Small, But
Substantial:
Specialty Press Produces Admirable Scholarship
by S. T. Joshi
Crawford, Gary William. Robert Aickman: An Introduction. Baton Rouge, LA: Gothic Press, 2003. 76 p.
The relative paucity of biographical or critical work on British writer Robert Aickman (1914-1981) is a crime of the first order. Possibly biographers have been inhibited by the poignancy and panache of Aickman's own autobiographies, The Attempted Rescue (1966) and The River Runs Uphill (1986). The scattered nature of Aickman's "strange stories" (fewer than 50 in number but spread out over nearly a dozen overlapping volumes, many of them scarce), not to mention the ambiguity and obscurity of much of this work, has perhaps intimidated the critics of our field, who seem content to regard Aickman as a hallowed predecessor of and possible influence on such contemporaries as Ramsey Campbell and Thomas Ligotti. But now that Tartarus Press has issued Aickman's Collected Strange Stories (1999; 2 vols.), there is no reason why critics and scholars should not strive to grapple with this difficult but rewarding writer. Gary William Crawford's slim monograph seeks to do just that and, aside from a few deficiencies, does the job admirably.
Crawford's book is a condensed biographical, critical, and bibliographical examination of Aickman that soundly lays the foundations for broader work. Perhaps the biographical section is the most valuable part of his treatise. Drawing upon first-hand research conducted over the past twenty years, when he strove to contact many of Aickman's closest colleagues (including several women who were the author's friends or lovers), Crawford draws, in scarcely more than twenty pages, a rich portrait of a complex and enigmatic figure---his tortured relationship with his parents, his conflicted attitudes toward women ("For years I suffered unspeakable agonies from sex frustration," he writes touchingly in The Attempted Rescue), and his valiant efforts, at a time when environmentalism was regarded as an eccentricity, to save Britain's "inland waterways" (chiefly canals) from destruction and degradation.
The bulk of Crawford's book, however, is critical in nature. Focusing on the "strange stories" (although addressing two brief chapters to The Late Breakfasters [1964], a moving novel of lesbianism with a few weird touches, and to The Model [1987], a kind of extended fairy tale set in pre-revolutionary Russia), Crawford first assesses Aickman's theory of the weird---chiefly as embodied in introductions to various volumes of the Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1964-72)---and then proceeds to analyse the stories themselves. It is here that a few caveats in Crawfords discussion need to be made.
In my own chapter on him in The Modern Weird Tale (2001), I took Aickman to task for what I believed to be both some in consistencies in his theory of the weird and some possible drawbacks in his expression of that theory in his tales. Crawford in turn takes me to task, as might be expected from a devoted partisan; but I am not convinced that he has dispensed with my rese rvations. The critical passage in Aickman's writing (never quoted in full by Crawford) occurs in the introduction to The Second Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1965):
. . . the ghost story must be distinguished both from the mere horror story and from the scientific extravaganza. . . . the ghost story draws upon the unconscious mind, in the manner of poetry. . . .
it need offer neither logic nor moral .. . . it is an art form of altogether exceptional delicacy and subtlety; and . . . not surprisingly, there are only about thirty or forty first-class specimens in the whole of western literature.
Some of this is unexceptionable, but the crux is Aickman's contention that the ghost story "need offer neither logic nor moral." The contradiction comes when Aickman elsewhere asserts that "what the ghost story hints to us is that there is a world elsewhere, as Coriolanus put it . . . that as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; that luck's a chance, but trouble's sure; that achievement and comfort are (like the poor ghosts themselves) immaterial." That certainly sounds like "moral" to me. To be sure, there is no heavy-handed didacticism in Aickman's work, and his conveyance of this grimly pessimistic message is oftentimes elegant, potent, and subtle, but surely there is a moral element being expressed here.
But it is the matter of "logic" that most concerns me. Crawford contends that my failure to accept this facet of Aickman's theory is because I "look at Aickman through the glasses of H. P. Lovecraft, who did not believe in the supernatural." But there is much more to it than that. In fact, my criticism is based on the entire history of weird fiction, especially in its successful utilization by such writers as Poe, Machen, Dunsany, Blackwood, Bierce, Campbell, and many others, some of whom did and some of whom did not "believe in the supernatural." It is striking that, just a decade before Aickman wrote his screed about the lack of "logic" in the weird tale, L. P. Hartley propounded an exactly opposite view: "The ghost-story writer's task is the more difficult, for not only must he create a world in which reason doesn't hold sway, but he must invent laws for it. Chaos is not enough. Even ghosts must have rules and obey them."(introduction to The Third Ghost Book [1955]).
It seems manifest to me that the great majority of successful weird writers have observed this principle---as Aickman himself does in his more effective tales, such as the imperishable "Ringing the Changes". The problem with the lack of "logic" in weird fiction is not merely that a tale will "make no sense" on the level of plot (as many of Aickman's do not), but that the supernatural phenomena in them will seem random and unmotivated (as, regrettably, many of Aickman's do). Indeed, Crawford all but admits this in some of his plot descriptions of Aickman's tales. Consider his account of "Rosamund's Bower":
"Rosamund's Bower" is a fable about a young man, Michael Aylwin-Scott, who ventures into a reputedly haunted bower. Michael, adventurous and callow, enters the bower, where he encounters a seneschal, a medieval judge, a female page, his own double, and a mysterious and beautiful woman, Rosamund. These mysterious characters appear in the maze Michael enters, and their actions imply that Michael is dying. He leaves the bower just as he entered it, and thus the story ends.
That is all Crawford ever says about this story, and the reader is left wondering what Aickman could possibly have meant by it, or what the point of these bizarre and seemingly pointless characters and episodes might be.
Crawford does provide valuable clues on the interpretation of Aickman's work by pointing out the influence of Freud, and Crawford also makes a good case that Aickman was advocating a kind of Surrealist approach to weird fiction. But I think some further analysis is necessary before we can begin to unlock the mysteries of Aickman's work.
Robert Aickman: An Introduction is one more example of the valuable work that can emerge from the small or specialty press; however, it also reveals some of the drawbacks. Several features of Crawford's writing could have benefited from the ministrations of a professional copy editor and a professional book designer---or even someone who can manipulate desktop publishing software---and all too often Crawford desends to plot description without sufficient analysis, with the result that Aickman's stories come across not merely as incomprehensible but tiresome and absurd. Even his plot descriptions often leave out some of the more interesting features of the tales---exactly those features that render them so unforgettable. In "The Hospice", for example, Crawford notes the grim macabre humour in the fact that the hapless traveling salesman, Maybury, is forced to leave the hospice "in a hearse carrying the body of one of the residents who has died," but the real horror of the tale lies in Maybury's appalled realization that the elderly occupants of the place are eating at a long table "as if their lives depended on it" and that they all appear to be chained to the table. Once again, these details don't "make sense," but they are both terrifying and symbolically powerful.
Crawford also yields to the understandable tendency to engage in partisan advocacy rather than sober analysis. This is a tendency that devotees of unrecognized authors find it difficult to restrain, and in my callow days I too gave way to it in regard to Lovecraft, Dunsany, and other of my enthusiasms; but in the end it really serves no purpose, or worse, becomes a disservice to the object of devotion. Crawford boldly claims that "Residents Only" "is the only story of Aickman's that I do not believe succeeds." Nonetheless, his own plot summaries strongly suggest that several others have their own deficiencies. Aickman's achievement is sufficiently solid that it can endure the sober criticisms of even its partisans.
If anything, one would wish Robert Aickman: An Introduction to be a bit longer and more substantial. Crawford tantalizingly mentions an unpublished novel, Go Back at Once, found in the Robert Aickman Collection at Bowling Green State University, but provides no synopsis of it. Possibly Crawford was unable to secure a copy of the work, for Bowling Green requires the permission of Aickman's agents before allowing it to be made available even to scholars. There is also an immense, 1000-page work called Panacea: The Synthesis of an Attitude, which Crawford describes as a philosophical treatise. Probably it is unpublishable in its present state, but perhaps an abridgement of it might be issued someday. Crawford concludes his work with a comprehensive primary and secondary bibliography, citing even websites or articles in amateur press associations. Certainly, his two decades of work on Aickman have made him one of the leading scholars on this inscrutable author, and one would wish that he had allowed himself even more space for exposition and analysis. Perhaps this work is only preliminary to a more exhaustive work to come, but until that work appears, the present booklet will suffice admirably.