March 14, 1869

Algernon Blackwood, (March 14, 1869 to December 10, 1951) an English writer of ghost stories, is the subject of this biographical essay:

'Algernon Blackwood is perhaps best known for his story "The Willows" which is considered one of the finest supernatural tales ever written. Born in in Shooter's Hill, Kent, on March 14, 1869, he grew up in a strict Calvinist family. He was the son of the widowed Duchess of Manchester and her second husband, Sir Stevenson Arthur Blackwood, a clerk in the Treasury and later Secretary of the Post Office. While in private school, at the age of 14, he decided to become a doctor. One of his teachers, a doctor himself, fascinated Blackwood with the powers of therapeutic hypnotism. Blackwood determined to be devote himself to psychiatric medicine. At the age of 16 was sent to Germany for a year to study at the Moravian Brotherhood school in Königsfeld. In line with his strict upbringing he found the military discipline of the school and by the meditative atmosphere and sense of honor and justice. But against the oppressive Sandemarian Calvinism background, a fellow medical student from India introduced him to the Hindu religion. Young Blackwood became fascinated with the Bhagavad Gita, the Vedanta, the Yoga of Patanjali, and theosophy.

'He finished college at Wellington College, Cambridge and spent a year abroad in Switzerland, and the a year in Canada doing business for his father. He went on to the University at Edinburgh but left the year after. His intention toward medicine was gone. Instead, in May of 1890 Blackwood moved to Canada and founded a dairy farm. It failed. He turned to hostelry but the hotel business didn't suit him and he sold his share of the business in 1892.

'Financially troubled and in conflict with his parents, Blackwood disappeared for a summer into the Canadian backwoods, a setting which would reappear consistently in later writings. Revived spiritually, Blackwood moved to New York City and went to work at the Evening Sun as a reporter for a small salary. He did make some side money modeling for artist Charles Dana Gibson...  New York was not a good place for Blackwood. He was unhappy, surrounded by crooks and worse. Besides being conned of his money and framed for arson, Blackwood made the mistake of befriending and rooming with the unscrupulous Arthur Bigge. Bigge robbed Blackwood and took off. In return, Blackwood tracked the man down and had him arrested. (Bigge's appears as Boyde in Blackwood's autobiography Episodes before Thirty. He was also swindled out of sorely needed cash while he was lying on the brink of death, and was almost railroaded for arson.

'In 1895 he was hired as a reporter for the New York Times which gave him a more financially stable existence. Two years later he left the paper to work as the private secretary to banker James Speyer. But in 1899 Blackwood gave up the New World and returned to England. ....

'In England, Blackwood returned to dairying, sort of. He becamse a partner in a dried milk company but spend most of his time traveling in Europe. In 1900 he discovered the Golden Dawn, the secret society, a return to the paranormal and spiritual interests of his childhood. And he began to write. He collected the meager produce and submitted it to Eveleigh Nash who published them in in 1906 as The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories. Blackwood followed this with a series of psychic detective stories featuring John Silence, "physician extraordinary." It was this series of novels and short stories on which his reputation rose. And he settled down to life as a writer moving to Böle, Switzerland from 1908 to 1914. During this period he wrote "The Centaur" (1910), often considered his finest work, after a trip to the Caucasus Mountains. A trip to Egypt produced "The Sand", "A Descent in Egypt", and "The Wave". His "A Prisoner of Fairyland" was adapted by Sir Edward Elgar into the successful musical The Starlight Express.

'When the First World War broke out, Blackwood enlisted in the British military intelligence (seemingly a common career for writers in wartime). After the war, Blackwood returned to his native Kent and produced two more collections of stories Tongues of Fire and Shocks but the majority of his fiction output was drama or children's fantasies ....

'His admirer, H. P. Lovecraft, wrote of him in his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature": "Less intense than Machen in delieating the extremes of stark fear, yet infinitely more closely wedded to the idea of an unreal world constantly pressing upon ours is the inspired and prolific Algernon Blackwood, amidst whose voluminous and uneven work may be found some of the finest spectral literature of this or any age. Of the quality of Mr. Blackwood's genius there can be no dispute; for no one has even approached the skill, seriousness, and minute fidelity with which he records the overtones of strangeness in ordinary things and experiences, or the preternatural insight with which he builds up detail by detail the complete sensations and perceptions leading from reality into supernormal life or vision. Without notable command of the poetic witchery of mere words, he is the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere; and can evoke what amounts almost to a story from a simple fragment of humourless psychological description. Above all others he understands how fully some sensitive minds dwell forever on the borderland of dream, and how relatively slight is the distinction betwixt those images formed from actual objects and those excited by the play of the imagination."

'While Lovecraft considered "The Willows" to be not only "foremost of all" Blackwood's tales but the best "weird tale" of all time, Blackwood, who was familiar with Lovecraft's work, failed to return the compliment. As he told Peter Penzoldt, he found "spiritual terror" missing in his young admirer's writing, while it was all-important in his own.

'In 1934 Blackwood was invited to read ghost stories on BBC radio. This was a great success. Blackwood turned to broadcasting as a playwright and personality. In 1936 he began appearing on television. In 1949 he received the Television Society's medal and, in 1949, was made a commander of the British Empire. ... '

One of Blackwood's tales was included in Van Vechten's Lords of the Housetops (1921) an anthology of cat stories. We excerpt certain descriptive paragraphs from Blackwood's story titled, "A Psychical Invasion":

'Cats, in particular, he believed, were almost continuously conscious of a larger field of vision, too detailed even for a photographic camera, and quite beyond the reach of normal human organs. He had, further, observed that while dogs were usually terrified in the presence of such phenomena, cats on the other hand were soothed and satisfied. They welcomed manifestations as something belonging peculiarly to their own region. .... 

'The cat he chose,[to help his investigation] now full grown, had lived with him since kittenhood, a kittenhood of perplexing sweetness and audacious mischief. Wayward it was and fanciful, ever playing its own mysterious games in the corners of the room, jumping at invisible nothings, leaping sideways into the air and falling with tiny mocassined feet on to another part of the carpet, yet with an air of dignified earnestness which showed that the performance was necessary to its own well-being, and not done merely to impress a stupid human audience. In the middle of elaborate washing it would look up, startled, as though to stare at the approach of some Invisible, cocking its little head sideways and putting out a velvet pad to inspect cautiously. Then it would get absent-minded, and stare with equal intentness in another direction (just to confuse the onlookers), and suddenly go on furiously washing its body again, but in quite a new place. Except for a white patch on its breast it was coal black. And its name was--Smoke. 

'"Smoke" described its temperament as well as its appearance. Its movements, its individuality, its posing as a little furry mass of concealed mysteries, its elfin-like elusiveness, all combined to justify its name; and a subtle painter might have pictured it as a wisp of floating smoke, the fire below betraying itself at two points only--the glowing eyes. 'All its forces ran to intelligence--secret intelligence, wordless, incalculable intuition of the Cat. It was, indeed, _the_ cat for the business in hand.

[Which business involved the cat which ]
'....had jumped down from the back of the arm-chair and now occupied the middle of the carpet, where, with tail erect and legs stiff as ramrods, it was steadily pacing backwards and forwards in a narrow space, uttering, as it did so, those curious little guttural sounds of pleasure that only an animal of the feline species knows how to make expressive of supreme happiness. Its stiffened legs and arched back made it appear larger than usual, and the black visage wore a smile of beatific joy. Its eyes blazed magnificently; it was in an ecstasy. 'At the end of every few paces it turned sharply and stalked back again along the same line, padding softly, and purring like a roll of little muffled drums. It behaved precisely as though it were rubbing against the ankles of some one who remained invisible. A thrill ran down the doctor's spine as he stood and stared. His experiment was growing interesting at last.'

Other of Blackwood's writings also involve cats, for example the pdf available at this site.