Aickman at the British Library: A Symposium

Our panel of 6, plus the 7th who moved unseen among us. (Photo: Chris Power)

Our Aickman evening at the British Library was, I believe, something of a success. At least, I like to imagine the man himself was with us in spirit, wearing the smile that a ghost would wear while we sang his praises. To be a ‘neglected’, ‘cult’ author is of course to be a bit of a phantomic presence, a perpetual ghost at the feast of English letters, maybe doomed to walk the earth forever unwelcomed. But Aickman is now a kind of fixture in the nation’s great library, and that’s not nothing, as they say in showbiz.

We tried to summon him right from the start of the night by playing a small audio clip of him reading, very characteristically, from ‘Bind Your Hair.’ (In a letter to Ramsey Campbell of June 1978, now lodged in the BL archive, Aickman writes: ‘I always read each story aloud to a [certain] selected person... There is nothing like reading aloud for the tidying up of stylistic shortcomings.’)

Then Ramsey himself spoke, reading from the memoir The Attempted Rescue in which Aickman praises the mountain-film era Leni Riefenstahl at vivid length and makes a tortuously felt effort to exonerate Riefenstahl of her later closeness to the Nazis. It was an astute way for Ramsey to open a window on Aickman’s unbending opinions – mostly of an artistic nature, some of them expressed in political conservatism. He was – to put it mildly, though it was put so on several occasions during our evening – a man out of time, who felt himself born in the wrong age.

Reece Shearsmith’s reading from ‘The Hospice’ could have lasted all night, such was the pleasure it stirred; and Jeremy Dyson’s turn with ‘Wood’, a superb if less-celebrated story replete with a secluded village and some sinister corn dollies, showed very well why The League of Gentlemen, as well as the contemporary turns both in English nature writing and supernatural writing, are really rather Aickman-esque.

In the end I had to ask the panel: here is a superb writer, a writer’s writer, writing (whether he disdained it or not) in one of the world’s most popular genres – why, then, is he still not better known? One reason, perhaps, is now to be found in the BL archive: a letter to a literary agent in which Aickman distinguishes between ‘entertainers’ who ‘write for a specific market’ and ‘artists’ who ‘write in response to a voice inside them.’ Aickman refused to sell out, whether or not anyone was buying. His friend Jean Richardson told me that he steadfastly refused to inject his stories with ‘more subtle sadism’ of a sort that might have served to ring the mainstream bell. No tears, then – for Aickman did what he wanted to do, and the outcomes earned him undying respect, that elusive immortality that many an artist will dream of.

Robert Aickman at the British Library 10.11.2017

Aickman photographed by Jean Richardson

Is Robert Aickman the twentieth century’s ‘most profound writer of what we call horror stories and he, with greater accuracy, preferred to call strange stories’? That was the view of Peter Straub, celebrated author of Ghost Story among others. I think ‘most profound’ is perfectly justifiable even before we get to considerations of style, which in the case of Aickman are considerable. The work is pregnant with unease, melancholia and dread – perfect, then, for this time of year, and also for any other.

Possibly Aickman is one of those writers who will never get his due, doomed to a purgatory of perpetual ‘rediscovery’; but the rediscoveries keep getting bigger. The British Library has now acquired and catalogued his archive, and there will be an event at the Library this Friday, hosted by your correspondent, to mark the occasion and celebrate the man and his work.

To speak of only one treasure in that archive: the Library now holds the manuscript of Aickman’s only unpublished novel, ‘Go Back at Once’ (1975); and that title is so marvellous and so very Aickman that I’m not sure I’d even want to read the work, such is my pleasure in just knowing that it exists.

Robert Aickman at the Freud Museum

Robert Aickman, photographed circa 1960

In his famous essay on ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) Freud was careful to let us know that he did not scare easily; that taking fright at strange things belonged, indeed, to the backward childhood of mankind, the natural fear of the body’s death and ‘the old, animistic conception of the universe’, of a world ‘peopled with the spirits of human beings.’ That said, Freud accepted that we all go through this phase and that ‘residues and traces’ of it may remain – old beliefs ‘ready to seize upon any confirmation’ of their survival and endurance. 

Freud paid special attention to the uncanny as evoked by literature because of its special appeal and privilege in terms of making the supernatural plausible to us– which is to say, ‘there are many more means of creating uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life.’ And Freud certainly understood that a great writer of the supernatural could shake us at our cores by the skilful pretence of moving ‘in the world of common reality… he deceives us by promising to give us the sober truth, and then after all overstepping it. We react to his inventions as we would have reacted to real experiences; by the time we have seen through his trick it is already too late…’

I note all of this in advance of a special event that I am compering tomorrow night, Thursday June 26, at the Freud Museum in Hampstead. The occasion is the centenary of the birth of Robert Aickman, the brilliant English author of ‘strange stories’ whose work I’ve been privileged to publish in Faber Finds and who is now being offered by the main Faber list in glorious-looking new editions. All tickets to the event are already sold, which is a tribute to Aickman’s ardent following but also, I imagine, to the drawing powers of the two gentlemen who will be reading from Aickman’s work and discussing his influence with me: Reece Shearsmith and Jeremy Dyson, formerly of Royston Vasey.

If you don’t know Aickman already, I can only say that you will not go wrong for one moment if you sample the oeuvre at any point. (The new edition of his Dark Entries, for instance, includes an introduction by me and an afterword by Ramsey Campbell.) Aickman's work is a wonder, and will always be so. He is an especially fine exemplar of the style Freud identified, as he seems always to proceed from a realism where detail accumulates without fuss, the recognisable material world seems wholly foursquare – until you realise that the narrative has been built as a cage, a kind of personal hell, and the protagonist is proceeding toward death as if in a dream.

Tomorrow night, in the house where Freud used to live, I hope we’ll throw some light into Aickman's shadows - and I hope to report back here, with pictures.