A Review of the Strangers and Other Writings, by Robert Aickman

Leyburn, Yorkshire: Tartarus Press, 2015.  Hardback with a Preface by Heather  Smith. 293 pp. Also includes a DVD film documentary on Aickman.

Simon Cooke

The Tartarus Press, a small independent publisher based in Yorkshire, England, has recently reprinted Aickman’s collections of short stories. The Strangers and Other Writings is the latest addition to this catalogue, but unlike the other volumes it combines lesser-known writing with material which was previously unpublished and only existed in typescript. The book is divided into two parts, fiction and non-fiction, and covers Aickman’s entire career, with the earliest piece (“The Case of the Wallingford Tiger”) written in 1936 and the latest (“Review of Russell Kirk”) in 1980. There is no rationale for the inclusion of each piece and in her Preface Heather Smith is disarmingly honest: “Why were the works included in this volume not published previously? I don’t know.” (vi) Quality does not appear to have been a consideration, as such, and a glance at the contents page gives few clues. However, I note that the selection was assembled under the guidance of two experts in the field, Jim Rockhill and Peter Bell; although their reasoning is never given, the selection is carefully made, and one which gives us an opportunity to explore some of the puzzles at the heart of Aickman’s  writing.

One theme emerging from this material is the range and character of Aickman’s interests. These extend from the plays of Oscar Wilde to the music of Delius, from Orwell’s Animal Farm to the fiction of Russell Kirk, and from Irving’s The Bells to the films Crossfire and A Gentleman’s Agreement. In each case, Aickman provides erudite commentaries which reveal a highly analytical mind: his critique of the two films is deeply informed with an awareness of the processes of cinematic narrative, and his exploration of literary techniques is equally penetrating. Able to move, in the terms of the forties and fifties, between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, he is a patient critic unwilling to make value judgements of relative quality while always identifying the implications of the works’ ideas. The idea of the connectedness between the text and the society that produced it is especially marked in his cinematic criticism; commissioned by The Jewish Monthly to investigate the alleged anti-Semitism of  the two films mentioned above, he comes to the conclusion that they are “fundamentally hostile [to the] Jewish attitude to life” (160), which he views as more joyful than that of Gentiles because Jews have a “greater gusto and love of life” (161) than the non-Jews who constitute the majority of the audience.

This is a philosophical response to the question and seems deliberately provocative. But it does reveal an unexpected strand in Aickman’s thought, and one which runs throughout the writings presented here. Usually regarded as inherently conservative and a nostalgic supporter of some imagined, idealised past of elegant living, Aickman emerges from this collection as a thoughtful critic not of social class and class relationships, but of the damaging  effects of modern living. He accuses the Hollywood system of being part of a terrible “celluloid morality” which imposes “rigidity, uniformity, and deadness” (160), and he finds the same tendency in the Socialism of Orwell’s Animal Farm. It is not a matter of equality, he says, nor of money, which everyone accepts and wants, but of power – the power to impose sameness, to impoverish life and reduce it to some inert formula. To be free, he playfully suggests, it is necessary to be an anarchist – a state of personal liberation which is the reverse of Communism and also the reverse of Capitalist materialism and Capitalist technology. On this last point he is completely unambiguous, arguing in “Magnificence, Elegance and Charm” that:

The modern conflict is between man and the machine for mastery. At present the machine is winning in every department of life and thought; television being without doubt its most dangerous and far reaching victory… Every time you take a television into your house; every time you buy a washing machine or a motor car instead of a Shakespeare or a guitar you bring 1984 nearer. (222)

He goes on to note at several points that what we need to do in order to live full lives is to be enriched by the wonder of everyday things, while finding beauty in art and literature. His arguments recall the mid-Victorian credo of Aestheticism and especially the ideas of William Morris in the Socialist fantasy, News from Nowhere. I can only think that Aickman would have hated D. H. Lawrence, and yet his opinions also form a curious echo with Lawrence’s belief in the importance of intense living and personal freedom. This is the “secret of life” (118) that he finds in the plays of Oscar Wilde and in some aspects of the music of Delius.

Such commentaries, some of them published for the first time, allow us to re-assess Aickman’s views on society and to see him as a humanist, a secular critic who places well-being above all other values. It seems a curious claim in conjunction with his stories, which are explorations of discord, madness, the subversion of the everyday, sexual tension, grotesque violence and the supernatural. How can these two positions fit together?  That tension must remain unresolved and the collection offers no way of resolving it. However, the volume does give us an opportunity to throw new light on Aickman’s practice as a writer of strange tales.

Aickman’s ideas are explained in his “Review of Russell Kirk”, whose fiction, he insists, is “high minded [and] difficult” (270), the product of a complex interaction between the supernatural and the workings of the mind. The ghost story, Aickman suggests, is difficult to define, although:

The true ghost story is akin to poetry (is not a shiver the authentic test of a true poem?); and of poetry it is acknowledged that the better it is, the more difficult it is to define or even describe in its own words… In the true ghost story, of course, no dependable apparition may even once submit itself to sight, hearing, or the judgement of any other sense. The area remains visionary, though not hallucinatory. Quite possibly, the area of poetry and Unheimlich is the most important area there is. (267)

Taken from the author’s mouth, these comments are a telling reflection on Aickman’s dense stories, in which the ghost – or whatever it is – is never conventional, and the tales’ effect is usually one of ill-defined ill-feeling, the embodiment of anxiety. Irreducibly complex, they have the intensity of poetry and are always “visionary” though never vague or “hallucinatory.” Aickman’s mentioning of the Freudian “unhomely” pointedly reminds us of his debt to psychoanalysis and persuades us to view his stories in these terms. Elsewhere in the collection he gives other hints as to what the ghost tale might do, and his comments are again surprising. In a cancelled introduction to a proposed anthology he claims the ghost story has a cathartic function, releasing negative emotions:

The ghost story is … a channel through which is discharged the not small content in all of us of aggression, and even of sadism and masochism … The distinctive sensation when [we read] a good ghost story, is, we suggest, precisely the sensation of aggression discharged. (174–5)

Does this explain the underlying violence of so many of Aickman’s stories? It is at least another possibility in the reading of his work, and one which reinforces the notion that his tales are Freudian allegories in which the repressed unconscious struggles to be free and can only be released in the form of grotesque and unexpected distortions of reality. Yet even this only takes us some of the way, and Aickman’s criticism often seems wilfully contradictory.

I was most surprised by his apparently genuine interest in the supernatural as a real as opposed to a psychological phenomenon. The collection contains three essays on ghosts and poltergeists, and each laments the lack of serious research to tackle the question. In the wittily entitled “The Popular Poltergeist” he dryly notes how Harry Price, the celebrated ghost-buster of the time, is too unscientific to be trusted (145–6), allowing Borley Rectory to be lost even though Aickman had offered to help Price to purchase the house for purposes of detailed investigation. In “’Ghouls and Ghosties’ of England” he writes again of his interest in poltergeists, reminding us of the fact that this most sophisticated writer of weird tales was first and foremost an Englishman – as immersed in the old ghost traditions of England as Dickens and his Victorian contemporaries. Aickman’s relish in describing the spectres’ varying forms is telling, implicitly positioning his own work in a wider literary culture which is based on the premise that the supernatural is real; he details his own sighting of an apparition and he reports his father’s encounter with a ghostly noise.

At these moments Aickman is seen at his most unguarded as a poet of the imagination whose Freudian ghouls, symbols of the mind, might be glimpsed, if only for a moment, as tangible entities. It is another dimension to what is already an extremely complicated portrait. In his fictions Aickman’s personality is “refined out of existence” in the manner of the Joycean narrator, but in the criticism we can trace many of his beliefs. The Strangers and Other Writings is valuable for that reason alone. But what of the stories contained in the volume? As with the critical material, the effect is uneven but revealing.

Some of the unpublished tales are jejune, the evidence of a writer struggling to find an original voice. “The Case of Wallingford’s Tiger” (1936) and “The Whistler” are both experimental pieces, and the same is true of “A Disciple of Plato” (late 30s) and “The Flying Anglo-Dutchman”. All of these have the cool, detached tone that is so characteristic of his style, but at this stage there is rather more levity and dry humour than in his published work, and no distinct sense of a unifying vision. Nevertheless, these minor pieces anticipate many of the themes and techniques of his later writing. “The Coffin House”, written 1941, is a war-time horror story of a strange encounter; surreal in effect, it represents the first of a long series of situations in which everyday life is confronted with the inexplicable and, as result, is transfigured or changed. It is not difficult to see in this piece how Aickman is already experimenting with the dynamics of his writing – framing the strange in the context of the ordinary, the “unhomely” within the prosaic workings of the “homely” to create the classic Freudian effect of uncanniness.

In “The Strangers”, on the other hand, these effects are fully realised. Written as a first person narrative, it pursues the story of Ronnie, Clarinda and the baffled narrator, all of them bewitched by the spell of Vera Z. The settings and characters are typical creations and the story moves briskly though a series of horrific but inexplicable events. Aickman’s tone is characteristically restrained, amplifying the menace through implication rather than explication. At the end of the concert, the narrator’s disorientation is notably conveyed in a passage of macabre suggestiveness:

The entire explanation for my departure was that I had a moment’s glimpse through the murk of something I found extremely unpleasant; it was connected with a certain action on the part of the figure on the platform, a certain gesture, and instant response to some of it by almost the entire audience.  At the same moment, a draught like a knife had come in through the open door behind me. It was the moment one yells, and, with luck, wakes up … I cannot detail even to myself what so dreadful about the particular effect or trick I had just witnessed. (68)

Deeply ambiguous, the passage typifies Aickman’s habit of occlusion, merging the terms of knowing (“explanation”, “certain”, “moment”) with confusion: “I cannot detail even to myself.” Deeply misogynistic, subversive in its attack on bourgeois respectability and carried forward by visceral detail that mediates between reality and dream, “The Strangers” is as good as anything Aickman wrote. It is puzzling to find it was not published, and its appearance here, as the title-piece, returns it to the canon.

The fiction part of the collection is closed with “The Fully Conducted Tour”, an eerie tale for the radio (1976) and one which inhabits, once again, the haunted space between conventionality and what might happen if reality is skewed unpredictably. This is another high-quality piece, and one which deserves to be better known.

This is enlightening for any student of Aickman, and taking the book as a whole I have only very minor cavils. One is the lack of a scholarly introduction. The reader’s experience would undoubtedly be enhanced by a critical framing. Helen Smith’s Preface is useful, but some explanation of the relationship between the unpublished pieces and those that were published would surely be asset. The book would likewise benefit from scholarly referencing and at least some consideration of the problems of dating. While reading “The Strangers” I puzzled over its position within his work. Information on the front end-paper notes only “date unknown,” but from internal references I would date it to around 1970. What was Aickman otherwise writing at this time? Can “The Strangers” be linked to other works produced at the end of the sixties? And why was it never published? Did he consider it unworthy – or was it rejected by an editor or publisher? It would be intriguing to know. This problem could be addressed, as could the wider question of Aickman’s topical allusions. Some of these will be obvious to British readers – or at least to readers of a certain age – but non-British readers may not understand or even register the importance of small, contemporary details.

With these reservations, The Strangers and Other Writings is a very worthy enterprise. It reveals a great deal about Aickman’s ideas and techniques and it gives access to at least two remarkable stories which are otherwise unknown. The book is extremely well-printed and produced, with high-quality paper and binding, with an elegant dustjacket embellished with a design; it also includes a DVD containing interesting reminiscences which present a good introduction to the writer for the uninitiated. Tasteful, informative and beautifully produced, this is an invaluable addition to the library of any reader with a serious interest in this most enigmatic and challenging of writers.