Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) is best known today for two short stories, “The Wendigo” and “The Willows”, both considered among the best works of horror, supernatural, or weird fiction in English. Not far behind those in reputation are a couple of his stories of the occult detective John Silence (especially “Ancient Sorceries”). Beyond that, though, the highly prolific Blackwood is mostly unknown even by readers well read in late 19th/early 20th century strange tales. This is unfortunate, because though his large oeuvre is certainly uneven, Blackwood’s vision is one that feels less anachronistic in our own time than the work of many of his contemporaries. His is at least as cosmic a vision as that of H.P. Lovecraft, but it is one deeply attuned to nature and a desire for transcendence that, unlike the work of Blackwood’s contemporary Arthur Machen, moves far beyond its Christian roots.
It is also, I will argue, a profoundly queer vision. By saying that, I don’t mean to make any claims about Blackwood’s own sexuality or sexual experiences. I trust Mike Ashley’s excellent biography of Blackwood, Starlight Man, that there is simply no evidence one way or another about Blackwood’s inclinations. He was intensely private, and even if by some chance he happened to keep love letters or something of that sort, most of his personal papers were destroyed in the Blitz. Ashley says it’s probably most accurate to say Blackwood was what we would now understand as asexual, but even that is highly speculative. What we know is that he traveled in circles where there were a few more or less openly queer people (mostly what we would now classify as gay men), that he seems never to have had a romantic or sexual relationship with a woman, and that his writing is full of homosocial bonding between men.
I am skeptical of biographical criticism, however. Too often, critics obsessed with bioography reduce the work to the person, a denial of one of the most important and wondrous powers of art: its ability to be more resonant, polyphonous, and transcendent than its creator. More often than not, biographical criticism is a shackle on the art, not a lens into it. I do think, though, that by seeing Blackwood as a queer writer, we can expand our view of his work, and perhaps even find new ways into neglected elements of it. For me, this isn’t even a particularly biographical argument — as I said, the biographical evidence for Blackwood’s personal inclination is slight and circumstantial — but rather a textual argument. These are phenomenally queer texts.
Here, I want to look at a few aspects of one well respected (if not especially well known) novella, “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” (1912), which has begun to get occasional notice from academic ecocritics. (In many ways it anticipates some ideas in Richard Powers’ Pulitzer-winning The Overstory (2018), which has become something of an academic darling.) Though there are some queer readings of Blackwood, these days the writing on him is usually from an ecocritical standpoint. For me, though, queer and ecocritical approaches complement each other, and it’s time to bring more of a queer perspective into the ecocritical discussion of Blackwood’s work.
Let’s approach “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” via a tangent — E. M. Forster’s novel Maurice, the first draft of which was written in 1913 and 1914, shortly after Blackwood’s novella was published in the March 1912 issue of London Magazine and later that year in Blackwood’s extraordinary collection Pan’s Garden.
In Maurice, a certain sense of utopia appears in Forster’s concept of the greenwood: “Perhaps among those who took to the greenwood in old time there had been two men like himself — two. At times he entertained the dream. Two men can defy the world.”
Later, a psychiatrist tells Maurice that he “must remember that your type was once put to death in England.” To which Maurice replies: “Was it really? On the other hand, they could get away. England wasn’t all built over and policed. Men of my sort could take to the greenwood.”
The woods are where the merry men hide together. Howard Pyle knew this in 1883 —his Merry Adventures of Robin Hood presents the bandit crew as having established a kind of queer utopia (“we are all equal here in the greenwood, for there are no bishops nor barons nor earls among us, but only men”).
Forster’s 1914 typescript of Maurice included an epilogue that as far as I know has only ever appeared as volume 5 of the Abinger Edition of the novel edited by Philip Gardner and published by Andre Deutsch in 1999. (The full epilogue is available on a Tumblr site here.) Forster cut the epilogue from the manuscript by the time of a significantly revised 1932 typescript, for reasons that remain uncertain. For me, Forster’s first impulse to write the epilogue is the right one and the loss of those pages seems to me an error; its continued obscurity only compounds that error. While, as he sometimes hinted, Forster may have thought the epilogue was too much of a stretch for anyone to believe — too optimistic, too mythic — it allows a wistful, almost fairy-tale ending to the story, though with an undercurrent of darkness.
(An interesting bit of biographical and textual trivia: the 1914 typescript of Maurice survives because it was kept by Forster’s friend Leonard Hugh Graham Greenwood. The greenwood was saved by Greenwood! He and Forster knew and, indeed, lived near each other for most of their lives, but their friendship seems to have been most intimate during the relatively brief time of Maurice’s writing. See Philip Gardner’s introduction to the Abinger Edition pp. xiii-xiv.)
The epilogue shows us Maurice and Alec some years after they have escaped together to the greenwood. Maurice’s sister Kitty happens upon them working as woodcutters. She doesn’t recognize her brother at first, then does, and doesn’t understand their relationship. She’s always felt a certain revulsion with her brother, but now she is trying to be more broad-minded, trying to understand what might have caused him to so absent himself from society. Soon, she “found herself asking the landlady about the men who worked in the woods through which she had bicycled. Her question was vague, as was the landlady’s answer: there were so many woods, she implied, and so many men, and some came and others went.”
The final paragraph is quite something:
“It must be much too cold up there alone,” said Kitty, whose idea of love, though correct, remained withered: for Maurice and Alec were at that moment neither lonely nor cold. Their favourite time for talking had been reached. Couched in a shed near their work—to sleep rough had proved safer—they shared in whispered review the events of the day before falling asleep. Kitty was included, and they decided to leave their present job and find work in a new district, in case she told the Police, or returned. In the glow of manhood “There we shall be safe” they thought. They were never to be that. But they were together for the moment, they had stayed disintegration and combined daily work with love; and who can hope for more?
Two men seeking safety together, threatened by their discovery by someone who knew Maurice from his previous life. They would never be safe, but they would have each other, their love together. Daily work and love. In a blighted world, who, indeed, can hope for more?
Hold Forster’s greenwood in mind as we return now to Algernon Blackwood and “The Man Whom the Trees Loved”.
Though it is 26,000 words long, it is not difficult to summarize the plot of Blackwood’s novella: David Bittacy, a civil servant who worked for the Imperial Forest Service in India and has now retired to a house on the edge of the New Forest in England, meets an artist, Sanderson, who has an extraordinary ability to render the individuality of particular trees in paint. Mr. Bittacy, too, has a great sense for trees, and the trees for him, as Sanderson teaches him. As Mr. Bittacy grows more and more entranced by the forest, his wife Sophia, a devout Christian, grows more and more concerned. Mr. Bittacy had apparently had times when he was more fond of trees than of herself when he was in India, and now Sanderson seems to have reignited this particular passion. Even after Sanderson leaves, Mr. Bittacy’s attentions turn more and more to the trees. Mrs. Bittacy loses her husband to the wonders of the forest, a forest that wants nothing to do with her.
At first, it seems that Blackwood is portraying Sophia Bittacy as an ignorant, nagging woman, a caricature. But though a lot of Blackwood’s sympathies are surely with Mr. Bittacy, most of the story is related from Mrs. Bittacy’s perspective, and the more time we spend with her, the more we feel her sense of loyalty, confusion, love, and abandonment. This is the effect of Blackwood’s careful, slow, detailed delineation of her thoughts and fears. While the story’s incidents could easily have been related in a fifth of the length of “The Man Whom the Trees Loved”, it’s not really a story about its incidents as much as it is a story about a pantheistic philosophy and the psychological effect of Mr. Bittacy finding his great love in the greenwood and Mrs. Bittacy being painfully left behind. It’s repetitive at times, but that’s because of the extremity of the change in their lives. It takes time and repetition for Mrs. Bittacy to be able to comprehend anything of what’s going on.
In some ways, Mrs. Bittacy is in the position of Kitty in the epilogue of Maurice. What’s happening is so far outside the scope of her comprehension that it takes her great time, effort, and suffering to be able to see what’s happening. And it destroys her world. Remarkably, she holds very little bitterness toward her husband for his abandonment of her, and even tries to follow him, but she is rejected by the world he has left her for. There is no place for her in the forest. A woman of domestic life and cosmopolitan interests, she has no greenwood of her own.
Reading the novella, I kept thinking of Constance Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s wife. She seems to have been a loyal wife and mother, an innocent whose life was destroyed by her husband’s need for the world of queer men and, especially, by the scandal of Oscar’s trials and imprisonment. In one of the earliest biographies of Wilde, Robert Sherard wrote of Constance:
She was a simple, beautiful woman, too gentle and good for the part that life called upon her to play. She was a woman of heart whom kindlier gods would never have thrown into the turmoil and stress of an existence which was all a battle.
It’s a good description of Mrs. Bittacy. There’s a certain sense of fate, or fatalism, in “The Man Whom the Trees Loved”. Mrs. Bittacy does not strongly blame her husband for the dissolution of their relationship. Her blame goes toward Sanderson and to the trees, but even there, she seems to feel that this is all somehow beyond choice and blame. Toward the end of the story, Blackwood makes a point of noting her generosity of spirit:
Hitherto she had divided the beyond-world into two sharp halves—spirits good or spirits evil. But thoughts came to her now, on soft and very tentative feet, like the footsteps of the gods which are on wool, that besides these definite classes, there might be other Powers as well, belonging definitely to neither one nor other. Her thought stopped dead at that. But the big idea found lodgment in her little mind, and, owing to the largeness of her heart, remained there unejected. It even brought a certain solace with it.
Since Blackwood himself clearly valued the transcendence possible through nature, and believed in the interconnections of animal and vegetal life he wrote about, the depth of the sense of loss the story provides in its last sections is surprising. It is a story ultimately about an unbridgeable difference between two people who do, in fact, love and care about each other, but whose destinies are separate and irreconcilable.
It is because of the way the story’s mysterious forces are identified with desire that I label this a story of the queer weird.
Consider a few quotations, a selection from many possibilities:
1. Surreptitiously, as though half ashamed of it, he had kept alive a sense of beauty that hardly belonged to his type, and was unusual for its vitality. Trees, in particular, nourished it. He, also, understood trees, felt a subtle sense of communion with them, born perhaps of those years he had lived in caring for them, guarding, protecting, nursing, years of solitude among their great shadowy presences. He kept it largely to himself, of course, because he knew the world he lived in. He also kept it from his wife—to some extent. He knew it came between them, knew that she feared it, was opposed.
2. “It really is extraordinary,” said a Woman who Understood, “that you can make that cypress seem an individual, when in reality all cypresses are so exactly alike.”
And though the bit of calculated flattery had come so near to saying the right, true, thing, Sanderson flushed as though she had slighted a friend beneath his very nose. Abruptly he passed in front of her and turned the picture to the wall.
“Almost as queer,” he answered rudely, copying her silly emphasis, “as that you should have imagined individuality in your husband, Madame, when in reality all men are so exactly alike!”
3. “Queer,” he reflected, “awfully queer, that trees should bring me such a sense of dim, vast living! I used to feel it particularly, I remember, in India; in Canadian woods as well; but never in little English woods till here. And Sanderson’s the only man I ever knew who felt it too.”
4. “It’s rather a comforting thought,” [Mr. Bittacy] said, throwing the match out of the window, “that life is about us everywhere, and that there is really no dividing line between what we call organic and inorganic.”
“The universe, yes,” said Sanderson, “is all one, really. We’re puzzled by the gaps we cannot see across, but as a fact, I suppose, there are no gaps at all.”
5. Deeply submerged in him there ran this tide of other thoughts, desires, hopes. What were they? Whither did they lead?
6. His life was somehow becoming linked so intimately with trees, and with all that trees signified. His interests became more and more their interests, his activity combined with theirs, his thoughts and feelings theirs, his purpose, hope, desire, his fate—
7. Her husband loved her, and he loved the trees as well; but the trees came first, claimed parts of him she did not know.
8. Her husband’s passion, she reflected, was natural and inborn. It had decided his vocation, fed his ambition, nourished his dreams, desires, hopes.
9. And then for the first time she realized, even at that distance, that the look upon his face was one of peace and happiness—rapt, and caught away in joy, a look of youth. That expression now he never showed to her. But she had known it. Years ago, in the early days of their married life, she had seen it on his face. Now it no longer obeyed the summons of her presence and her love. The woods alone could call it forth; it answered to the trees; the Forest had taken every part of him—from her—his very heart and soul.
10. It seemed to her the trees were always in the house with him, and in their very bedroom. He welcomed them, unaware that she also knew, and trembled.
While of course the word queer in 1912 more commonly meant strange, its current meaning of something beyond heterosexuality and heteronormativity was beginning to appear in subcultures’ jargon and in vernacular English (often as a description for people who didn’t fit dominant gender roles), as documented in works such as Queer London by Matt Houlbrook and Gay New York by George Chauncey.
The men in Blackwood’s story are undeniably queer — it’s the word the text itself uses for the deep connection the men feel for the trees. The connection between Mr. Bittacy and Sanderson is itself queer, while also being a shared sympathy to the queerness of the trees. Sanderson is a younger man, and Mrs. Bittacy notes he has “beautiful eyes” and is far from being blasé. Mr. Bittacy’s attraction to him is strong, and doesn’t seem entirely a spiritual attraction — this is a confident, exciting, good-looking man of 30.
The queerness of the story pulls Sanderson and Mr. Bittacy toward a philosophical animism, a sense of Nature as one unified force. Mrs. Bittacy stands separate from that, unassimilable. The path toward one-ness is a path of desire, and it’s not a desire she has access to. She is like the cedar tree, separated, weakened, and ultimately destroyed, despite her good work:
And when the winter’s morning stole upon the scene at length, with a pale, washed sunshine that followed the departing tempest, the first thing she saw, as she crept to the window and looked out, was the ruined cedar lying on the lawn. Only the gaunt and crippled trunk of it remained. The single giant bough that had been left to it lay dark upon the grass, sucked endways towards the Forest by a great wind eddy. It lay there like a mass of drift-wood from a wreck, left by the ebbing of a high spring-tide upon the sands—remnant of some friendly, splendid vessel that once sheltered men.
She is left at the edge of the forest, alone, hollowed out, a remnant.
This final image links Mrs. Bittacy to a tree, a single one, not the mass (the forest) that, in its amalgamation, possesses fierce strength. In the first part of the story, Sanderson’s painting of the cedar represents the one deep difference between husband and wife, as he loves the painting (and the tree), while she is wary of it. But by the end of the story, her own fate is that of the cedar — she and it are, effectively, one. This is her own arboreal queerness. Blackwood’s story is, ultimately, much like Sanderson’s painting: it finds the individuality in Sophia Bittacy, providing us a framed portrait of this “splendid vessel that once sheltered men”.
In the early 2000s, sparked by Lee Edelmen’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004) and José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009), queer theory got stuck in a binary argument about whether futurity is heteronormative. A lot of the writing around this question offers interesting ideas, but I find the general argument ridiculous in its insistence that there are sides and we must choose one. Instead of arguing an either/or for futurity, we ought to queer time. For that, I look to things like quantum mechanics and Zen poetry and philosophy. We can learn more about the queerness of time and nature from Dōgen than from any academic theorist.
We can also think about the queerness of time and nature via works like “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” and writers like Algernon Blackwood. In Blackwood’s novella, nature is the site, supporter, and assimilator of queer desire. Blackwood’s forest is a place of love, but it is not an uncomplicated idea of love — the forest in this story feels jealousy, and its destructive impulses are based in that jealousy. Morever, it lusts. The forest not only is desired, it desires.
The characters openly discuss plant consciousness, but what the story demonstrates is that consciousness is linked with desire. To desire is to be conscious, to be conscious is to desire. However, the unity of Nature does not require that all desires be congruent. Mrs. Bittacy has desires of her own, but they are frustrated, separated. She and the old cedar have a role in the natural order, but it is not a role that allows their desires to be fulfilled. Blackwood has great sympathy for the remnants and driftwood, even as he proposes a transcendent spiritual journey for people whose love expands beyond not only the social structures of their day, but beyond humanity itself.
Instead of talking about nonconformity, I want to talk about possibility and unnameably complex reality. What queer can offer is the identity of I am also. I am also human. I am also natural. I am also alive and dynamic and full of contradiction, paradox, irony.
—Alex Johnson, “How to Queer Ecology”
—–
images: illustration by W. Graham Robertson for Pan’s Garden; illustration by Howard Pyle for The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood; cover of Penguin Classics edition of Maurice; Oscar, Constance, and Cyril Wilde 1892 (via Wikimedia); cover of No Future; Thomas Eakins, “The Swimming Hole” via Wikimedia
