Down and Out with Algernon Blackwood

[Extollager]

Blackwood's personal experiences of American low life are narrated in Episodes Before Thirty. I propose to post here comments on this relatively little-known book by the author of "The Wendigo" and "The Willows," two of the finest tales of supernatural horror in the language ... for as long as Episodes holds my interest, anyway. We shall see.

There's the frontispiece portrait of our author.

He begins with a description of his New York City boarding room. There was one bed and the three men took turns being the odd man out since two could fit in. The bed was verminous. The men were hungry. They found that they could fend off the gnawing of hunger by eating dried apples and then drinking hot water, which caused the apple pieces to expand. It seems to me that George Orwell describes the same trick in Down and Out in Paris and London.

Blackwood makes us wonder how he came to be there and who the other two men were -- teasing us by mentioning that one of them is a confessed forger.

He also mentions sleeping on benches with hoboes in Central Park.

 

[Extollager]

By the way, has anyone heard this?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/07...11189&creative=373489&creativeASIN=0712305416

I'd like to hear Blackwood -- and Machen, Tolkien, Doyle, Kipling, and others.

 

[D_Davis]

By the way, has anyone heard this?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/07...11189&creative=373489&creativeASIN=0712305416

I'd like to hear Blackwood -- and Machen, Tolkien, Doyle, Kipling, and others.

I have a version of The Willows read by Blackwood. It's from an old time radio broadcast.

 

[Extollager]

I have a version of The Willows read by Blackwood. It's from an old time radio broadcast.

Well, I'm impressed.

 

[D_Davis]

Well, I'm impressed.

Actually I might be mistaken.

I was searching for the link and now I can't find it. I know I have something read by Blackwood - I'll have to look when I get home.

I could have sworn it was The Willows, though.

 

[Fried Egg]

Blackwood is one of my favourite authors. He just produced so much of a consistantly high strandard (in my experience so far). He really had a unique voice.

 

[Extollager]

Blackwood is one of my favourite authors. He just produced so much of a consistantly high strandard (in my experience so far). He really had a unique voice.

At his best, he is the best, or just about, in the field of the weird tale, but even "The Willows" is blemished, isn't it? I'm thinking that you have this superb development of atmosphere as the two men journey down the Danube and their sojourn in the willow-realm becomes prolonged -- and then they have to start talking like theosophists or something. Gahh! It's as if Blackwood doesn't have enough confidence in his material and has to "explain" it. If he had to explain some things, he should have found a better way, or so it seems to me remembering the story.

I think at least one of the John Silence stories basically gets swamped by that kind of thing -- ah, yes: "The Camp of the Dog." Such lovely evocation of atmosphere... and then we're reading this bushwah about sex-repressed astral selves or whatever it is.

 

[j d worthington]

If memory serves, there are several archived recordings of Blackwood. He did read tales on the radio for a while there, and was in fact known as "The Ghost Man" -- some of these are collected in a volume titled The Magic Mirror.

I have heard that Blackwood's autobiographical work is actually quite fascinating, but have not yet read it myself. I'll be very interested in your impressions....

 

[Extollager]

JD, I'll have to get the reference for the two-part article that Blackwood wrote about going down the Danube in a canoe. I don't have it, but I have read it & it was good.

In Episodes Before Thirty so far he has a good story to tell. In Chapter 2 he tells about working for a Toronto Methodist magazine, which seems to have featured wholesome recreational reading. I think that such magazines must have provided a great deal of pleasure for readers for several generations -- e.g. Dickens's own Household Words and All the Year Round. Blackwood mentions writing about "Life at a Moravian School The Black Forest, Travel in the Alps," etc. I'm reminded of Read Magazine, which was handed out free to us middle-schoolers back in the Sixties (and in which I read stories by Asimov, Vonnegut, Bradbury, and others).

However, the magazine for which Blackwood wrote monthly articles and picture captions, etc., wasn't well-organized enough to prevent printer's errors, e.g. picture of a bloy blowing bubbles getting matched up with a caption about the habits of snakes.

In Chapter 3 Blackwood tells about being taken for a ride as investor-partner in a dairy farm. Later he was to try the dried-milk business. Didn't Machen write for a magazine published by Horlick's Malted Milk?

 

[Extollager]

Blackwood backtracks further to describe his upbringing in a revivalist religious milieu, in which one did not touch alcohol, didn't read novels, didn't dance, didn't smoke (this was long before everyone knew about tobacco and emphysema, etc.), and so on. You might expect to read that his parents were bears and that he was miserable, but that's not what Blackwood says. But contact with Eastern thought and occult ideas appealed to the adolescent Blackwood more than hymns with harmonium accompaniment, etc. Shelley's poems and his own experiences of nature were important too.

 

[Fried Egg]

At his best, he is the best, or just about, in the field of the weird tale, but even "The Willows" is blemished, isn't it? I'm thinking that you have this superb development of atmosphere as the two men journey down the Danube and their sojourn in the willow-realm becomes prolonged -- and then they have to start talking like theosophists or something. Gahh! It's as if Blackwood doesn't have enough confidence in his material and has to "explain" it. If he had to explain some things, he should have found a better way, or so it seems to me remembering the story.

I've only read that story once and I'm not sure I remember it well enough to know what you mean. The only story of his I've read twice was "The Wendigo".

Sure, he may have his faults but the remarkable thing about him is the consistancy of his stories. I haven't actually read any bad stories by him. Oh, I'm sure they exist somewhere, I just haven't encountered them yet.

Contrast him with Lovecraft, who at his best wrote many amazing stories, but also wrote some (in my opinion) much weaker stories.

 

[GOLLUM]

Damn but you've been posting some real doosies here of late Extollager. You're on a real hot streak...

Actually all this activity is reinvigorating my own enthusiasm for starting up some long planned threads...

I'm another Blackwood fan but knew nothing of this work, so I shall read with interest.

Cheers.

 

[Extollager]

Blackwood writes several pages about sensing oneness in and through Nature (his capital N) and how they made the "ordinary life of the little planet" and mankind's troubles seem insignificant. I don't propose to say much by way of evaluating such passages. One might say the experiences were more of the psyche or soul than of the pneuma or spirit (the higher part of the soul), and that one should make a distinction between the experiences themselves and Blackwood's interpretation of their significance. His interpretation is colored by his reading of things that were in the air at the time (e.g. Romantic poetry), and in fact I believe one could make a small anthology of somewhat similar-sounding passages of "mystical" experiences, drawn from writings by people who came to adulthood in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Yeats, G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Machen, C. S. Lewis, Bede Griffiths, Kathleen Raine, Ruth Pitter, and others come to mind). To say this is not to scorn these passages but to relativize them. I suspect that such experiences, especially of nature, may have been fairly common in Britain at that time among people who had to cross a real threshold between home, school, business, city on the one hand and "Nature" on the other. Some authorities would question whether these experiences should be called "mystical," since that word, "mysticism," etc. can have differing meanings.

I personally would prefer to describe Blackwood's type of experience of nature in terms of "poetic feeling" or "imaginative and affective identification with nature" or something like that.

 

[Extollager]

Blackwood goes on, in Chapter 6, to tell about a business enterprise he undertook after the egg farm fiasco, namely the joint ownership of a hotel most of the income from which would come from two bars and rooms to rent for evening meetings, etc. He was much conflicted about this idea because, while he wanted to make money and was assured that profits would be great, he'd been raised a teetotaler. When his father learned that his son was operating a bar, he was indeed very hurt. Blackwood hated the whole thing and was somewhat relieved when, after a busy first day, the enterprise ended after six months. When he could steal away to spend a night in the woods beyond Toronto, however, he felt much refreshed.

 

[Extollager]

Oh dear.... By page 60 he's writing about hypnotism, seances, astrology, and (of course) a past life as an Atlantean... also as an American Indian... How fin-de-siecle and early-20th-century this seems. C. S. Lewis had a similar youthful experience of rejecting the religion in which he was raised and being intrigued by the occult, although a key figure for him was a matron at his boys' school, not, as with Blackwood, a fellow medical student. (The young Lewis also felt the itch for the dancing mistress, while Blackwood doesn't seem to have been troubled much, at any time of his life, by sexual appetite.)

 

[Extollager]

In Chapter 9 (begins on p. 70) Blackwood tells that "the last penny of [his] capital" was gone. However, "a young lawyer of our acquaintance" said that Blackwood and his business partner and friend John Kay could live on his ten-acre island in Lake Rosseau [sic]. I'm hoping for some good Blackwood description of life in the woods, but soon the narrative will return to New York, I expect.

 

[Extollager]

Blackwood's upbringing hadn't prepared him well for ordinary worldly social mixing and there's a brief anecdote of his failure to realize that a railway official (whom he needed to impress well) expected him to dance with his sister, but Blackwood didn't realize that (and didn't know how to dance, in any event). The next day he had to call on this official to ask for a job... Then he has interesting reflections on being such a misfit.

Let me quote an extensive passage in two or three messages.)

Two things, moreover, about people astonished me in particular, I remember ; they astonish me even more to- day. Being, in both cases, merely individual reactions, to the herd, they are easily understandable, and are men- tioned here because, being entirely personal, they reveal the individual whose adventures are described. The first — it astonished me daily, hourly — was the indifference of almost everybody to the great questions Whence, Why, Whither. The few who asked these questions seemed cranks of one sort or another ; the immense majority of people showed no interest whatever. Creatures of extraordinary complexity, powers, faculties, set down for a given period, without being consulted apparently, upon a little planet amid countless numbers of majestic, terrifying suns . . . few showed even the faintest interest in the purpose, origin and goal of their existence. Of these few, again, by far the majority were eager to prove that soul and spirit were chemical reactions, results of some fortuitous concourse of dead atoms, to rob life, in a word, of all its wonder. These problems of para- mount, if insoluble, interest, were taken as a matter of course. There was, indeed, no sense of wonder.


Source:

http://www.archive.org/stream/episodesbeforeth00blacuoft/episodesbeforeth00blacuoft_djvu.txt

 

[Extollager]

[continued]

It astonished me, doubtless, because in my own case this was the only kind of knowledge I desired, and desired passionately.* To me it was the only real knowledge, the only thing worth knowing, . . . And I was ever getting little shocks on discovering gradually that not only was such knowledge not wanted, but that to talk of its possi- bility constituted one a dreamer, if not a bore. How any- body in possession of ordinary faculties could look, say, at the night sky of stars, and not know the wondrous flood of divine curiosity about his own personal relation to the universe drench his being — this never ceased to perplex me. Yet with almost everybody, the few excep- tions being usually " odd," conversation rapidly flattened out as though such things were of no importance, while stocks and shares, some kind of practical " market-value," at any rate, quickly became again the topic of real value. Not only, however, did this puzzle me ; it emphasized at this time one's sense of being peculiar ; it sketched a growing loneliness in more definite outline. No one wanted to make some money more than I did, but these other things — one reason, doubtless, why I never did make money — came indubitably first. [*This reminds me of something quoted in E. F. Schumacher's little book A Guide for the Perplexed, a book that Blackwood would have liked, that goes something like this: "A little knowledge of the greatest things is more to be desired than great knowledge of the unimportant things."]

 

[Extollager]

continued:

The second big and daily astonishment of those awakening years, which also has persisted, if not actually intensified, concerned the blank irresponsiveness to beauty of almost everybody I had to do with. Exceptions, again, were either cranks or useless, unpractical people, failures to a man. Many liked " scenery," either perceiving it for themselves, or on having it pointed out to them ; but very few, as with myself, knew their dominant mood of the day influenced — well, by a gleam of light upon the lake at dawn, a faint sound of music in the pines, a sudden strip of blue on a day of storm, the great piled coloured clouds at evening — " such clouds as flit, like splendour-winged moths about a taper, round the red west when the sun dies in it." These things had an effect of intoxication upon me, for it was the wonder and beauty of Nature that touched me most ; something like the delight of ecstasy swept over me when I read of sunrise in the Indian Caucasus. . . . " The point of one white star is quivering still, deep in the orange light of widening morn beyond the purple mountains ..." and it was a genuine astonishment to me that so few, so very few, felt the slightest response, or even noticed, a thousand and one details in sky and earth that delighted me with haunting joy for hours at a stretch. [end of quoted passage]

 

[Extollager]

After several idyllic months, Blackwood and Kay arrive in New York and find cheap lodgings. Blackwood experienced "recurrent horror" thanks to the rats. He landed a job with the Evening Sun newspaper and held it for two years (p. 104) -- I'd forgotten that he'd had such a sustained experience of workaday journalism. "Passion of every type, abnormal, often incredible" was the reporter's "daily study," he writes. Usually jealousy or greed for money was involved. The motto of The Times was "All the News that's Fit to Print," but that of the Sun was "If you See it in the Sun it's so!"

It will be interesting to see if Blackwood reveals anything akin to the skills and (in the wide sense) imagination of Joseph Mitchell, whose book of (mostly) new York pieces, Up in the Old Hotel, is such a prize of mine -- or even of Jack Finney's novel Time and Again.