by S. T. Joshi
Of the five long stories in this book, two stand among Blackwood’s great triumphs. In “Ancient Sorceries,” all the inhabitants of a small town in France appear to turn themselves into cat-creatures who manifest their feline selves at night. Blackwood mars the story by tacking on a ponderous pseudo-scientific lecture by John Silence that purports to account for this phenomenon, but the atmosphere of terror is nonetheless unexcelled. “Secret Worship” is a grim tale of the ghosts of a sect of religious fanatics in Germany plague a visitor. This story too is profoundly autobiographical, as it reflects Blackwood’s unhappiness during his a year-long stay (1885–86) at the School of the Moravian Brotherhood in Königsfeld, Germany.
The success of John Silence allowed Blackwood to spend the next several years in Switzerland and to produce some of his most memorable works: the collections The Lost Valley and Other Stories (1910), Pan’s Garden: A Volume of Nature Stories (1912), and Incredible Adventures (1914); the weird novels The Human Chord (1910) and The Centaur (1911), and the children’s fantasies Jimbo (1909), The Education of Uncle Paul (1909), and A Prisoner in Fairyland (1913). These books constitute, for the most part, the basis of Blackwood’s reputation as a writer of weird fiction; the work he produced in the subsequent three decades of his career is markedly inferior, although some noteworthy items can be cited.
The Centaur can be seen as Blackwood’s true autobiography. This is the tale of Terence O’Malley, who aboard ship encounters a strange Russian man and his apparent son, and is invited to follow them to remote areas in the Caucasus Mountains, where he undergoes a mystical experience that makes him aware of the “cosmic life.” He returns to civilisation and seeks to convert the world to his point of view, but of course fails and dies. This bald account can hardly convey the poetry and throbbing vitality of this work, the cornerstone of Blackwood’s output.
Who is this strange being whom O’Malley meets? He is a “Cosmic Being . . . a little bit, a fragment, of the Soul of the World, and in that sense a survival—a survival of her youth.”[41] In the modern age there is no room for such a being, and O’Malley’s quest at regenerating his contemporaries was doomed to failure. But it is the transformation of O’Malley himself that is of greatest significance. At the outset he has nothing but scorn for his contemporaries: “‘And I loathe, loathe the spirit of to-day with its cheap-jack inventions, and smother of sham universal culture, its murderous superfluities and sordid vulgarity, without enough real sense of beauty left to see that a daisy is nearer heaven than an airship.’”[42] Without ever renouncing these views, O’Malley comes back from his voyage with a completely new desire to help the world he despises: “‘If only I can get this back to them!’ passed through him, like a flame. ‘I’ll save the world by bringing it again to simple things! I’ve only got to tell it and all will understand at once—and follow!’”[43] Naive and quixotic as this is—and as Blackwood intends it to be—there is a nobility in it that testifies to the expansion, in every sense, of O’Malley’s consciousness.
The culmination of O’Malley’s mystical experience in the Caucasus is the sighting of a herd of centaurs. The symbolism of the centaur is explained more clearly in “Imagination” (in Ten Minute Stories), a story that Blackwood wrote while experiencing difficulty completing The Centaur. Here a man who wishes to write about “some power of unexpended mythological values strayed back into modern life” chooses the centaur as his symbol: “His Centaur was to stand for instinct (the animal body close to Nature) combined with, yet not dominated by, the upright stature moving towards deity.”[44] It is this combination of reason and instinct that Blackwood sees as the optimum state of consciousness for human beings.
“The Wendigo” (in The Lost Valley) is Blackwood’s prototypical story of the terror that can be found in Nature. Here a band of hunters in the Canadian backwoods encounters traces of some dim cosmic entity called the Wendigo—a creature of ill-defined properties, existing in Native American folklore, that for Blackwood symbolises the essence of Nature as contrasted with civilisation. Once again, the gradualness with which the various characters perceive the existence of this entity is a masterwork of subtlety and restraint; it is first detected by smell (“an odour of something that seemed unfamiliar—utterly unknown”[45]). Later, a character is swept into the air, and his dismal cry—“Oh! oh! My feet of fire! My burning feet of fire!”[46]—is heard by the others as they search for him.
Incredible Adventures may be Blackwood’s greatest collection; I will discuss the five long stories in the volume elsewhere.[47] Among other things, it shows how Blackwood was particularly felicitous in expressing weirdness through the expansive form of the novella (notably “The Damned” and “A Descent into Egypt”)—a tendency he exhibited elsewhere. “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” (in Pan’s Garden) is set in the New Forest in southern England, where the soul of a man, David Bittacy, is slowly “amalgamated”[48] into the trees bordering his property—a psychic fusion that Bittacy has longed for. His wife testifies to the transformation: “And in the distance she heard the roaring of the Forest further out. Her husband’s voice was in it.”[49]
The Human Chord is a compelling novel that probes the mystical qualities of sound and music. Here, the Faustian Philip Skale gathers three other individuals in an attempt to set up a “human chord” that would potentially reorganise all matter; but the protagonist Spinrobin’s love for Miriam foils the plan. Just as the four are about to take their places and give utterance to the chord, Miriam flees and urges Spinrobin to do the same. His preference for the realities of the known world over the mysteries of a new cosmic dispensation is powerfully expressed: “when he stopped her outburst with a kiss, fully understanding the profound truth she so quaintly expressed, he smelt the trees and mountains in her hair, and her fragrance was mingled there with the fragrance of that old earth on which they stood.”[50]
Of the juvenile fantasies, Jimbo is slight but powerful. Here a small boy, Jimbo, has an accident and suffers a head injury, during which we are told that he is “wandering in the regions of unconsciousness and delirium”;[51] yet Jimbo’s dream—taking place in an abandoned house made terrifying to him by an irresponsible governess and involving his and the governess’s attempt to escape the evil guardian of the house—has a sort of never-defined quasi-reality: at one point the governess in the dream tells Jimbo his temperature, 102°.[52] There is certainly charm in this novel, but it is ultimately insubstantial: Jimbo’s eventual escape from the dream house no doubt symbolises both his awaking from unconsciousness and his freedom from irrational fear, but not much more can be got out of it.
It is entirely otherwise with The Education of Uncle Paul (1909), one of the most remarkable and heart-rending fantasies ever written. Uncle Paul—a man who has spent the bulk of his years in the wilds of Canada but who returns to tend to his sister and her children in England after her husband’s death—is a prototype of Blackwood’s mute, inglorious Miltons: “‘If only’—and the strange light came back for a second to his brown eyes—‘I could write, or sing, or pray—live as the saints did, or do something to—to express adequately the sense of beauty and wonder and delight that lives, like the presence of a God, in my soul!’”[53]
At the core of this novel is Nixie, the eldest of the children; not only does her name suggest fairies, but Uncle Paul sees her as the embodiment of natural forces:
The eldest and most formidable of his tormentors, standing a little in advance of the rest, was Margaret Christina, shortened by her father (who, indeed, had been responsible for all the nicknames) into Nixie. And the name fitted her like a skin, for she was the true figure of a sprite, and looked as if she had just stepped out of the water and her hair had stolen the yellow of the sand. Her eyes ran about the room like sunshine from the surface of a stream, and her movements instantly made Paul think of water gliding over pebbles or ribbed sand with easy and gentle undulations. Flashlike he saw her in a clearing of his lonely woods, a creature of the elements.[54]
It is she who leads her uncle to the perception of the world through the eyes of children. At the very outset it is announced that children are “closer to Reality, to God”[55]—and to nature (really all the same thing to Blackwood). Because this is so, children can quite literally see things adults cannot; and in one magical passage the children and Uncle Paul sink softly under the earth and actually see the winds as they unfurl themselves from a strange subterranean forest. Blackwood was, however, unable to duplicate this aesthetic triumph in subsequent children’s fantasies; and such novels as A Prisoner in Fairyland, The Extra Day (1915), and The Fruit Stoners (1934) are all marred by sentimentality and a lack of distinctive imaginative touches.
Blackwood’s later work is, indeed, a succession of misfires. The novel Julius LeVallon (1916), like The Wave, is concerned with the re-enaction of a mystical ceremony by three individuals—LeVallon, his wife, and the narrator—who, in a prior life in the remote past, were interrupted in the completion of the rite. At the end the mystical ceremony somehow goes awry, and we are led to believe that some strange nature-being has entered, not LeVallon, as was the intention, but his unborn son in his wife’s womb. This leads to The Bright Messenger (1921), the story of Julian LeVallon, a strange being raised in isolation in the Jura Mountains and brought to London by Fillery. His name, of course, is no accident; and we learn obliquely that he is the product of the mystical birth recorded at the end of Julius LeVaIlon. Will he be the means to revive the race? If not he, then no one, for we are awfully close to the edge: “[The planet] was exhausted, dying. Unless new help, powers from a new, an inexhaustible source came quickly.”[56] Blackwood trails off ominously. But when is this regeneration to occur? Fillery had already announced that his Utopia had “faded to the remotest distance,” and later he hammers home the same conclusion: “In a hundred thousand years perhaps! Perhaps in a million!”[57] Certainly not in 1921: the novel peters out, LeVallon not having done much save perturb a few society ladies with his unearthly presence. Of course, he unites at the end with a woman who thinks and feels as he does, but the promise of their joint rescue of the world is rather dim.
Later collections, such as Day and Night Stories (1917), The Wolves of God and Other Fey Stories (1921), Tongues of Fire and Other Sketches (1924), and Shocks (1935) largely feature reiterations of motifs Blackwood had expressed more effectively in earlier works. But even here there are some notable works. Elsewhere and Otherwise” (in Shocks) is one of Blackwood’s great later tales, and at the very outset we are given to see how Blackwood has put the horrors of World War I behind him. Although the tale is set at the commencement of the war—indeed, on the very day England declares war—the narrator remarks that “this world’s affairs, even a war with Germany, seemed somehow of less account than what we had afoot”[58]—that being, of course, how a man with a “changed consciousness . . . can function in different time.”[59] Specifically, Sydney Mantravers, at the age of sixty, looks only forty and seems to have spent those twenty years in some different state or realm. Mantravers then disappears for four years—exactly the period of the war—and then returns; but in his return he feels—like Uncle Paul—that he has left the “real” world and entered some dream world that is, moreover, ridiculously small and inhibiting.
But the relative failures of Blackwood’s later work must all be forgiven in light of the transcendent brilliance of his early tales—“The Willows,” “The Wendigo,” “The Damned,” “A Descent into Egypt,” and others—as well as the poignant novels The Education of Uncle Paul and The Centaur. It is this body of work that makes Blackwood perhaps the leading weird writer of his generation—one who chose to express his deepest philosophical convictions by means of fantasy, wonder, and terror. His understanding of the precise manner in which human beings react to the bizarre is a triumph of psychological analysis, and the originality of many of his conceptions—so different from the stereotypical vampires, ghosts, or haunted houses of conventional supernatural fiction—gives him an unassailable position in his field.
On “A Wine of Wizardry”
One of several major omissions from August Derleth’s otherwise impressive historical anthology of weird poetry, Dark of the Moon (1947), was the work of George Sterling. The omission was especially peculiar in light of the apparent fact that Derleth’s colleague Donald Wandrei—far more attuned to poetry in general and weird poetry in particular than Derleth—was a significant behind-the-scenes advisor to the book, and he was clearly familiar with and enthusiastic about Sterling’s poetry. Perhaps Derleth felt that Sterling’s most notable weird poems—The Testimony of the Suns (1903; 644 lines) and “A Wine of Wizardry” (1907; 207 lines)—were too lengthy to include (although he seems to have had no such concerns regarding H. P. Lovecraft’s sonnet cycle Fungi from Yuggoth, a cumulative total of 504 lines); but shorter weird poems by Sterling were readily available.
That Sterling was the mentor of the young Clark Ashton Smith was also a fact surely known to Derleth and Wandrei. Sterling in turn had been mentored by Ambrose Bierce (also omitted from Dark of the Moon, although there is a modicum of weird poetry amidst the mass of mostly satirical verse that he wrote over a lifetime); and one wonders whether, had he lived longer, Bierce might have come to sense that Smith ultimately outshone his master. But just as Smith gained celebrity by publishing a scintillating volume of poetry, The Star-Treader and Other Poems (1912), at the age of nineteen, so Sterling first came to the nation’s attention when Bierce shepherded “A Wine of Wizardry” into print (in Cosmopolitan, September 1907), prefaced—unusually—by a laudatory article, “A Poet and His Poem.”
It is not my purpose to trace the long and convoluted history of Bierce’s largely fruitless attempts to secure magazine publication of the poem from early 1904—when he first read it in manuscript—onward, nor to discuss the heated controversy the poem (and, perhaps more pertinently, Bierce’s article) engendered. In part, that controversy was deliberately fostered by the Hearst papers, while from another direction Bierce’s enemies—many of them stung by his own merciless dissection of their literary inadequacies—seized upon his flamboyant remarks to berate both Sterling as a flamboyant poetical novice and Bierce as an uncritical log-roller.
My chief query is much simpler: what, exactly, is the meaning of “A Wine of Wizardry”?
The matter is singularly difficult to ascertain. Sterling’s and Bierce’s remarks about the poem in their correspondence shed singularly little light on the issue. Sterling appears to have written the poem as early as late 1903 or very early 1904. In a letter of October 10, 1903, he cites the three lines from Bierce’s “Geotheos”— “When mountains were stained as with wine / By the dawning of time, and as wine / Were the seas”—that he used as the epigraph to “A Wine of Wizardry,” referring to them as having “indescribable beauty.”[60] Then, in his letter of January 2, 1904, Sterling quotes lines 173–76 and 196–97 of the finished poem, the latter constituting the celebrated couplet “The blue-eyed vampire, sated at her feast, / Smiles bloodily against the leprous moon.”[61] Late in January Sterling promised to mail Bierce his new poem. He must have done so toward the end of the month, for Bierce, in his letter to Sterling of February 5, 1904, wrote enthusiastically:
And the poem! I hardly know how to speak of it. No poem in English of equal length has so bewildering a wealth of imagination. Not Spenser himself has flung such a profusion of pearls into so small a casket. Why, man, it takes away the breath! I’ve read and reread—read it for the expression and read it for the thought (always when I speak of the “thought” in your work I mean the meaning—which is another thing) and I shall read it many times more.
In his reply (February 10, 1904), Sterling says next to nothing about the poem save to express gratitude at Bierce’s favourable opinion. In a letter April 22, 1904, Sterling states that “I think I’ll add a few more verses to my wine poem, and when I’ve done so would like to send you a new copy.” Sterling did just that, although i
t is unclear how extensive the additions were. Bierce does mention, in a letter of April 17, 1905, that “your two new and fine lines in ‘A Wine of Wizardry’ are well placed where you put them”; and Sterling notes in a letter of November 19, 1905, that he has added some twenty-five lines to the poem. As late as June 10, 1907, Sterling is speaking of “new lines” to the poem, so it is evident that he continued to tinker with the poem almost up to the time of its first magazine appearance. It was in his letter of June 19, 1907, that Sterling formally asked Bierce whether he could use the three lines from “Geotheos” as the epigraph to the poem. (These were omitted from the Cosmopolitan publication, because Bierce felt that their appearance would cast doubt upon the sincerity or objectivity of Bierce’s article about the poem.)
But Sterling himself says next to nothing about what his poem “means,” or what his purpose was in writing it. To some degree he felt it a pendant to The Testimony of the Suns, but perhaps only in the sense that it was a long poem with vivid imagery. In a letter of February 10, 1904, he says to Bierce: “I asked you if I would better try to write in a vein similar to ‘A Wine of Wizardry’, poetry purely ‘unhuman’ and imaginative, or in the line of the ‘Testimony’, semi-scientific verse. I’m anxiously awaiting your decision.” This is not terribly helpful, as it could be argued that Testimony could be considered the more “unhuman” of the two, since it is chiefly concerned with the cosmic conflicts of the stars (the second part of the poem attempts to draw parallels between these conflicts and human society, but the parallels are a trifle opaque), whereas the essence of “A Wine of Wizardry”—the wide and all but incalculable range of the imagination—seems more fundamentally human and far less overtly cosmic than Testimony.