"It is not unusual to get to the end of a Robert Aickman story and then to stare at the wall for a few quiet moments, ending with a Hmmm..."

BLOT: (07 Nov 2011 - 03:25:17 PM)

"It is not unusual to get to the end of a Robert Aickman story and then to stare at the wall for a few quiet moments, ending with a Hmmm..."

It is not unusual to get to the end of a Robert Aickman story and then to stare at the wall for a few quiet moments, ending with a Hmmm before either moving on to the next or getting up and doing something else. This afternoon I read "My Poor Friend"* and had that experience. In fact, it was more like about half an hour in a Aickman-induced daze.

The story is a bit of a puzzle. Jocelyn Grover-Stacey—the exact sort of more-British-than-British name you could picture an American anglophile picking out to be some well-to-do character in a middling mystery novel, and therefore likely intended for a degree of comic effect by Aickman—has a bit of a burn out in his current job and takes up the cause of a group, headed by Wycliff Bessemer, seeking to promote local electricity. I am unsure of what that entails, but I presume the construct is locally owned power plants, on a small scale, that are run off local resources—namely rivers and streams—and are maintained by communities rather than by the government at large. In order to progress, the group needs a Parlimentary committee and someone to speak on their behalf in Parliment. This leads them to Walter Enright, a Member who is willing to take up the cause and to whom Grover-Stacey takes personally.

Now, we get to the point that makes this story Aickman-esque. If you were take the parts of the story that are semi-black comedic about Parliment, and assign those red blocks, and the bits that are about obvious horror, and assign those blue blocks, you would end up with a big stack of red blocks with a faint set of blue blocks on top and buried somewhere within. In fact, for most of the about-thirty-page story the only weirdness we get is that Enright smokes some strange blend of cigarette in an overly ornate case—I wonder if this is a reference to marijuana but that might be too mundane a solution—and seems to have some largely undetailed stain upon his character that stops people from taking him at 100% in Parliment. This section, the red block section, has a continuous irony of impact in a mix of lighthearted, or even heavyhearted, commiseration about politics for something like comedy.

In one quote, as example, Grover-Stacey "proves" that he and Enright are real friends because they do not use each other's first name...

In this light, this story can be thought of as much like the scene in Shaun of the Dead where Shaun walks down the street, the morning after the dead rose and attacked the living, completely oblivious to his surroundings. He slips in a pile of blood, ignores zombies reach out for him, overlooks bloody handprints and destruction around, and returns from his trip to the store with goods in hand. In that case, it is played up for comedic intent. Though imagine had it been written first person by Shaun. It would seem to be a rather simple story told with little overt action: a beggar in the street, a slipping in the floor, maybe a funny smell in the air. Still, you could at least imagine a version where, bound as the reader is to the narrators point-of-view, you could have hints of horror underneath: likely non-comic because rather than be faced with an oblivious narrator in an obvious situation, we would be forced to try and peer beneath the obvlivion.

In "My Poor Friend", this technique shares a hint of horror and a hint of tragedy. The great impotence of Grovery-Stacey, a man who left his good paying job over stress and ended up losing his wife because he could not quite get himself together, fancies himself a charming player in the games at the edge of Parliment, who sums up all the other hangers-on with quick generalizations and makes big pronouncements about this or that social group or this or that speaker as though he is greatly in the know. And yet, even when faced with snippets of direct evidence, is unable to even spot the secondary blue block tale that is occurring all the time.

Taken to Enright's home, meeting his strange mother who talks of Enright's wife in past tense despite Enright saying that she is only temporarily gone, seeing wooden children toys covered with strange markings—"Teeth", said Enright, dropping the toy on the floor. "Just teeth"—, and hearing strange things being said about the kids—how one was bad enough but two was enough to drive anyone away and how they are not human—our oblivious Jocelyn breaths in the strangeness in stride. Politely at best. Ignorantly more akin to his actions. In fact, when confronted with a small, high window covered with small, deep gashes high up, as though torn with a file, and then being told the children did it in "under a minute", he simply states, "It hardly amounts to wrecking the flat." This is a window so high that he, a grown man, had to stand on the bathtub to see it clearly and yet he scarcely blinks, not even when Enright's mother describes the difficulty of "getting them back in again"—

—after they were "let out" by Enright's wife. He only truly wakes up and flees when he is shown a long tress of fine hair that has a discoloration on it, one he assumes [and is likely correct] is blood.

Later, as Enright's machinations in Parliment become more daring, and their contact lesser and lesser, Grover-Stacey begins to notice a woman in black hanging around Parliment. He assumes, with no good cause besides the color of hair, that she must be Enright's wife. He does not approach her, nor does she approach him, and in general neither of them interact much with others. Finally, on a rainy day when he can hear something fluttering around in the rafters, a strange sound halfway between a panicked bird and a large fly, the woman in black does wave him over to follow. He ends up at a door to an old abandoned room, one he cannot seem to open, when someone on the other side opens it. It is Enright, and in his hand is a small saw—like a child's toy—and shortly thereafter Enright has some sort of fit, with the flapping sounds growing louder, and curls up unto himself into a tight fetal position. When he comes out of it, he chastises Grover-Stacey for not leaving him in peace and effectively seals the friendship closed.

Jocelyn goes home, ends up somewhere between a sulk and a panic—because he knows something was up in that room and he feels that by not coming forth he is opening himself up to some sort of potential rebuke—and eventually loses his wife and moves on to another career. And with a short burst of description about how Enright met his fate, which I'll leave to you to find out, he closes it up: a failure of a man who had mostly occupied himself for a time with a cause that got nowhere.

You are left with more questions than ever answered: what were the "children", what was the "wife", what were the strange cigarettes that Enright smoked, what was up with the fit, with the saw, with the abandoned dark room that Enright was hiding out in, and so on. And that is the point. You can come up with a number of theories but since Aickman did not ever fulfill them, there is no way for you as a reader to truly do so. In order to reduce the tale, you have to make assumptions and so every reduction is only a theory and therefore the sum total of reductions is likely greater in volume than the story itself, an interesting conundrum that makes for a fascinating story. Overall very effective and a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to the rest of Powers of Darkness.

If you wish to read more about "My Poor Friend", you can do so at The Kind of Face of Hate with the entry: "The Kind of Face You SLASH!!: Day 23 - It is Beyond Even the Forgiveness of God" [he also briefly discusses "The Waiting Room", an Aickman story with which he was much less satisified...]. A Google search suggests it is a fairly popular one that has been discussed in a number of places, though mostly in snippets. Finally, if you want to read the story but not pay the amount needed for a book (see footnote "*" below), WorldCat shows some copies of Painted Devils not too far from here.

* Based on a look around, it is in Powers of Darkness, which is how I read it, and in Painted Devils. Neither are exactly easy to come by or cheap at moment, but one might hope that an ebook collection or cheaper reprint will not be too terribly long down the road since Aickman's names to be increasingly returning to consciousness. It was also in the first volume of the Collected Strange Stories by Tartarus, but a quick glimpse on Amazon reveals prices near and over 1000usd for each volume, much higher than the about 50-60usd for the two listed above.

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: November 2011