Algernon Blackwood, Horror Writer, In Muskoka Part 5

PART FIVE

Algernon Blackwood arrives in Muskoka for his five month retreat, circa 1892

By Ted and Suzanne Currie

     In the spring of 1892, when Algernon Blackwood and his companion, Kay, arrived on what is now known as Wistowe Island, they would have witness a still-pioneering era countryside. While lakeshore resorts, such as Windermere House were enjoying the late years of the Victorian period, with its characteristic protocols and elegance, there would have been a significant number of dwellings visible, that might have been described, even then, as homesteader's cabins and shanties. There were significant cottage and lodge accommodations, but by and large, there was modest recreation compared to what we recognize know as the cottage Muskoka lifestyle.
     The twosome, in their very small shelter, with a rustic finishing as was the style of the day, they would have witnessed the comings and goings of steamboats large and small, some pulling booms of the winter cut of logs, on the way to assorted sawmills around the lakeshore. They would have witnessed many rowboats during the summer season, as rented to tourists, and watched as canoes of all vintages, passing by, some loaded with visitors to the region, enjoying the sights, and others with loads of supplies headed to various locations, to supply cottage pantries. It would have, until the fall of the year, at times a very busy location in this part of Muskoka. By the later days of August, the population in the vicinity would have greatly thinned-out, and most of the marine traffic would have been local labourers and business interests, connecting to work on islands and on shore parcels still not connected by road. There would have been the scent of woodsmoke and steamship exhaust mixing with the aroma of tall pines, open water and the soggy leaves, floating in large clusters, having fallen from the hardwood boughs by late September. The solitude of the autumn in Muskoka, circa 1892 would have been all consuming, there being few lights visible on the lake and shoreline, except for the few passing boats and steamships tending the last chores of the shortening season of navigation.
     Algernon Blackwood, standing out on that island shore, at dusk, would most certainly have heard the shrill call of a loon, last to leave the lakeland, the rhythmic thrust of the steam engines, of the ships in the vicinity, and the distant howl of resident wolves, reclaiming the hinterland from its human occupation. In short, it would have been a visibly lonely place, a long way from the city-life both Algernon and Kay were used to, and most familiar with as far as lifestyle and business. But it was what the young Blackwood was most interested in observing, and living, as he had felt beaten-down by city existence. So he may well have been revitalized and inspired by the distant howl of wolves, and watching the intense roll of autumn thunder storms etching down on this hollow in the earth, that held such magnificent bodies of glistening water. These observances and experiences, often garnered from long paddles around the lakeshore, would serve him in good stead, when he began writing his famous stories in later life. Did he get some ideas for his horror stories, of which he would become famous, from those months in the embrace of the lakeland? Possibly he did!
     "Venetia. This portion of Lake Rosseau is fairly gemmed with islets, and as they were early selected for their beauty and admirable situation, more island population has been accumulated in this part than in any other. On almost every island can be seen some pretty home, each varied by the tastes or fancies of the owner. Home-made architecture and amateur carpentering have put some together out of the materials to be found on the spot; others have called in more specially instructed aid, but none are pretentious. Comfort rather than display, simplicity and make-the-best-of-it seems to be the ruling influences among the 'Muskokans'. They are clannish in their upholding of the special beauties of the vicinity in which they are settled, but national in united assertion that there is no place like Muskoka.
     "Hospitable they certainly they are, and to overflowing, for when the steamer touches at their islands, and one sees the number of people and babies that run down to the dock, and the number of heads that pop out of the windows of the house itself, one wonders where they all put up, and whether some, like the Indians, wrap themselves in blankets and sleep beneath the spreading trees. But another turn of the wheel and the white ridge of a tent or the clustering poles of a wigwam, tell where the boys - and what boys the Muskoka boys are - have overflowed to make room for the welcome guests."
     The following overview, written by Barlow Cumberland, was published in the book, "The Northern Lakes," in 1886, six years before the arrival of Algernon Blackwood in Muskoka, for his five month retreat on Wistowe Island, Lake Rosseau, not far in navigable terms from the Village of Windermere. Blackwood's introduction to Muskoka, and Lake Rosseau specifically, is documented in his 1923 biography, "Episodes Before Thirty," and follows-up several unfortunate business failures, that cost the future writer a considerable amount of the money family had provided, so that he could acquire property in Canada, in the 1890's, in an attempt to start a new life in a new land. It didn't work out as his father had hopped, and in just over a year, it can be said with some accuracy, the younger Blackwood was near destitute.
     Algernon Blackwood writes, "The pain of the failure was mitigated for me personally by the intense relief I felt to be free of the nightmare at last. (Referring to the Toronto hotel investment that failed) Whatever might be in store, nothing could be worse that that six months' horror. Besides, failure in Canada was never final. It held the seeds of success to follow. From its ashes new life rose with wings and singing. The electric air of spring encouraged brave hopes of a thousand possibilities, and while I felt the disaster overwhelmingly, our brains at the same time already hummed with every imaginable fresh scheme. What these schemes were it is difficult now to recall, beyond that they included all possibilities of enterprise that a vast young country could suggest to a penniless adventurous youth."
     He writes, "What memory still holds sharply, however, is the face of a young lawyer of our acquaintance, as he looked at me across the fiddle (Blackwood was playing), and said casually: 'You can live on my island in Lake Rosseau if you like!' Without a moment's hesitation we (with business partner Kay) accepted the lawyer's offer of his ten acre island in the northern lakes. The idea of immediate new enterprise faded. Kay was easily persuaded into a plan that promised a few week's pleasant leisure to think things over, living meanwhile for next to nothing. 'I shall go to New York later,' he announced, 'and get on the stage. I'll take Shakespeare up to the island and study it.' He packed his Irving wig. It was the camping-out which caught me with irresistible attraction: the big woods, an open air life, sun, wind, and water. 'I'll come up and join you later,' promised the sanguine Louis B. 'I'll come with some new plan we can talk over round your campfire.' He agreed to pack up our few belongings and keep them for us till we went later to New York. 'We shall go to the States,' he urged. 'Canada is a one-horse place. There are far more chances across the line'."
     The biography continues, "We kept secret our date of leaving, only Louis knowing it. On the morning of May 24th, the Queen's birthday (Victoria), he came to fetch us and our luggage, the latter reduced to a minimum. There were no good-byes. But this excitable little Frenchman, who loved a touch of the picturesque, did not come quite as we expected. He arrived two hours before his time, with a wagonette and two prancing horses, his fat figure on the box, flicking his long whip and shouting up at our windows. His idea, he explained as we climbed in, was to avoid the main station, where we should be bound to see a dozen people we knew. He proposed, instead, to drive us twenty miles to a small station, where the train stopped on its way north. There was not time to argue. I sat beside him on the box with the precious fiddle, Kay got behind our two bags, and Louis drove us and his spanking pair along King Street and then up Yonge Street. Scores recognized us, wondering what it meant, for these were principal streets of the town, but Louis flourished his whip, gave the horses their head, and raced along the interminable Yonge Street till at length the houses disappeared, and the empty reaches of the hinterland took their place. He saw us into the train with our luggage and our few dollars, waving his whip in farewell as the engine started. We did not see him again till he arrived, then, worried, anxious, and gabbling in the East 19th Street boarding house (in New York), the following autumn."
     Blackwood confesses in earnest, "My Toronto episodes were over. I had been eighteen months in the country and was close to twenty-two; my capital I had lost, but I had gained at least a little experience in exchange. I no longer trusted every one at sight. The green paint had worn thin in patches, if not all over. The collapse of the Dairy made me feel old, the Hub disaster made me feel like a Methuselah. My home life seemed more and more remote, I had broken with it finally, I could never return to the old country, nor show my face in the family circle again. Thus I felt, at least. The pain and unhappiness in me seemed incurably deep, and my shame was very real. In my heart was a secret wish to live in the backwoods for evermore, a broken man, feeding on lost illusions and vanished dreams. The light-hearted plans that Louis B. and Kay so airily discussed I could not understand. My heart sank each time I recognized my father's handwriting on an envelope. I felt a kind of misery that only my belief in Karma mitigated.
     "This mood of exaggerated intensity soon passed, of course, but for a time life was very bitter. It was hard at first to 'accept' these fruits of former lives, this harvest of misfortune whose seeds I assuredly had sown myself long, long ago. The detachment I was trying to learn, with its attitude of somehow being 'indifferent to the fruits of action,' was not acquired in a day. Yet it interests me now to look back down the vista of thirty years, and to realize that this first test of my line of thought, whether it was a pretty fancy merely, or whether a real conviction - did not find me wanting. It was, I found, a genuine belief; neither then more in the severer tests that followed, did it ever fail me for a single moment. I understood, similarly, how my father's faith, equally sincere though in such different guise to mine, could give him strength and comfort, not matter what life might bring."
     Of his and Kay's rail adventure north, he writes, "As our train went northwards through the hinterland towards Gravenhurst and the enchanted island where we were to spend five months of a fairyland existence, I grasped that a chapter of my life was closed, and a new one opening. The mind looked back, of course. Toronto, whose Indian name means 'Place of Meeting,' I saw only once or twice again. I never stayed there. At the end of our happy island-life, we rushed through it on our way to fresh adventures in New York, Kay hiding his face in an overcoat lest some creditor catch a glimpse of him, and serve a blue writ before the train's few minutes' pause in the station ended. The following winter, indeed, this happened, though in a theatre and not in a railway carriage. The travelling company, of which he formed a member, was giving its Toronto week, and a creditor in the audience recognized him on the stage, though not this time in his Irving wig. The blue writ was served, the balif standing in the wings until the amount was paid.
     "In the mood of reflection a train journey engenders, a sense of perspective slipped behind the eighteen months just over. Shot forth from my evangelical hot-house into colonial life, it is now seemed to me rather wonderful that my utter ignorance had not landed me in yet worse muddles, even in gaol (jail). One incident, oddly enough, stood out more clearly than the rest. But for my ridiculous inexperience of the common conditions of living, my complete want of savoir faire, my unacquaintance even with the ways of normal social behaviour, I might have now been in very different circumstances. A quite different career might easily have opened for me a career in the railway, in the Canadian Pacific Railway, in fact, on one of whose trains we were then travelling. But for my stupid ignorance, an opening in the C.P.R. would certainly have been found for me, whether it led to a future or not. The incident, slight and trivial though it was, throws a characteristic light on the results of my upbringing." Blackwood in no uncertain terms, was open to new adventures, and sources of inspiration, to influence his future choices. The desire to be a writer? At this point he hadn't given this much, if any thought, and although he might have written down stories, as they came to his mind, he had no intention of releasing them for a publisher's consideration. But he could write, and write with considerable proficiency, which would soon earn him a reporter's position on a New York City daily newspaper. The money helped keep a roof over his head, and food in the cupboard but not much more. It just wasn't the kind of writing that appealed to him, but enough of an apprenticeship, with veteran newspaper colleagues, to garner him on-the-job tutoring, to hone his skills, and pen more compelling stories for public consumption.
     In tomorrow's story, Algernon and his friend Kay, finally arrive in Muskoka, by rail and steamship, and are transported to their Lake Rosseau island retreat. The year is 1892. Please join us for part six.