There's Nothing in Why: Robert Aickman's "The View"

"The View," Robert Aickman's third contribution to We Are for the Dark, is the first of four of his "strange stories" that have very similar narrative outlines. A man goes on holiday, where he meets an attractive and mysterious woman with whom he forms a brief, blissful physical relationship before some disaster separates them, bringing his happiness to an end. This might be "The View," or "The Wine-Dark Sea" (where there are three essentially interchangeable women rather than one), or "Never Visit Venice," or "The Stains." To point out this similarity is not to suggest that the stories are repetitive; indeed they are not, for the specificities, of character and setting and supernatural phenomenon, render them quite distinct. One common feature, however, makes them difficult to write about within the framework of these essays: there is little about them to explain. Both in terms of broad narrative meaning and of wide-ranging theme, they seem to me fairly straightforward. (If I can be forgiven a digression, this may be why they have never struck me as among Aickman's finest tales; the air of unsettling ambiguity, though present in all of them, is not as strong or as all-pervading. In this, and in most other ways, I think "The View" is the best of the four.)

One could, of course, dig deeper, searching for a hidden level of meaning, a key to unlock the story and make every bewildering detail relevant. But I'm not sure that's a helpful approach. Both Aickman's theory of the ghost story as an artifact of the unconscious, "akin to poetry," and his philosophical stance that the modern over-reliance on reason and the scientific method represents a "wrong turning" for the human race, suggest that past a certain point the search for meaning is fruitless or even dangerous. "The View," though not the first Aickman story to hint at his criticism of the modern world-- there are intimations of that perspective in both "The Trains" and "The Insufficient Answer"-- is the first to move it into the foreground, contrasting the over-explained, dreary, unhappy world of contemporary England with the baffling, beautiful, fascinating Island and its lovely inhabitant, Ariel.

The critique of modernity begins with the description of the protagonist's temperament in the second paragraph. "Carfax always saw all good in terms of 'emancipation': all beauty, all duty. Others had seen the vision, but the slave selves of their past had intervened, making the gorgeous tawdry, the building in strange materials as rapidly failing in beauty, use, and esteem as the human body itself." (In the same vein is his later remark that "There are no beautiful houses in England now. Only ruins, mental homes, and Government offices." Note, by the way, that Carfax's own brief escape from his "slave self" is followed by the rapid aging of his own body.) Shortly afterward comes a glimpse of several such slave selves, in the array of overheard comments on the deck of the boat, which captures in a few brief paragraphs the depressing, faintly absurd quality of daily life and the various unsatisfactory bulwarks built against it.

"She has no idea how plain she is and of course you can't tell her," observed a conspicuously unattractive woman of about forty-five to a replica of herself.

"Communism gives the workers something to work for," vehemently asserted a man in a raincoat. His wispy colorless hair appeared on his prematurely obtruding scalp-line like the last vegetation in the dust bowl.

"So I said I'd give it to her if she promised to have it dyed green," remarked a round matron to her bored and miserable-looking husband.

"If you'll bring in the orders, I'll look after production. You can leave that to me. I know how to handle the ruddy Government."

"In the end I had to drag the clothes off her, and she tried to turn quite nasty." The speaker looked away from the other man and laughed gloatingly before resuming his former confidential manner.

"There's no hope for the world but a big revival of real Christianity," said the serious-minded, rather important-looking man. He was apparently addressing a large popular audience. "Real Christianity," he said again with emphasis.

"Look, Roland! A porpoise!" said a woman of thirty to her offspring, in the tone of one anxious to guide rather than dominate the child's formative years.

The pessimistic tone set by this passage and by the disagreeable boat journey is disrupted by the arrival of the woman known as Ariel, Aickman's first real femme fatale and the voice in this story of the rejection of modern communal values. There is her dismissal of her real names as "hideous commonplaces names of schoolgirls and young brides, and elderly lonely pensioners, and pure women in books. Godparents' names. Goodly names. Useful names which people in shops can spell." There is her description of Carfax's usual existence:

You live surrounded by the claims of other people: to your labor when they call it peace, to your life when they call it war; to your celibacy when they call you a bachelor, your body when they call you a husband. They tell you where you shall live, what you shall do, and what thoughts are dangerous. Does not some modern Frenchman, exhausted by it all and very naturally, say 'Hell is other people'?

The complaints she invokes are at once sweeping-- describing life in England as lived "entirely among madmen"-- and exact-- references to the absence of British taxes on the Island and to eating a lot of butter with breakfast. And finally there is the couplet written in her hand, reiterating her rejection of the pursuit of explanation: "There's nothing in why/The question is How?/Whatever you learnt/From the golden bough."

Faced with a story that itself seems to abrogate exegesis, one might simply throw up one's hands and enjoy it as an encounter with the irrational and beautiful and disturbing world that exists, or might exist, or ought rightly to exist, under and around the common one. But the details of that world, while not fitting into a reductive schematic explanation, do contribute to its resonance in ways that may not be obvious. "The View" is one of Aickman's more profusely allusive stories, rich in reference to the worlds of myth and art, and the remainder of this essay will track down some of those allusions for the benefit of readers who don't wish to do so themselves, suggesting in places how they relate to the larger theme of the story. Such a process does, of course, leave one at risk of "fancying absurd resemblances" and "making quite false identifications," but when analyzing Aickman, such risk is never far away.

Carfax: the name of Dracula's home in England in the Stoker novel, but I doubt that matters much. Its origin is in the Latin word for a crossroads, which would certainly fit the character's status, but it may just be the sort of British name Aickman was drawn to: at once vaguely aristocratic and faintly ridiculous (cf. Wendley Roper, Laming Gatestead).

Ariel: Shakespeare's air spirit from The Tempest, obviously, perhaps with reference also to the Biblical angel of the same name. Considering the gender ambiguity surrounding the Shakespearean character, which is explicitly mentioned in the story, the Aickman character's habit of dressing as a man is striking, if only as a suggestion of a more than human quality or of a duality comparable to a simultaneously human and non-human nature.

Fleet: Time is fleeting, indeed.

the Island: wherever it is. That it is left unnamed is surely the point. The Isle of Man is located in the right general area, and is likewise something of a tax haven, but I don't detect specific reference to that or any other place.

The Last of England: a Ford Madox Brown painting, shown here along with an accompanying sonnet by the author. The poem is, in tone if not in details, suggestive of Carfax's ambivalence about his holiday.

the Pastoral Symphony: Beethoven's Sixth,  intended to suggest the pleasures of travel in the countryside, with movements labeled "Awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the country," "Scene at the brook," "Happy gathering of country folk," "Thunderstorm, storm," and "Shepherds' song, cheerful and thankful feelings after the storm." The association with Carfax's pastoral recollections and reflections is obvious.

Voltaire: his freethinking tolerance is, of course, quite fitting for Ariel.


the carpet: Possibly with an echo of Henry James' "The Figure in the Carpet," where a writer's great and secret intention is compared to "a complex figure in a Persian carpet," though one hardly needs to have read James to use carpet patterns as a metaphor for pointless meaning-seeking.

a huge and burly man: "one of the Island gods" according to Ariel, and therefore perhaps with some reference to giants of Celtic myth. It's worth mentioning that, with its mysterious woman, its strange and magical landscape, and its unexpected time dilation, "The View" has an underlying similarity to very old stories about visits to faerie lands.

Ariel's verse: This is a translation of a Sappho fragment by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of a pair of fragments he combined into a poem variously known as "One Girl" and "Beauty." Aickman's ellipsis at the end covers his omission of the final words "till now." The second fragment as translated by Rossetti is "Like the wild hyacinth flower which on the hills is found,/Which the passing feet of the shepherds for ever tear and wound,/Until the purple blossom is trodden into the ground." Sappho has already been mentioned as part of Carfax's train of thought that was interrupted by Ariel-- that drew her into being near him, if one wants to interpret the story in that way. Critics have observed that Rossetti's use of these fragments has mythic significance, reflecting on love and death with reference to underworld myths like those of Orpheus and Persephone. But that observation postdates the writing of this story, and the general resonance of these images of the desired, the unattainable, and the destroyed for "The View" is a simpler matter given Ariel's own fleeting quality.


Così è se vi pare: Literally means "You're right if you think you're right." The title of a Pirandello play dealing with the fragility of truth and the relentless search for meaning.

Beddoes: Thomas Lovell Beddoes' work demonstrates an ongoing obsession with death, which would seem to make it a poor, or perhaps a telling, choice for Carfax's musical endeavor.

Dahlmeier's collection of Judaeo-Arabic fables: I assume this is a real book, though I can find no information about it. I have no idea about the relevance, if any, of the first fable to Carfax's situation, unless to suggest he has made or will make a wrong choice, but both the second, with its tradeoff between lifespan and pleasure, and the third, with its "pleasurable but dangerous activities... of some visitor from another world" are certainly suggestive.

"Dover Beach": I imagine the relevance of the poem to Carfax's situation is obvious from the section quoted by Aickman, but for those who somehow got through school without reading it the whole thing is here.

the golden bough: As the text suggests, Sir James Frazer's book was The Golden Bough, a rationalist, non-theological study of myth and religion, and as such a logical target for Ariel's (and Aickman's) criticism of scientific analysis at the expense of metaphysical significance. The absence of capitals, if it means anything, may also be meant to bring to mind the specific "golden bough" out of which Frazer's book grew. This was a ritual associated with the goddess Diana Nemorensis in which a runaway slave could pull down a bough from a special tree and fight the priest-king to the death; if he was successful, he became the new priest-king, at least until someone successfully challenged him. Frazer linked this practice to a perceived worldwide myth about a sacred king, married to a goddess, who died and was reborn as part of a cycle associated with fertility.

Without forcing a tempting but imprudent one-to-one comparison (Carfax as runaway slave, the impossibly tall figure as dominant god), one can see this legend and others reflected in "The View," a story that, for all its distinctive Aickmanesque touches, has something classically mythological about it. Whether a conscious product of revision or a result of the unconscious workings to which Aickman attributed the success of all true ghost stories, this air of myth produces that juxtaposition of the quotidian and the uncanny on which Aickman and so many other great writers of the supernatural have drawn.

Three Creatures and a Castle: Robert Aickman's "The Insufficient Answer"

After much consideration, it seems to me that the best approach to an explanatory analysis of "The Insufficient Answer" is three mini-essays on the story's central characters, each of whom appears to be a supernatural being of one sort or another.

Felicity: The Ghost

That Felicity is a ghost now seems so overwhelmingly obvious that I have no idea how I ever missed it. She has a tomb, for heaven's sake, even if housekeeping standards at the Schloss Marcantonio are so eccentric that it might just be an unusual bed. And Cust considers the possibility that she might be a ghost, which is, in an Aickman story, the equivalent of a large neon sign spelling out "SHE'S A GHOST!" in violent green letters. Her ability to move among the locked rooms of the schloss is another clue. But I didn't quite put it all together when I read the story a few months ago. That's the thing about Aickman; his stories are so rich in detail and implication that they become overwhelming, creating an impression of inscrutability so profound that even obvious connections can be overlooked. For that reason, I'll deal briefly with Felicity's two appearances in the narrative, highlighting the hints of her ghostly nature, some of which may not be noticed even by those who know a ghost when they see one.

Felicity died when, in her desperation to escape the schloss, she threw herself from its only large window, the one Cust finds and wonders about. As a ghost, she relives those moments over and over again. This is why, in her first conversation with Cust, she begins to fade as the sounds from the hall are overheard; the sounds are her, weeping as she runs down the corridor toward the window, and disappearing from the room altogether as she and the fallen iron shutter, which Cust sees at the end of the story, on the ground outside and covered with years' worth of vegetation, strike the ground below, setting up the enormous clattering that is either the source of Mrs Hastings' aversion to noise or an especially ironic mockery of it. That there is, despite the comparatively new glass Cust notices, no sound of its breaking when he sees the figure fall from the window, is another indication that the fall is spectral rather than physical.

A few aspects of Felicity's dialogue, which is, like Beech's at the end of "The Trains," a model of the suggestive yet opaque manner of certain Aickman characters, also allude to her status, of which she seems at least partially aware. (If that's so, there's a chilling pathos to her description of being imprisoned and looked in on and getting out.) The statement that Cust wouldn't believe how long she has been at the schloss implies her death was so long ago that, if she were aging normally, she'd be much older than she appears. The concern about whether women still say "bloody" in London also reflects the passage of time. Her reference to "the goose who lays the golden eggs" is presumably about herself as Mrs Hastings' model, killed like the goose by another's cruel greed. And finally there's the remark that Poppy is always ill "at these times," a sign that she knows there is some unnatural cycle involved in her escapes.

But how did that cycle begin? Why was Felicity imprisoned, and what need of Mrs Hastings' did she fulfill?

Mrs Hastings: The Vampire

Just as "The Trains" brought Aickman's distinctive devices to certain horror tropes, so too does "The Insufficient Answer" seem to be his variation on two great nineteenth-century tales of vampirism: Stoker's Dracula and Le Fanu's "Carmilla." As "Carmilla" was itself an influence on Dracula, the specific source of some of these similarities can't be pinned down. All three works have English characters in Central European castles, with an emphasis on secrecy, locked doors, and emergence late in the day. All three feature mysterious, powerful characters whose effusive and learned conversation is emphasized. Dracula and Mrs Hastings are both unexpectedly robust and both are shown sleeping in chapels deep inside their castles (though for very different reasons); both castles are without mirrors. Even Miss Franklin's delirious mutterings about Whitby may be an allusion to Stoker's novel, in which that city was the site of Dracula's first landing in England. There's also the mention at both the beginning and the end of the story of the Irving statue near which Benson's gallery is located. That would be Henry Irving, whose friend and biographer Bram Stoker used the actor-manager as an inspiration for Dracula. The most salient direct parallel between "The Insufficient Answer" and "Carmilla" is that in both stories the dominant figure and her victim are female.

Given the absence of explicitly monstrous behavior in the Aickman canon, the question these similarities raise is not so much whether Mrs Hastings is a blood-drinking vampire as it is what subtler form her victimization might take. One need not assume any supernatural manifestation at all; it might be that she is simply a cruel, controlling woman whose behavior drives people to despair. One certainly doesn't know what she might have done to cause her husband's plane crash, or exactly what (if anything) happened to Miss Franklin's sister Lilian, whose belongings are for some reason stored in the castle. But in the case of Felicity, we have a little more to go on.

In the first place, there is something off about Felicity's willingness to travel halfway across Europe to stay at a ruined castle with an older woman she's only just met.  It's perhaps not insignificant that one of the subtexts of "Carmilla," and many other female vampire stories, is lesbianism. The reference to unspecified "talk" about Mrs Hastings could support such a reading (or any number of others, of course), and even the mention of "just a phase" could be so interpreted if one wished. Most interesting in this context is Miss Franklin's explanation of why Mrs Hastings came to Slovenia: "I should say it was simply to get away from the world of men." This, like several of her explanations, appears to be consciously disingenuous, trading on the difference between "men" as a species and "men" as a gender; it is at the very least suggestive. But in any case a sexual reading is hardly necessary, as the strongest intimations of strangeness around Mrs Hastings are not about love but about art.

If Felicity is to be believed, Mrs Hastings imprisons her simply to use her as a model. That could be motivation enough; she has great hopes for the work she does with Felicity's image, and it is, in Cust's judgment, "curious" and "astonishing;" he "had never seen anything like it." The tomb sculpture in her shape is "brilliantly suggestive" and a "masterpiece." More is involved than beauty, though; in one of the story's more bizarre moments, Mrs Hastings' statement that she is learning to paint in the dark "seemed perceptibly to shake the previously assured Miss Franklin." Is there something dangerous about her talent? A now-obscure allusion may be significant here.

When studying Mrs Hastings' library, Cust pulls out a book at random, Chris Massie's Corridor with Mirrors. This is a real novel, published in 1941 and therefore fairly recent at the 1951 publication of We Are for the Dark, but both it and its author are so poorly-known today as to have left little mark on the Internet. Any readers of this essay who are familiar with the book or the author are encouraged to leave a comment, but in the interim I must rely on this summary of a 1948 film version. If it's at all representative of the novel's plot, Aickman's allusion to the story of a woman shaped by an eccentric figure into the ideal female of his imagination may be a hint of how intense, ominous, and possibly supernatural is Mrs Hastings' interest in Felicity. Or it might just be that the title of that novel allows Aickman to bring up the absence of mirrors in the schloss.

Whatever her precise nature, Mrs Hastings is certainly a powerful personality. But by the end of the story one suspects she is not the most powerful woman in the castle. That dubious honor must go to the third member of the story's peculiar triad.

Miss Franklin: The Witch

I've suggested that Miss Franklin's answers to Cust's questions are sometimes dishonest. Three times she pauses before replying to him: when asked about the loud noise, when asked about Mrs Hastings' reason for leaving England, and when asked if she has any control over Felicity's appearances.  In the first instance, her answer is a lie with a hint of the truth; in the second, it's so ambiguous as to be meaningless. I would argue that the third answer is also dishonest: that Miss Franklin is in fact the source of the apparition of Felicity, and since that apparition is (savor the irony of her name) the reason the older women "must absent ourselves from that felicity [of leaving the schloss] a while," she has therefore imprisoned Mrs Hastings as thoroughly as Mrs Hastings once imprisoned Felicity. Cust himself, remembering Felicity's "fear and hatred" and "constant references to her rather than the sculptress," is on the verge of a similar conclusion, and back aways from it only out of fear.

Before going over the evidence for this proposition, it's worth looking at the relationship between the two older women. Felicity says, "They hate each other, of course," and Mrs Hastings' indifference to Miss Franklin's potentially fatal illness ("It's very tiresome of her and quite unnecessary") backs up that contention on one side. On the other, Miss Franklin shows no sign of warmth toward or about anything or anyone. It's unlikely such enmity was there from the beginning; Miss Franklin would hardly have taken so solitary a job with a woman she despised. One might speculate, then, that the mutual hatred began when Miss Franklin saw what Mrs Hastings was capable of, what she did to Felicity, to her husband, or to Miss Franklin's sister Lilian. Possessed of that knowledge, Miss Franklin apparently armed herself against becoming the next victim. As she says to Cust, after inexplicably unlocking her door without a key, "I have no intention of being trapped."

There are a few signs that she is linked to Felicity's appearances. It's Felicity herself who observes that Miss Franklin is always ill at these times, and Miss Franklin is said to have woken suddenly in the middle of the night, presumably around the time Felicity appeared or disappeared. But the largest clue is her amusement when Cust suggests a mundane cause for her illness, and the exchange that follows.

"Pneumonia?" Cust might have said rabies.

"I recollected your cold when we last met."

"Oh yes. That." Miss Franklin laughed. "I followed my sister Lilian's remedy."

"Your sister Lilian?"

"Two heaping tablespoonsfull of salt in a tumbler of water piping hot and drink it down."

"I see. It certainly seems to work like a charm."

"Well, it works, Mr Cust. Charms often don't and when they do you oftener wish they hadn't." She still looked extraordinarily ill and her hair was a disorganized heap; but she was fully dressed in an ugly brick-coloured frock.

"You know about charms?" inquired Cust lightly but, all recent events considered, fearing for the answer.

"I've been asleep for goodness knows how long. That's something I'm not used to at all. I think there must have been magic in the air." The sentimental cliche sounded ludicrously sinister.

Magic indeed. In this light, Miss Franklin's unflappable calm (I think especially of her "neat ladylike figure" and amused laughter during Mrs Hastings' fitful response to Felicity's appearance), and the statement that she loves her job, make a grim sense, as does her fear of Mrs Hastings' ability to paint in the dark: if the two women are in some way dueling forces, an unexpected advance on the part of one might endanger the other. And their relationship is psychologically rich as well; one hardly need invoke the supernatural to imagine dangerous power games, driven by secrets, in the dynamic between a servant and her mistress. Possible sexual interpretations of Mrs Hastings' behavior become interesting again here: Miss Franklin as abandoned lover, Miss Franklin as willing or unwilling procuress.

But whether one prefers a reading that involves sex or one that emphasizes other deep, mysterious drives, the psychological element is a constant. It's often true of Aickman that even when the narrative details of a story remain obscure, the philosophical and psychological weight is clear. Whatever the specific connections and secrets that were involved, all three of the story's female characters are trapped in the Schloss Marcantonio by networks of mutual need and loathing, and each is, despite evident flaws, tragic or pathetic in her own way. There is, as Miss Franklin suggests, no end in sight to their suffering, and Cust, who only spends a week with them, loses his job as a result of the contact. Not all Robert Aickman's stories are bleak, but the world of this one does seem to be an inescapable and permanent hell.

Open Questions

1. As mentioned above: how similar is Massie's novel to that film version? What further connections might be made by one who had read the book?

2. Names are important in Aickman. "Cust" is probably related to constancy and perseverance, which is rather funny in the circumstances, and the irony of "Felicity" has already been mentioned, but what about Lola Hastings and Poppy Franklin? Is there anything there? And why is it called the Schloss Marcantonio? A reference to the engraver? The composer? Someone else? My guess would be the first, but what would be the reason? Is there a specific work of his that might be relevant?

3. Is something particular meant by that bit about painting in the dark?


As ever, comments on these or any other aspects of the story are welcome.

Blood and Iron: Robert Aickman's "The Trains"

This is the first in what will, I hope, be a series of in-depth essays on individual stories by Aickman, in the hope of diminishing the unwarranted air of utter impenetrability that surrounds them. Disagreements, amplifications, alternate theories, and other additions are strongly encouraged. Use the comment form at the bottom of the post.

Robert Aickman's career as a writer of what he called "strange stories" began in 1951 with the joint collection We Are for the Dark, containing three stories by Aickman and three by his then-lover Elizabeth Jane Howard. Coming second in the table of contents, Aickman's "The Trains" was his first story in that collection, and therefore (though we cannot to my knowledge ascertain the order of composition) in some sense his first published work. (It was eventually reprinted as the penultimate story in his final, posthumous collection Night Voices, and thus comes close to bookending his career.) Perhaps fittingly for a writer whose stories would often be seen as constituting a modern variation on the classical ghost story, "The Trains" combines narrative elements from traditional horror stories with the psychological focus, fear of modernity, and surreal opacity that are common to Aickman's fiction.

An Old House With a New Twist

Certain aspects of the plot of "The Trains" would not be out of place in a campfire yarn. The travelers, the sudden storm, the isolated house, the eccentric inhabitants, the dimly-seen figure on the stairs, and Margaret's final vision of the hanged Miss Roper, described in terms that are for Aickman unusually explicit (and I think chilling, though less so outside the context of the story):

Then Margaret became aware of something very horrible indeed: it began with the upturned dead face of an old woman, colourless with the exact colourlessness of the colourless light; and it ended with the old woman's crumpled shape occultly made visible hanging above the trap-door in the corner of Margaret's compartment-shaped room. Up in the attic old Miss Roper had hanged herself, her gray hair so twisted and meshed as itself to suggest the suffocating agent.

Such similarity to the popular idea of the ghost story is uncommon though not unique in the Aickman canon. But for all that "The Trains" is recognizable as a ghost story in the way that something like "Into the Wood" or "The Hospice" is not, it has features that are, from the perspective of tradition, baffling. The ambiguity over whether Margaret's vision of Miss Roper is "real" or internal is the least of these.

The description in the above passage of Margaret's room as "compartment-shaped" is part of a pattern in which the old house Margaret and her traveling companion Mimi take shelter at is described not in terms of an "old dark house" in the Gothic sense but of a train or some other feature of the railways. This begins with the doorbell.  "'It's a curious bell,' said Margaret, examining the mechanism and valiant to the soaking, shivering end. 'It's like the handles you see in signal boxes.'" (Signal boxes are, as some readers may not know, the points along a rail system by which the movements of trains are controlled. The handles would shift the rails and other equipment so that trains moved in the correct direction.) Later railway-influenced descriptions of the house introduce a note not only of oddness but also of distaste. The first floor of the house (in British usage; the second floor to Americans) has "several large doors, such as admit to the bedrooms of a railway hotel, but no furniture... nor were the staircase or either landing carpeted," an unappealing sparseness. The comparison to a "railway hotel door" is later repeated.

Images of railroads as well as railroad-influenced design begin to appear. The dining room contains engravings of the railway construction done by the house's builder, and a clock that "clicked like a revolving turnstile," though the association of turnstiles with mass transit may be too recent for Aickman to have meant this as a railway allusion. The drawing room, which is like the dining room described as "bleak," has more railway items, including "scale models of long-extinct locomotives" and "a vast print of a railway accident, freely coloured by hand." Margaret later realizes something about her room, whose barred windows had disturbed her: "the room suddenly struck Margaret as having the proportions of a railway compartment, a resemblance much increased by the odd arrangement of the windows, one at each end. Old-fashioned railway carriage windows were commonly barred, Margaret was just old enough to have noticed." At dinner Margaret comments on these "railways influences about the house," and eventually, finally invited into a room she regards as normal and inviting, Margaret thinks that "the railway blight" is totally absent.

Of course, it is not simply that the house happens to invite various railway associations; it is located directly next to the tracks of the railway the house's builder constructed, and on which he died in what may have been an odd accident or a suicide. The passage of trains is a constant, disconcerting undercurrent during events in the house: when first noticed it is "a sudden rumbling crescendo, which made the massive floorboards vibrate and the light bed leap up and down upon them. Even the big black stones of the walls seemed slightly to jostle." It punctuates the meal-- "At intervals through dinner, passing trains rattled the heavy table and heavy objects upon it"-- and continues late into the night. It is little surprise that Wendley Roper, grandson of the builder, once worked in the railway business like the rest of the family, and even having gotten free continues to research and publish books on the history of railways, under an ironic pseudonym, Howard Bullhead, that is itself a railway reference. (For the curious, "bullhead" refers to a particular type of rail design, based on its cross-sectional shape, and fishplates, the subject of Roper's book, are the pieces of metal that link the rails at either end.) His conversation with Mimi as they drink coffee in the drawing room uses trains as an existential metaphor: a branch line, a dead end, getting off the rails. It is little wonder that he should say, "I can't get it altogether out of my blood... The family motto might be the same as Bismarck's: Blood and Iron."

Why, from a literary perspective, all this focus on trains? To answer that question fully we must step back and look at the opening section of the story, before Wendley Roper and his railway-blighted house have even appeared.

"It's Not Nice Country"

Before the storm that traps them at Roper's house, Margaret and Mimi pass from pleasant countryside into a bare, deserted valley. "They noticed no traffic on the road, which, when reached, proved to be surfaced with hard, irregular granite chips, somewhat in need of re-laying and the attentions of a steam-roller. 'Pretty grim,' said Mimi." The first building they visit is an abandoned wreck, the second a barely used and unlicensed Guest House. "'Not much traffic,' said Margaret... 'They all go by train' [said Mimi]." Met in the Guest House with taciturn service, Margaret learns from a local man that the area is called the Quiet Valley and that indeed "the locals don't come here... They all take the railroad. They scuttle through shut up like steers in a wagon."

After leaving the Guest House, Margaret and Mimi have a close encounter with one of those trains.

As they stood uncertain, the sound of an ascending train reached them against the wind, which, blowing strongly from the opposite direction, kept the smoke within the walls of the cutting. So high was the adverse gale that it was only about a minute between their first hearing the slowly climbing train and its coming level with them. Steam roared from the exhaust. The fireman was stoking demoniacally.  As the engine passed to windward of the two women far above, and the noises from the exhaust crashed upon their senses, the driver suddenly looked up and waved with an apparent gaiety inappropriate to the horrible weather. Then he reached for the whistle lever and, as the train entered the tunnel, for forty seconds doubled the already unbearable uproar. It was a long tunnel... A nimbus of oily warm air enveloped [Margaret], almost immediately to be blown away, leaving her again shivering.

And later, as Margaret is in bed in Roper's house attempting to sleep:

Immediately she had groped into the pitch-dark bed, a train which seemed of an entirely new construction went past. This time there was no blasting of steam and thundering or grinding of wheels: only a single sustained rather high-pitched rattling; metallic, inhuman, hollow. The new train appeared to be ascending the bank, but Margaret for the first time could not be sure. The sound frightened Margaret badly. "It's a hospital train," her mother had said to her long ago on occasion of which Margaret had forgotten all details except that they were horrible. "It's full of wounded soldiers."

Out of all this one could construct a theory that for Aickman trains are an unpleasant and malevolent force. As he says in "An Essay," his remarks on winning the World Fantasy Award in 1976 for the short story "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal," Aickman believed that humanity had taken a "wrong turning" around the time of the Industrial Revolution, pursuing rationalism, science, and technology at the expense of our sense of the inexplicable, supernatural, and numinous. Trains, stark, loud, and polluting, seem an ideal symbol of that error, and the notion of a countryside deserted because people are taking trains past it rather than traveling through it-- a countryside where Miss Roper's frantic waving for help is ignored or misconstrued, and only the sight of blood has any hope of drawing attention from the mechanical passersby-- has obvious implications as a metaphor for indifference and isolation in a technological society. Up to a point such a reading is useful, but there are stumbling blocks.

In the first place, Aickman plainly did not dislike trains. He was (for a time) a close friend of railway enthusiast L. T. C. Rolt; both were founding members of the Inland Waterways Association, and Aickman apparently appreciated Rolt's ghost stories, some of which have railway settings and are not noticeably down on railways. And within the story itself there are signs that Aickman's point of view is not as crudely anti-industrial as a shallow interpretation of his philosophy might lead one to believe. As the story opens, Margaret and Mimi have just departed an industrial city, which Margaret has not at all disliked but Mimi has hated.

The city Margaret had found new, interesting, unexpectedly beautiful and romantic: its well-proportioned stone mills and volcanic chimneys appeared perfectly to consort with the high free mountains always in the background. To Mimi the place was all that she went on holiday to avoid. If you had to have towns, she would choose the blurred amalgam of the Midlands and South, where town does not contrast with country but merges into it, neither town nor country being at any time so distinct as in the North. To Margaret this, to her, new way of life (of which she saw only the very topmost surface), seemed considerably less dreadful than she had expected. Mimi, to whom also it was new, saw it as the existence from which very probably her great-grandfather had fought and climbed, a degradation she was appalled to find still in existence and able to devour her. If there had to be industry, let the facts be swaddled in suburbs.

Given that Margaret is the point-of-view character and generally seems to be more perceptive and stronger than Mimi (she notices earlier that there is something disturbing about Roper, and is the one to devise a solution to their predicament, a point to which we'll return; even the name "Mimi" suggests a trivial flightiness as compared to the solidity of "Margaret"), I would suggest that the perspective of the story is closer to Margaret's than to Mimi's: that the industrial, however regrettable its existence, is not incapable of beauty. In this context we might wish to consider a single sentence from Margaret and Mimi's encounter with the train that I tactically withheld via ellipses:

It was a long tunnel. The train was not of a kind Margaret was used to (she knew little of railways); it was composed neither of passenger coaches nor of small clattering trucks, but of long windowless vans, giving no hint of their contents. A nimbus of oily warm air enveloped [Margaret], almost immediately to be blown away, leaving her again shivering. (emphasis added)

Contrast this with the train Margaret hears (or imagines she hears) while in bed, which is "of an entirely new construction," and one begins to see that what Aickman finds sinister are not the trains of the early 20th century (with which he very probably grew up; those opposed to modernity do tend to give a pass to their own childhood associations) but the trains of the future, computerized, metallic, and impersonal and without the rustic (if polluting) charm of steam and the thundering of wheels.

But why, you might ask, is the house of the Ropers so grim and dangerous, if it is only the trains of the future that are such dark portents? One answer would focus on the fact that Margaret and Mimi are, as noted, largely ignorant of the industrial world; trains may have a certain charm from a distance, but living literally in their shadow is another matter. A second, somewhat richer answer provides a window into Aickman's aesthetics and the psychological aspects of the story.

Not on Solid Ground

In Aickman's worldview, as expressed in both stories and essays, strange and supernatural events are always impinging on the rationalist perception of normality, and it takes a concerted effort of mental will (of which a great many moderns are capable) to ignore this fact, to maintain the sense of order that defines a resolutely natural universe. Recall that the passing trains rattle the heavy dinner table and the heavy plates upon it, even seeming to jostle the walls themselves. What better metaphor for the effect of the paranormal upon staid sensibilities? Then there is the exchange between Margaret and Roper on the late-night movement of trains, of which Margaret had been ignorant.

"I see you're not used to living by a railway," said Roper. "Many classes of traffic are kept off the tracks during ordinary travelling hours. What you hear going by now are the loads you don't see when the stations are open. A railway is like an iceberg, you know: very little of its working is visible to the casual onlooker."...

"But surely only the passenger trains have time tables?"

"My dear Margaret, every single train is in a time-table. Every local goods, every light engine movement. Only not, of course, in the timetable you buy for sixpence at the Enquiry Office. Only a small fraction of all the train movements are in that. Even the man behind the counter knows virtually nothing of the rest."

"Only Wendley knows the whole works," said Mimi from the sofa.

There are more trains in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Trains, then, are like many mystical things in that they bring greater knowledge, but also greater danger, as suggested by the fates of Joseph Roper, Miss Roper, and Beech, by the probable fate of the insane Wendley Roper, and by the narrowly averted fates of Margaret and Mimi. This is a common theme in Aickman's stories, where characters often receive disturbing yet life-altering revelations.

It is in this light that Margaret's psychological development in the story is best examined. She is, as the story begins, a novice at hiking, deferring to Mimi's wisdom much of the time. Their rather uncertain friendship, tracked in seemingly innocuous exchanges with Aickman's usual subtlety and acuity, is particularly strained by Mimi's flirtation with Wendley Roper. Margaret's frustration leads to an epiphany:

Suddenly, looking at Mimi sprawling in her trousers and tight high-necked sweater, Margaret saw the point, clearer than in any book: Mimi was physically attractive; she herself in all probability was not. And nothing else in all life, in all the world, really counted. Nothing, nothing. Being cleverer; on the whole (as she thought) kinder; being more refined; the daughter of a Lord: such things were the dust beneath Mimi's chariot wheels, items in the list of life's innumerable unwantable impedimenta.

Taken by itself, this could be critiqued as rather patronizing male sympathy for an unattractive woman, with more than a hint of class condescension worked in. But as the story evolves, it becomes obvious that there are in fact things beyond attractiveness that "really count." Mimi's attractiveness has brought down on her the baleful attentions of Wendley Roper, and also of the man in the Guest House, with whom Roper is linked by the "inverted echo" of his words, itself explicitly paralleled to the verbal echo by which Margaret begins to realize that Beech is a woman. Recall also Margaret's observation that the man in the Guest House is "one of the many men who classify women into those you talk to and those with whom words merely impede the way."  Mimi's lack of cleverness has also left her unable to see that Roper is quite dangerous. Margaret's cleverness, on the other hand, allows her to recall the existence of Mimi's knife and use it to save herself from Beech, which in turn helps her protect Mimi from Roper's attentions, though not before Mimi has had whatever disturbing experience the train tickets shoved into her pockets are meant to suggest.

The conclusion of the story, with the tickets, the revelation of Beech's cross-dressing, and the abrupt ending so common in Aickman, has a mysterious and surreal quality that is equally common in Aickman, but each of these elements has its logic. The tickets, whatever one thinks of them aesthetically-- personally I find them too absurd to be unsettling, if to unsettle was the intention-- are an extension of "the railway blight," its invasion of the person of the visitor. It may be trite to point out that pockets are yonic, but with Aickman one never feels that the sexual is very far away. Beech's cross-dressing is a consequence of the love that has also trapped her with Wendley Roper. I can't work out whether she is supposed to have been in love with Miss Roper, in which case her cross-dressing, undertaken only after Miss Roper's death, would have an added pathetic irony, or with Wendley; I'm inclined to assume the former. Either way, the perils of attraction and attractiveness are once again involved, as they are in many of Aickman's stories about women. (His stories about men, on the other hand, tend to glamorize and mystify female attractiveness. These are not incompatible approaches, but I'll withhold further discussion of the point for a more appropriate essay.) And the ending, in which Margaret uses Beech's bloodstained blouse to wave to the train, represents the triumph of Margaret's cleverness over Mimi's sex appeal, Mimi having given up and been reduced to near-catatonia. There is also the potency of the approaching train, previously an image of mystery, power, and danger, becoming a symbol of hoped-for rescue.

There is, though, a darker reading of the story's final image. Miss Roper, after all, had been signalling from the same window several times a day for years, and all anyone ever did was wave back. Although the blood on Beech's blouse might be expected to garner more attention, there is no guarantee that Aickman meant to suggest Margaret and Mimi would achieve rescue; one cannot rule out the possibility that they are trapped.  But that would be atypical, as Aickman's stories with female protagonists generally end, if not optimistically, than at least with the sense that their lives have opened out rather than being curtailed: "Bind Your Hair," "The School Friend," "Into the Wood," "The Real Road to the Church," "Growing Boys," "The Next Glade." ("The Inner Room" is an exception, though, to the extent that its protagonist's gender is significant, and "Hand in Glove" is a more pertinent one.) It is that sense of opening out with which "The Trains" begins:

On the moors, as early as this, the air no longer clung about her, impeding her movements, absorbing her energies. Now a warm breeze seemed to lift her up and bear her on: the absorption process was reversed; her blood stream drew impulsion from the zephyrs. Her thoughts raced from her in all directions, unproductive but joyful.

Such "lifting up" is the result of supernatural experience in many of Aickman's tales, whether they end well or ill; even the fatal carries with it certain revelations. "The Trains" is thus the first of many explorations of what one will find if one wanders (forgive the slight muddling of metaphors) off the beaten track.

Tales of Love and Death

I am still of the opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mind-- sex and the dead.  --W. B. Yeats

That quote was the epigraph to Robert Aickman's second collection, Powers of Darkness, but it would self-evidently have served equally well for his fifth, Tales of Love and Death.  That title might lead one to expect stories in which the sexual element found throughout Aickman's work is especially prominent, but in fact the "love" of the title has wider reference, and in some of the stories appears not to be present at all; the meaning of the title would seem be "Tales of Love and/or Death," but that would have been rather less catchy.

Aickman is renowned for his subtlety, but there's nothing subtle about "Growing Boys," the first and longest of these tales.  The story is, in fact, ridiculously overstated, in a way that lends it the same strange and uneasy affect as the elusive tales.  Millie Morke is a woman saddled with an ineffectual husband, a doting but eccentric uncle, and truly demonic twin sons, and the story plays out as a satire on the various flaws of contemporary men.  For readers accustomed to the understated ghostliness of typical Aickman, this gruesome, almost garish story may come as a bit of a nasty shock, but interpreted as black comedy it has a certain charm, and Millie's interactions with a local fortune are more like the author's usual form.

"Marriage" is also about the weaknesses of men, but from a male perspective, and in a lower key.  Indeed, the story is so subtle that, allowing for the guilty mind of the protagonist, it might not be supernatural at all.  Laming Gatestead is dating Helen Brown, a kind but rather dull woman he met at the theater, and infatuated with her roommate, Ellen Black.  What may or may not be a chance meeting with Ellen leads to an affair that leaves Laming by turns overjoyed and miserable, but as the situation develops, he begins to see things that make him regard his life in a new light.  The connection between Helen and Ellen may be eerie, or Laming's infidelity may be commonplace, but either way the story explores the distinction between love and desire, and offers a cool yet sympathetic portrait of a man who has, in every way, gotten in over his head.

The collection includes two atypically short pieces, "Le Miroir" and "Raising the Wind."  The former tells of the decay of an aristocratic Englishwoman as she struggles to survive in Paris, and of the ornate mirror that may or may not be hastening her decline; the latter features two boatmen forced by circumstance into an unusual method of ensuring smooth sailing.  Although both stories, particularly "Le Miroir," offer flashes of Aickman's finest uncanny imagery, they're too brief for the proper atmosphere to develop.  This makes, "Le Miroir," another of Aickman's frequent reflections on how simply dreadful the modern world is for people who used to be rich and important, rather tiresome, which is a pity, as with more deft handling it could have been one of his finest tales.

Although it's closer to normal Aickman length, "Compulsory Games" is another story that feels more dully world-weary than enticingly strange.  Colin and Grace Trenwith have maintained cordial enough relations with their elderly neighbor Eileen McGrath, but when Grace leaves the country to see to an ailing relative, Eileen invites Colin over for dinner, alone.  When that event fails to go according to her plan, whatever that plan might be, Eileen moves in on the returned Grace, inviting her to take flying lessons.  By the end of the story, events have taken their usual bizarre turn, but too much time has been taken up by Colin bemoaning his age and the fact that contemporary life has no room for him.  He's not a well-enough developed character for these meditations to feel organic, and (justly or not) they read more as authorial self-pity than anything else.

"Residents Only" also has its complaints about the late twentieth-century, namely bureaucratic disrespect for an old cemetery, but the evocation of that cemetery's decline and its two mysterious keepers is potent enough to balance the thematic elements, and as in "My Poor Friend," the absurdity of government procedure is drily mocked.  The primary supernatural feature of the story is eminently predictable and takes rather too long to emerge, but the final image is strong enough to earn this a place as a solid, though not exceptional, contribution to the author's oeuvre.

In "Wood," a late marriage to an undertaker's daughter leads to a new life for Mr Munn, but what sort of a life, exactly?  This is, on first reading anyway, the most Aickmanesque story in the collection, with an awkward and unusual wedding celebration leading up to an impossible, inexplicable married life.  Recurring images based around the titular material, and some play with the social and personal distaste morticians often inspire in people who ought to know better, lend this story that sense of an almost-grasped guiding logic that is one of the virtues of this author's strange stories.

Burdened with several weak stories at its center, Tales of Love and Death is not one of Robert Aickman's finest collections, but the dark gusto of "Growing Boys," the wild cemetery of "Residents Only," and the oblique social commentary of "Marriage" and "Wood" are enough to make it a success.  After the shortly-forthcoming Cold Hand in Mine, this will presumably be Tartarus Press' next Robert Aickman reprint, and fans of the author who have yet to encounter some or all of these stories have much to look forward to.

Powers of Darkness

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 [Robert] Aickman. [Peter Straub, in his introduction to The Wine-Dark Sea]

In Powers of Darkness, Aickman's second solo collection, he demonstrates that continuum between tedium and terror in six stories of the absurdity of modern life.  From "Your Tiny Hand is Frozen," in which technology, namely the telephone, is simultaneously baffling and monstrous, to "The Wine-Dark Sea," the tale of a fleeting escape from the contemporary, his protagonists navigate a world in which the mundane frustrations of society, culture, and politics can at any moment turn into something darker.  The precise narrative mechanics of these transitions may remain obscure, but Aickman's philosophy and voice-- world-weary, intellectual, mordantly witty-- is clear, and constant.

Powers of Darkness has recently been rereleased by Tartarus Press in a durable, elegant hardcover edition of 350 copies, as part of a serious of Aickman reissues.  In addition to the pleasure of its handsome yet reserved design, part of the Tartarus aesthetic and a perfect match for Aickman, there is a new introduction by Mark Valentine, which, like all Tartarus introductions, is succinct and valuable.  Valentine comments aptly on the author's traditionalism and the relationship between aspects of his biography and his stories, as well as making intriguing suggestions regarding writers with similar sensibilities.

"Your Tiny Hand is Frozen" was the first Aickman story the present reviewer ever read, sitting at a worn and graffitied desk on the lowest level of his university library.  He blushes to admit that he didn't make much of it at the time.  This is especially baffling as it is, in fact, one of Aickman's more frightening tales, with a climax that is simple yet horribly vivid.  Edmund St Jude lives in his fiancee's apartment, waiting for her return and doing minor translation work to get by.  When his lonely existence is disrupted by a series of mysterious telephone calls, he finds himself drawn into a powerful yet dangerous obsession.  St Jude is a sensitive man, unable to summon up the force of personality necessary to deal with the faceless bureaucracy of the telephone company, and the headaches caused by the strange calls suggest that Aickman viewed the telephone, and perhaps much modern technology, as more trouble than it was worth: an innovation we would be better off without.

And so, he seems to have thought, was democratically-elected representative government.  The protagonist of "My Poor Friend" expresses a preference for hereditary rule, and Aickman shared that preferece, or at least claimed to do so.  From M. R. James such a statement would seem unthinking conservatism, part of what A. C. Benson not unreasonably identified as a an almost aethetic traditionalism, lacking in ideas or principles.  From Aickman, though, it is clearly the product of thought and bitter experience.  "My Poor Friend," in which an advocate of local electricity befriends a noble, doomed Member of Parliament, rings with authentic detail, drawn, one assumes, from Aickman's encounters with politicians on behalf of the Inland Waterways Association.  The eccentricities of government become almost Gothic as the cynicism of Parliament swallows the narrator's poor friend.  There is a passage that, I think, captures the futility of public attempts to influence government as well for America of the 2010s as it did for Britain of the 1960s:

Generalisations such as these [about hereditary versus representative government] are common talk.  What upset me was how it works in practice.  Government has been carried on less and less visibly for a long time; but the critical thing in Britain has been the swift development of official public relations.  Every public authority that knows its business now has what may be termed a paddock for its critics and opponents, not excluding those inside Parliament.  Quite rapidly it has become almost impossible to be a rebel.  Today the rebels are put in a paddock and then built into the structure.  They are patiently listened to, when they have made themselves assertive enough.  They are pressed to deliver their ideas in writing.  They are invited to serve on Joint Committees.  It is implied to them that if they keep their criticisms 'constructive', they may even become O.B.E.'s.  'Look at our splendid collection of rebels.  It proves how strong, important, and on the right lines we are.'  The Speaker's Corner technique, one may call it: intensely British, brilliantly adaptable, utterly null.  Faced with it, Bessemer [the head of the local electricity organization] emerged, quite unawares, as a mere nineteenth-century evangelist; not only incapable of planting his petards deep enough, but incapable of even seeing that he was paddocked, that his ostensibly critical notions were being applied, Judo-wise, to the actual strengthening of his opponents.  It is sadly true that only the power to inflict actual damage of some kind holds any hope of surmounting the official techniques.

 Tea Partiers and liberals alike take note.

In "Larger Than Oneself" it is not political but religious organizations that take a hit.  Mrs Iblis, despite her apt name, is entirely out-of-place at a gathering of contemporary spiritual authorities, having shown up by mistake after a letter postponing her visit to an eminent journalist failed to arrive.  Aickman perfectly captures the isolation and misery of a party at which one knows nobody and is interested in nothing, and Mrs Iblis' silent suffering is conveyed with a very British restrained irony that makes this one of Aickman's funniest tales.  Beneath the humor, however, is a wise commentary on the futility and the danger of using religion as a crutch, attempting to assign to it a meaning it cannot offer if one lacks inner strength.  Look too hard for something larger than oneself, Aickman suggests, and you may be swallowed by it.

"The Visiting Star" offers irony of a darker sort, as a celebrated actress' visit to a regional theater has unfortunate consequences for a number of area residents, including the author of a book on lead and plumbago mining with whom she shares some disturbing information.  Thematically reminiscent of "Perfect Love," written by Aickman's one-time lover Elizabeth Jane Howard for her collaboration with Aickman in We Are for the Dark, the story is surely a metaphor for the regrets and demands of any difficult, past-her-prime performer.

Aickman often begins to generate unease through awkward social scenarios, typically involving eccentric strangers, where the stomach-twisting quality of embarrassment merges with the stomach-twisting quality of the inexplicable.  In  "A Roman Question," the narrator and his wife must deal with the elderly couple whose house they are staying in during a dull conference, and with the odd young woman also sharing that home.  When the young woman suggests a strange ritual that may help locate the elderly couple's missing son, the five are drawn into something much more interesting, but much less pleasant, than any conference.

"The Wine-Dark Sea" was the second Aickman story this reviewer ever read, and he must confess that on rereading he likes it even less than he did then.  A better title might be "Never Visit Greece," for, like "Never Visit Venice" but thankfully to a lesser degree, it features a world-weary traveler disappointed to find that the foreign country he visits has a lot of stupid, degenerate natives in it.  As in that story, the protagonist finds pleasant distraction in the form of sexually available but mysterious women, and the self-pity is so overpowering, the imagery so bare and straightforward, that the total effect is rather distasteful.  One supposes that the story was, for the author, a powerful expression of principles, but the aphoristic dialogue of the three women is unduly pompous, and the protagonist feels more like a spoiled aristocrat on holiday than a person of any depth.

But the story nonetheless offers flashes of interest, and its flatness is an exception in what is otherwise a fine collection, comparable to Sub Rosa as a top example of the author's early work.  Although Aickman's stories are both viscerally and philosophically unsettling examples of supernaturalism, he should not be overlooked as an observer of and commentator on ordinary life.  From the small details of an uncomfortable reception to larger questions of character, morality, and survival, he is a thoughtful and erudite chronicler of the less gentle aspects of the human condition.  Happiness, many an Aickman story suggests, is possible, but only fleetingly, and at great cost.  It's a notion that deserves more attention than the modern world seems inclined to give it.

We Are For the Dark

This is, I suppose, the third in a series of personal reflections on Robert Aickman collections.  Previous posts dealt with Sub Rosa and Dark Entries.

Robert Aickman's first book was, of course, a collaborative collection with his then-lover, the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard.  Containing three stories by each, the volume, like most to which Aickman contributed, is now out of print and difficult/expensive to find.  However, I was lucky enough to find a copy of the scarce paperback edition at a very reasonable price.

The collection opens with Howard's novelette "Perfect Love," which uses the antiquarian ghost story device of multiple, indirect information sources to fashion a distinctly modern, suggestive story of a great opera singer and the presence that haunts her.  This like all Howard's strange stories, captures much of the same bewildering atmosphere as Aickman's stories, without being quite so narratively obscure.  I still want to read it again to see if I've missed anything, though.

Next is Aickman's "The Trains," a favorite of mine among his work.  From the amusing but insightful portrayal of two young women with different temperaments on a hiking trip, to the sparse, cheerless landscape of the train-dominated valley they find themselves in, to the eccentric household where they take shelter from a storm, this is an ambitious story about the ambiguities of love and desire that more than justifies its length.  And the ghost, though seen fleetingly if at all, is quite frightening.

Aickman's "The Insufficient Answer" was the only one of his three contributions that was new to me.  It's another story in which an unusual, awkward social environment is edged with hints of the supernatural: an English sculptress has withdrawn to an ancient castle high in the mountains of Eastern Europe, and maintains a solitary existence there with a single female companion.  As this was my first reading, it goes without saying that I didn't particularly understand the story, but it's effective all the same, and the (sufficient) answer seems closer to the surface than in some of his work.

"Three Miles Up" is by Howard, but some early reviewers of the book, which does not attribute the stories to their particular authors, took it to be by Aickman.  It's not difficult to see why: taking place during a canal voyage, dealing with two male friends and the mysterious woman they encounter, and ending on a note of baffling ambiguity, it is very Aickmanesque.  It is, however, more viscerally chilling than most Aickman stories.

I wrote about a later, slightly revised version of Aickman's "The View" in my post on Dark Entries, where I also remarked on "something that has often happened to me with Aickman...  I read a story once, think it's rambling and pointless, then read it again and realize how tightly structured and clever it is."  On this, my third reading of "The View," I finally had that epiphany.  Well, I still think that the enigmatic, aphoristic dialogue of "Ariel," the protagonist's mysterious lover, could be trimmed without notable loss to the story, but in that earlier post I was polite about the story without much admiring it.  Now I appreciate better (without accepting) its chains of association and symbolism relating to male and female identity.

The simplest and most terrifying story in We Are For the Dark is "Left Luggage" by Howard, which takes the most innocuous of objects, a stray suitcase, and imbues it with malevolent presence.  As with "Perfect Love," Howard demonstrates mastery of various structural tricks of the ghost story, but "Left Luggage" is so concise and clearly-explained that the effect of those tricks is much greater.

Despite dual authorship by writers with slightly different sensibilities, the stories in We Are For the Dark complement each other nicely, offering a fine mix of the ambiguous and the direct, the quietly unsettling and the outright frightening.  It's a pity that, while all of the stories are, for the moment, relatively easy to find,* they're not readily available under a single set of covers.  Their cumulative effect is not to be missed.

*The Howard stories, along with a fourth strange tale, can be found in the almost-out-of-print Three Miles Up from Tartarus Press,  "The Trains"  in the Aickman reprint collection The-Wine Dark Sea, "The Insufficient Answer" in the instant-remainder anthology Girls' Night Out, and "The View" in the Aickman reprint collection Painted Devils or the Tartarus edition of Dark Entries.

Dark Entries

The more I read of Robert Aickman, the more I realize how thoroughly unfathomable his stories are.  I'm forced to wonder whether their depths have a bottom, or whether their mystery extends forever, meaningless.  This ought to matter, some part of me is insisting, but I know full well that it doesn't.  The reason I read the six stories in Dark Entries in a single, nausea-inducing sitting, even after finishing two other books the same day, was not that I was doing the literary equivalent of a crossword puzzle, but that I was caught up in the workings of a particular kind of mind, a machine where product is irrelevant and pleasure exists simply in watching the gears turn.

This was Aickman's first solo collection of strange stories, and what strikes me about it is how fully-formed his sensibilities were.  These stories are no less suggestive, elaborate, and baffling than those included in his later collections.  There is no sense that Aickman, like other writers of the strange and the weird, went through an early imitative phase before developing his voice.  Perhaps this has something to do with the fact he became a published writer at mid-life; he was in his thirties when his first collaborative collection appeared.  It may be that the lesser efforts never saw the light of day.  Whatever the case, I felt as I read that a full-length biographical study of Aickman is much to be desired.  From what little I know, he doesn't seem the sort of person to be easily got at, but any light would be a help.

The stories themselves number only six, but most are quite long.  The first, "The School Friend," remains as wonderfully confusing to me as it did after I first read it in the reprint collection Painted Devils.  I can see how the story's epigraph, Elizabeth Bibesco's remark that "To be taken advantage of is every woman's secret wish," must have something to do with it, and it's perfectly possible to decode the story as a metaphor for the restrictions society sets on women's achievement.  (Given the slightly lascivious attitude toward women in many of his stories about male characters, it's somewhat surprising how sympathetically Aickman treats female protagonists.)  But that sounds terribly reductive, and as Glen Cavaliero notes in his introduction to the Tartarus Press edition of Dark Entries, there is much tangible detail in the story, so much that I feel treating it purely as metaphor would be a great mistake.  However one reads it, "The School Friend" offers that gradually mounting sense of disorder, leading to a final moment of inexplicable terror, that one hopes for in any strange story.

With "Ringing the Changes," one of Aickman's best-known stories, I feel on slightly firmer ground.  Metaphor is not the only thing at work here, but I marvel that on first reading I missed the connection between the honeymooning protagonist's mundane anxieties and the horrifying supernatural events that threaten to engulf him.  This is something that has often happened to me with Aickman, I must admit.  I read a story once, think it's rambling and pointless, then read it again and realize how tightly structured and clever it is.  That's not to say I understand everything about "Ringing the Changes."  I haven't yet grasped what, if anything, is the deeper spring of the wonderfully-named Commandant Shotcroft and his actions.  But again, that doesn't matter.  What makes the story-- and many of Aickman's others-- memorable is the way it turns events that are ordinary, if deeply atypical, into something with a collective effect that's menacing or uncanny.  Drunken hoteliers, a melancholy guest, a town where church bells ring all night and the beach is hard to find in the dark-- nothing sinister there, and yet...

"Choice of Weapons" was the only story in Dark Entries I hadn't previously read, so I was delighted to see that it was long, the longest in the volume in fact.  For most of its length it seemed (for Aickman) unusually comprehensible, and it was only when I came to the ending, which seems abrupt and which I am utterly unable to interpret, that I realized I had been skimming along on the surface, enjoying Aickman's description of unrequited love and decayed gentility without thinking enough on the larger intentions of the story.  For now, then, I can only admire the characters, lovestruck Fenville, seemingly-guileless Dorabelle, and the friendly yet somehow disturbing Doctor Bermuda.

"The Waiting Room" is rather short and straightforward; like his much longer "The Unsettled Dust," it's about as close as Aickman ever came to writing a traditional ghost story.  There is little enough to say about it, except perhaps that the most salient feature of Pendlebury's dream is a reminder of one of Aickman's recurring themes: that our only hope for an escape from the wearying dailiness of life may be a heightened existence that is equally ghastly in its own way.

That theme is even more prominent in "The View," one of at least four Aickman stories in which a world-weary man travels to a new place, meets an attractive woman/women, forms a sexual relationship with her/them, achieves something like an epiphany, and then discovers the consequences of these actions.  (The others are "The Wine-Dark Sea," "Never Visit Venice," and "The Stains.")  "The View" is the earliest of the four, and I think possibly the best.  The motif of changing and unchanging patterns is used to great effect, and the final revelation makes sense in a way that is beyond logic.

With "Bind Your Hair," the final story, I found a third stage in my Aickman-reaction pattern.  I had found the story impenetrable on first reading, but this time I thought I was understanding it as a metaphor for, almost a kind of satire on, certain anxieties in the protagonist about her future and its potential limitations.  But, again, the details defeat me.  I know it to be an excellent story, but... What do the children mean?  The pigs?  The maze?  Lateness?  Even as I type these words a new theory is forming in my mind, but it feels so preposterous that I hesitate to set it down.

I know I will have to read these stories, and Aickman's others, 13 of which are still unknown to me, many times more.  Not, as I say, in the hope of finding "the answer;" I'm not sure it exists.  But, just as Aickman's characters stumble through strange landscapes in the possibly vain hope of finding clarification and safety, so must his readers.  It can be a frustrating journey.  Even now, as a deeply committed Aickman reader, there were times when I wanted to say "This means nothing!" and toss the book aside.  But instead I read on, and was entranced by a strange detail, a new nuance, a possible symbol that made it all worthwhile.  The Aickman reader may have to bind his hair before entering the maze, but as it may not have been for Clarinda, what he'll find there is worth the trouble.

Sub Rosa

Travel is a good thing; it stimulates the imagination.  Everything else is a snare and a delusion.  Our own journey is entirely imaginative.  Therein lies its strength.

This quote from Louis-Ferdinand Celine, used as the epigraph for Robert Aickman's novelette "Never Visit Venice," could also serve for the entire collection in which it appears.  Seven of the eight stories in Sub Rosa features some form of travel.  Whether it's a business trip to Bedfordshire or a vacation to Belgium, Aickman's characters leave home and encounter ghosts and other mysterious phenomena.  Aickman called his work "strange stories," which is as good a label as any for the elusive and allusive feel of his fiction.  It's difficult to describe the nature of his work, or its likely effect on any reader.  His sensibility either appeals or it doesn't.  As Neil Gaiman once said,

I think that Aickman is one of those authors that you respond to on a very primal level. If you're a writer, it's a bit like being a stage magician. A stage magician produces coin, takes coin, demonstrates coin vanished... That tends to be what you do as a fiction writer, reading fiction. You'll go, "Oh look. He's setting that up."...Reading Robert Aickman is like watching a magician work, and very often I'm not even sure what the trick was. All I know is that he did it beautifully. Yes, the key vanished, but I don't know if he was holding a key in the hand to begin with.

 For myself, I think Aickman wrote some of the greatest ghost stories of the 20th century, but also produced some real clunkers, fiction in which his motifs and preoccupations are tedious or even offensive rather than chilling or psychologically potent.  Sub Rosa, fortunately, is much more tilted toward the former than the latter, including a number of my favorite Aickman works, and only one real clunker.

Because the original British editions of Aickman's collections are rare and rather pricey, I first read his work in the slightly-cheaper American collections.  Only one of those, Cold Hand in Mine, is a straight reprint of a British version; the other two, Painted Devils and the posthumous The Wine-Dark Sea, mix stories from several of his British collections.  As a result, when I received a copy of the handsome new Tartarus Press edition of the British collection Sub Rosa, I had already read seven of its eight stories.  However, that was no bad thing; Aickman's stories often feel so different on rereading that it's like encountering a whole new story.  In more than one case I liked a story much more after finishing it the second time than I had the first.

A case in point would be the opening tale, "Ravissante."  At a party, the narrator meets an ex-artist who now collates soulless books of reproductions.  They become friends, and after the ex-artist's untimely death, the narrator inherits a first-person account of the artist's meeting with Madame A, the widow of a famous symbolist painter.  As is often the case in Aickman, the events of that meeting are just unusual and baffling enough that it seems they must have been supernatural, even if each individual aspect can be explained by eccentricity or psychological breakdown.

The first time I read "Ravissante," I wasn't sure what to make of it.  It seemed to me that the opening section with the narrator went on too long, and that the artist's encounter with Madame A was too random to be frightening or disturbing.  But this time the meeting seemed much simpler and more symbolically potent, and as for the opening... Well, as R. B. Russell observes in his introduction to the Tartarus edition, in Aickman's stories "that which is left imperfectly explained haunts the more imaginative reader, who will go over the story for clues and hints."  Although I'm never sure whether meaning in Aickman is real or an illusion, I do find myself forming theories about just what's going on.  When it comes to "Ravissante," I can't escape the feeling that there may be some connection, literal or symbolic, between Madame A and the wife and later widow of the artist, a shadowy figure who appears prominently in the opening but is absent from the flashback.  And yet, what's the evidence for that idea?  Why, none at all.

"The Inner Room," the next story, features a dollhouse, which is a potent device for a ghost story, as any reader of M. R. James's "The Haunted Doll's House" can attest.  But, while there are a few skin-crawling moments here, mostly to do with the suggestive rather than the explicit, "The Inner Room" is as much about guilt, neglect, and the power of the unconscious as it is about spirits.  I liked this story a lot when I read it in The Wine-Dark Sea, and I enjoyed it even more in Sub Rosa.  It is, I think, one of Aickman's more straightforward works, to the extent that that word is ever applicable to his "strange stories."

I think it most certainly is applicable to "Never Visit Venice," a story in which devices Aickman uses well elsewhere fall apart entirely.  Driven by a recurring dream, the world-weary Henry Fern travels to Venice in the hope of some revelation, only to find it a cheap, tawdry disappointment.  Aickman's overlong description of Venice rather reminds me of Nathaniel Hawthorne's from his overlong romance The Marble Faun: it would be nicer, they both seem to think, if only there weren't so many filthy Italians in it.  By the time Fern takes a gondola ride with a mysterious woman, my patience has been exhausted, and what follows is no help.  The symbolic significance of the black-clad woman isn't real hard to work out, and Fern's sexual encounter with her feels like crude wish fulfillment.  Generally when Aickman writes about characters disappointed by ordinary life, his creations are detailed enough that they feel like people rather than a loud authorial voice, but Henry Fern is thin, and feels like a self-pitying device whether he is or not.  There's no substance to "Never Visit Venice," and the fact that it's well-crafted on a basic level doesn't make up for that.

With its silent spectre and its inexplicable layers of lingering dust, "The Unsettled Dust" is the closest thing to a traditional ghost story in Sub Rosa, but the real driving force of this story is shattered, dysfunctional human relationships.  Mr Oxenhope works for the Historic Structures Fund, which buys British country houses from their occupants and allows them to continuing living there in exchanging for maintaining the houses as museums.  Staying at Clamber Court for a nearby project, he meets the Brakespear sisters, whose covert feuds make for a series of uncomfortable evenings, and disrupt the sexual tension between the narrator and one of the sisters.  And then, one night in his room, he sees a mysterious figure...  "The Unsettled Dust" also tilts more toward the straightforward, but the characters are so richly drawn, and their pathetic conflicts and desires so real, that the story is a triumph anyway.  The only sour note is that project Oxenhope is working on.  He says that he won't focus too much on it because it's irrelevant to his story, which it is, but he says rather a lot about it anyway.  This may be a subtle piece of characterization, but the portrayal of Oxenhope's antagonist on that project is so one-sided that I wonder if Aickman, who worked for a similar organization at one point, is working out some real-life issue in fiction.  Either way, this material drags the story down somewhat.

"The Houses of the Russians" is also more traditionally ghostly, to the point where I can't find much to say about it, except that it is, as with Aickman's best work, allusive and chilling, mining a real landscape and real history for ghostly effect, and sending a shiver down the spine even though I don't know what, if anything, the events described actually mean.

"No Stronger Than a Flower" is the one story in Sub Rosa that doesn't deal with travel, but with another sort of new world: marriage.  It's also the story I hadn't previously read, so I'm hesitant to analyze it too much, lest I come back to it in the future and realize how stupid my initial interpretation was, but on one reading I found it an intriguing story of psychological warfare that goes farther than anyone could have guessed, with a realistic, aptly-observed newlywed couple and an ending that is literally absurd but makes perfect surreal sense-- another Aickman trademark.

In the brief but invaluable story notes unearthed for the Tartarus edition of Sub Rosa, Aickman remarks that the events "The Cicerones" happened to him, "(almost) precisely."  And indeed, John Trant's experiences at the Cathedral of Saint Bavon could almost have happened to someone, and yet they are also uncanny and deeply disturbing.  I admire this story, but I can't escape the feeling that there's something about it I don't quite understand.  Maybe if I researched the paintings described at the Cathedral I would be less in the dark.  Or is that only an illusion?

The collection ends with its longest and, to my mind, best story, "Into the Wood," one of my two of three favorites among the Aickman I've read.  Set at a sanatorium for insomniacs in Sweden, it mines the phenomenon of insomnia for all its disturbing value, observing that those who can't sleep can, in a certain light, seem almost like vampires.  But, like many of Aickman's best works, it also addresses the ambiguous nature of metaphysical revelation.  Molly Sawyer, the American who finds herself at the sanatorium with a decision to make, may be saved if she ventures into the wood, or damned.  Or the two may be the same thing.  This is another story that brilliantly blurs the line between ordinary eccentricity and the supernatural.

I wasn't sure at first whether it would be worth buying the new edition of Sub Rosa.  It's pricey, and I already owned most of its content in other editions.  But I received a copy for Christmas, and now I'm glad I did.  The stories work very well collected in this order, as intended by Aickman, and being spurred to reread them has made me admire his work all the more.  The Tartarus edition of another collection, Dark Entries, is forthcoming soon, and although there is once again only story I haven't read, I definitely intend to buy it.  If you're a ghost story fan and you haven't experienced Aickman yet, do yourself a favor and try to find one of his collections in your library system.  Whether you enjoy it or not, you'll be having a literary experience like no other.