The Face of the Earth & Other Imaginings by Algernon Blackwood, (Compiled and Edited by Mike Ashley), Stark House Press

I felt a frisson of joy, stumbling across this recent release - the first 'new' collection of Blackwood since 1989's The Magic Mirror. (Also from Mike Ashley). When it came to humanising nature, most of his contemporaries – from Potter to Grahame - anthropomorphised woodland beasts for children; Blackwood – almost single-handedly – anthropomorphised the elements around them for adults. He achieved this – especially in his pre-World War One work – by manifesting the child-like idealism still slumbering in himself and, unarticulated, in many of us grown-ups. Add the mystical atmosphere – fired by his own belief – and the undeniable beauty of his vision remains unique.

  Today, a brisk surface read by a Blackwood novice could form an assumption of him as a mere sentimentalist; and a dated one at that. In truth, his resonance is far more profound.

  After his death, aged 82 in 1951, his last hurrah of major sales subsequently faded in the wake of 1967's Summer of Love. John Baker re-published The Empty House, The John Silence Stories and Selected Tales collections - and that was it. A sad but significant ending for a bibliography that, by the 1930s', had been a staple of the private and public school curriculum; significant also in its reflecting what were fast turning into more cynical times.

  Mike Ashley's choice and compilation of material is first rate. I only wish Stark House's realisation was equal to it. The usual bold, painterly art cover and graphics work well, always enticing the eye; but, within, there is something about the crowding of the text and the office-type paper – used by so many inde publishers now – that lets the production down. (Presumably to cut costs). That said, it is worth the purchase for Ashley's well-considered chronicling of Blackwood's early oeuvre, highlighting the arc of his nature vision, and the detailed bibliography at the back.

  Some of the journalism acts as useful prologues to some of the later, more famous, short tales (not featured here) for the scholar seeking deeper context. The elemental descriptions in 'The Willows,' 'The Wendigo' and 'Ancient Sorceries' clearly resonated with what he'd already witnessed in these earlier explorations around the mountains and valleys of the Balkans, Canada, Austria and Egypt.

  Ashley – Blackwood's biographer – has separated his finds, culled from Blackwood's early stories and journalism, into four sections: 'Early Tales,' 'Imagination Awakes,' 'Nature Inspires' and 'Conflicts of the Soul.' If not strictly chronological, they are ordered logically enough to easily follow his literary and spiritual journey up to the end of World War One.

  Of the four, Section 3 reveals itself as both key and the most memorable. Here, we come closest to seeing life through Blackwood's eyes as lived. It is nature as a mystical liberation; one with no beginning and no end, ever-active, ever-changing, yet eternal. 'Down the Danube in a Canadian Canoe' - the centrepiece of, perhaps, the whole book – clearly made a lasting impression on him, echoed in several subsequent pieces – including 'Egypt: An Impression.' These are more transcending than mere travelogues, while never descending to the showily sentimental.

  Two pieces in Section 4 stand out as contrasting results of encounters made during World War One, working first for the Field Ambulance Service and, latterly, as an Intelligence Agent. 'Onanonanon' may be unique in the canon for detailing the psychosis of a schizophrenic, first as a boy, then as a man, making disturbing connections. If not his best, then it's certainly his most radical short tale and singularly ahead of its era. (c. 1920). 'The Memory of Beauty,' the final tale here, concerns a convalescing soldier in a nursing home, making a mental connection of his own to somehow recapture the little he can recall of his past. Again, Blackwood avoids saccharin pathos; instead producing a scene genuinely moving to anyone – like myself – who has a relative afflicted with Alzheimer's.

  Then again, from a memory all my own, he unwittingly left me with a smile. A line on the last page leads into the soldier's epiphany: 'He saw two Lebanon cedars, the kitchen garden wall beyond, the elms and haystacks further still, looming out of the summer dusk...' Recall that it was his literary rival, Machen, who was quoted as remarking; ‘Tennyson, you remember, says, “the cedars sigh for Lebanon,” and that is exquisite poetry, but Blackwood believes the cedars really do sigh for Lebanon and that … is damned nonsense!’ 

The Three Impostors by Arthur Machen, The Everyman Library edition.

Far more of a challenge than your typical novel, this is the story of three men too absorbed by their own literary interests to realise the truth, or otherwise, of the events unfolding around them. These are Dyson, in thrall to his own imagination, Phillipps, an adherent to science, and Russell, who simply considers himself a realist.
  Structurally based upon R. L. Stevenson’s ‘New Arabian Nights,’ thirteen chapters here act as anecdotal short stories, delivered to Dyson and Phillipps by supporting characters inveigling upon them their recent plights, and on whom we – and they – must trail to decide upon the truth of their motive and intent. If this sounds dry, it is only because to describe it effectively at all on one reading is in itself a challenge.
It’s necessary to place the work in the context of its time.
  First published in 1895, this era of supposed ‘decadence’ amongst the monied classes incrementally seeps through our consciousness. For though only sketched, Dyson, Phillipps and Russell still evoke the lazy wit, diffidence and nonchalance of stoned Sixties rock stars. They seem to live for kicks, their own amusement, and little else. They appear bored, dissolute and need adventure. Only, there is the growing, unnerving feeling in this reader that Dyson in particular cares only for the sating of this need over and above the fate of those who may require his help. Machen doesn’t force us to believe this; he simply plays it out. Such progress through the dark makes the work – if not entirely successful – the page-turner it needs to be.
  So, what’s interesting is what author Machen himself thinks of their status. Is he contemptuous of the three? - not obviously. Does he approve of their self-absorption? - it is never made clear. (As literary impostors, who are they pretending to be?) A clue might lay in the work he released in its wake. The novel ‘The Hill of Dreams’ (1897) may be the longest suicide note in history, in its part-autobiographical depiction of a failing writer whose talent and unique personal vision is overlooked to the point where madness fatally perverts whatever it was he’d earlier harboured. Here, the author seems to be predicting his own fate; what may – and may yet – happen to him if he listens to all those who think he should give up his art and get a ‘proper job.’
  Oh, how we can relate to it…
This was also, remember, the time of Chesterton’s sledgehammer metaphors in ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’ and ‘The Club of Queer Trades,’ and Belloc’s satirical sketches. So, it is possible Machen - to a certain extent – is satirising himself and his generation in the former book.
  Two anecdotal ‘stories’ in particular have co-existed in neat isolation from the rest of ‘The Three Impostors’ for at least the last seventy years. Both ‘The Novel of the Black Seal’ and ‘The Novel of the White Powder’ episodes have rightly made countless horror anthologies through the 20^{th Century and done so again in the imminent, and welcome, Penguin Classics reissue, ‘The White People & Other Weird Stories.’ With their contemporary themes of archaeological intrusion and unchallenged drug addiction resonating down the decades, Lovecraft, Howard and their offspring have been milking those particular seams ever since.}