Algernon Blackwood, page 2 of 2

Of all those early-20th century weird writers (Arthur Machen, M R James, Lord Dunsany, H P Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith), Algernon Blackwood seems the most difficult to really know. Reading Lovecraft — the very type of the weird writer — you can’t help being aware that HPL has a definite idea of what a weird tale should be, and that he’s doing his best to capture it in form, content, style and idea, honing his approach tale by tale, in theory and in practice. Blackwood doesn’t seem to have an aesthetic ideal; his fiction is an outpouring of all sorts of stories and styles, ghostly, adventurous, romantic, comedic. (Lovecraft himself calls Blackwood’s work “voluminous and uneven”, though says it contains “some of the finest spectral literature of this or any age”.) He does though, like Lovecraft, have a central belief that acts as the DNA that shapes and unites all his fiction — “an interest in the Extension of Human Faculty”, as he puts it — but it seems to me that, in contrast to Lovecraft’s fiction, where the best tales are usually those that most embody Lovecraft’s stated ideals, those where Blackwood most explicitly captures his views on “extended or expanded consciousness” are usually the least successful as fiction. Fortunately, Blackwood has another force driving the production of his stories, and it’s where this is most evident that he’s at his best.

In his introduction to The Insanity of Jones and other tales — a selection of his fiction written between 1906 and 1910 —  Blackwood says:

“I recall, anyhow, that these tales poured from me spontaneously, as though a tap were turned on, and I have often since leaned to the suggestion that many of them derived from buried, unresolved shocks… These ‘shocks’ had come to an exceptionally ignorant youth of twenty who had drifted into the life of a newspaper reporter in New York after a disastrous cattle-farm and a hotel in Canada, and the drifting had included the stress of extreme poverty and starvation… the New York experiences in a world of crime and vice had bruised and bludgeoned a sensitive nature that swallowed the horrors without being able to digest them, and… the seeds thus sown, dormant and unresolved in the subconscious, possibly emerged later — and, since the subconscious always dramatises, emerged in story form.”

The best of the tales in this book are those most obviously rooted in real experience and vividly-created, authentic-feeling settings. The weird desolation of the wilds of the Danube in “The Willows”, and the truly vast and primal wilderness of Canada in “The Wendigo” are two obvious ones, but Blackwood isn’t only a wilderness man. The New York of “Max Hensig”, with its evocation of the alcohol-sodden, sleep-deprived world of city reporters is just as convincing — and gripping — an environment. Elsewhere, although Blackwood can be poetic (as in, say, “The Dance of Death”, or “The Old Man of Dreams”, which mostly work because they’re short), the difference begins to tell in those stories written purely as stories rather than outpourings of genuine experience (“Miss Slumbubble”, in which an overly-anxious woman finds herself trapped in a haunted train carriage, or “The Insanity of Jones”, where a young clerk is given the chance to enact a karma-free revenge on a man who tortured him to death in a previous life) are the least substantial, and least convincing.

The key (with all weird writers, I suspect, particularly those who have a philosophy to expound) is mystery. Whatever a writer’s beliefs, while they’re conjuring the mystery — the awe, the fear, the terror, the wonder — they include us all, but as soon as the explanation arrives, the portcullis clangs down. The perfect example is Blackwood’s “May Day Eye”, which starts as a vivid evocation of the borderline panic of being lost in a mile or two of English countryside as dark descends — then, suddenly it’s all technical talk of “elementals”, and it’s not convincing. The point at which this tale changes is where the narrator meets with an expert on folklore who has all the necessary explanations. Such a mouthpiece character doesn’t always appear in Blackwood’s fiction, but when he does, he usually spoils it, for me. The most obvious example is the “psychic detective” John Silence (if only he would be silent), one of whose tales, “The Camp of the Dog” is in this book. John Silence is absent for much of the tale, and before he comes we get — again — a great evocation of an environment, in this case a vast collection of tiny islands north of Stockholm, and a growing tension between the small group of campers holidaying there, a tension taking a dangerously lycanthropic turn. Then John Silence arrives and talks all about “vital forces”, “the Subtle Body” and all things “fluidic”, and puts a dampener on what was building up to be a rather hothouse tale of teenage lust at odds with civilised values.

But when Blackwood’s good, he can be very good, and he’s good when his tales are backed up by a solid grounding in real places and situations. In “Max Hensig”, the New York reporter, Williams, gets to interview a psychopathic doctor on trial for the poisoning of his second wife. Williams is convinced Hensig is dangerous, and writes so in the papers, but Hensig — who is clearly a psychopath, and is openly contemptuous of so unimaginative a way of killing someone as poison — is released, and then Williams knows Hensig is after him. The interviews, with Williams one side of the prison bars and Hensig the other, feel like Hannibal Lecter territory, and when we know Hensig is on the loose once more, hard-drinking Williams’ descent into near-nervous collapse is as thick and sticky as an alcoholic sweat.

But the best tale in the book, for me, is “The Wendigo”. (“The Willows” is here, too, but I think that, despite Lovecraft’s endorsement, it has to take third place after “The Wendigo” and “Max Hensig”.) For a start, the environment is wonderfully realised:

“In front… lay the stretch of Fifty Island Water, a crescent-shaped lake some fifteen miles across from tip to tip, and perhaps five miles across where they were camped. A sky of rose and saffron, more clear than any atmosphere Simpson had ever known, still dropped its pale streaming fires across the waves, where the islands — a hundred, surely, rather than fifty — floated like the fairy barques of some enchanted fleet. Fringed with pines, whose crests fingered most delicately the sky, they almost seemed to move upwards as the light faded — about to weigh anchor and navigate the pathways of the heavens instead of the currents of their native and desolate lake.”

Then there’s the supernatural element itself. Simpson’s hunter-guide Défago is snatched from the very mouth of his tent by the Wendigo — snatched and carried off to race through the woods, then up into the skies, where his cries about his “burning feet of fire” echo down to the terrified Simpson. But this isn’t all. Out of sheer boldness, Blackwood has Défago return after several days’ absence for an hour or two — or is it Défago? The thing looks like him, but that likeness could be “a mask that was on the verge of dropping off, and… underneath they would discover something black and diabolical revealed in utter nakedness.” Défago’s comrade Hank shouts that this isn’t Défago, and the thing disappears as mysteriously as it came… Then, later, we find Défago again, only this time, we’re told, it’s the real man, one utterly frostbitten, exhausted, and empty-minded. And so, is the Wendigo an actual creature? Is it a supernatural entity? Or is it a metaphor for “that other aspect of the wilderness: the indifference to human life, the merciless spirit of desolation which took no note of man”? Blackwood — as caught up in the rush of his tale as Défago is in the Wendigo’s grip — doesn’t answer, but lets the mystery remain:

“Out there, in the heart of unreclaimed wilderness, they had surely witnessed something crudely and essentially primitive. Something that had survived somehow the advance of humanity had emerged terrifically, betraying a scale of life monstrous and immature. He envisaged it rather as a glimpse into prehistoric ages, when superstitions, gigantic and uncouth, still oppressed the hearts of men; when the forces of nature were still untamed, the Powers that may have haunted a primeval universe not yet withdrawn.”

A glimpse — this is what a great weird tale should be, not an explanation. And it’s when Blackwood keeps his tales to that glimpse that he most succeeds.

They’re not typos, they’s scanspellos — errors that come not from someone mistyping something and failing to check it, but from someone scanning something in, running a quick OCR and spellcheck, then thinking that’s enough work on that one and publishing the damn thing. And I’m not talking about people putting stuff up on the web, I’m talking about supposedly professionally produced books available through Amazon. And this plague of scanspellos is set to get a lot worse as ebooks gain in popularity.

It’s not an issue limited to ebooks. The old Ballantine Adult Fantasy paperbacks had their fair share of typos, for instance — enough to make me want to replace them with a higher quality edition if I ever wanted to re-read them, but never so many that it made me give up reading them to start with. I first read A Voyage to Arcturus in its Ballantine edition, and although the typos were mildly annoying, they never got in the way of my understanding — and in fact being bowled over by — the book. It was always obvious they were typos. The trouble with scanspellos (a horrible word for a horrible phenomenon) is, because they involve a careless run through a spellchecker, they’re that much less obvious. The first book that really got my readerly goat as far as scanspellos are concerned was, in fact, another edition of A Voyage to Arcturus, in this case one produced by a university press — Bison Press, who are associated with the University of Nebraska. In a supposedly “commemmorative” edition (that’s one “m” too many, they even managed to introduce an error on the cover), the text was so garbled I actually fired an email off to the publisher (and never got a reply of course). Although it was full of silly little obvious errors, including number 1’s for letter l’s (hardly an important error, but irritating enough to act as a constant distraction from pure reading), some of the words, and therefore the meaning, had actually been changed. At one point, for instance, the text said, “The short stranger turned and comforted the party”. Any reader new to Arcturus would read that and take it at face value, but I, having read the novel a fair few times and knowing that the very essence of the “short stranger”, Krag, is discomfort — he is a supernatural being who has another name in our world, and it is Pain — checked that sentence in another edition and found it was supposed to read “The short stranger turned and confronted the party” — an entirely different meaning.

I’ve recently been reading Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural, a bumper volume of Algernon Blackwood stories. This is from House of Stratus, a publisher who has issued a lot of Blackwood in affordable paperback form. A while ago I bought their edition of his novel, The Human Chord, and it was a well-produced paperback. I thought Tales would be up to the same standard. In fact it was scanspelloed to the hilt. “Her” constantly replaced “for”, “ox” replaced “or”, “axe” replaced “are”, “lie” replaced “he”, among many, many others. Worst of all was its constant replacement of long dashes with hyphens. This might sound like a minor annoyance on a par with number 1’s for letter l’s, but it was actually the thing that most interrupted my reading. There’s a constantly disruptive effect in reading a sentence like:

“The Club-it crossed his tortured mind for a second-was impossible.”

The worst thing was, once I’d been reading the book for a while, I found myself looking at hyphenated words I came across elsewhere, wondering if they were supposed to have a dash or a hyphen between them, and tentatively re-reading them each way before continuing.

Neither of these examples are of ebooks. I recently read Treasure Island on my Kindle, in the free edition offered by Amazon. That actually had very few scanspellos, but had plenty of examples of the other fault that irritates me about ebooks — poor design. I hate books that use html-style paragraphing (a double line-space between paragraphs rather than a single line break and an indent). The free edition of Treasure Island didn’t do that, fortunately, but quite frequently had line breaks within paragraphs, though aside from that — and the poor formatting of chapter headings — it was generally readable. But bad enough to persuade me to pay for a book I want to read in future.

None of this is because of the rise of ebooks, or of print-on-demand technology (the House of Stratus book was POD, the Bison Press wasn’t), but it is an effect of the ease with which old, often out-of-print, books can be brought into production nowadays. On the one hand, I applaud publishers for bringing hard-to-find works back into print once more — particularly the Algernon Blackwood novels and stories. But the very thing that makes it viable for them to do so is that they can put so little effort into it — just scan them, OCR & spellcheck them, and release them to the public without a proper (human) proofread. And the trouble is that once these cheap editions are out there, it makes it so much less likely that a proper publisher — one who will actually check what they publish — will bring out a better edition to replace it, one which will necessarily be more expensive, and so sell less.

In the meantime, I’ve discovered a better way of reading out-of-print books. I download them as PDFs from archive.org. Kindles are generally pretty bad for reading PDFs because they either shrink them too small to read in order to fit on the screen, or you have to constantly pan right and left to read them; but books of a certain age are just the right size to fit on a Kindle screen and remain readable. And they’ve got a good selection of Algernon Blackwoods at archive.org.

I’ve been reading a bit of Algernon Blackwood recently, so I thought I’d post what is one of my favourite fantasy illustrations, Matt Fox’s two-page spread for Blackwood’s excellent weird story, “The Wendigo”:

It would have originally been divided by inner page margins, hence the fact that the two halves don’t fit together.

It originally appeared in Famous Fantastic Mysteries in June 1944 (Blackwood’s tale was first published in 1910), but the above scan comes courtesy of Peter Haining’s wonderful Terror! A History of Horror Illustrations from the Pulp Magazines, a 1976 book chock-full of classic (and not-so-classic) pictures from the pulps and penny dreadfuls.

When I first saw this illustration, I was initially put off by its unrealistic style, but I kept coming back to it, and eventually it won me over. Nowadays, I’ve come to prefer illustration which is as much design as realistic representation, and, particularly in fantastic art where an air of make-believe is so necessary, I always find art which is only realistic — however perfect — just doesn’t do it for me as much as stuff which is plainly artificial, and so obviously the product of a human imagination.

If you want some more Matt Fox, here’s a pretty thorough gallery of his Weird Tales covers, illustrations, and some comic work, over at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.