Story Responses --
7 Pillars of Horror Part I
Algernon Blackwood, from
Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories
The Man Whom the Trees Loved
Posted 11/06/2020 (v 1.0)
Keywords: Trees, Tree-spirits, Woods, Woods-spirits, Cottage, Art, Artists-painting, Marriage-relationship, Mental breakdown, Nature communion, Nature communion-danger, Wind-supernatural, Moods of nature, Philosophical discussion, Science supporting the supernatural, Supernatural-objective connection, Inner "occulting" process, Peronsality-philosohical transformation, Religious orthodoxy challenged
At last a Blackwood story that can perhaps hold a candle to
The Willows! Though it far lags behind that story in action, excitement and in the amped-up fear department, it is a considerably deeper, more subtle psychological exploration. It has the same tight artistic focus, lack of digression and dilution and a clear, simple plot. Of course it is also fundamentally different from
The Willows in tone, theme and effect.
It is a longer tale, and at times its limited action, scope and occasional repetitive ideas feel claustrophobic. It is highly concentrated on two characters and above all, it is the story of a marriage. As a plot sequence, it is spare indeed. A husband and wife have a cottage on the edge of an old forest -- David and Sophia Bittancy. David is obsessed with trees and commissions an artist, Sandborne, famous for his masterful tree paintings, to portray a cedar in Bittancy’s front yard. Later Sandborne visits the couple. Strange, and to Sophia, probably sacrilegious ideas about trees and nature are discussed. Afterward her husband’s mania for trees and the woods increases. Spirits of the woods seem to be unleashed. Sophia suffers several stages of mental anguish.
Never was there a more terrifyingly destroyed creature than Sophia. She is bashed, slashed, confined, controlled, drained and finally snapped mentally by a terrible array of forces. Even more than the frightening unknowability of the trees, the main emotional and thematic horror punch is the sheer awfulness of Sophia’s mental disintegration. Her problems include her shell-like, checked-out husband, her burning, woman’s-duty-based need to love and protect him, isolation from all human interaction, transgressions of her core religious orthodoxy, and finally the terror of the woods and its spirits. Even the narrator is against her – reminding us that (like all women) she was ultimately not really that bright.
The injection, though not overwhelming, of brief, explicit sexism here is a mini art tragedy. If the explicit statements had been left off, it would have been a better story, and nothing whatsoever would have been lost. The narrator, while he centers his entire story upon her profound inner struggles, reminds us incongruously — she was a women and women really can't actually think much. The narrator is providing the fancy words for her experience, but she could never conceive of those words herself. It’s implied the reason for this is she’s a woman. She’s meek and clingy, outwardly at least, and it seems we are to take that as a virtue. Unfortunately, these aspects of the story, are not entirely tangential. Her distinguishing characteristic is that her entire existence is lived through her husband. He in turn is sometimes portrayed in vaguely Godlike terms, and her worship of him is almost literal. To a modern reader these indications of her inescapable male-society-brainwashing adds even more to her wretchedness and the hopeless horror of her situation. Though we can assume that this effect was not intended by Blackwood. (?)
Christianity has a delicious dialog with "nature worship" in this story. Sometimes nature’s argument is even bolstered by science. Points are scored on both sides. Centrally, though it’s not about which is correct, but the inner breakdown of Sophia. Blackwood treads with expert ambiguity here, implying a danger in intense nature communion, but also a greater truth. There is virtually no mention of anything overtly occult or even pagan – no folklore, no legendary underpinnings. This is a story an order of magnitude deeper.
His poetic, omniscient narrator, through from Sophia's POV predominantly, knows many things of course about her, she doesn’t know herself. As usual, the consistency of tone and high quality of the languge is impressive. Blackwood mixes a three-part brew. First the possibility of plot as real-life metaphor (David’s obsession for nature could be a stand-in for any husband’s relationship-destroying obsession). Second is a suggested objectivization of emotion. When the mood changes in a room, a shadow enters – but is it real, imagined or metaphorical/poetic shadow? The third is about possibly *
real* spooks, things seen, visual double-takes suggestions of hallucination or possibly an empirical supernatural. All three of these are Blackwood’s turf. And he give you a deep, multi-themed, extended, beautifully written, reality-blurrer of a story like no one can.
Would sure be fun to hear what you think of my analysis though. Want to re-read Smith, Devotee of Evil? It's super-short. Think I'll make it next response.
