‘Robert Aickman: An Attempted Biography’
By R.B. Russell
Tarturus Press, 439 pages

Robert Aickman (1914-1981) believed in a world elsewhere, a phrase that recurs in this masterful biography of a man acknowledged as a savior of  Britain’s inland waterways and, with increasing frequency, as one of the masters of what he called “strange stories.”

Aickman believed in the primacy of the imagination, which could seduce us into the world of the occult and of fantasy, without ever relinquishing an exquisite grip on the elegance and superiority of language that made fiction a domain that needed no other. In short, fiction did not require a referent in reality, as conventionally and diurnally understood by the commonality.

Aickman, an elitist with an anti-egalitarian sensibility — the product of some rather painful parenting — learned early to rely on his own inimitable conceptions of what the world should look like. His realm was not 20th century Britain, but the past in which certain forms of technology, like the creation of the waterways, could remain in balance with nature.

When Aickman discovered the waterways — most of them abandoned and even used as refuse dumps—he set out to rescue them, all of them, encountering resistance not only from government and business but from others who believed in a piecemeal approach: one waterway at a time. No, Aickman insisted, it was all or nothing.

This vehement campaigner for restoration of the past seemed to offend almost everyone, especially since he had no truck with democratic procedures and made many high-handed decisions. In the end, his vision and tenacity prevailed, even if certain critics believed the reclamation of the waterways could have been accomplished with far less acrimony than Aickman always seemed to engender.

All the while, Aickman was writing his strange stories, acquiring a select following but never breaking through to a more popular audience. So what? he said. How many copies of Henry James’s “Turn of the Screw” sold while he was alive? Aickman, in other words, was content with contemplating his posthumous fame.  

Aickman married and his wife was a help to him in all his projects, but he proved impossible to live with; after his wife left, he preferred to consort with a wide variety of women he entertained on jaunts into the country and to the theater.  

He was good company, except when he wasn’t. Aickman had no trouble insulting hosts he deemed unworthy even as he courted women who would have to look after a man who needed looking after. 

R.B. Russell is quite aware that a biography of Aickman can only be attempted because, from moment to moment, what Aickman experienced and what he imagined are hard to separate. It is a virtue of this biography that it shows how, for Aickman, experience was what he imagined. 

Mr. Russell does his best to trace the process by which Aickman worked out his life and stories. The key to this process, if I apprehend the biographer correctly, was Aickman’s disenchantment with science, industry, and almost everything else that others took for granted. Think Edwardian when you think of Aickman.

His stories and his campaign to save the waterways are never quite connected, though perhaps the biographer prefers that we complete the attempt. Why so many ghosts in Aickman’s stories? The writer himself might be said to be a ghost: eluding full materialization, appearing as one kind of man to one set of friends and another to others.

But then what is a ghost story except an acknowledgment of the past that haunts the present. The ghost is not there in so far as it cannot be touched, and yet that ghost is tangible nonetheless. Aickman’s stories, it seems to me, keep warning that we regard the past as a relic at our peril.

You can decide for yourself, as Tartarus Press has reissued Aickman’s work, including several collections of stories: “Dark Entries,” “Night Voices,” and his autobiography, “The River Runs Uphill.” 

The author of “The Conservative Mind” and of notable ghost stories Aickman admired, Russell Kirk, shall have the last word, praising Aickman’s stories of the uncanny: “For subtlety and significance, he has no peer in his eerie realm. His tales literally haunt me: his plots and turns of phrases run through my head at the most unlikely moments.”

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Old Rowan Oak: William Faulkner’s Conservatism,” published in “The Imaginative Conservative.”