ALGERNON BLACKWOOD – MENACING WILDERNESS
Frances Oliver
In Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, which I reviewed in the last issue, Ghosh deplores ‘serious’ fiction’s failure to address climate change, the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced. Post-industrial novels are mostly stuck in the realm of personal relations; only science fiction, Ghosh asserts, and the literature of the ‘paranormal’ confront cataclysms and the ‘uncanny’. With climate change it is an ‘uncanny’ cataclysm we are facing now. So it is those works that posterity will remember.
Ghosh’s list of writers whose work does deal with the ‘uncanny’ did not include my favourite author of such books, the late Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951).
Blackwood’s family were strict evangelicals. His father, despite a puritanical fundamentalism which Blackwood rejected, had a mystical streak which Blackwood shared. A teacher led to Blackwood’s interest in therapeutic hypnotism, and he went to Germany to study psychiatry. German culture and militarism did not agree with Blackwood but he was fortunate in meeting an Indian fellow student through whom he discovered Buddhism and Yoga. Eventually Blackwood studied medicine in Edinburgh but soon left the profession for the proverbial voyage of self-discovery, which began with sailing to North America.
Blackwood had a series of jobs, backpacked in the Canadian wilderness, and joined various occult, metaphysical and ghost-hunting societies. He also lived briefly in Manhattan where he almost died and was falsely convicted of arson. It was an adventurer’s life, devoted whenever he could manage it to mountaineering, skiing and travel. In 1906 Blackwood began to write, and his ghost stories were an immediate success. He then lived for several years in Switzerland and traveled more widely, in Egypt and the Caucasus.
Blackwood wrote a number of good conventional ghost stories, where the ghost is a human presence, but in his best and most eerie tales nature is not a setting but the chief protagonist. In these stories humans are trespassers in wild landscapes which both attract and terrify; the trespasser who does not escape in time becomes a sacrifice.
The two most famous and powerful stories, still never left out of anthologies, are The Wendigo and The Willows. The ‘Wendigo’ is a mythical giant beast, the spirit of the great
Frances Oliver
ALGERNON BLACKWOOD – MENACING WILDERNESS
Canadian wilderness. It leads its chosen victim on a mad leaping journey that destroys his feet and ultimately his mind. In The Willows, inspired by a canoeing trip on the Danube Blackwood made with a friend, the spirits of the miles of whispering swamp trees disfigure and kill a sacrificial human victim. The other works I know, Sand and The Glamour of the Snow, have similar themes but seem less effective, as they involve human rituals or human-appearing personification.
Blackwood’s style may now appear a little antiquated and heavy but that appearance is soon overcome. The suspense is compelling and Blackwood captures superbly that sense of trespass and danger, not a fear of predators but of the sheer ‘otherness’ of great wilderness. When Blackwood lived and wrote there was still much untrodden wilderness on the earth. Now we are in what Bill McKibben in his book’s title, called The End of Nature, an earth completely controlled and soon to be exhausted by the overpopulation and greed of human beings. I wonder if the climate crisis is not an ultimate answer from what, were one mystical, one could call the natural spirits. When we have trespassed everywhere, the sacrifice will be all of us.