The Wine-Dark Sea Read online

  ROBERT AICKMAN

  THE WINE-DARK SEA

  With an introduction by Peter Straub

  Title Page

  Introduction by Peter Straub

  The Wine-Dark Sea

  The Trains

  Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen

  Growing Boys

  The Fetch

  The Inner Room

  Never Visit Venice

  Into the Wood

  About the Author

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  by Peter Straub

  Aickman at his best was this century’s most profound writer of what we call horror stories and he, with greater accuracy, preferred to call strange stories. In his work is a vast disparity between the well-mannered tone and the stories’ actual emotional content. On the surface of things, if we can extrapolate from the style, diction, and range of allusion in his work, Aickman was a cultivated, sensitive, thoroughly English individual. It’s not hard to imagine him as having been something like T. S. Eliot: dry of manner, more kindly than not, High Anglican in dress, capable of surprising finesses of wit. His chief influences were English, the stories of Walter De La Mare and M. R. James (and probably also the subtle, often indirect supernatural stories of Henry James, England’s most assimilated American), and his own influence has been primarily on English writers like Ramsey Campbell and, through Campbell, Clive Barker. (I think Aickman would have cherished Barker’s story ‘In the Hills, the Cities.’) In fact, neither Campbell nor Barker is really very much like Aickman. His originality, conscious and instinctive at once, was so entire that although he has provided us with a virtual model of what the ‘strange story’ should be, if anyone tried to write to its specifications, the result would be nothing more than imitative.

  Unlike nearly everybody writing supernatural stories now, Aickman rejected the neat, conclusive ending. He was, you might say, Stephen King’s opposite. In his work there are no climactic showdowns, in part because his work uses almost none of the conventional imagery of horror. Aickman was sublimely uninterested in monsters, werewolves, worms, rats, bats, and things in bandages. (He did, however, write one great vampire story.) Absent from this list of horror conventions is ghosts, because Aickman was interested in ghosts, at least in a way – in the atmosphere a ghost creates, the thrill of unreality which surrounds it. Aickman was a queerly visionary writer, and ghosts, which are both utterly irrational and thoroughly English, would have appealed to him. In this collection a ghost might very well be making telephone calls in ‘Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen,’ and a kind of ghost, the ‘old carlie,’ plays a crucial role in ‘The Fetch’, one of the most explicit and straightforward pieces here. You could stretch a point – stretch it past breaking – and say that ‘Never Visit Venice’ concerns an encounter with a ghost. It does not, of course. What attracted Aickman to ghosts was not the notion of dripping revenants but the feeling – composed in part of mystery, fear, stifled eroticism, hopelessness, nostalgia, and the almost violent freedom granted by a suspension of rational rules – which they evoked in him. Ghosts – or the complex of feelings I’ve just tried to summarise – gave him a degree of artistic freedom granted to only a very few writers.

  We are in the age of Dawn of the Dead and Friday the Thirteenth, and to describe a writer of supernatural stories as cultivated and sensitive is nearly to condemn him. I had better explain what I mean by those terms and describe what I see as their consequences. Aickman’s general learning gave him a wide referential range: these stories often allude to the worlds of opera, art, and literature, and if you really know nothing at all about Mozart or Wagner or Homer, you will have to pay even more attention than usual while reading some of these stories. Aickman’s ‘cultivation’, which to me feels like that of an autodidact, enabled him to draw more kinds of experience, more nuance and shading, into his work; and his sensitivity meant that he felt things very deeply, everyday life as well as great art. Very good horror writers often demonstrate that ordinary life can be horrific and tedious at once for the sensitive person, and one suspects it was so for Aickman. It is a great mistake to read the life of the writing for that of the writer, but these stories leave little doubt that for Aickman’s sensibility the contemporary world was a raucous, clanging din growing ever emptier of any real content. He frequently tells us that he abhors man in the mass and the pleasures of the vulgar crowd, what in the wonderfully titled ‘Never Visit Venice’ he calls ‘the world’s new littleness’. Experience was being flattened out all around him, being rendered coarser, simpler, and more accessible, and this process clearly made Aickman as ‘sick at heart’ as it does his protagonist, Henry Fern.

  This response is not merely snobbish. There is too much sadness in it for that; and beneath the educated sadness, too much fear; and beneath the fear, too much respect for the great common human inheritance.

  In nearly all of the stories collected here, the world of ordinary experience is as porous and malleable as a dream. ‘Growing Boys’ is a deadpan bit of uncharacteristic black humour in which the irrational and grotesque are hauled right into the immediate foreground of the story. (The only other story here as explicit as that, apart from ‘The Fetch’ and its family spectre, is ‘The Wine-Dark Sea’, a forthright allegory: as in a myth, man is blindly destructive to the original sacred world of the gods, and even Aickman’s typically responsive and insightful lone traveller must be returned to the noisy, empty world he came from.) In every other story, the immediate result of a finely tuned sensibility finding danger and uncertainty everywhere in ordinary life is to make meaningless the concept of the ‘ordinary’. Aickman’s characters find themselves trapped in a series of events unconnected by logic, or which are connected by a nonlinear logic. Very often neither the characters nor the reader can be certain about exactly what has happened, yet the story has the satisfying rightness of a poem – a John Ashbery poem. Every detail is echoed or commented upon, nothing is random or wasted. The reader has followed the characters into a world which is remorseless, vast, and inexorable in its operations.

  Unconscious forces drive these characters, and Aickman’s genius was in finding imaginative ways for the unconscious to manipulate both the narrative events of his tales and the structures in which they occur. Because there are no logical explanations, there can be no resolutions. After the shock of the sheer strangeness fades away, we begin to see how the facts of the stories appear to grow out of the protagonists’ fears and desires, and how the illogic and terror surrounding them is their own, far more accurately and disturbingly than in any conventional horror story. ‘The Trains’ is a perfect story of this type, and ‘The Inner Room’ is even better, one of Aickman’s most startling and beautiful demonstrations of the power over us of what we do not quite grasp about ourselves and our lives.

  As wonderful as those stories are, ‘Into the Wood’ seems to me the masterpiece of the collection. In it all of Aickman’s themes come together in an act of self-acceptance which is at once dangerous, enigmatic, in narrative terms wholly justified, and filled with the reverence for the imaginative power demonstrated by Aickman’s work in general.

  On the narrative surface ‘Into the Wood’ is about insomnia. Margaret, the wife of an English road builder, inadvertently comes upon a sanatorium set in a Swedish forest. After she has arranged to stay there for several days, she discovers that the sanatorium, or the Kurhus, is a refuge for those who never sleep: the rest of the world, the ‘sleepers,’ cannot tolerate their presence. True insomniacs ‘have to live with reality twenty-four hours a day,’ she is told, and their knowledge makes them feared. During the day they rest, aloof even from one another, and at night they walk in the woods around the sanatorium. Margaret’s dissatisfaction with th
e empty social round she must endure as her husband’s wife and her uneasiness at finding herself stranded amidst these silent and peculiar people are delineated subtly and economically. Aickman tells us that until her experience at the Kurhus, Margaret would have rejected the idea that she was unhappy, being ‘insufficiently grown for unhappiness or happiness.’ Swedish hospitality has exhausted her, but the Kurhus is like the Alice books in its reversal of ordinary rules and customs. Two orders of being are opposed here, and when Margaret enters the woods, she realises for the first time that her true self, the Margaret of her inner life, requires more spiritual and imaginative freedom than life with her husband provides. She senses that she has begun to find a way of being ‘beyond logic, beyond words, above all beyond connection with … normal life.’ She has found within herself a capacity for seeing what is real. That evening a sympathetic Kurhus resident tells her that ‘only by great sacrifices can we poor human beings reach great truths.’ Margaret instinctively knows what he means. Some few insomniacs, he says, walk into the great Swedish forest beyond the wood and never return: they have reached their limits and found their deepest truth.

  From this point the story moves like a series of tapestries as it enacts the consequences of Margaret’s strange encounter with her own being. In a sense, ‘Into the Wood’ is an extended metaphor for the separation, even estrangement, between the artist and the conventional world, and the artist’s sense of an inner glory and necessity which can be shirked only at the expense of his true relationship to himself; or so I thought when I first read it, and was immediately grateful to have read it. But abstract reflections on ‘the artist’ are seldom satisfactory, and are never as satisfactory, nor as moving, as this story. We could say, far more pertinently, that if stories are ever about anything but the particular ways they are themselves and no other story, ‘Into the Wood’ is about being a dedicated, delicately organised man named Robert Aickman; about knowing there is a great wild forest within you; about understanding that you must go into that forest in search of your own limits; and doing so with the knowledge that many other people have felt that a world of unsentimental grandeur lies within and that to deny or ignore it is to choose an uneasy half-life. Aickman’s originality was rooted in need – he had to write these stories, and that is why they are worth reading and rereading.

  © 1988 Seafront Corporation

  THE WINE-DARK SEA

  Off Corfu? Off Euboea? Off Cephalonia? Grigg would never say which it was. Beyond doubt it was an island relatively offshore from an enormously larger island which was relatively inshore from the mainland. On this bigger island was a town with a harbour, mainly for fishing-boats but also for the occasional caïque, and with, nowadays, also a big parking place for motor-coaches. From the waterfront one could see the offshore island, shaped like a whale with a building on its back, or, thought Grigg, like an elephant and castle.

  Grigg had not come by motor-coach, and therefore had freedom to see the sights, such as they were; to clamber over the hot, rocky hills; and to sit at his ease every evening watching the splendid sunsets. He found the food monotonous, the noise incredible, and the women disappointing (in general, they seemed only to come to identity around the age of sixty, when they rapidly transmogrified into witches and seers); but drink was cheap and the distant past ubiquitous. The language was a difficulty, of course, but Grigg could still scramble a short distance on what remained to him of the ancient variety, which, now that a test had come, was more than he had supposed.

  Most of the time it was straight, beating sunshine, something that had to be accommodated to by a steady act of will, like a Scandinavian winter (at least if there was any kind of serious enterprise on hand), but sometimes the air was green or blue or purple, and then the vast bay could be among the most beautiful places in the world, especially when the colour was purple. On his second or third evening, Grigg sat outside the café, an establishment patronised almost entirely by boring, noisy males, but unself-conscious and affable, none the less. He was drinking local drinks, and, despite the din, feeling himself almost to merge with the purple evening light. In the middle of the view appeared a smallish boat, with curving bow and stern, low freeboard, and a single square sail. If it had not risen from the depths, it must have sailed from behind the small offshore island. It seemed timeless in shape and handling. It added exactly the right kind of life to the sea, air, and evening.

  But Grigg noticed at once that the other customers did not seem to think so. Not only did they stare at the beautiful boat, but they stared with expressions of direct hatred that an Englishman has no practice in adopting. They fell almost silent, which was a bad sign indeed. Even the white-coated waiters stopped running about and stood gazing out to sea like the customers. All that happened was that the boat put about and sailed on to the open waters. As she turned, Grigg thought that he could discern the shapes of sailors. They must have been good at their work, because the ship made off along a dead straight line in what seemed to Grigg to be very little breeze. Already she was merely a darker purple fleck in the perceptibly oncoming evening. The hubbub in the café soon worked up again. Grigg got the impression that the ship, though unpopular, was quite familiar.

  Soon his waiter was removing his glass. Grigg ordered a renewel.

  ‘What was that ship?’

  He perceived that the waiter had a little English, but doubted whether it would suffice for this. It did suffice.

  ‘She comes from the island.’ The waiter stood gazing out, either at the ship or at the island.

  ‘Can I visit the island?’

  ‘No. There is no boat.’

  ‘Surely I can hire one if I pay for it?’

  ‘No. There is no boat.’ And the waiter departed.

  When he returned with Grigg’s ensuing ouzo, Grigg did not resume the subject. All the same, what the waiter said had been absurd. The island could hardly have been more than a mile way and lay in the centre of the calm, sheltered bay. Grigg had not previously thought of the island as anything more than a point of emphasis in the view, an eye-catcher, as our ancestors termed it. Now he wanted to see more.

  In the town was one of the state tourist offices, to which all foreign travellers are directed to go when in need. Grigg had not visited any of them before, but now was the time. He went next morning.

  The pleasant young man who seemed in sole possession spoke pretty good English and received Grigg’s enquiry with sophistication.

  ‘The fishermen do not like the island,’ he said, smiling. ‘They give it, as you say, a wide berth.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘It is said to be a very old island.’

  ‘But surely this is a very old country?’

  ‘Not as old as the island. Or so the fishermen say.’

  ‘Is that a bad thing? Being very old?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the young man, with perceptibly less sophistication. ‘A bad thing.’ He sounded surprisingly firm. Grigg recollected that the tourist officials were recruited from the police.

  ‘Then you think that no one will take me there?’

  ‘I am sure of it,’ said the young man, again smiling. ‘No one.’

  ‘Then I shall have to swim,’ said Grigg. He spoke lightly, and he would have hated to have to do it. But the young man, who could not be sure of this, tried another tack.

  ‘There’s nothing to see on the island,’ he said a shade anxiously. ‘Nothing at all, I assure you. Let me give you our leaflet of tourist sights. All very nice.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Grigg. ‘I’ve got one already.’

  The young man put the leaflet away, more obviously disappointed than an Englishman would have permitted of himself.

  ‘Then you’ve been to the island yourself?’ asked Grigg.

  ‘No,’ said the young man. ‘As I told you, there is nothing to see.’

  ‘Last night I saw a ship sail from the island. Either someone must live there or there must be some reason for going there.’<
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  ‘I do not know about that,’ said the young man, slightly sulky but still trying. ‘I cannot imagine that anyone lives there or wants to go there.’ Grigg could not suppose that this was to be interpreted quite literally.

  ‘Why shouldn’t they?’

  ‘The Turks. The Turks made the island unlucky.’

  Long before, Grigg had realised that throughout Hellas everything bad that cannot be attributed to the evil eye or other supernatural influence is blamed upon the Turks; even though the stranger is apt on occasion to suspect, however unworthily, that the Turks provided the last settled and secure government the region has known. And he had furthermore realised that it is a subject upon which argument is not merely useless but impossible. The Turks and their special graces have been expunged from Hellenic history; their mosques demolished or converted into cinemas.

  ‘I see,’ said Grigg. ‘Thank you for your advice. But I must make it clear that I do not undertake to follow it.’

  The young man smiled him out, confident that the local brick wall would fully withstand the pounding of Grigg’s unbalanced and middle-aged head.

  *

  And so it seemed. Contrary to legend, Grigg, as the day wore on, discovered that few of the fishermen seemed interested in his money: to be more precise, none of them, or none that he approached, and he had approached many. It did not seem to be that they objected to going to the island, because in most cases he had not reached the point of even mentioning the island: they simply did not want to take him anywhere, even for what Grigg regarded as a considerable sum. They appeared to be very much preoccupied with their ordinary work. They would spend one entire day stretching their saffron-coloured nets to dry on the stones of the quay. Naturally the language barrier did not help, but Grigg got the impression that, in the view of the fishermen, as of various others he had met, tourists should adhere to their proper groove and not demand to wander among the real toilers, the genuine and living ancestors. Tourists were not to be comprehended among those strangers for whom, notoriously, the word is the same as for guests.