Robert Aickman

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Robert Fordyce Aickman (27 June 1914 – 26 February 1981) was an English conservationist and writer of fiction and nonfiction. As a writer, he is best known for his supernatural fiction, which he described as "strange stories".

Life

Aickman, born in London, England, was the grandson of the prolific Victorian novelist Richard Marsh (1857–1915), known for his occult thriller 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 the association's 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.

With a keen interest in the theatre, ballet, and music, Aickman also served as a chairman of the London Opera Society and was active in the London Opera Club, the Ballet Minerva, and the Mikron Theatre Company in London.

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

Writings

Fiction

Short story collections

Original collections
Reprint collections
  • 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)
Notes

Painted Devils consists of revised versions of stories which had appeared in earlier collections. August Derleth proposed that Arkham House should publish a book of Aickman's best stories, but was unable to meet the author's demands and withdrew the proposal.

Cold Hand in Mine and Painted Devils featured dust jacket drawings by acclaimed gothic illustrator Edward Gorey. The original collections of short stories are quite scarce, though copies of the U.S. edition of Cold Hand in Mine 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.

A previously unpublished short story, "The Fully Conducted Tour", appeared in the Tartarus Press periodical Wormwood in 2005.

Novels and novellas

Aickman's published novels were The Late Breakfasters (London: Victor Gollancz, 1964) and The Model: A Novel of the Fantastic (New York: Arbor House, 1987). The latter was a novella which had remained unpublished in his lifetime. Aickman had hoped to have had the latter work illustrated by Edward Gorey. Another novel, entitled Go Back at Once remains unpublished. S.T. Joshi is at work on this and it may be published.

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 Cold Hand in Mine.

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

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

Nonfiction

Aickman's autobiographical writing consists of the two memoirs The Attempted Rescue (London: Victor Gollancz, 1966) and The River Runs Uphill: A Story of Success and Failure (Burton-on-Trent: Pearson, 1986). In 2001, Tartarus Press reissued the former volume in a new edition with a foreword by the writer and Aickman enthusiast Jeremy Dyson of the British comedy quartet The League of Gentlemen.

For a time, Aickman served as theatre critic for The Nineteenth Century and After. His reviews remain, to date, uncollected in book form. He also wrote The Story of Our Inland Waterways (London: Pitman, 1955).

Unpublished fiction and nonfiction

Other than Go Back At Once, mentioned above, Aickman produced a novel of other unpublished works. These include the plays Allowance For Error, Duty and The Golden Round. Another book, a vast philosophical work entitled Panacea ran to over 1000 pages in manuscript form. 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. He selected 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 introduction for every volume except the sixth.

Recent interest

The most detailed biographical and critical study is Gary William Crawford's Robert Aickman: An Introduction (Gothic Press, 2003). Crawford has also compiled an online database of works about Aickman. David Bolton's Race Against Time: How Britain's Waterways Were Saved (Methuen, 1990) contains a great deal of material about Aickman, including several photographs of him, and the final chapter is devoted to him. Elizabeth Jane Howard's autobiography Slipstream (Macmillan, 2002) gives an account of her relationship with him.

A critical essay on Aickman's fiction appears in S. T. Joshi's book The Modern Weird Tale (2001). Christopher Barker 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, among them references to Elizabeth Jane Howard. Articles, essays and papers by other authors have appeared on the website Robert Aickman: An Appreciation, and in the journals Studies in Weird Fiction (published by Necronomicon Press), All Hallows (published by the Ghost Story Society), Studies in the Fantastic and Wormwood.

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. A radio play version based on "Ringing the Changes" appeared on the CBC Radio drama series Nightfall on 31 October 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.

Jeremy Dyson has adapted Aickman's work into drama in a number of forms. A musical staging of his short story "The Same Dog", which Dyson co-wrote the libretto for with Joby Talbot, premiered in 2000 at the Barbican Concert Hall. In 2000, with his Leauge collaborator 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.

Quotes

I think that Aickman is one of those authors that you respond to on a very primal level. If you're a writer, it's a bit like being a stage magician. A stage magician produces coin, takes coin, demonstrates coin vanished... That tends to be what you do as a fiction writer, reading fiction. You'll go, "Oh look. He's setting that up."...Reading Robert Aickman is like watching a magician work, and very often I'm not even sure what the trick was. All I know is that he did it beautifully. Yes, the key vanished, but I don't know if he was holding a key in the hand to begin with. I find myself admiring everything he does from an auctorial standpoint. And I love it as a reader. He will bring on atmosphere. He will construct these perfect, dark, doomed little stories, what he called "strange stories".

Neil Gaiman quoted in The Neil Gaiman Reader by Darrell Schweitzer

References

  • R. Reginald (1979). "Robert Aickman". Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, v. 2: Contemporary Science Fiction Authors II. Vol. 2. Gale Research Company. p. 791. ISBN 0-8103-1051-1.

External links

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