Robert Aickman

Robert Fordyce Aickman (born June 24 1914— February 26 1981) was an English conservationist 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 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 twelve 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

Altogether, twelve collections of Aickman's "strange stories" have now been published. Of these books, 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).

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 Ltd 1968
Cold Hand in Mine: Eight Strange Stories, London: Victor Gollancz Ltd 1975
Tales of Love and Death, London: Victor Gollancz Ltd 1977
Intrusions: Strange Tales, London: Victor Gollancz Ltd 1980
Night Voices: Strange Stories, London: Victor Gollancz Ltd 1985

The reprint collections are:

Painted Devils: Strange Stories, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 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 Press/Durtro Press 1999 (two volumes)

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

Aickman published only The Late Breakfasters (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd 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 originally appeared in February 1973 in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and two years later in the collection Cold Hand in Mine: Eight Strange Stories (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd 1975). 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 lack collection of Aickman's short stories published during his lifetime, Night Voices: Strange Stories.

In 2000, the Tarturus 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 Ltd 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, was also theatre critic for The Nineteenth Century and After as well as the 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. These reviews remain, to date, uncollected in book form.

Unpublished writings

Aickman also wrote a number of 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). This, 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 added insightful introductions for 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 also contributed a detailed essay entitled 'The Stains: Robert Aickman's Swan Song' to an issue of 'Supernatural Tales' in 2003 which argued that the story possessed many autobiographical elements, including references to Elizabeth Jane Howard.

The original collections of short stories are quite scarce though copies of US edition of 'Cold Hand In Mine' - wonderfully 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 reissued the first volume of Aickman's autobiography, The Attempted Rescue in a new edition with a foreword by writer and Aickman enthusiast Jeremy Dyson, of 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", re-titled "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 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 an Aickman work, "The Cicerones" with Gatiss as the principal actor.