The Collected Short Fiction Part 73

Robert Fordyce Aickman was born in London on June 27, 1914. His father, William, was "the oddest man I have ever known." William had married at age 53 to a woman 30 years his junior and, being deeply set in his bachelor ways and accustomed to living alone, could not adapt to married life. This resulted in a family environment that was chaotic and emotionally empty, with the parents constantly bickering. Aickman's rancorous home life is mirrored in his stories "The Clock Watcher," "Ringing the Changes," "The Stains," "The Fetch," and others. When Aickman was a teen-ager, his mother deserted the family. His father also eventually left, living Aickman living at home alone.

Aickman was originally schooled in architecture, which was his father's profession. However, his interests were more in the arts. Apparently, writing was in his blood as his maternal grandfather, Richard Marsh, was a prolific Victorian novelist, who wrote The Beetle (1897), an occult novel that was almost as popular as Dracula in its time. Aickman's mother encouraged him to write. He stated, "My mother aimed from the start to make me an author." He started reading the cla.s.sics early and began writing while in school.

His first publication was the collection We Are For The Dark: Six Ghost Stories (1951), which contains three of his stories and three he wrote in collaboration with Elizabeth Jane Howard.

Critics have compared his work to that of Walter de la Mere and M.R. James. Peter Straub writes in his introduction to The Wine-Dark Sea: "What attracted Aickman to ghosts was not the notion of dripping revenants but the feeling composed in part of mystery, fear, stifled eroticism, hopelessness, nostalgia and the almost violent freedom granted by a suspension of rational rules which they evoked in him."

The protagonist in "The Visiting Star" (1966) is an author who spends a winter in a desolate English town while researching a book on the mining industry. A famous actress shows up to star in a play at a local theater. The actress has a split personality literally with a mysterious character accompanying her embodying that personality.

"The Inner Room" (1966) tells of Lene, who visits an old shop and buys an odd doll house, the windows of which are shut fast, except for one from which a doll is partially protruding. When Lene gets the doll house home, she finds all the windows are tightly closed, and the doll is nowhere to be seen. She cannot remove the roof or any of the walls, and the only access she has to the inside of the doll house is the front door. Her exploration of the interior reveals many strange and unsettling sights. During a thunderstorm, she has a dream of the doll house and awakens to hear unfamiliar footsteps and then to see life-size dolls skulking about in the darkness. Nevertheless, she keeps the doll house, which affects her strangely for the rest of her life.

In "The Hospice" (1975), a traveling businessman loses his way in a maze of rural roads and ends up at a mysterious inn, where he has a series of strange encounters. The protagonist in "Into the Wood" (1968) has a similar strange stay at a hotel in the Swiss Alps, but unlike the businessman, is changed by the experience.

"The Next Glade" (1983) is about a strange hidden glade in a small wooded area in which a woman, Noelle, loses a friend, John, while strolling with him. Months later, while walking there with her husband, Melvin, she finds John standing next to a small house and digging a garden trench. Melvin is mortally wounded by a knife he is using to clear the path. At the funeral, John appears and takes Noelle for a walk in the woods. When they reach the glade, the small house and trench are gone, replaced by a huge pit in which hundreds or thousands of men are workingor is it just a vision? John again disappears. This story reflects Aickman's preference of nature over industrial progress.

Aickman's short stories he published a total of 48 have been gathered into eight original collections and four reprint collections. Besides We Are For The Dark, the other original collections are: Dark Entries: Curious and Macabre Ghost Stories (1964); Powers of Darkness: Macabre Stories (1966); Sub Rosa: Strange Tales (1968); Cold Hand in Mine: Eight Strange Stories (1975); Tales of Love and Death (1977); Intrusions: Strange Tales (1980); and Night Voices: Strange Stories (1985). The reprint collections are Painted Devils: Strange Stories, which contains revised stories (1979); The Wine-Dark Sea (1988); The Unsettled Dust (1990); and The Collected Strange Stories, two volumes containing all of his published stories (1999).

"The Fully-Conducted Tour", a previously unpublished story, appeared in the Autumn 2005 issue (Issue 5) of Wormwood.

Besides short stories, Aickman wrote three novels: The Late Breakfasters (1964), about lesbian love, ghosts, and the reviled inhabitants of a mysterious mansion; The Model: A Novel of the Fantastic (1987), a fairy tale set in pre-revolutionary Russia; and Go Back at Once (unpublished).

On the non-fiction side, Aickman wrote The Story of Our Inland Waterways (1955) and two autobiographies, The Attempted Rescue (1966 and reprinted by Tartarus Press in 2001), which relates his early years, and The River Runs Uphill: A Story of Success and Failure (1986), about his involvement with the Inland Waterways a.s.sociation. He was also a theater critic for The Nineteenth Century and After, but his reviews have not yet been collected in book form.

Aickman edited eight volumes of the Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, from 1964 through 1972. He included a story of his in six of these anthologies, and he wrote introductions for all but one.

Some of his writing remains unpublished. Among these works are three plays, Allowance for Error, Duty, and The Golden Round; Panacea, a philosophical work, which runs to over a thousand pages in ma.n.u.script; and Go Back at Once. The ma.n.u.scripts of these works are among the papers preserved in the Robert Aickman Collection at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

A few of Aickman's works were adapted for other media. In 1968, "Ringing the Changes" appeared as "The Bells of h.e.l.l" on the BBC2 television program Late Night Horror. The same story was adapted for the CBC Radio drama series Nightfall on Halloween in 1980 and for BBC Radio Four on Halloween in 2000. "The Swords" was filmed in 1997 for the television horror series The Hunger. "The Same Dog" premiered as a musical play in 2000. "The Cicerones" was made into a short film in 2002 (which can be viewed at: The Cicerones).

As a conservationist, Aickman was best known as one of the co-founders of the Inland Waterways a.s.sociation, whose aim was to restore and preserve England's ca.n.a.l system. Another co-founder, L.T.C. Rolt, was also a writer of weird fiction.

Aickman won the 1975 World Fantasy Award in short fiction for his vampire story "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal" and the 1981 British Fantasy Award for his story "The Stains." The Collected Strange Stories won the 2000 British Fantasy Award for best collection.

Aickman developed cancer and refused conventional medical treatment. He died on February 26, 1981.

Ron Breznay.

Introduction To The Wine-Dark Sea by Peter Straub.

Aickman at his best was this century's most profound writer of what we call horror stories and he, with greater accuracy, preferred to call strange stories. In his work is a vast disparity between the well-mannered tone and the stories' actual emotional content. On the surface of things, if we can extrapolate from the style, diction, and range of allusion in his work, Aickman was a cultivated, sensitive, thoroughly English individual. It's not hard to imagine him as having been something like T. S. Eliot: dry of manner, more kindly than not, High Anglican in dress, capable of surprising finesses of wit. His chief influences were English, the stories of Walter De La Mare and M. R. James (and probably also the subtle, often indirect supernatural stories of Henry James, England's most a.s.similated American), and his own influence has been primarily on English writers like Ramsey Campbell and, through Campbell, Clive Barker. (I think Aickman would have cherished Barker's story 'In the Hills, the Cities.') In fact, neither Campbell nor Barker is really very much like Aickman. His originality, conscious and instinctive at once, was so entire that although he has provided us with a virtual model of what the 'strange story' should be, if anyone tried to write to its specifications, the result would be nothing more than imitative.

Unlike nearly everybody writing supernatural stories now, Aickman rejected the neat, conclusive ending. He was, you might say, Stephen King's opposite. In his work there are no climactic showdowns, in part because his work uses almost none of the conventional imagery of horror. Aickman was sublimely uninterested in monsters, werewolves, worms, rats, bats, and things in bandages. (He did, however, write one great vampire story.) Absent from this list of horror conventions is ghosts, because Aickman was interested in ghosts, at least in a way in the atmosphere a ghost creates, the thrill of unreality which surrounds it. Aickman was a queerly visionary writer, and ghosts, which are both utterly irrational and thoroughly English, would have appealed to him. In this collection a ghost might very well be making telephone calls in 'Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen,' and a kind of ghost, the 'old carlie,' plays a crucial role in 'The Fetch', one of the most explicit and straightforward pieces here. You could stretch a point stretch it past breaking and say that 'Never Visit Venice' concerns an encounter with a ghost. It does not, of course. What attracted Aickman to ghosts was not the notion of dripping revenants but the feeling composed in part of mystery, fear, stifled eroticism, hopelessness, nostalgia, and the almost violent freedom granted by a suspension of rational rules which they evoked in him. Ghosts or the complex of feelings I've just tried to summarise gave him a degree of artistic freedom granted to only a very few writers.

We are in the age of Dawn of the Dead and Friday the Thirteenth, and to describe a writer of supernatural stories as cultivated and sensitive is nearly to condemn him. I had better explain what I mean by those terms and describe what I see as their consequences. Aickman's general learning gave him a wide referential range: these stories often allude to the worlds of opera, art, and literature, and if you really know nothing at all about Mozart or Wagner or Homer, you will have to pay even more attention than usual while reading some of these stories. Aickman's 'cultivation', which to me feels like that of an autodidact, enabled him to draw more kinds of experience, more nuance and shading, into his work; and his sensitivity meant that he felt things very deeply, everyday life as well as great art. Very good horror writers often demonstrate that ordinary life can be horrific and tedious at once for the sensitive person, and one suspects it was so for Aickman. It is a great mistake to read the life of the writing for that of the writer, but these stories leave little doubt that for Aickman's sensibility the contemporary world was a raucous, clanging din growing ever emptier of any real content. He frequently tells us that he abhors man in the ma.s.s and the pleasures of the vulgar crowd, what in the wonderfully t.i.tled 'Never Visit Venice' he calls 'the world's new littleness'. Experience was being flattened out all around him, being rendered coa.r.s.er, simpler, and more accessible, and this process clearly made Aickman as 'sick at heart' as it does his protagonist, Henry Fern.

This response is not merely sn.o.bbish. There is too much sadness in it for that; and beneath the educated sadness, too much fear; and beneath the fear, too much respect for the great common human inheritance.

In nearly all of the stories collected here, the world of ordinary experience is as porous and malleable as a dream. 'Growing Boys' is a deadpan bit of uncharacteristic black humour in which the irrational and grotesque are hauled right into the immediate foreground of the story. (The only other story here as explicit as that, apart from 'The Fetch' and its family spectre, is 'The Wine-Dark Sea', a forthright allegory: as in a myth, man is blindly destructive to the original sacred world of the G.o.ds, and even Aickman's typically responsive and insightful lone traveller must be returned to the noisy, empty world he came from.) In every other story, the immediate result of a finely tuned sensibility finding danger and uncertainty everywhere in ordinary life is to make meaningless the concept of the 'ordinary'. Aickman's characters find themselves trapped in a series of events unconnected by logic, or which are connected by a nonlinear logic. Very often neither the characters nor the reader can be certain about exactly what has happened, yet the story has the satisfying rightness of a poem a John Ashbery poem. Every detail is echoed or commented upon, nothing is random or wasted. The reader has followed the characters into a world which is remorseless, vast, and inexorable in its operations.

Unconscious forces drive these characters, and Aickman's genius was in finding imaginative ways for the unconscious to manipulate both the narrative events of his tales and the structures in which they occur. Because there are no logical explanations, there can be no resolutions. After the shock of the sheer strangeness fades away, we begin to see how the facts of the stories appear to grow out of the protagonists' fears and desires, and how the illogic and terror surrounding them is their own, far more accurately and disturbingly than in any conventional horror story. 'The Trains' is a perfect story of this type, and 'The Inner Room' is even better, one of Aickman's most startling and beautiful demonstrations of the power over us of what we do not quite grasp about ourselves and our lives.

As wonderful as those stories are, 'Into the Wood' seems to me the masterpiece of the collection. In it all of Aickman's themes come together in an act of self-acceptance which is at once dangerous, enigmatic, in narrative terms wholly justified, and filled with the reverence for the imaginative power demonstrated by Aickman's work in general.

On the narrative surface 'Into the Wood' is about insomnia. Margaret, the wife of an English road builder, inadvertently comes upon a sanatorium set in a Swedish forest. After she has arranged to stay there for several days, she discovers that the sanatorium, or the Kurhus, is a refuge for those who never sleep: the rest of the world, the 'sleepers,' cannot tolerate their presence. True insomniacs 'have to live with reality twenty-four hours a day,' she is told, and their knowledge makes them feared. During the day they rest, aloof even from one another, and at night they walk in the woods around the sanatorium. Margaret's dissatisfaction with the empty social round she must endure as her husband's wife and her uneasiness at finding herself stranded amidst these silent and peculiar people are delineated subtly and economically. Aickman tells us that until her experience at the Kurhus, Margaret would have rejected the idea that she was unhappy, being 'insufficiently grown for unhappiness or happiness.' Swedish hospitality has exhausted her, but the Kurhus is like the Alice books in its reversal of ordinary rules and customs. Two orders of being are opposed here, and when Margaret enters the woods, she realises for the first time that her true self, the Margaret of her inner life, requires more spiritual and imaginative freedom than life with her husband provides. She senses that she has begun to find a way of being 'beyond logic, beyond words, above all beyond connection with... normal life.' She has found within herself a capacity for seeing what is real. That evening a sympathetic Kurhus resident tells her that 'only by great sacrifices can we poor human beings reach great truths.' Margaret instinctively knows what he means. Some few insomniacs, he says, walk into the great Swedish forest beyond the wood and never return: they have reached their limits and found their deepest truth.

From this point the story moves like a series of tapestries as it enacts the consequences of Margaret's strange encounter with her own being. In a sense, 'Into the Wood' is an extended metaphor for the separation, even estrangement, between the artist and the conventional world, and the artist's sense of an inner glory and necessity which can be shirked only at the expense of his true relationship to himself; or so I thought when I first read it, and was immediately grateful to have read it. But abstract reflections on 'the artist' are seldom satisfactory, and are never as satisfactory, nor as moving, as this story. We could say, far more pertinently, that if stories are ever about anything but the particular ways they are themselves and no other story, 'Into the Wood' is about being a dedicated, delicately organised man named Robert Aickman; about knowing there is a great wild forest within you; about understanding that you must go into that forest in search of your own limits; and doing so with the knowledge that many other people have felt that a world of unsentimental grandeur lies within and that to deny or ignore it is to choose an uneasy half-life. Aickman's originality was rooted in need he had to write these stories, and that is why they are worth reading and rereading.

1988 Seafront Corporation.

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