…for old ones and others
Entry Points
The Isle of Lewis
…and Carnac
Today Clacton, but…
The Lewis Clan in Callanish and Carnac…
….in 1970s and 1980s :-
Later by Berietree:
Later by Killystar:
Protocols of Romance in Aickman
LETTERS TO THE POSTMAN by Robert Aickman
“All the larks were holed that day. […] The larks were chiming to the pulses in his body; the waves whispering. […] The larks flew higher than ever. The waves lapped erotically.”
“They were in a region of unadopted roads, underdefined boundaries, random structures at uncoordinated angles.”
It is is usually down to any Aickman readers to help triangulate such regions of his work into a gestalt, I guess. Not least with this particular story, where genders feint and prestidigitate across such underdefined boundaries — feints and prestidigitations between sister and brother, mother and son, man and woman, more specifically, here, a young postman and the peat-burning woman to whom he delivers letters and from whom he receives personal letters when they spring out of her literal letter “box”, a box where her letters are placed at the front toor, these being missives about the husband who once turned up without her knowing who he was, just his name. There are mysterious protocols of ‘Your’ without an s and an x as a kiss, whether it be an initial as a name or the full name itself, at the end of the letters to each other. The woman seems to want to be rescued from this mysterious (uncouth?) husband and later to find a handsome Prince perhaps currently disguised as a dog. Equally, our callow GPO postman (who happens to be the son of a GP) wants to find a woman to fulfil his even more mysterious protocols of relationship and/or his physical expectations of romance. You see, he plants his face into his own mother’s bosom one day in the family kitchen and later allows his own sister to pull down her skirt in the expensive digs he hires to house the woman to whom he delivers letters and from whom he receives letters. Except pulling down her skirt really means that his sister is pulling it down straight in a prudent spinsterish way while keeping it tightly belted at the waist! Ironically, when he later tells the woman whom he has rescued to take of her dress when alone with her in the digs, it is discovered that she is wearing more than one dress underneath. Every young man should take note, I guess. All of this taking place in an Aickman-like Holihaven seaside resort where the sea is so flat the tide never comes in, and the larks are now inaudible, I infer. All of it being an absurdist way to make some sense, some rhyme and reason, of the interaction between different genders in the days of yore when there was always a second delivery. A second meaning that creeps up on you like a letter dropping on the mat late in the afternoon, that you discover later and decide to leave ever unopened and unrequited. Meanwhile, in order to rescue you ‘little people’ from future temptation of coming in closer union with this story’s own delivery, below there is a harmless clue as another quotation that I have endangered myself by digging it out from the rest of it… The further need for any of you little people to triangulate coordinates from “deep beneath the praties” is thus obviated….
“Problems, if meant to be solved, solve themselves more effectively than we can solve them.”
All my reviews of Aickman: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/robert-aickman/
The Moment of Panic — Steve Duffy
PS PUBLISHING 2013
My previous reviews of Steve Duffy: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/steve-duffy-reviews/ and of this publisher: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/ps-publishing/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
#killystar
The Forfeits of Bashan
“How agreeable to watch, from the other side of the high stile, this mighty creature, this fat bull of Bashan, snorting, champing, pawing the earth, lashing the tail, breathing defiance at heaven and at me … his heart hot with hate, unable to climb a stile.” – Rose Macaulay
Robert Aickman considered Elizabeth Bowen to be “the most distinguished living practitioner” of ghost stories. And she happened to be a close friend of Rose Macaulay. Bowen has long been my favourite writer!
“Elk and yak, the bulls of Bashan and of Babylon, mammoth and mastodon, they come trooping to the sunken sea, Lacus Mortis. Ominous revengeful zodiacal host! They moan, passing upon the clouds, horned and capricorned, the trumpeted with the tusked, the lionmaned, the giantantlered, snouter and crawler, rodent, ruminant and pachyderm, all their moving moaning multitude, murderers of the sun.” — ULYSSES by James Joyce (a book also with a section headed ‘Raising the Wind.’)
And Thomas Mann had a favourite dog called Bashan about which he wrote one of his works.
My photo of a Thames Barge also on route for Southend Pier.
RAISING THE WIND by Robert Aickman
“The din was like six mad bulls charging about and bellowing like Bashan. You will remember Bashan.”
No, but I do remember the bulls disguised as cows, or vice versa, in Aickman’s other Essex story HAND IN GLOVE, and the implications involved there, making it a strongly kindred work (my review of it HERE). Now, after some research, I can see the connections with the Bible. And the wind that God makes in the same context of the Book of Amos. And this story is a brief gust of a story compared to his usual seeming attritional story lengths elsewhere! And, indeed, I see this story as an ironic nod by an author at his own now perceived obsession in fiction with literary slowth, Zenoism aka nullimmortalis….
“; and I could imagine that speed could well be of the essence.” — here in RAISING THE WIND
compared with
“‘I’m not sure that time is the essence, Slow,’….” — THE BREAKTHROUGH
A story of an insurance man as narrator raised from rest by a friend to accompany him in a commission to sail, two-handed, a Thames Barge along the estuary coast in the area where I happen to live — from a stinky downtrodden port to another no doubt more salubrious one, with a time deadline involved and if they didn’t get there duly on time there would be a financial forfeit!
While they did succeed, they also somehow didn’t succeed! See what I mean by raising this story to read. It won’t take much of your time, I promise.
The wind raised through the keyhole of a church door between the narrator and an old stinky woman blowing into each other’s mouth raises whatever power is then somehow bottled in a Chianti flask provided by the narrator, later to help the sails of the barge fill with wind…. And the voyage then became indeed ‘sweetly swift’, but leaving behind the church in a near ruinous mess. But their craft perhaps fares no better, by some act of ‘pandemonium’, I infer. A craft called Dorothea.
“I mean, marriage drinks up all of our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know it may be very dear—but it murders our marriage—and then the marriage stays with us like a murder—and everything else is gone.” — said by Dorothea Brooke in MIDDLEMARCH, probably the most famous Dorothea of all.
I simply know in my heart, from research, that Aickman was an enthusiast for Thomas Mann, but now I wonder what MIDDLEMARCH meant to him. It seems, in hindsight, now, and from what I have grown to know about his fiction and its themes, that it surely must have been an enormous influence on him!
“When I was a boy, confetti was at least confetti. Now it is great lumps of stuff, which lie about far longer than the tiny things ever did.”
I’d better now try halt this review before it grows longer than the story itself!
All my reviews of Aickman: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/robert-aickman/
PS: That old photo above perhaps inadvertently the perfect expression of Aickman’s Zenoism!
Half and half again.
The Ornamental Waters
COMPULSORY GAMES by Robert Aickman
“‘But books take you away.’”
Here it is the buzzing Moth aeroplane that the book creates, not to take you away, but to stalk you as close to the loose slates of your roof as possible. And it sure did this to me many years ago I now recall, but I must have blocked it out or — perhaps more meaningfully in the context — airbrushed it till I foolhardily read it again just now, and without warning, it’s back there but this time under the roof of my head, seeking to airbrush equivalently its version of my own “implicit ghost”, I feel.
The satisfyingly complex story of the Trenwiths, Colin and Grace, husband and wife, living near Cromwell Rd and their endurance of the ‘boring’ Eileen McGrath, a widow and top civil servant with her own ‘lodestar’, the one who lives in oblique neighbourly contiguity with them, along with her invisible tenants — a story of aloneness and social differences and false fronts, and richly if darkly tantalising interactions between them. About the English and their use of laughter. Then there is Eileen’s one attempt to co-opt Colin when Grace is abroad in India to visit a dying mother. But when Grace returns it is her instead who is co-opted by Eileen into an aviation project, resulting in the hunting of Colin by both or one of them — or by neither of them, as the small aeroplane is often seen flying without a pilot. It even hugs Colin’s trail on holiday by train to visit a country house, one whose “ornamental waters were full of sewage.” (My italics.)
Reading this story one tempts such airbrushing or subsuming upon oneself in a similar way, and so I am trying to get it off my chest again, and leaving it for you to deal with by means of this review. Not a game, I assure you, but something definitely compulsory! Not sure whether it is a gender thing, whether any reader is more or less susceptible to reading it? But I sense it is a masochistic man who wrote it for married men to read. Unless you know different?
Probably the most important passage that Aickman ever wrote:
“A year ago, all the words that matter had suddenly changed their meanings and changed them for ever. Nor was this process of change going to cease. Colin felt that he would never even die. Rather was he to be endlessly dragged out of himself; moulded, melted, and miniaturized: while all the time, his real self remained entirely conscious but entirely powerless, like a discarded chrysalis still with feeling. A manikin was materializing while the man watched, having first been paralysed.”
The heads above the country house wall watching him at the end are probably all you readers. Me included, if I could but know. Or have all the words changed meaning yet again?
All my reviews of Aickman: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/robert-aickman/
Clacton Day
The Next Glade of Light
THE NEXT GLADE by Robert Aickman
“‘Have a chocolate finger?’ she said,…”
…not said by Noelle to her husband, the ambidextrous Melvin, but to her prospective fancy man with a fancy name whom she picked up at a party….
I have two editions of this story, the original, and a reprint, whereby in the latter, perhaps significantly, the boy Agnew is actually ‘misprinted’ twice as Agnes. ‘Agneau’ in French is the word for ‘Lamb’: “Hoodwink’d with faery fancy; all amort, / Save to St. Agnes and her lambs unshorn,…” from the famous Keats poem about St. Agnes, and see also the above famous painting of Judith shearing off a head, and this is a deadpan story about the loose marriage conducted by Noelle and Melvin (the latter with career frustrations and rivalries) and their two children Agnew and Judith, a marriage so loose that Noelle allows herself to be cuddled by a fancy man with a strange morphing double-barrel of a name when they are alone together in the suburban woods near the marital home at the time Melvin is away on difficult business abroad in the New World.
Men who sort of come and go like Stepford Husbands almost mindlessly in a farrago of leanings that lead to a visionary epic in a pit forever near or within the ever-next glade, a Blakean or John Martin epic of commercial double-dealing exploiting the labouring men and typing women (an epic bodily interweaving a human panoply not unlike the vision in BIND YOUR HAIR), all amidst the gluey resistances of passage while wading through them wearing shoes and boots as in the same BIND YOUR HAIR story appropriately reviewed by me just before this one; in fact this story and that one are kindred stories that somehow deal with the complex relationships and jobs and mindless pretensions that both men and women conduct. Toward family ruin et al.
Here Melvin’s downfall (even before the men in white coats could come for him first as he feared) takes place when he is childishly role-playing a sort of Wild Bill Hickok scenario in the woods with a deadly lumber knife…. And then thoughts of ‘an infection poisoning his brain.’ But who shears whom, and by what means? Whose ‘fine fabric’ business suit becomes just another Mr Millar mistexturing?
“It seemed to Noelle that the din was rising in a degree entirely out of proportion with the distance she was covering, as presumably she advanced towards it.”
“In the stream of light from the passage, Noelle could see Agnew’s wild head.”
Noelle as a sort of female Christ or Christ’s Mother? Her Lamb of God pressed against her breasts at the end. Time itself, meanwhile, had to have exactitude when children were involved, this story says.
“Men and their dreams!” — Eskimo carpet and Australian boomerang stretching as if globally? Any “conjectural rats”, notwithstanding. But never any butterflies.
No Fragonard or Watteau — nor even this story’s mention of wigs or ribboned shepherd crooks — involved. But the trees are mysteriously architectural. As we readers struggle with dark meanings always hovering halfway through to the next glade of light. At a time when colour TVs needed to be specifically called, as in this story, colour ones, to differentiate from black and white.
“‘I’m sure the whole thing’s a fantasy, as I said before.’
‘It is, and yet it isn’t,’ said Noelle.”
My other reviews of Aickman: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/robert-aickman/
MALBIQUE.Org
Can I change my shoes?
BIND YOUR HAIR by Robert Aickman
“‘Let there be wet,’ quoted Clarinda to herself in her clear gentle voice. ‘Oh let there be wet.’”
And now, of course, we duly arrive at the most clinging and insidious ‘I’m not sure that time is the essence, Slow,’ of them all — indeed the most gluey Zenoism (“it was now something after half past”) in the shape of the MIST against the wetness of which Clarinda, during a solitary outing, needs to bind her hair, as she wades through near ankle-breaking muddiness, and through very soft rubber and other resistances of passage, an outing that she foolhardily takes during this first stay with her future husband’s ‘lobster-pot’ of a family in an empty part of an English county whereto rich men of the shoe and the bootlace industry retire, one of them being her fiancé’s father. She tries to escape, by means of this outing, from the socially claustrophobic house and its hindsight promise of an over-large breakfast fated for the next morning. An outing that turns out to be darkly time-mazed with gradients of early cinematography, including sights of pigs and smells of unsavouriness and meeting two indeterminate children and a slouching mis-languaged man with a shepherd’s crook, and the unforgettable Mrs Pagani who had been part of the original social gathering at the family house.
A story that is another theme-and-variations by Aickman upon the Lordly Ones, I guess. There is even, within it, a vision of my own photo above that I have used time and time and time again in my reviews, a photo originally taken uncounted years ago. Not forgetting the children’s diving-suits with hoods. And the long red mouths. And listening to four chapters of PERSUASION read aloud by the father in one sitting before supper. No need, surely, to provide further inducement for those with sufficient sump to receive this story. And strong enough ankles to kick away its boars.
“Can I change my shoes?”
All my reviews of Robert Aickman: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/robert-aickman/
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