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There may be nothing particularly remarkable about the sentimental mysticism of Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951), but the uniqueness of his writing lies in its earnest and daring, if never wholly successful efforts to make a home for this ideology in the world of sensational fiction. Although Blackwood’s mysticism discerned nature as an otherworldly and transcendental realm – a reality above and beyond the little human detritus of cities and civilization – he himself was a hack, an author of “horror” stories and children’s books and, eventually, a pioneering BBC broadcaster. Blackwood wrote for money – he had no qualms about this, understanding that he needed financial independence in order to appreciate nature. He seemed entirely unperturbed, however, by the eccentricity of unveiling transcendental wonders in the pages of commercial magazines.

Algernon was, incidentally, unrelated to Edinburgh’s house of Blackwood, which also specialised in literary horrors. The leading scholar of “weird” fiction S. T. Joshi has despaired that the “complete ignorance of Blackwood in the critical community is a fact that stupefies me the more I think about it.” Blackwood’s only biographer, Mike Ashley, is more of a fan than a scholar, and his Starlight Man: The Extraordinary Life of Algernon Blackwood (2001) is written with an unmistakable enthusiasm for its subject: “Algernon Blackwood was no ordinary writer. He was no ordinary person. Those who counted him as a friend revered him, and called him magical.” When evoking Blackwood in an interview with the nonagenarian Lady Vansittard, Ashley finds that “the age fell from her face, her eyes twinkled and for a moment she was thirty again. Anyone whose memory can achieve that, had to be magical.” This bumps rather awkwardly against the scene in “The Empty House” when sheer terror causes Aunt Julia to assume “her face of forty years ago, the vacant innocent face of a girl.” Elsewhere, Ashley somewhat nauseatingly enthuses that, “As Blackwood grew physically older, so his mind and imagination retained the purity and innocence and, above all, wonder of childhood.” The what of childhood?

Ashley claims to have spent twenty-three years working on his biography – with the assistance of Blackwood’s family, friends and “estate” – and yet most of the book seems to uncritically cite the contents of Blackwood’s autobiographical Episodes Before Thirty (1923). In this respect, Ashley too often reaches for low-hanging fruit. Blackwood would tell the younger writer Ron Hall that all his books were “more or less autobiographical.” Joshi rightly states that Episodes is one of “the most exquisite autobiographies in English,” and Blackwood himself declared of it that “I feel that I have written my last book… I have said all that was in me.”

Yet whilst Episodes may be an impeccably accurate autobiography, it is a much better novel, and one which is quite plainly modelled upon Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). The passages in which Blackwood experiments with morphine and records the sensations associated with different highs, seem to deliberately acknowledge De Quincey’s Confessions. At one stage, Blackwood recounts how he and his friend Otto Huebner ended up “chanting” De Quincey’s prose until “its full meaning with the appeal it held” was “now all explained to me at last.” Blackwood’s hunt for his cosmic foe Boyde has many similarities to De Quincey’s flaneurial quest to find the little, lost prostitute Ann. De Quincey will never recover his lost comrade, but Blackwood strikes it lucky: “As a matter of fact, I went straight to the exact spot where, among the teeming millions of the great city, Boyde was.”

Jack Sullivan’s Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood (1978) finds Blackwood at a crossroads, caught between the “double role as creative artist and psychic instructor.” Sullivan argues that Blackwood’s creative imagination armed itself with the conventions of the English ghost story, whilst his resort to “jargonistic” mysticism articulated the broader cultural dissatisfaction at “Victorian scientism and technology.” “It is disheartening to watch him derail his best metaphors with self-consciously didactic material… It is as if one of Blackwood’s ears is as sensitive to exotic sounds as the ear of a Debussy, while the other ear is tone deaf,” Sullivan quips. As befell Tychy when struggling to account for Blackwood’s “The Man Whom the Trees Loved,” Sullivan will end up comparing Blackwood to D. H Lawrence:

Indeed, Blackwood has several things in common with Lawrence, the most noticeable of which is a repeated use of Lawrentian terms – “nonhuman,” “otherness,” “separateness,” “the beyond,” – before Lawrence codified them in The Rainbow and Women in Love… Blackwood and Lawrence are part of a reactionary, anti-human[ist] thread which twists through writers such as Conrad, Yeats, Eliot, and Pound. Rather than putting us in touch with our larger possibilities, communion with nature in Lawrence and Blackwood shows us that nature is a distinctly “other” form of life to which humanity is profoundly irrelevant.

Yet this is not as convincing as it first seems. The unworldly, aristocratic Blackwood and the lusty, working-class Lawrence cannot help reminding one of Lovecraft’s distinction between the “pale and stately” traditional ghosts and the “dwarfish and hairy” Jamesian abominations. There are plainly many more dissimilarities than likenesses between the two writers’ fictions. Sullivan’s point – that both reflected the same historical moment – is well made, but one senses that Blackwood was influenced by more immediate factors.

By the end of his career, for example, Blackwood was most famous for reciting ghost stories in BBC radio and television broadcasts. Although it is pleasant to imagine Blackwood, the professional socialite, polishing his narrative skills by telling ghost stories to fireside gatherings at country houses, it is likely that he was influenced by the success of the pseudonymous broadcaster A. J. Alan, whom Ashley claims the BBC had recruited in 1926 after being rebuffed by Blackwood. Whilst Blackwood, who only began broadcasting after 1934, would dust off stories from a large pool of pre-existing material, Alan wrote his tales directly for the air. Starlight Man does not address the potential similarities and affinities between the two storytellers: did they ever meet? what did they think of each others’ broadcasts? are their recordings today accessible to the public (probably not)?

In fairness to Ashley, the un-materialistic Blackwood had left behind few records as most of his personal possessions were lost in the Blitz. Yet Ashley too often assumes that Blackwood’s writing is flatly autobiographical. For example, he deduces from the fantastic short story “Onanonanon” that “it’s quite possible that Blackwood caught influenza during the 1918-19 epidemic and became delirious.” But Blackwood may have merely observed influenza, or a friend may have caught the disease, or, more befitting a professional author, he may simply have plucked the whole thing out of the ether.

One does not wish to banish the idea that Blackwood was a confessional author, but simply to insist upon a little more suspicion of this assertion. Blackwood’s narrative authority often derived from an impression that he was reporting from a mystic frontier, and offering a straightforward testimony of all which he had experienced. Yet Blackwood – whose only recorded otherworldly experiences seem to have amounted to a bit of meditation – was a seasoned hack and his fiction frequently recycled ideas, characters, and strands of plot. With his long journalistic experience, he knew what to offer the readers of the Westminster Gazette, and what to give the purchasers of Country Life. Blackwood’s literary discipline may have owed something to his Methodist schooling – in Episodes, he commends the evangelical writer G.H. Pember because he “had proportion” and “knew where to stop.”

Although occasionally remarking on his love for Shelley’s poetry, Blackwood seemingly wished to further the idea that he was untutored by literary sources. Temporarily jobless in New York, Blackwood spent “hours… in the free libraries. Never, before, or since, did I read so many books in so short a time.” But he never elaborates on this, and rarely does he admit to being inspired by particular books. Blackwood would have us think that he read books merely to supplement his own ideas, rather as others may munch on vitamin tablets for improved health. He states that it had not occurred to him to write professionally until his thirties, and that even then it was a friend who found a publisher for him.

Perhaps in his mystical fervour, the young Blackwood simply regarded writing as inferior to experienced truth. At one point in Episodes, Blackwood seems to take the same view of all narration, describing how, as a reporter, he had daily observed that “even a man who was trying to tell the truth seemed unable to achieve it.” Yet Blackwood defines the mission of Episodes as that of recovering the truth of his own past, and whilst autobiographical writers are characteristically sceptical of the reliability of memory, Blackwood has complete faith: “The room I am writing in now seems less actual than the one in the East 19th Street boarding-house… Horror draws its lines deep; its pictures stand out in high relief.” When he put pen to paper, one with such a disregard for narrative testimony seemed to retrieve the past with an almost visionary clarity.

Yet the unruly realism of the narrative ends up elbowing all of Blackwood’s mystical certainties out the way and leaving them in tatters. Particularly awkward is Blackwood’s friendship with the doctor who dies unrepentant of his atheism. “The hours spent with him did not refresh or invigorate me as the woods and music did… His end made a great impression on me,” Blackwood comments mildly, as if untroubled that his friend could have perished without achieving any grasp of what he himself saw as the basic meaning of life. Blackwood elsewhere dutifully reports Otto Huebner’s sceptical belief that “We know – nothing, you must remember… Nor can we remember anything ever.” Huebner’s dissent from Blackwood’s mysticism is presented as valid-in-itself, and nothing is submitted to validate either his or Blackwood’s beliefs, investing a potentially vital ideological rupture with the blandness of an exchange of views over dinner.

When it comes to Blackwood’s mysticism, Huebner’s concludes that the “higher states of consciousness you mention are nebulous, probably pathogenic.” Blackwood seems to concede that his readers may agree with Huebner rather than himself and there is little effort to champion his own side. When floating in morphine, Blackwood experiences “the absolute conviction that the teaching and theories in my books were true…,” but he will wash up in a world bereft of moral ease and clarity, as evinced by the fact that Huebner gives morphine to his young daughter. In Episodes, we dine well but the family silver remains locked away. Despite advertising the work as confessions - not least by referencing De Quincey – we are left only with episodes, and Blackwood’s mystical beliefs are largely unaired or are else cited as mere context. He resolves to describe “merely certain surface elements” of his life, and he will not disturb the “veil of privacy which only in rarest cases of exceptional value should be lifted.” Blackwood becomes all blank ego and we may at times feel that we are left with the back end of the pantomime horse.

The surface, as Joshi has intimated, is rendered beautifully. Episodes would, at least technically, be a better book if Blackwood had thrown his weight behind one of his alternating literary strategies of awkward realism or gentle Dickensian humour, but the former threatened his mystical certainties whilst the latter was too lightweight a substitute for the sort of confessional truth which Blackwood wished to achieve. The consequent stalemate presents an arresting piece of autobiographical spectacle, and one which is tantalisingly incomplete, or even necessarily aborted.

[Future instalments of this series will look at "The Empty House," The Centaur and A Prisoner in Fairyland. Ed]