Robert Aickman: An Attempted Biography by R.B. Russell (Tartarus Press, 2022)

Alone and lost in a dream of the past

Having never read Aickman's fiction, I am really not qualified to discuss questions of art and aesthetics explored in Robert Aickman: An Attempted Biography by R.B. Russell (Tartarus Press, 2022). Likewise Aickman's organizing work for Inland Waterways. Author R.B. Russell has clearly spent a long time with a very uncongenial fellow human, and written about him at length with skill, sympathy, patience, and a sense of humor. 

Below I add some lines I underlined during reading.

* * *

Chapter Seventeen: Strange Stories

[....]'The School Friend' is a good example of Aickman's credo that the ghost story is akin to poetry, with suggestion and allusion offering greater power than straightforward exposition. The horror is more disturbing for readers when they have to follow the clues, but suspect that these have not all been supplied. For Aickman to have clearly described miscegenation as the result of abusive and/or supernatural sex would have simply made the story a crass tale of horror. And besides, there are hints at further complexity, with the possibility being left open that Sally herself may not have been naturally conceived.

[....]He also admits that an effective ghost story is difficult to write, but that, 'a vital ingredient is beauty. In all beauty, said Hesiod, is an element of strangeness.'

[....]He claims that the best era for the ghost story, 'the Romantic age', was the later eighteenth century to a 'pre-1914 Eden'. He writes, 'organisation, uniformity, and sheer noise have encroached that much further upon the imagination and the soul' that effective ghosts, fictional and real, are less often encountered.

[....]His introductions to the volumes of ghost stories are always interesting, often knowledgeable, but could not be called scholarly. For a popular series of paperback anthologies this is understandable, but Aickman is not always coherent in his arguments, preferring to appeal more to the emotions than the intellect.

[....]The [Powers of Darkness] cover design shows a Rorschach Test-style ink-blot, which is an apt metaphor for Aickman's psychologically suggestive stories.

[....]Aickman's Introduction [Third Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories] argued that there are two good reasons for reading a ghost story, the first being the 'need we all must feel for some degree of reconciliation with death'. The second,

. . . is vaguer but more continuously present in the consciousness of most of us: the need to escape, at least occasionally, from a mechanistic world, ever more definable, ever more predictable, and, therefore, ever more unsatisfying and frustrating. As an antidote to daily living in a compulsorily egalitarian society, a good ghost story, against all appearances, can bring real joy.[39]

[....]Of 'The Beckoning Fair One' [by Oliver Onions], it must be said that it is one of the (possibly) six great masterpieces in the field; constellated here with Algernon Blackwood's 'The Wendigo' in the first collection, and Robert Hichens's 'How Love Came to Professor Guildea' in the second.[40]

Chapter Eighteen: A Tainted Star, and a Fascination for Fascism

[....]Aickman's reactionary and right-wing political views were always complicated, not least by his innate pessimism and his romantic and artistic perspective on history. He would later sympathise with certain positive comments Kirby McCauley made about the English politician Enoch Powell, whose 'Rivers of Blood' speech (1968) was condemned by The Times as 'evil'. Aickman stated he disliked Powell because he was a political opportunist intent on creating social discord:

      

     I do not say he is even wrong in his views about colour, but the trouble with him is that he [has] . . . no real solution to offer.[9].

      

     Aickman also complained that Powell was a 'Little Englander',[10] and a 'very inferior'[11] Oswald Mosley (founder of the British Union of Fascists in 1932). Mosley was an aristocrat, which commended him to Aickman, who made the point that,

      

     So many people when finding their political or other brilliance impeded and frustrated by mass mediocrity, have recourse to desperate measures; desperate and, usually, unproductive also.[12]

      

     Aickman believed that strong, clever men with hereditary rank and titles had a right to lead. He would make a point of visiting Benito Mussolini's tomb when visiting Italy in 1970, and to McCauley he would assert:

      

     No man could dispute that Franco has achieved marvels in Spain.[13]

Chapter Nineteen: Sub Rosa

[....]Sub Rosa received few reviews. The writer Fritz Leiber discussed the book in the magazine Fantastic, understanding Aickman and his style well, while admitting,

      

     Nevertheless, for a story that is not to be pure psychopathology, I want more than simply the given (This is my horror, the writer says, take it or leave it). I want some powerful suggestion that there has been a suspension of natural law, an intrusion of outer forces that amounts to more than a kink in the human brain.[25]

      

     This was a philosophical difference that has made Aickman a difficult author for admirers of, say, H.P. Lovecraft to come to terms with. Such readers often want the horror not to be an internal battle, but an obvious external threat. At the other end of the spectrum, some fans of writers like M.R. James are frustrated at Aickman's delight in leaving threads unresolved and unexplained.

[....]The story ['The Swords'] is equally horrible about men as women, and is fundamentally pessimistic about human relationships on any level. It is also a story that could be described as having an element of sadism, which Aickman had previously argued was the failing of horror stories.

[....]Mann appears to have seen the supernatural very much as I see it, though possibly with a shade more moral significance. The last scene in 'Death in Venice' is, among other things, a tour de force in supernatural writing.[37]

[....]There is evidence that a mystical, clairvoyant faculty of a most practical kind is commonly taken for granted in many 'primitive' societies, from pre-Communist Tibet to the Hebrides; and is merely bred out and killed off by industrialism, compulsory education, and the belief that every question has an answer.

[....]Despite admitting that psychic research and ghost fiction were far apart, he claimed that the latter would be nothing without the former.

Chapter Twenty: Fandom and Fantasy Conventions

[....]He expected to give a speech [1975 First World Fantasy Convention], no doubt along the lines of the essay that was later published in the First World Fantasy Awards book edited by Gahan Wilson, published by Doubleday. It would have included many of Aickman's main interests and preoccupations. The essay begins with him stating his belief that mankind took a wrong turning at the time of the Industrial and French revolutions, which he likened to a Faustian pact with the Devil. Rejecting science and embracing 'religion, poetry, art, the imagination, and the spirit',[31] he sympathised with Nostradamus, St Malachy and even Mother Shipton, who all foresaw the impending end of the world. 'Everything that matters is indefinable,' he declared, bringing in both Blake and Freud. He invokes ' "the promptings of the muse" ' and states that his own best work came to him 'as if dictated, and in very little need of subsequent correction; as if written in at least a half trance'. It is a terrific piece of writing, and with Aickman's many years' experience of public speaking would have made a powerful speech.

[....]he did tell McCauley that Russell Kirk's The Surly Sullen Bell, was 'quite simply, the best collection of new stories by a single writer that I have read for at least twenty years, and perhaps much more.'

[....]Rosemary's Baby (the novel) he thought 'a good shocker'. As to films, he enthused about Leni Riefenstahl, Das Blaue Licht in particular. Ugetsu Monogotari and (later, after I'd commended it to him) Picnic at Hanging Rock drew his praise. A mention of Don't Look Now provoked his ire—'offensive to du Maurier, to the ghostly and to Venice in particular'.

[....]The books by the great writers of supernatural fiction he appears to have retained must have been those he considered the most important: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by M.R. James (Dover, 1971, paperback), Holy Terrors by Arthur Machen (Penguin, 1946, paperback), The Dunwich Horror by H.P. Lovecraft (Lancer, 1963, paperback). Of more recent writers, he retained five books by Russell Kirk: The Surly Sullen Bell, Lord of the Hollow Dark, Old House of Fear, and The Princess of All Lands. He had six by Stephen King: Salem's Lot, Danse Macabre, The Stand, Cujo, The Dead Zone and Night Shift. He also owned books by Clark Ashton Smith, and Ramsey Campbell's The Doll Who Ate His Mother.

Chapter Twenty-One: Abiding Interests

[....]There should be no doubt of Aickman's sincere belief in supernatural manifestations

he made it crystal clear in his Introductions to the Fontana Great Ghost Stories series.

[....]In the Introduction to the Third Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories Aickman wrote:

There has been, in fact, no people and no culture without ghosts, except, perhaps, the Communist (so far), and no land without poltergeist disturbances from earliest times. But England is generally regarded as the metropolis of the supernatural, as of lyric poetry. In England you cannot gather together more than twenty random people without it transpiring that at least one of them has had a paranormal experience, and very likely seen an apparition. What is more, there will regularly be among the twenty a further person who has been through something considerably more upsetting than the tale told by the first speaker in the group; so upsetting that the person does not care to talk about it, except sometimes to a single individual of proven sympathy.[20]

[....]Heather Smith remembers, 

He felt very strongly that he had been born in the wrong age, and this led him to believe in another world. He believed that things intruded from time to time—things we weren't really meant to know anything about.[22]

[....]Aickman told them of another experience: 

One day he woke up on board a boat and he saw a hand pressed against a porthole or a cabin window. But the hand was on the water side, not the tow-path side, where there was no way a hand could have got there.

[....]Aickman's interest in the paranormal, be it in ghosts, poltergeists,[24] spirit writing,[25] talking mongooses, or spontaneous human combustion,[26] as well as his sympathy with astrology,[27] the Tarot,[28] palmistry,[29] water divining,[30] graphology,[31] homeopathy,[32] the American Bigfoot,[33] U.F.O.s[34] and a later interest in the Swedenborg Society[35] are all indicative of his desire that there should be 'a world elsewhere'. Perhaps he was more than a little concerned that no such elsewhere might exist? His interest was measured, however, and he could be critical. He did not accept every paranormal or occult theory he came across.

Chapter Twenty-Two: Love, Friendship and the Artist

[....]as Jean Richardson pointed out, 

Robert saw himself first and foremost as an artist—and this conditioned his whole attitude to life. His one skill was writing, and yet he was not a writer in the modern sense of the word in that he was unwilling—and perhaps unable—to harness this skill to the task of earning a living. . . . His inability to turn writing into a full-time occupation left him without the means to earn a living, and this in turn conditioned his whole life. He never conquered the outside world in which a man establishes himself partly by his ability to make money. Instead, Robert hankered after the world of private incomes and dreamed of meeting a woman with enough money to keep him, rather than his having to keep her. He did have a small private income and was always very careful with money, and managed to give the impression that he was much better off than he really was, but he did count every penny and was a stickler about paying one's own way.[17]

[....]D'Annunzio's ultra-aristocratic ideas are identical to those of Nietzsche and Aickman, who did not believe in democracy.

[....]Aickman believed in the power of rhetoric over considered argument, and emotion over logic. His continual complaints about the modern world and his suggestions for a better future were not necessarily meant to be understood, but felt.

[....]The author was certain that such efforts to show mankind the way forward were doomed to fail, just as he had not succeeded in changing society through his activities with the I.W.A.

[....]He stated that since his resignation (which he reported was in 1964) he had undertaken his 'most important writing'.

'I was born under Cancer, a water moon sign and it has obviously had a strong influence on my life. I was sufficiently concerned to want to rescue the waterways, such intrinsically beautiful things. I am also a Romantic in the sense of the great Romantic age, in that I don't think the visual and aural are the whole of experience. Some time ago, there was an article about me in a little specialist paper called Shadow which said that I was unique. There were no comparisons for the kind of stories I write. I'd rather there were though. Two of the last great ghost story writers have recently died. L.P. Hartley was the leading performer in his day and Elizabeth Taylor wrote some beautiful ones. Much of her work has a luminous other-worldliness quality. Living ones? None really. Elizabeth Jane Howard started by writing a wonderful ghost story.'

[....]From the literary point of view, the great writers of ghost stories have been extinct since the great period 1870-1940. Perhaps it reflects what's happened to writing all round. They say we are entering the age of Aquarius which fills me with horror. It's supposed to be the end of the era of imagination and the beginning of an age of fads.'

Chapter Twenty-Three: Tales of Love and Death

[....]'Wood' was first published in Superhorror, edited by Ramsey Campbell (W.H. Allen, 1976 and St Martin's Press). As with many of Aickman's stories, it begins prosaically enough, but the final scenes are quite surreal. Once again Aickman has nothing good to say about marriage, and after his story 'The Clock Watcher', one also wonders about his attitude towards cuckoo clocks.

[....]The story 'Marriage', characteristically, is not about marriage as it might be understood conventionally. The protagonist, Laming, meets chaste and pretty Helen Black, but has sexual assignations with her flatmate, the sultry Ellen Brown. Whatever Aickman is saying about women does not appear to be complimentary, but he deflects accusations of misogyny by making his male hero so pathetic.

Jay

4 February 2022