THE DEEP ONES: "A Touch of Pan" by Algernon Blackwood

"A Touch of Pan" by Algernon Blackwood

Discussion begins November 3, 2021.

First published in Day and Night Stories (1917).



BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?63841

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural
The Dance of Death and Other Stories

ONLINE VERSIONS

http://algernonblackwood.org/Z-files/The_Touch_of_Pan.pdf

ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiDlqzzqWec

MISCELLANY

https://weirdfictionreview.com/2013/01/wfrs-101-weird-writers-19-algernon-blackw...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algernon_Blackwood
https://tellersofweirdtales.blogspot.com/2017/12/a-little-or-lot-on-algernon-bla...
https://tinyurl.com/ve99ff8z

Pandaemonium continues. (It continues online for me.)

I note that the Weird Fiction Review piece complains about the use of the label “ghost story” for stories that contain or reference no ghosts, apropos of my comment in the other thread.

The descriptions of Blackwood's novel The Centaur are reminiscent of the Benson story we just read, "The Man Who Went Too Far".

I found this well written, but I find it difficult to share Blackwood's evident sympathies. The lifestyle of the the sophisticated set may be shallow and articifical, but at least it's possible for mere humans.

Were Heber and Elspeth born Bacchic creatures, brought up in human society as changelings, or did they somehow get transformed into faun and nymph under the influence of the deity? The horns grow before their encounter with Pan, but the grove perhaps works enough of his power?

Wow. I've never previously come across this one; and it's altogether too much for me to get a proper hold of in one reading. There is so much going on, and on so many levels. It seems, for a while, to be developing into a rather charming love story; but that's not it, really, is it? Even before the turn the story took when the main couple went back to look through the windows, it was striking me as rather sad: there seems to be longing and, perhaps, loss to the narrative voice and I wondered how old Blackwood was when he wrote it (I note from the OP that he was forty-eight when it was published, but when was it written), perhaps a regret for lost youth or lost opportunities?

I got an impression that he wrote it in a rush, almost stream of consciousness, without much preparation or revision, and I wondered if he was feeling a need to get something out of his system.

It doesn't help that the inclusion of Saki's 'The Music on the Hill' in these threads set me off on a weeks long Saki kick, so I've come to this with my mind very much attuned to Saki. Their similarities in background and age shows in the writing and I struggled to disentangle this story (or my thoughts, pehaps) from Saki's cynicism ... but then, thinking over the opening page or two and the section after that turn, I decided there actually was quite enough cynicism for Saki.

I'm definitely feeling the need for rereadings and some background reading to get much further with this ...

The overall impression for me was one of elemental powers, the allegorical trappings (humans opening themselves to instinctive nature, humans warping their nature through artifice and social vice) there to give shape to the plot but seemingly not more important than that.

Overall I like the approaches of Saki and Forster better, more rooted in a ritual civility and the sacred that can be found in civilization, than Blackwood's preference for abandoning the social world. Benson would fit somewhere between these, a foot still in the social world, but looking to someone stepping away from it.

In the end, though, the gist of all (Saki, Forster, Benson, Blackwood) seem to align with one another, rather than painting drastically different pictures of Pan.

>7 elenchus:

Pan is another of those topics I've long been meaning to read up on. I mean as regards his popularity in Edwardian times. He turns up all over the place apart from the weird and horror genres. The Wind in the Willows (1908) comes to mind. A passing reference of the fear of Pan in Murder Must Advertise (1933) suggests to me he was in the air a lot in DLS's formative years. He must have chimed somehow with the zeitgeist of the day and I'd love to know the why and how of it. I wonder if the Great War finished him off; perhaps brought the literary classes 'down to earth', so to speak?

>8 alaudacorax:
DLS had a penchant for the Gothic and the spooky. Her book The Nine Tailors is a Gothic story and includes quotes from Le Fanu and uses a character and other elements from the stories of M R James.

>9 pgmcc:

Damn! Another reminder of my near-terminal tardiness! >8 alaudacorax: had me checking back in my journals and, rather to my shock, I realised I've been 'meaning to' read up on Pan for ten years! Now you've reminded me that I resolve to read Wylder's Hand every time I read The Nine Tailors (an all-time favourite and what I class as a 'comfort read'—the kind of thing I'll escape to when miserable with flu or some such thing) and I still haven't.

Anyway, last night I was pondering over whether to buy Paul Robichaud's Pan: The Great God’s Modern Return (no touchstone, oddly), or Pan the Goat-God: His Myth in Modern Times (expensive), or both; and now I'm going to have to add Wylder's Hand to the shopping bag—well, it's Le Fanu, isn't it, so deserves a nice, hard copy.

>10 alaudacorax: - ... well, it's Le Fanu, isn't it, so deserves a nice, hard copy.

Hah! 'Print on demands' or high prices. I'll read it on my Kindle ...

Well, Blackwood certainly goes full pagan with this one. I kept help thinking, given his mystical interests and own love of nature, that his attitudes weren't far from Hebers and Elizabeth.

Blackwood, of all the authors of Pan stories we just finished most emphasizes the sheer abandon Pan represents and the purely pagan celebration of nature and rejection of civilization. Forester’s Pan may reveal nature’s secrets, but the abandon of worshipping Pan is muted in that story compared to Blackwood’s. Saki has the pagan worship of Pan but mostly emphasizes the perils of interfering in it sacrifices to a fertility god, but Blackwood goes into the details of it and its nature worship and the orgies of nymph and satyr. Benson’s story centers on the pursuit of joy, but Blackwood’s is more detailed in the ecstasy of joy.

I also wondered about those horns of Elizabeth and Hebers. Will they return to normality when the sun rises, marry in our world? Or will they somehow permanently inhabit Pan's realm.

It's interesting that, of all the Pan stories we've read so far, this is the only one with lovers in it. (I don't think the married protagonists of Forester's and Saki really count.) Blackwood introduces eroticism right at the first meeting of Elizabeth and Herbers when she asks him to remove her shoes.

I assumed they permanently joined Pan's realm, FWIW.

>12 RandyStafford:, >13 AndreasJ:

Well, they do get married at some point; which must, perforce, have involved some return to the 'unsupernatural' world. The first couple of paragraphs don't really read as if Blackwood is talking about a ceremony in the woods with Pan officiating; though it has just dawned on me that those paragraphs, perhaps, leave the nature of their married life open to interpretation. This marriage business, though, was one of the reasons I wrote in >6 alaudacorax: about feeling it was written in a rush—I half-suspect he'd forgotten about it by the time he'd got to the end.

>12 RandyStafford:

A bit embarrassed to say that I hadn't realised we were doing a Pan series—been too busy with one thing or other to drop in here much, lately. As I've just added the subject of Pan in Victorian and Edwardian literature to the list of stuff I'm over-busy with (>10 alaudacorax:), I see I have more reading to do here ...

>14 alaudacorax: Well, they do get married at some point; which must, perforce, have involved some return to the 'unsupernatural' world.

Not sure why it must. Grecian supernaturals marry all the time (and occasionally stay faithful).

>15 AndreasJ: ... and occasionally stay faithful

I must admit I can't think of any such instances, but fully admit I have a familiarity with Greek myth at a general level and don't recall details like that.

>16 elenchus:

I think Hades and Persephone might have been the one instance of a faithful, happy marriage. I'm sure I remember reading that somewhere ...

>15 AndreasJ: - Not sure why it must.
>14 alaudacorax: - The first couple of paragraphs don't really read as if Blackwood is talking about a ceremony in the woods with Pan officiating ...

Now you've got me doubting myself. Perhaps that second paragraph is not as cut and dried as I thought ...

I didn't read this in one sitting but in two, several days apart. Not ideal of course and everybody's comments above had me scrambling back to the opening paragraphs, and sort of putting the narrative together in my head.

So Heber and Elspeth come back to the mundane world and marry. The growing of horns and so on - "just" some sort of mystical experience? Were all the other nymphs and satyrs, and Pan himself, actually the spirit of the woods (justifying the stories inclusion in a collection of ghost stories, maybe)?

The observations on the Bright Young Things* in the house, and the contrast with the cavortings in the wood, seemed to be to point up that Blackwood was both a Victorian and a "Nature Boy"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq0XJCJ1Srw

The photo-hippie vibe also chimes with Pan's 1960s resurgence. Or that's how it seems, from Pink Floyd's debut LP being named after the Pan chapter in The Wind in the Willows, to Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka, to the Top of the Pops dancers being named "Pan's People". But then, the UK paperback publisher Pan Books had started back in 1944 (with a logo designed by Mervyn Peake). So I don't know.

This story is also, I realise, structured like the stories Blackwood told on television and radio (judging by the remaining evidence of two cinema shorts - from the time when British film was copying and adapting stories, and borrowing stars, from the new rival mass media). I mean it's introduced as an anecdote about someone he knows (in other stories, perhaps we know him too, "do you remember old so-and-so?"). I'm not sure if this is important, stylistically. Maybe it makes the story more - struggling to think of the right word - more intimate? confiding?

* I use the term slightly anachronistically, I know, (the story being published in 1917 but, I assume, with a pre-War setting) but that's definitely how they come across.

I have this story in a cheap hardback collection, from 1977, that I found in a charity bookshop in 2017.



I thought the jacket (actually, inside flap) copy might be of interest, for what it said about Blackwood, and in passing, what it said about M. R. James and H. P. Lovecraft - although I have to wonder: were they known to the casual reader back then, or is the assumed familiarity with their work actually a clever rhetorical device, flattering the customer's knowledge whilst actually informing them about what the two writers are about?

>20 housefulofpaper:

I like Munch's woodcuts as much as anyone, but hummm ... cover image for a collection of Algernon's supernatural fiction? I presume it was public domain and indicates the general audience targeted by the publisher.

I did enjoy reading the flap copy, thanks for posting that.