by S. T. Joshi
Lawford’s transformation affects not only him but those around him. Unlike the lonely protagonists of Poe’s or Lovecraft’s tales, Lawford is an outwardly normal bourgeois figure—married, with a child, friends, and colleagues. The response of his wife, Sheila, is perhaps more appalling than the physical change he himself has suffered. Her selfishness (“What, what have I done to deserve all this?”) and conventional fear of social disgrace (“We must do our utmost to avoid comment or scandal”) are immediately evident. At first she even refuses to believe Arthur is her husband, maintaining that he must be some impostor playing a trick on her. She later refuses to sleep in the same bed with him; and at the end, even when Arthur’s face has returned to normal, she is easily persuaded by friends and relatives that her husband must be either mad or possessed.
The harshness of de la Mare’s portrayal of Sheila is balanced by the delicacy of his etching of Lawford’s daughter, Alice. (Strangely enough, we do not learn Alice’s age until nearly the last page of the novel, when it is revealed that she is almost sixteen.) Sheila is determined to keep Arthur away from her; and Alice, pained that her father, even in his “illness,” does not apparently want to see her, is overwhelmed when he comes into her room one night in the dark. She has no doubt that he is her father, and when she finally sees him during the day she accepts him lovingly, even chiding him for his reluctance to reveal himself to her (“Would I have asked a single question? How could I? Oh, if you had only trusted me!”).
Matters become still more complicated when a neighbour, Herbert Herbert, accosts Lawford and takes him back to his home. When first seeing Lawford, Herbert had expressed startlement, and it quickly becomes clear why: He owns an old French book that contains a crude woodcut of Sabathier, and the resemblance to Lawford’s present countenance is to him unmistakable. It is only at this time that Lawford learns that his remolded face is that of a centuries-dead pirate and suicide.
Herbert’s sister, Grisel, although appearing only for a few chapters of the novel, is perhaps its critical figure. During long walks taken with Lawford, she accepts him for what he is and urges him to carry on. Should we then be surprised that Lawford, even after his face has once again become his own, professes love to Grisel? Certainly, Grisel has shown him more unaffected sympathy than anyone except his own daughter. But could it also be that Grisel is herself a supernatural figure—the avatar of the woman Sabathier loved and because of whom he took his own life? More so even than Lawford or Sabathier himself, Grisel is the enigmatic key to the novel.
The Return is about many things at once—physical (and perhaps psychic) possession, domestic trauma, unrequited love, philosophical reflection—and one of the secrets of its greatness is the seamlessness with which all these elements fuse together into a unified whole. But most of all, the novel is about the existential horror of losing control of one’s own being. “You can’t possibly realise what a ghastly change it really was,” Lawford says simply but keenly at one point. Elsewhere he ponders his plight:
Round and round in dizzy sickening flare and clatter his thoughts whirled. Contempt, fear, loathing, blasphemy, laughter, longing: there was no end. Death was no end. There was no meaning, no refuge, no hope, no possible peace. To give up was to go to perdition: to go forward was to go mad. And even madness—he sat up with trembling lips in the twilight—madness itself was only a state, only a state.
It is moments of quiet desperation like this that make The Return the triuimph that it is. Without requiring any overt violence either in incident or in diction, de la Mare has penned a masterpiece of brooding horror that will linger long in the memory after many noisier works have fallen into oblivion.
Psychic possession as a theme by no means ended with The Return. From H. B. Drake’s obscure novel The Shadowy Thing (1928) to H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1933) to Ramsey Campbell’s The Influence (1988) to Anne Rice’s The Tale of the Body Thief (1992), the notion of one strong personality—whether living or dead—ousting another has remained a constant in weird fiction. It is unlikely that de la Mare’s regrettably little-known novel had much influence on these works, but it nonetheless set a precedent for others to follow.
De la Mare himself was by no means finished with the weird himself. His landmark story collections—The Riddle and Other Stories (1923), The Connoisseur and Other Stories (1926), On the Edge (1930), and The Wind Blows Over (1936)—feature such celebrated horror tales as “Seaton’s Aunt,” “All Hallows,” “Mr. Kempe,” and “A Recluse.” His novels and tales for children—The Three Mulla-Mulgars (1910), Broomsticks and Other Tales (1926), and other works—are liberally dosed with fantasy. Even his poems—the body of work for which he is now most widely known—contain weird elements. And who but de la Mare could have assembled that distinctive anthology, Behold This Dreamer! (1939), involving “reverie, night, sleep, dream, love-dreams, nightmare, death, the unconscious, the imagination, divination, the artist, and kindred subjects”?
Walter de la Mare—recipient of the Order of Merit and of honorary degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, and St. Andrew’s, among others—died quietly at his home in Twickenham in 1956. His vast and multifarious output is so difficult to assimilate that it has perhaps impeded the critical study of his work, and he is by no means accorded the place he deserves in the course of English literature. But his weird work—chief among which is The Return—should always have an audience that will shudder appreciatively at its horror and be moved to somber reflection by its pensive philosophy.
Algernon Blackwood, Incredible Adventures (1914)
“A weird story, to be a serious aesthetic effort, must form primarily a picture of a mood—and such a picture certainly does not call for any clever jack‑in-the-box fillip. There are weird stories which more or less conform to this description . . . especially in Blackwood’s Incredible Adventures.”[168] So wrote H. P. Lovecraft in 1935, echoing a comment he had made nearly a decade earlier in “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” where he observed:
In the volume titled Incredible Adventures occur some of the finest tales which the author has yet produced, leading the fancy to wild rites on nocturnal hills, to secret and terrible aspects lurking behind stolid scenes, and to unimaginable vaults of mystery below the sands and pyramids of Egypt; all with a serious finesse and delicacy that convince where a cruder or lighter treatment would merely amuse. Some of these accounts are hardly stories at all, but rather studies in elusive impressions and half-remembered snatches of dream. Plot is everywhere negligible, and atmosphere reigns untrammeled.[169]
That final comment, reflecting as it does Lovecraft’s chosen gauge of excellence in weird fiction (“Atmosphere is the all-important thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation”[170]), makes us realise why he valued this distinctive Blackwood collection so highly: in many ways it represented the goal to which he himself aspired in his own weird writing—a goal that, toward the end of his life, he felt he was farther and farther from achieving.
The curious thing about all this is that Lovecraft’s first exposure to Blackwood was exactly by way of Incredible Adventures—but his reaction was far different, and far less favourable. Writing to the Gallomo around April 1920, Lovecraft delivered a somewhat cocksure verdict upon the volume:
At the recommendation of James F. Morton, Jr., I am perusing the works of a modern imaginative author named Algernon Blackwood . . . I can’t say that I am very much enraptured, for somehow Blackwood lacks the power to create a really haunting atmosphere. He is too diffuse, for one thing; and for another thing, his horrors and weirdness are too obviously symbolical—symbolical rather than convincingly outré. And his symbolism is not of that luxuriant kind which makes Dunsany so phenomenal a fabulist. Just to see what he’s like, youse fellers might read “Incredible Adventures”, a collection of five very long “short” stories. It ain’t half bad, and if the first one tires you
out, you are not compelled to swallow the remainder.[171]
It is difficult to credit how so diametrically opposite a judgment could have been delivered, one that would be reversed in only five or six years. If we find the passage in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” insufficient evidence for such a reversal, we need only turn to a letter written a few months after the publication of that essay in the Recluse (1927), when Lovecraft remarked: “I am dogmatic enough to call ‘The Willows’ the finest weird story that I have ever read, & I find in the Incredible Adventures & John Silence material a serious & sympathetic understanding of the human illusion-weaving process which makes Blackwood rate far higher as a creative artist than many another craftsman of mountainously superior word-mastery & general technical ability.”[172] It is not to our purpose to discuss how this revision in Lovecraft’s critical judgment occurred; suffice it to say that his maturer view of Incredible Adventures seems a far more judicious evaluation of this remarkable volume than his earlier, cruder opinion.
The very manner in which Blackwood wrote this book is a testament to another central component of Lovecraft’s aesthetic stance. Convinced that the greatest literature emerges from a purely non-commercial focus on “self-expression” without thought of markets or audience, Lovecraft himself strove in his work to repudiate prevailing standards in both pulp fiction and in the scarcely less trite and hackneyed material that appeared in the popular “slick” magazines of the day. It is no accident that he held up Lord Dunsany, that titled nobleman who conjoined the aristocracy of blood with the aristocracy of art, as a literary model of disinterested aesthetic achievement. He would have been similarly heartened by the remarkable fertility of Blackwood’s decade or so of writing following the spectacular success of John Silence—Physician Extraordinary (1908), an unexpected bestseller that allowed its author to settle in Switzerland for the period 1908–14 and write some of his most celebrated and brilliant works. While it is true that such well-known stories as “The Willows” and “The Wendigo” had been written a few years earlier, Blackwood used his freedom from monetary concerns to generate such works as the powerful mystical fantasy The Human Chord (1910), the substantial collection Pan’s Garden (1912), and, most significant of all, The Centaur (1911), the novel that defines Blackwood’s entire work and can be regarded as his spiritual autobiography. Incredible Adventures, published in 1914, came toward the end of this vital period of writing. Although his career extended for another three and a half decades, Blackwood never produced any body of work to match the volumes of 1908–14 in concentrated excellence, complexity, and depth.
Lovecraft’s frequent comments regarding the relative absence of conventional plot in the tales in Incredible Adventures are part and parcel of his oft-expressed scorn of the pulp-magazine standard that insisted on “action” plots to sustain the interest of lazy readers. Blackwood himself reflects this stance when, in one of the two times he cites the title phrase in the volume, he notes poignantly: “The incredible adventure was literally true, but, being spiritual, may not be told in the terms of a detective story.” This notion of the “spiritual” was highly important to Blackwood, and it really structures his entire work. A mystic who had early absorbed the teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism as an antidote to the stifling and rigid Christian orthodoxy of his parents, Blackwood was perennially searching for an expansion of consciousness that would allow for the perception of what he believed to be the essential unity of all entity. It is this expansion that Lord Ernie, in “The Regeneration of Lord Ernie,” experiences as he participates in a ritual in the fastnesses of the Swiss Alps; it is this that the protagonists of “A Descent into Egypt” experience as they wait for the dawn in hoary, aeon-weighted Egypt.
It could well be said that religion—although scarcely of a conventional sort—is at the heart of all the stories in Incredible Adventures. “The Damned” is, in this sense, the most obvious and straightforward tale in the volume. In the figure of the rigidly doctrinaire Samuel Franklyn, who even in death exercises a baleful influence over both his own widow and his rambling house in Sussex, we can detect a hint of what Blackwood felt about his own father, who expressed alarm that his son’s soul was in peril when he caught him studying Eastern religious texts. Blackwood’s biographer, Mike Ashley, also sees a reflection of another real-life figure in the portrayal of Franklyn. Incredible Adventures is dedicated to “M. S.-K.”—Maya Stuart-King, a woman whom Blackwood met around 1911. At that time she was married to Johann, Baron Knoop, a Russian nobleman. The lifelong bachelor Blackwood appears to have had a complex but platonic relationship with Maya: far from being merely an object of affection, carnal or otherwise, she seems to have been a kind of Muse for Blackwood, who dedicated many books to her. Ashley believes that there is something of Baron Knoop in Samuel Franklyn; the house that serves as the setting of “The Damned” is manifestly modelled upon a home, South Park, near the village of Wadhurst on the border between Sussex and Kent. Blackwood was staying in this houue in the summer of 1913 when he was working on three of the stories in Incredible Adventures, “The Damned,” “The Regeneration of Lord Ernie,” and “A Descent into Egypt.”[173]
That last story is only the greatest of many tales by Blackwood set in Egypt, which he visited for the first time in early 1912. Perhaps only “Sand” (in Pan’s Garden) can compare to this tale in its cumulative intensity and its remarkable fusion of horror, awe, and pathos; the diffuse reincarnation novel The Wave (1916), although Blackwood’s most exhaustive treatment of Egypt, can by no means be regarded as among his successes. The reincarnation theme enters into “Wayfarers,” a tale that renounces horror altogether for wistful delicacy. “The Sacrifice” is an almost unclassifiable story that takes as its theme the notion that “all of life is a Ceremony on a giant scale, and that by performing the movements accurately, with sincere fidelity, there may come—Knowledge.” What is remarkable in this tale is how, with every act being a ceremony, every sentence becomes a metaphor. It may have been this “symbolical” quality in the tale that evoked Lovecraft’s disapproval in 1920.
What, then, did Incredible Adventures mean to Lovecraft? Can we detect any demonstrable literary influence upon any of his own works of fiction? Such an influence is, precisely because of the extreme subtlety and lack of obvious plot-elements in the tales, difficult to specify. Whereas we can tell that “The Wendigo,” with its use of footprints to signal the advent of an invisible monster, unmistakably influenced “The Dunwich Horror”; that “Ancient Sorceries” (a tale in John Silence), depicting an entire town turning into cats at night, must have played a role in the conception of “The Shadow over Innsmouth”; and, a bit more nebulously, that “The Willows,” with its imperishable depiction of a locale haunted by the most intangible of entities, had some impact on “The Colour out of Space” (1927), we struggle to find any direct correlation of the tales in Incredible Adventures with those of Lovecraft’s later period. It is unlikely that the subtle but inexpressibly powerful evocation of Egypt in “A Descent into Egypt” had any role in Lovecraft’s much cruder depiction in “Under the Pyramids” (1924). But perhaps a more remote influence of that story upon two of Lovecraft’s narratives can be detected. George Isley, after participating in the ritual that is at the heart of that tale, returns to his normal, present-day life a mere shell of a man—just as Thomas Olney, in “The Strange High House in the Mist,” appears to have left his spirit in that inaccessible house perched on the cliff outside of Kingsport. And the narrator of “A Descent into Egypt,” torn between pursuing the inexplicable mysteries of Egypt with his friend or holding back in order to maintain his sanity and identity, bears some faint resemblance to Albert N. Wilmarth in “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930), who cannot decide whether to follow his correspondent Henry Akeley into the exploration of the wonders being revealed by the fungi from Yuggoth or to remain in the safety of the known and familiar.
Perhaps, in the end, the
most significant influence of Incredible Adventures upon Lovecraft was that it set so high a standard of excellence. These tales, by incorporating the weird within the framework of a coherent philosophical system; by focusing not upon the “dovetailing of a plot” but, almost in the manner of Henry James, upon the shifting perceptions of a human consciousness encountering the bizarre; by utilising prose in a virtually poetic manner to convey the most delicate shades of meaning and the subtlest turns of thought and feeling, transmute the crude emotions of fear and horror into the broader, deeper emotions of awe and wonder. There is, then, some truth in Lovecraft’s rueful comment, made at the very end of his life: “To compare any of my stuff with Machen’s Hill of Dreams or Blackwood’s Incredible Adventures or Dunsany’s ‘Bethmoora’ or M. R. James’s ‘Count Magnus’ or Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ would be simply to subvert the soundest principles of criticism.”[174] Lovecraft was, as was his custom, being a bit hard on himself; but it may well be the case that in only the very best of his narratives did he attain the depth and substance that make Incredible Adventures an authentic contribution to the literature of its time.
Arthur Ransome, The Elixir of Life (1915)
Arthur Ransome’s The Elixir of Life (1915) is one of the rarest works of twentieth-century supernatural literature. It is not cited in E. F. Bleiler’s otherwise exhaustive Guide to Supernatural Fiction (1983); no entry on Ransome or his book appear in such works as Jack Sullivan’s Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural (1986), David Pringle’s Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers (1998), or even Donald H. Tuck’s Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy through 1968 (1974–82).[175] Published only in England by Methuen, the book apparently received no substantive reviews in the United States, and it is currently found in only six libraries in the United States; the British Library in London has only a microfilm of it.
