June 27 was Robert Aickman’s birthday, but I missed it. I was busy somehow. I’m often late to people’s birthdays. I don’t think Aickman minds very much, since he’s been dead for most of my life.
To be honest, I was thinking it was this month. I’ve been reading Tartarus Press’s new book of Aickman letters, and Aickman was explaining to Kirby McCauley his general interest in astrology by saying he is himself as Cancer. Odd, I thought, since July 27 is, I believe, Leo. Had the zodiac signs changed since 1969, when Aickman wrote that letter? Had he simply made a mistake? I then fell down a rabbit hole of trying to determine if zodiac signs have changed as people have learned more about actual astronomy. And then I noticed that Aickman’s birthday is June. Not July.
So happy birthday, Robert Aickman, you old weirdo! Here are some things I’ve written about Aickman in the past:
- “The Strange Horrors of Robert Aickman” is an overview I wrote for Electric Literature in 2016.
- I wrote about my favorite Aickman story, “The Stains”, on his actual birthday in 2012.
- “Compulsory Genres” is a blog post from 2018 about Aickman and genre, spurred by an interesting collection of his stories edited by Victoria Nelson for NY Review of Books Classics. It examines the ways “horror” is too limiting a category for Aickman’s strange stories.
Reading through the letters to Kirby McCauley, I’m struck by just how strange Aickman himself was. This comes through some in Ray Russell’s biography of Aickman, but the casual letters really bring it out. His political beliefs, for instance, tend toward the authoritarian (he repeatedly praises Franco) while also offering surprises: for instance, he says how much he liked Norman Mailer’s platform when running for mayor of New York. But his support for both Franco and Mailer makes sense in its own way — Aickman desired order, and respected the kind of macho swagger that promised to stand up against the disorders of society. He also hated much of contemporary life, so Mailer’s promise to institute “Sweet Sundays” where “every form of mechanical transportation – including elevators – would be halted” must have been terribly appealing to Aickman. Given how attached he was to propriety, I’m surprised the vulgarities of Mailer didn’t put him off, but I suppose that was easy to put aside for a candidate who promised to stop the machines.
For all his deep conservatism and his attraction to authoritarianism, Aickman’s aesthetics were generally liberal — he was fond of many art-house movies, some contemporary musical compositions, etc. And he was, in his own way and under his own limitations, open minded artistically. In one of the last letters to McCauley, he praises Night of the Living Dead: “I do not normally care for such films, but I think that one is very impressive, and a genuine work of art at its peculiar level.”
Still, Aickman complains about ghost and horror stories that are, he thinks, “sadistic”. (This is not unreasonable — there is certainly a strain of sadism in horror movies and fiction, and is arguably one the things that attracts readers and viewers, though I don’t necessarily see this as a bad thing. To me, the safe play of fantasy is important to mental health and social functioning.) Aickman had particular ideas and strong opinions about the occult, supernatural, and fiction. In a 1967 letter to J. Vernon Shea included as an appendix in the new Tartarus volume, Aickman writes: “Here I return to my conviction that the supernatural is, or should be, like poetry. It cannot really be produced to order, or on any kind of commercial basis. It is really a way of seeing life.”
That sense of the supernatural and strange as a poetry of life is one of the great contributions Aickman made to fiction. He was not the first or last writer to see things this way, but he found a balance between the poetic, the oneiric, and the real that makes his stories unique.
