Robert Aickman

Robert Fordyce Aickman (June 24 1914–February 26 1981) was an English conservationist and writer of fiction and nonfiction. As a writer, he is best known for his short supernatural fiction, which he described as "strange stories".

Life

Robert Aickman was the grandson of the prolific Victorian novelist Richard Marsh (1857–1915), known for his occult novel The Beetle (1897), a book as popular in its time as Bram Stoker's Dracula.

He originally received his training in architecture, the profession of his father, William Arthur Aickman. In the opening lines of Robert Aickman's autobiographical work The Attempted Rescue, he described his father as "the oddest man I have ever known".

Aickman is probably best remembered for his co-founding of the Inland Waterways Association, a group devoted to restoring and preserving England's inland canal system. One of his co-founders, L. T. C. Rolt, also produced a volume of supernatural tales, entitled Sleep No More (London: Constable, 1948). Aickman was married to Edith Ray Gregorson from 1941 to 1957. For a full exposition of the battle for the waterways, David Bolton's book Race Against Time: How Britain's Waterways Were Saved (London: Methuen, 1990) is essential, although there are other interpretations.

Aickman died of cancer on 26 February 1981 after refusing to have conventional treatment. His obituary appeared in The Times on 28 February 1981.

Writings

Fiction

All together, twelve collections of Aickman's "strange stories" have now been published. Of these, eight are original collections and four are reprint collections (one of which—Painted Devils: Strange Stories—consists of revised versions of stories which had appeared in earlier volumes). The original collections are:

• We Are for the Dark: Six Ghost Stories, London: Jonathan Cape, 1951 (a collection containing three stories by Elizabeth Jane Howard and three by Aickman)
• Dark Entries: Curious and Macabre Ghost Stories, London: Collins, 1964
• Powers of Darkness: Macabre Stories, London: Collins, 1966
• Sub Rosa: Strange Tales, London: Victor Gollancz, 1968
• Cold Hand in Mine: Eight Strange Stories, London: Victor Gollancz, 1975
• Tales of Love and Death, London: Victor Gollancz, 1977
• Intrusions: Strange Tales, London: Victor Gollancz, 1980
• Night Voices: Strange Stories, London: Victor Gollancz, 1985

The reprint collections are:

• Painted Devils: Strange Stories, New York: Scribner's, 1979 (revised stories)
• The Wine-Dark Sea, New York: Arbor House/William Morrow, 1988
• The Unsettled Dust, London: Mandarin, 1990
• The Collected Strange Stories, Carlton-in-Coverdale: Tartarus/Durtro, 1999 (two volumes)

Several of Aickman's short story collections published during his lifetime featured dust jacket drawings by the gothic illustrator Edward Gorey.

Aickman's longer works include The Late Breakfasters (London: Victor Gollancz, 1964) and The Model: A Novel of the Fantastic (New York: Arbor House, 1987), the latter a novella which had remained unpublished in his lifetime. Another novel, Go Back at Once, remains unpublished.

Awards

In 1975, Aickman received the World Fantasy Award for short fiction for his story "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal". This story had originally appeared in February 1973 in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction; it was reprinted in the collection Cold Hand in Mine. In the same year he also won the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement.

In 1981, the year of his death, Aickman was awarded the British Fantasy Award for his story "The Stains", which had first appeared in 1980 in the anthology New Terrors (London: Pan, 1980), edited by his friend and protégé Ramsey Campbell. It subsequently appeared, posthumously, in the last original collection of Aickman's short stories, Night Voices.

In 2000, the Tartarus Press compilation The Collected Strange Stories won the British Fantasy Award for best collection.

Nonfiction

Aickman's autobiographical writing consists of The Attempted Rescue (London: Victor Gollancz, 1966) and The River Runs Uphill: A Story of Success and Failure (Burton-on-Trent: Pearson, 1986). He also wrote The Story of Our Inland Waterways (London: Pitman, 1955).

Interested in the theatre, ballet, and music, Aickman served as theatre critic for The Nineteenth Century and After and chairman of the London Opera Society. He was also active in the London Opera Club, the Ballet Minerva, and the Mikron Theatre Company in London. His reviews remain, to date, uncollected in book form.

Unpublished writings

Aickman also wrote the plays Allowance For Error, Duty, and The Golden Round, none of which has yet been published. Two further books, a vast philosophical work entitled Panacea (running to over 1000 pages in manuscript form) and the novel Go Back at Once, have also never seen publication. Copies of these items are preserved, along with all of Aickman's other remaining papers, in the Robert Aickman Collection at Bowling Green State University, Ohio.

Career as editor

In addition to his own stories, Aickman edited the first eight volumes of the Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories between 1964 and 1972, selecting six of his own stories for inclusion over the course of the series (the fourth and sixth volumes lack one of his tales). He also supplied an insightful introduction in every volume except the sixth.

Recent interest

A critical essay on Aickman's fiction appears in S. T. Joshi's book The Modern Weird Tale (2001). Christopher Barker of The Haunted River contributed a detailed essay entitled "The Stains: Robert Aickman's Swan Song" to an issue of Supernatural Tales in 2003, in which he argued that the story possesses many autobiographical elements, including references to Elizabeth Jane Howard.

The original collections of short stories are quite scarce, though copies of the U.S. edition of Cold Hand In Mine—illustrated by Edward Gorey—are very plentiful. Most of his best tales can be found in the equally affordable collections The Wine Dark Sea, Painted Devils, and The Unsettled Dust.

In 2001, Tartarus Press reissued the first volume of Aickman's autobiography, The Attempted Rescue, in a new edition with a foreword by the writer and Aickman enthusiast Jeremy Dyson of the British comedy quartet The League of Gentlemen.

A previously unpublished short story, "The Well-Conducted Tour", appeared in the Tartarus Press periodical Wormwood in 2005.

Adaptations

In 1968, a television adaptation of "Ringing the Changes", retitled "The Bells of Hell", appeared on the obscure BBC 2 program Late Night Horror. The first radio adaptation of "Ringing the Changes", appeared on the CBC Radio drama series Nightfall on October 31, 1980.

A 1997 adaptation of "The Swords", directed by Tony Scott, appeared as the first episode of the cable original horror anthology series The Hunger (not the same as Scott's film of the same name).

Jeremy Dyson has adapted Aickman's work into drama in a number of forms. A musical staging of the Aickman short story "The Same Dog", which Dyson co-wrote the libretto for with Joby Talbot, premiered in 2000 at the Barbican Concert Hall. Also in 2000, with his League of Gentleman partner, Mark Gatiss, he adapted into a BBC Radio Four radio play Aickman's short story "Ringing the Changes". (This aired exactly twenty years after the CBC adaptation, on Halloween, 2000.) Dyson also directed a 2002 short film based on Aickman's story "The Cicerones", with Gatiss as the principal actor.

External links

• Robert Aickman: An Appreciation
• The Works of Robert Aickman
• Robert Aickman: A Pictorial Bibliography
• Robert Aickman at the Internet Book List
• The Curious Silence - The Missing Aickman Stories & Audio Recordings
• The Bells Of Hell - comprehensive article on this missing-believed-wiped TV adaptation
• The Cicerones - watch the Channel 4 adaptation online

See also

• List of horror fiction authors