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The real imagined worlds of Algernon Blackwood


 

I cannot recall why I decided to read the stories of Algernon Blackwood, but having acquired the volume shown above, I set off on an extraordinary journey.

It began with a visit to a haunted house occupied by the ghost of an obsessive lover and his victim, which I subsequently discovered was based on one of Blackwood's own researches as a member of the Society for Psychical Research, before encountering a village of witches, vengeful willows, a loving forest, and, most famously, an indigenous North American folk creature fond of a dangerous form of dancing!

Strikingly, Blackwood claimed that his stories were based on real experiences, either of himself or trusted friends, which raises the question of how much of each story is grounded in ''actual" experience and how much is subsequent imaginative embellishment filtered through Blackwood's own framing beliefs, shaped by his interests in ''occult" thought and psychic research, and his membership both of the Theosophical Society, the Order of the Golden Dawn and the Society for Psychical Research. 

It was a question that the poet, Oscar Milosz, asked about Swedenborg's more concrete, less fictional descriptions of otherworld journeys - how much is "actual" experience and how much theological amplification? This is not to suggest dishonesty on either's part, simply to recognise the complex dance between experience, belief and the imagination in creating wholes, and wholes that are truthful to what measuring? Recognizing too how the play of memory also affects what we subsequently think we saw and did.

It is true, however, that Blackwood's own experience of the world, particularly nature, was essentially animist - a world in which there are multiple persons, only some of whom happen to be human, and many of whom are, what we might call, superhuman (with varied, and often intermittent interest in human beings, who may not, whisper it not, be at the centre of the world). Arthur Machen, Blackwood's friend and rival in the development of weird literature, said that when most people suggested the wind was ''a spirit" they were being poetically metaphorical, but when Blackwood said it, he was being concretely real; he meant it!  This gives a number of his stories a very contemporary ecological edge, too. 

As I read on, this became increasingly apparent, whether or not particular details were being 'made up', the whole fitted into a deeply believed imaginative whole, and the imagination, properly exercised, is itself a way to truth. We are in a deeply 'Romantic' territory more akin to Blake and Coleridge or Novalis than any of Blackwood's contemporaries (unless possibly his indigenous contemporaries, some contact with which Blackwood had sympathetically had in North America), and it is a territory in which I find myself most at home. Blackwood has a distinctive view of how the world is, and the stories are slivers of this world, and their realism comes from being parts of a wider imagined whole (built upon more expansively in his novels). 

The writing is excellent - beautifully descriptive both of the natural world about the characters and of the characters' own psychologies - and the often mutually accumulating suspense of mystery. Delightful to drop into a new writer able to extend the possibilities of the world and your own imagination, and who is emotionally satisfying. I look forward to reading more.




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