The View by Robert Aickman

“When you live entirely among madmen, it is difficult to know how sane you are.”

“There are no beautiful houses in England now. Only ruins, mental homes, and Government offices.”

This is probably the most spiritually complex or artistically sophisticated story that Aickman ever wrote and I stand abashed and humbly fazed before its vision of the Isle of Man just a few hours after I happened to link to the Isle of Lewis HERE with these words of mine in 2011 about the other story there: …a  transience-permanence parable and the ability to cheat logic for real through fiction, an invisible power that needs one to strip away bit by bit, move by move, sacrifice by sacrifice, one’s physical body to become a noumenon, nay, this story’s “No-Man”…. — For me an incredible coincidence or a sudden preternaturally pattern-clinching synergy!

I speak of ‘parable’ there, while here is a fable in the Aickman about a man living his life like reading a story scrolled from one roller to another at variable speeds — and this seems to be the apotheosis of what I have been slowly establishing about the primacy of Zenoism and Nullimmortalis in Aickman’s fiction and in his edited anthologies! 

“…his own soul took flight and drifted warm and lazy and for ever.”

A convalescent man called Carfax (skilled in the drawing arts as with a pencil-as-planchette and in composing music) who views a variable VIEW from the room where he is staying and the garden when drawing such a view, the same view but views ever different from each other, after having been picked up on the inferred ferry from Liverpool by a variable woMAN who becomes his lover by night and a lone horse rider by day (if indeed that is what she does during daylight bearing in mind that  Carfax’s name is, well,  Carfax!), a woman whom he later calls Ariel, with his being picked up by her to stay at her wondrous secluded house  called Fleet, by the Island’s sea, containing a household of a grey-clad maid and deceptive mirrors and visions of his other selves and his half-dreams, an outer house or an inner world threatening to turn into the tawdry town life he usually lives and into his convalesce-able ills again. This is essential Aickman fiction as well as coming to “some sort of terms with the intransigent and rather trivial opposite sex”, but, like the view, a sex opposite to what? — a fiction with many key passages: …

“Immortals have no names,…” like this story’s suit of armour — or amour?

The giant carpet of carpets snaking on the stairs and bedrooms….

”The answer you cannot make, the pattern you cannot complete — till afterwards it suddenly comes to you — when it is too late.”

Mention of Wagner – and of course mention of Rutland Boughton who was inspired by Fiona MacLeod in his ‘IMMORTAL HOUR’ opera that gave prominence to The Lordly Ones that I have found  appeared in at least two other Aickman stories (‘Growing Boys’ and another story that  I have now forgotten but have already reviewed!)

“You live surrounded by the claims of other people:” — “…nonsense with a lovely strangeness about it.” — or a comforting commonplace?

Hanging a sodden towel from one of this story’s immortal moments of truth so that you can find it again one day, but has the towel fallen off when you come to read it yet again? —  “‘I think the secret’ she replied, kissing him, ‘is to get it down quickly. Quickly. Immediately you see it. When you see it. Don’t stop till you’ve got it down.’”

“Did his imagination in some way have to embrace everything or nothing?”

The flaw that the Chinese used to create an  ultimate perfection. The racing down the lines of print to take in whatever is of exceptional interest in them, but gathering less and less the faster one goes…

“We had better go to bed. We had better go to bed.” And he wonders if the room they were both in at any one time appears to be a different room to the perception of one or other of them. A parallel to one reader  reading this story who feels they are reading a different story from the one another reader is reading while both are reading the same story. 

Aickman apotheosised, indeed.  

‘Ariel’ and ‘alien’ used in a single paragraph of THE VIEW, my view.

“The moment was immortal.”