Blackwood Redux

When Mike Ashley published his magisterial biography of Algernon Blackwood back in 2001, I thought it would never be bettered.  But it has been bettered, now, and by Mike Ashley himself. The original edition was Starlight Man: The Extraordinary Life of Algernon Blackwood (the US edition was boringly retitled Algernon Blackwood: An Extraordinary Life).

Stark House has just published the first paperback edition, under the original title, but it is not a mere reprint. It is a revision which restores text cut (for reasons of space) from the manuscript before publication in 2001, and it adds new material and revisions based on what Ashley has discovered in the intervening years.  Also, there are a lot of additional photographs in this edition, and I note that the footnotes are now helpfully placed on the same page rather than, as in the earlier edition, grouped together at the end of the book.

Anyone interested in Blackwood will find this book essential.

Blackwood Telling Stories on Film!

Some years ago I wrote here on Wormwoodiana about a snippet of film of Algernon Blackwood, see here (though the links to the program which included the snippet are now dead).  Now I'm pleased to report that two short films, about thirteen or fourteen minutes each, of Blackwood telling stories are viewable on youtube.

They are the two surviving episodes of a series of six such short-films made by Rayant Pictures in  1949-1950. (For details, see Mike Ashley's Starlight Man: The Extraordinary Life of Algernon Blackwood, 2001, pp. 330-331.) I learned of them last week via a posting by Jim at the Blackwood yahoogroup (ablackwood).  Having just watched them, I thought I'd share them with readers of Wormwoodiana.  Here are the titles and links:

The Reformation of St. Jules 

Lock Your Door

Enjoy!

Julius Le Vallon - Centenary

This month marks the centenary of an unusual and original novel of the supernatural, Julius Le Vallon by Algernon Blackwood, which was issued by Cassell in May 1916. I remember finding this in a little compact cinnamon-coloured book, probably the Cassell’s Pocket Library reprint of 1929, on a shelf standing by the open door, in cracked white paint, of the lobby of a bookshop in Winchester.

At the time I was living in a bedsit in Southampton, and to escape from this I often went out at weekends to the old towns nearby. The ancient Saxon cathedral city was only half an hour away and a pleasure to stroll around, with its statue of King Alfred, cathedral and half-timbered buildings. Above the city was St Catherine’s Hill, with its turf maze carved into the green slopes (I was then researching and exploring these curious antiquities), and along the river the chapel and medieval hospital (almshouse) of St Cross.

I associate the finding of the copy of Julius Le Vallon with pale sunlight and some first hesitant warmth, so it was probably in Spring. I remember the great delight of the discovery because, although Blackwood’s stories were fairly easy to get in various collections and omnibus volumes, the novels were much harder, and I rarely saw them. I am sure I took it back to the green armchair with its snagged threads, thin flat cushion and long worn wooden arms, and started reading straightaway. The book reminded me quite a lot of Herman Hesse’s Demian, then a favourite of mine, and also a wartime novel. They were both about youth in the quest for the visionary and unearthly, which is how I liked to think of myself then.

I have been rereading and thinking about Julius Le Vallon fairly recently, as I tried to write a longish story involving a form of reincarnation, but in a different, less deterministic way than it is often presented in older fiction. This is due out shortly in Pagan Triptych from Sarob Press, along with other Blackwood-inspired long stories by John Howard and Ron Weighell.

It seems to me that in this and Blackwood’s other major “reincarnation” works, what he is actually writing about is the attempt to channel a cosmic power. His books have characters who are indeed reborn versions of previous figures involved in such experiments, but they are not from the historical past, so much as from other dimensions.

The two main protagonists of Blackwood’s book meet as schoolboys and recognise their mutual destiny, and he does well to balance their mystical adventures with the minutiae of ordinary school life. Later, though, he introduces a love triangle with a young woman also from their cosmic past, and I think he struggles to make these relationships quite as convincing. His characters are rather solemn, and sometimes speak portentously, and the book occasionally gets a bit weighed down.

Even so, there is no mistaking the ardour of Blackwood’s beliefs about unearthly powers, and his novel must certainly have been among the strangest and most original books to appear in those dreadful days of war one hundred years ago. It has certainly remained a talisman for me, a remembrance of a minor wonder, found when I needed it most.

Mark Valentine

Image: Tower Project blog.

Best Books

A current offering on ABE is a cache of letters, addressed to E.H. Visiak, for an author’s symposium for John o’London’s Weekly in early 1924.  The seller is David J. Holmes Autographs, of Hamilton, New York, and the thirteen letters (7 autograph letters and 6 typed letters) are priced US$1,000.  The physical documents don’t interest me, but the contents do, and I recently enlisted the aid of a friend (thanks, John!) and now have a copy of the symposium, “My Best Book: Famous Authors Name Their Favourites for John o’London,” published in the 22 March 1924 issue. E.H. Visiak is nowhere mentioned in the article, but clearly he prepared it for publication. Some twenty-six authors (or their secretaries) are quoted.  Here is a selection of the ones that interest me the most, listed alphabetically:

J. D. Beresford

“My favourite is The Hampdenshire Wonder, which has the distinction of having sold fewer copies and of having brought me more friends than any other novel of mine. . . . The book wrote itself. I could not get it down fast enough. And it has always remained to me as the admired work of another person rather than of my own.”

Algernon Blackwood

Mr. Algernon Blackwood selects the Centaur, as having expressed most of himself.

G.K. Chesterton

Mr. Chesterton’s secretary writes: “In reply to your letter of to-day, Mr. Chesterton asks me to say that he considers all his works deplorable, but the one that has given him most satisfaction to have written is Orthodoxy.”

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

“I think Sir Nigel my best novel, and The White Company second.”

Arthur Machen

“I should think that on the whole The Hill of Dreams is my most successful experiment in literature . . .  [sic]

“Whatever merit the book may have is perhaps due to the fact that it is a reflection of the impressions of my native county, Gwent, or Monmouthshire, which I gathered when I was a boy.

“I am a great believer in the doctrine that a man of letters knows everything vital that he is to know by the time he is 18.

“When I read that Mr. Thingumbob has gone to Penzance or Pernambuco ‘to get local colour for his new novel’ I know that Mr. Thingumbob, is, roughly speaking, a rotter.”

Barry Pain

Mr. Barry Pain thinks that his best book is Going Home:  “It is,” he says, “in the vein of fantasy and I enjoyed writing it.”

Rafael Sabatini

“In my own opinion Scaramouche is the best novel I have written. At least, in Scaramouche I was less conscious than usual when the work was done of a gap between the aim and the achievement.”

Other authors responding include Joseph Conrad (his letter appears in Visiak’s book on Conrad), John Galsworthy, Jerome K. Jerome, John Masefield, George Bernard Shaw, May Sinclair, etc. 

Story-readings by Blackwood, Dunsany, Coppard, etc.

Just a quick plug here for a CD released in "The Spoken Word" series put out by the BBC and the British Library.  Short Stories: English and Irish Authors Read Their Own Work is a three disc compilation that includes  two stories read by Algernon Blackwood, one by Lord Dunsany, one by A.E. Coppard, one by Angela Carter, one by Kingsley Amis, as well as other authors including W. Somerset Maugham, William Trevor, Harold Pinter, Edna O'Brien, V.S. Pritchett, Sean O'Faolain, Phyllis Bentley, and Frank O'Connor.

The Blackwood tales include "The Destruction of Smith", first published in The Eye-Witness for 29 February 1912, and collected in Pan's Garden (1912); and "The Texas Farm Disappearance", published in The Listener for 13 May 1948, and collected in the section titled "Five Strange Stories" in The Magic Mirror: Lost Supernatural and Mystery Stories by Algernon Blackwood (1989), edited by Mike Ashley.  The recording of "The Destruction of Smith" was first broadcast on 6 September 1940, and that of "The Texas Farm Disappearance" was first broadcast on 10 May 1948. 

Lord Dunsany's tale is one of Joseph Jorkens, "The Pearly Beach", first published in Vanity Fair for March 1932, and collected in Jorkens Remembers Africa (1934).

A.E. Coppard's tale is "The Princess of Kingdom Gone", which first appeared in Voices for November 1919, and was collected in Adam and Eve and Pinch Me (1921). 

The Angela Carter story is "The Snow Child" and the Kingsley Amis on "The Green Man Revisited".

For me it's been especially nice to hear Blackwood and Dunsany read their own tales.  Blackwood's voice is more restrained than I might have expected considering his fame as a reader of ghost stories.  And Dunsany seems to have (to these American ears) only a slight Irish lilt in some words. Both are effective as readers of their stories. 

For more details, here are the Amazon US and Amazon UK links. 

Blackwood on Film!

There is a for me a special interest in seeing video or hearing a voice recording of a long-dead favorite author. I have heard some recordings of Arthur Machen, an author typically associated with the 1890s, and it almost felt like having a time machine when I heard his lilting voice. I have never heard any recording of Lord Dunsany, but suspect some may survive, owing to his broadcasts on the BBC. There are various recordings and even some video footage of Tolkien, but I doubt I'll ever hear the voice of David Lindsay (alas!). Or Kenneth Morris. Or E. R. Eddison.

I knew from Mike Ashley's excellent Algernon Blackwood: A Bio-Bibliography (1987) that late in life Blackwood did radio and television broadcasts. And some years ago some surviving clips of one of these 1951 television programs showed up in a BBC4 show "The Story of the Ghost Story", broadcast on December 23, 2005. I hoped (in vain) that this show might appear somewhere on US television, but it never did. No DVD came out either, but at last I've found it on YouTube. The program is just under thirty minutes, and on YouTube it appears in two parts, part one and part two.  The snippet of Blackwood (less than twenty seconds) appears in part two, from the 6 minutes and 51 seconds mark, through 7 minutes and 9 seconds. Not much, but it is a privileged glimpse at the man, and it whets your appetite for more.

If more footage of Blackwood and other such classic authors survives, and could be complied on a DVD, I'd be first in line to buy it.

GHOST STORIES: The Magazine and Its Makers

 John Locke, with his Off-Trail Publications, has quietly been producing some excellent books for anyone interested in the pulp magazines, and especially for those of us who, in particular, are also interested in the men and women behind the stories—the authors, editors, and artists. One recent release deserves special attention for the exemplary coverage of one particular pulp magazine, Ghost Stories.  It ran for a total of 64 issues, from July 1926 through the December 1931/January 1932 number.  There has been one previous anthology centered on this pulp: Phantom Perfumes and Other Shades: Memories of Ghost Stories Magazine (2000), edited by Mike Ashley.  It contains seventeen stories, along with a history of the magazine by Mike Ashley, a short Foreword by Hugh B. Cave (who contributed two stories to the magazine in 1931), and two appendices: the first a checklist of issues of the magazine, the second an index to the contributors.

John Locke’s new project brings us not one but two books:  twenty stories in volume one, and another fifteen in volume two, with no overlap of stories from Mike Ashley’s anthology and with plenty of extras.  These volumes are formatted the same size as the original pulp magazine, so you get some neat extras like a sprinkling of facsimile ads, a bunch of the original illustrations to the stories, and full page reproductions of all sixty-four covers to the magazine.

Ghost Stories: The Magazine and Its Makers, Volume 1 (9781935031093  $24.00 trade paperback) additionally includes a lengthy history of the magazine, putting it in the context of other magazines of the time, particularly those published by MacFadden Publications, who were responsible for nearly four years of the run of Ghost Stories before it was sold. Other lengthy sections give biographies of all of the editors, and all of the authors who are represented in volume one.  And these are not the usual short one-paragraph biographies, but often a couple of pages, giving the results of original research on these people.  There are also some statistical analyses of that magazine, showing that it paid 2 cents a word under MacFadden, but slipped to 1 cent (and up) under later owners.  Over its run, Ghost Stories published 517 short stories, 12 novelettes, 47 serials (of various installments), 148 nonfiction items, 44 editorials, and one poem.

Ghost Stories: The Magazine and Its Makers, Volume 2 (9781935031130  $24.00 trade paperback) continues on in the same comprehensive manner, with biographies of the authors who appear in volume two, a section on the artists, and the cover gallery of all sixty-four of the covers.  (Each volume also has an index.) 

To mention only a few of the stories reprinted in these two volumes, H.P. Lovecraft’s friend, Muriel Eddy, is represented with a short “True Ghost Experience” from the April 1926 issue.  Nictzin Dyalhis's single contribution to Ghost Stories, “He Refused to Stay Dead” (April 1927) which had been announced in the previous issue as “My Encounter with Osric, the Troll”, is also reprinted.  And Leonard Cline, author of God Head (1925) and The Dark Chamber (1927), is represented with his pseudonymous story “Sweetheart of the Snows” (August 1928), as by Alan Forsyth.  It’s is a tale reminiscent of Algernon Blackwood’s “The Glamour of the Snow”.  Cline’s title for the story had been “The Lady of Frozen Death”, and his typescript version under that title can be found in the booklet The Lady of Frozen Death and Other Weird Tales (Necronomicon Press, 1992).  Comparing the texts, one can see that the editor at Ghost Stories made numerous minor changes and additions, ones which tend to lessen Cline’s distinctive style and to add more pulpish sentimentalities.

This two-volume history and anthology brings the pulp magazine Ghost Stories, defunct now for almost seventy years, vividly back to new life.  I recommend it highly.

The Ghost That I Like Best: Famous Authors on Their Favourite Spooks Pt. 1

In the December 8, 1923 issue of T.P.’s & Cassell’s Weekly, there appeared a symposium of responses to a question along the lines of “What is your favourite ghost?”. Here are some of the responses.  More will appear in a future posting.   

Thomas Burke

Yes, but what sort of ghost? The author’s “ghost”? Ghosts in literature? Ghosts I have met?  I have never yet met a ghost, and don’t want to. With Charles Lamb, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I am afraid of them. Of ghosts in literature I prefer those with plenty of clanking chains and grisly robes, ghosts that do squeak and gibber round the ivied walls at midnight. Marley’s ghost and the ghost of Hamlet’s father are most unsatisfactory; they are ghosts with moral purposes. Ghosts in fiction should have no purpose beyond that of hair-raising; and in this matter the best ghost I know is the ghost in G.W.M. Reynolds’s “Bronze Statue,” because I was twelve years old when I read it, and it was the first and only ghost that raised my hair.
 
Vere Hutchinson

You are quite right to think I have a favourite ghost.  I frankly confess the more ghostly the story or legend the happier I am! I think there has never been anything so terrible or realistic as Kipling’s “The End of the Passage.”  I do not remember anything with such horror in it.  To me it is the one great classic of the uncanny. Then there is that mad, jolly yarn of Richard Middleton’s, “The Ghost Ship,” the most crazy, most enchanting fantasy; to be read on a dark night with a wild wind and driving rain. It is absurd, if you like, with its village of nice, properly conducted ghosts, but it seems to me to have a magic of its own, and after you’ve read it, if the real ghostly spirit is upon you, then open your window and you can see “The Ghost Ship” sailing through the air, with her flare of lights and her noise of singing, her great masts raking the stars—I swear you can!
 

Edward Shanks

My favourite ghost is chosen by pure favouritism,  It is not much of a ghost, but it is my own, or, at least, I have a good long lease of it, which is nearly as good.

The house in which I live consists of two old cottages thrown into one. The little room which I use as a study was once, so far as I can judge, the kitchen and sole living-room of the smaller cottage. One day, some fifty years ago, the labourer who lived here, oppressed, I dare say, by the too close presence of his wife and children, hanged himself from a beam in this room. So says village tradition: and there is to this day a large, firm nail in the beam, from which a man might very well hang himself. He might, that is to say, if he were a dwarf or without legs; any other sort of man would find it difficult. And, for reasons which will appear, he cannot have been legless.

This tradition, once heard, vanished from my mind. But after some time it happened that I was working alone past midnight, all the others in the house being long asleep. Not quite alone, for my cat was there—a detestable cat, kept only for mousing, not at all an author’s favourite cat who shares his study and his labours with him. Something, I do not know what, made me look round.

There, directly beneath the suddenly sinister-looking nail, was the cat, walking up and down with all the motions and the pleased expression of a cat which is rubbing itself against someone’s legs. Up and down she went for several minutes, purring softly, while I sat looking over my shoulder, unable to move. Then I went to bed and left her there, and left all the lamps burning and all the doors open behind me.

And yet, strangely, in the morning the pride of possession threw out the horror of the night. It was my ghost, my very own; not a freehold ghost, to be sure, but even a leasehold ghost is more than most people have. He is my favourite ghost, now almost an “affable familiar ghost,” and I look at all others as a man who loves his own mongrel fox terrier looks at the champions assembled at Cruft’s.

 
W. B. Maxwell

My favourite ghost is that of Lord Strafford in the novel “John Inglesant.” “All to nothing,” he seems to me the most appropriate and majestic apparition that has ever been imagined.

As many of your readers will remember, it is two nights after Strafford’s execution (the consummation of King Charles’s betrayal of a loyal servant), and Inglesant, on duty at the palace of Whitehall, sees the dead man pass through the outer rooms and enter the King’s bedchamber,  “He was falling asleep when he was startled by the ringing sound of arms and the challenge of the yeoman of the guard on the landing outside the door. The next instant a voice, calm and haughty, which sent a tremor through every nerve, gave back the word ‘Christ.’ Inglesant started up and grasped the back of his chair in terror. Gracious heaven! Who was this that knew the word? In another moment the hangings across the door were drawn sharply back, and with a quick step, as one who went straight to where he was expected and had a right to be, the intruder entered the antechamber. . . .”

If anything could make me believe in ghosts, it would be Shorthouse’s conception and handling of this dread visit.

 
Algernon Blackwood

My favourite ghost story is what I believe to be also the shortest:

“Do you believe in ghosts?” said Jones.
“No,” said Smith.
“I do,” said Jones—and vanished.

Its authorship I do not know. It may be a chestnut too. Next to this, I place “Turn of the Screw,” by Henry James, for its majestic horror; and “The Monkey’s Paw,” by W.W. Jacobs, for it cumulative horror and its inevitableness.


W. L. George

I am very fond of supernatural stories, and am sure that the best I have ever come across exhibits the intangible couple of ghosts, those of the governess and the valet who float about the lake and establish a connexion of nameless horror and vileness with the two children who occupy the centre of the story called “The Turn of the Screw,” by Henry James.


May Sinclair

If by my “Favourite Ghost” you mean the apparition that has most appealed to me in literature I should vote unhesitatingly for the ghost or ghosts in Henry James’s “Turn of the Screw.”

Blackwood's The Wave as reviewed in America

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Brooklyn, New York, 24 February 1917

I'll keep this item brief: in 1917, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, a newspaper out of Brooklyn, New York, published a review of Algernon Blackwood's The Wave, An Egyptian Aftermath.

The reviewer concluded: "Anyone who has read Julius Le Vallon, John Silence, Ten Minute Stories, etc., by the same author, will be pleased to read The Wave, which is quite as good in its way as any of its predecessors."

Poe's Rival

Writes the Encylopedia Brittanica on Algernon Blackwood: "...operating a hotel, mining in the Alaskan goldfields, and working as a newspaper reporter in New York City, experiences that he recalled in Episodes Before Thirty (1923), Blackwood returned to England in 1899. Seven years later he published his first book of short stories..."

A contemporary review of Blackwood's Episodes Before Thirty that was published the next year, gives a much better insight in the trials and tribulations that Blackwood encountered during his early career as a writer. 'Poe's Rival in Mystery Tales Starved on New York Papers' was the headline of the review in the Auburn, New York newspaper The Auburn Citizen of Episodes Before Thirty in its April, 11, 1924 edition.

John Silence

I was looking up something else in a magazine from January 1909, and was pleasantly surprised to discover a snippet about Algernon Blackwood, along with a choice illustration. The text reads:

His John Silence, published some months ago in England, was described as having for the hero the most mysterious character in fiction, and the poster which we reproduce herewith caused considerable talk as a successful rendering of this motif.

The picture is fairly small, and the scan is the best I can do. But I wish I could find an original poster, though I doubt many have survived the century since it was issued.