Haunter of the black woods
Colin Wilson
STARLIGHT MAN: THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF ALGERNON BLACKWOOD by Mike Ashley Constable, £20, pp. 395, ISBN 1841194174 Immediately after his death in 1951, Algernon Blackwood was completely forgotten. Today, the few who have heard of him regard him as a writer of ghost stories found in 1930s anthologies. Yet T. E. Lawrence thought highly of the 1911 novel The Centaur, which he described as a reasoned and definitive attack on the modern world. And that is how Blackwood liked to see himself — as a nature mystic who carried on a lifelong campaign of subversion against 20th-century materialism.
Blackwood was born in 1869 into a rigidly Victorian family with connections to the nobility; his father was a civil servant who later received a knighthood, while his mother had a title in her own right. Young Algernon was what we would now call a hobbledehoy, paralysed by shyness and always tripping over his own feet. But to counterbalance his inferiority complex, he had a love of nature so passionate that it amounted to mania, and as a child used to sneak out of bed at midnight to go and sit by a pond in the woods.
As a teenager he was packed off to Canada with an allowance of £100 a year, and was soon on the breadline. His father, a born-again Christian, thought Algernon's soul had gone to hell when he gave up Christianity in favour of the Hindu scriptures and Madame Blavatsky, and never saw him again. After his father's death, Blackwood blew his inheritance on a business that went bankrupt, then fled to New York to escape his creditors and became a poorly paid journalist. After ten years of hardship, the penniless prodigal returned to London. and found a secretarial job at £2 a week.
Meanwhile he went on scribbling out of force of habit and let his manuscripts accumulate in a cupboard, Fate took a hand when he bumped into a journalist he knew in Piccadilly and took him back to his room for a coffee. Asked if he still did any writing, Blackwood showed him a cupboard full of manuscripts, and his friend took a pile of them away. Blackwood heard no more until he received a letter from a publisher asking him to go and see him. This first book of ghost stories was moderately successful, and was soon followed by more, although from one of them Blackwood made only £16. (The author explains that this should be multiplied by 60 to turn it into modern money, but it is still very little.) Gradually, Blackwood began to express his nature mysticism, closely akin to Wordsworth's, and began to acquire admirers. In 1908, his publisher asked him to invent a central character to tie a volume of stories together, and Blackwood invented a kind of psychic Sherlock Holmes called John Silence, who brought him a modest degree of fame. A rather Peter Pan-ish novel called A Prisoner of Fairyland — like Barrie, Blackwood adored children — was staged in London under the title of The Starlight Express, with music by Elgar, but only survived a dozen or so performances.
So Blackwood grew older gracefully. A tall, thin man of unfailing courtesy, he never married because he wanted to devote his sparse royalties to travel, which he needed as much as food and drink. He had a long platonic love affair with the wife of a German baron, but when the baron died lost no time in fleeing.
In the Thirties he became a well-known broadcaster, and appeared on the first television transmission from the Alexandra Palace, telling a ghost story to camera. But no one any longer read the novels he thought were his most important work — everyone knew him by ghost stories like 'Secret Worship' and 'The Wendigo', a vein he had long exhausted. He died, at 82, still broke but much loved by his friends.
Are his novels worth reviving? I think they are. I recently reread The Centaur, a first edition of which I picked up for a few pence, and found it very impressive. Although he is not, perhaps, of great stature, Blackwood is still a minor classic, and deserves to be assigned his proper place. Mike Ashley's amusing and beautifully researched biography, the first so far, is an important step in that direction.
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