Compulsory Games Read online

  ROBERT AICKMAN (1914–1981) was the son of an architect and grandson of the Victorian Gothic novelist Richard Marsh (author of the occult bestseller The Beetle). He did not attend university and subsisted on a small family income in London, working variously as a literary agent, editor, and theater and art critic. A prominent advocate for preserving and restoring England’s extensive network of canals, he was cofounder, in 1946, of the influential Inland Waterways Association. Above all, Aickman wanted to be an author, and he realized this desire with an extensive oeuvre of quasi- supernatural tales. In addition to eight collections of “strange stories,” as he dubbed them (the first, We Are For the Dark, included stories written by the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard), his writing includes a short novel, The Late Breakfasters (1965), a posthumously published novella, The Model (1987), and various unpublished fiction, dramatic, and nonfiction works. He published two memoirs, The Attempted Rescue and The River Runs Uphill, and two popular nonfiction books about the inland waterways. Aickman won the World Fantasy Award in 1975 for his story “Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal” and edited eight volumes of The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, writing introductions for six. He died of cancer in 1981.

  VICTORIA NELSON is a writer of fiction, criticism, and memoir. Her books include Gothicka and The Secret Life of Puppets, a study of the supernatural grotesque in Western culture that won the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies in 2001, and Wild California, a collection of stories. She teaches in Goddard College’s MFA creative writing program.

  COMPULSORY GAMES

  And Other Stories

  ROBERT AICKMAN

  Edited by

  VICTORIA NELSON

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOK S

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Stories copyright © 2016 by the Estate of Robert Aickman, c/o Artellus Ltd., London, UK

  Selection copyright © 2018 by NYREV, Inc.

  Introduction copyright © 2018 by Victoria Nelson

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Paul Nash, Pillar and Moon, 1932–1942; © Tate, London / Art Resource, NY

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Aickman, Robert, author. | Nelson, Victoria, editor, writer of introduction.

  Title: Compulsory games : and other stories / Robert Aickman ; edited and with an introduction by Victoria Nelson.

  Description: New York City : New York Review Books, [2018] | Series: New York Review Books Classics |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017055019 (print) | LCCN 2017057586 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681371900 (epub) | ISBN 9781681371894 (softcover : acid-free paper) Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Short Stories (single author). | FICTION / Occult & Supernatural. | FICTION / Romance / Gothic. Classification:

  LCC PR6051.I3 (ebook) | LCC PR6051.I3 A6 2018 (print) | DDC 823/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017055019

  ISBN 978-1-68137-190-0

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction: Under the Skin

  Compulsory Games

  Hand in Glove

  Marriage

  Le Miroir

  No Time Is Passing

  Raising the Wind

  Residents Only

  Wood

  The Strangers

  The Coffin House

  Letters to the Postman

  Laura

  The Fully-Conducted Tour

  A Disciple of Plato

  Just a Song at Twilight

  INTRODUCTION

  Under the Skin

  A COMFORTABLE experience it’s not, reading a Robert Aickman story.

  Disturbing, persistent noise—of trains, bells, cuckoo clocks, watches, iron shutters, too-loud wind, whistling, small aircraft—assaults your inner ear. Substances that proliferate unpleasantly—lichen, soot, mist, dust, wet straw, mushrooms—rise off the page to envelop you. Squirming, you find yourself embarked on a journey to an unknown destination that once reached proves even less comprehensible than the events along the way. When, baffled, you set the book down, you brush your arm reflexively to remove the dust that lingers—oh, that unsettling dust!—but it doesn’t go away, not ever, because now the dust is in you. An Aickman story is a dream you never wake up from.

  It’s also a dream unshaped by the procrustean bed of genre. Just as he will disappoint the reader who believes realism or a genteel modernism to be the prerequisite of a high literary work, Aickman is likely to disappoint the reader who demands the thrills and chills of traditional supernatural fiction. There is never the comforting frame of the traditional horror story that attaches definite causes to uncanny events—causes that explain everything even when the explanation turns out to be supernatural. In the classic formula such stories follow, the irrational is safely unleashed within the boundaries of the quasi-rational, generating a reassuring feeling of closure after the climactic scare. Right, that scholar in M. R. James’s “Casting the Runes” is being stalked by an unknown creature because an amateur researcher smarting at the scholar’s unfavorable review slipped him a paper with a runic curse on it! Return the slip of paper to its writer, the creature kills the perpetrator instead of the scholar, and the world is restored to order.

  Don’t expect this kind of normalizing closure from Aickman, whose “unheimlich maneuver,” in John J. Miller’s very apt phrase, is impossible to nail down and remains unique to this author. (The term “Aickmanish,” as accurately evocative a label as “Kafkaesque,” was already being used by one of Robert’s Highgate School teachers to describe a student essay of his.) An Aickman story typically opens with a quotidian character leading a humdrum life—a minor bureaucratic functionary or low-level bank employee, a middle-class wife with a conventional husband and home. But daily life, Aickman cautions us, “is entirely a matter of the pattern men and women impose upon it.” Reality, which is far more dangerous than these easy patterns, “lies far behind, and is unchangeable.” So the narrative builds slowly, almost magisterially, until the first highly unpredictable moment—“the moment that, of its nature, can never be quite examined, quite elucidated, or quite extinguished,” as Aickman puts it in “The Strangers”—when events take a sharp left turn and then another, and another, and nobody ever quite finds their way home.

  Confounding to some readers but never overplayed for cheap thrills, these left turns can sometimes be classified, inadequately, as supernatural, sometimes not. (The best word is possibly unnatural.) More often than not, they involve a shifting of dimensional zones, a rejiggering of the laws of time and space within overlapping but noncontiguous perspectives. In literary terms, they are something like what happens in the interstices between sentences in a Henry Green novel. Sometimes the main character escapes the uncanny predicament, sometimes not, but either way his or her life never quite gets back on track, at least not in the usual way. How, for example, after a bewildering series of logic-defying shifts, is the protagonist of “Compulsory Games” able to see himself at story’s end as a separate figure standing in a field, about to be crushed (maybe) by a small airplane piloted by his wife and her female lover (or are they, maybe, the two other figures standing in the field)?

  To be crude where Aickman is not, these are the kinds of questions that lay eggs under your skin. No satisfactory answer
s are available, either in the stories themselves or in the reader’s head. More precisely, any answer that might be proffered will be (to echo an Aickman title) insufficient.

  This trail of maddening loose ends is no careless mistake on the author’s part; it is a calculated tactic that serves to collapse the premises of the material world far more effectively than any number of invented hauntings shaped by genre tradition. Aickman is a subtle minimalist who means to set us on a Jabberwockian path into a different plane of reality. “The essential quality of a ghost story is that it gives form to the unanswerable,” he wrote in his graceful introduction to the third of the eight Fontana Great Ghost Stories collections he edited. Dubbing them “stories not concerned with appearance and consistency, but with the spirit behind appearance, the void behind the face of order,” he proposed the word geist, or spirit, instead of ghost as the best descriptor for this genre. “In the end,” runs a pronouncement by Sacheverell Sitwell that Aickman used as an epigram to one of his collections, “it is the mystery that lasts and not the explanation.”

  Of no stories is this truer than of Aickman’s own, for which he preferred the enigmatic label “strange.” That is an apt word for these nuanced tales of characters in settings that are irreconcilable with received notions of what is real. Aickman’s territory of strange—that “void behind the face of order”—draws neither on the constricted Protestant Christian–inflected tradition of the evil satanic supernatural or (with one or two exceptions) the folkloric faux-pagan conventions of Victorian fantasy. Morally neutral and utterly original to him, it is a region ruled by the unconscious logic of dreams. No stranger to the surrealist tactic of radical juxtaposition, Aickman employed it with great and unobtrusive skill. As one of his characters, an amateur painter confounded by the constantly changing prospect from his holiday hotel room, exclaims, “Did his imagination in some way have to embrace everything or nothing?”

  •

  Some defining features of Aickman country, in no particular order:

  Time and space. If we are no longer situated in linear time or three-dimensional space, that means any sense of cause and effect dissolves, too, and all happenings become synchronous. In “Hand in Glove,” time functions on different tracks for timid Millicent and her bossy friend Winifred: Thursday for one, Wednesday for the other, with crucial consequences for the story. When the suburbanite Delbert in “No Time Is Passing” returns from hobnobbing with a sinister but unidentified entity on the other side of the (previously unnoticed) river below his house, he finds that no time has passed, in the usual sense; it has gotten all twisted up instead. Not only has the house been vandalized but his wife, Hesper, returns wearing a different dress than the one she wore when she left that morning, she either is or isn’t unfaithful this day or at some future time, and the child she was pregnant with that morning has maybe already been born. In the face of all this, Delbert can only respond with the equivalent of a doomed shrug: “Tomorrow is always another day, take it or leave it.”

  The natural order. What is supernatural (or unnatural) in an Aickman story is not always horrifying in itself, it’s the casual positioning of this element that terrifies. He loves oblique, corner-of-the-eye effects, throwaway asides that don’t bear directly on the narrative, and the fact that the uncanny lurks in the margins instead of being front and center makes it doubly unsettling. In his great story “The Stains,” Aickman tells us of a “curious serpentine rabbit-run” in the woods, adding the chilling caveat, “except that rabbits do not run like serpents.” The creature that made this trail, however, never figures in the story. A glimpse of the inside of a country church in “Hand in Glove” shakes two characters to their core, but we readers never lay eyes on it. When the hero of “Laura” enters a room with “rotting woodwork, and huge worms, and soiled rags on the floor,” we almost miss those worms tucked between the woodwork and the rags, and they are never mentioned again. A character in “Residents Only” notes in passing that he spent a week every summer in childhood at a certain coastal town and “would remember the Strange Things on the cliff until the day he died”—but not a word more do we hear of town, cliff, or Strange Things. In some ineffably Aickmanish way, this kind of omission feels scarier than a whole story devoted to Strange Things.

  Men and women. Aickman’s male characters tend to be ordinary citizens with ordinary jobs, lives, and prospects. Many of the females they run up against, however, turn out to be one version or another of Lady Death and share the interesting traits of being both physically powerful and strangely costumed. Of the innumerable loving descriptions of the clothes his female characters wear (“The blouse was in narrow honey and petunia stripes, with a still narrower white stripe at intervals”), a reliable marker of dangerous female feyness is “oddly dressed,” and this description is often not elaborated on. Moreover, these dangerous objects of his heroes’ desires—such as the title character of “Laura,” a revenant whom he does dress in sixties-style short skirts and white mod boots as she tries to lure the hero into her modernist underworld—are rarely linked with any preexisting mythos. They remain ciphers, too much their own creatures to be pinned to the wall with the label “fairy” or “fata morgana.”

  Aickman’s female protagonists, in contrast, are nuanced, sophisticated, and sensitively drawn. He seems to like them better than his men, actually. Where his male characters get ensnared in a downward spiral, his women transform in a way that recalls the alchemical tales of Leonora Carrington. Both types, the Lady Deaths his men chase and the housewife pupae soon to be butterflies, experience a more expansive trajectory than the men, and their startling metamorphoses confound and sometimes threaten the very existence of their more conventional husbands and lovers. In some cases the daring break with predictable routines catapults them into a very ambiguous future indeed. While Grace and her female lover of “Compulsory Games” are liberated to a presumably more adventurous existence, Millicent of “Hand in Glove” is not: after succeeding, in classic passive- aggressive fashion, in getting her sadistic former lover trampled to death by the wraiths of jilted women (incarnated for this purpose in a herd of cows), she gets hunted down in turn by his vengeful spirit.

  Sex and sensuality. As a rule, sex is notable by its displaced absence in the horror genre, where fear trumps lust as the overriding emotion. Here Aickman is unusual on two counts. Sexual desire is often a driving force in his stories, and when the act is represented, his descriptions are more provocative than those of his mainstream realist contemporaries, including Kingsley Amis, his rival for the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard’s affections. In “Marriage,” a man seesawing between two women who share a disturbingly fluid identity finds himself having sex with one of them on a divan: “Clinging together, he and she were drowning in it, down, drown, down, drown. As they dropped, all the way, she showed him small, wonderful things, which tied him in fetters, clogged him with weights.” In the last outrageous left turn of this story, the diffident protagonist’s offbeat sexual experiences with the enigmatic Helen Black and Ellen Brown send him home to bed with his mother, an act that produces this final consoling reflection: “He knew that she would never change, never disappoint. She did not even need to be thought about.”

  Black humor. Like sex, this element, and its prerequisite of a sophisticated sensibility, is usually absent in the horror genre. Aickman’s own voice, invisible to his narrators but not to us, drips with satire; like Saki’s, it constitutes the default subtext of every story. (Sample: “Local councillors have this in common with African kings: at first they are popularly voted in and on all sides pampered with sweetmeats; but it is upon the unmentionable understanding that ultimately they are to be maltreated and slain.”) He often read his stories aloud, laughing, to one of his young companions, Leslie Gardner, and told her they ought to be read that way, for their humor. In the same dark spirit, it’s reported that Franz Kafka laughed so hard when he read his stories to his friend Max Brod that the tears rolled down his che
eks.

  •

  Robert Fordyce Aickman was born in 1914, the son of a London architect and a much younger woman who fought bitterly during their marriage and separated when Robert was seventeen. So mismatched a couple were they that he would doubtless have endorsed the narrator’s sentiments in Delmore Schwartz’s classic story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” who dreams he is watching a news-reel of his parents’ courtship and, burdened with full knowledge of the impending debacle, stands up in the theater and shouts warnings at the screen, begging them to go no further. Both of Aickman’s parents sought the love they missed in each other in Robert and treated their son as a fellow adult even as each had passionate friendships with people of the same sex. Robert’s father in particular seemed fixated on (as opposed to being genuinely affectionate with) his son. Sociable but disorganized, William Arthur Aickman also painted (he showed regularly at the Royal Academy) and delighted in taking young Robert on long walks in the country. It was on one of those rambles that Aickman remembers his first glimpse of the canals that were to figure prominently in his adult life but in surprisingly few of his stories.*

  By his own account, Robert filled the vacuum of parental neglect by retreating into Brontësque fantasies of imaginary nations in East Africa and an alternate-reality Venice, both manageable worlds that could be satisfactorily controlled by a solitary child. Admirers of the magnificent story “The Trains” will not be surprised to learn that transport systems, including elaborate train and tram schedules, were prominent in these invented principalities.

  Fantastic tales were already a tradition in his family. Aickman’s mother’s father was Richard Bernard Heldmann, the son of a German Jewish émigré merchant and a prolific author; under the pen name Richard Marsh he was most notorious for the best-selling Victorian Gothic horror novel The Beetle, about an Egyptian scarab come to sinister life. Like his grandson, Heldmann also tried his hand at being a literary agent. As a child Aickman visited his grandfather’s mansion, Heldmann Close. In correspondence with the psychic Harry Price, however, he confessed he did not share others’ high opinion of The Beetle and considered it merely a “period piece.”