Ultimately and Irrevocably Tragic: Robert Aickman’s “Choice of Weapons” (1964) by Stina Patton

“I was wondering about my eyes; one of my eyes—the left—saw everything golden and yellow and orange, and the other eye saw shades of blue and grey and green; perhaps one eye was for daylight and the other was for night. If everyone in the world saw different colors from different eyes there might be a great many new colors still to be invented.
—Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

The power of Aickman’s stories, to me, lies in their VIBE: how does one analyze that? I can relay the known facts, characters, plot points (and assume that these facts, as relayed, are reliable)—this does little to explain the atmosphere you find yourself in, upon reading this story. Without reading his specific words, phrasing, etc—without ingesting how the words are arranged—it’s a bit akin to me explaining a particularly disturbing dream I had: I can relay the pertinent details, but the mood and feel are impossible to convey.

It is the accumulation of myriad things and personal symbols, arranged just so, that provides the unique distress of our dreams, and they seem rather nonsensical as a whole, or incredibly banal when relayed. This is what I am reminded of when I delve into this story. I can read you the lyrics of a song- without the music, it is an incomplete encapsulation. To try to fully analyze or interpret Aickman does his Art and Words a tremendous disservice because it is fundamentally the MYSTERY that contains the magic of his storytelling.

Many readers may be frustrated by the ambiguity inherent in his stories, or baffled by their cryptic nature; others may find them to contain exactly what they were looking for, scratching an itch that they hadn’t even known they had.

As a queer woman, I am instinctively drawn to such ambiguity. Unless we are lucky enough to be surrounded by other queer people, we usually live our lives in—and surrounded by—a constant, perpetual state of ambiguity. We still exist on the outskirts and fringes of society, and whether we’re trying to interpret another’s romantic affections (or interest), their intentions, our human rights, or whether our queerness is embraced or even acknowledged, we are usually unable to take anything for granted or as a given.

My perspective has a queer lens, but this also applies universally. Aickman’s stories reflect the ambiguity, uncertainty, and peculiarity of Life in all its glory. They take the utter weirdness of Reality and skew it just enough to say something profound about what we can interpret from “the left unspoken,” the truly unknowable; the cracks in the spaces of things.

Most horror, especially cosmic horror, relies on its implications; I feel that Aickman’s horror is very much of a cosmic nature, but deviates from the definition as we ascribe it traditionally. Aickman, according to Ramsey Campbell, was not a fan of Lovecraft OR horror. He preferred the term “strange stories.” They certainly are strange, but many are also definitely horror. (They are also simultaneously comforting to me in a way, because of this peculiar ambiguity, but that’s another essay.)

The horror of an Aickman story does not lie in the implications because by definition, implications are implied by undisputed facts, concrete knowledge we assume within the confined reality of a story. Yet in the nightmare logic of an Aickman story, everything is called into question because much of what comes across as “peculiar” are typically things and situations we would think of as mundane, benign, ordinary, on their own—it is how and where these things are placed within the confines of his stories, and their accumulation, that allows the uncanny feel to increase. The true “why” remains undetermined. The abject horror I feel inherent in most of Aickman’s stories is in the immense possibilities and implications of the implications themselves: ALL bets are off. If most horror shows us pieces of the shadowy Things hiding in the shadows, Aickman’s shows us that those shadows have cracks of their own where other Things hide.

Coming to the end of an Aickman story is to amass a giant jigsaw puzzle, realizing as you snap the last piece into place that there are actually still several fundamental pieces missing, and that it is only with the addition of these pieces that it is possible to comprehend exactly what it is that the puzzle is of. Aickman may have had the pieces, but he’s not sharing.

I feel a summary of the story is helpful:

In “Choice of Weapons” the prickly, stuffy, dissatisfied, somewhat unsympathetic Malcolm is dining with his hapless fiancée Ann when he becomes suddenly, intensely enamored with a woman sitting by herself. He flees his date, follows the woman, and sees a man in fancy dress leaving a house he thinks may be hers. A concerned doctor, Dr. Bermuda, hypnotizes him to determine the address (telling him “the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it”) and also provides her name.

He visits her and discovers Dorabelle is a peculiar woman with peculiar thoughts living in a peculiar house. She is quite possibly unbalanced, erratic, and may be having hallucinations. It also appears, although she claims she is poor and the house is in a state of disrepair, that the house is stuffed with money—until her butler makes off with it and never returns.

After several visits, Dorabelle tells him she is in love with another man—the fancy-dressed man he saw previously. She confides that this man appeared to her one day in her mirror after her reflection disappeared; they will be married. After a disastrous encounter where Malcolm attempts to kiss her and she responds with fury, he is surprised when Dr. Bermuda arrives at the house with his son and takes him home. There, he is informed that after being “prescribed” to by the sympathetic Dr. Bermuda, Ann has overdosed on pills.

Malcolm goes to sleep, dreams of Dorabelle, then awakens to discover a note that reads, ‘I want you’ with no signature. He assumes it’s from her and races to her house, where he is accosted by the man in fancy dress who accuses him of stealing Dorabelle’s money and challenges him to a duel: “There are rapiers behind the clock. Or pistols in my bedroom.” Malcolm chooses the swords—they duel. He throws a candlestick in the man’s face while piercing him with his weapon, then falls unconscious. When he awakes, Dr. Bermuda is there and leads him to Dorabelle, who is gravely wounded; he realizes that Dorabelle was the fancy-dressed man. She proclaims her love, they kiss, and she dies. The police arrive; Dr. Bermuda is again sympathetic, telling Malcolm that although modern science has failed to cure him, he will not leave him to suffer consequences from the law. He instructs his son to look behind the mirror in the bedroom and bring them what he finds, at which point the story ends.

I share this summary to relay the salient points of this story for anyone unfamiliar, but it does not begin to convey the myriad ways in which this story meanders and weaves in and out of itself and defies an easy explanation. Almost everything of import that happens can be read in different ways, and even insignificant details are odd. The things Aickman does not explain feel as important as what he does. The entire thing is an enigma wrapped inside a riddle of near inscrutability. Going for a logical explanation of the whole sends you into unfathomable possibilities and interpretations. No one is a reliable narrator, including the Reality of the story.

Ultimately, the doctor can be seen as being a benevolent helper or a malevolent manipulator. His hypnosis and specific advice help fuel Malcolm’s trajectory when his obsession would have likely petered out on its own. He may have innocently prescribed the fiancée sleeping pills; he may have hypnotized and/or manipulated her; he may have murdered her due to an unknown motivation, then used his medical credentials to cover it up. It also appears that he may have been the one responsible for writing the anonymous note that Malcolm finds by his bedside. Is he orchestrating all these deaths for his own selfish reasons? What is the something that the doctor asks his son to fetch from behind the mirror—the pistols? Is he going to kill Mlacolm or convince him to kill himself? Was it all an elaborate plan to steal Dorabelle’s money—the money the butler already made off with?

The meaning of the title “Choice of Weapons” literally refers to the rapiers and pistols, and the story implies that no matter which Malcolm chose, one of these weapons would be responsible for his undoing, even upon winning the duel. Yet another interpretation is: will science or emotion win out? Will rationality, or delusions? These choices also determine his and Dorabelle’s outcome.

What was Dorabelle’s motivation for dressing up as a man? To make Malcolm jealous? Did she even impersonate a man? For there is a supernatural interpretation one can make: that in this world, there really IS a man living inside her mirror, either existing already or conjured up by Dorabelle’s desire/longing, and that he took possession of her body during the duel, only to be banished back to his realm once he is grievously injured.

The only things I can say with certainty about “Choice of Weapons” are that in this story, unrequited or unproclaimed love ultimately brings ruin to the two main characters, with one of them causing the death of the other and also having a hand in the death of his fiancée. Even if Malcolm was manipulated, it’s of note how easily he was influenced when in a vulnerable state, and it illustrates how subjective our reality is when perception and perspective are colored by our own desires. The other lesson it proffers is that it is not wise to put all of your faith in a doctor (or anyone in authority) and assume that they’re working in your best interests.

It’s interesting to note that in most of the accounts I’ve read about him, Aickman himself could be described similarly to Malcolm: prickly, stuffy, discontented. This story ultimately speaks to the dangers of obsession and jealousy, which may have been his ultimate intention; Aickman may have been purging personal demons. It may or may not be relevant that he knew firsthand of being madly in love and then rejected: he was deeply wounded/offended when his affair with the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard ended and she chose instead to marry another. It’s a theme that comes up in more than one of his stories.

A strong sense of alienation frequently infuses his work, and his characters are often outsiders. Even when not sympathetic, they retain an inherent sadness and dissatisfaction within the reality of the worlds they inhabit, and this is something that resonates deeply with me, particularly in this story. I often feel a bit sad about, or pity, his characters and the frustrations they must feel navigating a world that often seems unfamiliar or unwelcoming to them. It may be my queerness or my neuro-divergence but I feel a kinship with and empathy for these two main characters who find themselves adrift, lost, as they make their way through their lives. Both the man and Dorabelle are each looking for someone who accepts and loves them—each of them thinks they find it—but neither is ready to accept the reality of their surroundings and situations, and the results for both are ultimately and irrevocably tragic.

This story provides ample puzzling material for analysis and attempting to determine meaning. I don’t presume to have any “right” answers- I don’t think there ARE any. That’s the joy for me of an Aickman story, and each time I read this, or any of his stories, I have new and different thoughts and opinions about what they may mean. He remains a unique, memorable storyteller of a very particular type of magic: one that sometimes leads me to believe that he may have been seeing the REAL world all around us, but that WE only have the right kind of eyes some of the time.

Stina Patton is an artist, writer, reviewer, and lover of the strange, surreal, and unsettling. She currently resides in Hell where she is kept sane by her many, many books and not as many cats. Find her creepy (and not-so-creepy) Art at stinasdemons.bigcartel.com/ and see her thoughts on life and Horror on Bluesky @stinasdemons.com

¿Donde Duermes, Elderado? Y Otros Poemas (1964) by Clérigo Herrero

Am pulling out of a bad physical slump and have not done too much work, apart from the writing of poems in Spanish, some of which I hope to place sooner or later with Latin-American periodicals. They have been checked over by a good Spanish professor, who did not find too much to correct.
—Clark Ashton Smith to August Derleth, 31 March 1950, Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith 364

English was the language of Weird Tales during its first run (1923-1954), though stories might have snippets of any number of languages, natural, artificial, and fictional.

Neither H. P. Lovecraft nor Robert E. Howard were ever fluent in Spanish, though both of them were at least somewhat familiar with it. The evidence for Lovecraft’s knowledge is fairly slight: the two passages in his story “The Mound,” which had been ghostwritten for Zealia Brown Reed Bishop, both of which are largely accurate (the final portion was deliberately designed to appear somewhat crude); Lovecraft’s library included a copy of Ollendorff’s New Method of Learning to Read, Write, and Speak the Spanish Language (Lovecraft’s Library 139), which may have served him as a reference. Lovecraft also used Spanish openings and closings to some of his letters to Bernard Austin Dwyer in 1928 (during the period “The Mound” was written, and when Lovecraft recounted his dream of Roman Hispania), signing himself once “Luis Randolfo Cartero y Teobaldo” (LMM 468)

Robert E. Howard’s knowledge of Spanish was probably more utilitarian. In at least a casual way, he had picked up at least a small stock of Spanish and Mexican words—exclamations, terms of address, names of food and drink. Certainly, when Spanish-speaking characters appear in his stories their English dialogue tends to be sprinkled with a few choice Spanish terms, although sometimes with some peculiarities of spelling; a common technique when Howard wanted to express something of the rural or uneducated nature of the speaker, though it’s hard to tell sometimes if he is doing it on purpose or not, as he seems to have dropped this tendency in Spanish relatively quickly. So, for example, in “Red Shadows” (1928) he writes “Senhor,” in “Winner Take All” (1930) he writes “Senyor,” but in “The Horror from the Mound” (1932) he writes “Señor.”

In late 1948 or early 1949, Smith learned Spanish, made his first translations of Spanish poetry, and wrote his first poems in Spanish.
—Donald Sidney-Fryer, “A Memoir of Timeus Gaylord: reminsicences of Two Visits with Clark Ashton Smith, &c.” in The Romanticist #2 (1978) 3

Smith had already taught himself French from dictionaries and grammars in the 1920s; Lovecraft would praise his translations of Baudelaire. A decade after the death of Howard and Lovecraft, Smith would do the same with Spanish. All three men shared a love of language and poetry, and were autodidacts, but Smith was the only one of the three to attempt anything like fluency in Spanish, at least to the point of translating and composing poetry in that language.

His hopes of being published in that language do not appear to have been fulfilled during his lifetime, although some of his translations of Spanish poetry from Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, José A. Calcaño, and José Santos Chocano (“El Cantor de América”) did see print in zines and his poetry collections, and some of the English translations of his Spanish poems also appeared in his Arkham House poetry collections—including a translation or two of “Clérigo Herrero,” Smith’s Spanish pen-name (“Cleric Smith”—Clark, clerk, cleric).

After Smith’s death in 1961, his widow attempted to continue to publish his work, and selling some of his letters and manuscripts in conjunction with letterpress printer and bookdealer Roy A. Squires. One of these projects was the small pamphlet ¿Donde Duermes, Elderado? Y Otros Poemas (1964), done entirely in Spanish, publishing eight of his poems as by Clérigo Herrero. The colophon says this printing was only 160 copies, although the bibliographies say 176.

Typescripts of some of his other Spanish poems, discovered after this printing, were published in Shadows Seen & Unseen (2007), showing something of his process:

For long decades, the Spanish poetry of Clark Ashton Smith was relatively unavailable: published far apart in limited editions. Today it has all been republished as part of the Collected Poetry and Translations of Clark Ashton Smith (2012) …and it is a testament to one of the great voices of Weird Tales to extend himself this way, to explore and express himself in another language. Because there is far more to this world than just the English language.

El mundo es el suyo,
El sol es el tuyo,
La luna es la mía.

The world is yours,
The sun is thine,
The moon is mine.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).

“I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket … But By God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph from Life!” (1964) by Joanna Russ

Before the story begins, before the very first word, Lovecraft fans will recognize the title as the the climactic revelation of H. P. Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” (1926). The title is the hook to reel the reader in, and the import of that one line doesn’t hit the reader until the penultimate sentence. Despite the fact that “I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket … But By God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph from Life!” was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1964, it would not appear in a Mythos anthology until Cthulhu 2000 (1995)… and it hasn’t been reprinted in a Mythos anthology since.

This might seem odd, considering that Joanna Russ might be the first female prose writer who contributed to the Cthulhu Mythos. H. P. Lovecraft himself collaborated with “Elizabeth Berkeley” (Winifred Virginia Jackson) on “The Green Meadow” (1918-1919) and “The Crawling Chaos” (1921), Anna Helen Crofts on “Poetry and the Gods” (1920), and his future wife Sonia Haft Green on “The Horror at St. Martin’s Beach” and “Four O’Clock” (1922). None of these are Mythos tales per se, although “The Crawling Chaos” became a sobriquet for Nyarlathotep. Later, working as a revisionist, Lovecraft ghost-wrote tales for female clients including “The Curse of Yig” (1928), “The Mound” (1929-1930), and “Medusa’s Coil” (1930) for Zealia Brown Reed Bishop; “The Horror in the Museum” (1932), “Winged Death” (1932), “The Man of Stone” (1932), “Out of the Aeons” (1933), and “The Horror in the Burying-Ground” (1933-1934). HPL also “collaborated” with Catherine L. Moore insofar as both contributed sections to the round-robin “The Challenge from Beyond” (1935); Moore herself never appears to have written a Mythos story.

From Lovecraft’s death until 1964, when Russ’ “I Had…” was published, the sub-genre of Mythos fiction appears quite bare of female writers—although it is hard to say this with utmost certainty, given the prevalence of the fanpress (for example, Virginia “Nanek” Anderson contributed the poem “Shadow Over Innsmouth” to The Acolyte Winter 1942). Certainly the first edition of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1969) was all-male, as were several anthologies that followed. Russ finally made it in to the revised version of Tales, the 1990 edition, with her second and final Mythos story “My Boat” (1976).

The problem for editors and anthologists is that “I Had…” was way ahead of its time. It is a reference to H. P. Lovecraft and his Mythos, but it isn’t a Mythos story in itself, does not use or expand the mythology. August Derleth, if he had been in a litigious mood, could hardly have found anything to issue a cease & desist about except the title. The crux of the story is that if you recognize the title, if you pick up the story to read it, if you go in there expecting another pastiche or sequel to “Pickman’s Model”… then you the reader have taken the bait.

Which is all the more apt when you consider that the story is almost cruelly accurate portrait of a certain segment of fandom itself; the socially awkward nerd, the obsessive Lovecraft fan which is a Western prototype of the otaku. Even today the caricature of Irvin Rubin she sketches cuts precisely because fannish collectors not only knows something of the type, but if they’re reading the story then they probably identify at least a little bit with that dark side of fandom. Rubin is the bookish kid with no friends who grew up to be a bookish adult with no friends, no lovers, no real life but a long delayed adolescence. There but for grace may have gone us all. For many such fans starved of human companionship, the possibility of real interaction is enticing as it is abnormal…so it is when Rubin meets a woman.

On a technical level, Russ is playing a stranger game than even the premise of the story. In format, it is not quite a Lovecraftian pastiche; Rubin is the vaguely Lovecraftian protagonist, but the story itself is told through two narrators—the good-hearted, older Miss June Kramer he works with, and a nameless narrator who provides the final piece of the story. Kramer’s narrative gives a view of Rubin by someone who is at once wiser and sympathetic, though we see little enough of her: the Miss suggests a woman who never married or divorced, rather than a widow; her age is somewhere north of 40, putting at least 12 years between her and Rubin; she has sufficient regular social interaction to have a group of ladies over for bridge and to share a story over a cup of coffee in the company cafeteria—and who is moved enough by Rubin to leave her bridge game and go to his cold room, just to prove that he does have at least one friend. The nameless narrator we never see; Kramer’s narrative serves to get us to the anticlimax, where Rubin is about to be married. The nameless narrator carries the story through the last part, which Miss Kramer never saw—perhaps because Russ didn’t want her to see it, wanted her to preserve the innocence of knowing what really happened to Irvin Rubin. Yet Russ definitely wants the reader to know what happened to him…

It is the reader that completes this story. If you haven’t read “Pickman’s Model,” if you aren’t familiar with Lovecraft and that certain type of obsessive and lonely fan, then the story is a fine weird tale, but nothing special. Maybe even a little hokey, because like M. R. James it leaves a great deal unsaid, unexplained; the meaning is implied between the lines. The catch requires recognition, and a very different use of Lovecraft than almost any other author has ever used. Arguably, Russ didn’t have to use Lovecraft for the story—but who else would she use, in 1964? Lovecraft already had the legend for it, the myth built up around himself and his writings.

Once you read the story, once you get the cruel joke, you may never read it again. The prose is not beautiful, the essence of the story a one-note tragedy. That couldn’t have helped it with the anthologists either: many fans want pastiches, stories that celebrate and expand on Lovecraft & co.’s artificial mythology, and many writers want that too. It’s fun, it’s part of the game. “I Had…” is ultimately more adult and demanding—a story with insight, which demands a moment’s reflection. One you may be glad to have read, if only because it is so different from what most people consider a “Lovecraftian” story.

###

Bobby Derie is the author of Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014)