Elizabeth Jane Howard – Blood and Porridge

October 20, 2021October 20, 2021

Kingsley goes green

© Penguin Books

And here’s another re-posting in anticipation of Halloween, one that originally appeared on this blog seven years ago. This time, I offer my thoughts on Kingsley Amis’s ghostly novel of 1969, The Green Man.

I can claim to be neither an expert on nor a fan of Kingsley Amis. While I’ve enthusiastically worked my way through the fiction of several of his contemporaries – Anthony Burgess, William Golding, Graham Greene – until recently I’d read only a couple of Amis’s short stories and one of his books, Lucky Jim. The latter was an early (1954) example of the literary sub-genre now known as the ‘campus novel’ and I have to say I found it pretty dated and unfunny.

I suspect the main reason for my aversion to Kingsley Amis, though, is the persona he projected when he was alive. He didn’t seem like a nice piece of work and so I rarely felt an urge to dip into his writing. In the 1950s he trumpeted his support for the Labour Party but by the 1980s he’d become an enthusiastic fan of Mrs Thatcher. He seemed to me pretty typical of people whose politics undergo a severe rightward turn during their lifetimes. Socialist egalitarianism and liberal permissiveness are great things when you have youth, and a lack of material possessions, on your side. But when you reach a point in your life when you’re too old, and too moneyed, to benefit from them any longer, and when a younger, upstart generation arrives on the scene with their own ideas about how to do things, it’s time to change into a reactionary old fart and whinge about other people being radical in a way you once were yourself.

But far worse than Amis’s Conservatism was the fact that in later years he seemed unashamedly anti-Semitic, racist and misogynistic. I’ve read an interview with his long-suffering second wife Elizabeth Jane Howard in which she, rather gallantly, blamed much of that nastiness not on Amis but on his fondness for alcohol. In other words, his odiousness was really just the drink speaking. However, I can’t help thinking of an old saying they have in Northern Ireland: “If it’s not in you when you’re sober, it won’t come out of you when you’re drunk.”

Still, I have one reason for liking Amis, and that’s because unlike nearly everyone else in Britain’s snobbish literary establishment at the time, he didn’t look down his nose at genre writing. He was openly supportive of it and occasionally dabbled in it himself. For example, Amis was one of Ian Fleming’s most heavyweight admirers and it’s fitting that, after Fleming’s passing, he was the first person to write a non-Fleming James Bond novel, Colonel Sun, which he published in 1968 under the pseudonym Robert Markham.

Amis was also a big fan of science fiction and in 1960 he wrote a critique of the genre, New Maps of Hell. As J.G. Ballard noted, New Maps of Hell was important for science fiction’s development because Amis “threw open the gates of the ghetto, and ushered in a new audience which he almost singlehandedly recruited from those intelligent readers of general fiction who until then had considered science fiction on par with horror comics and pulp westerns.” Predictably, though, the curmudgeonly Amis went off science fiction in the 1960s when younger sci-fi writers like Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, Harlan Ellison and Thomas M. Disch started going all experimental and New Wave-y on him. Before long, he was raging at how those whippersnappers had contaminated his beloved science fiction with horrible things like “pop music, hippie clothes and hairdos, pornography, reefers” and “tricks with typography, one-line chapters, strained metaphors, obscurities, obscenities, drugs, Oriental religions and left-wing politics.”

Amis seemed too to be interested in supernatural stories and in 1969 he tried his hand at writing one, a novel called The Green Man. This has long been a neglected entry in Amis’s oeuvre, overshadowed by more prestigious books like Jake’s Thing (1978) and The Old Devils (1986), out of print and near impossible to find in bookshops. It was, however, adapted into a three-part drama serial by the BBC in 1990, with the script written by none other than Malcolm Bradbury, an author whose own books like Eating People is Wrong (1959) and The History Man (1975) were examples of the campus novel that Amis had helped pioneer with Lucky Jim. The TV version of The Green Man starred the splendid Albert Finney and it began with a memorable and grisly sequence that didn’t evoke Kingsley Amis, or Malcolm Bradbury, so much as it evoked Sam Raimi’s 1981 classic schlock-horror movie The Evil Dead.

© A&E Television Productions / BBC

Anyway, I enjoyed the televisual The Green Man so much that I made a mental note to set aside my prejudices against Amis and hunt down the original novel of The Green Man. It wasn’t until nearly a quarter-century later, however, that I noticed a new edition of The Green Man sitting on a shelf in a bookshop, bought it and finally got around to reading it. So here are my thoughts about this particular foray by Kingsley Amis into the realms of the paranormal and macabre.

The Green Man is narrated by the fifty-something Maurice Allington, the character played by Albert Finney in its TV adaptation. He owns and runs an inn of some antiquity, the titular Green Man, on the way from London to Cambridge. Living on the premises with his second wife Joyce (his junior by a number of years), his teenage daughter Amy and his ailing father, Allington is unnerved when the hoary old ghost stories associated with the inn over the centuries start to intrude on reality. In particular, he has several encounters with the ghost of Thomas Underhill, a supposed sorcerer who lived in the building in the 17^th century; and he senses the presence of a more monstrous apparition, a demonic creature that Underhill once summoned up from the local woods to destroy his antagonists. The inn’s name is a clue to this demon’s constitution.

Allington eventually realises he’s become enmeshed in a scheme that Underhill has devised to transcend his own death. However, his attempts to outwit the ghostly sorcerer are hampered by his own failings: his ill-health, his liking for the bottle – to which, of course, his family and friends attribute his strange visions – and the distractions posed by his carnal appetites. Not only is the lusty Allington engaged in an affair with another younger woman, Diana, who’s the wife of the local doctor, but he’s devised a less-than-noble scheme of his own. He wants to persuade both Joyce and Diana to participate with him in a ménage à trois.

I hadn’t got far into The Green Man before I’d realised that both the book’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness are its characterisations. Amis does an excellent job of sketching Allington, with his many vices and virtues. He’s annoyingly conceited, intellectually as well as socially. Talking about his book collection, he says sniffily: “I have no novelists, finding theirs a puny and piffling art, one that, even at its best, can render truthfully no more than a few minor parts of the total world it pretends to take as its field of reference. A man has only to feel some emotion, any emotion, anything differentiated at all, and spend a minute speculating how this would be rendered in a novel… to grasp the pitiful inadequacy of all prose fiction to the task it sets itself.” Allington, thus, is a poetry snob. “By comparison… verse – lyric verse, at least – is equidistant from fiction and life, and is autonomous.”

Actually, his love for the poetic and his disdain for the more mechanical medium of prose remind me slightly of the late 19^th century / early 20^th century occult writer Arthur Machen, who speculated in his fiction that supernatural phenomena are best perceived by people with receptive intellects and imaginations. These include the very young, the insane and the poetically-inclined. Perhaps that’s why, of all the people living, dining and drinking in the Green Man, the verse-loving Allington is the one with whom the supernatural intelligence of Thomas Underhill makes contact.

Meanwhile, feminist readers will no doubt feel like strangling Allington on account of his baser musings. “Ejaculation,” he comments at one point, “as all good mistresses know, is a great agent of change of mind and mood.”

And yet as a bundle of contradictory traits – stuck-up, sexist, cynical, drunken, cranky, comical, cunning, occasionally courageous and very occasionally principled – Allington is a believable figure in this story. He might be an unfortunate mess of vanity, lust and booze, but at the book’s finale, when he rushes out of the inn and into the night to try to save the sleepwalking Amy from the predatory green man, we aren’t surprised that he shows a streak of heroism as well.

But on the other hand, Amis is hopeless at drawing believable female characters here. Joyce and Diana give little impression of having minds of their own. They seem like manifestations of Amis’s notion of what women should be like – statuesque, well-bred and utterly pliable to the needs of the local Alpha Male. “Together,” says Allington, “they made an impressive, rather erectile sight, both of them tall, blonde and full-breasted… Dull would he be of soul that would pass up the chance of taking the pair of them to bed.” In their speech, meanwhile, they spout irritating upper-class adverb-adjective couplings: “jolly closed up”, “perfectly awful”, “frightfully exciting”, “damn good”. Late on in the book, Allington’s devious ménage à trois plan backfires and Joyce and Diana get their revenge on him, but this isn’t enough to convince me that they’re anything more than Kingsley Amis’s idea of desirable posh totty.

From artinfiction.wordpress.com

Elsewhere in the book, predictably, we’re treated to a list of things in the modern (or at least, 1960s-ish) world that the grumpy, ageing Amis finds appalling. He sounds off against radical students: “First one whiskered youth in an open frugiferous shirt, then another with long hair like oakum, scanned me closely as they passed, each slowing almost to a stop the better to check me for bodily signs of fascism, oppression by free speech, passive racial violence and the like.” He rails against popular music: “Amy’s gramophone was playing some farrago of crashes, bumps and yells from her room down the passage… I listened, or endured hearing it…” He has a go at trendy vicars: “I found it odd, and oddly unwelcoming too, to meet a clergyman who was turning out to be, doctrinally speaking, rather to the left of a hardened unbeliever like myself.” Readers will either find this aggravating or endearing. Now that Amis has been dead for a quarter-century and I’m in the process of turning into a grumpy old man myself, I have to confess I found it rather endearing – more so than I would have if I’d read the novel in my youth.

Failures in female characterisation aside, I generally enjoyed The Green Man and I had more fun reading it than I had with Lucky Jim. However, is the novel successful as a ghost story? In my opinion, for a ghost story to succeed, it needs to convey a degree of believability. If I can be lulled into thinking, however fleetingly, that this could be happening, I’m more likely to be affected, unsettled, even frightened by it. On this account, Amis’s book almost succeeds. For the most part, he convincingly moves the plot from being about a man whose home has some strange old tales attached to it to being about a man who has to deal with the unwelcome, ghostly protagonists of those tales. To facilitate this jump from the credible to the incredible, Amis adds some persuasive background details. A section where Allington visits a library at Cambridge University in search of a long-lost journal by Underhill has a scholarly believability that’s worthy of M.R. James.

Alas, all is betrayed by a scene near the novel’s climax where Amis goes too far and introduces another supernatural character, the most famous and powerful supernatural character of the lot – guess who that is. Now any story involving ghosts has implications about the wider scheme of things. It makes life after death a fact, which raises questions about the design and purpose of the universe and about the intelligence that might be behind it. However, for the sake of believability, it’s advisable for ghost-story writers to keep things localised and small-scale. In M.R. James’s celebrated short story Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, my Lad, for example, what’s important is that the hero is being pursued along a beach by a terrifying supernatural entity. Not that this entity’s existence calls into question our scientific assumptions about the universe – because if it does exist, then scientists are likely wrong and the priests, magicians and shamans of history were likely right.

Amis, unfortunately, can’t resist exploring the universe he’s created in The Green Man further than is necessary and so Allington ends up having an unexpected visit from the Big Man Upstairs. Their confrontation resembles something from the classic 1946 Michael Powell / Emeric Pressburger fantasy movie, A Matter of Life and Death. And that’s what The Green Man promptly becomes, a fantasy rather than a ghost story – a story that’s no longer believable and hence no longer scary.

J.G. Ballard once said of Kingsley Amis: “as with so many English novelists he was vaguely suspicious of the power of the imagination: it could be too much of a good thing. Yet the radical imagination is what we seek in a writer; when we read we want to encounter a very different world that will make sense of our own.”

Ironically, the problem with The Green Man is that in the end, and atypically, Amis lets his own imagination run away with him. The book would have been more effective if, like those English novelists whom Ballard complains about, he had decided that too much imagination here is a bad thing.

© David Smith / From the Guardian

October 25, 2020November 22, 2020

The unsettling Robert Aickman

From the Independent

Six days before Halloween, here’s another reposting of an old blog entry about one of my favourite writers of macabre fiction. This time it’s Robert Aickman, about whom I wrote this piece in 2015.

Over the years I’ve learned to be sceptical of the publicity blurbs adorning the covers of new paperback books, which usually assure potential buyers that the book in question is an absolute page-turner and can’t be put down. However, the blurb on the cover of The Wine-Dark Sea, a collection of short stories by Robert Aickman that was originally published in 1988 and republished in 2014, is bang on the money. It contains a comment by Neil Gaiman, no less, who says of the author: “Reading Robert Aickman is like watching a magician work, and very often I’m not even sure what the trick was. All I know is that he did it beautifully.”

That’s as good a description as any of the feeling I get when reading Aickman. You’re aware that he’s going to perform a trick involving some literary sleight-of-hand. You don’t know what the trick’s going to be, or when he’s going to do it. Afterwards, you’re not even sure if the trick has been performed, or what the point of it was. Then you mull it over. And most of the time, you decide: Wow! That was impressive!

I’ve added ‘most of the time’, though, as a disclaimer to that last sentence. Because, very occasionally, my reaction to an Aickman story has been different: What a load of bollocks!

I first came across Aickman’s work in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when his stories cropped up in horror anthologies such as The Far Reaches of Fear (1976), New Terrors (1980) and Dark Forces (1980). Although in those collections they rubbed shoulders with some grisly items, Aickman’s stories didn’t fit comfortably with the ‘horror’ label. And the claim that some people made about him, that he was actually a ‘ghost’ story writer in the mould of M.R. James, didn’t convince either. Aickman liked to describe his stories as ‘strange’ ones and ‘strange’ is the adjective I’d attach to them too.

It wasn’t just his fiction that seemed out-of-place. Aickman himself seemed out-of-place in post-war Britain, being a man of old-fashioned views and erudite – some would say ‘elitist’ – tastes. He was a conservationist who co-founded the Inland Waterways Association and battled to prevent Britain’s no-longer-in-commercial-use canal system from being filled in; a political conservative; and a connoisseur of ballet, opera, classical music and highbrow theatre. I imagine that by the 1970s, when the UK’s political and cultural landscape was one of Labour governments and frequent industrial action by trade unions, glam rock and bubble-gum pop music, platform heels and loon pants, and cheap, cheerful and massively popular television sitcoms like Man about the House (1973-76) and On the Buses (1969-73), he was not a particularly happy bunny.

Inevitably, this sense of alienation appears in his fiction. His stories feature a lot of discontented middle-aged men (or women) who are set in their ways and don’t do a good job coping with a changing, modern world that seems diametrically opposed to their ways.

I found much of Aickman’s work baffling when, as a teenager, I first encountered it. However, I was impressed by his contribution to New Terrors, a 55-page story called The Stains. It tells the tale of Stephen, a widowed civil servant, who meets a mysterious, wild-seeming, almost dryad-like girl called Nell whilst rambling on some remote moors. Stephen becomes infatuated with Nell, with the result that he takes early retirement from his job, abandons his ties with the ‘civilised’ world and attempts to live with her in an empty, tumbledown house on the moors. Yet the story is no New Age male fantasy. Aickman steers it in a darker direction. Nell seems to embody the natural world, but nature soon intrudes on her relationship with Stephen in a more grotesque way. As their romance progresses, Stephen notices weird moulds, fungi and lichen spreading across the walls and furniture around him. There are even hints that these agents of decay have manifested themselves on his flesh too, which I suppose makes the story an example of what would later be known as ‘body horror’.

The Stains is regarded as one of Aickman’s most autobiographical stories. Many people see in Stephen’s unpleasantly doomed relationship with Nell a metaphor for Aickman’s love affair with the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard. After being involved with him, and then with Laurie Lee and Arthur Koestler, Howard married Kingsley Amis in 1965. Aickman, whose obsession with Howard was described by one friend as a ‘mental aberration’, must have found the thought that she’d chosen the increasingly boorish Amis over him hard to stomach. Incidentally, like several of Aickman’s stories, The Stains shows that he wasn’t afraid to infuse his work – no matter how fuddy-duddy the characters – with a strong dose of the erotic.

My teenage self was sufficiently curious to seek out more of Aickman’s work and I located two collections of his short stories, Dark Entries (1964) and Cold Hand in Mine (1975). Predictably, some of those stories bewildered me, and a few irritated me; but several, like The Stains, have haunted me ever since. By the way, I wonder if a young Peter Murphy got his goth-y hands on the earlier collection and was so impressed by it that he pinched its title for the Bauhaus song Dark Entries, their second single, which they released in 1980.

One story I remember well is The Swords, in which a young travelling salesman goes to bed with a strangely blank woman whom he encounters at a seedy carnival sideshow. Again, this allows Aickman to serve up some disquieting body horror at the story’s close. Also memorable is The Hospice, a Kafka-esque tale of a motorist getting lost at night and asking for shelter at the titular institution. Inside the hospice, he notices odd things about how the inmates are cared for. For instance, in the dining room, he sees that one patient is discreetly shackled to the floor.

And in the award-winning Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal, Aickman tackles one of the commonest tropes in horror fiction in one of its most traditional settings. This purports to be a series of diary entries written by a young woman in 1815 who’s accompanying her parents on a tour of central Europe. She becomes excited when she discovers that they’re in the same neighbourhood as her secret hero, Lord Byron, who lives there ‘in riot and wickedness’. And she soon encounters her own personal Lord Bryon in the form of a mysterious gentleman attending a local contessa’s party. His ‘skin is somewhat pallid’, his nose is ‘aquiline and commanding’ and, most suspiciously of all, his mouth is ‘scarlet’. You can guess where this is heading.

Aickman’s approach to telling creepy stories was subtle, mannered and leisurely. Often, his stories needed a lot of build-up before they reached their denouements. By the start of the 1980s, this seemed anachronistic. The British tradition of horror fiction had been subtle, mannered and leisurely once, in the days of M.R. James and E.F. Benson, but it’d experienced a punk-rock moment in the mid-1970s when James Herbert unleashed a slew of bestselling horror novels like The Rats (1974) and The Fog (1975) that were unapologetically in your face with gore and violence. And a little later, in the 1980s, Clive Barker’s Books of Blood series (1984-85) would pioneer a style of horror-writing that was in equal parts perverse, visionary and wildly gruesome.

So when I read in 1981 that Aickman had died of cancer – which, in his typically obstinate way, he’d refused to have any conventional medical treatment for, preferring instead to rely on dubious ‘homeopathic’ cures – I assumed, sadly, that his work would soon be out of fashion, out of print and out of readers’ memories.

Years later, I stumbled across a copy of a posthumously-published collection by him called The Unsettled Dust (1990). It contained one or two stories that annoyed me, but generally I greatly enjoyed it. By now I knew what to expect from Aickman and was mature enough to appreciate his elegant prose, his subtle build-up of suspense, his oddball but well-drawn characters and his moments of utter strangeness. Admittedly, I sometimes wasn’t sure what happened at the stories’ ends. And even after thinking about them carefully, I still wasn’t sure. But what the hell? With Aickman, the pleasure was in getting there.

I particularly liked the title story, in which an official stays at a stately home whilst negotiating the transfer of the house’s running from the hands of its aristocratic inhabitants into the hands of the National Trust. He discovers a peculiar room deep inside the house where, like in a giant snow globe, huge patches of dust are continually and spectrally floating through the air. This illustrates another of Aickman’s abilities, to convincingly weave into his stories scenes and incidents that are totally outlandish. So sober is the tone of everything else going on that you readily accept these mad bits as parts of the narrative.

Nonetheless, it seemed appropriate that I found The Unsettled Dust in a rack of second-hand books in a corner of a small antiques shop in a village in rural County Suffolk – an obscure place to find an obscure book by an obscure writer.

But, happily, I was wrong. Recent years have seen a revival of interest in Robert Aickman, which reached a peak in 2014, the centenary of his year of birth, when Faber & Faber republished The Wine-Dark Sea, Dark Entries, Cold Hand in Mind and The Unsettled Dust. His work has been championed by Neil Gaiman; by Jeremy Dyson, Mark Gatiss and Reece Shearsmith of the influentially bizarre television show The League of Gentlemen (1999-2002, 2017); and by Dame Edna Everage herself (or himself), Barry Humphries, who in addition to being a comedian and actor is a committed bibliophile with a library of 25,000 books. And the Guardian, Independent and Daily Telegraph have all printed articles about him lately.

I’ve just finished reading The Wine-Dark Sea and it’s possibly my favourite Aickman collection yet. I wouldn’t say it’s perfect, though. This being Aickman, there has to be at least one story that gets on my wick. In this case the offender is Growing Boys, a satiric fantasy about a woman who has to deal with two sons growing at a supernatural rate, to a supernatural size, and becoming criminal psychopaths. An ineffectual police force, an ineffectual school system and an ineffectual father (more interested in running for parliament as a Liberal Party candidate) do nothing to stop them. Aickman uses the story to bemoan the delinquency of the younger generation and the inadequacy of Britain’s post-war institutions. It’s reactionary but, much worse, it isn’t funny.

On the other hand, my favourite story here is The Inner Room. It’s about a haunted doll’s house, which is a staple of many scary stories, most famously one written by M.R. James called – surprise! – The Haunted Dolls House. Aickman, however, treats the subject with dark humour. The story’s climax is unexpectedly and phantasmagorically weird, meanwhile, and reminds me a little of the work of Angela Carter.

Elsewhere, both Never Visit Venice and Your Tiny Hand is Frozen suggest Aickman taking two of his modern-day bugbears and transforming his indignation at them into horror stories. Never Visit Venice lays into mass tourism. Its hero is so disappointed in how the city of the title has been degraded by sightseers that, unwisely, he ends up taking a ride in an infernal gondola that seems to have been punted out through the gates of hell. Your Tiny Hand is Frozen features an unsociable man who becomes addicted to his telephone, through which he communicates with a strange woman who may or may not really exist. Telephones were becoming increasingly widespread at the time the story was written, presumably to Aickman’s discomfort. It’s just as well that he didn’t live to see the situation today when smartphones have practically taken over the world.

Incidentally, so in vogue is Aickman now that there’s even a Facebook page and Twitter account devoted to him. Robert Aickman with a presence on 21^st-century social media? I’m sure he would have loved that. Not.