Robert Kunath (May 13, 1998)Dear Bill [Barnett],Thanks for the description of "The Model." Simply as another book by Robert Aickman, "The Model" would figure on my reading list. Another reason to check it out is that I find Aickman's stories written from the point of view of a female protagonist are often his very best (I think particularly of "The School Friend" and "The Inner Room," well up at the top of my list of Aickman favorites). Thinking about why the stories with a female protagonist seem better, I hazard the speculation that there is a certain sameness to Aickman's stories with a male protagonist; he certainly "rings the changes" brilliantly--and I think many of those stories are first-rate--but they tend to focus quite often on somehow rather hapless men (timid, or bereaved, or isolated) yearning for love, and getting something that initially seems to be that--and perhaps sometimes is--but which is also destructive or deadly. One reason that Aickman might like that basic set-up is that it lends an immediate overarching coherence to his carefully unexplained narratives. The stories with female protagonists, by contrast, are less straightforward--they don't have the template of desire/apparent fulfillment (or tremulous hope thereof)/dread-full denoument to structure them. As a result, when they work, they may be even more allusive. "The School Friend" still strikes me as Aickman's masterpiece: a story in which the narrative is perfectly clear, but whatever happened is perfectly, ominously, mysterious, and the forces at work are more than Eros (though the charged relationship between Mel and Sally has erotic overtones). Thinking of templates (or, more properly, similarities) it is interesting that both Mel in "The School Friend" and the narrator of "The Inner Room" are depicted as women who have had a disappointing experience of life and in some ways are in retreat from it. The process of becoming aware of that disappointment is also at the heart of another of Aickman's masterpieces written from a female point of view--"Into the Woods." Aickman clearly understands the differences between male and female dreams of happiness and fulfillment, and he takes both sorts of dreams of happiness and shows how larger forces--sometimes malign, sometimes just powerful--must destroy them. One of my friends has referred to the "Freudian" elements in Aickman, and certainly his unifying theme seems to echo Freud: "Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures." (*Civilization and Its Discontents*. NY: Norton, 1961, p. 23).
Broodingly yours,
Robert
ooOoo