Horror Writer Algernon Blackwood Retreated to Lake Rosseau Island

 

Photo by Suzanne Currie

A PREAMBLE TO OUR STORY ABOUT HORROR WRITER, ALGERNON BLACKWOOD'S STAY IN MUSKOKA

By Ted and Suzanne Currie

     When Suzanne and I began dating, oh, so many years ago, or so it seems, we used to spend quite a bit of time at the family cottage on Lake Rosseau, nestled into the pinery backdrop along the shoreline of the mesmerizingly picturesque, silver and black shallow channel, that divided the mainland from Wellesley Island only a short canoe traverse to the bay where Windermere House rises from the promontory of Muskoka Rock, that overlooks the busy Village waterfront. We’d sit in one of the Stripp family’s vintage wooden boats, lashed into the boat slips, and listen to the sounds of the boathouse frame, being shifted ever so slightly by the incoming waves, the scent of lake and the watercraft awakening our senses, and setting out so many plans and adventures for the rest of our lives. Whether we were lodging in the charming early 1900’s cottage, sitting in the sunroom overlooking the channel on colder afternoons, or during rain events, or resting by a snapping cedar fire in the parlor hearth, we knew this was an incredible haunt, and all the ghosts within were family, near and dear. We thought about how we would like to live here in Muskoka, as a married couple, and it was considered a possibility that we might even live in this relic cottage that seemed most cheerful when occupied. But they were plans and more often than not, life, as they say, gets in the way. Although we did spend many more months residing at the cottage, even after both boys, Andrew and Robert had arrived to enhance our family desires, the early trend of waterfront property values took its toll particularly in the way of market value assessments. Suzanne’s father didn’t really have much choice, but to sell the cottage, that had been built as a family homestead by his father Sam Stripp, where five children were born and four were raised and tough economic times weathered; like the durability of house and boathouse to have survived handsomely for so many decades. It was sold and torn down by the new owner, who erected a modern building that, in our opinion, was typical but not remarkable. The old cottage and boathouse that we knew was perfect for that hillside above the channel, and could have been easily renovated to serve a succession of cottagers for another century.

     Before the cottage was knocked down, and the landscape bulldozed into submission, Suzanne and I took as many of the original lilacs as we could, and many raspberry canes and day lilies from the garden planted by Suzanne’s grandmother. We brought these reminder-plants home to our new Gravenhurst home, we call, with affection, our Birch Hollow. So we have a little of Windermere still thriving just beyond our front porch, which does help us rekindle those good old days when we had lots of time to plan out the future. Well, the future is a lot shorter now, but we still find ourselves caught up in the romance of the Muskoka we have grown up in, and refuse to rest on whatever laurels we still have, preferring instead to carry on our writing adventures for some time to come. And one of the stories we bandied about, as we rocked in the bosom of the antique Hunter launch, in the light and shadow spell of the open boathouse, was the folk tale about a revered writer of horror stories, who had once also enjoyed a Lake Rosseau retreat, on a truly enchanted little island just a short boat ride away from Suzanne’s cottage. We thought it would be a good place to start our co-operative writing projects, yet, for many different reasons, it wasn’t until well into this new century, that we actually put pen to paper, and wrote the story of Algernon Blackwood and uncovered what the Muskoka lakeland did for the budding writer on the cusp of a stellar international career.  

     We have long known about Algernon Blackwood's stay in Muskoka, in the late 1800's, on an island in Lake Rosseau, but we never understood until recently, just how much the adventure meant to the soon-to-be writer, who would go on to become one of the best known horror writers of his period. We are so glad we put some research hours into this project, because what we came out with, at the conclusion, was a totally different opinion than when work was initiated.

     It began with the purchase of the book "Episodes Before Thirty," an autobiography by Algernon Blackwood, with a lengthy section about his first (of two) stays in Muskoka. We purchased the book from an antiquarian book dealer from the Advance Book Exchange (abe.com),  and we acquired a nicely bound, secure, 1923 first edition, published by Cassell and Company. There is also his story of "The Haunted Island," which is one of his classic horror tales, probably, in part, inspired by his five month stay on the Lake Rosseau island, circa 1892, when he was twenty-two years of age.

     Suzanne and I are pleased to offer our friends this multi-part summer series to honor both the work of Blackwood, and recognized, most importantly, the amazing spiritual electricity of this amazing district in Ontario.

PART ONE - ALGERNON BLACKWOOD IN MUSKOKA

     "A strong emotion, especially if experienced for the first time, leaves a vivid memory of the scene where it occurred." (Algernon Blackwood)

     One of my writing mentors, from the past, and a good friend in the field of local history, Sylvia Duvernet, once explained to me, upon my enquiry about what, in her opinion, has made Muskoka so attractive to authors and artists, replied, without hesitation, "It's a very spiritual place." If anyone could make such a claim, and validate the opinion of "spirituality," it was Sylvia DuVernet, the author of numerous books about Muskoka. One in particular profiling the activities of the writer's retreat at the Muskoka Assembly, on Lake Rosseau's Tobin's Island, in the summers of the 1920's and 30's. A collective of creative types including some of Canada's best known authors and poets, at the time, who very much appreciated what Algernon Blackwood had found of the same lakeland environs thirty years earlier. A pleasant haunting sensation!

     I have lived for periods on Lake Muskoka, Lake Joseph and Lake Rosseau, and Suzanne, of course, grew up in Windermere and had a family cottage on Lake Rosseau opposite Wellesley Island. We had both long appreciated the spiritual allure of the lakeland through the four seasons. I have always found Muskoka a wonderful place in which to write, a reality of considerable pleasure that I continue to this day, from Birch Hollow, now looking out over a beautiful little paradise of lowland we call The Bog. We understand what Algernon Blackwood and the writers who attended the Muskoka Assembly found so spiritually significant and enduring about the natural elements of the regional environment. To sit out on the end of a dock to watch a sunrise over Lake Rosseau, breaking through the morning mist, or to watch the milky moonlight rippling across the water surface at midnight, is to appreciate from the roots-up just how hauntingly strange yet beautiful it all is, as the environment subtly manifests thoughts, in its voyeurs, of the joyful play of roaming spirit-kind. Sylvia DuVernet and I probably agreed, on that day, that Muskoka is, and will remain, an enchanted place on earth, to benefit creative enterprise.

     Well respected Canadian ghost sleuth, John Robert Colombo, who also wrote about Algernon Blackwood's late 1800's stay in Muskoka, suggested a few years back, that I should compile a sort of compendium of Muskoka ghost stories. It was John who wrote the lead article in a series of ghost stories, I had researched and written, that summer, published in The Muskoka Sun. You never know. Maybe this is one of my next projects.

     To begin this series on Algernon Blackwood, it's necessary to provide some biographical background into writer's early life, and his budding philosophy, and enduring kindred relationship with what he regarded as the spiritual essence of nature. For this information we will consult his biography "Episodes Before Thirty."

     "We arrived in New York towards the end of October, (1892) coming straight from five months in the Canadian backwoods," wrote Algernon Blackwood, in the opening paragraph of Chapter Two, in "Episodes Before Thirty." "Before that, to mention myself first, there had been a year in Canada, where, even before the age of twenty-one, I had made a living of sorts by teaching the violin, French, German, and shorthand. Showing no special talent for any profession in particular, and having no tastes that could be held to indicate a definite career, I had come to Canada three years before for a few weeks' trip. My father, in an official capacity, had passes from Liverpool to Vancouver, and we crossed in the 'Etruria', a Cunarder which my mother had launched. He was much feted and banqueted, and the C.P.R. bigwigs, from Lord Strathcona and Sir William van Horne downwards, showed him all attention, placing an observation car at his disposal. General James, the New York postmaster, gave a dinner in his honour at the Union League Club, where I made my first and last speech - consisting of nine words of horrified thanks for coupling 'a chip off the old block,' as the proposer called me, with the 'Chief of the British Postal Service."

     The author notes that, "In the lovely autumn weather, we saw Canada at its best, and the trip decided my future. My father welcomed it as a happy solution. I came, therefore, to Toronto, at the age of twenty, with one hundred pounds a year allowance, and a small capital to follow when I should have found some safe and profitable chance of starting life. With me came - in the order of their importance - a fiddle, the 'Bhagavad Gita,' 'Shelley,' 'Sartor Resartus,' Berkley's 'Dialogues,' Patanjali's 'Yoga Aphorisms,' de Quincey's 'Confessions,' and a unique ignorance of the Methodist Magazine, a monthly periodical published in Toronto, and before that licked stamps in the back office of the Temperance and General Life Assurance Company, at nothing a week, but with the idea of learning the business, so that later I might bring out some English insurance company to Canada."

     Blackwood's business experience, which was a near-constant source of self inflicted agony, especially in those early years of trying to make a gainful position for himself in the world, became the polar opposite for what his escapes into the bosom of nature restored in kind. He took a large amount of money, given generously from family coffers, sent for his prudent use to invest in Canadian farmland, being instead squandered on a number of high-risk investments. He invested in a Toronto area dairy farm, said at the time to be a leading one, that would innovate the industry and increase milk production to an approving marketplace. In less than a year he lost his investment as the business venture failed to live up to its claims; and the promises of his partners to return a healthy profit on Blackwood's money. Shortly after this failure, he and another partner, who saw a similar pie-in-the-sky opportunity, that would return big money over a short term, also caused the future writer another business horror. This time it was in the joint purchase of a Toronto watering-hole, hotel known as "The Hub," which was entirely contrary to his father's innermost Christian values; being a fierce temperance advocate, and having raised the young Blackwood to adhere to the vow of abstinence as far as alcohol was concerned. The Hub failed as a business investment, and cost him the final few dollars of his family's endowment, to set up, and operate a successful business in Canada.

      It was at this time, on the cusp of his 22nd year, that he and his former business partner, at The Hub, accepted a generous invitation from a lawyer they both knew, from their near-year as hoteliers, to retreat to an island he owned in Lake Rosseau, in the District of Muskoka, a hundred and twenty miles or so from the big city. He came to Muskoka feeling a failure as a son and businessman, betraying family values, and as it turned out, he had bottomed-out even before he began a career in earnest. There would be more failures to come, when he would eventually move to New York with the same business partner, and this time, it became the struggle of a rookie reporter for a well known city newspaper. His experiences in Muskoka for those five months however, continued to inspire him of a better life yet to come.

      As conditions of his existence in New York were always a hair's breadth away from starvation, and the final snuffing-out of poverty embrace, it is interesting to note, that his most called-upon source of rejuvenation, was to venture to the then forested Bronx Park on Sundays, to relive some of the wild splendors he had known in Muskoka. He would make a campfire in the woods, and wax poetic and rework his philosophy through the day and nights, studying nature as if trying to squeeze nourishment from every hour spent in its company. He felt a spirituality in these natural settings, and it would be a source of nourishment and companionship cherished for the rest of his life. Muskoka was never far from his thoughts, and like former United States President, Woodrow Wilson, who had vacationed frequently on the same lake (before he was elected to office), staying at The Bluff resort, operated by Thomas Snow, also very much feeling the inherent enchantment of those mist-shrouded mornings, watching the sun rise, and celebrating the haunted moonlit revels on warm summer nights. On his deathbed, the President recalled with family, those wonderful days spent in Muskoka.

     Please join Suzanne and I again tomorrow, for part two of this seven part series of stories, on Algernon Blackwood and his relationship with our district.