Invisible ink no 267: Algernon Blackwood

In the league table of obscure British writers, Algernon Blackwood ranks highly. His tales were collected in the kind of tattered books that lay around British houses 60 years ago. One of the greatest writers of supernatural fiction in the 20th century, he produced 13 collections of around 200 spiritual and often mystical tales (his novels and children’s books proved less impervious to passing time).

Blackwood based his stories on personal experiences and beliefs, creating plots that twisted the ordinary and familiar into something mysterious and confounding. Haunted mansions, the souls of the dead, the spirits of nature, and a fascination with time and space recur. Many tales take place in natural, sensual settings, from frontier Canada and the Black Forest to the marshes of the Danube.

His life spanned two centuries, from 1869 to 1951, and his works inspired Elgar, Henry Miller, and H P Lovecraft. He counted H G Wells, Hilaire Belloc, and W B Yeats among his friends, and appeared on the very first British television programme.

Blackwood came from a now-vanished world; his mother was the Duchess of Manchester, his evangelist father was a knight, but Algernon forsook his privileged heritage to become an adventurer and traveller, and remained a natural storyteller to the end of his life. He was eventually awarded a CBE in 1949, and still we knew virtually nothing of him, probably because he hailed from a period when the concept of the peculiar Briton was no novelty.

As a sensitive, dreamy youth, he studied the Bhagavad Gita and theosophy, learning spiritual exercises that divorced him from worldly problems. His inner calm was tested in Canada, where his dairy farm failed, and in New York, where he was penniless and ill. Conned out of his cash and framed for arson, he finally became a reporter for The New York Times in 1895. His interest in the paranormal led him to join the magical Order of the Golden Dawn. He became an undercover agent for British military intelligence during the First World War.

Blackwood’s first collection, The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories, found favour with readers, and his popularity soared. He was nicknamed the Ghost Man and never made much money from his stories, but they paid enough to free his life. There really was no one quite like him. Many of his still very readable tales are classics of the genre, and have entered the collective memory.