English language in our century, and an internationally famous literary connoisseur who knew everyone from Oscar Wilde to James Branch Cabell.

    Machen was born in Wales: to be precise, in Caerleon-on-Usk, a tiny, remote village that had once been the golden Isca of the Roman legions, and later one of the splendid capitals of King Arthur and a seat of the Round Table. He was born Arthur Llewelyn Jones on March 3, 1863. That was a very long time ago: George MacDonald was a young novelist of thrity-nine, and had published his first novel, Phantasies, only five years before; while the great William Morris, not yet thirty, was a decade or so away from witing his first fantasy romance, The Wood Beyond the World. Lord Dunsany, E. R. Eddison, Cabell, Lovecraft, and Merritt had not even been born.
   Arthur Machen spent his early years as an only child in a country rectory; his family circle consisted of a clergyman father, an invalid mother, and a maiden aunt who had the task of raising the boy. Inured to loneliness from his earliest years, Machen turned to the wild, glorious, untamed nature of wooded Wales for solace, and to the world of books for companionship. He fed upon Dickens, Cervantes, De Quincey, Scott, Tennyson, and the Brontes. His formal schooling was got at the Hereford Cathedral School, which dated to the fourteenth century and which offered a sound [ix] classical education. He revolted against the compulsory athletics and the English public school tradition in general and quit school at seventeen.
    He came to London that same year taking with him a solid knowledge of French and Latin. Instead of schooling himself further, he turned to juvenile verse writing, producing reams of heroica inspired by Swinburne. His first book, published at his own expense in a limited edition of one hundred copies, was simply a long poem called Eleusinia. He later admitted that he had simply taken an article on the Eleusinian Mysteries from Smith's Classical Dictionary and turned it into verse -- "some blank, some rhymed, but all bad" -- as a recent biography, Wesley D. Sweetser's Arthur Machen, puts it. (Incidentally, with his Eleusinia, Machen invented a system which might be called the "do-it-yourself collector's item." Unhappy with the poem a while later, he destroyed all but two copies of the book, thus making it a rarity for collectors beyond the dreams of avarice.)
    Machen became caught up in the raffish, slummy world of the Grub Street journalist, hacking out bits of newspaper copy starving (and freezing) in a garrett, taking odd jobs in literary fields, doing a bit of translating here and a book review there. He was calling himself "Arthur Machen" by this time (you will have to admit that Arthur L. Jones is not a very memorable name for an author). This pen-name came about in an amusing way: while Arthur was sitll a boy at school, his father took to calling himself Jones-Machen, thus adding his wife's maiden name to his own surname. He may have done this to give the illusion of family background, or perhaps he hoped to solicit some support for the boy's schooling by appealing to family-conscious wealthier relatives. At any rate, our author adopted the bifurcated surname while at school, and later trimmed it down to just Machen.
    His classical education, early reading and the old authors he found himself translating all contributed to forming his style. It was one of the most remarkable of his achievements.   As Philip Van Doren Stern describes it: [x]

A taste for his work has to be acquired; the writing is polished and elaborate, the thinking is subtle, and the imagery is rich with the glowing color that is to be found in medieval church glass. His style does not belong to our period of stripped diction and fast-moving prose; it stems instead from the latter part of the nineteenth century, and preserves some of the formality of that age when authors were learned people who had to undergo long apprenticeships to master their profession.

    Machen wrote The Three Impostors in 1890. He was a young man of twenty-seven, far from being famous, still grubbing in Grub Street for the wherewithal to keep body and soul together. It was, more or less, his first novel. By this bit of hedging I mean that it was the first actual novel he had witten (if you want to call it a novel, and some of you won't), although he had at twenty-one composed something called The Chronicles of Clemendy. Now, you can claim Clemendy a novel, if you like, but to my taste its claims to that classification are even slenderer than those of The Three Impostors. Clemendy reads like a horribly inept and ill-advised attempt to rewrite Rabelais. If you have ever read Rabelais -- and I have, grimly plodding every foot of the way -- you will probably have decided (as I did) that whatever the excellences of Rabelais may be, they are largely invisible to the ordinary reader; and thus the notion of someone sitting down deliberately to imitate Rabelais may strike you as mildly incredible. Anyway, Clemendy seems to me almost unreadable, and whether something no more novelistic than Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is to be considered a novel remains highly questionable. But The Three Impostors is closer to the formal novel than anything Machen had previously attempted, and thus it may be called his first. He did not write many.
    My title for this introduction is "Baghdad-on-the-Thames." I wonder if you will agree and interpret The Three Impostors as I do. To me it reads rather as if Machen were trying to look at London as Scheherezade looked at Baghdad -- through eyes that saw everyday life as a tangle of incredible coincidences, chance meetings, [xi] overheard anecdotes, and marvelous encounters. The book teems with adventure and romance, but the exotic coloring and bizarre ornament are mostly a matter of point of view and personal interpretation. At any rate, through the eyes of Arthur Machen, London becomes a fantastic metropolis, filled with intrigue and mystery and marvels.
    Most commentators on The Three Impostors consider it an imitation of Robert Louis Stevenson's The New Arabian Nights. This may be so -- I must confess to never having read this book of Stevenson's. I know that Machen once was asked the source or sources of The Three Impostors and replied that it had come entirely from his head -- and Stevenson's; but I can't see that it really matters very much where the book came from, so long as we have it to enjoy. Some of the best books in the world are imitations of other books (in fact, speaking of Rabelais, his Gargantua and Pantagruel just happens to be laid in the same Utopia invented by Sir Thoms More, while Stevenson's New Arabian Nights is, of course, and imitation of the old Arabian Nights).
    Like many of the best books I know, The Three Impostors was a dismal flop when it first came out. It had a bit of trouble getting published in the first place, come to think of it; Machen began it in 1890, but John Lane did not publish it until five years later. By then Machen was becoming established. He had already published his most famous tale, The Great God Pan, and Lane's famous publishing house, The Bodley Head, had issued it with illustrations by the spectacular Aubrey Beardsley, which had not harmed the sales any.
    But 1895 was the year of the stormy public scandal centering around Oscar Wilde and his rather sensational amours. Anything remotely connected with Wilde -- such as The Three Impostors, written by an acquaintance, and illustrated by Wilde's own illustrator -- was to be shunned as a tainted thing. Thus the reviews of The Tree Impostors either denounced or dismissed the novel, and it was a very long time before people could look at the book [xii] with clear, unprejudiced eyes and see its remarkable beauties.
     Arthur Machen was eighty-four when he died on December 15, 1947. Most of his major work was done when he was quite young, and his work was largely forgotten before his demise. But a few American Machen enthusiasts of excellent literary taste, Vincent Starrett and Carl Van Vechten most importantly, introduced him to the readers in this country during the 1920s, and thus he came in for quite a renaissance on this side of the Atlantic although he had faded into limbo in the country of his birth long before.
    The 1920s, you will recall, saw a rebirth of interest in belles-lettres. Beautifully written books, especially if they are tinged with delicate eroticism or were even faintly perverse, touched with obscure lore, occult learning, were being imported and actually read in the United States. These were the days when James Branch Cabell (a great Machen admirer, by the way) and J. -K. Huysmans and Edgar Saltus rose to fame in a republic which generally reserved its laurels for writers of the general ilk of Lew Wallace and (at the other end of a narrow spectrum) James Fenimore Cooper.
    It was Alfred A. Knopf, that famed publisher of amazingly good taste and not inconsiderable daring, who brought Machen into print on this side of the Atlantic. H. P. Lovecraft read Machen, learned much from him and praised him highly in his brilliant study of the weird story, Supernatural Horror in Literature. Thus given a new lease on life, The Three Impostors began to accumulate the good reviews it had deserved from the beginning, ran through several printings, and became in fact just about Machen's best-known, and most popular book.
    From this position it has since declined a bit. The 1920s, of course, are long over -- who reads Cabell or Huysmans or even Edgar Saltus today? -- and Machen is primarily remembered for several very brilliant examples of short weird fiction. Oddly enough, it is in the world of mystery writers which The Three Impostors is remembered, and it has been reprinted in recent years under the [xiii] guise of a mystery story. But it is intrinsic in the ambiguous, all-encompassing style and nature of The Three Impostors that it can pass as amost any kind of fiction. Even adult fantasy!

-----Lin Carter

Editorial Consultant:

Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series

Hollis, Long Island New York

A Note on The Three Impostors

    Most editions of The Three Impostors omit for some reason "The Decorative Imagination" and the "Novel of the Iron Maid."
    I have no idea why this is. Perhaps it may have been done by Mr. Machen himself: few authors can resist the temptation offered by a new edition of one of their older books to tinker and tamper with the text yet once again. (I have been guilty of this sort of thing myself.)
    At any rate, there are pleasant things in "The Decorative Imagination," and the "Novel of the Iron Maid" deserves a place beside the "Novel of the Dark Valley," the "Novel of the Black Seal" and the "Novel of the White Powder." So I have returned both of these brief sections to the text.
    I include this note of explanation in case my readers already closely familiar with the text of The Three Impostors who may not have seen "The Decorative Imagination" or the "Novel of the Irom Maid" before are wondering where in the world these two unfamiliar items came from.
    And I trust Mr. Machen, from whatever literary Valhalla he now inhabits will smile down approvingly on an editor so fond of his book that he is willing to overrule even its author in restoring to the text a few lost pages.

-----Lin Carter [2]

A Note on The Red Hand

    Those of my readers who have managed to find their way this far in the book will now be familiar with Dyson, that armchair supersleuth who somehow fails, throughout the length of The Three Impostors, to actually capture a single culprit.
    During those same years, the 1890s, in which Arthur Machen composed The Three Impostors, he wrote another tale of Dyson's less-than-effective sleuthings, The Red Hand, which follows next.
    Machen seems to have developed a certain fondness for his drawing-room Sherlock, and in The Red Hand (which was originally written as an entry in a short story contest) he permits him, at long last to capture a real criminal.
    Although The Red Hand is not really a sequel to The Three Impostors, it seems fitting to include the remainder of Dyson's detectings in the same volume with his initial exploits.

-----Lin Carter [160]

*Introduction © 1972 by Lin Carter. I see Carter's introductions to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series archived in many places on the net without apparent difficulties. However if there is any legal objection to this essay being posted, let me know and I will do the right thing.

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The Great God Nodens Arthur Machen Gallery Golden Dawn Gallery Introduction to The Three Impostors by Machen The Order of the Twilight Star, by Machen Arthur Machen on the Kabbalah The Black Fool's Speech by W.B. Yeats. Reader Feedback about Arthur Machen