The Centaur

Mike Ashley wrote in Algernon Blackwood: An Extraordinary Life that Blackwood regarded The Centaur as “the favourite among his novels, because it best represented all he was trying to achieve” and was “closest to his own personal outlook.”

Here is a passage from The Centaur describing a character with a lot of Blackwood in him, named Terence O’Malley; does it remind you of anyone else?

“Occasionally, and at the time of this particular ‘memorable adventure,’ aged thirty, he acted as foreign correspondent; but even as such he was the kind of newspaper man that not merely collects news, but discovers, reveals, creates it. Wise in their generation, the editors who commissioned him remembered when his copy came in that they were editors. A roving commission among the tribes of the Caucasus was his assignment at the moment, and a better man for the purpose would have been hard to find, since he knew beauty, had a keen eye for human nature, divined what was vital and picturesque, and had, further, the power to set it down in brief terms born directly of his vivid emotions.”

To me these words, written in 1911, scream the name of arguably the greatest writer of our own time. As do these:

“Ten men will describe in as many different ways a snake crossing their path; but, besides these, there exists an eleventh man who sees more than the snake, the path, the movement. O’Malley was some such eleventh man…
“The others reasoned where the snake was going, its length in inches and its speed per second, while he, ignoring such superficial details, plunged as it were into the very nature of the creature’s being… For him mere intellectuality, by which the modern world sets such store, was a valley of dry bones… It missed the essential inner truth…”

The writer I have in mind wasn’t one in eleven—he was unique. But he said that as a young man he was greatly influenced by Henry Miller, who has said that HE was greatly influenced by Algernon Blackwood. So there is a tangible connection between Blackwood and—Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

The farther I got in reading The Centaur, the more the allusions to O’Malley’s life and work intrigued me as they might also apply to the young Hunter Thompson of The Proud Highway (volume one of Thompson’s letters, edited by Douglas Brinkley), which I’m now re-reading. O’Malley is not a dead ringer for Thompson, by any means. But there is, I think, an evident kinship.

It’s fascinating to imagine what, if Hunter Thompson had found a mescaline pathway to the central vision of Blackwood’s Centaur, he would have made of the occasion—or better yet, what would have happened had he met, in real life, the gentleman O’Malley meets on the boat. Maybe O’Malley couldn’t hang; throughout much of The Centaur he definitely has The Fear. But I think they’d have enjoyed knowing each other. Blackwood himself would have had far more stamina than his alter ego, I think.

Blackwood’s introduction to mind-altering drugs included at least one bout with hashish pills (an experience he turned into an article) and a month’s worth of morphine injections, though it may be supposed that he dropped these experiments in favor of a mysticism fueled largely by theosophy. All of Blackwood’s works, like Thompson’s, would be based on personal experience.

Algernon Blackwood arrived in New York in September 1892; he and the friend he stayed with had $60 between them. Hunter Thompson arrived in New York with $119 in December 1957, and moved into a friend’s place. Both Blackwood and Thompson were outdoorsmen in excellent physical condition who supplemented their incomes early on with modeling work. In establishing themselves in the city as journalists, they dealt with several of the same publications. They found New York to be a terrific spectacle full of stimulating people but largely horrifying, particularly in contrast to the wild places they loved. In a l958 letter, Thompson described New York as a “huge tomb full of writhing, hungry death.” That pithy summation dovetails nicely with Blackwood’s opinion; Ashley titled the first New York chapter of his Blackwood biography “The Depths of Hell.”

O’Malley’s (and Blackwood’s) need to go to nature for succor and refreshment after the enervating experiences which drove them to write are expressed in terms with which Thompson would have identified in The Centaur:

“He (O’Malley) often would compare the thin help or fellowship he gained from ordinary social intercourse, or from what had seemed at the time quite a successful gathering of his kind, with the power he gained from a visit to the woods or mountains. The former, as a rule, evaporated in a single day; the other stayed, with ever growing power, to bless whole weeks and months.”

They had similar feelings about grey flannel suits and the whole concept of civilization: “Civilization, he (O’Malley) loved to say, had blinded the eyes of men, filling them with dust instead of vision.”

Afain and again Blackwood and Thompson stood at the intersecting edges of untamed nature and untrammeled mind, rocking on their heels, and looked over, seeking truth— then struggled to convey in words what can’t be described in words, and succeeded--by imbuing their writing with the palpable passion of a unique voice. It’s impossible to dissect the strange genius of either man--you can only speak dumbly about words you don’t so much read, as feel…

“…perception came to them in general, massive sensations rather than divided up neatly into five channels—that they felt all over so to speak, and that all the senses, as in an overdose of haschish, become one single sense.” (The Centaur)

Blackwood wasn’t widely hailed for The Centaur, which is difficult in that it doesn’t read well as a novel. That Blackwood has filled it with his own spirit and must have greatly enjoyed being immersed in the writing of it, is evidenced by the many other writers quoted in its pages; these were the writers most important to him. The gist of their perspective is that mankind has come too far from its primitive roots to perceive the layers of consciousness which include Gaia and the entire universe beyond—that every new civilization has diminished rather than improved the human condition.

To some of those who foretell the end of the world as we know it and the descent into utter chaos, this might conceivably be a comforting thought—that a return to nature would open the doors of perception, and man would no longer be limited to the use of a tiny sliver of his brain.

But ultimately O’Malley sought “the blending of his being with the Cosmic Consciousness,” submerging rather than developing his personality; Thompson embodied what he wrote in a 1958 letter, (The Proud Highway) “We strive to be ourselves.”

In the beginning pages of The Centaur, though, where O’Malley is introduced as an intense young man at odds with all current concepts of society and civilization, a provocateur with no fixed residence but a tiny room full of his books and papers, and a satchel ready for traveling, I saw a kind of preliminary ghost of the young man who would become Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

Later, in the world glimpsed by O’Malley that was populated by gods of man’s own making, I saw a likely limbo for the legendary Lono:

“He felt them now, these stately Powers men once called the gods, but felt them from a distance; and from a distance, too, they saw and watched him come. He knew their gorgeous forms half dimmed by a remote and veiled enchantment; knew that they reared aloft like ancient towers, ruined by neglect and ignorance, starved and lonely, but still hauntingly splendid and engaging, still terrifically alive.” (The Centaur)

It would be Thompson who woke that god:

“Because I AM Lono…and every night around sundown I crawl out and collect all the joints, coins, and other strange offerings thrown over the stake fence by natives and others of my own kind. So don’t worry about me…” (from a letter to Ralph Steadman also reprinted in Songs of the Doomed.)

Here is another powerful bit of imagery from Thompson’s The Curse of Lono which brings to mind a certain passage in The Centaur (which I won’t quote because it’s integral to the unfolding of that story):

“Over the side. Into the deep, blowing air like a porpoise as he slid away from the rocks and out to the open sea, disappearing into the ocean with the atavistic grace of some mammal finally remembering where it really wanted to be.” (For the full story, see pgs. 202 & 203 of the 2005 Taschen edition.)

Neither The Curse of Lono nor The Centaur has received the attention they deserve; neither the critics nor the authors’ fans wholly embraced either book, preferring other, greater works. But in my opinion, the closest we readers can come to meeting Blackwood and Thompson is to look for them in the books that come the nearest to self-portrait. And curiously, it is in these same works that they most nearly approach one another.

Thanks for stopping by!