A Literary Analysis of Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Willows’
Note: this article was published on 14 March 2024, on my Substack newslettter, the Traveller’s Literary Supplicant.
Algernon Blackwood’s Spooky Fiction: Travel & Philosophical Aspects
By Christopher Deliso
Today’s a great day to enjoy a story by Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951), a master of ‘weird’ fiction, and a mystic who educates more than he frightens. I’m providing a YouTube link to a great reading below, and if you find my thoughts on the story itself of interest, please do read the sections before it. I thought it timely and important enough to take time away from my novel-revising to bring this to you today, so I hope you enjoy it.
Today, 14 March, is Blackwood’s 155th birthday, and he’s long overdue for a comeback. (Fortunately, there seems to be much interest in him among modern readers). Although Blackwood’s oeuvre is vast, popular understanding of him has been strangely shaped by an anachronism—a situation perhaps suiting some of his stories.
Algernon Blackwood was a journalist, broadcaster and writer—so prolific that even he reputedly didn’t know how many stories he’d written. Early readings of Buddhism influenced his outlook, and he would join esoteric societies and the local ‘ghost club.’ Above all, he was a great traveler and outdoorsman, a skier and canoer with a love of nature and exploration, and a curiosity about local cultures.
The Influence of H.P. Lovecraft on Future Perceptions of Blackwood
One younger contemporaneous critic who appreciated Blackwood—naming him one of the ‘modern masters’ of the genre—was H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). Still, Lovecraft wasn’t a famous writer in his own time, though today he enjoys cult-status, having been critically rediscovered since the 1970s. However, his fundamentally pessimistic worldview, influenced by his own life’s circumstances, differed from Blackwood’s apparently positive views, which characterized both his writing and life.
Lovecraft’s oft-quoted praise came in his 1927 essay, ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature.’ This genre-survey on ‘weird literature’ is diverse but encyclopedic, and of historic significance, as its discussion of developments from the origins of Gothic horror through the 1920s was nearly unprecedented in Lovecraft’s own time, and has had influence more recently. Among much else, Lovecraft wrote that:
“…Of the quality of Mr. Blackwood’s genius there can be no dispute; for no one has even approached the skill, seriousness, and minute fidelity with which he records the overtones of strangeness in ordinary things and experiences, or the preternatural insight with which he builds up detail by detail the complete sensations and perceptions leading from reality into supernormal life or vision.”
Here Lovecraft hits upon a key element of Blackwood’s storytelling, which is to find the extraordinary within the ordinary, to extricate the unexpected from that which is expected, and to depict the two thinly-veiled worlds nearly merge, so that questions of epistemological uncertainty become the foremost expressions of what the characters suffer.
Today, despite his vast oeuvre, Blackwood is remembered first for the few works specified by Lovecraft in his 1927 survey. This bizarre wrinkle in the space-time continuum seems to have derived from Lovecraft’s latter-day fame among fans of horror and fantasy into the Internet era.
Of course, H.P. Lovecraft knew more about the horror genre than I ever will. That’s partly why I find what he didn’t observe in Algernon Blackwood so intriguing. I can only conclude that his omissions owed to the specific nature of his survey, and speculate about the rest.
Travel Writing and Blackwood’s Aesthetic in ‘The Willows’
Blackwood’s ability to conjure up a sense-of-place that matches his philosophical goals is evident in his famous story, ‘The Willows’ (1907). Without giving away plot spoilers, it’s about two old friends, an Englishman and a Swede, seasoned outdoorsmen seeking to canoe their way down the River Danube to the Black Sea. However, they are warned by locals not to travel further, midway through, for their own safety. The story retells the human characters’ experience with natural ones (the river, wind, sun and the willow trees overgrown on sandy islets), that seem to acquire supernatural powers. Lovecraft praised ‘The Willows’ thus:
“…Here art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a single strained passage or a single false note.”
Since Lovecraft lists ‘The Willows’ first in his section on Blackwood, it’s unsurprising the story is listed highly in online coverage. There have also been many audio-productions of it. Indeed, it is a very good story, though not having read most of Blackwood’s voluminous works, I cannot judge it relative to the totality. What I will say is that the restrictiveness of Lovecraft’s genre-based survey means he ignored just how great ‘The Willows’ is as a piece of travel writing, even being fictional.
I’ll illustrate my point with a brief excerpt from an early bit of ‘The Willows.’ It indicates both Blackwood’s capacity to make the river a living, knowing character, and to further develop the travel-aspect of the specific countryside where his canoers find themselves, at the invisible border between known and unknown worlds; in mundane terms, this is also the invisible border between the rational, well-ordered world of the Hapsburgs and generally, the West, and the wilder, primordial and imagined one of the Balkans.. It does us well to remember the opinions that early-20th-century readers would’ve had of the dichotomy of this localization, for there is a whole reservoir of connotations and implications for the setting, though now largely lost on us moderns. At this point in the story, they are midway between the Black-Forest headwaters and the Black Sea, where the Danube’s purpose is fulfilled. Blackwood writes of the great river thus:
“…Happy to slip beyond the control of the stern banks, the Danube here wanders about at will among the intricate network of channels intersecting the islands everywhere with broad avenues down which the waters pour with a shouting sound; making whirlpools, eddies, and foaming rapids; tearing at the sandy banks; carrying away masses of shore and willow-clumps; and forming new islands innumerably which shift daily in size and shape and possess at best an impermanent life, since the flood-time obliterates their very existence.
Properly speaking, this fascinating part of the river’s life begins soon after leaving Pressburg, and we, in our Canadian canoe, with gipsy tent and frying-pan on board, reached it on the crest of a rising flood about mid-July. That very same morning, when the sky was reddening before sunrise, we had slipped swiftly through still-sleeping Vienna, leaving it a couple of hours later a mere patch of smoke against the blue hills of the Wienerwald on the horizon; we had breakfasted below Fischeramend under a grove of birch trees roaring in the wind; and had then swept on the tearing current past Orth, Hainburg, Petronell (the old Roman Carnuntum of Marcus Aurelius), and so under the frowning heights of Thelsen on a spur of the Carpathians, where the March steals in quietly from the left and the frontier is crossed between Austria and Hungary.”
Repeated re-reading, or even better, listening, enhances the appreciation of this and other of Blackwood’s stories, because the cadences and tonalities of the language also bolster the meaning. This is a point that Lovecraft seems to have missed. It’s not just the specific words Blackwood has chosen, and their inferences, but the spaces between syllables, the alliterations and repetitions, and the ‘erosions’ of words into other words (most obviously, fragmented use of the actual title throughout) that are all done purposefully, to convey a greater meaning than could be pedantically expressed.
This is incredibly difficult to do for any writer, and scarcely ever attempted. The ‘facts’ of the narrative, wedded with its musicality of expression, and the character-dialogue iterations of philosophical concepts, allow an implicit meaning—one in which the ostensible supernatural tale about a river becomes allegorical for our epistemological condition, and in which the specific language itself mimics the river’s expression.
Ultimately, rather than a ‘horror’ story, ‘The Willows’ uses the characters’ ostensible fear of nature as metaphor for fear of omniscience, of the very possibility of universality of mind. Serious philosophical questions underpin the story, though they are well-disguised—overgrown, one might say—the more obvious ekphrastic elements that constitute the body of the text. But that’s just my interpretation. After all, this is the kind of story where every reader will find something unique.
Listen to ‘The Willows’
Among the many readings and adaptations online, this one on the HorrorBabble channel is well-narrated by Ian Gordon. It’s almost two hours long, and I recommend listening to it all in one go. This is again because Blackwood’s use of language is specifically experiential; it brings with it the rush, hesitations and eddying of a great river, and the growing interference of interwoven trees on a sandy eroding bank.