Encountering the Unknown in Aickman's 'The Next Glade'

Encountering the Unknown in Aickman's "The Next Glade"
by Adam Walter

    In the introduction to the first of his Fontana ghost story anthologies, Robert Aickman comments on the danger of "the ghost that at first seems, like the things in shops, useful…." These "things in shops" are useful in a material sense--that is, useful in terms of the body and not of the soul. The great irony here is, of course, that one should overlook the transcendent implications of a numinous manifestation in favor of temporal concerns. Yet this is what we are given to expect from human nature, especially in the modern world. For societies that treat their environment mainly as a heap of unsorted resources, anything unknown or unfamiliar becomes subject to the values of utility and standardization, to being converted into some consumable known-thing, some commodity. Standardization promotes the familiar by attempting to eliminate risk, difficult choices, wasted time, and unexpected surprises. This battle against chance is the very theme of the urban experience where modern city streets, and modern city lives as well, comprise a delicately balanced grid with complete efficiency as the ideal goal. It may be argued, however, that minimizing risk from a thing also reduces that thing’s uniqueness, its character--that is, its transcendent value.
    This dichotomy between the material and the transcendent plays a constant part in Robert Aickman’s short stories. "The Hospice," for example, demonstrates the sort of terror awaiting someone used to dealing with regular streets, detailed maps, and ordinary businesses when Lucas Maybury, a travelling businessman, loses himself at "the back of beyond." Maybury makes the mistake of deviating from his set route, fails to unravel a maze of rural roads, and is forced to spend an evening at the most unusual of inns where he has a series of unexplainable encounters. In "Into the Wood," Margaret Sawyer decides to spend a few days at a similarly strange resort isolated among the forests of the Swiss Alps. Unlike Maybury, who seems to exit his adventure unchanged, Margaret adapts fairly quickly and learns the secret of walking through the Aickman unknown.
    Clearly this ability to travel comfortably with mystery is, for Aickman, the antidote to urban life. In his stories, at least three common fates befall any characters who fail the existential challenge put to them. Many are either devoured or doomed. Those devoured finish their stories with no hope of surviving their climactic encounter with the dark side of the unknown ("The Trains," "The Fetch," and "Never Visit Venice"). Those doomed find themselves cursed with an inescapable, unhappy future, and this curse often gains its full significance only after they have also lost, in one sense or another, their spouse or lover ("The Clock Watcher," "Just a Song at Twilight," "Ringing the Changes"). Thirdly, the unknown may simply reject a person--such as Lucas Maybury--for their failure, allowing them to go on with their small lives unenlightened. It is rare for someone in an Aickman story to meet the unknown and end up benefiting from the encounter, but in "Into the Wood" Margaret clearly succeeds in doing just that. Another such success is found in "The Next Glade," where the tale’s complex subtlety yields a fairly cryptic resolution.
    "The Next Glade" is the story of Noelle, a housewife and mother in her late thirties. Noelle occasionally, when her husband is out of town, attends parties hosted by some younger friends and enjoys the youthful flirtation that comes her way there. At one such party a man named John decides he wants to take things a step further; he promises to visit Noelle at her home and take her for a walk in the wood nearby. Noelle does accompany John on a walk, and she inexplicably loses him in the small wood. Months later, Noelle’s husband Melvin takes the family for a walk along the same path. This time Noelle pushes through to "the next glade," where John disappeared. There she comes upon an improbable sight: beyond a wire fence she sees a small house where John is busy digging a garden trench. At the same moment, Melvin manages to mortally wound himself in an accident with a pocket knife, an event which leads to hospitalization and a very pitiful, protracted death. After Melvin’s funeral, John reappears and joins Noelle for another walk. This time when she reaches the hidden glade, the house is gone and more has been dug than a mere trench; an incongruous amount of earth has been excavated, revealing "the most enormous hole or cavity" filled with loud construction projects and frenzied business offices. Noelle’s vision of this pit has almost Dantesque implications:
"All down the hole men were working, constructionally--or so she assumed. Hundreds of men--thousands, she might have been forgiven for thinking. Men were doing pretty well everything the mind could think of--and not only Noelle’s quiet and reasonable mind."
She then finds that John has disappeared again. When Noelle returns to her family, her son asks her about John. She says that he was just a man who "wanted to take me out of myself. It was kind of him."
    This ending leaves the reader with a number of persisting questions. Who was John? Was he even a real person? What was the meaning behind Noelle’s vision? A careful reading, however, will show that the story works only because these questions remain unanswered.
    To grasp the significance of this unusual ending, the reader must first deal with the symbolism of the wood and the walks taken there. Woods are a setting common to Aickman‘s stories, such as "Bind Your Hair, "The Inner Room," "Into the Wood," "The Same Dog," "The Stains," and "Rosamund’s Bower." One can understand the obvious appeal of this setting to Aickman, forests being the very antithesis of the infernal metropolis of Noelle’s vision. Unlike the streets of a city, a forest holds uncertain paths and mystery, stillness and quiet enough for the imagination to thrive on. Where Noelle lives there are "woods of a kind in almost every direction." However, the wood closest to her home is also marked by litter and crude public benches, and Noelle tells John--before their first walk--that the wood is really too small to get lost in. Still, when Noelle eventually reaches the hidden glade, she finds it idyllic:
"As she expected, it was quiet there, reassuring; unlittered, because untracked. The trees were taller and more dignified. There was an element of natural architecture, an element of mystery. Foliage hid the sky, moss the ground."

        The walks taken in the wood near Noelle’s home are important for the vision they ultimately bring Noelle and for the contrast made between nature and the urban abyss; but these walks also contrast the characters of Melvin and John. Melvin, as a business man, is a natural enemy of the wood. He seems to spend little time at home because he is busy elsewhere pushing the machine of progress, to which he has become, ironically, enslaved. The situation is the same with the husband of Kay, Noelle’s neighbor. So, to Noelle: "It seemed natural that Melvin should be blown hither and thither by the trade winds, because everyone else was." When Melvin takes his family for a walk in the wood, his exhaustion with business has made him morbid. He remarks, "I am dead to the world" and "something will just have to give, or I shall break." And break he does. Going into the wood, he outfits himself against nature with an excessive amount of outdoors gear, approaching the wood as an obstacle to overcome, an enemy to defeat. His fatal mistake comes when he tries following Noelle into the hidden glade and insists on clearing a path with his knife. Noelle warns him that such force is unnecessary: "A very little pushing will do it."
    John’s walks with Noelle reveal him as an enigma not only for his disappearances and his vague identity, but also for his comportment toward Noelle. On the surface, his pursuit of her has the feel of a blossoming love affair, and their walks together have some of those connotations. When John first arrives at her house, Noelle seems nervous, stalling him and talking often about her children and husband. She makes a point of telling him that the children are due home from school soon, therefore she can spare him very little time. However, John’s behavior is largely innocent; he is remarkably considerate and complimentary toward her. His entire reason for taking her on a walk seems to be a desire to see her in what he insists is her "proper element." While he does embrace her at one point, he never becomes aggressively amorous. This is in contrast to Melvin who decides on an impulse, in a moment of intense emotional desperation, that he must make love to Noelle in the wood. John, rather, seems not to think of himself at all; his entire focus is Noelle and getting her to open herself to the wood. When she becomes upset at the litter along the path, he tells her to ignore it: "Look upwards. Look at the trees."
    Regardless of John’s ambiguous identity, he certainly fulfils a distinct role in Noelle’s life at a crucial moment. He seems to be a particular kind of Aickman ghost, something more abstract and inscrutable than even the spirit of a dead man. Perhaps he is also a sort of grim reaper--in a suit and tie and wielding a spade rather than a sickle--come to take Melvin away and leave Noelle with a mystifying vision meant, somehow, to illuminate her bereavement. Or possibly he is symbolic of what a Jungian psychoanalyst might call Noelle’s developing animus--that is, her inner masculine side; after all, it is worth noting that Noelle’s relationship with her son Agnew grows curiously during the story, a change that begins the very moment Melvin is wounded.
    Whatever the case, the story ends with Noelle’s eyes opened, her vision enlarged, and John still refusing to be explained. He remains a mystery that defies being made use of in any tangible way. John’s challenge to Noelle is identical with the question Aickman repeatedly puts to his readers: can one simply accept mystery without debasing it? Aickman writes, in the same Fontana introduction:
"If we see fewer ghosts to-day, it should not for a moment be supposed that we are the wiser for it: rather it is that organisation, uniformity, and sheer noise have encroached that much further upon the imagination and the soul."
Yet in Aickman’s stories the ghostly powers remain and also the wood with its promise to change us, a promise that one may enter the trees as one person and leave them having become someone else entirely.