I tend to think of Algernon Blackwood more as savant of the ineffably extra-dimensional beyond our ken (see "The Willows," see "The Winnebago Wendigo," etc.), but this story and many others demonstrate how good he could be even at the ghost story, that root basic unit of horror. "The Listener" takes on the form of diary entries, a classic not to say overplayed device, and then in many ways proceeds as vividly as Hanns Heinz Ewers's "The Spider." Blackwood's anonymous urban creature is more of a Londoner, as opposed to Ewers's Parisian. He's a freelance writer who finds rooms that are dirt-cheap and close to the newspaper offices where he pitches stories. You can guess the reason those rooms are cheap, though Blackwood's typical light touch slips it by. He's remarkably good at working variations on the conventions. It's always a ghost that's bothering our freelancer, though the one clumsy element of the story is a visit our man pays to a lecture about death that basically explains fine points of the story's conceit, a good old ghost bit that runs from Sheridan Le Fanu's "The Familiar" to the Paranormal Activity movie franchise, with a ghost attaching itself to an individual. The way the plot point is inserted via the public lecture is what's clumsy, not the concept or the language: Suicides, he learns, "cannot shirk their responsibilities so easily. They must return to take up life exactly where they laid it so violently down, but with the added pain and punishment of their weakness. Many of them wander the earth in unspeakable misery till they can reclothe themselves in the body of someone else—generally a lunatic, or weak-minded person, who cannot resist the hideous obsession. This is their only means of escape."
A freelance writer is clearly an example of a lunatic or weak-minded person, so we quickly grasp the sense of his danger. He also mentions in his diary that he has had problems with sleepwalking in the past—not good! He is obviously ripe for a reclothing exercise on the part of some suicide still residing in the Phantom Zone of his rooms. Blackwood inserts passing examples of our man's mind being preyed on even as he is writing out his diary entries in real-time, such as one where he is talking about his exasperation with the housemaid who cleans his rooms and misplaces his things: "Sometimes I feel inclined to throw the inkstand at her, just to bring an expression into her watery eyes and a squeak from those colorless lips. Dear me! What violent expressions I am making use of! How very foolish of me!" One obvious point in such stream of (double) consciousness foreshadowing is how much H.P. Lovecraft was influenced by Blackwood, whose best is better than anything Lovecraft touched for all his considerable influence himself. Even the misplaced things is done insidiously well here—it could be the help, it could be the addled freelancer, or it could be the ghost, which systematically works on him on different sensual levels: sounds and smells long before sight of anything, and at one point he feels the arm of another person in a dark room. "Like small doses of morphine often repeated," he writes, "she has finally a cumulative effect." But we know it's not the housemaid.
When the ghost is finally named, as "the Listener," it brings sharp focus to the strange events and perceptions swirling around our man and/or merely in his mind. He is plainly haunted now, by something that feels more and more predatory: "Last night I was again troubled by most oppressive dreams. Someone seemed to be moving in the night up and down my room, sometimes passing into the front room, and then returning to stand beside the bed and stare intently down upon me. I was being watched by this person all night long. I never actually awoke, though I was often very near it." The lines between annoyance and dread and danger are passed successively in order but almost imperceptibly. Blackwood always works well at his peak operatic moments. Part of his skill is the way he raises the temperature so high even as we barely notice. Suddenly things are dire and how did we get here? The final payoff and explanations are a bit pat and a lot antiquated and insensitive, but certainly grotesque so (on one level) why not? The least you can say about Blackwood is that he's a certifiable master of horror.
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