Ramblings
“...Rosa reflected, all roads had begun to barge through once again, and no longer went courteously around and about. Very much so: that, she thought, was symbolic, if anything was.” --The Real Road to the Church
“Your husband is a fortunate man. I could only wish he didn't build roads.” “Why?” asked Margaret.
The Colonel spread out his hands.
“The blood. The noise. The aggression and hostility. The devastation and emptiness. The means with no ends. The first roads, the first roads like that, were built by Hitler. The place of war is now taken in society by motoring. I, a soldier, tell you that my trade has changed its shape.”
--Into the Wood
Personal Woes
The first volume of Robert Aickman's autobiography, The Attempted Rescue was quite open and informative about the first twenty-five years of his life. The narrative ends as World War II begins. Aickman's first 'true love' affair also ended as the war began, partly because he could not share his love's involvement with the conflict. He states, “she had emerged as one of the many people who quite consciously like war”. At the close of the book, Aickman writes, “I dim the lights on new years of anguish. I hope after an interval to raise them again on the garish, Wild West melodrama of the campaign for the waterways.”In 1987, six years after Robert Aickman died, the second volume, The River Runs Uphill, was published by J.M. Pearson. It covers the years 1946-1950, and primarily concerns the story of The Inland Waterways Association. All of the purely personal information was taken out by RA (after he had included it in the first draft), for “reasons of discretion and delicacy”. The dedication reads: “...to those who did it. Including those who should be named but are not. And those who should have received mention but have not.”
We learn a few things about what Robert Aickman left out of his story in Race Against Time: How Britains's Waterways Were Saved, written by David Bolton, who also wrote Journey Without End about life on a narrowboat.
We learn, for instance, that Robert Aickman was granted conscientious objector status during the Second World War for his strongly held pacifist views. We learn that he married “not for love” in 1941. We learn that his mother was killed in her home by a German bomb in 1943, while Aickman and his wife, who had been visiting, were out for a walk.
We learn that, contrary to an earlier assumption, Robert Aickman was never married to Elizabeth Jane Howard, (with whom he collaborated in We Are For The Dark, a book of ghost stories published in 1951).
In The Attempted Rescue, RA mentioned a “relationship that ultimately had far-reaching and terrible consequences”. This probably refers to his marriage. Apparently, Robert's conception of his marriage was what we today would term an 'open' one. His wife, Ray (Gregorson), moved out of their home in 1953, but there was no formal divorce until 1957. It is unclear what the marriage was all about, but RA was depressed when it was finally over. His wife eventually entered a High Anglican convent (no date is given) and died in 1983, after earning a fine reputation working with 'fallen women' at a mission in Soho.
If Robert Aickman wanted to keep his private life private, we see no reason to engage in speculation. We have his writings, into which he put his heart and his soul. They often show him engaging in nostalgic regrets and remembrances.
“...One's broken heart, if it can be mended at all, can be mended only in one way.” “And yet at times,” said Millicent, “the whole thing seems so trivial, so unreal. So absurd, even. Never really there at all. Utterly not worth the melodrama.”
“Indubitably," said Miss Stock. "And the same is true of religious faith, of poetry, of a walk round a lake, of existence itself.”
--Hand in Glove
“... Men do not speak of it. It is like the secrets of the heart, the true secrets which one man only knows.” --Niemandswasser
The Writer
In The Attempted Rescue, after briefly noting that typewriters are said to degrade one's writing, Robert Aickman adds, “I myself am writing carefully with a pen”. RA's handwriting goes close to the very edge of the paper, on all sides. What would a graphologist say about this? The left margin is supposed to represent the past, and starting close to the edge might mean one is preoccupied with or obsessed with the past. We know this describes RA. However, the right margin represents the future. If Aickman concerned himself with the future, it was only to strive to preserve what was beautiful and valuable about the past. This writing habit may represent frugality, or merely denote a comprehensive effort to get it all down. One might say this writing effort simply crowds out all other considerations.In the following excerpt, the owner of a doll's house is looking in through the windows:
“Two rooms on the ground floor remained before I once more reached the front door. In the first of them a lady was writing with her back to the light and therefore to me. She frightened me also; because her grey hair was disordered and of uneven length, and descended in matted plaits, like snakes escaping from a basket, to the shoulders of her coarse grey dress. Of course, being a doll, she did not move, but the back of her head looked mad. Her presence prevented me from regarding at all closely the furnishings of the Writing Room.” --The Inner Room
And apropos of that...
“There is one other sister, Topaz. But she is busy writing.” “Writing all our diaries,” said Emerald.
“Keeping the record,” said my hostess.
A silence followed.
--The Inner Room
The Shadow
You may have noticed by now that many of RA's protagonists are female. They are almost always more sympathetic characters than their male counterparts. They seem often to represent the ideal inner self, while the males seem more to represent the thoroughly unsatisfactory outer personality. Robert Aickman had a theory of the 'shadow'.
“With most people, it seems to me, one can, in time and after experience of the person, discern and distinguish between the true entity, almost always kind and even idealistic, though often a little child-like; and a Shadow which influences for the worse all the person's actions and opinions, and does what it can to spoil the person's life. The nature of this Shadow differs from person to person as widely as people differ.” --The Attempted Rescue
Aickman goes on at some length about the horrors of “the oddest man I have ever known”, his father, whose shadow “was as dense as a yew”. He writes, his “wild rages” of frustration “and other things, have brought about in me a degree of determination almost never to lose control, which psychologists tell me is bad”; and “Like my Father, I am most easily brought to a standstill by the detailed repetitive necessities of daily, individual existence”.
“Over the fireplace was a big portrait of a furious old man... he was brandishing a very thick walking stick which seemed to leap from the picture and stun the beholder. He was dressed neutrally, and the painter had not provided him with a background: there was only the aggressive figure menacing the room.” --The Inner Room
The Women
Nevertheless, how *did* Aickman come to write so many sympathetic feminine characters, in such a convincing fashion? One would think he must have had substantial female companionship to be able to write such characters, and one would be right.In The Attempted Rescue Aickman summarized his life thusly: "Loving women, my years became solitary." Nevertheless, the public saw him often accompanied by a different beautiful woman at every occasion. The truth was that he enjoyed the company of women more than men, and women seemed to be fascinated by his mind and his personality, more than anything more physical. Aickman had several life-long friendships with women, some romantic, some not.
When he became ill with cancer in the fall of 1980, four women got to know each other for the first time, nursing him with loving care. Refusing orthodox medical treatment, Aickman chose a homeopathic physician. He was gravely ill when he had a much anticipated reunion meeting with Elizabeth Jane Howard, who had only shortly before separated from her husband, Kingsley Amis. Aickman had spoken very highly of her in The River Runs Uphill, after refusing for a long time to allow anyone to speak her name in his presence after the stormy end of their relationship.
Tales of Love and Death
For anyone interested in Robert Aickman, the man, the epilogue “Tales of Love and Death” in Race Against Time is indispensable reading. David Bolton met the people who had known him, and more than one emphasized that they had met no one else quite like him. The controversies may still be raging today, but the fact remains that Aickman himself, in The River Runs Uphill spoke ill of nobody. Though actually shy and socially often ill at ease and terrible at small talk, Aickman sometimes offered counselling to people disturbed by their supernatural experiences. Though flawed by elements of intellectual intolerance on certain occasions, he inspired devoted long-term friendships in many others.
The Real Trouble
“Man does not live by bread alone, if only because ordinary day-to-day living is mainly horrible; so that to think otherwise is a major neurosis - or to think that one thinks otherwise.” --“An Essay”
“...But the real trouble is that there's always something. Not just something wrong, but something badly wrong. ...Believe me, my friend, there's always something that's bloody about living among the toiling masses. From my point of view this place is a real oasis.” --Meeting Mr Millar
Robert Aickman was tortured by time. It seemed as if everything that was beautiful and everything that was accomplished was destroyed by time. Life was precious but ephemeral, and surely only death was eternal. The dead surely outnumber the living.Does this go some way toward explaining “Ringing the Changes”? Living in a body, in a physical universe subject to time, involves aging and death, putridity, failures, bitter remorse, and general total unpleasantness. But if you seek to avoid all that, what else are you also avoiding? Don't you have to embrace all of it? Is Robert Aickman acknowledging here that he has been unable to do so? Some of us just need a better reason than others. Why do we have to be here, when there is a so much better world 'elsewhere'? There must be a reason, but what is it?
“I believe in life after death, and I decline to particularize upon the meaning of the words, because of all futile and reductionist attempts at definition, this is the most idle. I believe, first, upon the worldwide and almost (though not quite) universal assurances of faith. I believe, second, because I can make no sense otherwise of the tragic lives that people lead; except, perhaps, upon the heretical, though far from illogical, thesis that the world is a construct of a devil.” --“An Essay”
“...we sob inconsolably upon our first introduction to the world in any case, all of us...” --The Attempted Rescue
To Aickman, as he says in “An Essay”, humanity “took a wrong turning” when it decided that “by application of reason and the scientific method, everything will be known, and every problem and unhappiness solved”. He says, “Spirit is indefinable, as everything that matters is indefinable”, and “nothing which is worthwhile can be predicted scientifically”.To Robert Aickman, life was only bearable if you knew that there was a 'world elsewhere'. RA believed in that world, but did he ever have a direct experience of it? Or was it necessary in this lifetime to never have that comfort, other than faith, in order to so exquisitely capture the horrors of this world in his stories?
The problem of seeing beyond this world is that we still have to live in it. How to do this with a good will and a hopeful heart, ah - that is the question.
“See that neither of you treads on that stoat,” I enjoined sternly. “Or the last word may be his.”