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Post by fritzmaitland on Oct 24, 2020 5:18:47 GMT
I agree and disagree. NB The Stains (I think) was the first Aickman story I read that really made things fall into place about his ...e...legend.
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peedeel
Crab On The Rampage
Posts: 61
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Post by peedeel on Oct 24, 2020 6:27:00 GMT
andydecker said: "Aickman is the greatest and worst writer there ever was. Sometimes I just think he was smashed off his face on whatever he could get into his stomach and wrote and wrote loads of shite and still thought it good in the morning."
There can be no denying Robert Aickman enjoyed a drink or two. However, his tales tend to reflect his view that modern life is without true meaning.  |
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Post by helrunar on Oct 24, 2020 14:21:42 GMT
I haven't been able to talk myself into reading any of Aickman's tales. It always sounds too much like something between going to the Doctor and visiting an elderly war veteran who tends to be slightly tipsy all the time and rambles on until he abruptly stops because he just drifted off into a doze.
I've read plenty of stories that lacked any discernible point or conclusion, however. There are loads of them in the Asquith Ghost Books. And I survived. Irritated and baffled but I did live to tell the tale (that there was no tale to tell). So maybe it wouldn't be so bad. There's one in the Fourth Ghost Book I may try on, one of those dark autumn afternoons.
H.
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Post by weirdmonger on Jul 13, 2021 12:20:39 GMT
RINGING THE CHANGES by Robert Aickman  Although I myself live on the east coast out of Liverpool Street, I’ve never visited Holihaven, as the name often assonates and resonates too much with Halloween and honeymoon for me. And I read this terrifying story first in the 1960s, just when I moved away from the east coast. I have returned since in more recent years, though. And keep my ears open for the bells of distant Dunwich, while. having finally found my own sea here. The sea that is so elusive in Holihaven and its quay. I often recall the honeymoon of Gerald at Holihaven with his wife Phrynne, twenty plus years younger than him. A journey slower because it was flatter. Neither had been there before and when they arrived early in the evening it seemed deserted even for October. With echoing bells practising, they are told — enough bells for two churches. They stay at the lodging house run by Mr and Mrs Pascoe, the husband with a great gob of spit and a bad stomach, and the wife belittled by him for breaking a whole bottle of brandy. Phrynne thinks men wear too many clothes. And there is a regular at the lodging house, a Commandant who stares at the “toppling citadels in the fire” that they sit around in the coffee room, or was it the lounge? He tells them the bells are ringing to wake the dead on this very day the honeymooners have chosen to arrive in Holihaven, and Phrynne gets an “unusual devil” inside. A suit of Japanese armour outside the Commandant’s room, the Commandant whose sword was once broken in half, we are tellingly told. He, though, tells the honeymooners to leave Holihaven straightaway for fear of what might happen to them on this special night. What’s the difference between ‘ecstatic’ and ‘agonised’, I ask. The peals swell and diminish. Phrynne becomes part of it all — and I need not tell you what that ‘all’ actually is, as we all already know this famous story — but there’s something sexually aberrant as well as morbidly so. Mrs Pascoe stares at Phrynne’s revealed pretty body with animosity. And it is as if recent events in our own times, with that Wembley football match the other night, are reflected in this ‘all’, one of the swaying lumpy wraiths waving his arms “like a negro”. Others “were agitators bawling a slogan, or massed trouble-makers at a football match.” Dancing whirling, bursting their lungs. Pandemicised lungs, I say. No wonder in the aftermath, the milkman in Wrack Street had the name of another town on his cart. And, as you can see above, at least one of the peals was a peel… “Then passion began to open its petals within him, layer upon slow layer.” |
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Post by weirdmonger on Aug 9, 2021 14:37:52 GMT
THE SCHOOL FRIEND by Robert Aickman
“(I was able to construe Latin fairly well for a girl, but the italics and long s’s daunted me)”
“Haven’t you noticed by this time that everyone’s lives are full of things you can’t understand? The exceptional thing is the thing you can understand.”
…being a mission statement from the ever undying Aickman…
This story being the first person singular narration by Mel about her schooldays friendship with pretty perfect Sally (the latter extraordinarily advanced for her age culturally) and Mel’s inferiority complex when compared to Sally, but in later life Sally’s father Dr Tessler ‘dies’ and the Tessler house, opposite a dentist, is later put under Mel’s care while a more mentally and physically run-down, if still “absurdly virginal”, version of Sally is in hospital after being run over — and all manner of strange things seem to have gone on, in fact are still going on…some of which may, in later hindsight, become spoilers…
There are indeed so many things in this story, generously crammed with clues as to their nature, clues that so far, for me, lead nowhere. Except, if one is experienced in creating wholes from parts, one can potentially spend a whole lifetime cohering them into a meaning, as I intend to spend what little lifetime I have left doing…
“It was an ordinary enough school, and sex was a preoccupation among us. Sally’s attitude was surprisingly new and unusual.” — an old-fashioned horse hearse bearing Dr Tessler, as reflected between “the aggregations of ‘Shredded Wheat’ in the window” — a removal man called Mr Ditch — a picture postcard of Mitylene — Sally’s “distasteful sandals” — “The room was horrible. I had expected eccentricity, discomfort, bookworminess, even perhaps the slightly macabre.” — “six uniform pink cakes from the nearest shop, and a flavourless liquid full of floating ‘strangers’.” — the late Dr Tessler’s papers with a “top dressing of flaky black particles” — “unskilled cuttings and bodgings” — “the chestnut about the architect who forgot the staircase.” — Miss Garvice’s yellow cat — a room in the Tessler house that seems designed for aid-raids — “it is possible for a child to be born in a manner you never dream of.” —
I will not divulge what godmother was offered what godchild, an entity that anyone would fine hard to conceive. And I will not divulge certain other things, such as the state that Miss Garvice at the cottage hospital found Sally to be in after having been run down. Nor will I divulge the eventual outcome of the story and what some of us could imagine from various unimaginabilities. Suffice to say, this story probably says more about Aickman than any other of his stories — more even than Aickman himself could in fact conceive about himself. From himself, too.
The jury is still out… however passé.
What of the woolly animals? Toys?
And what of the “acquired iron feet” and other bone-structural changes? God as an architect who has forgotten the staircase but remembered the concrete rafters for aid-raids? The drumming noise of bombers?
Like Donne with his shroud.
Mission statements and their clues, galore…
“Psychologists, I recollected, have ascertained that the comparative inferiority of women in contexts described as purely intellectual, is attributable to the greater discouragement and repression of their curiosity when children.”
“(it was a job for a man, or for no one)”
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Post by Middoth on Aug 9, 2021 15:17:26 GMT
I was terrified with this story much more than any other written by Aickman.
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Post by weirdmonger on Aug 9, 2021 16:04:44 GMT
I was terrified with this story much more than any other written by Aickman. Having just re-read it, I agree. |
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Post by weirdmonger on Aug 10, 2021 12:19:44 GMT
I was terrified with this story much more than any other written by Aickman. Having just re-read it, I agree. Someone on Twitter where I had linked to this review of THE SCHOOL FRIEND said… “ My favorite Aickman story. Sally is an android & she knows she is.” |
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Aug 10, 2021 12:49:36 GMT
“ My favorite Aickman story. Sally is an android & she knows she is.” Oh, so that is the explanation. It makes perfect sense now. |
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Post by Middoth on Aug 10, 2021 13:15:52 GMT
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Post by weirdmonger on Sept 23, 2021 13:17:50 GMT
From A CHOICE OF WEAPONS by Robert Aickman
“You must have heard that love doesn’t go by desserts.”
As a misprint for ‘deserts’?
***
There is also a Dr Bermuda in this story who believes in masticating and biting and fully digesting the woman one loves (please see elsewhere John Magwitch’s theories on the theme of cannibalism in Aickman.)
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Post by weirdmonger on Sept 24, 2021 15:50:25 GMT
From A CHOICE OF WEAPONS by Robert Aickman “You must have heard that love doesn’t go by desserts.” As a misprint for ‘deserts’? *** There is also a Dr Bermuda in this story who believes in masticating and biting and fully digesting the woman one loves (please see elsewhere John Magwitch’s theories on the theme of cannibalism in 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.” — #RobertAickman (THE VIEW) |
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