PART SEVEN
Note: Watch for Part 1 of Beatrice Scovell's, The Muskoka Story starting tomorrow.
"Episodes Before Thirty," explains Algernon Blackwood's Muskoka experience circa 1892
By Ted and Suzanne Currie
"This capacity for invention and imaginative detail of most ingenious sort, using the tiniest insignificant item of truth, as starting point, suggests that even the dullest people must have high artistic faculties tucked away somewhere in them. M any of these tales we traced to their source - usually a person the world considered devoid of fancy, even dull. Here, evidently, possessing genuine creative power, were unpublished novelists with distinct gifts of romance and fantasy who had missed their real vocation. The truth about us was, indeed, far from glorious, but these wild tales made us feel almost supermen. Many years later I met other instances of this over that dull, even stupid people could keep carefully hidden till the right opportunity for production offers - I was credited, to 'name' the best, with superhuman powers of Black Magic, whatever that may be, and of sorcery. It was soon after a book of mine, 'John Silence,' had appeared. A story reached my ears, the name of its author boldly given, to the effect that, for the purposes of this Black Magic, I had stolen the vases from the communion altar of St. Paul's Cathedral and used their consecrated content in some terrible orgy called the Black Mass. Young children, too, were somehow involved in this ceremony of sacrilegious sorcery, and I was going to be arrested." (Algernon Blackwood; "Episodes Before Thirty")
Blackwood continues, reporting that "The author of this novelette was well known to me, connected even by blood ties, a person I had always conceived to be without the faintest of imaginative gifts, though a credulous reader, evidently, of the mediaeval tales concerning the monstrous Gilles de Rais. Absurd as it sounds, a solicitor's letter was necessary finally to limit the author's prolific output, although printed editions continued to sell for a considerable time. There is a poet hidden, as Stevenson observed, in most of us."
Algernon Blackwood and his former business associate, and actor, known only as Kay, had only recently arrived on what is now known as Wistowe Island, in Muskoka's Lake Rosseau. The date is the summer season of 1892. Accommodations on the island are basic and altogether rustic, but both men would have gladly slept out under the stars for those five months of solitude and recovery. Both men had experienced unfortunate business failures in Toronto, immediately prior to the visit, and were on the island thanks to the kind charity of a lawyer friend, the had met during their few months as hoteliers at "Hub," which at this time of escape, was in the hands of a Receiver.
Blackwood writes, in his biography, published in 1923, "Meanwhile, summer began to wane; we considered plans for attacking New York; hope rose strongly in us both; disappointments and failures were forgotten. In so big a city we were certain to find work. We had a hundred dollars laid aside for the journey and to tide us over the first few days until employment came. We could not hide for ever in this fairyland. Life called to us. Late in September, just when the lakes were beginning to recover their first solitude again, we packed up to leave. Though the sun was still hot at midday, the mornings and evenings were chill, and cold winds had begun to blow. The famous fall colouring had set fire to the woods; the sumach blazed a gorgeous red, the maples were crimson and gold, half of the mainland seemed in flame. Sorrowfully, yet with eager anticipation in our hearts, we poured water on our camp-fire that had served us for five months without relighting, locked the door of the shanty, handed over to (Mr.) Woods the canoe and boat, and caught the little steamer on one of its last trips to Gravenhurst, where the train would takes us, via Toronto, to New York.
"It had been a delightful experience; I had seen and known at last the primeval woods," he wrote. "It never occurred to me to write even a description of our picturesque way of living, much less to attempt an essay or a story. Nor did plans for finding work in New York - we discussed them by the score - include in their wonderful variety and suggestion of a pen and paper. At the age of twenty-two, literary ambition did not exist at all. The Muskoka interlude remained for me a sparkling radiant memory, alight with the sunshine of unclouded skies, with the gleam of stars in a blue-black heaven, swept by forest winds, and set against a background of primeval forests, that stretched without a break for six hundred miles of lonely and untrodden beauty."
It was long before the two gentlemen were living in New York City, trying to find employment, but largely failing as there were few jobs available that either man could handle; or wished to be employed. When there were jobs they were low paying, and barely covered expenses, leaving little leftover for food. It was not a contenting time for either man, and although it was an enlightening experience, over several years, it was also full of physical and emotional hardship, so that memories of those five easy, inspiring months on the Lake Rosseau island, were amongst the affordable respites, for peaked imaginations.
Working as a crime beat reporter, for a New York daily newspaper, compounded the disenchantment with the city and the urban catastrophe, witnessed up close in the jail-house, where there were murderers awaiting the administration of their penalties. The following passage identifies just how desperate Blackwood was, at times, to escape his circumstance, to retreat again to the wildernress he found so restorative in the region of Muskoka.
"My former life became more and more remote, it seemed unreal; the world I now lived in seemed the only world; these evil, depraved, tempted, unhappy devils were not only the majority, but the real ordinary humanity that stocked the world. More and more the under-dog appealed to me. The rich, the luxurious, the easily-placed, the untempted and inexperienced, these I was beginning to find it in me to look down on, even to despise. Mutatis mutandis, I though to myself daily, hourly, where would they be? Where would I myself be.
"Bronx Park, Shelley, the violin, the free library, organ recitals in churches, my Eastern books, and meetings of the Theosophical Society, provided meanwhile the few beauty hours to which I turned by way of relief and relaxation. One and all fed my inner dreams, gave me intense happiness, offered a way of escape from a daily atmosphere I loathed like poison. Sometimes, sitting in court, reporting a trial of absorbing interest, my eye would catch through the dirty windows a patch of blue between the clouds...and instantly would sweep up the power of the woods, the strange joy of clean solitary places in the wilderness, the glamour of a secret little lake where loons were calling and waves splashing on deserted, lonely shores. I heard the pines, saw the silvery moonlight, felt the keen wind of open and untainted spaces, I smelt the very earth and the perfum of the forests."
There are two of Algernon Blackwood's stories, that were probably influenced by the young author's stay on Wistowe Island, or later, as rumoured, on North Boehemia Island (in later years), both on the picturesque Lake Rosseau. "A Haunted Island," and "Skeleton Lake," each containing references that can be attributed to his experiences in Muskoka, as he wrote about in his biography, "Life Before Thirty." He has placed different realities regarding the setting of the stories, specifically "Skeleton Lake," that he establishes in the wilds of Quebec instead of Ontario. There are references to Skeleton Lake and its name, that seem quite close to the history of the lake a short distance from Lake Rosseau, which Blackwood would have been aware of, undoubtedly, during his 1892 stay in the region.
In New York, for those first hours of adjustment, the young Blackwood reported, "The furious turmoil of the noisy city, boiling with irrepressible energies, formed an odd contrast to the peace and stillness of the forests. There was indifference in both cases, but whereas there it was tolerant and kindly, here it seemed intolerant and aggressive. Nature welcomed, while human nature resented, the intrusion of two new atoms. Nostalgia for the woods swept over me vehemently, but at the same time an eager anticipation to get work." "New York, I felt, was not to be trifled with; the human element was strenuously keen; no loafing or dreaming here; work to the last ounce, or the city would make cat's meat of one! Whereupon, by contrast, stole back again the deep enchantment of the silent woods, and the longing for the great, still places rose; I saw our little island floating beneath glittering stars; a loon was laughing farther out; the Northern Lights went flashing to mid-heaven; there was a sound of wind among the pines. The huge structure that reared above me seemed unread; the river of men and women slipped past like silent shadows; the trains and boats became remote and hushed; and the ugly outer world about me merged in the substance of a dream and was forgotten."
Instead of repeating the contents of both of these interesting stories, or any other of Algernon Blackwood's work, you can read them online, by visiting algernonblackwood.org.
Thank you so much for joining Suzanne and I for this glimpse back in time, to the experiences of Writer Algernon Blackwood's stay in Muskoka; a very under known and celebrated reality in the history of our region of Ontario.
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