Algernon Blackwood’s Episodes Before Thirty, from 1923 (a gift from a friend), was a revelation, to one who has previously
read only his superb fiction. The book is a carefully-composed, thoughtful
memoir, written by a man in his 50s, looking back on the travails and lessons
of his youth; with an eidetic richness in its prose. The volume ran parallel to
his fiction in some ways, in its concerns with the occult and supernatural, but
offered other moods and elements, as well. Blackwood’s tales of supernatural
mystery and occult events, provided my introduction to his writing. His powerful
story, The Willows, which I read in a
Scholastic anthology when I was about eleven, spoke to me, and stayed with me,
even at that early stage of my life.
Blackwood’s (by his own description) cocooned
upbringing, with doting, yet austerely religious parents, was succeeded by
harsh realities (contrasting with immersion in the spiritual qualities of the
natural world, on a Canadian island, and other places), through his travels and
various occupations in North America. The story begins in media res in New York
City; with descriptions of tough living conditions reminiscent of George
Orwell’s Down and Out In London and
Paris. The autobiography also covered his childhood in Great Britain, and his
introduction to Eastern thought, through a chance encounter with a volume of
Patanjali. From the future author’s immersion in the
inferno of Tammany-era New York, to his succession of side hustles and jobs
(including working as a journalist for the New
York Times, and other newspapers), to his brief experiences with morphine
(and one experiment with cannabis), to his transformative “meetings with
remarkable men,” including attorney, poet, and mystic, Alfred Louis, the book provided
a captivating experience. Although, as a cryptic remark about occult experiences toward the end of the tome indicated, what is absent from the book was telling, also.
“These woods, this river, ruled the world, and
somewhere in the heart of that old forest the legendary Wendigo, whose history
I wrote later in a book, had its awful lair.”—p. 143
-- by Jonathan Falk, June 2018
