Robert Aickman’s Favourite Film: The Blue Light

In 1966 Robert Aickman devoted most of Chapter Twenty-Four of The Attempted Rescue to a lengthy description of his favourite film, Leni Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light (1932). He wrote: 

 

I saw it again and again, as an allegory so near to my heart

   In The Blue Light the heroine, Junta (Riefenstahl), lives apart from her fellow villagers, and is popularly considered to be a witch. She is shown roaming over the mountains and through the woods as a free spirit. At the time of the full moon, light enters a grotto on the mountainside, illuminating the crystals inside which give off a beautiful blue light. This place is sacred to Junta. However, the blue light can also be seen from a distance by the young men of the village. The light appears to bewitch them and when they attempt to reach it they fall to their deaths.

   The hero, Vigo, a painter from the city, visits the village and falls in love with Junta, despite (or because of?) her persecution at the hands of the locals. He later saves her from the villagers after another young man dies, and follows her to the cabin where she lives. At the next full moon he sees her climbing to the grotto and follows her, finding her inside in a state of ecstasy, bathed in the mystical blue light.

 

Junta in the grotto on the mountainside

   Vigo realises the value of the crystals, and now he knows how to reach the grotto. He hopes to help both Junta and the villagers by revealing his knowledge. The villagers remove the crystals and sell them, but Junta is devastated by the desecration of her sacred place, and by her misplaced trust in the hapless hero. Her body is discovered by Vigo after she falls to her death. 

   For Aickman the allegory is clear—there is truth, beauty, mystery and love in this world, but it is destroyed by the greed and ignorance of modern man.

When The Blue Light was re-released on DVD in 2010, it was reviewed in Video Watchdog (#159) by Aickman’s old friend, Ramsey Campbell, who pointed out that there had been several different edits of the film over the years (including a silent version with inappropriate music and many cuts, as well as one prepared by Riefenstahl herself in which the uncanny elements are downplayed). Campbell also pointed out another apparent variant—the one that Aickman relates in The Attempted Rescue.

 

[Aickman] has Vigo learning of the blue light when he watches all the men of the village attempt to scale the mountain with ladders, and Vigo later climbs the mountain in their company but reaches the summit alone. In Aickman’s version it’s Vigo who finds the cave despoiled because ‘the villagers have called in experts’, and the film ends with him roaming the mountains and vainly calling Junta’s name. I don’t think any amount of re-editing could change the film so radically, and must conclude that this vision was to some extent Aickman’s own.

 

   It is very odd that Robert Aickman should get the plot of his favourite film so wrong—a film that he had seen ‘again and again’, and often cited as an example of great film-making. Although he did not have the modern luxury of being able to view the film at home whenever he wanted to, being such an admirer, and living in London, he would have had many opportunities to see it over the years. 

   For Aickman to call the villagers who mine the crystals ‘experts’ is characteristic Aickmanesque propaganda—he distrusted experts, and although this might be viewed as an affectation or an excuse for his own shortcomings, it was nevertheless sincere (and it may have resulted in his early death). 

   However, to have made errors in describing the plot is more difficult to explain. Aickman re-tells the story from the idealised viewpoint of the hero, Vigo, and it is his part in the story that is altered and embellished. It seems possible that Aickman was so enamoured of the film, and thought about it so often, that he imagined alternative scenarios, and that these became more real to him than the film he had seen. We know that he was a great admirer of Riefenstahl, and even went so far as to write to her. An old friend has said he was ‘potty’ about her. When he wrote about Riefenstahl in The Attempted Rescue he portrayed her as a beautiful victim and refused to accept that she was anything other than innocent in her associations with Hitler and the Nazis. It is not too fanciful to believe that in Aickman’s imagination he merged Riefenstahl and her character, Junta, who is likewise persecuted. He may even have imagined himself as Vigo, the doomed lover of the beautiful heroine who must be revealed as innocent of the crimes of which she is accused.

 

Vigo and Junta

It is telling that when Aickman and Elizabeth Jane Howard were putting together the stories that would be published as We Are for the Dark, Aickman considered using a pen name—Robert Vigo:

Corrected title page of typescript of We Are For the Dark

 

You can order Robert Aickman: An Attempted Biography now. It will be published February 3rd, 2022.

Robert Aickman: An Attempted Biography, by R.B. Russell, Tartarus Press, 2022

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.

Robert Aickman: Worton Court

Worton Court c.1945

One of the highlights of Robert Aickman’s autobiography, The Attempted Rescue, is is his evocation of Worton Court, a historic William-and-Mary house that stood in Isleworth, Middlesex, and which was at one time the home of his great uncle, Harry Heldmann. During his childhood, Aickman stayed at Worton Court with his mother for ‘frequent periods’, and it provided to be a model for him of how he believed life should be lived. He wrote:

The idea that my Great-Uncle’s ménage would represent a splendour which later in my own lifetime would be unattempted even by a prominent chairman of companies, would have seemed inconceivable, pessimist though I already was. I am glad to have known Versailles in its greatness . . .

 Aickman described, over many pages, Worton Court’s four reception rooms, with the library, billiard room and study, the ten bedrooms, hallways, corridors, and wine cellars, noting also that there were servants’ quarters (which he was not allowed to enter). He described the fascinating furniture, textiles, pictures and ornaments (including ‘a complete suit of black Japanese armour’). Additionally, there were extensive gardens. His great uncle’s behaviour at meal times was described as ‘patrician’ and the young Aickman determined ‘to soar’ to the same state when older. He recounted his great uncle’s many achievements, and described his forceful personality, summed up in the portrait:

The animals barked around him as he strode, a white-haired Dionysus.

 

 

Alice and Harry Heldman

 

Aickman seems to have been under the impression that there was a large family fortune and an impressive social standing that was lost following the death of his great uncle, and then his great aunt. However, unknown to Aickman, Worton Court was only ever leased by Harry Heldmann, a self-made man who worked in the City of London. At great uncle Harry’s death in 1932, he did leave a large amount of money in his will, but this was dispersed through subsequent generations. Despite his complaints, it also resulted in a small legacy for Aickman himself. Great Aunt Alice, Harry’s sister, continued to live in the house until her death in 1938.

 

 

Worton Court Sale Particulars

 

 

Cutting from Middlesex Chronicle, 25th February 1939

 

The 1939 particulars of the sale of contents of Worton Court corroborate Aickman’s account of the lavish style in which the Heldmanns lived. Sadly, the estate was sold to a property speculator just before the war began, and the house stood empty and derelict for several years before being pulled down. When I started to research Aickman’s biography I discovered that I had just missed buying a set of photographs of Worton Court from an online auction. Intriguingly, one had written on the back:

 

 

Some say it was a prison. 

But on the floor was a sheet of music with the title “Home Sweet Home”

 The photographs seem to have been taken in April 1940 by Herbert Jones, but the provenance of the inscription is impossible to research. It is interesting that Aickman also suggested that everything was not necessarily unalloyed happiness at Worton Court. In The Attempted Rescue, Aickman has the fascinating tendency to undermine and even attack that which he claims to have loved. Writing about a ‘dim daguerreotype’ of his great grand­father that he salvaged from Worton Court, he wrote:

 

I do not care to forget the past, indefinite though it was, and mostly, at the time, very unpleas­ant.

making the reader question whether his feelings should really be called ‘nostalgia’, that is, a sentimental longing for the past. However, one must remember that he complained that the Inland Waterways Association was a:

. . . quest for happiness in a world where happiness is impossible.

Aickman’s nostalgia was knowingly romantic. The ‘dim daguerreotype’ is meant to have included a painting of flowers which Aickman attributed to a Great Aunt, and this was bought by him at the Worton Court sale in 1938:

I often gaze at it [the portrait of flowers], recalling a past I never knew, of which, indeed, I might even claim to have been consciously deprived. . . . It stood, when I was young, in the ornate Worton Court Drawing Room, to the left of the first door through to the Dining Room, on a moulding which ran round the room (including the Dining Room door) about three feet from the floor.

which sounds very much like nostalgia, as does the fact that on the mantelpiece of his various homes Aickman always gave pride of place to an Ormolu clock with match­ing urn garnitures that also came from Wor­ton Court. Throughout his life it had an almost hurried, though impercep­tible tick, and would strike the hours (and half hour) with a slow, solemn and quiet authority.

   When Aickman’s Great Aunt Alice died, his father apparently instructed him to go to Worton Court to ‘take charge’. Although the servants were in a ‘vague’ panic, he viewed Alice’s body in her ‘congested, dark-green, necromantic room’, before going downstairs where he ‘rallied the servants with mysterious success’.

   Aickman seems to have spent time at Worton Court at this time, suggesting that he was given certain duties, although his mother’s sister, Aunt (Madge) Shaw actually moved in to oversee the breaking up of the Heldmann estate,

  

. . . and the great, dark house became almost gay for the months that the formalities lasted. Nothing in any of our times had so become the old place as the leaving of it. One’s mind was at last free to see how beautiful it was; and with the extra beauty of tragedy added, for demolition and destruction could hardly be avoided.

   Aickman spent time in the surroundings to which he aspired, and he is known to have invited both Audrey Linley and Edith Taylor (‘Eve’) there to dinner on occasion, although the house was presumably being emptied and prepared for sale. Aunt Shaw would have been letting the servants go, and the contents were being by the auctioneers in preparation for the sale.

   Aickman wrote to Edith Taylor on 3rd December 1939, with reference to her visit to Worton Court shortly before:

Sweet one,
   The room where you dined is empty; and the garden where I am so very glad you walked that night, is overgrown and the long pergola is fallen. The windows are broken, the glass in the really magnificent library bookcases is likewise, three enormous boards announce Luxury Houses in this Delightful Old Garden, and four such houses of an almost incredible, quite monumental nastiness have duly appeared in the meadow in front of the house. . . .
   I am filled with distaste for the sheer staleness of a people which will pay £795 (the price exacted) for houses of such utter nastiness; people to whom this Delightful Old Garden seems a delightful place of residence. . . .
   When I see you again I will give you a dead rose. Plucked, I could say, from the garden, which an age ago was my family’s, but is now the roosting dump of men and women without souls (necessarily in that they live in such a place). I could say it, but it would not be true. There were no roses blooming; and if they had been, I should have forgotten to pluck one.

Aickman was a morbid romantic. He knew that the past was not just irrecoverable, but had likely never been as he enjoyed imagining it. He aspired to the impossible, knowing that it could never be gained, and he seems to have found perverse comfort in this. It enabled him to attack the present day for not being how he fantasised the past.

He noted that Worton Court was finally pulled down after the war:

The past is condensed into the name of one of the new suburban roads. It has been called Heldmann Close. It is a cul-de-sac.

   This is reported with obvious sadness at the passing of greatness, testifying to the crass philistinism of the present, but it is possible to also detect a relish in this justifying of his innate pessimism.

 

Robert Aickman: An Attempted Biography, by R.B. Russell, Tartarus Press, 2022

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.

Robert Aickman: A Curious Lack of Honours

Robert Aickman introducing the Queen Mother to David Hutchings, 1974

Robert Aickman was the co-founder of the Inland Waterways Association, and for many years its driving-force and main spokesman as the IWA campaigned for the restoration of Britain’s waterways. It is curious that despite his work he never received any official honour or recognition, as, for example, did David Hutchings, who received an M.B.E. for being the prime mover in the restoration of several canals. 

It cannot have helped his cause that Aickman was a rather divisive character, splitting the membership of the Association, causing, in effect, a civil war. His dogmatic approach was one reason why some regional branches disassociated themselves from the I.W.A. But despite these battles, the stated aims of the association were eventually met and its work is widely considered to have been a success.

The reason Aickman did not receive an M.B.E., a peerage or knighthood is that he made enemies in high places. Sir John Smith at a Memorial Tribute to Robert Aickman explained:

To further a cause, you have first to gain attention, particularly from those in authority. There are two ways of doing this; you can cajole and influence and generally stroke the ears, or you can attract a person’s attention by punching him on the nose. Robert belonged to the latter school of thought with this important refinement—he made the opposition look ridiculous as well.

According to Hugh McKnight, the photographer and commentator on the waterways:

. . . . people in high places put his name forward, only for the proposal to be blocked by a man that Aickman had insulted in the most unkind, uncalled for, and unprovoked manner years earlier. Meanwhile, that person progressed to a position of power and influence. Time passed and the application was repeated. Once more, it arrived on the desk of Aickman’s enemy and once more the idea was dis­carded. A member of the House of Lords, mystified at this outcome, told me that he was astonished at such an unheard of double rejection.

 

Hugh McKnight is waiting until the publication of his own memoirs before making public the name of the man who blocked Aickman’s honours.

You can order Robert Aickman: An Attempted Biography now. It will be published February 3rd, 2022.

 

Robert Aickman: An Attempted Biography, by R.B. Russell, Tartarus Press, 2022

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.