Robert Aickman

Nemonymous said:
Following comments above, I have now obtained The Complete Stories of MARY BUTTS.
Can anyone recommend any stories, especially any that may be Aickman-like?
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And, oh yes, I reviewed R.B. Russell’s A REVELATION in 2010 as follows…


“Her voice was lifeless, for all that there was a slight foreign lilt to it.”
Ostensibly, a reminiscence of a Local Council Housing worker checking up on Council properties – and the curiouser and curiouser tenants he happened to meet in the course of his duties, one tenant in particular. A lady with a taste in Brontë novels, but otherwise nondescript and with no ambitions beyond being ordinary all her life, co-tenanted by her son … and a loft with a padlock on it. This is a believable absurdity told with that now increasingly deadpan Russell approach. There is a skill in making an absurdity haunt the reader with its edge of truth, as this story does. [As an aside, I somehow sense that the woman tenant is the story itself (a woman of suspect lifelessness from being a fiction) but a fiction she manages to transcend by further managing to fabricate a frame to stretch herself within and, by this means, she plants herself in the flow of plot in a slightly different more enticing guise than her real self so as to reveal (by using a fiction skill learnt from Charlotte Brontë?) something beneath (or above) the story that the Council worker would otherwise miss.]
 
Nemonymous wrote: "Following comments above, I have now obtained The Complete Stories of MARY BUTTS. Can anyone recommend any stories, especially any that may be Aickman-like?"

Some of my favorites included: "Look Homeward, Angel," "Madonna of the Magnificat," and especially “Mappa Mundi."

Mark Valentine has a particularly good review of this book on Wormwoodiana; an excerpt below:

"some critics consider her real forte was the short story, and her piece “Mappa Mundi” has been particularly praised for the way it mingles inner and outer worlds, the streets of Paris becoming also a terrain of hidden dimensions: it recalls her own genuine experiences. Her characters struggle to explain it: “An extraordinary, a unique sense of all sorts of mixed pasts, a sense of the ancient city and all the fury of life that went to make it…that and something else. Like something out of which they all came. A matrix, which is Paris and the secret of Paris.” This sense of overlapping realities was not only known in London and Paris, but in Dorset, in Cornwall, in the country: the implication is that it might be encountered anywhere."

Wormwoodiana: THE COMPLETE STORIES OF MARY BUTTS
 
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Nemonymous said:
L.P. Hartley has the disarming strangeness of Aickman, I feel.
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FALL IN AT THE DOUBLE a ghost story by L.P. Hartley

“…written, printed rather. White over white, very hard to decipher….”

I once lived in a house where the floorboards of the stairs had been worn down, and I was told this was due to soldiers, billeted in my house during the war, walking up and down on the then bare boards in their army boots! So imagine my frisson at this unmitigated ghost story wherein similar conditions prevailed! And I loved the play on words with the title, and the oblique circumstances that happened to Philip, the central character, and the ambiguity of his factotum’s intentions at the end, soon after Philip seeing “only the moon shining as innocently as that de-virginated satellite can shine.” (This story was first published in 1970)
 
aiCKMAN

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The bed outside aiCKMAN’s hospice building symbolises the sick car in which Maybury arrived and the bedroom shenanigans inside ??

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My review of THE SCHOOL FRIEND. Perhaps Sally is more of an AI by aiCKMAN than an Android? —

An Undying Aickman | The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews of Books

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You can see the pictures more clearly here: A few of my Praiternats… | Träumtrawler
 
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An interesting Aickman related story. I recently received a book through inter-library loan (Corridor of Mirrors by Chris Massie) and on the front end paper I see this.

aickman.jpg


So this book was owned by the great man himself? This very edition was sitting on one of his bookshelves at the Gower Street house and perhaps in some way influencing his own writing. Philippa Bowley was one of Aickman's lovers so I guess she was overseeing the handling of his estate. You never know what treasures may sometimes turn up at a seemingly ordinary Midwestern library.
 
evenfall said:
aickman.jpg


So this book was owned by the great man himself? This very edition was sitting on one of his bookshelves at the Gower Street house and perhaps in some way influencing his own writing. Philippa Bowley was one of Aickman's lovers so I guess she was overseeing the handling of his estate. You never know what treasures may sometimes turn up at a seemingly ordinary Midwestern library.
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I emailed Ray Russell a link to this. His reply back -
"Aickman's library was meant to go to Philippa Bowley, but she was persuaded that it had been his wish that they be sent to Bowling Green University Library, where they are properly accounted for. It's great that they sometime take trips out on Interlibrary Loans!?"
 
Zaharoff said:
evenfall said:
aickman.jpg


So this book was owned by the great man himself? This very edition was sitting on one of his bookshelves at the Gower Street house and perhaps in some way influencing his own writing. Philippa Bowley was one of Aickman's lovers so I guess she was overseeing the handling of his estate. You never know what treasures may sometimes turn up at a seemingly ordinary Midwestern library.
Click to expand...

I emailed Ray Russell a link to this. His reply back -
"Aickman's library was meant to go to Philippa Bowley, but she was persuaded that it had been his wish that they be sent to Bowling Green University Library, where they are properly accounted for. It's great that they sometime take trips out on Interlibrary Loans!?"
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Robert Aickman's unpublished philosophical work, titled Panacea is kept at Bowling Green State University. This manuscript runs to over a thousand pages and remains one of Aickman's lesser-known works.

I have been down there a couple of times but never looked it over. I never did understand why Aickman chose Bowling Green to house his material.
 
Interesting, I was wondering how it ended up at Bowling Green of all places. It was almost surreal receiving a book at very much a small provincial library branch around here and seeing what to me is a piece of history. Besides the name and address in pencil there are no other notes by Aickman in the book, otherwise it would have been even more fascinating. By the way, this book has completely disappeared off the market and is not available for sale anywhere so it is valuable enough already but this just adds another special element to its value. And it totally sounds like the type of book Aickman would enjoy and appreciate.

I had a somewhat similar experience a few years ago when I bought a relatively rare John B. Ford edition online and it turned out to be a copy inscribed by the author to the writer/editor John Pelan with the latter's notes heavily added all throughout the book. I imagine it also ended up being part of the estate sale after his passing.
 
Where did Robert Aickman stand politically? In "Never Visit Venice" I thought to detect some harsh opposition against modern capitalist industrialization, and by the end possibly some indirect sympathy with Mussolini.
 
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