"Few writers think before they write, or even when they are writing; they
let their pen guide their thoughts. And I am certain that those writers who
write too much suffer from a disease of the fingers not the brain."
Maurice Baring.
That photograph of Aickman, the one where he's walking the towpath of St
Helens Canal with his dog, his back to the camera and his face denied the
viewer, somehow epitomises the man for me.
His stories in a way resemble a strange, sinister, enticing funhouse its
doors flung open in invitation to the unwary reader who on occasion enters.
His story "Wood" is the hall of mirrors within this funhouse, its anonymous
narrator mirroring his world in a comically distorted way - to the
consternation of the poor reader who first makes his acquaintance.
It seems a tale of numerous, nebulous and unaccountable secrets. It is in
part a humorous tale - but, beware, the humour has barbs. We, the
unsuspecting readers, take a glance at marriage in the mirror of the
narrator - in this instance the hurried marriage of Leonard Munn to Miss Vi
Pell.
Incredulously, we observe via the eyes of the narrator, their almost
indecent rush, pell-mell, so to speak, in to matrimony - the service itself
over in moments. And yet this is not an affair of blushing bride and groom,
honeymoon and passionate nuptials - for the groom, Munn doesn't even kiss
his new bride.
The name Munn originates in the Western Isles of Scotland and means: One who
resides in a monastery, a monk, so a celibate. When first introduced to us,
he lives alone producing his "daffies", a man "who instead of embracing a
woman, embraced a grievance."
Jim Rockhill once wisely suggested "Vi - not quite Vie, because she's not
quite alive." But with Aickman we chase multifaceted shadows. The
"Nibelungenlied" provided the inspiration for Wagner's "Ring" cycle, Aickman
always insisted "you must hear all the Ring or nothing!" so he was well
aware of the Norse myths. Odin's brother Vili (Vi) gave reason and motion to
man and woman who'd been carved from an Alder tree by Odin - carved from
wood.
We become enmeshed in the subtleties of this tale, reach with an almost
Pavlovian reflex for the endless distortions - but meaning often evades us.
Who, we ask, is this narrator? Do we trust him?
He has many things in common with Aickman himself - his hatred of things
mechanised, his belief that the Great War symbolised "Gotterdammerung" - the
peaceful and industrious life of the gods in their palaces (the English
country house) in Asgard ceasing with the year 1914. Instead, mediocrity
reigns triumphantly in their place.
He explains that in the war he served as an officer but was "badly knocked
out" at about the time Wilfred Owen was killed - which was one week before
the armistice in 1918, an event made perhaps more poignant and even more
futile by this timescale (Owen's parents were informed of his death even as
the victory bells were ringing out across the land).
Aickman via his narrator indirectly introduces the circumstances of Wilfred
Owen's death. Owen, an outstanding critic of the war, its waste and the vast
numbers of men slaughtered, was an influential poet, perhaps the best the
war produced, whose future seemed assured. He resided with the other gods in
Asgard, but like them he fell in the last battle (coincidentally, it was
suggested he was a "closet homosexual" - this on the strength of his
friendship (adoration?) of Siegfried Sassoon).
Our narrator assures us: "I was not killed" (do we believe him?) and
explains that his recovery was both good and swift. However, he then informs
us that he "never succeeded in marrying" as a possible cause for this, he
suggests: "The war seemed to do something to me there; or perhaps it was
mainly my experiences at the end of the war."
So, a survivor then, our narrator forms a part of that generation described
as "lost" by Gertrude Stein, and might well have gone on to subscribe to
Wyndham Lewis' sad reflection (in the year 1937) "We are the first men of a
future that has not materialised".
Perhaps, too, our narrator has something in common with Hemingway's
eponymous hero, Jake Barnes in "The Sun also rises", although he does assure
us that he has had "many affairs" these "mainly, indeed, with married
women."
His history is ambiguous, of course - the "something" the war did to him
could have been physical as with Jake Barnes, who was rendered impotent from
his war wounds, or the problem may be psychological, trauma again
effectively leaving him impotent. His affairs may be lies, a cover up to
protect his own damaged ego.
Returning from the war, our narrator complains that he did not return to
architecture (in which he had trained) because now, following
"Gotterdammerung" "the word art was seldom mentioned, still less the word
beauty." The war had destroyed everything - taken beauty out of life and
debased art, mediocrity ruled. Disillusionment was everywhere. Instead, he
was offered and accepted a "job editing a series of architectural lives" -
no longer a creator of art and beauty himself (an impossibility post war),
but instead a recorder of the works of past creators, his living earned on
the reputations of others from the "golden age".
He settled in a cottage in Suffolk on the outskirts of a small village -
marginalized by the war, he lives almost an outcast, on "the outskirts" a
fact he mentions more than once. With wry humour he mentions another Suffolk
son - Edward FitzGerald, poet and translator, claiming in the process to
have resisted the temptation offered by the "local fishing lads" (something
FitzGerald may not have done - his translation of Omar Khayyam is
homoerotic, and he certainly preaches grab hold of life while you can).
The more he tells us about himself and his world, the more uneasy we become.
His descriptions of people, of scenes seem almost a pastiche, not "copied
from life" but from art, from the stage, from pantomime and the ballet. We
feel the narrator is at his most playful, his most blatant where such
description is concerned. For example his description of Munn and the Pells
and of the house that Pell built - a stage set if ever there was one, and
all built in wood.
As often happens with this story we think of "Commedia dell'arte" - this
improvised theatre mirrors the story's style: sexual ambiguity in the
"Commedia" with its characters wearing masks (of wood), men in bright wigs
and women's clothing, female impersonators, seems implied by Aickman's
narrator in recounting his story; the plots of these plays, carefully
constructed around love, jealousy and matrimonial misunderstandings, left
each character to improvise their performance within the play's fixed
structure.
Munn's father-in-law is an "undertaker", a funeral director with a knack for
carpentry. But, of course, the word "undertaker" has other meanings: a
producer of drama or impresario, for example, which returns us again to the
stage and to pantomime.
Munn mentions a story by Maurice Baring (Aickman included one of Baring's
stories in the 5th Fontana book of ghost stories). Baring, now much
neglected as an author, a man whose lifetime scanned the centuries, 19th
into 20th, wrote what were basically love stories with bitter endings. He
(like Aickman) tended to prefer the company of women to men, although he
never married and may have died a virgin. A character in his novel "Cat's
Cradle" states, "there is no such thing as a 'wonderful' woman. But men
think there are, and that's just as well."
One of the central characters in Baring's novel "C" announces: "The point of
life is-I think-its imperfection. The point of human beings to me is that
they are full of faults and weaknesses and wickedness".
Aickman's work often echoes similar sentiments. In fact, I'm certain Aickman
would have expressed deep sympathy with the claim made by Baring to Laura
Lovat regarding a particular review of his work: "He is praising me for what
isn't there, I shall have to explain." He felt reviewers rarely grasped the
point of his work.
Our narrator feels the one thing he holds in common with Munn is a sense of
"exile". He declares openly: "All the remaining days of our lives seemed to
drop upon us like dried-out snowflakes or like daily leaves from the dead
calendar of a past forgotten year."
And we consider those "daily leaves" - leaves of a calendar, leaves of a
tree, wood, our tale's enigmatic title, and the medium Mr Pell works with.
Wood - traditionally a symbol of protection, a source of maternal
nourishment, "a life force" no less. Don't we "touch wood" to preserve luck
and keep ourselves safe from harm?
Our narrator received a card with Munn's address when he and his bride had
settled in their new home. "It also bore a faint fringe of acorns", he tells
us. Abruptly we are back in Asgard because the acorn was always sacred to
Thor - part of the cult of the oak, and the acorn has always been considered
the seed of truth, a symbol of fertility and spiritual growth.
With a ferocious humour worthy of Swift, our narrator's use of occasional
literary allusions serve to highlight the problems that exist in modern
heterosexual relationships. Even his reference to "Hamlet" reminds us that
this tragic prince drove his would be bride to madness and then suicide (not
to mention Shakespeare's own domestic arrangements; he married, set up home,
then trouped off alone to London for some years - and may have written some
of his sonnets for a young man!).
Perhaps through the mirrors subtle distortions we catch sight of Aickman's
wife leaving him to enter a convent?
Our narrator during the course of his tale fires barbed arrows of humour at
English Licensing Laws governing the opening hours of Inns: "Even drinks all
round was precluded by the licensing hours". These laws were introduced
during the Great War, of course. The Inland Revenue, too, comes under fire:
"If Munn had been still in the employ of the tax people, instead of on bad
terms with them, I could never have known him even as an acquaintance;
Because, say what they will, I cannot accept that any kind of gentleman
will, under any circumstances, make a career of prying into the private
affairs of others and then mulcting them, commonly to the point of spoiling
and destroying their entire lives and those of their families."
England pre 1914 was almost a "tax free zone". The need for money to fill
government coffers during the war led to personal taxation and a very much
larger revenue department to collect and administer these new taxes.
Munn had helped gather the money to pay for the war, had helped topple the
gods from Asgard (perhaps) - but because of "trouble" Munn and the revenue
had parted company.
Only three weeks in to his marriage and Munn announces his new wife is to
have a child. We, the readers, raise an eyebrow: Oh? Our smirk is both
knowing and condescending.
When, inevitably, we accompany the narrator on his journey, some years
later, to the town where the Munns are resident - a trip he wishes he'd
taken in disguise - we are not surprised that he encounters both them and
the "teeny" house that Pell built. We encounter, too, via our narrator, the
child - could Pell have also built this seemingly wooden child? With his
daughter?
Naturally we are troubled. "Who shall guard the guards themselves?" asks our
narrator on examining the child. The question remains unanswered. This
quotation, of course, comes from the verse satire "The ways of women",
written by Decimus Junius Juvenalis - "Juvenal" is the anglicised version of
his name - and forms part of a discussion within the satire on the
usefulness of employing eunuchs or effeminate men to guard a wife!
Juvenal suggests there is no point - women are inherently treacherous, she
tyrants who lie and manipulate to their own advantage. Men, he recounts,
were born from oak trees and lived differently in those days long past,
without parents of their own. Now, the better a man might be, the more
desirable he will be as a husband - but the less good he'll get from his
wife. She will arrange his friendships and turn friends of long standing
from the door. And if the mother-in-law is still alive - watch out! "It is
she who teaches her daughter to revel in stripping and despoiling her
husband."
"The bed that holds a wife is never free from wrangling and mutual
bickerings; no sleep is to be got there" Juvenal confidently informs us.
Juvenal, like Aickman's narrator, continuously looks back to a "golden"
past. He tells us that now, in an age of iron, the Delphian oracles are
dumb. No astrologer has credit unless "he have been imprisoned in some
distant camp, with chains clanking on either arm!"
Quoting from Juvenal's sixth satire sets a resonance also with his second
and ninth satires - the ninth in particular is still shocking today. In
these Juvenal casts a glance over homosexuality and the betrayal of
traditional values, and recounts a dialog with a male prostitute - they are
faintly echoed in "Wood".
Returning to our narrator, on his discovering the Munns, he makes a
statement of fact that is most definitely wrong: "Daphne who was changed by
Apollo into a tree" - she wasn't!
Apollo the sun god, god of music and son of Zeus was a many-sided god - A
god who punishes (he killed all Niobe's many sons because she had claimed
herself above Leto, his mother who had only two children). More importantly
in the context of our tale, a god of prophesy.
True, he gave chase in a mad fit of lust to the nymph Daphne, daughter of
the river god Peneus. When her strength began to fail and Apollo was gaining
on her, she rushed to the edge of her father's stream and called on him, her
father to help her - to change her. Her feet immediately took root, green
leaves sprouted from her head and hands and grey bark covered her body. Her
father had answered her prayer transforming her into a Laurel-tree. Apollo
could clasp only the rough trunk of a tree.
How many other errors has our narrator made?
Obviously we are reminded of Munn's "daffies", those strange little figures
he makes to earn a living. Vi, our narrator explains, knew Munn was "the
one" when she first caught sight of his "daffies" - the OED explains daff
means "one deficient in sense or spirit". Vi (Vili) breathed sense and
motion in to one of Munn's larger "daffies" creating their "child"....
perhaps!?
He describes the child's hands as being "involved with a system of wires and
pulleys which went upwards into the dimness, but was rusty, broken and
drooping" (a reflection of Juvenal's description of a modern fortune
teller). Wood doesn't rust. Pell's craft with wood has been interfered with
(we know it has because Vi stated the house would be made all of wood, with
out plumbing or electrics) - a mechanism has been introduced! It's been
ruined! The past has been despoiled by the future!
And what can we make of the cuckoo? "Shouting its head off four times" In
folk law much is made of the number of times a cuckoo calls - depending on
the listeners age and circumstances, it can predict the number of years you
have left to live, the number of years till you marry, how many children you
will have. So a bird of prediction - and also a symbol of Munn's cuckoldry.
Our tale has gone in a full circle, sunrise to sunset. We have caught
distorted hints of the narrator's satyrism, Vi's unchasteness and possible
incest, the woodenness of most marriages, and possibly, too, we have
glimpsed the narrator's paranoia.
On first sighting the Munns home, our narrator states: "the notion of an
hallucination seemed slightly more plausible than it commonly does."
Oh, dear, we say.
He makes several subtle allusions to FitzGerald's "Omar Khayyam" - "The
finger of fate", for example mentioned at least twice. There is a resonance
also in this from the Rubaiyat:
"For in and out, above, about, below,
'Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow-show,
play'd in a box whose candle is the Sun,
Round which we phantom Figures come and go."
One is also reminded of Wilfred Owen's poem "Exposure":
"For hours the innocent mice rejoice: the house is theirs;
Shutters and doors, all closed: on us the doors are
closed -
We turn back to our dying."
So Aickman's story, dizzy with subtle allusions, enigmas, and ambiguity,
comes to a close. We are reminded of James Joyce's statement:
"I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors
busy for centuries in arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of
insuring one's immortality."
Certainly "Wood" opens as it closes with "one of those weather houses -
attuned to tell more things than the merely literal state of the heavens" -
the house that Pell built mirroring Delphian oracles where prophesy had been
silenced by time and rationality and materialism; but a new soothsayer is on
hand, "blood and sawdust are the same", linked in some cold way to a
mechanism of the age of iron. This is the future. This is our fate. And our
only hope (a small one agreed) would appear to lay in the all-consuming
conflagration that left "sheds and shanties burnt out" and may one day
eradicate each and everyone of us.
But were the Munn's burnt? We don't know - our narrator mentions the fire
and by implication suggests, "the spell was, in fact, now broken." Yet we
are unable to shake off a growing sense of unease, fuelled by those last
lines of the verse our narrator claims to have copied in the house that Pell
built:
"Let them prophesy for ever
Curse them once and come back never"
Never again will we be able to return to those golden times - those halcyon
days that existed before the lights went out all over Europe and the world
erupted in a war unlike any war that had preceded it. The Great War they
called it. It changed society and heralded an era of materialism and
mechanisation that reduced the individual to helpless impotency - the old
crafts were transformed into mass production. Quality bled out of the fabric
of society to be replaced by hopeless mediocrity. Gone forever are those
golden days when the English Country House reigned supreme, they are as lost
to us as the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, or the Roman society that Juvenal's
vicious satirical verses wounded so deeply when he compared his age to the
"days of Saturn" - those Golden days of innocence which ended when Astraea
was placed among the stars as Virgo.
And we are left yet again contemplating that photograph of Aickman; his back
to us as he walks away, a view of his face denied us, a moment frozen in
time - for all time! Perhaps, our thoughts turn to the transitory nature of
things? Perhaps, we think of a carpenter carving out a coffin, one of Pell's
boxes? Or perhaps we think again on those immortal lines of Edward
Fitzgerald:
"The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it."