Today is Robert Aickman's 98th birthday, and in honor of that, here are some thoughts on my favorite Aickman story, "The Stains". I've been meaning to write about Aickman's work, and this story in particular, for a long time, but I have found it difficult to muster the courage to write about works that are so mysterious, so ineffable, so richly strange and deeply affecting. I think it is no coincidence that I have had the same struggle with the work of Franz Kafka, who is absolutely central to my reading life, and yet I have never written at much length about him at all. Aickman is not as great a writer as Kafka, but that's no insult; Aickman's talent and vision were narrower, his oeuvre less ragged. Nonetheless, there is an affinity of effect (and affect), partly, I suspect, because both writers were masters of writing from repressed obsessions, and both found unique, personal forms of fiction with which to encase those obsessions.
"The Stains" is a late story by Aickman, first published in Ramsay Campbell's anthology New Terrors. It won the 1981 British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction, but has rarely been reprinted. (Currently, it's in print in the Faber & Faber UK edition of the Aickman collection The Unsettled Dust, which, along with a couple other Aickman collections, is also available as a Kindle ebook from Amazon, though I haven't found it for other electronic formats.)
It is the story of a civil servant named Stephen, whose wife, Elizabeth, has recently died, and whose very straight-laced, controlled world has begun to come apart. Stephen seems like a perfect representation of the stereotypical stiff-upper-lip, aging British male — but really there's nothing essentially British about this stereotype, for it is more generally a kind of masculine ideal: fastidious, emotionally repressed, with a sense that one's status as a (white, middle-to-upper-class) male should lead then to dominance over a world that always threatens chaos. Such attributes lead to a psychology that fiercely guards against the exotic. Stephen's Britishness (and Aickman's) will be important to the story, though, because of the story's subtle allusions to the Empire.
Marriage is, for Stephen and his ilk, a vital component in the fight against chaos, and Elizabeth was for him the nearly-perfect wife. ("They said he was a man made for marriage and all it meant. ... [H]ow many women would want to marry Stephen now? A number, perhaps; but not a number that he would want to marry. Not after Elizabeth.") A man made for marriage and all it meant. Elizabeth's only flaw was her inability to bear Stephen a child, preferably a son to carry on his name, lineage, tradition. But no man can have everything, and each needs some burden to bear.
It is no surprise that once Elizabeth is dead, Stephen's world shifts toward chaos. Their doctor immediately leaves, and he is replaced not by another man of the same mold, but rather someone different. "The new man was half-Sudanese, and Stephen found him difficult to communicate with, at least upon a first encounter, at least on immediate topics."
Stephen leaves to see his brother: the Reverend Harewood Hooper BD, MA. ("Their father and grandfather had been in orders too, and had been incumbents of that same small church in that same small parish for thirty-nine years and forty-two years respectively.") A man of scholarship and God, Harewood is also a "modestly famous" expert on lichens.
