One of the pivotal stories of the modern era is the life of Franz Kafka, a story remarkable especially for the author's tragic attempts to define himself against the backdrop of a cold, materialistic, mechanized society. Kafka struggled his entire life against the critical and reductive personality of a compassionless father, and at the same time he searched the dark recesses of the contemporary collective unconscious to find some glimmer of transcendence, some remnant of the vanishing human soul. Robert Aickman in The Attempted Rescue (1966), the autobiography covering Aickman's first twenty to thirty years, tells a very different story which nonetheless resulted in a similar personal and artistic struggle. While Kafka fought the ever-present paternal figure and its stifling systemization, Aickman's challenge was to imagine life where he saw none, to seek animation beyond the walking dead that populated his world. Whereas Kafka from the very start had an archetypal enemy to strive against, Aickman grew up in an emotional vacuum. If Kafka lived in constant fear for the doomed human soul, Aickman could only pick through the detritus of modernity in hopes of salvaging some small trinket of beauty. Most importantly, like Kafka, Aickman was an incurable cynic and pessimist with a jewel of romanticism buried at the heart of his being.

Foundational to Aickman's cynicism was the unhappy situation with his parents and their impossible relationship. From Aickman's description, his mother was a stubbornly bitter person, and his father was hopelessly indecisive. Mrs. Aickman's father was Richard Marsh, an author prolific in several genres of popular literature--horror, comedy, romance, and mystery. Marsh met Mr. Aickman at a hotel--a recurring setting in the lives of both the Marsh and Aickman families--and Marsh's daughter latched onto the man. Aickman writes of his parents that "it was she who married him." The engagement was a long one, owing to Mr. Aickman's indecisiveness, and concluded with a simple and spontaneous event. Mrs. Aickman's first notion of her husband's age came when they signed the marriage registry: She was 23, and he, very near her father's age, was 53. Mrs. Aickman once implied, to her son, that the couple consummated their relationship only one time, and that she found it unbearable.

The marriage is described as a pact of frustration; Mr. and Mrs. Aickman both had been at their best before the relationship. Mr. Aickman, in particular, never managed to adjust. He was deeply set in his bachelor ways, in idiosyncrasies of character which did not account for living with others. He kept long nights and drew a dark cloud over the household in the late morning and afternoon; no one was ever sure if he would, on any given day, overcome his characteristic sloth and leave for work at his architectural firm before the evening's dinner, or whether he would finally give up and stay at home for the day.

Aickman writes: "My father remains the oddest man I have ever known." One could never guess his age from his physical appearance, and he had no family that his son ever met. The one compelling detail of his background comes in an anecdote so perfunctory and so existentially absurd that it nearly outdoes the similar scenarios in Aickman's fiction. As the story goes, the family's Scottish roots actually originate with the more common name Aikman; however, "Aickman derived simply from an error made by a law agent on a legal document. The ancestor whose name was misspelt, changed his name and not the document." Just such a pitiful enigma, as well, was Mr. Aickman--even to his family. He "was impossible to live with, to be married to, to be dependent upon." Mr. Aickman did have his good side, his enthusiasm for theatre and for long country walks. However, the marriage and the birth of his son narrowly preceded the start of World War I, and the year 1914 marked a distinct break with the man's accustomed way of life. Likewise, World War II would coincide with the deaths of both parents, but only after Mrs. Aickman had left her husband and both had fallen ill--she with a vague problem first considered to be kidney trouble which left her an invalid for the last 14 years of her life, and he with a disturbing skin disease.

This incongruous marriage launched a central theme which would run through Aickman's life and so many of his stories--including "The Clock Watcher," "Ringing the Changes," and "The Stains," to name just a few with striking similarities to his parents' relationship. Between the couple there was "no language of common sentiment," and bickering was their standard mode of interaction. In this rancorous environment, their son was left without emotional nourishment and without a clear model--even a poor one--for the development of his personality. Aickman writes: "It might not have been so appalling if I had felt, as I have felt about a few people since, that one of them was bad, or mainly bad." Unlike Kafka, Aickman did not have even a distinct adversary, a unified front against which to aim the early battles of childhood.

Throughout the book, Aickman gives frequent attention to the details of his life which are of psychological interest. When he stresses his dangerous bouts as a newborn with diarrhea and delivers a strong opinion on his having been circumcised, his preoccupation with Freud is clearly rising to the surface. Curiously, Aickman is quite willing to delve into the most private of details regarding his parents and other family, while in the later half of the book his descriptions of his own early romances are strangely elliptical. Possibly the most striking psychological observation concerns his father's "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 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. . . . My father had a habit of which I have never heard or read the like in another, though nothing human is truly as rare as that. He would be in a room by himself, and something would go wrong. Perhaps he had lost a stud or his nail-scissors, or could not find a clean handkerchief or a suitable necktie. It could be anything. My Father, all by himself, would begin to make a noise: a throaty, gurgling scream of frustration, with a rhythmic pattern in it, like a man drawing a rough circle and continuing the line to draw another and another. . . ."

This would often occur early in the day as his father went through his long, drawn-out ordeal of preparing for work. He never seemed able himself to cut off the sound, and Mrs. Aickman would have to finally go to him and "stop it with a few bitter words." One can hardly wonder that a child growing up with such a phenomenon would later develop an interest in psychology.

Aickman's perceptive understanding of complex personalities is a significant part of what makes his fiction as unique and powerful as it is. However, there is also a contrasting irrational element in his writing which one glimpses throughout the autobiography, and that is his concern with the uncanny, his appreciation for inviolate mystery--for the Weird, undiluted and inscrutable. His biographical remembrances of the uncanny include examples both of the actual paranormal and of simpler events, certain peculiar happenings which left their mark on his imagination for a lifetime. Aickman again tells a story of his father that is as unsettling as any of his fictional work. Mr. Aickman had once been boating with a friend, and in the middle of the night both men were awakened in their cabins by a violent crashing sound. They hurried on deck only to find that the sleeping crew had heard nothing. At home in bed one night, several weeks later, his father heard the same noise. He awoke dazed and nearly stumbled through his bedroom window, thinking he was rushing to look out a boat's porthole. The next morning he visited his friend and found him bedridden, recovering from an injury after having fallen out his own window the previous evening when he had woken to the very same experience. Aickman also tells of an uncle who lived near the ocean and would rise in the very early hours of the morning to go for a vigorous swim, regardless of the season. "When there was no sea, he was known to make use of the 'elephant' (for recharging the then steam locomotives with water) at a nearby railway station, tipping the staff to help with the mechanism. My father claimed that Harold generated exceptional heat. . . ." Of further interest on this subject are three images or experiences which haunted Aickman from the early days of his family's walking holidays in the country, during which he, from at least the age of five, would walk with his parents 12-15 miles a day. On separate occasions they chanced across all of the following: dismembered scarecrow-like rifle targets left over from WWI, a body being retrieved from the sea by policemen, and a herd of livestock which charged at the family, then suddenly stopped within a few feet of them and went back to grazing.

The various troubling aspects of Aickman's early life laid a pattern which was not to be much improved through the course of The Attempted Rescue and, roughly, the first three decades of his life. He did not enjoy school and for many years felt trapped between the two agonies of his home life and of formal education. There are, of course, several good things he credits to his school days. For example, he discovered two elements of his character at school which would aid him later in public life--his talents for both public speaking and leadership. He was, however, taken out of school at age 17 due to money troubles and his mother's sudden and secretive desertion. His father needed him at this time. Mr. Aickman, it turned out--though unreliable himself--had come to rely very much on his family. Aickman then began assisting him with the architectural business. Finally, Aickman even ended up living alone in the family home, which slowly sunk toward ruin around him, as his parents each stayed elsewhere for health reasons. During this time, Aickman went regularly to the theatre and the opera, where he began to make friends. These excursions appear to have been a natural, self-directed form of education, an education of personal interest and aesthetic appetite. It was then also that he began to have small romances which culminated in the great love of his youth, with a woman he calls Eve. The relationship lasted two years and ended in a confused and unresolved manner when WWII began. At various points throughout the book, Aickman mentions women that he idealized. Some of them he saw again much later in life, such as Eve and Anne Watson, a childhood friend upon whom he based the character Mary in "The Same Dog": "Anne was one of those angelic children who, though dear to the fancy of sentimental Edwardian writers, really are to be found from time to time." It is obviously with great pain that Aickman writes of the later meetings with these women, when he found that the magic he once saw in them had disappeared almost entirely, and they had become ordinary, unexceptional individuals.

Failing at love, Aickman eventually found two passions which allowed him to make some sense of the world as he saw it. Little discussed in this volume--but treated at great length in his second autobiography, The River Runs Uphill--was his work with the Inland Waterways Association. The Association formed in 1946 to preserve England's waterways against the ravages of progress, and it was to be considered by some "the most successful voluntary body" lobbying Parliament over the next two decades. Aickman writes: "I believe this to be because the Association has uniquely deep roots in history, imagination, and the quest for happiness in a world where happiness is impossible." The Association was his first vocation and clearly the great public pride of his life.

Aickman's distinguished personal accomplishment was, of course, literary and manifested in what he refers to as his "strange stories," 48 published stories and two novels which occupy a most unique territory somewhere between the ghost story and the weird tale. In an essay responding to his receiving the 1976 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Work, he writes: ". . . I do not regard my work as 'fantasy' at all, except, perhaps, for commercial purposes. I try to depict the world as I see it. . . ." Supporting this assertion, there is much evidence of Aickman's blending fictional elements in his stories with many specific biographical details and anecdotes recorded in The Attempted Rescue. A few examples of this have already been mentioned, but many more remain. "The Fetch," with its succession of romantic failures ending for the protagonist in a dilapidated family home, has its obvious roots in the author's life. A chapter of the autobiography, titled "A Distant Star," discusses the vexed career of German actress and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, whom Aickman admired from a distance and even corresponded with on one occasion, finally writing a story clearly inspired by the woman and her plight: "The Visiting Star." One also wonders how much of "Marriage" was inspired by the time Aickman spent attending the opera and ballet with a particular pair of Jewish girls. "I had made the first girl friends I had ever made completely on my own," he writes of these two girls.

The autobiography also gives several details regarding how he came to a preoccupation with fiction. There was, of course, the influence of his grandfather. Though Richard Marsh died when Aickman was very young, the influence continued through Mrs. Aickman: "My mother aimed from the start to make me an author." Aickman gives a fascinating overview of Marsh's work, noting that one of his best remembered horror novels, The Beetle, was once nearly as popular as Bram Stoker's "Dracula." He summarizes the central conceit of the novel, approving of an essential mode of storytelling which also characterizes Aickman's own work:

"It is about a malignant entity which can turn at will into man or woman (always an appealing concept to the reflective, of course), or into an insect, and which has exceptional hypnotic powers. My grandfather embarked upon no foolish explanations, which in any case only render down truth for the relief of the timid."

Aickman also cites his four strongest literary influences, some of whom he terms "anti-Christian traditionalists": Norman Douglas (South Wind), H.L. Mencken, Bernard Shaw, and W.H. Mallock (New Republic). He was well prepared for the literary life through a very early reading of the classics and through the occasional assistance he received with his writing at school. Additionally, from childhood he demonstrated a rich imagination by writing elaborate fantasies. These early writings resembled the famous imaginary lands created by other British authors in their youth--the Brontë's Gondal and Angria and C.S. Lewis' Boxen. Aickman calls these utopian fantasies his "projects for a better world."

The prose of The Attempted Rescue itself is wonderfully textured and evocative. Some of the book's great delights are the revealing maxims which occasionally follow an anecdote or an observation on the character of a certain relative or acquaintance: "I believe that magnificence, elegance, and charm are the things that matter most in daily life"; "Like happiness or unhappiness, success or failure are things one is born to"; "Leadership is certainly not an ambition, because leadership that has to be striven for is less accepted and less secure than leadership which simply emerges as a fact of temperament, like, perhaps, a gift for languages or the piano"; ". . . feasting in public does little to prevent one starving in private." Likewise, Aickman expresses with eloquence his unconventional--or, perhaps, regressively conventional--social and political views. Reflecting on his father's place in pre-WWI Britain, Aickman observes that, "The English gentleman did not aspire to genius but to happiness. . . . Of course it was a world for the few, but almost all good things are for the few, and almost everything is depreciated when too many people have it." He also comments upon a childhood preoccupation with the social paradigm of a monarchy supported by a hereditary aristocracy: "I still believe it to be the system which best promotes the things I care about in life."

As with Kafka, this reaction against modernity is both the principal social problem and the defining personal issue Aickman gleaned from his early years. It is also at the heart of his fiction. While it is not difficult to sympathize with the disenchantment he exhibits toward the industrialized world and its degraded culture, Aickman's intense affection for an abandoned social system is surprising. Perhaps, though, it should not be. Looking again at the World Fantasy Award essay will illuminate the issue:

"I believe that at the time of the Industrial and French revolutions (I am not commenting upon the American one!), mankind took a wrong turning. The beliefs that one day, by application of reason and the scientific method, everything will be known, and every problem and unhappiness solved, seem to me to have led to a situation where, first, we are in imminent danger of destroying the whole world, either with a loud report or by insatiable overconsumption and overbreeding, and where, second, everyone suffers from an existentialist angst, previously confined to the very few. There is a fundamental difference between worrying where one's next meal is coming from and worrying about the quality and reality of one's basic being. The great prophetic work of the modern world is Goethe's Faust, so little appreciated among the Anglo-Saxons. Mephistopheles offers Faust unlimited knowledge and unlimited power in exchange for his soul. Modern man has accepted that bargain."

Aickman links the Industrial Revolution with the French Revolution, scientific advancement with existential angst, and material progress with damnation. He makes the case here that many troubles and many benefits of modern life are interdependent. For him the abyss around which nihilism and existentialism circle is directly tied to both industrialization and democratic individualism. Though modern society would like to exorcise the evils of this problematic system, the complexities of the situation are generally overlooked. After all, isn't the rising contemporary value placed on individualism owed largely to industrialization, to the growing need for an educated and highly-skilled workforce? And isn't all this rampant existential despair simply a by-product of progressive democracy, a system which at once elevates and isolates the individual?

The central question to be answered, then, is whether the benefits of modernity outweigh the attendant social harm. For Aickman, of course, they do not; for him, this is a bargain with the devil. He also concludes, sadly, that no attempt to fight against the modern world can be entirely successful. In fighting against a dominant system, one opts for a disadvantaged position and, ultimately, accepts the enemy's compromising rules of engagement. As Aickman notes on the very first page of The Attempted Rescue, all of his personal and public struggles against the modern "machine" and on the side of imagination and beauty may have been compromised from the very beginning: "I gathered knowledge as an innocent, starting from an unusual zero. . . . Did the machine master me after all, as a parent can master a child by the child's reaction against the parent?" Through the experiences of their bleak lives, both Kafka and Aickman sensed essentially the same problem: Someone, it hardly matters who any longer, has accepted the devil's bargain on behalf of the entire world, and we all can expect to pay for it.
 
 

Adam Walter
(April 28, 2001)