peedeel
Crab On The Rampage
Posts: 61
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Post by peedeel on May 28, 2021 12:03:03 GMT
Robert Aickman’s “The Trains” – random speculations on an early
conundrum.
“Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.”
NOT WAVING BUT DROWNING
— Stevie Smith
Stevie Smith, that prolific and eccentric writer, had much in common with Robert Aickman, writer of strange tales. She tended to hide herself away in her verse behind augmented columns of wild, oddball, and scatty personas. Consequently her work displays so many faces. Comic, absurd, whimsical, brooding, melancholic, a quality of voice and vision at times deceptively childlike. Her poems, cruelly comic as most of them are, tend to distract us from the lonely and unsettled side of her nature – like a magician’s sleight of hand.
So it was with Aickman. In “The Trains” he introduces us to the two M’s, Margaret and Mimi, and we (knowing as we do R.A.’s involvement with theatre, music, ballet and opera) think of La Bohème and that other Mimi, poverty stricken and consumptive, playing out her own personal tragedy against those colourful cut-outs of the rooftops of Paris with that big moon hanging high overhead. Ah, and indeed, Mimi’s early aria, “Si, mi chiamano Mimi”, in particular that single line of hers to Rodolfo: “Lei m’intende?” (“You understand me?”) at the end of the aria’s first part seems particularly relevant to Aickman and his strange tale.
You understand me? Aickman may ask.
And we, his readers, hesitate to answer, unsure. For here (we feel) there be archetypal images which we know and understand are charged with emotion – and that function independently, from within our own unconscious. The name Margaret, for example, has almost one hundred variant forms including Gretal, Gretchen, Megan and, beyond these, also means a Magpie!
So, these are our heroines and we join them on holiday in the Pennines, that range of hills known as “the backbone of England”, 400 km in length and running from the Scottish Border to the Peaks in Derbyshire. Here our pair of fleshy goddesses tramp the carboniferous limestone moorland, often bickering like old lovers, producing ritual and Mandela, and craving metamorphosis:
‘ “I wish we were Crows,” Mimi exclaimed.
Margaret said yes and smiled.’
This desire for transfiguration to the form of Tyrannosaurus Crow – to the flesh eating carrion bird that’s rooted like a tree in Middle English narrative poetry of the darker sort, and which bears the collective name, a ‘Murder’ of crows – is a portent of trouble to come, for certain.
The crow has always been seen as a harbinger of death. In “The Twa Corbies” they fatten themselves on the corpse of a dead lord. Myth and folklore use crows symbolically to accent the spiritual aspect of death, or the journey of the spirit to the afterlife. And the Celtic goddess Mórrígan is closely associated with the bird, this Irish goddess whose name means terror, haunted battlefields often in the shape of a crow. As a goddess she also has tenuous links to both fertility and the land.
Our heroines make mention of Pudsley – which brings to mind Pudsey in West Yorkshire, so we’re in Brontë country, perhaps, and the Gothic novel comes readily to our thoughts. So with his readers poised, one foot on the door step of his tale (so to speak), Robert Aickman, wry smile firmly fixed in place, points subliminally at Graveyard Poetry, then at the Brontës, which can’t fail to bring Smollett, Walpole, Radcliffe, Lewis and the rest of that motley crew to the forefront of our poor reeling minds. Soon, we sense, our “Twa Corbies” will be lost on that blasted moor – lost and seeking refuge in some remote pile:
“Huge halls, long galleries, spacious chambers, joined
By no quite lawful marriage of the arts,
Might shock a connoisseur; but when combined,
Formed a whole which, irregular in parts,
Yet left a grand impression on the mind,
At least of those whose eyes are in their hearts:
We gaze upon a giant stature,
Nor judge at first if all be true to nature.”
Such was Byron’s description of the sort of thing we have in mind – and what we have in mind has been planted by Robert Aickman, his settings, his obsessions and insistent connections weigh us down and we resign ourselves to his deliberate obscurity, and the ambiguity of his prose with its essentially archaic points of reference and its redefinition (on this occasion) of gothic themes.
They, Margaret and Mimi, eventually arrive at a guest house, and the impetuous Mimi hurries on to enter, leaving her friend to devour the remains of her meal alone on the moor; finally Margaret follows, only to be confronted, ultimately, by “a middle-aged man wearing tennis shoes”. He has lived ten years in New York (so he claims), but his accent is North Country, a businessman – although he addresses her as “sister”, so reminiscent of Raymond Chandler (“The Little Sister”, for example), and American pulp detective fiction generally. However there’s also a faint echo of Shakespeare:
“And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring! I tell thee, churlish priest,
A ministering angel shall my sister be,
When thou liest howling.”
He tells them they are in the “Silent Valley” – and we the readers ask: could this be the “Ruhige Senke” from Arnold Fanck’s film “Der heilige Berg” and staring Leni Riefenstahl?
Possibly, but we sense more of the xxiii psalm in this valley of silence, we (perhaps instinctively) believe that the two M’s are walking through the valley of the shadow of death – but without rod or staff to comfort them!
Certainly, consideration of Riefenstahl reminds us of the tramp of jackboots on narrow cobbled streets, of tall buildings impossibly wedged together, and of bloated red banners waving in the wind, stark black crooked crosses centred in white ovals, floating on each of them in turn as they depended from windows and balconies above the glowing faces of crowds fed on an ecstasy of myth and absurdist medievalism.
Yet the Silent Valley is not silent – there are the trains, continuously coming and going, rattling over the rails. But there’s no other sound, no wildlife, no birds. Nothing. The Silent Valley is dead, but for the trains. And the two M’s.
While the two M’s are in the Guest House a door opens – behind them! The waitress appears and charges a shilling for Margaret’s drink – the same cost as the old shilling shockers, no less, the term perhaps derived from the 14th November 1885 issue of Athenaeum where readers were advised “Mr R L Stevenson is writing another shilling-dreadful” but this had become by 1886 a shilling-shocker, follow up perhaps to the earlier term of penny-dreadful. Interestingly, Margaret pays with a half-crown – the half-crowner was a publication priced at 2s. 6d. and was a colloquial booksellers term from the 1880’s!
We find we are forced to ask is this of any relevance? Does it matter? Certainly Aickman’s work is threaded with ambiguity and multiple-meanings. His sense of humour and playfulness run darkly through his creations like the veins through a chunk of Carrera marble. So what?
At the story’s opening there are obscure references to GNER’s advertising posters, mention of zephyrs and ozone, suggesting elemental spirits of the air related to Paracelsus’ sylphs. Any mortal who has preserved inviolate chastity may enjoy intimate familiarity with these spirits! From almost the first sentence we have entered a world of myth and archetype.
And Aickman cleverly proceeds to pay homage in a most satirical way to the Brontë sisters and Gothic romance in particular by the introduction of his own mythic archetypes – to fail to understand this is to jeopardise further understanding of the content, or even the point of the story, however tenebrous we may feel that point to be.
One thinks of poor Jane Eyre quietly declaiming: “I retained my station when he waved to me to go, and announced: – I cannot think of leaving you, sir.” Did Aickman on reading this passage smile wryly to himself over a good malt whiskey, light yet another cigarette as his thoughts turned to railways and railway stations and waving? Edward Rochester as we all know had a mad wife locked in the attic. And Jane, plain, intelligent, passionate, Jane Eyre was prone to occasional visions or vivid dreams. So, ideal Aickman material.
RA’s Gretal and her companion embark on this odyssey across his vividly constructed stage set in search of the gingerbread cottage, and we the reader can almost hear their boots churning millstone grit as they flounce across that moor. Here Rochester’s wave to Jane Eyre becomes something far more sinister – wave, as we all know, derives from the old English wafian; this in turn has a Teutonic root: wab, meaning doubt, uncertainty. We also realise that the expression “to wave in the wind” means to hang. Quite sinister this. And Mimi, impetuous Mimi, waves at a train – or the train driver.
Now no need to explain the concept of those trains roaring into long dark tunnels, is there? They see one train with windowless carriages, not only phallic this, but reminiscent of a fair ground ride – and also those bleak windowless hospital carriages returning with the worse of the wounded from the western front during the first world war.
Eventually, having suffered a total reversal in weather conditions, from baking heat to an icy cold downpour, (not at all unusual in the UK, by the way, in fact quite the norm) our intrepid pair reach a house that stands in splendid isolation beside the railway lines, a sullen rectangular brick pile like a glowering goal hurled from the heavens with the storm. Here they are destined to meet Wendley Roper.
Wendley? Of course we’ll be forgiven for thinking of Wensley and hard green mouldy cheese (Wensleydale), but RA’s sense of fun may have wanted to misdirect us in this way! Instead, and more sensibly, we should have thought of the word Wend – “to alter the position or direction of” “To turn from one condition to another” “To journey or travel”. And then Roper – well, that means a gambling house decoy, or a rope noose (for hanging someone), or one who makes ropes (or even one who makes lassos). We would be forgiven, too, I feel, for thinking of the phrase “to rope in”, to ensnare in other words – after all a Roper resides in a Ropery where ropes are made – and perhaps Aickman will give him enough rope to hang himself? But Ropery is also a term used to describe an establishment where trickery, knavery, and roguery are the order of the day. Then again an early meaning of the word rope was an outcry, cries of distress, a lamentation.
Aickman’s descriptions of the interior of Roper’s house, his Ropery, are redolent with reference to gothic fiction, in particular Jane Eyre, and we are forced again to consider the forlorn figure of Edward Rochester – blind at the end (although he does partially recover his sight) one eye lost in the attempted rescue of his mad wife. Like Odin he has sacrificed an eye. Odin god of war, wisdom and poetry, prophecy and magic. His wisdom came from drinking at the fountain of Mimir (Mimi?) in the underworld – he’d given an eye in exchange for his draughts of wisdom to Mimir. On his finger he wore a black ring called Draupner. He kept in touch with the outside world via Hugin and Munin his black ravens (of the crow family). As god of the winds (zephyrs) he rode the air on his eight legged steed and had the power to transform himself in to any form or shape he desired. Often he visited the earth to see how people were behaving, and to see how they’d treat him not knowing who he really was. To suddenly reveal his true self could drive his unexpected victim mad.
One hears faint echoes, too, of sister Emily’s great novel in Aickman’s story: in particular Heathcliffe’s visions as he waits alone for death and reunion with Catherine; in fact “Wuthering Heights” contains a number of possible supernatural events, but the truth of them always remains ambiguous – very like Aickman’s strange tale. At one point the suggestion is seriously made that Heathcliffe is a changeling – which description would fit Roper quite well, too.
Roper openly announces that they are in the “house of the dead”. Dante’s “deep place”, “basso loco” (locomotive?), where “‘l sol tace”, the sun is silent. In fact Dante’s “Commedia” allows us a glimpse of the first circle of hell in his “Inferno”, this circle containing similar characteristics to the Elysian Fields where the guiltless damned are punished – their fault being lack of faith and an inability to hope for better or greater good other than that which surrounds them (in a word: lack of imagination or vision). Our two M’s are certainly guilty of this sin – in fact they’re civil servants, bureaucrats, unimaginative and non-creative individuals, simple numbers, thus they are Aickman’s hated, faceless, nonentities who help feed the miseries of modern life. As such they are not worthy of his, or our sympathy. According to Dante these souls contained within the first circle are neither within hell nor without it….
They are in limbo!
So when Margaret asks what they’re to do, Mimi answers, “Catch the first departure for hell, I should say.” Suggesting there’s only one way out of Limbo – not toward the light of paradise, but instead toward the inner circles of hell.
Here I’ll interpose some comments on one of the underlying story strands of “The Trains”, namely Aickman’s “Quiet Valley” western vignette: the valley straight out of a cheap western paperback, peopled by Mr Tennis Shoes who though English speaks with the natural idiom of a cheap American pulp (thus is neither English or American), cultureless, the railroader who “lassos” his victims in, his dead grandfather who made no end of enemies carving his rail empire out of this virgin land and who was known as Wide Joe. Here Aickman points an accusatory finger (accompanied, I suspect, with a bit of a belly laugh): the station bookstands of W H Smith were loaded with paperback Westerns, the B Western dominated both British TV and Cinema, the indigenous culture was being swamped, drowned in waves of shallow nonsense from across the Atlantic. This cultural betrayal he uses as one simplistic example to explain why Mimi and Margaret are imprisoned in limbo – it’s a prison of their own making.
Which brings me to Beech. I see Mimi and Margaret as opposing sides of the same coin. Aickman needed to demonstrate that loss of culture was independent of background; it wasn’t just about life in the city or a rural existence; nor about wealth or poverty. No, these two M’s (money and materialism) whose underlying desire for each other, (their duality an example of divided self consequent to a loss of true identity) with their differing backgrounds and their likes and dislikes, symbolise society as a whole as Aickman saw it – trapped in a limbo of its own making. In much the same way Beech and Roper/Odin demonstrate aspects of the same fragmented personality, however we should refer perhaps to Beech as Frigga, Odin’s wife whose interest in mortals was shown in her protection of marriage and the home.
So did Margaret see a ghost or not? Well, did Heathcliffe? Did Jane Eye have visions? Hallucination or reality? More importantly, if Margaret and Mimi are in the “house of the dead” does that not mean they are in fact deceased themselves? That it is their very souls that are trapped in the prison they made for themselves when they locked the door against Roper/Odin – when they closed their minds to creativity and originality and wisdom. So, they are more than likely the ghosts in this limbo of nullity.
And those trains? Margaret alone in the attic room with its two cyclopean walls hears a “new train”, a modern diesel electric perhaps, not steam, definitely not that – it forms a symbol of the onset of the new machine age, the age of limbo and cultural betrayal. The trains ferry the dying and the badly maimed from the battlefields of France during the First World War, the war that ended all hope for society in RA’s view, ferry them in to the Quiet Valley. And Margaret in hope waves at them with a blood stained piece of fabric, while we look on only too aware of the hopelessness and futility of her actions.
Lastly, because this is very much a personal view, I’ll comment on my first reading of “The Trains” some years ago. I was reminded very strongly of the 1893 version of “The Cry” by Edvard Munch – the raw emotion and power of Munch’s work, its stark depiction of the isolation of the individual, the emphasis Munch placed on the vanishing line on the left of the painting, giving perspective to the work, yes, but carried out in such a sweeping way that even the face of one of the onlookers in the background is slashed through with colour. For whatever reason (and I suspect it was the subliminal realisation that so many of Aickman’s words within the story had root meanings of cry, shout or lamentation) I can never view the painting without calling to mind this story and vice versa.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no, no, no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
Stevie Smith.
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