Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction by S. T. Joshi

Author:S. T. Joshi
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Hippocampus Press
Published: 2015-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

ii. Algernon Blackwood: Nature as God and Refuge

Algernon Blackwood lived his work as few authors have ever done. On the most superficial level, this means that he incorporated abundant autobiographical elements into his tales and novels, especially from his wide-ranging travels—from the wilds of the Canadian backwoods to the parched sands of Egypt; from the snowy crags of the Alps to the forbidding remoteness of the Caucasus Mountains. But there is far more to it than that. Virtually every one of the central figures in Blackwood’s fiction is a thinly disguised self-portrait, and of the most intimate sort—a self-portrait that probes the depths of his own complex and mystical temperament at the same time that it depicts the interaction of that temperament with the people and lands he encountered over a lifetime of unceasing wandering. What is more, Blackwood writes with so powerful a belief in what he is saying that he inexorably induces belief in the reader as well. However fantastic his imaginings, one gains the impression that Blackwood always means exactly what he says.

Algernon Blackwood was born on March 14, 1869, at Wood Lodge, Shooter’s Hill, Kent. He was the son of Stevenson Arthur Blackwood, who served in the Crimean War and subsequently became permanent secretary to the Post Office; he received a knighthood in 1887. Stevenson had become a fervent and evangelical Christian in 1856 and devoted much of his time to lay preaching; accordingly, young Algernon—whose family moved several times in his early childhood, finally settling at Shortlands House, Beckenham, Kent—grew up in a household of extreme religious strictness, with an emphasis on personal salvation and the heavy burden of sin. Matters were not helped by the year (1885–86) Blackwood spent in the overly strict discipline of the School of the Moravian Brotherhood in the Black Forest of Germany, a period he would later depict vividly in the John Silence story “Secret Worship.”

Blackwood escaped the oppressive religiosity of his family environment in a number of ways. Chief among them was his discovery, in 1886, of Buddhism, as embodied in Patanjali’s Yogi Aphorisms; shortly thereafter he was absorbing books on spiritualism and theosophy. But these rebellions were only preliminary to his discovery of Nature (always with a capital N in Blackwood), a discovery that ultimately formed the core of his entire outlook on life:

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