The Promise of Air

A review from the Theosophical Outlook, Volumes 3-4:
If Christopher Morley were the author of Algernon Blackwood's "The Promise of Air," he might have described it on the jacket as being about blue eyes, advertising copy, Cambridge, the Rolls-Royce, Chopin, Schumann, the movies, wireless, airplanes, revolving desk chairs, the Kingdom of Heaven, yellow wagtails, perfumes and furs, flocks of stars, the winter temperature of robins, and analytical chemists.
Because I once wrote a story about a fellow with an obsession to be cradled in billows of air, this Blackwood book was wished on me to review. E. P. Dutton & Co.'s announcement of "The Promise of Air" had not made me eager to spend my money for the book. Neither had earlier reviewers' appraisal of it delivered what the kids around Gross Park, Chicago, used to call the "cardy blow" in their Hamilton school days. The reviewers had declared with mild and reserved literary caution that one might like the book very much, or not so very much. It simmered down to a fifty-fifty case of plus and minus.
I began reading "The Promise of Air" in the Hudson tubes. The air. as usual, was thick, vitiated, unsanitary, and unlovely. The pack of commuters from points on the Lackawanna who hemmed me in were chewing Life Savers, gnawing chicle, and gasping for green fields and sunny air. For once I was among, but in nowise of them. I had made a great discovery. The Blackwood book acted as the perfect antidote to the toxins of commuting. The Duttons should pile dunes of it at every station in tube and subway. It should be advertised in every packed and humid streetcar, elevated, and suburban train.
Mr. Algernon Blackwood has put a pulmotor between book covers. It is deep breathing transmuted into print. It is a rhapsody on air, achieved, happily, with British restraint. It is the story of Joseph Wimble, and Joan, his wife, and Joan, his daughter. This odd Wimble individual has peculiar eyes, peculiar hunches, peculiar longings. He objects to his bones, his flesh, to his being on the ground. He regards gravity as the devil because it keeps him from soaring into the sun. At times he feels his heart flutter; he feels wings in it. He learns at school in "a flashing, darting, sudden way, like the way of a bird." He feels that life is much too rigid.
The narrative moves rapidly forward with gusts of sentences, billows of paragraphs, swinging chapters. The whimsical theme is developed with emotional brilliance and elasticity. It swoops, and soars, and glides. It is a buoyant emotional statement of the restlessness of the race. It is ornithology without Latin. It's flying without a reference to aces, Caproni triplanes, or horsepower. At times you don't know what Mr. Blackwood is talking about, but that does not matter. You get the impression of lift and surge, which is what you want if you commute.
"Fly at everything you're afraid of. That paralyzes it. It can't happen then," you discover. You also discover that "societies are cages. You're caught and you can't fly on." Here is Blackwood occultism hitting the earth with a bounce and shooting away on new slants. You are glad Mr. Blackwood has eschewed for the moment things like "Day and Night Stories" and "Julius La Vallon."
You know what he means when he says: "A new language is floating into the world from the air - a new way, a bird way of communicating." And again: "A new language is wanted-a flying language with a rapid air vocabulary, condensed, intense." Whereupon he turns around and knocks the wind out of his lament by writing sentences like this: "January sparkled, dropped like a broken icicle, and was gone." An English writer who can carve a sentence like that out of the English language has no business to complain. He can have some of my money every time he chooses to write another book.