by Adam Walter
 
 

Robert Aickman's "Mark Ingestre: A Customer's Tale" can only be fully appreciated if the literary references within the story are recognized and properly interpreted by the reader. While his fiction often contains elusive cultural and historical references, Aickman rarely requires his audience to take such an active role in supplying essential background information for a story. Indeed, if one does not make the necessary connections to Sweeney Todd and Chaucer, "Mark Ingestre" will likely prove confusing and difficult to enjoy.

To the unprepared reader, "Mark Ingestre" may appear as odd a story as any Aickman wrote. The main action of the story is bordered by a narrative framing device in which two men meet, one quite old, the other young. They strike up a conversation and soon make their way to a pub, where the older man relates a strange adventure from his youth. When he was seventeen, the man left his beloved mother to spend an afternoon on London's Fleet Street. There he was pulled into a barbershop and prepared for a shave. After only a few moments in the barber's chair, the world seemed to spin and go black. When he came to his senses again, he was lying on a dirty mattress in a dark room. There a large, swarthy woman questioned him about his life and then seduced him with the aid of her young assistant, Monica. Soon the man found himself making love with the two of them on a bed of hair. Eventually, the woman threatened him with a knife, and the man fought his way out of the place. He fled through several doors and ascended a stairway to the street, finding that he had just left Mrs. Lovat's Pie Shop. In the end, the pub setting of the frame story returns, and it is revealed that both the man telling the story and his young listener are drama critics who met after a performance of "Sweeney Todd." The older man criticizes the production, in particular the costuming of the Mrs. Lovat and Mark Ingestre characters: " 'Making him wear a three-cornered hat!'  the old man had exclaimed with derision. 'And Mrs. Lovat with her hair powdered!' "

Readers familiar with the legendary London bogey Sweeney Todd may begin to suspect the direction in which "Mark Ingestre" is heading as soon as the young man is pulled off Fleet Street and into a foreboding barbershop. The story of Sweeney Todd--who is also known affectionately as "the demon barber of Fleet Street"--has been told in many forms for more than a century. It was a favorite subject in English pulps and has been dramatized numerous times for stage, television, and film. Whether the story has any basis in fact is questionable, but the many fictional renditions have lent the legend a number of rich variations.

At the center of the legend are Sweeney Todd, a crazed barber who slits the throats of the rich and powerful when he finds them in his chair, and Mrs. Lovat (or "Lovett"), the widowed proprietress of a meat pie shop that is attached to Sweeney's establishment. This pair have struck a sinister arrangement. Sweeney uses a trick barber's chair to dump his corpses into a cellar that is accessible through both shops, and there the sinister partners pick their victims' pockets before grinding them into pie filling. The story also contains a parallel young-lovers subplot which is, incidentally, often the dullest part of the story. The young woman of the couple may be, variously, Sweeney's estranged daughter, his ward, or the object of his lecherous affections. Whatever the case, the young woman always has a beau, a fresh-faced hero who threatens Sweeney's tenuous relationship with the girl. The young man is usually treated to Sweeney's trick chair and survives the fall into the cellar, thereby discovering the secret of the two shops. Mark Ingestre is one name that has been given to this young hero. The story's climax usually leaves Sweeney in his bloodsoaked cellar with his own throat slashed and, possibly, the shop burning above him.

Aickman was a life-long theatergoer and onetime drama critic. These facts, along with the various elements of the story, make the Sweeney Todd story a fairly natural object of interest for Aickman. Sweeney Todd is, of course, layered with the sort of Freudian potential that infuses many of Aickman's other stories. In "Mark Ingestre," Aickman exploits the legend's pungent, carnal, somatic symbols of hair and meat. He also elaborates on the legend to address such themes as the dark mother, the hostile womb, weaning from the mother, and loss of innocence. Additionally, it is worth noting that as a coming of age story involving a confusing and frustrating loss of virginity, "Mark Ingestre" parallels Aickman's "The Swords" and "Marriage."

Once one recognizes the shadow of Sweeney Todd in the background of "Mark Ingestre," there may be a temptation to discard the story as an ill-conceived plundering of the legend--a legend now muddled and obscured by the garish graffiti of surreal erotica. Such an assessment may be partly right. However, the situation cannot be taken too seriously if Aickman's Chaucerian references have been properly grasped. From the very beginning of the story, Aickman gives his reader--through the words of the young man narrating the frame story--the necessary cues for appreciating the unusual form of this tale:

" 'The Customer's Tale' I call it, because the Geoffrey Chaucer implication may not be far from the truth: a total taradiddle of legend and first-hand experience. As we grow older we frequently become even hazier about the exact chronology of history, and about the boundaries of what is deemed to be historical fact. . . . Well: the old man was a very old man, very old indeed; odd-looking and hairy; conflating one whole century with another whole century, and then sticking his own person in the centre of it all, possibly before he was even born."

While the narrator of the frame story ostensibly invites readers to consider the old man senile, his invocation of Chaucer grants a greater generosity to the man's story. This reference suggests that the story be accepted as a tall-tale, an old man's attempt to amuse and shock, to portray himself as a once young and sensual being in a tale of coarse sexual exploits outrageous enough to rival Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale" or "The Reeve's Tale."

Most importantly, when considering "Mark Ingestre" in a Chaucerian light one must recall the competitive nature of "The Canterbury Tales." There was often an ulterior motive and a spirit of one-upmanship in many of the stories. The Canterbury pilgrims would take turns spinning their elaborate narratives, sometimes using a story to poke fun at a particular rival while, at the same time, working hard to delight the company and earn their applause. In "Mark Ingestre," the old man is dissatisfied with the production of "Sweeney Todd" that he and his companion have seen, and he feels the impulse to outdo that prettied-up and sanitized production. What he presents is a truly grotesque rendition of a grotesque legend, a customer's tale from behind the counter of Mrs. Lovat's pie shop and below the fateful barber's chair of Sweeney Todd. This perspective on the story is perhaps the most important piece of literary interpretation the reader must assemble in response to Aickman's cues. To whatever extent that "Mark Ingestre" succeeds, it does so only when taken as an exercise in half-serious leg-pulling.
 
 

Adam Walter
(June 28, 2001)