The Development of the Weird Tale Read online

  Pain’s first book, In a Canadian Canoe (1891), chiefly contained humorous tales, but does include one grim tale of psychological terror, “‘Bill,’” in which a lower-class boy struggles to deal with the death of his infant sister. It is a searing portrayal of the wretched fate to which Brit­ish society condemned its working classes at that juncture in history. The volume was the first of nearly sixty books that Pain published in a career that spanned nearly four decades; his uncollected tales and sketches (the great majority of them humorous, but with apparently a few weird items buried among them) number in the hundreds.

  Stories and Interludes (1892) contains two weird tales that contain more promise than fulfilment—“The Glass of Supreme Moments” and “Ex­change”—and, sadly, much the same can be said for Stories in the Dark (1901), a choice item for the weird collector but one that doesn’t quite de­liver on the potential of some of its premises. This slim collection—it is well under 30,000 words—features a number of tales with powerful ideas that are not executed quite as effectively as one would wish. “The Diary of a God” could have been a powerful tale of psychological horror in its de­piction of a man who becomes increasingly isolated from humanity and develops a fierce misanthropy, but its development is crude. “This Is All” is a somewhat more effective sketch of the universal fear of death, and “The Magnet” is another non-supernatural tale that underscores a scarcely less universal fascination with tragedy and catastrophe. But even the vol­ume’s lengthiest and most impressive story, “The Undying Thing,” leaves us vaguely unsatisfied. It powerfully etches a generational curse in its account of an anomalous creature, born of one of the ancestors of the own­ers of a venerable English castle, that dwells in the woods near the estate; but Pain’s refusal to specify the nature of this entity seems less an instance of artistic restraint than a failure of imagination.

  Nevertheless, one can see why H. P. Lovecraft found the tale powerful, even though he did not read it until 1934. At that time August Derleth had given Lovecraft a copy of Stories in the Dark, and Lovecraft waxed enthusias­tic about the story: “Ugh! I really half-believe I ought to mention this in my article.”[28] He is referring to his history of weird fiction, “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927), a revised version of which was then running in the Fantay Fan (1933–35); but although he noted the story in a list of “Books to mention in new edition of weird article,” he had apparently already prepared a revised version of his essay and sent it to Charles D. Hornig, editor of the Fantasy Fan, and so there was no opportunity for him to cite “The Undying Thing.” As it happened, the Fantasy Fan folded before it could run the chap­ter of “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (chapter 9, “The Weird Tradition in the British Isles”) in which the story would presumably have been men­tioned, and Lovecraft had no other occasion to submit a newly revised ver­sion of his essay for magazine or book publication.

  The final story in Stories in the Dark, “The Gray Cat,” is a powerful tale of metempsychosis—a theme that Pain had already treated in a different way in “Exchange”—and perhaps set the stage for his novel-length working out of the idea, An Exchange of Souls. That novel is clearly the pinnacle of Pain’s weird work, but later specimens among his short stories are worth more than fleeting discussion.

  “The Unfinished Game,” in the collection Here and Hereafter (1911), is a routine ghost story about billiards, while “The Unseen Power” is a scarcely less conventional tale of a haunted house. Stories in Grey (1912) contains two powerful specimens. “Smeath,” the longest of Pain’s weird short sto­ries, is a richly complex tale about hypnotism and clairvoyance, with a grisly ending that even today’s splatterpunk devotees can relish. “Linda” is a powerful and moving tale of love and terror that again broaches the me­tempsychosis theme.

  Pain wrote hundreds of short stories, and many of them are uncollected; the great mass of them are humorous tales, but a few weird speci­mens can be found among them. One of these is “Celia and the Ghost” (Strand, December 1916), which—if one discounts a very curious story in Stories in the Dark, “The Bottom of the Gulf,” about a Roman encounter­ing a strange entity under the earth—is a unique instance of Pain’s attempt to mingle humour and horror. The result is perhaps not entirely satisfac­tory, but the story—which also features a sentimental romance element that Pain also employed in much of his work—is of interest from the weird perspective in its depiction of a ghost from the future.

  The untitled volume of short stories published in the series “Short Sto­ries of Today and Yesterday” (1928) contains some of Pain’s most assured work; it is regrettable that it appeared in the year of his death, for it au­gured an impressive seriousness of conception and ability to handle com­plex interplays of emotion that Pain might have used in later weird work. “The Tree of Death” is perhaps the most curious item in his weird reper­toire, a kind of Eastern fantasy in the manner of the Arabian Nights, told in a stately and archaic diction that is highly evocative and convincing. “Not on the Passenger-List” is a powerful tale of supernatural revenge that brings the earlier tale “The Widower” to mind. “The Reaction” vaguely echoes Arthur Machen’s “Novel of the White Powder” in its account of a strange drug that has unexpected effects, while “The Missing Years” is a strange and appar­ently non-supernatural narrative about amnesia.

  What led Pain him to write (in conjunction with James Blyth) The Shadow of the Unseen (1907), a capable witchcraft novel, and An Exchange of Souls (1911) is a mystery; perhaps we are left with Lovecraft’s possibly whimsical notion, in “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” that the tenacity of the inclination toward weird fiction is evidenced by “the impulse which now and then drives writers of totally opposite leanings to try their hands at it in isolated tales, as if to discharge from their minds certain phantasmal shapes which would otherwise haunt them.”[29] In Pain’s case, it might be inferred that his several novels and tales about bold and resourceful (but not exactly feminist) female characters—notably his “Eliza” novels, Eliza (1900), Eliza’s Husband (1903), Eliza Getting On (1911), Exit Eliza (1912), and Eliza’s Son (1913)—led to his conceiving, in An Exchange of Souls, a more intimate fusion of the male and female life-principle than was possible in comic stories intended for a lowbrow audience.

  Evidence of Lovecraft’s reading of An Exchange of Souls is circumstantial; he had the book in his library and clearly knew that it was a weird tale, as he lists it in his “Weird &c. Items in Library of H. P. Lovecraft.”[30] That the fundamental plot of Pain’s novel—a man exchanges his soul or personality with that of his fiancée—bears an uncanny resemblance to that of “The Thing on the Doorstep” (1933) is undeniable. Lovecraft has, however, indicated that the prime influence on that story was H. B. Drake’s The Shadowy Thing (1928; published in England in 1925 as The Remedy). Entry 158 of his commonplace book supplies a plot synopsis of Drake’s novel: “Man has terrible wizard friend who gains influence over him. Kills him in defence of his soul—walls body up in ancient cellar—BUT—the dead wizard (who has said strange things about soul lingering in body) changes bodies with him . . . leaving him a conscious corpse in cellar.” At the end of the entry is the laconic notation, written later: “Thing on Doorstep.”[31]

  What should be evident is that Lovecraft has made a fundamental change in the plot of The Shadowy Thing in adapting it for “The Thing on the Doorstep”; and that change—whereby the “exchange of souls” (or bodies) is between a man and a woman with whom he is intimately related—could well have come (if it had a literary source) from Pain’s novel. In his story Lovecraft has infused the character of Asenath Waite with features deriving both from his mother and his ex-wife, Sonia H. Greene, while the character of Edward Derby is a fusion of traits from himself and such of his friends as Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, and Alfred Galpin;[32] so a literary influence for this use of male-female personality-exchange may not exist; but it is likely that Pain’s novel gave Lovecraft some suggestions as to h
ow this exchange could be effected and what its ramifications might be.

  There is, indeed, some ambiguity in both works as to exactly what has been exchanged. Pain speaks of the “transference of an Ego to a mind and body other than that [sic] with which it had previously been associated,” but makes it clear that this Ego does not include the brain or mind (or, more specifically, the contents of the mind): the scientist Daniel Myas, who has conducted an experiment in which he has exchanged his “Ego” with that of his fiancée, Alice Lade, finds that he no longer has the knowledge that had allowed him to construct the apparatus that effected the exchange—an apparatus that, in a fit of madness, he destroyed when he found that he was in the body of Alice and that his own body had died in the experiment. In Lovecraft, it is a bit clearer that Edward’s mind (or its contents) has been transferred when he finds himself in the body of Asenath; indeed, Lovecraft the materialist does not speak of the “soul” at all, knowing it to be a vestige of an archaic religious worldview. Neither Pain nor Lovecraft addresses the potentially bizarre possibilities of gender-switching; if anything, Pain is a bit more forthright on the subject than the sexually repressed Lovecraft could allow himself to be. One final detail that may clinch the hypothesis that Lovecraft did indeed read Pain’s book and learn from it is the strikingly similar use of the telephone at the conclusion of both tales (see section 4 of the postscript of An Exchange of Souls).

  In spite of such a volume as Stories in the Dark (1989), a collection of tales by Pain, Jerome K. Jerome, and Robert Barr, edited by Hugh Lamb, the totality of Pain’s weird work remains uncollected. One can only echo the sentiments of John D. Cloy: “It is a pity that Pain didn’t expend more energy on his serious fiction; he might have made a more lasting mark as a teller of strange tales.”[33] As with so many other writers, from F. Marion Crawford to Thomas Burke, we can only be grateful that Pain did choose, with surprisingly frequency, to broach the weird in the midst of a career devoted to work of a very different kind.

  Algernon Blackwood and the Ghost Story

  The career of Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951) extended for more than four decades, during which he established himself as a prolific and unique voice in British supernatural fiction. What distinguishes Blackwood’s work from that of many of his contemporaries is its exemplification of the author’s coherent worldview—a worldview in which “Nature” (always capitalised in his work) plays a central role, its purity, energy, and vitality contrasting sharply with the artificiality of modern industrial civilisation. Blackwood found both terror and awe in the natural world, but the latter was far more prevalent than the former.

  Blackwood’s upbringing was central to the development of his personal philosophy. Born in Shooter’s Hill, Kent, the son of Sir Stevenson Arthur Blackwood, a clerk in the Treasury and later Secretary of the Post Office, Blackwood in his youth absorbed a strict evangelical upbringing from his father; but early on he showed signs of rebellion by surreptitiously reading the Bhagavad Gita and theosophy. Later he was attracted to occultism, being briefly a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn; but he would ultimately reject conventional occultism as a narrow and superficial view of the universe.

  A critical event in Blackwood’s early life was a visit to Canada in 1887, a visit he repeated in 1890, as he hoped to start a dairy farm there. This venture failed, and Blackwood was forced to go to New York to earn a living as a journalist. This stark contrast from the beauty of the untenanted wilderness with the noise, filth, and congestion of New York is keenly etched in Blackwood’s autobiography, Episodes Before Thirty (1923):

  I seemed covered with sore and tender places into which New York rubbed salt and acid every hour of the day. It wounded, not alone because I felt unhappy, but of itself. It hit me where it pleased. The awful city, with its torrential, headlong life, held for me something of the monstrous. . . . It became, for me, a scab on the skin of the planet, brilliant with the hues of fever, moving all over with its teeming microbes. I felt it, indeed, but half civilized.[34]

  The contrast was particularly jarring to Blackwood because New York then embodied not only a physical corruption—poor sanitation, wretched living quarters for those on the lower end of the economic ladder, unchecked criminal activity—but a moral corruption as represented by the political machinations of Tammany Hall and an immense economic and social gulf between rich and poor in the Gilded Age. Although Blackwood seemed largely apolitical for most of his life, he could hardly avoid both witnessing and, to some degree, experiencing at first hand the horrors of the American megalopolis. He himself lived in desperate poverty for much of his stay in New York; and his struggles with a man named Arthur Bigge (disguised as “Boyde” in Episodes Before Thirty), who stole much of his money and forced Blackwood to track him down and have him arrested, make for painful reading.

  At the opposite extreme is Blackwood’s loving and heartfelt account of what nature meant to him:

  Forests, mountains, desolate places, especially perhaps open spaces like the prairies or the desert, but even, too, the simple fields, the lanes, and little hills, offered an actual sense of companionship no human intercourse could possibly provide. In times of trouble, as equally in times of joy it was to Nature I ever turned instinctively. . . . The strange sense of oneness with Nature was an imperious and royal spell that overmastered all other spells, nor can the hint of comedy lessen its reality. Its religious origin appears, perhaps, in the fact that sometimes, during its fullest manifestation, a desire stirred in me to leave a practical, utilitarian world I loathed and become—a monk![35]

  This tells us many important things: first, that nature worship functioned as an ersatz religion; second, that it came to outweigh—or, perhaps, helped to put into proper perspective—Blackwood’s more earthy sentiments; and third, and most important, that this perception of nature was linked—indeed, became united—with his mystical sense of the oneness of all existence. Perception, indeed, is of especial importance, for it is through a heightened or altered perception that we are given access to other, truer realms of entity. In his autobiography Blackwood quotes a passage from William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience that he could have written himself:

  One conclusion was forced upon my mind . . . and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it. is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about us, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there are potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus and at a touch they are there in all their completeness; definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation.[36]

  The expansion of consciousness—this is what Blackwood is after. The terms vary from work to work—expansion, extension, intensification, sometimes merely change—but at its heart is some mystical awareness of a broader vista than science and rationalism provide. Many things produce such an augmented consciousness: intense emotion, ritual, drugs, and dislocation from one’s everyday routine. Ultimately, what Blackwood seeks to accomplish by this extended consciousness is to overcome the limitations imposed upon our beings by the laws of time and space—what he refers to in The Human Chord as “the essential bitterness and pain that lies at the heart of all transitory earthly things—the gnawing sense of incompleteness and vanity that touches the section of transitory existence we call ‘life.’”[37]

  The autobiographical element is strong in Blackwood’s first book, the collection The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories (1906). Aside from some routine ghost stories (“The Empty House,” “A Case of Eavesdropping”) and a tale with the trite “It was all a dream” conclusion (“A Suspicious Gift”), it features a curious non-supernatural tale (“The Strange Adventures of a Private Secretary in New York,” a fictionalised account of Blackwood’s own work as a private secretary for the wealthy banker James Speyer, an
d two powerful tales set in Canada, “Skeleton Lake: An Episode in Camp” and “A Haunted Island,” the latter a mesmerising account of the ghosts of some Indians haunting a house on a small island.

  The Listener and Other Stories (1907) is remarkable simply for the assurance of technique it displays. Its chief feature is “The Willows,” which H. P. Lovecraft regarded as the finest weird tale in all literature. This tale too is autobiographical, in that Blackwood himself sailed down the Danube in 1900 in a canoe and wrote about it in a two-part article, “Down the Danube in a Canadian Canoe” (Macmillan’s Magazine, September and October 1901). What is remarkable about the story is the incredibly gradual accumulation of bizarre details that cause the first-person narrator and his Swedish companion to sense the presence of cosmic entities of seemingly incalculable power. But Blackwood exercises exquisite restraint in refusing to specify the nature or attributes of these entities, thereby augmenting the protagonists’ perception of inexplicable terror. The narrator feels unease at his “realisation of our utter insignificance before this unrestrained power of the elements about me”;[38] and at the conclusion his Swedish comrade announces harriedly: “There are forces close here that could kill a herd of elephants in a second as easily as you or I could squash a fly. Our only chance is to keep perfectly still. Our insignificance perhaps may save us.”[39]

  But The Listener also contains memorable stories of a very different type. “The Woman’s Ghost Story” is a poignant tale in which a woman investigates a reputed haunted house and finds that the ghost wants nothing more than her love and affection. She provides it, and the house is haunted no more. “The Insanity of Jones” is a gripping tale of reincarnation, a theme to which Blackwood would return frequently in later writings.

  John Silence—Physician Extraordinary (1908) proved to be a bestseller, thanks in part to a clever advertising campaign by the publisher. Here a self-styled detective, John Silence, investigates various mysterious phenomena that may or may not be supernatural in origin. Although Silence repudiates the notion that his work is related to the occult (virtually his first utterance is a horrified reaction to his colleague’s casual mention of his knowledge of occultism: “Oh, please—that dreadful word!”[40]), several stories do seem to convey Blackwood’s belief in the reality of spiritualistic phenomena.