A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (23 page)

Algernon Blackwood was born in Shooter's Hill, Kent, on 4 March 1869, the son of a clerk in the Treasury who later became Secretary of the Post Office. Blackwood grew up in a strict Evangelical household - his parents were converts to a Calvinist sect - but he rebelled early on, absorbing Patanjali's Yoga Aphorisms, the Bhagavad Gita and books on theosophy; he would later become a member of the society. Blackwood attended several private schools, and spent a year (18851886) at the School of the Moravian Brotherhood in Konigsfeld, Germany. Here he was impressed by the military discipline, but also by a spirit of "gentleness and merciful justice." The next summer was spent in Switzerland, before being sent to Canada on business by his father. In 1888 Blackwood went to Edinburgh University but left the next year. In 1890, at the age of 21, he returned to Canada to seek his fortune.

These early travels set a pattern in Blackwood's life; for the rest of his days he remained a wanderer, eventually pruning his possessions down to a trunk, a change of clothes, his pyjamas and a typewriter. In Canada he failed as a dairy farmer and hotelier, and decided to cross the border into America. In New York Blackwood worked as a journalist with the Evening Sun. Innocent and trusting, Blackwood's roommate stole most of his savings, but Blackwood eventually tracked him down and had him arrested. Blackwood's days in New York were grim, and he tells the story in his autobiography Episodes Before Thirty (1923). Living in dire poverty, barely relieved by getting a post with the New York Times in 1895, it was only after becoming the private secretary to a banker in 1897 that Blackwood's circumstances improved.

In 1899 Blackwood returned to England, and got involved with other business schemes, one involving a powdered milk company. But business was not for him. He travelled to France, then to Germany. He went down the Danube, the setting for perhaps his most well known story, "The Willows," and climbed in the Alps. It was around this time that he became interested in magic and when he returned to London he joined the Golden Dawn. A meeting with a friend led to Blackwood submitting a collection of his stories to the publisher Eveleigh Nash. The Empty House appeared in 1906, followed by The Listener and Other Stories the next year. Then in 1908 Blackwood published John Silence - Physician Extraordinary. His fortune was made. The book was an instant success, combining two of popular fiction's current crazes, the occult and the investigative detective. John Silence was not, of course, the first or last of his kind. After Blackwood refused to follow up the initial collection, his publisher turned to the novelist William Hope Hodgson (The House on the Borderland (1908)), who promptly created Carnacki, the Ghost Finder. Other occultists created their own mystical gumshoes, like Sax Rohmer's Morris Klaw, an Eastern European London emigre, who knows the Kabbalah and dreams the solutions to crimes. Rohmer too was apparently briefly a member of the Golden Dawn.

Blackwood, however, didn't need a Sherlock Holmes to perpetuate his success. Nash had launched the book with a massive advertising campaign, with some of the biggest posters yet seen on hoardings and buses, and Blackwood had made enough from the sales to concentrate full time on writing and developing his ideas. Several more collections appeared, as well as cosmic novels like The Human Chord (1910) and The Centaur (1911) - the latter based on Blackwood's travels in the Caucasus and perhaps the central expression of his mystical beliefs. A Prisoner of Fairyland (1913) was later transformed through the help of Sir Edgar Elgar into the musical The Starlight Express, whose title Andrew Lloyd Webber took for his own long-running musical. Later, in the 1920s, Blackwood turned his hand successfully to children's books. He was, by any account, a prolific writer as well as a man who, in Henry Miller's phrase, lived life "to the hilt". In fact Blackwood turns up in Miller's The Books in My Life (1952), where he calls Blackwood's novel The Bright Messenger (1921) "the most extraordinary novel on psychoanalysis ..." Miller too was a vagabond who came to writing late, and in several of his books displays a fascination with mysticism and the occult.

In the midst of all this travel and productivity - as well as a stint as a secret agent during WWI - Blackwood found time to devote himself to the mysteries. In 1900 he was introduced to the Hermetic Order of the Golden dawn through Yeats. When he joined members included Florence Farr, Maud Gonne, Constance Wilde, A.E. Waite, and Arthur Machen. The infamous Aleister Crowley and the order's dethroned despotic leader, MacGregor Mathers, had recently left: Mathers to set up a rival group in Paris, Crowley on a trip to Mexico. Blackwood spent the next two years studying Kabbalah, the Hebrew alphabet, alchemy and astrology. But magic per se was not Blackwood's forte, and after achieving the rank of Philosophus, he decided to stop. The Order itself suffered several blows, one of which, `the Horos scandal' - in which Mathers had been duped by a husband and wife team of sexual predators who used the society to gather prey - led to its reformation. A.E. Waite10 reformed the society again in 1903, and both Blackwood and Machen followed. But both soon lost interest and the society eventually faded. Later, both Machen and Blackwood would speak critically of their occult dabbling, but both would draw on it extensively as source material for their writing.

It would be wrong, however, to think of Blackwood as an occultist proper; he is much more of a mystic, and his best writing conveys a sense of the `unknown modes of being' that Wordsworth and his fellow Romantics saw in nature. Blackwood's real theme is the expansion of consciousness, and his eager mind followed up any possibility of achieving this. Like Wells, he was a friend ofJ.W. Dunne, and Dunne had read him extracts of his book An Experiment With Time before its publication. (A respected engineer, Dunne held off publishing for fear of being thought a crank.) Through recording his dreams, Dunne became aware that he often dreamt of future events. Dunne later developed his notion of `the serial universe', in which an infinite series of `me's' exist in parallel times. Blackwood met Dunne in 1925 and the friendship produced several stories dealing with kinks in time, but along with Dunne, and aside from Blackwood's own speculations, a central influence on his `space and time' tales is P.D. Ouspensky.

Through the courtesy of Lady Rothermere - estranged wife of Lord Rothermere, the newspaper baron, and devoted reader of Ouspensky's bestselling book of metaphysics, Tertium Organum" - Ouspensky escaped the refugee life of White Russian Constantinople, and in 1921 arrived in London, the "intellectual flavour of the month." Along with the other literary stars attending Ouspensky's lectures at Lady Rothermere's St. Johns Wood salon was Blackwood. But although Blackwood thought highly of Tertium Organum, he was less impressed with Ouspensky himself, finding his lectures dull. When Blackwood remarked on this, Ouspensky suggested he go to France and work directly with Gurdjieff, the source of the ideas, then setting up his `Prieure' in Fontainebleau. Blackwood did, and for the next two years Blackwood made frequent visits to Gurdjiefl's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. He was not the only literary guest: others included Sinclair Lewis, A.R. Orage - who, after Ouspensky, became Gurdjieff's right-hand man - and, famously, Katharine Mansfield, who died there in 1922. Blackwood eventually had his fill of Gurdjieff as well, and on his last visit found a reading of Gurdjieff's enormous Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson (1950) an exercise in "sheer megalomania," suggesting "paranoia."

Gurdjieff's and Ouspensky's ideas, however, came into his work, most notably in a late collection of stories, Shocks (1935). In the Gurdjieff "work," `shocks' is a technical term, describing certain influences that help in `waking up'. 'Waking up' is the central aim of Gurdjieff's teaching, and the idea that we are not truly awake surfaces in many of Blackwood's tales. In "The Pikestaffe Case" (Tongues of Fire (1924)), a teacher of higher mathematics and his student travel into the fourth dimension, encountering difficulties on the way. "I woke at 4 o'clock" one writes to the other. "About ten minutes later, as you said might happen, I woke a second time. The change into the second state was as great as the change from sleeping to waking ... But I could not remain `awake' ..." In "Elsewhere and Otherwise" - Blackwood's longest excursion into higher space - he speaks of horror as a "negative emo tion," another direct term from Gurdjieff. Mantravers, the central character, has spent a moment in the fourth dimension, amounting to four years in linear time. When he suddenly returns, he feels the restrictions of mundane life. "The cage is about me, the stupid, futile cage," he cries. "It's time that does it, it's your childish linear time, time in a single line. In such a limited state it's not even being awake, just trivial dreaming, almost death ..." Mantravers' colleague in the higher realms is a certain Dr. Vronski, known for his experiments with "glands, hypnotism, yoga," all ofwhich Ouspensky wrote about. And later, when the narrator finds himself in a German prisoner of war camp, he meets a Russian professor who speaks to him about the different dimensions of time ... In the title story, "Shocks," a young poet receives a mysterious legacy of five thousand pounds a year. ". . . shocks," he remarks "drive one explosively out of an accustomed rut. I'd willingly give my last ten years of living in a rut - crystallized - for the blessed shocks of this single, brief little hour." Along with `shocks', `crystallized' is another Gurdjieff term, denoting a consciousness almost irredeemably sunk in `sleep', although Gurdjiefl's own shocks generally came in a less desirable form.

Lord Dunsany

In 1905 a strange little volume appeared on the London bookstalls. Published by Elkin Mathews at the author's expense, its title was The Gods of Pegana, and in its pages, elegantly illustrated by the artist Sidney H. Sime, readers were introduced to a hitherto completely unknown pantheon. Mana-Yood-Sushai, Mung, Sish, Skarl, Roon, Slid and other weird, unfamiliar names rose out of the orotund, biblical sentences. Flush with archaic, lapidary prose their rolling, rhythmic flow had a curiously dreamlike effect. Halfforgotten memories of ancient lands and lost worlds, of mystical gods and timeless goddesses, drifted through the sonorous, perfumed language, the effect being something like that of a dose of opium. Yet there was also something else, a sense of melancholy, a world weariness, pessimism even. These tales were of gods who were no more. Voluptuous, regal, these jewelled prose poems spoke of the passing of beings whose beauty and magnificence were more than superhuman, and yet they too came at last to an end.

The moral, if there was one, seemed to be that in this land of shadows, even the immortals must decline. Life, existence, the entire universe was merely an entertaining pastime, a game set to occupy the idle minds of bored, indifferent deities, who occasionally put away the pieces until sheer ennui brought them out again. Schopenhauer had said it before, as did Wagner. It was a theme well suited to the sophisticated decadence of the late fin de siecle, and here it was in a beautiful, slim package.

The author of these tales, however, was no mystical dreamer or drug addicted occultist labouring away in a freezing garret. Born in 1878 at his family estate in County Meath, Ireland, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett - better known as Lord Dunsany - was the 18th Baron Dunsany, the proud inheritor of one of the most ancient baronial titles in the British Isles. He was also a Conservative candidate in his constituency, the owner of 1,400 acres, a big game hunter, sportsman, traveller and veteran of the Boer War. Educated at Eton and Sandhurst, Dunsany in many ways had the kind of aristocratic life that Villiers de l'Isle-Adam had only dreamt of, and it is perhaps because of this that his writing, popular in his lifetime, is now, aside from weird fantasy enthusiasts, mostly forgotten. After publishing The Gods of Pegana Dunsany put aside any thoughts about politics - he was, after all, only drawn to it because he thought he had to do something - and became a full time writer. Yet, although he published stories, poems, plays, novels, essays and autobiographies well into the 1950s - at one time five of Dunsany's plays were on Broadway simultaneously - writing for Dunsany seemed always an amateur activity. He had an intellect, he said, but he didn't care to use it, except when playing chess. He may have been telling the truth: Dunsany once won the chess championship of Ireland, and in 1929 even managed to hold the World Champion, Capablanca, to a draw. Yet this seems to emphasize the point: his mind was only good for playing games, not for anything serious. In fact, one wonders if Dunsany ever took anything seriously. With everything handed to him, he may have had no reason to. As his friend Yeats declared, "Fifty pounds a year and a drunken mistress" would have done him well.

The picture book nihilism that infuses his stories and plays12 may at the time have seemed deeply profound. It doesn't today, and for all Dunsany's activity, suggests a kind of laziness. Dunsany never really considered himself a literary man, even after producing more than sixty titles, and was more at home as a soldier and a hunter. But he had, as the critic E.F. Bleiler remarked, a dubious talent for turning almost anything into a saleable story: Dunsany once claimed that he could write a story about the mud of the Thames, and did. But this knack for `dashing things off' - he wrote quickly with little revision - useful for the journalist, is deadly for the serious writer. Dunsany's exotic fatalism, reminiscent of Omar Khayyam, is not, as the scholar S.T. Joshi would have it, "Nietzsche in a fairy tale," or if it is, it is a severely truncated Nietzsche, lacking the Ubermensch and Nietzsche's belief in the need to transcend nihilism. Dunsany, who never cared to use his intellect, clearly lacked any beliefs other than in the value of sport and fine living. As his biographer wrote of his work, it shows "a complete lack of interest in any connection with the real world . . ." Dunsany "had a remarkable lack of curiosity about people" and "saw the world almost entirely in terms of himself and his reactions ... He had no interest in injecting a message or indeed any thought ...s13 Dunsany once defined genius as "an infinite capacity for not taking pains. i14 Clearly, by his own account, he possessed it.