1 This paragraph represents AB’s views only in part. He was in fact significantly influenced by theosophy, the mystical religion founded by Helena P. Blavatsky (1831-91) and others in the late nineteenth century. AB published several essays in the Theosophical Society’s magazine, Lucifer, including “Notes on Theosophy” (March 15, 1891) and “From a Theosophist’s Diary” ( January 15, 1892). AB also had considerable dealings with members of the Society for Psychical Research, attending several séances and exploring supposed “haunted” houses (one such exploration is related in the late essay “The Midnight Hour,” in Queen, November 24, 1948), but he remained skeptical toward much spiritualistic phenomena. His psychic detective John Silence, when hearing the word occultism, responds with a shudder: “Oh, please—that dreadful word!” ( JS 1). See also “Credulity and Faith” (Time and Tide, June 2, 1922), a sympathetic review of Harry Price and E. J. Dingwall’s The Revelations of a Spirit Medium, an exposé of frauds practiced by spirit mediums. Nevertheless, late in life AB asserted: “My interest in psychic matters has always been the interest in questions of extended or expanded consciousness. If a ghost is seen, what is it interests me less than what sees it? Do we possess faculties which, under exceptional stimulus, register beyond the normal gamut of seeing, hearing, feeling? That such faculties may exist in the human being and occasionally manifest is where my interest has always lain.” “Author’s Preface” (1938), Selected Tales of Algernon Blackwood (London: John Baker, 1964), pp. 8-9.
2 AB himself, toward the end of his New York period, served for two years (1897-99) as private secretary for the wealthy philantropist James Speyer. Like Jones, he gained the appointment by “chance” (see EBT 338) when he met an old friend of his father’s, William Dodge, who recommended him to Speyer. Although AB’s two years in Speyer’s employ were among the most pleasant of his early life (“James Speyer proved a good friend during the two years or so I spent with him” [EBT 342]), they inspired the bizarre nonsupernatural tale “The Strange Adventures of a Private Secretary in New York” (in EH).
3 AB similarly felt the need to escape from the tedium and strain of being a reporter for the New York Sun by means of various kinds of imaginative stimuli: “Bronx Park, Shelley, the violin, the free library, organ recitals in churches, my Eastern books, and meetings of the Theosophical Society, provided meanwhile the few beauty hours to which I turned by way of relief and relaxation. One and all fed my inner dreams, gave me intense happiness, offered a way of escape from a daily atmosphere I loathed like poison” (EBT 122).
4 The idea of a dead person keeping an appointment made in life is the basis of such stories as “Keeping His Promise” (in EH), “The Deferred Appointment” (in TMS), and “The Return” (in PG).
5 A ghostly assemblage of a very different sort is found in “The Damned” (in Incredible Adventures): “The throng that pressed behind me, also surged in front: facing me in the big room, and waiting for my entry, stood a multitude; on either side of me, in the very air above my head, the vast assemblage paused upon my coming. The pause, however, was momentary, for instantly the deep, tumultuous movement was resumed that yet was silent as a cavern underground. I felt the agony that was in it, the passionate striving, the awful struggle to escape. The semi-darkness held beseeching faces that fought to press themselves upon my vision, yearning yet hopeless eyes, lips scorched and dry, mouths that opened to implore but found no craved delivery in actual words, and a fury of misery and hate that made the life in me stop dead, frozen by the horror of vain pity. That intolerable, vain Hope was everywhere” (IE 207). These are the souls of people “damned” to hell by the intolerant religious fanaticism of the house’s occupant.
6 One is reminded of AB’s tortured relationship with his New York roommate, Arthur Bigge (disguised as “Boyde” in EBT). Although he learned unequivocally that Bigge was robbing him of money and telling lies about him, AB decided to forgive him in the hope that he would reform: “. . . the moment had now come, I thought, to tell him he was forgiven. So I . . . crawled slowly over to him. Putting my hand on his shoulder, and using the gentlest, kindest voice I could find, I told him he should have another chance, but only one. All excitement had died out of me, I felt real pity, the old affection rose, I urged and begged him to ‘run straight’ from this moment” (EBT 163-64). But Bigge presently resumed his criminal ways and AB tracked him down and had him arrested.
7 Cf. the late story “ ‘Vengeance Is Mine’ ” (in The Wolves of God and Other Fey Stories, 1921), in which an Englishman, appalled at the atrocities committed by German soldiers, seeks to exact vengeance upon one of them but at the last minute, hearing a snatch of birdsong, relents.
ANCIENT SORCERIES
“Ancient Sorceries” first appeared in JS; no prior periodical publication has been located. It is the second “case” of the psychic detective John Silence, following “A Psychical Invasion.” AB states that the Hindu medical student he had met at Edinburgh University was the partial basis for the figure of John Silence, although Mike Ashley believes that a later close friend of AB’s was also an inspiration for the character. In his “Author’s Preface” (1938) to Selected Tales (see n. 1 to “The Insanity of Jones”), AB declares that the locale of “Ancient Sorceries” was based upon the city of Laon, about 75 miles northeast of Paris and the capital of the department of Aisne. AB describes it as “a lovely old haunted town where the Cathedral towers stand up against the sunset like cats’ ears, the paws running down the dusky streets, the feline body crouched just below the hill.” He appears to have visited Laon sometime between 1902 and 1905, a period in which little is known of his exact movements.
“Ancient Sorceries” suggests that the inhabitants of the town all turn into cats at night. AB’s fascination with the psychic sensitivity of animals was of long standing. In “A Psychical Invasion” he noted that “animals were more often, and more truly, clairvoyant than human beings” ( JS 32), and he went on to say: “There rose in him [John Silence] quite a new realisation of the mystery connected with the whole feline tribe, but especially with that common member of it, the domestic cat—their hidden lives, their strange aloofness, their incalculable subtlety. How utterly remote from anything that human beings understood lay the sources of their elusive activities. As he watched the indescribable bearing of the little creature mincing along the strip of carpet under his eyes, coquetting with the powers of darkness, welcoming, maybe, some fearsome visitor, there stirred in his heart a feeling strangely akin to awe” ( JS 44).
1 Surbiton is a residential community near Kingston-upon-Thames, about 13 miles southwest of central London; it is now part of the London metropolitan area. It was widely seen as prototypical of suburban middle-class respectability.
2 AB had a lifelong fear of spiders, so this metaphor may have been of particular poignancy to him. See the late article “Along Came a Spider,” London Mystery Magazine no. 8 (February-March 1951): 84: “I share our lovely planet with another inhabitant who inspires me with a degree of loathing that includes fear, even horror. If brought suddenly face to face with this repulsive individual, something akin to paralysis attacks my muscular system, so that for a passing moment I seem unable to act. I stand and stare, fascinated, frightened, and without knowing why.” AB’s fear of hornets is expressed in the story “An Egyptian Hornet” (in DNS).
3 An analogous reaction is experienced by the protagonist of “The Touch of Pan” when, in the midst of a tedious and superficially “decadent” party, he meets a woman whose vital reactions to Nature are identical to his: “He knew her secret then, for she had told it to him. It was his own secret too. They were akin, as the birds and animals were akin. They belonged together in some free and open life, natural, wild, untamed. That unhampered life was flowing about them now, rising, beating with delicious tumult in her veins and his, yet innocent as the sunlight and the wind—because it was as freely recognised” (DNS 24).
4 Cf. “The Eccentricity of Simon Parnacute”: “. .
. there is no Chance, playing tricksy-wise behind the scenes of existence, but . . . all events falling into the lives of men are the calculated results of adequate causes” (LV 297).
5 The Witches’ Sabbath was customarily celebrated on four occasions: Candlemas (February 2), May-Eve (April 30), Lammas (August 1), and Halloween (October 31). The most significant of these were May-Eve and Halloween. These latter two festivals have their origin in primitive times, specifically in certain rituals of the Celtic tribes.
6 Presumably Ilsé is anointed with belladonna (deadly nightshade), an ointment made from a plant (Atropa belladonna) and used by medieval witches. It frequently induced hallucinations of various sorts.
7 AB rarely depicted the conventional Devil or Satan in his stories, but his tale “H. S. H.” (i.e., His Satanic Highness) involves a man who inadvertently summons the Devil. The protagonist of the tale reflects upon “the simple, precious, old-world stories of heaven and hell, of a paternal Deity, and of a daring, subtle, personal devil” (DNS 174).
8 The John Silence story “The Camp of the Dog” is concerned with lycanthrophy, while “The Strange Adventures of a Private Secretary in New York” (in EH), although largely nonsupernatural, carries a suggestion of lycanthrophy in its depiction of Joel Garvey, a businessman encountered by the private secretary: “He stared for a second—it seemed only for a second—into the visage of a ferocious and abominable animal” (EH 274).
THE MAN WHO FOUND OUT
This story first appeared in the Lady’s Realm ( June 1909); it was then reprinted in the Canadian Magazine (December 1912) and collected in The Wolves of God and Other Fey Stories (1921). An unwontedly pessimistic tale, it treats of the “Tablets of the Gods” that an explorer discovers—tablets that purportedly explain the purpose of human life. But the explorer—whom AB describes as “that unique combination . . . a man of science and a mystic”—finds the writing on the tablets so horrible that he cannot endure to reveal it to the world. AB wisely makes no attempt to explain in detail what the message is, but to one of his generally optimistic temperament the only revelation that could be so cataclysmic would be one to the effect that human life has no grand purpose in the cosmic scheme of things. In this sense the story prefigures some of AB’s later and gloomier writings, such as The Bright Messenger (1921), in which the cultural and psychological devastation caused by the world war is clearly evident, as reflected in the protagonist’s prophecy: “Entire race slips back into chaos of primitive life again. Entire Western Civilization crumbles. Modern inventions and knowledge vanish. Nature spirits reappear” (The Bright Messenger [London: Cassell, 1921], p. 25). And yet, in that last sentence AB manages to turn even his blackest pessimism into a kind of optimism: the moral and physical destruction of Western civilization might lead to a recrudescence of primitivism, but it might also lead to a closer union with Nature.
1 AB used the pseudonym “Du Bois-Noir” (literally, “Of the Black Wood”) in the early article “Notes on Theosophy” (Lucifer, March 15, 1891).
2 Scrutator was the title of two different weekly papers in England (published in 1764 and from 1820 to 1821, respectively); but AB was probably making a veiled allusion to the Spectator, the well-known British weekly magazine of political, social, and literary comment. Several of his own early volumes were reviewed in the Spectator.
3 Cf. AB’s account of his exploration of a “haunted house” in the 1890s: “Once inside, I closed the front door behind me and took out my matchbox. For this was before the days of electric torches, I must mention. And as I opened the box, there was a sound of someone coughing beside me. There, standing in the darkness of the entrance hall, someone coughed. It was a man’s cough, I swear.” “The Midnight Hour,” Queen (November 24, 1948): 37.
4 AB’s fascination with time, although exhibited in so early a tale as “Wayfarers” (in Incredible Adventures, 1914), was augmented by his acquaintance with J. W. Dunne, who propounded his theories of serial time in An Experiment in Time (1927); Dunne had read parts of this book to AB prior to publication. A character in the late story “The Man Who Lived Backwards” states: “I can go backwards or forwards [in time] . . . by changing my type of consciousness. It’s open. It’s here, it’s now, both accessible, as between the covers of a book—if only I escape from being fixed on a point so stupidly.” Shocks (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1936), p. 249.
5 AB had been taught hypnosis by one of the doctors at the medical school at Edinburgh University during 1888 and 1889. “I recalled Dr. H——who used hypnotism in his practice, taught me various methods of using it, and often admitted me to private experiments in his study” (EBT 59).
THE WENDIGO
This story was first published in LV; no prior periodical publication has been located. It was based on two separate voyages to Canada. The first occurred from June to September 1892, when AB and two others hunted for gold in the Rainy River district of Ontario, as discussed in EBT (266-86); this trip was the probable inspiration for the early tale “A Haunted Island” (in EH). The second and more pertinent voyage was a moose-hunting expedition in October 1898, when AB was in the employ of James Speyer; this trip was recounted in the article “ ’Mid the Haunts of the Moose,” Blackwood’s Magazine 168 ( July 1900): 58-72 (abbreviated in the notes as “Moose”). See also the article “Summering in Canadian Backwoods,” Longman’s Magazine 37 (January 1901): 215-24. This latter trip also inspired the story “Skeleton Lake: An Episode in Camp” (in EH).
The Wendigo or Windigo is a mythical creature imagined by the Algonquian tribes inhabiting central Canada and the Midwest. It was envisioned in a variety of forms, sometimes as a cannibalistic Indian who breathed flames, sometimes as a spirit with a heart of ice who flew through the air. The conception was apparently inspired by native fears of starvation and exposure in the wilderness. See John Robert Colombo, ed., Windigo: An Anthology of Fact and Fantastic Fiction (Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1982). AB had initially come upon a mention of the Wendigo in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem The Song of Hiawatha (1855), then heard accounts of the Wendigo from a friend who had just traveled to Labrador. AB may also have been influenced by the work of his friend John Dyneley Prince, a professor of Semitic languages at New York University and Columbia University whom AB had known during his years in New York in the 1890s. Prince did much research on Native American languages and mythology; in collaboration with Charles God frey Leland, he published Kulóskap the Master and Other Algonkin Poems (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1902), containing several poems dealing indirectly with the Wendigo myth. AB took note of Prince’s work in “Algon quin Songs and Legends,” Country Life no. 826 (November 2, 1912): 609-11; no. 829 (November 23, 1912): 704-5.
1 Nimrod was a legendary figure reputed to be a great hunter and the founder of the Babylonian monarchy in the third millennium B.C.E., hence prototypical of anyone with great prowess for hunting.
2 The name Défago was a common one in the area around Neuchâtel, Switzerland, where AB resided when he wrote this story; he was in fact acquainted with a family of that name. The character of Défago appears to be based upon a taciturn and vaguely suspicious half-breed, Gallup, whom AB and his compatriots picked up in the course of their gold-hunting expedition of 1892 (see EBT 275). AB had two guides for his moose-hunting trip of 1898; like Défago, these guides were expert woodsmen, but they were not French Canadian. Indeed, AB remarks that “They profess contempt for the French-Canadian guides as well as for the Indians. The former are lazy and too often dishonest. Moreover, they have indifferent lasting powers” (see “Moose,” p. 70).
3 “We cursed Gallup behind his back and to his face. He never even answered. His sulky silence broke only round the evening fire, when he would tell us appalling tales of murder, violence and sudden death about the goldfields whither we were bound” (EBT 277).
4 “The stillness [of the night] was almost unearthly when the moon rose over the lake, silvering untold distances, and throwing impenetrable shadows
under the trees. I sat over the little fire at the mouth of my tent long after the others were asleep. It seemed unnatural that the whole country should be so silent when the woods were full of life—moving life too” (“Moose,” p. 61).
5 AB’s moose-hunting trip of 1898 began at Deux Rivières, on the Ottawa River, at the border between Ontario and Quebec. AB then proceed north to Lake Cogawanna (Lac Caugnawana) in Quebec, then moved farther north to Garden Lake (Lac Des Jardins). “Ten miles to the north of us Garden Lake stretched its lonely bays and arms over an immense surface, dotted with wooded islands” (“Moose,” p. 64).
6 “Portage” refers to the carrying of boats from one navigable body of water to another. “The lake had to be crossed and a mile ‘portaged’; then a second lake came, and after it a second portage” (“Moose,” p. 68).
7 “Once the man [one of AB’s guides] stopped suddenly and sniffed the air like a dog. He made a sign to me, and I helped the canoe off his shoulders. . . . ‘It’s a young cow. Guess she ain’t been away long either! ’ ” (“Moose,” p. 65). AB’s friends have testified that AB himself sniffed the air during his outdoor excursions, seeking evidence of animals, plants, and weather conditions.
8 Cf. AB’s wonderment at the total absence of human beings in the Canadian woods: “. . . the real charm of it all lay in the utter loneliness and remoteness from the scenes of men’s labours. Wild-duck of all descriptions we saw; cranes, huge fish-hawks, divers, laughing loons, eagles, tracks of otter, mink, bear, deer, and occasionally of wolves along the shores—and moose-tracks, where the great beasts had blundered through the dense scrub to find a drinking-place. But no men, not even Indians; no farms, no shanties. We had the great woods to ourselves” (“Moose,” p. 59).
Ancient Sorceries And Other Weird Stories Page 47