Robert Aickman and the English Abroad

The novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, Robert Aickman’s sometime lover and collaborator, described him as “unusual and intriguing”. Her biographer, Artemis Cooper, is less forgiving, depicting Aickman as “‘a strange man’ notable for his ‘high-minded intensity’,” his hatred of technology, his rosy vision of the past, and his disregard for marital fidelity. It has often been suggested that British fiction of the 1950s and 1960s was parochial and inward-looking, dominated by a realism obsessively preoccupied with questions of social class. This may have been the case in certain areas of “literary” and indeed, middlebrow fiction, but experimentation thrived in the margins, where writers looked to Europe, the United States, and Latin America for technical invigoration. Folktales frequently emphasize the dangers of marrying those from outside one’s own culture or region. Wandering the woods amounts to “a melancholy liberation but it is liberation nonetheless”.