TARTARUS PRESS 2022
My previous reviews of Robert Aickman and of Tartarus Press / R.B. Russell
I am pleased to now own this, what I expect to be, excellent biography of one of my two favourite fiction writers. I am pleased, too, that the other one, Elizabeth Bowen, has at least three brief mentions in it, judging by the index.
If any version of Aickman’s ineffable ‘Attempted Rescue’ of his own autobiography ensues when the facts are obtainable actually as well as instinctively, I trust that eventuality results, as based on my own evidence so far, in Bowen duly having many more substantive parts recorded in his life, literarily and bodily.
When I read this important book, any further comments I need to make will be in the comment stream below . . .
Amazing! — after writing my words above that mention Aickman’s ‘The Attempted Rescue’, I discovered that the other volume of his autobiography (with the Zenoistic title of ‘The River Runs Uphill’) appropriately provides the headquote for the whole of Russell’s ‘The Attempted Biography’! —
“Facts do not exist: most supposed facts are a matter of actual controversy, and all facts change into quite different facts as history proceeds.”
The River Runs Uphill by Robert Aickman
I also checked Thomas Mann in the index and he has only one brief mention!
More later below, as and when I actually read this majestic book properly…
Majestic, in the sense that this is a most beautiful book to handle and read, in every respect, including its photos. The First Edition, limited to 500 copies, mine numbered 74.
A quote from Heather Smith about RA – “He would notice, possibly, one oddity and concentrate on that and the whole house took on this quality.”
Me about Bowen re the Aickman ‘house’?!
UP TO THE END OF CHAPTER TWO
“Aickman doesn’t say that his mother was in any way reconciled to the resultant pregnancy, but he does claim that she had wished for a daughter. Robert only added to her woes by being a boy.”
Fascinating stuff, and very readable so far, about Richard Marsh, RA’s childhood and dubious father et al, and the root of the telegraph wires in the Inner Room, and much else that is revelatory. I can’t list all that is described here. This biography will be read more and more as Aickman’s work becomes disseminated as a deserving literature in coming years — much of his life described so far seeming straight out of the fiction of Bowen, especially the nature of Worton Court, its psychological furniture, ambiance and people. Cf Bowen’s Court.
Chapter Three: School
I hesitate to keep calling this biography ‘fascinating’ because I am sure it will remain fascinating until its end. So please take this as read in future. I found this chapter allowing me to factor some of his experiences into my own schooldays during the 1950s and early 60s.
Also, please take it as read that there are many footnotes as academic booster shots of substantiation in this book, plus all the information at the end of this book that I have not yet fully explored.
This chapter mentions, inter alia, Aickman’s first publication in 1932, entitled ‘What is Flounce.’ Seems somehow appropriate.
And there are some wonderful photographs, too!
Chapter Four: 1931-1936
The significance of the Architecture business in his life, and St Leonards on Sea close to where I used to spend, as a boy, many summer holidays with my grandmother (looking to me like Bowen does in photos and born in the same year as her of 1899)…
Some character study, in his parental backdrop, and of Aickman through his own words and outside sources, sexual frustration mentioned, a girl in ‘trousers’ (in my own experience, they called them slacks in the 1950s when women wore what we now call trousers), interest in cinema, theatre, opera and the ‘Wagnerian trance’ to mention a few.
“Later, the girls secured places for the three of them in the queue for La Bohème.”
…the three including Aickman, and echoing the Bohème in a real-life Bowen’s then already extant ‘shadowy third’ literary syndrome?
He got to meet many people in society despite his supposed lack of gregariousness …
“Aickman says that he fell in love with one of them (‘who would have none of me’)…”
Bowen, I wonder, being 15 years older than him?!
Chapter Five: 1937-1939
“….while poetically describing the woman he loved, he could juxtapose her charms with a description of his ailing father ‘dabbing’ at his suppurating legs.”
Read so far in this chapter only up to the mislaying of PANACEA, ‘The Synthesis of an Attitude’ — and Russell does well in conveying what this hoped-for publication of near Juvenilia is about, and it seems to me something little better than what I might myself identify alongside (other than its subject matter) one of my own self-deprecatingly pretentious comment streams today! Synthesis as an attitudinal Gestalt. And I can also empathise with “working for love is better than working for money,…”
Still he did not have enough money to pay Mrs Gill for typing out PANACEA! Mrs Gill also being the name of my landlady at University….
Mention of his budding love life, Audrey Linley, the mysterious Eve, and my own love for Delius, amid Aickman’s love for other music. I often quote a significant section from Aickman’s SOME NOTES ON DELIUS elsewhere: a quote that I first included here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2015/05/26/the-strangers-robert-aickman/#comment-4631
Russell’s references so far to a mysterious ‘Eve’ has started a lot of possibly extraneous hares running in my mind!
Years up to and including the Second World War…
Needless to say, there is much in this wonderful book (and I do mean wonderful) that I am not covering in my attempted review of it. You need to read it for yourself, and thus judge RA’s seeming flaws and so called inconsistencies, as well as the inconsistencies with his own autobiography. And his development as a writer and thinker.
I am merely tracking my ‘one oddity’ type journey as a canal through it…
Here, this section. there is much about RA’s gradual interface with the war, including his Conscientious Objection (while there is little Pacificism in Panacea!), and meeting his wife ‘Ray’, who, I somehow recall and am now reminded by Russell, never appeared at all in his two-volume autobiography! She was airbrushed out of it! But there is the first mention of Elizabeth Jane Howard in this section…
His first recorded published fiction is mentioned : ‘The Case of Wallingford’s Tiger’ (1936). As part of the ‘one oddity’ scenario here is my recent as well as older review of that story: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/the-case-of-wallingfords-tiger/
(And, as a gratuitous aside, today’s daily mention by me of Bowen in connection with Aickman (including reference to Hythe where Bowen finished her years in 1973: https://dflcollaborations.wordpress.com/384-2/#comment-437))
There is also here a remarkable photo of Eve in ‘trousers’, who seems to be an imposing lady similar in elegant gait and physical looks to a younger Bowen (though I have never seen a photo of Bowen in trousers!), and, unless time travel is involved, this lady is too young-looking at that time for it to be her!
We know that Bowen stayed in London during the Blitz.
I have now read, so far, in this biography up to: “It is impossible to know how many of Aickman’s friends from the 1930s remained in London once the war started.”
Talking of ‘time travel’, there was mention of an Aickman Road (in Colchester) during a Doctor Who episode some years ago. (https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Aickman_Road)
And Bowen wrote a children’s book called ‘The Good Tiger’, comparable to the Wallingford one!
Read up to the end of Chapter Six…
The marriage with Ray and its circumstances, with analysis into their characters and implications of what each thought about this possible ‘marriage of convenience’, and her own description of him is particularly evocative for Aickman watchers.
I am particularly interested in the description of Aickman’s paranormal or supernatural beliefs and investigations, which I don’t think I knew about before, certainly not in such detail presented here.
Also a description of Aickman’s experience of — and views upon — the ins and outs of the Second World War, with one of its references being to his story ‘The Clockwatcher’ that I reviewed here a few months ago: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/29651-2/, a review that contains the same controversial quotation that is quoted in this chapter of the biography.
Chapter Seven: The Formation of the I.W.A.
I have found this chapter excellent and generously fulsome with the facts that can be ascertained by fine research, specially in its examination of the Rolt-Aickman interaction, and in the light of my own experience in travelling along these canals in the 1980s on narrow boats. Meanwhile, I continue to be pleased that I have had a lifelong ‘intentional fallacy’ approach to great literature such as Aickman’s. And one day, I am confident that RA’s work will be established as such. A mighty Grand Union Canal of literature that he shares with the gestalt as his future legacy…. But, yes, the intentional fallacy makes me try to divorce literature from its sources, so it does not matter so much that I would probably dislike Aickman as a person, judging by what I increasingly get to know about him.
Here, in this chapter, the eclectic items I pick out are the Nagasaki Atom Bomb happening during the Tardebigge meeting of Rolt and his wife with Aickman and the latter’s airbrushed wife. And something or other about a ‘cosmic dilemma’. And this passage from Russell that I hope I shall be forgiven quoting in full: “In this whirl of reactionary opinion, he then explains, bizarrely, that traditional ideas of love are ‘being superseded by veterinary approaches’. He concludes with a flourish that, ‘It is agreed that if we do not blow ourselves off the world, we shall crowd ourselves off the world.’”
Chapter Eight: Richard Marsh Ltd
I admire this book’s seemingly immense scholarship demonstrated by the anecdotes, the quotes, the people (famous or little known), the facts, the apparent gossip, the great knowledge of available evidence, the frankness about faults, and the seeming love in thus doing all these things for a writer admired for his work that in the future may be even more admired, perhaps partly due to this book. This chapter is a case in point towards this end.
The women, and the men with whom RA cultivated so as to cultivate the women, with his appreciating, for example, the gaucheness and even aggression in a particular man — traits that could also describe RA himself, I guess. Also there’s talk of Rolt, EJH and ghost story projects. And much more.
My favourite part of this chapter begins…”Aickman wrote a curiously absurd account of an ex-‘court physician to Tsar Boris III of Bulgaria’ who treated an ‘inelegant area’ of Aickman’s anatomy, and whose receptionist invited him to a party…”
Chapter Nine: The I.W.A. and Other Business
Some very interesting lengthy material about the IWA, its surrounding personalities, politics and events. And RA’s relationship with EJH. Ray’s nodding it through, it seems. And the budding of the nemonymously-bylined WE ARE FOR THE DARK anthology.
All of this adeptly seen against the backdrop of RA’s foibles and strengths.
Some points for me to dwell on. I came into the world at the beginning of 1948 and feel more in touch, as a result, with this chapter’s own real-time review of RA’s life. I recall seeing Peter Scott in my earliest memories of TV in 1950s with his programme LOOK. That not only was there an Aickman Road in Colchester, but also some Aickman Islands in Canada. And a most interesting anecdote about this chapter’s then future, an anecdote concerning Margaret Thatcher and RA!
Chapter Ten: Literary Endeavours
Some Rolt / Aickman disagreements covered.
Isle of Man trip for RA and RAY, and an accident they have. 🙁 😀
And a talking mongoose called Gef (a forerunner of a GIF if not an emoji?) — ‘…Gef, though he seldom stopped talking, never said anything of the smallest value.’
Part of RA’s ghost hunting kick. While I gestalt hunt.
GHOST STORIES
“Transportation, though, is a theme in all their work”
RA, Rolt, EJH therefore must have read Bowen’s TO THE NORTH novel, I guess.
RA jealous of Rolt’s success in this field, it seems
Reviews I carried out recently for some stories from WE ARE FOR THE DARK (stories brilliantly described in this chapter; although I recall THE TRAINS was only mentioned)…….
THE VIEW (RA): https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/the-view-by-robert-aickman/
THE INSUFFICIENT ANSWER (RA): https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/09/29/the-insufficient-answer-to-life-the-universe-and-everything/
THE TRAINS (RA): https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/27/the-trains/
THREE MILES UP (EJH): https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/24/three-miles-up/
***
Later in this chapter — matters concerning RA and Jews
My journey through this book continues here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/aickman-biography/