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. Click the link below to sign up to read the full article as a paid TLS subscriber.
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.
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