Ghostland

by Edward Parnell

  Into this seemingly happy union comes, at the invitation of Bittacy, the artist Arthur Sanderson, a young man with a creative gift: ‘He painted trees as by some special divining instinct of their essential qualities. He understood them.’ According to Blackwood’s biographer Mike Ashley, Sanderson is loosely based on his dandyish friend and mentor, the painter, illustrator, theatre designer and art collector Walford Graham Robertson. Robertson’s large circle of celebrity acquaintances included Oscar Wilde, Henry James and Ellen Terry (whose portrait he painted). And he himself featured as the subject of a well-known canvas by John Singer Sargent, now in the collection of the Tate. In the portrait, Robertson’s thin boyish frame (he was twenty-eight when he posed for it) sports a full-length, fur-collared black coat, his left hand clasping an elegant jade-handled cane and his right resting on his waist; by his feet lies his oversize poodle Mouton. Robertson was to illustrate Pan’s Garden, and his striking frontispiece for ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’ has an appropriately decadent, almost Aubrey Beardsley-esque feel – though to my mind there’s also something of Marvel Comics’ Silver Surfer about the figure that dominates the foreground of the composition.

  The quiet retirement of David Bittacy changes with the arrival of Sanderson. The artist, thanks to his profound empathy with the forest, manages to unlock a latent fellow-feeling in his older friend, who for the first time realises that the trees he has always loved possess, in isolation, a cognisance approaching that of a person, and together a swarming collective consciousness capable of influencing their surroundings, including the very air itself. Indeed, the wind is another natural force imbued in the story with a strange power, a power that Sophia fears because of its ability to ‘blow something from the trees – into the mind – into the house’. Though this is the very reason David is so ecstatic when the breezes build: ‘They blow the souls of the trees about the sky like clouds.’

  The exotic introduced cedar on the lawn – standing apart from the massed, native woodland trees – acts as a guardian of David Bittacy’s human existence, keeping the encroaching forest from enveloping the old man.§ Damage to the tree by a storm, however, starts to strip this protection, and the rapturous connection that David has with the woods – walking for hours through them on his own, during both the day and the darkness – appears to be changing him, certainly in the eyes of his increasingly estranged wife. She fears he is becoming a shell of a person, presenting only a trace of the man he once was, while his true being is close to fusing with the forest. She tries to save him, but the forces are too powerful for her and the God of her oversized Baxter Bible. When the sinuous physical manifestations of the trees crowd around the bed of her sleeping husband she knows he is lost:

  She saw their outline underneath the ceiling, the green, spread bulk of them, their vague extension over walls and furniture. They shifted to and fro, massed yet translucent, mild yet thick, moving and tuning within themselves to a hushed noise of multitudinous soft rustling.

  At the end of the story, catching sight of the cedar of Lebanon now finally felled on the grass outside their bedroom window, Sophia gets confirmation of the thing she most dreads: ‘And in the distance she heard the roaring of the Forest further out. Her husband’s voice was in it.’

  ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’ is an atmosphere-laden story that offers a vision not unlike that of the early English Romantics – a feeling that the forces of nature and the universe are greater than man and possess a timeless, unknowable power. Blackwood was influenced by the nineteenth-century Theosophical writings of Franz Hartmann, particularly his Magic: White and Black, and the work and animistic outlook of the psychologist and philosopher Gustav Fechner. The 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica – the same year Blackwood’s New Forest-set story was written – had the following to say about Fechner, a sentiment equally applicable to Blackwood:

  He feels the thrill of life everywhere, in plants, earth, stars, the total universe. Man stands midway between the souls of plants and the souls of stars, who are angels. God, the soul of the universe, must be conceived as having an existence analogous to men.

  Photo (Algernon Blackwood) Hulton Deutsch/Contributor via Getty Images

  Algernon Blackwood achieved popular fame in his last few years through his appearances on Saturday night BBC television, where, working without a script, he delivered his ghost stories straight to camera. He had a splendid voice and looked the part: avuncular, with a wizened face etched with age and tanned by a life spent outdoors. From photographs, Blackwood bears a passing resemblance to my lock-keeper grandfather – as well as their sun-cooked features, both possessed impressively aquiline noses and an infectious impishness about their expressions.¶ Blackwood’s peak-time live broadcasts began at the end of 1947, when he was seventy-eight, and led to him being awarded the Television Society Medal the following year – marking him out as 1948’s outstanding, albeit unlikely, TV personality.

  In truth, the later stories of Blackwood’s prolific career don’t come close to his formative works, the best of which were based on his own experiences. He spent large early chunks of his rich and varied life living among or near to wild places, and he draws strongly on these memories in the settings of his stories. For instance, for a little over a year of his education, Blackwood was schooled in Germany’s Black Forest at a strict institution run by the Moravian Brotherhood, where long hikes into the woods were one of the few available pastimes; the school and its surroundings forms the basis for his John Silence story ‘Secret Worship’, which is tinged with obvious autobiographical detail – though whether his own teachers resembled the story’s devil-worshipping acolytes is another matter.

  Aged twenty, Blackwood undertook a three-hundred-mile trek across the Alps, before a later failed dairy-farming venture outside Toronto and a moose-hunting expedition to the wilds of Quebec. The latter inspired one of his most highly rated short stories, ‘The Wendigo’, written a decade after the trip, in 1908. In the story, the vast ‘bleak splendours of these remote and lonely forests’ are haunted by the wendigo, a shifting, ventriloquial entity that shares the name of a spirit creature from Algonquian legend; Blackwood, however, subsumes the original First Nation myth into his own distinct creation, which is memorable for its indescribable call and fetid, rotten, but strangely sweet scent, carried on the breeze like the stench of the slaughterhouse. It’s a good story, but not to me quite among his best – though Robert Aickman regarded it as ‘one of the (possibly) six great masterpieces in the field’ – as I find the undoubted horror of the monster and the claustrophobic atmosphere of the endless northern woods diluted by distracting lines of dialogue (‘Oh, oh! This fiery height! Oh, oh! My feet of fire! My burning feet of fire …!’).

  The wendigo also features notably in Stephen King’s novel Pet Sematary, the first of the American author’s books that I read, though I’d previously been terrified after being allowed to remain up to watch the TV mini-series of Salem’s Lot while staying at my grandmother’s.** The jagged-toothed, blue-skinned vampire Barlow is still, I think, one of the scariest screen images of the undead, right up there with Max Schreck’s cadaverous Count Orlok; I had to knock on Nan’s door in the middle of the night because foxes were barking in the blackness of the fields and I could hear tapping from behind my curtains. In the scene from the 1979 television adaptation that most frightened me, a grinning pyjama-clad Ralphie Glick floats outside the bedroom window of his soon-to-be victim (his older brother), scratching his nails down the glass pane; viewed again now the young vampire happens to bear a more than passing resemblance to the razor-clawed hurdy-gurdy boy Giovanni in M. R. James’s ‘Lost Hearts’. My grandmother emerged in her white nightgown, suitably spectral herself, but we went down the twisting staircase together and she made hot chocolate to take my mind off the imagined tapping.

  To me, ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’ surpasses the ‘The Wendigo’. Blackwood places the events in a landscape that wo
uld have been more recognisable to his British readership – though at the time he penned the story the New Forest would have been quieter than the tourist-thronged destination it’s become. He manages to infuse the familiar with an aura of dreamlike otherness, of the Romantics’ sense of the ‘sublime’ – although these age-old English woodlands exist on nothing like the insanity-inducing scale of the Canadian wilderness. Yet even now, a century on, there remain silent corners of the Hampshire countryside where you feel you’re the only person ever to have set foot, where the trees and topography mask the sound of traffic; there are still secret heathland glades where spindle-tailed Dartford warblers skulk among the gorse, or blocks of impenetrable conifers above which goshawks might deign to display to a fortunate few on bright spring mornings. There can be surprises and strangers too – odd gale-borne waifs such as the chaffinch-sized dark-eyed junco from North America that my brother and I watched feeding beneath a fallen New Forest pine in late January 2012, a lost slate-and-white songbird destined never to find its way home.

  I am close to that spot today, having pulled my car down a narrow track that skirts one of the forest’s clearings. A swift spears silently through the wind-wasted sky beyond the space in which I am paused, twisting its wings to navigate the ebbs and flows of the fast-moving air. In a month or so – as July drifts towards August – I shall watch them gather high over my house in excited shrieking groups. A few days later they will begin to make their way south of the Sahara, where they will spend their perpetual summer skimming the vast rainforests of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. This lone bird above me – above this infinitely smaller, drizzle-dampened forest – will have been back in English skies since the beginning of May, among the latest of our migrants to return. I always think it noteworthy to see the species in April, and can recall exactly the last time I saw one in that cruellest of months: I know the date because I have found a forgotten fragment of text conversation on my phone. It was only ten miles from here – a short flight for a swift. My eyes followed its movement as it scythed above the massed buildings beside the multi-storey car park of Southampton’s General Hospital. Chris replied, joking, to the message I sent him that I was a ‘stringer’, that I had made the swift up.

  It was real though, Chris. Like your frog and the snake. Are they in their own place now too?

  Afterwards I headed across the dusk-washed forest, back towards his house, where I was staying. ‘The Night transfigures all things in a way,’ says the artist Sanderson in Blackwood’s story. And perhaps he is right, because I had the urge to traverse the darkness of the woods, rather than the emptier predictability of the quicker road. Somewhere, before the light was lost entirely, a woodcock beat heavily above the tops of the trees in front of me.

  That was real too.

  All of it was real, I think.

  They are mesmeric in the way that they move. On calmer days these sixty-five-foot giants that shield my garden sway like wave-washed sea urchins, but whip to and fro with an unpredictability bordering on violence as the wind strengthens. In a gale their smaller twigs are shed like confetti and the precarious angled boughs make strange high-pitched squeals that have me puzzling momentarily what species of bird they might be – before I realise that the sounds originate from the trees themselves.

  From the willows.

  Not that they aren’t home to a good variety of birds – wood pigeons gorge themselves on the berries of the ivy that stifles the leaning trunks, while cryptic treecreepers pick delicately beneath their skin of flayed bark, and, in most summers, the half-hearted midnight begging whistles of young tawny owls can be heard as they wait behind the screen of narrow leaves to be brought their next feed. The willows are a haven for other, largely unseen, wildlife too, with a legion of insects, including ephemeral day-flying red-tipped clearwings and pale, nocturnal furry puss moths and sallow kittens, regarding these trees as the entirety of their world. Indeed, the time towards dusk when the light starts to die is when I find the willows at their strangest, their most beguiling. In the greyness their bowed branches take on different forms, like the appearance of large nodding beasts – perhaps an elephant or mastodon swaying its trunk, or a herd of antediluvian aurochs shuffling through the air – or, as Algernon Blackwood would put it, ‘a host of beings from another plane of life, another evolution altogether’.

  After his travels in Canada and a poverty-stricken stint among the riotous hustle of 1890s New York, where he got his first proper writing job as a junior reporter on the Sun, Blackwood, now aged thirty-one, undertook an ambitious dawn-of-the-century canoe adventure from the headwaters of the Danube in the Black Forest. He and his companion planned to navigate the entire course of the great river, but the impracticability of this soon became apparent. The curtailed trip, however, proved to be the initial inspiration for what is widely considered to be the greatest of Blackwood’s supernatural stories, ‘The Willows’. H. P. Lovecraft rated it as one of his favourite works of weird fiction, stating that ‘an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a single strained passage or a single false note’. I would agree.

  ‘The Willows’ was published in 1907, in Blackwood’s second supernatural collection The Listener and Other Stories. It is another of his tales, like ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’, in which the foreboding power of nature features at the forefront, though here the overall impression is more unsettling still. The action of Blackwood’s masterpiece takes place in a lonely stretch of the Danube downstream from Pressburg (now Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia) – ‘the wilderness of islands, sand-banks, and swampland beyond – the land of the willows’.

  The story’s willows are quite unlike the tall, branch-shedding crack willows (Salix fragilis) that line my garden. And they’re nothing like Old Man Willow, the demonic tree at the heart of the Old Forest in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, or Green Noah, the shambling weeping willow that pursues Tolly at the climax of The Children of Green Knowe. Blackwood describes his Danube trees as ‘willow bushes’, and it is their sheer unending multitude that seems to give them their dominion over the human world, rather than some individual, animated Ent-like majesty:

  Their serried ranks, growing everywhere darker about me as the shadows deepened, moving furiously yet softly in the wind, woke in me the curious and unwelcome suggestion that we had trespassed here upon the borders of an alien world, a world where we were intruders, a world where we were not wanted or invited to remain – where we ran grave risks perhaps!

  Adrift from the world of men in the water- and tree-filled vistas of the roaring Danube, the narrator and his companion, a laconic Swede, make camp on a sandbar and are doing their best to enjoy the sublime spectacle. They have already fulfilled the first rule of the horror story by ignoring earlier cautions, from a Hungarian officer they encountered in Pressburg, not to carry on with their expedition: ‘There are no people, no farms, no fishermen. I warn you not to continue. The river, too, is still rising, and this wind will increase.’

  Blackwood’s descriptions of the two explorers’ temporary island home, constantly under assault from the angry waters, and of the primordial willows that crowd the horizon, are vivid. From the beginning of their mid-stream encampment the narrator is aware, of a sense of pervading unease, of terror-tinged awe:

  Altogether it was an impressive scene, with its utter loneliness, its bizarre suggestion; and as I gazed, long and curiously, a singular emotion began to stir somewhere in the depths of me. Midway in my delight of the wild beauty, there crept, unbidden and unexplained, a curious feeling of disquietude, almost of alarm.

  Two incidents occur as the men gather driftwood for their fire in preparation for their first night on the islet. The Swede notices what he believes is a dead human body washing past in the current – ‘A black thing, turning over and over in the foaming waves’ – but as it twists in the water they see its eye gleaming yellow before the shape plunges below the waters: a hunting o
tter, they decide. Soon after they think they really are witnessing another person – this time alive – in an incident which, for me, ranks as the most troubling of the story’s events:

  It seemed, however, to be a man standing upright in a sort of flat-bottomed boat, steering with a long oar, and being carried down the opposite shore at a tremendous pace. He apparently was looking across in our direction, but the distance was too great and the light too uncertain for us to make out very plainly what he was about.

  The narrator and his companion believe that the gesticulating figure, who they assume to be a superstitious local, is crossing himself as his strange craft floats – almost seeming to fly – through the miasma of mist and sunset. He is too far away, however, for them to catch his attention.

  ‘There was something curious about the whole appearance – man, boat, signs, voice – that made an impression on me out of all proportion to its cause.’ After this, things rapidly move out of control – and out of reason – as other-dimensional forces intersect with the willow-infested wilderness. The narrator witnesses monstrous shapes, or figures, above the willows in the night sky (a vision reminiscent of ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’, as is the story’s preternatural driving wind), and strange pattering sounds outside the tent that seem to be the unrooted trees themselves drawing closer. The following morning the Swede reveals that their canoe has somehow acquired a deep gouge in its hull, and their paddle has been ground down to an unusable thinness. Thousands of small hollows pocket the surface of the ever-diminishing island. Stranded while they make repairs, their conversation turns to the previous day’s otter sighting. The narrator laughs off the Swede’s doubts as to whether it was such a creature (though it is noted that otters do not have yellow eyes) by joking that next he’ll be querying the identity of the local they glimpsed in the hazy craft.