In The Dance of Death, Algernon Blackwood
uses the supernatural to express platitudes. A modern man, a modern-deskbound-man,
yearns for rugged nature. Mr Browne’s nine-to-five deadens him, you see.
Blackwood does not redeem this trite setup with nuance, character depth, and/or
Weirdness. From respect to Blackwood, an acknowledged master storyteller, I was
tempted to uncover layers of irony, to find, beneath the naïve protagonist’s
thoughts, a subtext criticising the protagonist’s naiveté. But no, The Dance of Death depicts a love of
nature held only by those who have never met nature.
Mr Browne
loves nature. He saves up, from his stultifying desk-job, so he may retire to a
life among nature. His doctor’s diagnosis, then, comes as quite a shock; and a
shock is the last thing he needs, what with his weak heart. Living among nature
would be far too strenuous for him. Even dancing must be undertaken with care.
He attends that night’s dance hesitantly and sadly. Then he sees a woman, Miss
Issidy, a woman none else seem to see, a woman more like a forest sprite than an
urban dancer. He dances with her, and she reveals she knows him, and was waiting
for him. We zoom out: Browne died on the dancefloor from overexertion. His boss
is glad to be rid of him.
The
Everyman is not a relatable character. Call me arrogant, but I cannot identify
with people who have no personality. Blackwood avoids all characteristics that
would distinguish his protagonist from his audience of middle-class
desk-jobbers, who divert their free-time by reading trite fantasies like this*.
Browne has a precarious post at his job, and daydreams about living ruggedly in
rugged nature. (You know, the type of guy who reads Walden and Fight Club for
escapism.) He has nothing else characterising him. He has a dream-destroying
heart problem – conflict! – but it is a conflict which afflicts a character
with no character, a character I am meant to care about merely because he,
hypothetically, resembles me.
Browne’s
driving passion in the story, the thwarted passion, is his naïve love of nature.
A love of nature that only we most tamed and civilised people have. A man who,
unironically, believes being a ‘shepherd’, a ‘dweller in the woods’, will stoke
his ‘savage yearnings’. Blackwood means me to feel sympathy for Browne, because
his weak heart ‘at one fell swoop … destroy[ed] a thousand dreams’. Yet all
these thousand dreams are insubstantial, mere daydreams about rustic idylls,
too Romantic to ever become reality.
But H P
Lovecraft praised Algernon Blackwood, so I shouldn’t dismiss him lightly.
Perhaps, on close-reading, this story will become a satire.
Looking for
irony, I can find it, in the first half. Blackwood’s page-long description of
Browne’s sensitivity to nature approaches self-awareness. A snippet:
‘[Browne] was an idealist at heart, hating the sordid
routine of the life he led as a business underling. His dreams were of the open
air, of mountains, forests, and great plains, of the sea, and of the lonely places
of the world. Wind and rain spoke intimately to his soul, and the storms of heaven,
as he heard them raging at night round his high room in Bloomsbury, stirred
savage yearnings that haunted him for days afterwards with the voices of the
desert.’
That first sentence is one-sentence description of so many
Everymen – good, good, that’s self-awareness to build on. Storms ‘spoke
intimately to his soul’ – something so earnest-sounding cannot be genuine;
Browne feels it, but Blackwood mocks it. Blackwood then contrasts Bloomsbury, an
upmarket area, with Browne’s ‘savage yearnings’ – so evocative of the bougie
kid who wants to travel Africa to ‘find himself’. Oh, and rainy storms filling Browne
with ‘voices of the desert’ implies he doesn’t know how deserts work.
This close-reading thing seems to work. I’m building respect
for Blackwood. Let’s turn the page.
Browne fears his weak-heart will force him to spend his
holidays and retirement ‘in some farmhouse “quietly,”
instead of gloriously in the untrodden wilds’. How different that ‘quiet’ life
would be from his dreams, his dreams of becoming ‘a shepherd on a hundred
hills, a dweller in the woods, within sound of his beloved trees and waters,
where the smell of the earth and campfire would be ever in his nostrils, and the
running stream always ready to bear his boat swiftly to happiness.’ If Browne
cringes at ‘quiet’ living, I’m surprised his daydreams don’t make him retch.
The ending neuters the text’s satiric potential. Brown meets
Miss Issidy, the spirit of Nature, or some such saccharinity. Issidy does not
belong to ‘ordinary humanity’, being invisible to all but Browne, and evoking a
‘young tree waving in the wind’, ‘ivy leaves’, and a ‘life of the woods.’ They
have an instant and soul-deep connection, as of a forest goddess and her
unwitting worshipper. They dance ‘with music … within, rather than without;
indeed they seemed to make their own music out of their swift whirling
movements’. Their dance lifts them from the hall, takes Browne over ‘the
dark-lying hills’, with the ‘cool air of the open sky on his cheeks’. The girl,
the spirit of Nature ‘melted away into himself and they had become one being’.
Browne dies in sublimity.
The moral of the story, children, is: Nature was in you all along.
The denouement, where Browne’s boss callously plans to replace
him with a more efficient worker, does not salvage the story. Rather than
pulling back from Browne’s daydream, showing perspective, the last paragraphs
validate Browne’s daydreams. The sordid world of business deserves to be
deserted, for nature is so much more fulfilling. The sentiment is valid, even
agreeable. But, as expressed by Blackwood, it is hardly interesting.
*This is
unfairly reductive towards middle-class desk-jobbers, but that’s the point:
such reductive characters don’t exist in real life.
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