Wednesday 6 March 2024

Correspondence between Robert Aickman and Edith Tyler, March 1937 to August 1940


One of the great loves of Robert Aickman’s life was Edith Tyler, whom he called ‘Eve’ in The Attempted Rescue, presumably to hide her identity. When his autobiography was published in 1966 she may have been still alive, and perhaps had a family. Recently discovered love letters exchanged by Robert and Edith corroborate many of the details he gave in The Attempted Rescue, but Aickman appears to have re-written their history in a few respects.

Robert and Edith met in 1937, at a time when both were living bohemian existences in London. It is not surprising that he omitted to mention that when they became lovers she was a married woman. It is unclear whether Edith was estranged from her husband, but she and Aickman were at pains to keep their relationship out of the public eye, and especially unnoticed by her family. She was 29 and he was 23.
 
The letters are full of their love for each other, which is obviously sincere, although Aickman is by far the more conscientious and assiduous letter-writer. He makes a point of asking Tyler to preserve the letters, and she writes, ‘I know you like to keep track of your literary efforts’. At one point he says the letters may one day be published, and when their relationship ended she returned them all to him. Most of Aickman’s letters to Tyler contained an extra sheet of notepaper on which he quoted from his favourite writers, including Oscar Wilde, Gabrielle D’Anunzio and Oliver Onions.


It is clear that Aickman preserved their love letters for posterity, and he would have been able to consult them when writing The Attempted Rescue. Nevertheless, he knowingly altered the facts beyond what was required to simply preserve Edith’s privacy. For example, he wrote that they ‘moved into’ a disused windmill at Baldslow just before the start of the Second World War. It is offered as an important moment—the last period of true happiness he would ever experience in his life. He wrote to Audrey Linley in April 1940 that during the summer of 1939, he spent ‘three weeks in a windmill which I leased with some friends,’ which a different story already. But the letters clearly show that it was Edith’s family who rented the Windmill, briefly, and that Aickman visited them on only a couple of occasions. (He left at one point because it was important for him to go to the first night of the Proms.)

He also wrote that when war broke out, Edith was sent to Liverpool ‘for a few weeks’ to be trained before departing for the West Indies. These details may have been made up so that she could not be identified, but when she moved to Liverpool she was to stay there for the rest of the war, and beyond. She went to work for the Postal Censorship (which greatly annoyed Robert), and while in Liverpool she met John Mallinson, whom she married. There may have been a very good reason for Aickman altering some of the facts, but it is strange that he felt the need to show her in a bad light by saying she thought he resented her for going to somewhere as nice as the (fictional) West Indies.


The correspondence between Aickman and Tyler is fascinating, not least for what it tells us about Aickman’s view of life when he was in his early/mid twenties. His interests and obsessions, his loves and fears, are all those that he appears to have carried into maturity. They reveal that an ordinary, conventional life of work and family was anathema to Aickman; only the arts were of any importance to him. The arts . . . and love.
 
While protesting his love for Tyler, Aickman devotes an equal amount of time in his letters to the organisation of visits to the theatre and to concerts. He refers to himself as an artist, but it is not clear what creative work he may be doing, and no writing projects are mentioned. His ambitious philosophical work, Panacea, seems to have already been completed. He complains of having very little money, but he is unwilling to find employment. There is brief mention of him attempting to help set straight his father’s business affairs, but this is only in passing. Aickman’s claim that he and ‘Eve’ dreamed of living together in a studio is corroborated by the letters, and he may have been correct to say that to afford such accommodation would have meant finding employment to pay the rent. He implies they were both equally unrealistic, but during their relationship Eve was always employed, first in the Staff Training Department at Harrods department store in London, and later for the Censorship in Liverpool. It was Robert who was unwilling to find a job that would have meant they could have rented their studio and lived together. Aickman is dreaming of an ideal that he is unwilling to try and realise. 


Aickman also explains how they must not make onerous demands on each other and tie the other down. For him, their great love exists because they are free of commitment, and he makes it very clear that he does not believe in marriage. Their free and easy relationship seems to have appealed to Tyler as much as to Aickman, at least to begin with. He also discusses the fact that he is at ease with her seeing other men, as long as he is still considered the most important man in her life. Again, he dreams of an ideal, but must know it is unworkable. It seems he thinks the ‘miracle’ he failed to perform was to offer her marriage.
 
One can’t help thinking that in those worrying and uncertain times, as war loomed, Aickman found solace in romance, while Tyler enjoyed the attentions of a fervent young lover. She then met somebody who not only offered her love, but the development of a long-term, workable relationship. Aickman would spend the rest of his life looking for other women who would not spoil his dreams by engaging with the conventional, everyday world.
 
Edith is not quite honest with Robert as to when she was married, and she returns his letters stating that he has reminded her often enough how important his writing is to him. He would thus be able to keep both sides of the correspondence for posterity.
 

Robert Aickman: A Biography, by R.B. Russell, Tartarus Press, 2023

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Heather Smith, and Artellus, Ltd.

All photos, unless otherwise stated, are copyright Estate of Robert Aickman/British Library/R.B. Russell, and are not to be reproduced without permission and acknowledgement.

Monday 19 February 2024

The Hill of Dreams and The House of Souls



The very first Tartarus Press publication, 34 years ago, was a small booklet entitled The Anatomy of Taverns, celebrating Arthur Machen’s favourite public houses. Our first hardback was the first ever publication of ‘Chapters Five and Six’ of Machen’s The Secret Glory, and we have always had a number of books by the author in print over the years, both as collectable hardbacks and affordable paperbacks.

This February we are delighted to make available once more, two very important sewn hardback editions of books by Machen:


The Hill of Dreams, lauded by writers as diverse as H.P. Lovecraft and Henry Miller, has been described as ‘The most decadent book in the world’. A novel of great power and beauty, it was Machen’s attempt ‘. . . to invent a story which would recreate those vague impressions of wonder and awe and mystery that I myself had received from the form and shape of the land of my boyhood and youth.’

We have also been able to bring back into print The House of Souls, an omnibus edition of some of Arthur Machen’s best-known, controversial, and curious fiction, first published in 1906. It contains ‘The Great God Pan’, his notorious 1890s tale of science and sex, and its accompanying story ‘The Inmost Light’. These appeared first in John Lane’s sensational Keynotes series, as did the portmanteau novel The Three Impostors, containing ‘The Novel of the White Powder’—another story of science gone bad—and the classic folk-horror tale ‘The Novel of the Black Seal’. ‘The Red Hand’ is a ‘shocking’ tale of curious survivals from the past lurking just beneath the surface of everyday London.

In an altogether more sensitively supernatural vein is ‘A Fragment of Life’, a quietly ambitious and affecting tale of a seemingly ordinary suburban couple who receive intimations of a much more numinous way of life.

But the tour-de-force of the volume is Machen’s occult masterpiece ‘The White People’, a ‘stream-of-consciousness’ tale far ahead of its time, written with the utmost empathy and panache.

Still in print and available as a sewn hardback is the now complete text of Machen’s novel, The Secret Glory. Ambrose Meyrick is at first a pupil at a hateful English public school, then a young man at large in bohemian London. Throughout his adventures, Ambrose cherishes his childhood vision of the mystical cup of Teilo Sant. But the young man also displays a fine delight in the good things the world can offer, and a few weeks spent with school servant Nellie Foran in a London lodging house prove a turning point in his life. When Ambrose returns home to his native Wales, Machen describes, in writing of great beauty and power, how Ambrose rediscovers the magical Gwent countryside, and performs the marriage of the cup with Sylvia, his symbolic muse.

Also available in paperback are Arthur Machen’s 1890s Notebook, which gives a great insight into the background to some of his most important writings, including The Hill of Dreams. We can also offer Dreads and Drolls, a series of essays, and the very curious book, The House of the Hidden Light (written with A.E. Waite)

Anyone who would like to go further into Machen’s books and writings might be interested in a series of videos entitled Collecting Arthur Machen:

Thursday 9 March 2023

Is Artificial Intelligence the Work of the Devil?

 
AI Artwork for boards, Literary Hauntings, Tartarus Press, 2022.
 
Artificial Intelligence is likely to revolutionise a wide variety of human activities, but while it may prove beneficial in many ways, it also has the potential to make some established occupations redundant, from mundane and repetitive jobs right through to positions in the creative and problem-solving professions. The anger of those who rail against AI is heartfelt and not without justification, but one cannot help being reminded of the nineteenth-century Luddites who destroyed textile machines in the belief they could halt industrialisation. They didn’t. It is not possible to put the AI genii back in the bottle, which means, like it or not, that we are going to have to adapt to it, work with it, and consider ways to mitigate any damage.

In our world of publishing there are two major concerns relating to AI. The first is AI generated text, and the second is AI art. Thankfully, AI text is still in its infancy. It can create quite useful results if asked to write about widely-considered, factual matters, and it will do so with a level of competence that is likely to become more impressive over time. However, anything that requires a little specialist knowledge, is slightly outside the mainstream, or is discussed in printed books rather than shared online, causes AI generated text to be full of obvious mistakes. The biggest concern at the moment is not that Artificial Intelligence is knowingly trying to mislead us*, but that it is very good at appearing plausible when it cannot find the information it requires. With just a little material it will generate a believable fiction to cover lacunae in its knowledge. (If asked for references to back up its claims, it may even create impressive-sounding but non-existent references.) AI may have already made redundant some authors of factual material, but editors are needed now more than ever because of AI’s dangerous potential for misleading readers.

Considering its ability to pass off fiction as fact, it is perhaps surprising that AI text is also failing to generate plausible creative content. Its attempts at stories, poetry, etc, are laughable, although these are likely to get better with time (and maybe not much time). At the moment the main problem in the world of publishing is that some people are using it to overwhelm editors with third-rate submissions. Looking into the future, if AI text continues to improve, there is a possible scenario of publishers having to choose between the work of human authors and AI generated texts of an equal quality. This would raise some very profound philosophical questions about the nature of literature and why we read it.

 Book jacket ideas created with AI.

However, the most pressing questions that need to be addressed today relate to AI art, because it is already being used by publishers, including Tartarus Press. Some AI art can be incredibly good, although it is not always recognised that some experience of writing the correct prompts is needed, and that digital re-touching is almost always required (the analogy is with editors who work on AI text). Is AI art likely to damage the livelihoods of artists? Almost certainly, especially commercial artists. For publishers, it is another alternative to conventional, hand-produced art in exactly the same way that photography became an alternative at the end of the nineteenth century, through to digital art in the early twenty-first century.   

AI art is a powerful and beguiling tool, but those using AI are not artists. Rather, they are akin to old-fashioned art directors who would previously have had discussions with a human artist as to what kind of image was required and achievable for a specific brief, asking for alternative options to consider, and fine-tuning the result. It is possible to generate good quality AI images in a fraction of the time and cost of working with a real artist, but AI art generated with simple prompts is easily recognisable as such by anyone who has used it for a short time. The creator of AI art has to be aware of such failings as its inability to generate hands with the expected numbers of fingers and thumbs. (In our field of weird and strange fiction, the errors in AI art generation, may, though, produce unintended and atmospheric results!)

AI art can create images in virtually any style you can imagine.

Before we go any further, there is a major ethical discussion to be had about copyright. Artificial Intelligence programmes ‘learn’ by feeding indiscriminately and voraciously on information supplied to them. It is possible to simply ask for a picture to be created in the style of an established artist, and this not only feels wrong, but any attempt to pass the work off as being by that artist is obviously illegal. This, though, is not a modern dilemma—the art world has had to grapple with similar problems down the centuries. There have always been ‘schools’ inspired by successful artists, outright imitators, and those who study the work of predecessors which they then attempt to improve. One major problem is that AI in its text and art forms is unable to ‘show its workings’ (as maths teachers still require).

There will always be a demand for artists using traditional materials and media, and many artists feel compelled to draw and paint whether or not they receive employment or recognition. Times will be getting much more difficult for them, but that has been the case not just since the invention of lithographic reproduction and photography, and most recently since digital artists appeared on the scene. Artists have always found that they need to adapt—very few work in a way that could be considered ‘pure’, standing at an easel with their subject in front of them. At Tartarus Press we have very recently been working with an artist who paints subjects in oil inspired by their own imagination, another who uses oils and works from photographs, another who draws in pen and ink based on all manner of existing images, and another whose work is entirely digital, but who does not use AI. Few artists are ‘pure’ in their art—they are on a spectrum, not only for how they conceive imagery, but how it is created and manipulated . . . and the furthest boundary of that spectrum has just been moved further away again in a manner we could not have conceived of only a few years ago. I am aware of artists who now use AI to inspire conventional artwork that is rendered by hand on paper.

To sum up, AI is here, and it isn’t going away. We believe that it should be possible to work with it ethically and harness its many possibilities. And we will continue to work with real, living artists too!

Recent art on Tartarus Press volumes by contemporary artists (left to right) Joseph Dawson, Kathleen Jennings, Gina Litherland, R.B. Russell, Eric Hansen, Reggie Oliver and Stephen J. Clark.

* This is not the place to discuss the concerns that AI might be used to manipulate our thoughts and even control our lives. There have always been information and news providers with biases and agendas, and just because their dubious content can now be generated by computers rather than people doesn’t alter our need to be vigilant. At all times, even before the advent of the internet and digital fakery, we have had to be wary of who is trying to exert influence by offering partial information or downright lying. To really understand the dangers of the mass media, we have to go back to Caxton and the first printing press.

Friday 24 February 2023

Dream Fox and Other Strange Stories – A Memoir and Manifesto by Rosalie Parker

Some of my earliest memories are of books. I was an early reader and spent a lot of my childhood and teens on our isolated family farm with my nose in a wide variety of books, often chosen for me by my mother during her weekly visit to our local library. They ranged from popular science and history to all kinds – and I mean all kinds of fiction. At around seven I began writing stories which I read aloud to Duncan, my long suffering little brother. As far as I can remember, those early stories often featured animals. No one in my family had been to university at that time, and when one of my English teachers suggested I should do an English degree, a whole new world of possibilities opened up. I was lucky enough to benefit from the expansion of higher education in England in the 1970s, and from a solid education at a state comprehensive school.

After completing a degree in English Literature and History, I spent several years trying to find a way to earn my living as a writer. I hadn’t a bean at the time, and worked in a part-time job in a shop and lived in some very cold rented flats, but the main problem was that I didn’t really know what I wanted to write about. In the end I realised I needed to live a bit more first. I went back to university and pursued a career in archaeology, a subject I that had always interested me, met Ray, produced our son Tim, and eventually joined Ray in running Tartarus Press.

This all sounds pretty idyllic, except that something fairly traumatic happened to me in my forties. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and, as well as some of the inevitable horrors of the ups and downs, sledgehammer medication and occasional hospital admissions this entails, I also have to live with the stigma and prejudice experienced by many people like me. Often, especially by some health professionals, you’re seen only through the prism of your condition. Somewhat under the radar, I managed throughout this difficult period to continue my work for Tartarus Press.

While still being advised to take one of the worst of the pills, and feeling life was hardly worth living, out of a strange mixture of desperation and hope I returned to writing short stories. A few of them were published in anthologies, and in 2010, Brian Showers at Swan River Press in Dublin very kindly agreed to publish my first collection, The Old Knowledge. I think there was some luck involved there. If I hadn’t already achieved some kind of profile as an editor, my stories might never have seen the light of day.

Some of my stories deal overtly with mental illness (especially ‘Bipolarity’), and I have been open about my experience of it in interviews. I wanted to make it doubly clear here that I am writing from personal experience, and not just picking a subject off a peg. I often write about things I have strong views about - some of them political. I don’t think my writing is therapy, more a creative exploration of the things that are most important to me, and which interest me. Sometimes I have no idea where a story comes from.

Since The Old Knowledge I’ve written three more collections, and now Dream Fox and Other Strange Stories has just been published by Tartarus. There are eighteen short stories and a kind of book within a book, ‘Mary Belgrove’s Book of Unusual Experiences’, which started life as an attempt to write a novel. It was supposed to have been a sort of ‘portmanteau’ novel, with various component parts. I wanted to write a novel because they’re generally taken more seriously than short story collections in the wider world of publishing. Also, I thought that if I didn’t at least try now, I might never get round to it! However, I soon had to accept that I was essentially writing a group of related short stories, and, anyway, instead of trying to get away from short stories, I should be celebrating them!

I hope if you decide to read the hardback or ebook of Dream Fox, you will enjoy the stories and find them interesting. I wrote them to be read, and I’m glad they’re out there. The rest is up to you.

www.rosalieparker.co.uk

Correspondence between Robert Aickman and Edith Tyler, March 1937 to August 1940

One of the great loves of Robert Aickman’s life was Edith Tyler, whom he called ‘Eve’ in The Attempted Rescue , presumably to hide her ident...