Wednesday 15 June 2016

“A Very Noisy Place”: Aickman, the Radio, and “Ringing the Changes”

Simon Cooke

Aickman’s “strange stories” could hardly be described as the sort of material that lends itself to a visual adaptation. It is difficult to envisage a stage version of any of his texts, and although there have been several television treatments of his work – notably Jeremy Dyson’s recent adaptation The Cicerones (2013) – the complexity of the writing, with its strange imagery, unresolved narratives and menacing tone is resistant to dramatization in the conventional sense of the term. It would be interesting to see how the director approached the television version of “Ringing the Changes”, re-titled The Bells of Hell, which was broadcast by BBC2 in the United Kingdom in 1968. Shot on colour videotape and featuring well-known actors of the time, it was deleted after its commercial potential had been exhausted [1].

Aickman may have seen this treatment, although it is improbable that he would have approved. Innately conservative, his attitude to television was either dismissive, or suspicious of its social implications as an instrument of control. In “Magnificence, Elegance and Charm” he notes that “every time you take a television into your house … you bring 1984 nearer” (The Strangers, 222).  And  in “The Swords” he refers to “the telly” (Cold Hand in Mine, 3), a pejorative contraction reflecting his negative view of the mass audience. He was probably more comfortable with the radio, the familiar medium of his age. He gave several interviews on the wireless and wrote at least one short story for the air-waves, “The Fully Conducted Tour” (The Strangers, 107–114), which was broadcast by the BBC on Radio 4 in 1976.

Again, no recording of the performance is available and probably no longer exists, but two radio versions of “Ringing the Changes” were made and preserved. One, part of the Nightfall series, was broadcast on Halloween 1980 by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation based in Toronto. Another, broadcast by the BBC on Halloween 2000, appeared exactly twenty years after the first. Referenced to the date on which the story is set and adapted, respectively, by P. Norman Cherrie and Jeremy Dyson and Mark Gatiss [2], who also produced The Cicerones, these treatments are short (half-hour) programmes. Several times repeated, they are now available on the internet. While the television version has disappeared, we are compensated with these two adaptations, which give intriguing evidence of how Aickman’s work might be adapted for an electronic medium.

Their principal value lies in their inventiveness. They preserve the terrifying essentials of Aickman’s text while creating two distinct interpretations in which the writers modify some elements, suppress others, add new information and generally enhance and enrich our understanding of the source material, by pointing to its unresolved complexities. In the following sections we will examine these unusual broadcasts, the contexts in which they operated and the key questions related to the problems of adaptation.

Adapting the text for CBC and BBC: working with sound and structure

As noted above, “Ringing the Changes” is difficult material, and it is hard to imagine how it would transfer to the screen. Its combination of psychological drama and the horrific effects of the danse macabre would always be problematic, posing the question of how exactly to show the events. When it comes to radio, on the other hand, other issues are at work and in making the adaptation the writers and producers must have asked a series of questions which probe a crucial consideration: will it transfer to the medium of the radio?

Foremost among these is the question of radio’s “blindness” and its capacity to depict a story containing visual information and enacted as a dramatic interaction of characters, settings and situations. “Ringing the Changes” features many descriptive passages and, like all of Aickman’s work, has a journalistic surface. We “see” Hilda’s “ridged” face painted with make-up (“Ringing”, 43) and the kitsch contents of The Bell, where the worn-out register and comically inappropriate antiques are solemnly catalogued. None of this can be shown. At the same time, none of it is purely visual in the way that, for example, Dickens’s characters have to be seen. Yet this apparent limitation is in many ways liberating, opening up a field of possibilities. Released from the need to represent visually, the adaptations of Aickman’s text are free to re-figure the material in terms which purely exist in the imagination. It might be a problem to create the visual image of a mob of dancing corpses, but it is possible to implant or evoke the idea of the scene through other means. As Vincent McInerey observes, a skilful adaptation equipped only with words and sounds can elide the text’s visuality, filling the medium’s “darkness” with implication as it works to “produce an image, or set of images, in the mind of the listener.” (2)

This is precisely what happens in the two versions of “Ringing the Changes”. Both sets of writers evoke “mind-visible” images (8) and both amplify, rather than diminish the text’s effects by empowering the listener to construct the scene for his or herself. Though populated with his strange iconography of familiar objects, uncannily half-skewed and somehow menacing, Aickman noticeably occludes the vital information. For example, we never see the dead in any detail, nor do we see Phyrnne dancing. Working with these weighted omissions, each broadcast opens a space in which the horror can take a very personal form (Crook, 7). The darkness of the radio texts in this sense re-invokes the personal interpretation that takes place when a reader engages with the original words, asserting psychological ownership of its narrative and allowing the spoken parts to seem like an internal voice.

Each listener is thus encouraged to construct his or her own version of the text, conflating the experience of reading and listening. Of course, the same could be said of any skillful adaptation, but in the case of “Ringing the Changes” the transfer from page to sound is efficiently achieved. Cherrie, an experienced writer, went on to adapt other material in the Nightfall series, and both Dyson and Gatiss worked on the radio before they presented material on the television. However, they were able to achieve these effects because the text itself is what Adam Golanski describes as “perfect for radio” (“As Dark Locks In”) and Richard Hand as “ideal material” (155) for the airways. Though incorporating visual imagery and informed with a strong sense of seedy reality in the manner of British “New Wave” films of the early sixties, “Ringing the Changes” practically begs to be heard. It is impossible to know if Aickman wrote it with a sense of its broadcast possibilities, but it is certainly constructed in a manner which facilitates adaptation. Its use of sound, its emphasis on a central relationship and its dramatic construction are lucidly realized, and each of these ingredients can be refigured in aural terms.

A key constituent in the text’s transfer to radio is the tightness of its structure. Short stories are generally the best material for broadcast in the form of a 30 minute programme (McInerey, 55) and “Ringing the Changes” is constructed as a classic piece of condensed story-telling, with limited information and the type of small cast that fits neatly within the constraints of a short slot. Sharp, terse and overwhelmingly urgent, its dramatic form enshrines the Aristotelian unities of time (from the afternoon of 31 October to early the next morning), place (Holihaven, with a short preliminary sequence on the train), and action (the Bansteads’ encounter with the townsfolk, both dead and living). This cogent organization empowers the radio writers to encapsulate its essentials in the form of a compressed dramatization, conveying the text’s work in a single, rapidly consumed unit which maintains its original focus.

The tale’s limited action and characterization are particularly useful as a means of building the “intimacy” that McInerey regards as one of the defining features of the radio play (55) and helps to make it intelligible as it is consumed (usually, but not exclusively) in domestic spaces. “Ringing the Changes” is especially effective in these terms because the central focus is on the relationship of newly-weds, mismatched though they may be, seemingly like figures of Age and Youth and with a huge generational distance between them. But their conversations are nevertheless ideal material for the all-listening ear of the domestic consumer who would have heard the plays in leisure time, late in the evening. Aickman dramatizes their relationship in the form of highly-nuanced dialogue, and the radio writers preserve most of their conversations, enabling the listener to enter into their most private exchanges. As in reading the text, most of what we need to know about the couple and the complicated dynamics of their marriage are condensed into rapid-fire exchanges, and the same could be said of the listener’s engagement with Shotcroft, Don and Hilda, whose inner lives are enshrined in their spoken dialogue. We listen in to their conversations and construct our understandings as they speak. The process is rather like hearing a secret: space is eliminated and listeners are immersed in the story as vividly as if they were overhearing confidential information.

This effect is heightened in order to create an emotional bond with Gerald, who suffers most and acts as the intermediary between the normal and strange. In the case of Cherrie’s version the third-person framing spoken as the prologue is changed into a first person narrative, engaging the reader in what seems like Gerald’s horrified confession after the event. And in Gatiss and Dyson’s the opening lines are preserved as a grim introduction. These changes strengthen the identification between the listener and the character and intensify the sense of deeply-felt experience. Spoken information more generally allows the radio adapters to build a clear sense of the characters’ personalities, casting the parts (as we shall see) with actors whose voices interpret the “detailed, witty characterizations” (Hand, 155) inscribed in the original text.

Spoken dialogue is thus deployed as the mainstay of the radio adaptations. Aickman draws the reader into a deadly nexus of intimacy, and the radio dramatists do the same.  The dialogue also provides an opportunity for the broadcasters to inflect the material, manipulating the way the words are spoken to bring to the foreground aspects of the characters and their situations. Both plays noticeably dwell on differences between the protagonists’ age. Gerald is spoken in both versions by an older man, while Phrynne is “twenty-four years younger” (“Ringing”, 38) and has a voice which in Cherrie’s version sounds girlish. Their conversations are well played, acted with close attention to detail by a range of outstanding and versatile actors. Douglas Campbell and Nicky Guadagni act the parts in the Canadian version with perfect, understated English voices, and George Baker and Fiona Allen, prime practitioners of “cut-glass” precision, in the broadcast for the BBC. The nuances of the lovers’ interactions are subtly conveyed, and the female performers are especially effective in bringing out the sexual undertones of Phynne’s apparently casual comments. Her final arousal is powerfully performed in both pieces and leave the listener with a lasting sense of unrest and puzzlement.

The radio versions are equally faithful to the original material in bringing out the nuances of class and power. Though Aickman never spells it out, the main characters’ bourgeois status is accentuated on the radio, with Gerald, Phrynne and the Commandant speaking in British “RP” or “Received Pronunciation” accents, the discourse of the educated and privileged. The “thick bucolic accent” (72) of the railwaymen and the Pascoes’ “common” idiom are similarly conveyed (with one or two inaccuracies in the Canadian version), and in both plays there is a clear sense of class distinction. Darryl Jones has noted how “Ringing the Changes” has “a real sociological point to make about the English class system in the post-war settlement” (76), and the two radio versions act as a dramatic microcosm of the troubled  relationship between the middle and lower classes. As in everyday life in an unequal society, the manner of speaking is as important as the words’ meaning, and the voices presented here express conflict in how they speak as much as what they say.  Gerald’s irritation at not being served by the railwaymen (who deflect his appeal for help with the bags) is vividly conveyed, and his disapproval of Hilda (implicitly a “common” woman) is registered in the contrast between Gerald’s commanding tone in a clipped accent and the landlady’s anecdotal, shapeless droning. He speaks in the accent of power and command, and they refuse to act with the appropriate deference.
This situation, implied in the silent text of the original story, is promoted in the plays, dramatising the idea that in Holihaven middle-class propriety is denied. The power of a bourgeois accent is meaningless in this setting, presenting in an aural form the class anxiety that underpins the story and that is found throughout Aickman’s fiction. Its final powerlessness, we might say, is conveyed in the arrival of the dead and their revellers. Aickman describes this moment in terms which are defined by the differences in class-accent and its dangerous implications. The Bansteads speak in Standard, non-regional English as they cower in terror, while the racket outside is described as the sound of proletarian yokels, “agitators bawling a slogan, or massed troublemakers at a football match” (“Ringing”, 74). This formless shouting and bellowing is overpoweringly presented on the radio, viscerally conveying the idea that the bourgeois voice (the agent of correctness, power and “normality”) is impotent in the face of the formless desires of the masses. This seems snobbish, but we have to remember that the dead (speaking in dialect, shouting loutishly and thrashing around) are more vital, paradoxically more alive, than the middle-class speakers of the Queen’s English. The plays postulate this riddle in accordance with the text, and the effect is unsettling in that both sets of accents are ultimately oppressive and destructive.

This complex interplay, uncovering the social implications in Aickman’s writing, typifies the sophisticated way in which dialogue is exploited for dramatic effect. Dialogue is also used to advance the story, and here, once again, Aickman provides a template. The initial moment of horror, when Shotcroft convinces Gerald of the terrible truth, is figured as a script of terse statements:

“Take her away, man,” said the Commandant, with scornful ferocity.
“In a day or two perhaps,” said Gerald, patiently polite. “I admit that we are disappointed with Holihaven.”
“Now. While there’s still time. This instant.”
“They can hardly go on practising all night,” he said. But now it was fear that hushed his voice.
“Practising!” The Commandant’s scorn flickered coldly through the overheated room.
“What else?”
“They’re ringing to wake the dead.” (“Ringing”, 60).

Functioning as a play-text which progresses the story to the next stage, these words are ready-made material. Indeed, Aickman does all the work. The exchange is animated by the immediacy of surprise, and he offers what are essentially stage-directions, telling us exactly how the words should be spoken in the form of the Commandant’s “scornful ferocity” and the hushing of Gerald’s voice as he realizes the truth of what is said. It seems, once again, as if Aickman is writing for the radio, and all the writers of the broadcasts have to do is preserve the original text and give it a spoken form. This they do with great effectiveness. The Commandant’s “scornful ferocity” is witheringly spoken in both versions, and Gerald’s fear is given subtle dimensions by George Baker’s intonation in the BBC treatment.

The urgency of the exchange propels the narrative forward in the short story and in the adaptations the pace likewise quickens. Underpinning this movement there is of course the overwhelming emphasis on the bells. Gerald describes Holihaven as a “very noisy place” (59), and the radio plays are practically overwhelmed by the clangour. The BBC version made use of a new recording, and in both treatments the “booming” of bells “like warriors fighting in the sky” (46) is maintained throughout. Like Phyrnne, who hears the ringing “with my left ear, and another lot with my right” (47), the listener is assaulted by the noise. Gerald’s half-deafened terror becomes the listener’s as our hearing struggles to cope with the cacophony, identifying with his discomfiture, “tautly listening” (47) to the developing clangour.

 However, this grisly campanology is only part of what Richard Hand describes as the story’s “aural register” (155). Critics have routinely spoken of the bizarre implications of the inescapable ringing, but it is important to point out that the story as a whole is arranged as a montage of significant sounds. As with the dialogue, so too with the background, the author constructs a ready-made, orchestrated framework which establishes the narrative and moves it towards a climax not of sound, but of silence. This structure underpins both broadcasts and once again the writers exploit the lexical markers in the story, converting them from descriptions of sounds into the sounds – or “sound signs” – themselves. They also expand the text’s aural textures by adding others which are implied but not heard.

Within this “noisy place” (59) the narrative is opened by the blowing of a whistle and the sound of the train’s rumbling (39). This opening effect is in the foreground of both plays, although each are obliged to add the unmentioned sound of a steam engine; this would have been taken for granted by readers of 1964, but is unfamiliar to the later radio audiences. Once the couple have arrived, however, Aickman provides a list of sounds that appear, in seamless transition, on the airwaves. The single bell initiates the sense of uncertainty, and thereafter we hear bells that boom (41, 46) in ‘deep note[s]’ (41–2), a ‘din’ (49) in the manner of firing ‘artillery’ (52), a Coffee Room bell that sounds ‘like a fire-alarm’ (51), an ‘inferno of ringing’ (69), shouting and singing in the street (75) and, finally, the glass, china and wood-work smashing into pieces as the dead bodies storm the Bansteads’ bedroom (75).

This arrangement works, in short, to create a progressive sense of tension. The louder it becomes, the more agitated Gerald gets, and the more terrifying the denouement becomes. At the same time, Aickman breaks the sound for dramatic effect, and both Cherrie and Gatiss and Dyson integrate this element, presenting clear caesuras in the noise. On radio, spaces without sound can be as effective as sound itself and, as the narrative moves towards its climax, the silence in the text becomes in the broadcasts a moment of dread and tension that forces the listener to strain for the next significant clue. As the Bansteads wait, the sudden diminution to a single bell in the text is matched by a weighted silence on the radio with “no sound of any kind … not a creaking floorboard or a prowling cat or a distant owl’ (70–71). This gives way to a “thick bucolic accent,” a “guttural vibrato of emotion” (72) which is then taken up by the “pandemonium” (69) of the deafening noise of the milling dead, “scraping …scuffling … singing …banging” (75). These effects overwhelm the soundtrack. The actors’ shrieking and screaming are powerful enactments of the characters’ terror, marking aurally the extreme point of distance from their light flirtations in perfect Home County accents, and the singing of the dead is enhanced in both versions with extra, demonic muttering and growling. The action is closed by the gravediggers working “silently” (80), though in the Canadian version the scraping of spades is distinctly heard.

It might thus be argued that Aickman provides the radio dramatists with a series of ready-made structures which enable them to adapt the material with efficiency and directness. The formal arrangement of the story, with its controlled narrative, terse dialogue and graded sounds make it, as noted earlier, a perfect piece for the assailing of our ears.  Showing it on the stage or film would probably be ineffective, running the risk of degenerating into just another retread of the zombie-genre. But it is the perfect starting point for a radio drama in which the “mind-visible” (McInerey, 8) is allowed to prevail, implanting the strongest of individual imaginings through the medium of highly textured sound. There are further complications, however. Although I have suggested the interchangeability of the structures, with the prose text providing a script for a play of voices, it is important to remember that Aickman’s short story is not and cannot be the same as the radio dramatizations. Aickman provides the ground-plan, but changes have to be made in addition to the elements that are preserved. As Albrecht-Crane and Cutchins explain of cinematic re-writing in words which also throw new light on adaptations for the radio:

Adapters cannot “transpose” or “transfer” [directly from one medium to another] … They must interpret, re-working the precursor text and choosing the various meanings and sensations they find most compelling … [and then select] scenes, characters, plot elements, etc., that match their interpretation (16).

The richness of the two versions of “Ringing the Changes” is vested in the fact that while they appear to be quite literal treatments of their source, there is still space in which editorial changes can be made, fashioning the material to reflect the contexts in which the broadcasts were made, and the expectations of the audience. Most of all, Cherrie, Dyson and Gatiss uncover the nuances of Aickman’s tale. Recognizing its status as a “fluid text … that exists in multiple versions” (Bryant, 48), they follow the style and outline of his writing but inflect the material, offering distinct interpretations that allow us to understand the multifaceted nature of his work.

Gothic horror: Aickman in Canada

As noted earlier, in Canada “Ringing the Changes” was broadcast as part of the celebrated Nightfall series. Other stories included Dickens’ “The Signalman”, Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw”. All of the pieces are Gothic in tone, with the explicit intention of frightening the audience in the relaxing setting of the fireside. Aickman’s story, with its horrifying encounter with the dead, was an obvious candidate for inclusion. Figured as a text within an anthology, a status it also enjoyed in print, Cherrie’s version is shaped to fit its listening context. Phrynne and Gerald (here called Horstead rather than Banstead) are terrified by the events, and Cherrie harmonizes the tale with others in the series (and with other texts within the genre as a whole) by emphasising its status as a Gothic thriller. This shift in emphasis was achieved by making small additions to the script, by focusing the actors’ delivery on conveying key messages and on creating the effects of horror, especially through the use of music.

Cherrie intensifies the suspense by preserving the more economical dialogue while adding proleptic details of his own. The framing section ominously warns that the tale is a “special love story for lovers of all ages” and Gerald’s opening lines are adapted to suggest some existential doom, announced as if in retrospect. In the original there is no suggestion of foreboding beyond his worrying about the age difference, but in Cherrie’s dramatization Gerald anxiously remarks that they had been “to the village at the end of all of things” and “perhaps they tried to warn us.” Warnings they certainly receive. In additional dialogue the railway porters tell them that they’ve “made a mistake” visiting on “tonight of all nights,” and before the Commandant instructs Gerald to escape, a drunken Don repeatedly tells him to “run – go.” Each of these markers project the narrative forward and other additions, spoken by Phrynne, have the same effect. While walking in the deserted streets she notes that “it’s like an empty stage set. I wonder what happens when the curtain goes up?”

Further prefigurative clues, giving new information, are applied to the encounter on the beach. Gerald asks what Phrynne has “stepped on,” and is told it is “something soft – and bone.” These warnings and speculations present more questions to be answered, and Cherrie is skillful at tantalising the listener. The reference to the object “like bone” implants the notion of a dead body, while Phrynne’s description of the streets seeming “like a tomb” amplifies the growing sense of morbid unease.
Adding pace in the form of these small interventions, and compressing what is already an extremely dynamic text, Cherrie’s treatment is restless and urgent. The hurrying of the narrative is matched by the febrile intensity of the acting and sound effects. Gerald – brilliantly played by Douglas Campbell – speaks impatiently to the Pascoes and the railwaymen, and the scene on the beach is treated as a moment of climactic horror, even though in the original narrative it is only a stage in the process of disorientation. Aickman notes simply that Phyrnne gives a “sharp cry” (48), but in the radio play this becomes a terrified scream. Gerald’s confusion is also intensified to the point of panic as he shouts repeatedly, casting around in an existential darkness. A moaning sound follows the insertion of her foot, apparently issuing from an invisible corpse. Ugly and disturbing, the play’s soundtrack underscores the volatility of the actors’ voices.

Built up in these small details, Cherrie’s Gothic excess quickly moves from suggestion to explicit horror. Tension is further developed by the unsettling music – sometimes percussion and sometimes “acid rock” – and the mounting suspense is formalized by dividing the text into short, episodic scenes. The score punctuates the sections, and the opening words of each part are noticeably more anxious in delivery as the play unfolds, accentuating the text’s staccato rhythm. The key moment in this treatment, as in the story, is the meeting with the Commandant. Positioned as the play’s centrifuge, his conversation with Gerald has immense impact, a moment in which secrets, so cleverly implied in the previous minutes, are revealed.

Played with relish by Nightfall regular Sandy Webster, the significance of Shotcroft’s bizarre disclosure is accentuated in a number of ways. The terse exchanges are preserved and his key line, “they’re ringing to wake the dead” (“Ringing”, 60) is delivered with sneering intensity. Other changes are made elsewhere. In pursuing his Gothic project Cherrie diminishes Shotcroft’s ambivalence, converting him from either a troubled neurotic, or a diehard of the military type, into a sort of shaman. His back-story is deleted and he speaks to Gerald in a curious, rasping accent which invokes the strangeness of the foreign Other, redolent of Bela Lugosi’s delivery in Browning’s film version of Dracula (1931). He is certainly not a native speaker of English, let alone a practitioner of an upper-class accent, and he seems to be timeless, speaking from beyond the grave. Essentially a supernatural monster, he is rewritten in this version to support the tale’s Gothic credentials. If there were any suspicion that Gerald is subject to an indulgent imagination, it is dispelled in his meeting with this strange creature. Shotcroft’s voice shifts the story from the prosaic everyday into the domain of nightmare, and the story quickly progresses to its all-too tangible conclusion.

Gerald and Phrynne do not have time to make love or attempt to make love. The cadavers arrive, complete with distorted voices, a demonic growling, screams and the sort of music  stereotypically associated with horror films. The action is closed by the Banstead/Halsteads’ recovery and here again there is a crucial change. In Aickman’s text the key moment is Gerald’s contemplation of Phrynne’s response to the re-interment of the dead, when she becomes momentarily aroused with her “soft mouth” becoming “fleetingly more voluptuous still” (80). In the play, however, he simply warns her not to look and is answered with a sensual “Why ever not, Gerald?  Why ever not?”  This change preserves the text’s openness but stresses a continuing menace. Once the knowledge has been gained, it is impossible to unlearn it.

The change points more generally to the ways in which the text has been transformed. Aickman’s text is a rich field of possibilities; Cherrie’s is much narrower. He highlights the dramatic effects of suspense, but elides the subtler implications of psycho-sexual malaise and the dynamics of the dream. In order to make the text fit into its broadcasting context, he converts it into a Gothic shocker which deploys a lexicon of familiar tropes. The innocent are overwhelmed by the experience, and the comfortable certainties of the everyday world are submerged by horrors. The fascination and threat of taboo, and the extension of the human mind by its transformative encounters with the unknown, are the central concerns of this interpretation, linking it to the broader concerns of its (putative) genre. A partial reading of Aickman which is at times too formulaic, Cherrie’s dramatization is still an unsettling experience that highlights the original author’s capacity to create bizarre situations of anxiety and despair.

Life in the provinces: a very English interpretation

Cherrie’s version stresses the horror of Aickman’s tale, and it is widely regarded as a worthy contribution to a series that is opened by a narrator imitating the voice of Vincent Price, set to stereotypically “spooky” organ accompaniment. Adam Golaski notes its impact on his childish ears as he listened in terror, and it undoubtedly made a lasting impression on many. Its appearance online has extended its malign influence over a new generation of listeners.

In Dyson and Gatiss’s approach (2000), on the other hand, there is less emphasis on the visceral nastiness of the situation and more on the text’s exploration of another sort of ugliness. Treating it as a coded exploration of the repressed horrors of respectability, sexual repression, class and the stultifying conditions of provincial life, these radio writers present Aickman’s tale as a Gothic critique of British society. As noted earlier, Darryl Jones reads the tale in sociological terms (76) and Dyson and Gatiss, working on the same premise, rewrite it as a piece of calculated subversion. It mimics the textures of the domestic dramas that typically feature on Radio Four, but it undermines their orthodox, conservative view of the status quo. Their adaptation re-positions the work in the social context in which it originated (1964), although it also comments on the social tensions of contemporary British society. Locating this analysis within the unfortunate encounters of Gerald and Phyrnne, the writers point to the fissures and inconsistencies at the heart of British (or at least English) life. This project is achieved with only small editorial changes and additions. As in Cherrie’s version, the nuanced speaking of the actors carries the effect.

Gender conflicts are clearly marked by accentuating the age difference between the main characters. Though Phrynne is supposed to be twenty–four years younger than Gerald (“Ringing”, 38), the voices suggest the difference is much greater. Acted by George Baker and Fiona Allen, the contrast between them is very pronounced, with Baker sounding old enough to be her grandfather rather than her husband. This difference is initially used to present the particular conditions of their marriage. Gerald is essentially a boring authority figure, pompously explaining the levelling of the railway line, while Phrynne, cast as a dependent, literally fixated by his plangent voice, only wonders how he knows about such arcane matters. The father/child relationship is asserted, though Dyson and Gatiss almost immediately point to the emerging weakness in this arrangement, inserting a few lines which suggest that Phrynne is unwilling to accept her role. Gerald claims he is mature “like old wine”, to which she responds that he is “deliciously full bodied.” This new line asserts her sexuality at the start of the play. According to him she is just “cold and choosy,” a sexless “girl” (38) or a “dead girl” (56). Yet her erotic small-talk clearly indicates she is looking forward to their bedtime encounter and is not willing to be the passive recipient of his affections. Her suppressed eroticism is also heightened in other changes. The text notes that he “kissed her” (39), but in the radio play she takes the initiative, saying “come here.” A loud kiss is heard for several seconds, creating a mental image of a passionate embrace.

Indeed, in this reading, Phrynne is far from the passive spouse of post-war Britain. Though described as a kitsch child-wife – with pathetic “big eyes” and a “tiny face” (39), a portrait in the manner of Dickens at his most sentimental and patronising – her mature sexuality is repeatedly asserted, and her physical attractiveness is as pronounced as her innuendoes and small-talk. Following on from the extended kiss, the railwaymen are positioned as admirers, with one lasciviously noting in an East Anglian accent: “look at that … cor!” Both Shotcroft and Hilda are impressed by her beauty. In Aickman’s words Hilda looks at Phrynne’s near-naked body following the dance with “animosity” (79), but here she is given an extra line, noting with regret that “she’s very beautiful.”

 More importantly, the writers stress Gerald’s discomfiture as he contemplates his wife’s behaviour, becoming progressively more anxious as the evening unfolds. One key line underpins this interpretation. We are told in the original text that she “opened her pretty legs to the fire” (53), but in the play Gerald’s response is the focus: “Don’t sit like that, Phrynne.” The line is spoken with an embarrassed tone which leads immediately to suppressed anger as he notices the Commandant inspecting her with her legs apart. “Why are you standing there?” he demands. Phrynne’s appeal is obvious and, crucially, she is willing to display herself.

This reorientation brings to the foreground the subtext and highlights the notion of the couple’s mismatch – with an older man in sexual decline married to a young women whose sexuality is on the point of release. The contrast is made entirely apparent following the danse macabre. Phyrnne (“almost naked”) is found downstairs at The Bell, while the Commandant has to help Gerald to walk. He is infirm, suddenly a very old man, while she is still luxuriating in her erotic encounter. This juxtaposition forms the dramatic core of Dyson and Gatiss’ treatment. Framing the tale as a contrast between repression and release, self-expression and fear, it presents Aickman’s tale as a study of sexual dysfunction in which Phyrnne’s encounter with her erotic self is a positive event.

Not quite a feminist tract, the play suggests that her transformation, her ringing of the changes, involves the death of her old self, which is cast aside when the dead literally dance anew and her vitality is re-discovered. Her marriage is already a grave and her grisly release is a resurrection - an escape from Gerald’s deathly presence. The point is clinched in the final sections of new dialogue, giving voice to a silent passage in Aickman’s text. Phrynne notices the re-interments and Gerald informs her that “ploughing” (shifting the action from the cemetery to a field) is taking place. Yet she immediately contradicts him: “they’re not ploughing, they’re sowing.” The “sowing” is her recognition of the awakening of her sexuality, and she closes the play with laughter and a sort of post-coital humming - a version of the mob’s singing. At the same time, she has taken control of her life and is no longer the inert recipient of his dull conversation. Talking down her husband symbolizes her new awareness of her own desires, and nothing he can say is important. “None of it matters any more,” she remarks, and the listener is left with an overwhelming sense of Gerald’s irrelevance as he lectures her on the sights of Cambridge. Their marriage has been fractured by her realization of her husband’s impotent uselessness as she seeks to express her erotic desire. Sombre oboe tones, which have punctuated the scenes, suggest the joyless, sexless years that will lie ahead.

Read in these terms, Gatiss and Dyson’s adaption is another treatment of a classic British theme: repression. The casting of the voices and the small inflections divert Aickman’s tale away from its Freudian track and re-cast it as a study of the sheer dullness of bourgeois respectability, and the psychological transformation that is needed to escape. Phyrnne, with her enhanced dialogue and voluptuous tones, is an iconoclast. She breaks the rules of middle-class propriety and asserts the text’s application as a mode of social criticism. It reminds us that the story’s first appearance was in 1964. Phyrnne is cast as a liberated woman of the sixties who rejects the stultifying lifestyle offered by the moribund Gerald, the emblem of an old-fashioned paternalism. It is equally relevant to audiences of 2000, projecting Aickman’s tale into a social arena in which women are still treated as objects and trophy wives. In this version, Phrynne’s dance with the dead is a dance to escape the limitations of sexism and male domination.

This assault on bourgeois mores has other applications in the treatment of class tension. As noted earlier, accents are used in both plays to register the difference between the bourgeois characters and the others, with each radio-text reflecting on the powerlessness of class superiority. Gerald, Phrynne and the Commandant are used to taking control and giving orders but the voice of privilege is useless in the context of Holihaven. For British listeners, however, the impotence of class-based authority has another, troubling dimension. The differences in accent and the differences between Standard and regional English are amplified in the BBC version with the aim of accentuating the couple’s sense of embarrassment and uncertainty. Gerald, though commanding, barely knows how to speak to the Pascoes, and adopts an inappropriate tone when he is speaking to the railwaymen. The denial of the usual response breaks the code of propriety and politeness, adding a sense of isolation to the developing sense of social anxiety. It is further accentuated by the Bansteads’ position between the unruly proletariat and the upper-class Commandant, whose cut-glass accent, spoken with cold precision by Michael Cochran, is as intimidating as the roughness of the other characters. Caught between the threatening coarseness of the under-educated and the arrogant dismissiveness of the upper-class Shotcroft, who treats Gerald with contempt, the Bansteads are placed in a familiar British trap. Voices connote the acceptable transactions of social discourse, but here the skewing of the register, with none of the rules being obeyed, adds materially to Gerald’s unease and Phyrnne’s bewilderment. With no other middle-class characters in the hotel, their fearfulness is intensified by their social isolation. Taken out of their milieu, with no one to speak to from their own class and taken away from their usual, reassuring routines, they are indeed outsiders, menaced by the rituals of a remote and inward looking community.

Indeed, Gatiss and Dyson focus on the provincialism of Holihaven, stressing its detachment, as a run-down backwater, from everyday life. The play removes Gerald and Phrynne from their social context by accentuating the conflicts of accents, and it removes them geographically from their Home Counties setting as well. Gerald is given extra lines to highlight the sense of difference. He explains the slowness of the train as a matter of Holihaven being part of a quieter lifestyle, a place where “Time matters less,” although his commentary is ironically contradicted when they arrive at the imagined rural idyll. Anything but cheerful bucolics, the railwaymen are rude and uncooperative, the streets are empty, the bells deafening, and the Pascoes unwelcoming. The town is redundant -  even the sea has retreated from it. In this treatment it is also unrelievedly bleak. At several points during the walk to the sea the added sound of wind is heard, evoking a sense of melancholy, and the intimacy of the couple’s conversations is undermined by subtle echoes, stressing the coldness of the empty streets. Caught in a drear and uninviting place, the Bansteads are the quintessential outsiders, the emblematic “civilized” people who, through some aberration, have moved from normal life to the abnormal, from reason to the strangeness of the archetypal, secretive “village” (“Ringing”, 39) of the Gothic imagination.

This emphasis aligns the reading with the enduring idea of the menace of the British provinces and here, once again, the appeal is directly to the home audience. Gerald imagines Holihaven in the stereotypical terms of the English paradise, the place of quaint streets and picturesque quayside, but Gatiss and Dyson uncover the darker side of the equation. Drawing on the tradition of remote communities as traps, the writers’ emphasis on Holihaven’s hostility connects their text most immediately with David Pinner’s novel, Ritual (1967), and Robin Hardy’s film treatment of the same material, The Wicker Man (1973). Somehow drawn to the place, Gerald and Phrynne are the unwilling participants who turn up at the least appropriate moment, and Gerald can be viewed as another version of the fated Sgt. Howie, the sexless, fearful puritan in Hardy’s film [3]. Like him, the Bansteads are allowed to see a pagan Britain, with bells raising rather than burying the dead in a curious subversion of the everyday structures of the prevailing, “normal” culture, and in paradoxical mockery of the Christian notion of resurrection.

In short, this treatment probes some particularly British anxieties, linking Aickman’s text to English Gothic by locating it within a discourse of social, sexual and cultural alienation. It pushes to the fore his story’s function as a critique and it suggests the range of its application, anatomizing the tensions lying at the heart of a series of codes. More understated and resonant than Cherrie’s version, its very rectitude is unsettling. Until the dead arrive, the play sounds like just another domestic drama on Radio 4, intensifying its horror by containing it within the reasonable tones of the English bourgeoisie.

Aickman and the radio

Both radio treatments of “Ringing the Changes” are accomplished works. A challenge to the listener, they preserve and promote the intensity of their source material while also providing lucid explication of Aickman’s ideas for a series of audiences. More interestingly, they inflect the story with seamless additions and small changes of emphasis, allowing us to view the material as a Gothic shocker and as an analysis of social and sexual mores. Like all good adaptations, the radio versions enhance the original text, pointing to its underlying tensions and its considerable density and richness. Stimulating and strange, they are worthy treatments of this most complicated of writers, allowing us to enter his world in ways which extend beyond the limitations of the visual and the literal.

Notes

1.      This programme was broadcast as part of BBC 2’s Late Night Horror series at 23:10 on 17th May 1968. Directed by Naomi Capon, the main parts were played by Ronald Hines and Michelle Dotrice. Its details have been preserved by the BFI.

Prior to the setting up of a professionally run archive in the mid-seventies, it was the BBC’s practice to delete its videotaped programmes once they had been broadcast, repeated and/or sold to foreign broadcasters. The relatively high cost of video at the time meant that erased material was taped over. This procedure was followed with scant respect for quality, with some outstanding programmes of the period being preserved and others, now considered significant, being discarded. We are fortunate in that most of the BBC’s “Gothic strand,” including masterworks such as Kneale’s The Stone Tape (1972) and John Bowen’s Robin Redbreast (1970) have been saved, and are now under the protection of the BFI. The Bells from Hell was not one of the survivors, unless, as has happened with a large amount of material, some copies still exist in overseas archives or private ownership. Material mounted on 16 mm. colour film (such as Lawrence Gordon Clark’s treatments of Dickens and M.R. James) is fortunately intact.

2.      I can find no details of P. Norman Cherrie’s writing career beyond his contributions to Nightfall. Mark Gatiss and Jeremy Dyson, on the other hand, are well-known British writers and actors. They are best known for their black comedy, The League of Gentleman, which was broadcast by the BBC in three series and nineteen episodes, 1999–2002. The incongruous and menacing tone of these programmes reflects the writers’ interest in Aickman. Both are champions of his work.

3.      The casting of Barbara Shelley as Hilda Pascoe is a playful reference to the text’s connection with cinematic versions of British Gothic. Shelley played the “love interest,” menaced by vampires and monsters, in many Hammer films of the fifties and sixties, bringing authenticity to her parts as she does to her reading of Hilda.

 The plot of “Ringing the Changes” (1964) is echoed in many morbid, low-budget Hammer films of the period that typically show middle and upper-class characters (doctors, scientists, landowners) being threatened by inexplicable traditions and the menace of an unknowable peasantry. Aickman’s tale is most closely related to John Gilling’s Plague of the Zombies (1966), an effective “B” film in which the dead overwhelm a small Cornish village.

Works Cited

Aickman, Robert. “The Swords.”  Cold Hand in Mine. 1975. Rpt. London: Faber, 2008. 1–25.
---. “The Fully Conducted Tour.” 1976. The Strangers. Leyburn: The Tartarus Press, 2015.  48–106.
---. “Magnificence, Elegance and Charm.” 1956. The Strangers. Leyburn: The Tartarus Press, 2015.  218–230.
.----. “Ringing the Changes.” Dark Entries. 1964. Rpt. London: Faber, 2014. 38–80.
Albrecht-Crane, Christa & Cutchins, Dennis. “Introduction”. Adaptation Studies: New Approaches. Eds. Albrecht-Crane and Cutchins. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 2010. 11–24.
Browning, Todd [director]. Dracula (85 mins). Black & white. Universal, 1931.Bela Lugosi (Dracula).
Bryant, John. ”Textual Identity and Adaptation Revision.” Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions. Eds. Joergen Bruhn, Anne Gjelsvik & Frisvold Hanssen. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. 47–68.
Cherrie, Norman P. Adaptation of Aickman’s Ringing the Changes (27 mins). Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, broadcast at 21.00 on 31 October 1980.  Produced by Bill Howell. Performed by Douglas Campbell (Gerald), Nicky Guadagni (Phrynne), Sandy Webster (Shotcroft) and Ruth Springford (Hilda).
Crook, Tim. Radio Drama: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge, 1999.
Dyson, Jeremy & Gatiss, Mark. The Cicerones. (13 mins). Colour. Sureshot Films, 2002. Broadcast on Channel 4 (UK). Directed by Jeremy Dyson and with Mark Gatiss as Trant.
Dyson, Jeremy & Gatiss, Mark. Ringing the Changes (26 mins). The British Broadcasting Corporation, broadcast at 23.00 on 31 October 2000. Produced by Pauline Harris. Performed by George Baker (Gerald), Fiona Allen (Phrynne), Michael Cochran (Shotcroft) and Barbara Shelley (Hilda).
Golaski, Adam. “As Dark Locks In: Nightfall.” Open Letters Monthly (1 October 2012).
Hand, Richard. Listen in Terror: British Horror Radio from the Advent of Broadcasting to the Digital Age. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014.
Hardy, Robin [director]. The Wicker Man (87 mins). Colour. British Lion, 1973. Written by Anthony Shaffer. With Edward Woodward (Howie), Christopher  Lee (Lord Summerisle).
Jones, Darryl. “Robert Aickman, the Ghost Story and the Idea of Englishness.” The Ghost Story from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century.  Eds. Helen Conrad O’Briain & Julie Anne Stevens. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010.  61–80.
McInerey, Vincent. Working for Radio. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988.
Pinner, David. Ritual. Bath: Chivers, 1967.

Friday 8 January 2016

Beyond the Human Compass - The Curiosity Cabinet of "Ravissante"

Matt Sampaio-Hackney

“Rudolf’s Kunstkammer incorporated both naturalia and artificialia, as a primary goal in forming a Kunstkammer was to gather objects of great variety, to represent the world and cosmos in miniature. This ran the gamut from a Renaissance painting to the horn of a unicorn. Although the actual purpose and meaning of the Kunstkammer has sparked a scholarly debate, with notions favouring the Kunstkammer as a political apparatus representing a courtly display of propaganda and magnificence, or as a private place of refuge, one meaning is generally accepted: the Kunstkammer as a microcosm of the universe.” - Jacob Wamberg, Art and Alchemy

A Cabinet of Aickmans
                                                           
There is a persistent mythology surrounding Robert Aickman that has disseminated the false belief that his stories are incomprehensible. They are reported to be insoluble puzzles, missing endings like limbs, or are baffling performances of stage magic. This belief has also sprouted a bestiary of contradictory Aickmans. There is Aickman the magus, who tricks even Neil Gaiman, summoning logical fractures and classical allusions to blinker and blind his readers. Then there is the frustrating Aickman, who is more of a poet than a story-teller, and never learned how to carve a plot from the hard marble of sense. Next is the Freudian resurrectionist Aickman, whose work grubs with slender hands in the grave soil of the unheimlich. Following him is the heroic conservationist Aickman, squinting into the sun from the deck of a canal barge, clad in a frumpy sweater. Finally comes the traditionalist and antiquary, R.F. Aickman, who wore spectacles, was fascinated by the Edwardian period, and neglected a weed-grown and unruly parcel of teeth.

The true Aickman can never be limited to any one of these personas, as he displayed features of each across all aspects of his life. Yet, frequently the most dominant persona is Aickman as trickster – the magician figure. As Gaiman and others have observed, it is difficult to tell what makes his strange stories tick and what rules govern their production. But there are indeed rules. The 1968 tale “Ravissante”, first appearing in Sub Rosa, is more than anything else a blueprint for the strange story, a sermon justifying its existence and worth. Read carefully, it becomes clear that it is a direct apologia for his own aesthetic – an aesthetic not materializing wholly from his own genius, but arising out of a literary tradition and context.

“Ravissante” is a fictional thesis, a tale that literalizes Aickman's aesthetic of the strange story with a temerity that suggests a certain subtle mischievousness in his writing. It is a hermetic and referential tale, not so much a fiction responding to life as it is a fiction about the production of a response to life, i.e. art and its power. It seeks to enact this power at the same time, and to lead by example. But, moreover, it attempts to channel or divert the power and perceived legitimacy of symbolist and decadent art into the realm of strange fiction.

“Ravissante” is a literary cabinet of curiosities, or Kunstkammer – an assemblage of animals, artefacts, and objects intended to create a microcosm of the world. Historically, Kunstkammers also demonstrated the power and wisdom of their owners and in this sense often functioned as a form of propaganda. “Ravissante” is propaganda for Aickman's aesthetic of the strange story and his vision of reality. Even topographically, the layout of the house in Brussels, with its long shadowy hall, resembles a wonder-cabinet toppled over onto its stomach, splaying out its contents – dogs, paintings, old-gold lamps, strange women, sculptures of succubi, and furred insect creatures with eyes as large and wet as oysters. Naturalia, artificialia.

There are several techniques Aickman uses in his position as defense attorney for the accused – the strange story – and how those techniques manifest within the narrative structure of “Ravissante” must be explored. But first it is necessary to place his work in literary context.

Evolution of the Strange Tale
                                                           
The popular idea that Aickman is a singular entity dropped ex nihilo into the backward fens and fields of supernatural fiction must be replaced with a more truthful and historical image of him as a writer consciously operating within a tradition. In this particular case, a sub-tradition: the strange story living in the basement of the supernatural tale, itself merely renting a flat from the Fantastic. What constitutes the true lodestone or foundation of what we call the strange story can be argued about endlessly, but certainly a forerunner to Aickman's work who must be considered is the American Henry James. Like Aickman, James favored ambiguity and enigma in his supernatural fiction. In a remarkable introduction to his own anthology Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday, Italo Calvino says, “With James… the fantastic genre of the nineteenth century has its final incarnation. Better put, its disincarnation, since it becomes more invisible and impalpable than ever: a psychological emanation or vibration… The ghosts in Henry James’ ghost stories are very evasive.” (Calvino, xvi)

We can see this trend of invisibility rippling outward from James in a number of Aickman's predecessors: Barry Pain, Rudyard Kipling, Madeline Yale Wynne, Walter de la Mare, Oliver Onions, John Metcalfe, A.E. Coppard, John Davys Beresford. To one degree or another, all of these writers tended not to hum the standard bars of the ghostly tale, and chose to pipe on a scale altogether more allusive and elusive. They drain the blood from their spectres and dry them on hooks, not in the dining room Uncle Hugh died in, but in the abattoir of their protagonist's brains. The interior becomes exterior, the fear of death fulminates behind their eyes and its smoke trails out into what Samuel Beckett called “the faint inscriptions of the outer world.” (Beckett, 38) This is a literary territory not of screaming skulls, mephitic puddles of putridity that once were men, or unctuous things in halls. Here, instead, is a literary topography of tiny hillside towns much bigger at night than they have any right to be, enticing attic trunks that swallow children whole, and perfectly non-descript country homes that might actually be way-stations between this world and the alleged next. From this fertile loam Aickman sprang.

With this uneven and provisional history charted – traveling, say, from an outlier prototype in Prosper Merimee's 1837 tale “The Venus of Ille”; rushing forward to Pain's “The Diary of a God” in 1901 and Kipling's “They” in 1904; D.H. Lawrence's “The Rocking-Horse Winner” in 1926; and Edith Wharton's “All Souls” in 1937 – the techniques and aims in collections such as Sub Rosa and Powers of Darkness become much clearer. These pieces are all strange fiction avant la lettre. Much as surrealism can be found in its progenitor, symbolism, the seeds of strangeness were sown in these earlier supernatural tales. Explanations are elusive, interpretations are multiple, conventions subverted, and for the most, blood and gore eschewed in lieu of psychology. Calvino gave his estimation of Henry James as “the apex of the incorporeal and ungraspable.” (Calvino, xiii) Since James, that apex has moved ever higher.
           
But if we consider Aickman’s supernatural to be a disincarnation of the fantastic, it is a disincarnation that remains more bodily focused than James, more sexual in its concerns and manifestations, and never wholly impalpable. These disincarnations, rather than making the fantastic less strange or more normalized and domestic (as arguably one could say about James), instead seem to make it more alien, more incomprehensible than ever. Aickman takes the corporeal-supernatural and turns it inside out, making it so psychological and incorporeal that it becomes bodily again, and the inside obtrudes on the outside. It is like a pig that has been carved and stewed for a feast, then put back together again on the table as if still alive, a sinister apple clamped in its mouth. The famous quote from Aickman that “the ghost story draws upon the unconscious mind, in the manner of poetry” is apt here (Night Voices, 279). Aickman’s description of the unconscious as “the magnetic under-mind,” is both stylish and punning.

This notion of corporeality and embodiment is important to the strange tale, because a distinction must be drawn between it and the ineffable and genteel ghost story often found in nineteenth century magazines, such as The Cornhill, Blackwood’s, and All the Year Round. At the same time it  must also be distinguished from the straightforward horror tale. Two core elements of embodiment brought to heavy usage in horror fiction are the grotesque and the horrible. The strange can encompass the grotesque but it is not often the focus, and horror seldom appears. This is fiction more closely allied to Boris Karloff's notion of “terror” as opposed to “horror.” One thinks of Aickman's own “The Swords” for an example of grotesquerie mingling with the strange, but one does not often find purulent popes, Inquisitional flaying, or rats the size of horses in the strange. It is a long way from William Mudford's “The Iron Shroud” to de la Mare's “A Mote.”
           
While the genteel ghost story features little more physicality than the appearance of chaste skeletons and anemic materializations, the strange as a genre often possesses sexual organs. It must be added that this is an innovation largely pioneered by Aickman. Sexuality in earlier strange fiction was more intimated, with a few notable exceptions, such as Coppard's “Arabesque, the Mouse” or May Sinclair's “The Villa Désirée”. Outside of (but also including) erotic feeling, physicality in the strange tends to be mediated or displaced, through masks, dolls, articles of clothing, cups, or even weapons. One is reminded of Japanese shunga which emphasize the erotic charge, not of nudity and bare touch, but nudity and touch mediated through elaborate, sensuous clothing. In the same manner, physical barriers and visual opacity heighten the uncanny.

The strange sub-genre does not so much have unique features as it has commonplace features enlarged to deformity. The primary characteristics of strange fiction – ambiguity, dream-logic, and sexuality (repressed or overt) – are all present in traditional supernatural and ghostly fiction. It is simply that these elements have metastasized and, as a result, transcend the fireside club-tale conformity found in the work of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sabine Baring-Gould. Resolution, conventional sentiment, and standard manifestations of the occult are all undermined. Mystery and the uncanny are elevated. The text becomes a catafalque of dream-imagery unencumbered by rationality.

In Aickman’s stories, the unconscious – the under-mind – undermines. What it undermines is not only generic convention, but often the narrator’s own conscious self-image, bourgeois comfort, or belief in materialism. It undermines the trail of mythologies we make about ourselves, the places where we live and the people we say that we love. Most notably, it undermines the reader’s expectation for a neat, closed and readily explicable ending. But this under-mind is not the totality of the supernatural for Aickman. It is just one agent for it. He stated: “[the ghost story] need offer neither logic nor moral.” (Night Voices, 279) Yet there is a logic to the tradition of the strange tale in which Aickman works.

Every literary genre has its tricks and sleights of hand, its semiotic devices employed to either smuggle contraband past Reader Customs or to concisely deliver information. As an example, science fiction has entered, through long usage, into a sort of common-law marriage with the “info-dump” technique, where a block of necessary scientific knowledge is didactically given to the reader all at once. But in fiction of the supernatural, the iconic technique is a form of subliminal suggestion. One must set up the appearance of the singer’s ghost in the phonograph, but not make it predictable. Thus it could be said that in science-fiction it is more necessary to give the reader information, whereas in horror or supernatural literature it is more necessary to hide it.

In traditional supernatural literature, this subliminal suggestion is often obvious and made more so by the number of structural conventions adhered to: the local townsfolk have heard whistling coming out of the pond, an innkeeper makes passing reference to a recent death in one of the rooms, etc. With the antiquarian spin from M.R. James, these intimations generally come from books, or urns, or washed out frescoes of demons gnawing on the fragrant toes of saints. At its crudest level, this subliminal suggestion is nothing more than foreshadowing.

In the strange story, the subliminal suggestions are more sophisticated and come from a variety of directions. Misdirection, a technique commonly associated with mystery fiction, is employed to great extent. Sometimes in order to hide information it is necessary to give more information. As Philip Challinor notes in his book Akin to Poetry, Aickman will often discuss plot-irrelevancies at length and then say something of great significance in passing. This is simple misdirection of the kind seen on stage, but not often in the pages of ghost stories. “Relevant details are often so slyly inserted that their significance is apparent … only on repeated readings” (Challinor, 8). To many readers it is confusing to find so many red herrings, like soup hairs, nesting in their fiction. But this evolution of foreshadowing into misdirected suggestion is one of Aickman's greatest innovations, and to paraphrase what G.K. Chesterton wrote of Bernard Capes, Aickman took a penny dreadful technique and made it worth a pound (Lamb, 11).

With Aickman situated within the historical framework of supernatural literature, and with some of the features and techniques of strange fiction in mind, it is now much easier to traverse the text of “Ravissante” and observe the magus’ tricks.

“Ravissante” is arguably one of the most complex works of fiction from the most complex supernatural writer, yet it uses the old framing structure of the manuscript found within a copper cylinder/burned house/etc. This may at first seem rather like performing complex brain surgery with an obsidian knife, but it does demonstrate Aickman’s sense of his work in literary continuity. It also provides a convenient distancing effect for what is in some respects a cautionary tale about the withering of the artistic spirit in a commercial society, and the complicity of artists in this process.
                                                                       
The Gateway of the Monster

It begins when the typical Aickman introvert narrator strikes up an acquaintance with a painter at a forgettable cocktail party. He himself is a dry and forgettable man, “faintly disappointing,” but a painter of some power (Painted Devils, 3). At the time of their meeting, he has renounced painting and instead pursues work as a commercial writer. His wife is even drier and more forgettable, a taciturn matchstick of a woman who says almost nothing all. Dinners occur at their Battersea flat, hung with the man's paintings – likened to the abstract spiritual work of later Charles Sims. But slowly the lifeless and boneless acquaintanceship dwindles. This ex-painter dies, and bequeaths his entire artistic output to the narrator – as well as a hundred pounds, the entire measly estate of a curdled life. The narrator meets with the painter’s wife, who indifferently says she will burn everything he does not take. He takes one painting and a stack of papers that consist of the man’s letters and writings. The narrative proper begins when our protagonist reads one of these papers, a tale chronicling the painter’s stay in Belgium as a young man, visiting the elderly wife of an unnamed symbolist painter.

A number of symbolist and decadent artists from the fin de siecle period are cited as influences for the painter, including James Ensor, William Degouve de Nunques, and Xavier Mellery – who went on record as saying that he painted “silence” and “the soul of things.” They all share aesthetic concerns and imagery with the strange story: the imagery of masks, death, silence, the landscapes of dreams, and religious icons.

In the course of the painter’s discourse regarding himself and his ideas about art, it can be seen that there are a number of similarities between his views of art, and Aickman’s of literature. At the trial of the strange that is “Ravissante,” Aickman calls to the stand what appears to an avatar of himself, or at least a humble proxy. Both are obsessed with the femme fatale figure, the painter noting his belief that death-by-woman seems a natural enough way to go. Both pinch pennies in giving admiration, the painter’s selective character mirroring Aickman's own stated belief that there are only forty or so top-notch tales of the supernatural. Both create their work in quasi-mediumistic fashion – as if through a form of communion or séance – indicated through the anecdotes surrounding Aickman’s approach to writing bulletins for the Inland Waterways Association. But of highest importance is their shared valuing of mystery above rationality, and their scorn of commercialism and scientific positivism. “I most certainly did not want to understand everything. I had once even told a fortune-teller as much.” (20)

The painter's tale is, of course, the point at which the story splits itself in two, where the main narrative shrugs out of the old skin that held it and slouches off somewhere else. It is important to note here Aickman’s assertion the ghost story should draw upon the unconscious mind. When the painter enters the house of Madame A, he is symbolically entering his own unconscious. The transition from mundane logic to dream logic is signaled when he stands at the front door and, without performing any action, observes: “There was a bell and I heard it ring.” (13) This is an abrupt and clear passage into the passive realm of dreams, where cause and effect speak in different tongues. Yet Aickman performs this invasive surgery with the lightness of touch of a water-strider, stirring nary a ripple in the reader's mind.

On being curtly greeted by Madame, he observes that the main room of the house is a long living room replete with symbolist sculpture, erotic works by Félicien Rops, smoked-glass lamps, and an enormous fireplace sonorously belching with flame. The painter notes, “Almost as soon as I entered, it struck me that the general coloration had something in common with that of my own works.” (14) This is Aickman’s deft handling of a sense of foreboding, and the first incision that will later grow into a larger wound. Lamps, painting, sculptures - these are the objects in the painter's unconscious; the curiosity cabinet that is his mind.
           
Of particular importance in regard to the artificialia found in the house is a sculpture depicting childbirth. Its unusual anatomy is explained by Madame A as being “la naissance d'un succube.” (14) The birth of a succubus. One could say this succubus, in a similar process to the leaving of the womb, achieves entrance into the world through the painter's own actions. This sculpture is the first intimation of the death of his career.

Madame A is described as being less than five feet tall, wrinkled and egg-like, but wearing a revealing dress and possessing a frankly erotic, even predacious, manner. She regales the painter with lurid, salacious tales of the personal lives of many artists she knew, saying of one, “I wouldn’t have used him as a pocket handkerchief when I had the grippe.” She rants and gripes and berates and belittles, and one can smell the stale hovels, stinking feet, furtively spilled seed, and fin-de-siècle Catholic shame implied in her harangue. The painter is mortified, feeling that her speech soils the dignity of the artists he adores, unseating them from their thrones. “An object of admiration is impaired by hostile criticism of any kind, however ill judged, and there is nothing the admirer can do to mend the wound, even though his full reason may tell him that the critic has no case.” (16) An opposition is set up here, with the painter as priest of art's sanctity and Madame A as the defiler and iconoclast. One of the unnamed icons appears to be Gustave Moreau who, in her memory, preferred his bucolic landscapes that would not sell to the lurid Salomés and burned martyrs he was known for. Lacking finer distinctions, Madame brings everything to the level of commercial exchange.

While she fumigates her own memories of the repulsive, insect-like artists she knew, something very odd happens. A small dog, resembling a black poodle, appears out of a shadowy corner behind a door. It pokes around the sitting area by the fire, and then trots away back into the darkness, entirely unnoticed by Madame A. The painter says that it has “very big eyes and very long legs, perhaps more like a spider than a poodle.” (19) He relates this to Madame, suggesting that it “must have got in from the darkness outside,” but she shrugs and replies that animals are always making appearances in the room, including “less commonplace species.” (20) It is important to note that just prior to the appearance of the animal, Madame A had called the painter back to his seat in front of the fire, “as if she were summoning a small, unruly dog.” (19) The painter stands in front of a doorbell; it rings of its own accord. He is summoned like a dog; a dog appears. Such is the logic of “Ravissante,” and the first instance of the house’s naturalia.

The Room of Silence

The strangest part of the story begins when Madame A invites the painter into the room of Chrysothème, her adopted daughter who is currently abroad. The invitation's pretext is to view Chrysothème's clothing, a curious suggestion the painter assents to hypnotically. Away from the clattering, hissing fireplace, a hush falls over the text. The room of Chrysothème is a room of silence. The painter has come to the soul of things, or is at least led to believe so. Madame A makes a number of curious statements about her alleged daughter, saying that she “is the most beautiful girl in Europe” and that “if you could see her naked, you would understand everything.” (20)

This is a statement of some import, considering the painter's response is an adamant rejection of such an understanding. Madame A is trying to suggest to the painter that Chrysothème is a kind of life-giving muse. She is seducing him with the notion that he can possess the muse, but what she actually intends for him to do is invoke the company of a succubus – the succubus hewn in marble outside. Once again, this is the unconscious logic of the strange tale. In a dream, a room from one's own life is never quite the same, and when one returns to the same room a second time while dreaming, it is even less so. What was a grandfather clock decorated with Prussian soldiers becomes a pattern on wallpaper, and in the same manner, what was hard marble in one room becomes animated spirit in the next. Dream-scribes are notorious for their freewheeling translations, dragging the lineaments of one thought, like sinuous Beardsley lines, into the frame of something else.

Still preoccupied with the spider-like dog, the painter dully exclaims that it is a “beautiful room.” The reply from Madame A: “That is because people have died in it… the two beautiful things are love and death.” (21) This is the most transparent instance of Aickman revealing himself through the tale, speaking not just through his avatar, but also through the femme fatale who will destroy him. Nearly a decade later Aickman entitled his 1977 collection of fiction Tales of Love and Death. He is drawing connections between the aesthetic and ontological concerns of symbolist artists and the aesthetics and ontology of strange fiction, thereby granting it greater legitimacy through a variety of character defense.

Locked in this room of silence the painter observes: “In the center of the far wall stood a red brocaded dressing table, looking very much like an altar…the only picture hung over the head of the bed in the corner behind the door… It looked more like a chapel than a bedroom. More like a mortuary chapel, it suddenly struck me; with a sequence of corpses at rest and beflowered on the bier-like bed behind the door.” (21-22) Here the ambiguous suggestion is made that the bedroom belongs to someone who is no longer alive, or who was never alive to begin with. Yet the dresses bear the marks of wear, the body of someone much taller than Madame A. This is characteristic of his misdirection. Rather than proffering one interpretation, Aickman gives several that seem to contradict one another.

The bizzarerie worsens when Madame invites him to touch and examine the clothes of Chrysothème, giving commands such as, “Lift the dress to your face,” “Kneel on it. Tread on it,” and “Why don’t you kiss it?” The painter obeys every one, and she notes, “You could almost wear it yourself…you like wearing blue and you are thin enough.” (23). Aickman has made much of Madame A’s Pan-like, aged sexuality, and here she plays dominatrix in a scene with more than a whiff of fetishism. The power dynamics are unusual; Madame is ordering the submissive painter not to submit to her, but to dominate another. He, the submissive subject, is dominated into dominating another. Or to desecrate, more to the point, given the religious appearance and silence of the room with its bed as both altar and bier. Of note is Madame A’s earlier interpretation of the painter's astrological sign as being one of “secrecy and sensuality.” When the painter demurred that only the first was true, she replied, “Then I must direct myself to awakening the second.” (15)

Acting under his own volition, but encouraged by Madame, the painter brings his lips to the blue dress she offers. He is faintly aware that she is demeaning and ridiculing him, but concerns himself only with “that other who wore the dresses.” After a brief affair with this garment, he is handed a black velvet dress. “The moon!” she exclaims. “And the night.” (23)

This psycho-sexual, fetishistic examination of Chrysothème’s apparel culminates when Madame A invites him to open a chest full of her lingerie. Again, compelled both by the Madame and by his own urges, he obeys, saying that “the scent was intoxicating in itself.” Tying the ribbon over the double entendres, Madame enjoins him to “plunge in [his] white arms,” and to “love them, tear them, possess them.” (24)

Lost in his reverie, he is unaware of the passage of time until he realizes that he is cold and has lost his sense of smell. He wakes as if from a fever dream, or the cessation of the act of love-making: “And at that moment, for the first time, I really apprehended the one picture, which hung above the wide bed in the corner. Despite the bad light, it seemed familiar. I went over to it and, putting one knee on the bed, leaned toward it. Now I was certain. The picture was by me.” (25)

Clarifying her disdain for the piece and for him, she drolly says, as if it were the creation of some absent person: “Not a painter at all. Would have done better as a sweeper out of cabinets... or a fetcher and carrier in a horse-meat market.” He notices that the angelic figures from his work have somehow been turned into clowns. Recognizing the pointlessness of defending his work, he utters a polite formality, perhaps more addressed to Chrysothème than Madame: “Thank you, madame... for receiving me.” (25) Let it not be said that Aickman lacked for dirty jokes.

Madame A greets this obvious, formal plea for freedom as if it were terrifying. She shouts for a souvenir like a drunken tourist at a gift shop that is closing, and the painter sees that she holds an enormous pair of scissors. One remembers the earlier bell that rang of itself. Now the pair of scissors suddenly appears. In dreams, cause and effect can seem as distant from each other as an old, married couple that sleep in different rooms and try to avoid each other as much as possible, within convention. The arrival of these two objects, bell and scissors, are the beginning and ending signals of the painter's journey into the house. A journey, it becomes clear at this point, more into the fleshy ontological tunnel of his own unconscious than anything else.

He understandably flees from the massive scissors, but out in the hall he finds “squatted on the single golden light that hung by a golden chain... a tiny, fluffy animal, so very small that it might almost have been a dark furry insect with unusually distinct pale eyes.” (25) This last and oddest specimen of naturalia within the cabinet is also the most apparently supernatural. Small mammals similar to the being described exist (mouse lemurs and pygmy possums, for instance), but they do not reside in Brussels. He rushes down the hall and through the big, flaming room, past the art he came to adore, faint and watery in the dimness, and to the front door. Madame chases with her scissors, crying for a lock of hair. Victory assured, he bids her good night and steps out to the Chausèe d’Ixelles.

Writing two weeks after the occurrence of this event, the painter makes a curious statement, that must be quoted in full: “Within twenty-four hours I perceived clearly enough that there could have been no dog, no little animal squatted on the lantern, no picture over the bed, and probably no adopted daughter. That hardly needed saying. The trouble was, and is, that this obvious truth only makes things worse. Indeed, it is precisely where the real trouble begins. What is to become of me? What will happen to me next? What can I do? What am I?” (26)

This statement presents a difficulty for a literal interpretation of the tale, until one realizes that “Ravissante” is primarily a glimpse into the painter's state of mind after he has been divested of his self. It is the first hint of the emptiness so apparent in his character years later. Secondarily it forms another piece of misdirection, along the lines of the earlier statement: “What one remembers is always far from what took place.” (7) One is taught to expect a tidy summing up at the end of cosy supernatural tales but, true to form, Aickman, with “Ravissante”, does not do this.

The Crock of Gold
                                                           
Throughout the course of “Ravissante” an impressive number of ironies and contradictions unfold. What must be admitted, in order to make sense of them, is that the occurrence of the dresses did not go as the painter thought it did. He was deceived. Instead of being the possessor, he was himself possessed.

Alan Moore said: “Treat writing as if it was a god. Treat writing as if it was some immensely powerful deity that you have to appease.” Chrysothème is the muse, the other, who dictates to an artist as if they were her amanuensis. She is pure inspiration and, as such, cannot be directly touched or perceived. It is impossible to drink from the unadulterated substance of creativity, but Madame A convinces him to make the same error as Faust. Aickman wrote of Faust: “Faust's error was an aspiration to understand, and therefore master, things which, by God or by nature, are set beyond the human compass. He could only achieve this at the cost of making the achievement pointless.” (Night Voices, 270-1) By making the same choice, the painter prostitutes himself and his art, and discovers the duality of artistic endeavour. Keep art holy and it fills you with life; degrade it, pervert it for commercial purposes, and it will degrade you, lapping up your life to the lees like a succubus.

With her fixation on the profitability of the artists, and her overriding concern for their follies and failures, Madame represents commercialism – the world of tabloid newspapers, profit margins, outlays, gross sales.  She is an agent of the Enlightenment science and materialism both Aickman and his avatar loathe. She denudes mystery and blasphemes against the fin de siècle idols. The little painter pretentiously stands up against this monstrosity, with lance and shield, under the banner of Art. He stands no chance.

True to the form of the strange story, Aickman layers Madame A with multiple coats of textual reference. In addition to her materialist function, he likens her to a leprechaun, creatures known to hoard crocks of gold. It should be observed here that the Greek word chrysos means “gold.” The painter ravishes Chrysothème expecting gold, only to receive base lead in return. But, of course, Madame does not just resemble the Irish faery. She is just as much a witch from German Märchen, living in a tantalizing ginger-bread house of decadent artwork. And so, too, she resembles the Pied Piper. Like Aickman's vision of reality, Madame A is meant to be irreducible, bewildering.
                                   
If the room of silence is a devotional chapel to the gods of art, it has been perverted as well as inverted into a scene akin to black mass. The recurring angel figures from the painter’s work are twisted on the canvas into clowns. The muse is transfigured into a demon. Madame A draws the painter towards his own desecration, lures him on to his own creative and spiritual dissolution. As an agent of the painter's unconscious or under-mind (a mind tempted by the commercial, for all its hatred towards it), she has undermined the recurring figures of his art and even his own sense of self. “What am I?” he asks. Not an artist, is the answer. And so to glossy, mass-produced commercial art criticism he goes, violating his animus in the pursuit of such a career. This is a form of death.

When the original narrator meets the painter at the cocktail party, he is a man without much in the way of viscera. He might just as likely tell a joke as a butterfly pinned to a board. If he smells of anything, it is likely formaldehyde. Yet in his manuscript he describes himself as being a raconteur of a kind, capable of amusing and witty remarks. But, he adds, “it is almost as if someone else were talking through me.” (9) This charming cad stands in marked contrast to the ineffectual, repressed, boring nobody who is “unable to make a hole in the wall that presumably enclosed him.” (3) Like a praying mantis, when the muse turns on her mate, she leaves very little left. The other from Rimbaud's “I am another” has fled, leaving behind only a hollow and ever diminishing “I am.” This is the price, Aickman suggests, for those who are not strong enough to keep their art pure – a fear he perhaps possessed.

Aickman is himself engaged in a Faustian pursuit: the construction of a story that mirrors reality's irreducible complexity, where all interpretation is provisional. The creation of fiction that eludes the science of textual analysis, though it dares one to try. The development of a story “set beyond the human compass.” The slippery aspects of his performance of the strange are not just aesthetic, but philosophical. They are not intended to frustrate and swindle the reader, like a clever junk seller touting turnips as fob-watches. Rather, they are intended to immerse the reader in the impenetrable mysteries of existence, its contradictions entangled within the petals of a rose as wide as a universe. But fiction’s mirror is always a cheap antique made of burnished copper, stained and scarred, as cracked as its creator. Aickman nonetheless endeavors to give us a glimpse, and his Kunstkammer is both universal and unconscious. In a way, the absent Chrysothème represents the true meaning behind “Ravissante”, a view of Aickman's reality that will always present more mysteries. She is distant, untouchable, and intoxicating, and all the more so because we know that we can never see her naked.
           
Works Cited

Aickman, Robert. Night Voices. Leyburn: Tartarus Press, 2013.
Aickman, Robert. Painted Devils: Strange Stories. New York: Scribner’s, 1979.
Beckett, Samuel. More Pricks than Kicks. New York: Grove Press, 1970.
Calvino, Italo. Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997.
Challinor, Philip. Akin to Poetry: Observations on Some Strange Tales of Robert Aickman. Baton Rouge, LA: Gothic Press, 2010.
Lamb, Hugh. The Black Reaper: Tales of Terror by Bernard Capes. Wellingborough: Equation, 1989.
Moore, Alan. Alan Moore Interview Part 1. Northhampton College, 26 February 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCPZdLgOXUY.
Wamberg, Jacob. Art and Alchemy. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006.