LUCY LETHBRIDGE on Robert Aickman, master of mysterious fiction
‘In many of Aickman’s stories there is an atmosphere, both seductive and sinister, of pagan amorality’
In CAR Hills’s DNB entry on Robert Aickman, his subject’s pivotal role in the founding of the Inland Waterways Association is given more space than Aickman’s strange and extraordinary stories. What fed Aickman’s fictional dream journeys, his depictions of worlds almost our own but somehow off-kilter and oddly aligned?
He was born in 1914, the only product of a miserable marriage. His father, a wealthy textile manufacturer, was 30 years older than his mother and had been persuaded to marry her by her father whom he encountered in a public lavatory. That father was Richard Marsh, a wildly prolific Victorian novelist: in his most famous work,
The Beetle, an unemployed clerk comes upon a beetle disguised as a human. Marsh died when Aickman was a few months old but in the Aickmans’ Victorian villa in Stanmore, all was suppression and gloom. By the age of four, Aickman was left to his own devices, reading the Times cover to cover and preparing all his own meals.
After his parents’ separation, he lived alone in Stanmore, penning the odd theatre review. In a deadpan line worthy of an Aickman story, Hills’s biography notes that he was ‘eventually rescued from the severe depression this isolation caused when he began to attend the queue for tickets at London’s Covent Garden Opera and acquired a series of female friends and lovers’. He greatly preferred women to men and female allurements feature strongly in his stories, with weak, drifting male protagonists often buffeted, captured, seduced and ravished by strong, dangerous, unknowable women in powerful underwear. In many of them there is an atmosphere, both seductive and sinister, of pagan amorality.
He married eventually and ran a literary agency with his wife. After he fell madly in love with Elizabeth Jane Howard in the 1940s, they became a kind of threesome, Aickman’s wife Ray apparently relieved to share him. According to Howard, he was manipulative, insecure, possessive and his ‘hair was scraped back by quantities of Brylcreem’. Yet his conversation dazzled: when on good form he was ‘extraordinarily good company’. She remembered heated discussions on the theme of ‘decline’, Aickman being a believer that everything was going to the dogs: ‘Robert was particularly incensed by the closure of the tram system.’
Howard was given a job as typist at the Inland Waterways Association, founded in 1946 to preserve British canals by the Aickmans and their friends Tom and Angela Rolt and run, autocratically, by Aickman himself. He didn’t start writing fiction until the mid-1950s but one of the many pleasures of his stories is the way that the fussy bureaucratic plod of everyday life is often the gateway to a supernatural dreamscape – or to madness, depending. His characters are often clerkly types in town halls or the Civil Service. Sometimes they have creepily specific posts as in
Residents Only where the narrator is chairman of The Open Spaces and Cemeteries Committee. In The
Unsettled Dust, the main protagonist is Special Duties Officer of the Historic Structures Fund. Like MR James, Aickman employs the high-seriousness of officialdom and pseudo-scholarly paperwork to great effect.
His stories are like none other: creations of a hyper-real unreality (or perhaps a hyper-unreal reality). He takes for granted the reader needs no explanation for this journey – and indeed for anyone who has ever remembered a dream, no explanation is required. There are passages, roads to nowhere, doors ajar, forests, odd noises, dust that can never be dusted, an island of living rock, a man tormented by the incessant buzz of a red Moth bi-plane. As in dreams, the action is driven by a sense of inevitability, of human agency paralysed and yet compelled by mysterious forces. When a man comes home from the office to find a river at the end of his garden, he must get into the boat moored there: as the reader knows he must. When a woman lost in a wood finds a house, she knows, of course she does, that it is the dolls’ house of her childhood, and that she must enter it. A young man is seduced on the edge of a car park, in his lunch hour, by his girlfriend’s flatmate. The postman knows he must save the woman who slides through the letterbox the note ‘I find I am married to a man I do not know’; but is she actually real?
The stories offer no conclusions: the reader is dropped into a deep well and never reaches the bottom. Aickman is a master at conveying unease within the apparently familiar. He has a way of slipping in distracting, even pedantic, details to put us off our stride from the beginning. The opening sentence of
Hand in Glove goes like this: ‘When Millicent finally broke it off with Nigel and felt that the last tiny bit of meaning had ebbed from her life (apart, of course, from her job) it was natural that Winifred should suggest a picnic, combined with a visit, “not too serious”, as Winifred put it, to a Great House.’ It is the cosy opening frame of a story thoroughly, enjoyably, hauntingly, dementedly un-cosy. As with all Aickman’s stories, there is absolutely no way home again.