The Wine-Dark Sea

With an introduction by Peter Straub

 

Aickman at his best was this century’s most profound writer of what we call horror stories and he, with greater accuracy, preferred to call strange stories. In his work is a vast disparity between the well-mannered tone and the stories’ actual emotional content. On the surface of things, if we can
extrapolate
from the style, diction, and range of allusion in his work, Aickman was a cultivated, sensitive, thoroughly English
individual
. It’s not hard to imagine him as having been something like T. S. Eliot: dry of manner, more kindly than not, High Anglican in dress, capable of surprising finesses of wit. His chief influences were English, the stories of Walter De La Mare and M. R. James (and probably also the subtle, often indirect supernatural stories of Henry James, England’s most assimilated American), and his own influence has been
primarily
on English writers like Ramsey Campbell and, through Campbell, Clive Barker. (I think Aickman would have
cherished
Barker’s story ‘In the Hills, the Cities.’) In fact, neither Campbell nor Barker is really very much like Aickman. His originality, conscious and instinctive at once, was so entire that although he has provided us with a virtual model of what the ‘strange story’ should be, if anyone tried to write to its specifications, the result would be nothing more than imitative.

Unlike nearly everybody writing supernatural stories now, Aickman rejected the neat, conclusive ending. He was, you might say, Stephen King’s opposite. In his work there are no climactic showdowns, in part because his work uses almost none of the conventional imagery of horror. Aickman was sublimely uninterested in monsters, werewolves, worms, rats, bats, and things in bandages. (He did, however, write one great vampire story.) Absent from this list of horror
conventions
is ghosts, because Aickman
was
interested in ghosts, at least in a way – in the atmosphere a ghost creates, the thrill of unreality which surrounds it. Aickman was a queerly visionary writer, and ghosts, which are both utterly irrational and thoroughly English, would have appealed to him. In this collection a ghost might very well be making telephone calls in ‘Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen,’ and a
kind
of ghost, the ‘old carlie,’ plays a crucial role in ‘The Fetch’, one of the most explicit and straightforward pieces here. You could stretch a point – stretch it past breaking – and say that ‘Never Visit Venice’ concerns an encounter with a ghost. It does not, of course. What attracted Aickman to ghosts was not the notion of dripping revenants but the feeling – composed in part of mystery, fear, stifled eroticism, hopelessness, nostalgia, and the almost violent freedom granted by a suspension of rational rules – which they evoked in him. Ghosts – or the complex of feelings I’ve just tried to summarise – gave him a degree of artistic freedom granted to only a very few writers.

We are in the age of
Dawn
of
the
Dead
and
Friday
the
Thirteenth,
and to describe a writer of supernatural stories as cultivated and sensitive is nearly to condemn him. I had better explain what I mean by those terms and describe what I see as their consequences. Aickman’s general learning gave him a wide referential range: these stories often allude to the worlds of opera, art, and literature, and if you really know nothing at all about Mozart or Wagner or Homer, you will have to pay even more attention than usual while reading some of these stories. Aickman’s ‘cultivation’, which to me feels like that of an autodidact, enabled him to draw more kinds of experience, more nuance and shading, into his work; and his sensitivity meant that he felt things very deeply, everyday life as well as great art. Very good horror writers often demonstrate that ordinary life can be horrific and tedious at once for the sensitive person, and one suspects it was so for Aickman. It is a great mistake to read the life of the writing for that of the writer, but these stories leave little doubt that for Aickman’s sensibility the contemporary world was a raucous, clanging din growing ever emptier of any real
content
. He frequently tells us that he abhors man in the mass and the pleasures of the vulgar crowd, what in the
wonderfully
titled ‘Never Visit Venice’ he calls ‘the world’s new
littleness
’. Experience was being flattened out all around him, being rendered coarser, simpler, and more accessible, and this process clearly made Aickman as ‘sick at heart’ as it does his protagonist, Henry Fern.

This response is not merely snobbish. There is too much sadness in it for that; and beneath the educated sadness, too much fear; and beneath the fear, too much respect for the great common human inheritance.

In nearly all of the stories collected here, the world of ordinary experience is as porous and malleable as a dream. ‘Growing Boys’ is a deadpan bit of uncharacteristic black humour in which the irrational and grotesque are hauled right into the immediate foreground of the story. (The only other story here as explicit as that, apart from ‘The Fetch’ and its family spectre, is ‘The Wine-Dark Sea’, a forthright allegory: as in a myth, man is blindly destructive to the original sacred world of the gods, and even Aickman’s typically responsive and insightful lone traveller must be returned to the noisy, empty world he came from.) In every other story, the
immediate
result of a finely tuned sensibility finding danger and uncertainty everywhere in ordinary life is to make meaningless the concept of the ‘ordinary’. Aickman’s characters find themselves trapped in a series of events unconnected by logic, or which are connected by a nonlinear logic. Very often neither the characters nor the reader can be certain about
exactly
what has happened, yet the story has the satisfying rightness of a poem – a John Ashbery poem. Every detail is echoed or commented upon, nothing is random or wasted. The reader has followed the characters into a world which is remorseless, vast, and inexorable in its operations.

Unconscious forces drive these characters, and Aickman’s genius was in finding imaginative ways for the unconscious to manipulate both the narrative events of his tales and the structures in which they occur. Because there are no logical explanations, there can be no resolutions. After the shock of the sheer strangeness fades away, we begin to see how the facts of the stories appear to grow out of the protagonists’ fears and desires, and how the illogic and terror surrounding them is their own, far more accurately and disturbingly than in any conventional horror story. ‘The Trains’ is a perfect story of this type, and ‘The Inner Room’ is even better, one of Aickman’s most startling and beautiful demonstrations of the power over us of what we do not quite grasp about ourselves and our lives.

As wonderful as those stories are, ‘Into the Wood’ seems to me the masterpiece of the collection. In it all of Aickman’s themes come together in an act of self-acceptance which is at once dangerous, enigmatic, in narrative terms wholly
justified
, and filled with the reverence for the imaginative power demonstrated by Aickman’s work in general.

On the narrative surface ‘Into the Wood’ is about
insomnia
. Margaret, the wife of an English road builder,
inadvertently
comes upon a sanatorium set in a Swedish forest. After she has arranged to stay there for several days, she discovers that the sanatorium, or the Kurhus, is a refuge for those who never sleep: the rest of the world, the ‘sleepers,’ cannot tolerate their presence. True insomniacs ‘have to live with reality twenty-four hours a day,’ she is told, and their
knowledge
makes them feared. During the day they rest, aloof even from one another, and at night they walk in the woods around the sanatorium. Margaret’s dissatisfaction with the empty social round she must endure as her husband’s wife and her uneasiness at finding herself stranded amidst these silent and peculiar people are delineated subtly and economically.
Aickman
tells us that until her experience at the Kurhus, Margaret would have rejected the idea that she was unhappy, being ‘insufficiently grown for unhappiness or happiness.’ Swedish hospitality has exhausted her, but the Kurhus is like the Alice books in its reversal of ordinary rules and customs. Two orders of being are opposed here, and when Margaret enters the woods, she realises for the first time that her true self, the Margaret of her inner life, requires more spiritual and imaginative freedom than life with her husband provides. She senses that she has begun to find a way of being ‘beyond logic, beyond words, above all beyond connection with … normal life.’ She has found within herself a capacity for seeing what is real. That evening a sympathetic Kurhus resident tells her that ‘only by great sacrifices can we poor human beings reach great truths.’ Margaret instinctively knows what he means. Some few insomniacs, he says, walk into the great Swedish forest beyond the wood and never return: they have reached their limits and found their deepest truth.

From this point the story moves like a series of tapestries as it enacts the consequences of Margaret’s strange encounter with her own being. In a sense, ‘Into the Wood’ is an extended metaphor for the separation, even estrangement, between the artist and the conventional world, and the artist’s sense of an inner glory and necessity which can be shirked only at the expense of his true relationship to himself; or so I thought when I first read it, and was immediately grateful to have read it. But abstract reflections on ‘the artist’ are seldom
satisfactory
, and are never as satisfactory, nor as moving, as this story. We could say, far more pertinently, that if stories are ever about anything but the particular ways they are themselves and no other story, ‘Into the Wood’ is about being a dedicated, delicately organised man named Robert Aickman; about knowing there is a great wild forest within you; about understanding that you must go into that forest in search of your own limits; and doing so with the knowledge that many other people have felt that a world of unsentimental grandeur lies within and that to deny or ignore it is to choose an uneasy half-life. Aickman’s originality was rooted in need – he had to write these stories, and that is why they are worth reading and rereading.

© 1988 Seafront Corporation

Off Corfu? Off Euboea? Off Cephalonia? Grigg would never say which it was. Beyond doubt it was an island relatively offshore from an enormously larger island which was
relatively
inshore from the mainland. On this bigger island was a town with a harbour, mainly for fishing-boats but also for the occasional caïque, and with, nowadays, also a big parking place for motor-coaches. From the waterfront one could see the offshore island, shaped like a whale with a building on its back, or, thought Grigg, like an elephant and castle.