Arts and Letters

Rereading Conrad Aiken's work, one is impressed again by the unity that underlies its real mass and apparent diversity. He published some fifty books, all told, and they include novels, stories, criticism, a play, an autobiography, and thirty or more books of poems that were finally brought together in Collected Poems: Second Edition, a volume of more than a thousand closely printed pages. He was a poet essentially, and a major poet, but he was also the complete man of letters, distinguished for his work in almost every form of prose and verse. The unity was there, however, and in every form he spoke with the same candid, scrupulous, self-deprecatory, yet reckless and fanciful New England voice.

I met him first in 1918, when I was a junior at Harvard and had just read The Jig of Forslin, a long poem that impressed and a little frightened the apprentice poet by what it had done to achieve a symphonic form. I went to see its publisher, Edmund Brown, who ran a little bookstore near the Back Bay station, and he gave me Conrad Aiken's address. There was an exchange of letters and we agreed to meet in the lobby of the Hotel Touraine. I was to look for a man with an orange necktie who wasn't a fairy.

Conrad was then twenty-eight years old, was six years out of college, and was already the author of two red-haired children and four published volumes of post-romantic poetry, besides two others waiting for publication. On that warm evening in February I saw the necktie as he came in the door; it was brighter than his short Valencia-orange hair. For the rest he wore the Harvard uniform of the period: white button-down oxford shirt and brown suit. His forehead was broad, though not so high as it later became, his jaw was square, and his blue eyes were set wide apart. Handsome in a quiet way, he had a look of mingled shyness and pugnacity.

I don't remember where we had dinner, though it may have been at Jake Wirth's beerhall, which, being German in atmosphere, had plenty of empty tables on those wartime evenings. I do remember that we found many common interests, in spite of my callowness and our nine years' difference in age. We both liked Boston in decay, we admired the French symbolists, we wanted to achieve architectural and musical effects in poems (I in theory, Conrad in practice), and we were fascinated by the political maneuvers of the poetry world without wishing to take part in them. We talked without pauses, talked with such excitement—at least on my part—that I didn't notice the streets through which we wandered before parting at the door of Conrad's lodging house on the unfashionable side of Beacon Hill.

I was right to be excited, and elated too, since I found afterward that Conrad seldom opened himself to literary strangers. There were years when he stayed away from almost all writers and editors as a matter of principle, and I was lucky to be one of the few exceptions. He refused to attend literary dinners and could seldom be inveigled into cocktail parties. The shyest man I know, he was also the best talker. The shyness kept him from talking in company, except for an occasional pun: thus, he would describe his friend Tom Eliot's notes to The Waste Land as a "verbiform appendix," but the phrase was spoken in a voice so low that most of the company missed it. Only quite late at night, or earlier over martinis with a single friend, would he launch into one of those monologues that ought to be famous for their mixture of flagrant wit and complete unself-protective candor.

In the course of time I discovered that candor was close to being his central principle as a man, as a writer, and especially as a poet. He believed, as he said in a letter, that the poet's real business was "to give the lowdown on himself, and through himself on humanity." "Look within yourself for truth" was his Emersonian motto; the microcosm corresponds to the macrocosm. He believed that the poet should be a surgeon performing an exploratory operation on himself, at whatever cost to his self-esteem; that he should penetrate through layer after layer of the semiconscious until he found "what you think or feel that is secretly you—shamefully you—intoxicatingly you." Then, having laid bare this secret self, which is also a universal self, the poet should find honest words for it, thus wresting it from the unconscious and giving it to the world. Aiken himself was engaged in a war of aggression against the subliminal and the merely instinctive. He believed that a man who dedicated himself to what he called the "supreme task" of widening and deepening and subtilizing the human consciousness would find in it "all that he could possibly require in the way of a religious credo."

The religion of consciousness is a doctrine that led, in Aiken's case, to many refinements and ramifications. Some of these are set forth, with an impressive density of thought and feeling, in two series of philosophical lyrics, Preludes for Memnon, published in 1931, and Time in the Rock, which appeared five years later; the poet regarded these as his finest work. But the doctrine is a unifying theme in almost all the poetry of his middle years, say from 1925 to 1956, and in the prose as well. It is clearly exemplified in his novels, especially in Blue Voyage (1927), which brought young Malcolm Lowry from England to sit at the feet of the author, and Great Circle (1933), which Freud admired and kept in his Vienna waiting room. Self-discovery is often the climax of Aiken's stories, and it sharpened the brilliant perceptions in his criticism. It is, moreover, the true theme of his autobiography, Ushant, published in 1952. At the end of the book Aiken says of his shipmates on a postwar voyage to England, "They were all heroes, every one of them; they were all soldiers; as now, and always, all mankind were soldiers; all of them engaged in the endless and desperate war on the unconscious."

Aiken's life had an underlying unity almost like that of his poetry and his fiction. Such is the final lesson of Ushant, which is one of the great autobiographies; in American literature there is nothing to compare with it except The Education of Henry Adams, which is admirably composed, but which gives us only one side of the author. In Ushant the author maintains the same objective tone as Adams, but still tries to give himself completely away, that is, to record his own faults and obsessions, his dreams, his amusing or shabby adventures, everything. His pursuit of himself leads him back to his childhood in Savannah, and he tells of two experiences there that shaped the rest of his life. One of them was lying on the carpeted floor of the nursery and reading the epigraph of Tom Brown's Schooldays: "I'm the poet of White Horse Vale, Sir, with liberal notions under my cap." Not understanding the word "poet," he asked his father what it meant, and learned that the admired father had written poems. From that moment the boy determined to be a poet himself, with liberal notions, and to live in England somewhere near White Horse Vale—as indeed he was to do for many years. "The entire life," he says, "had thus in a sense annihilated time, and remained, as it were, in a capsule, or in a phrase." The second experience confirmed the first and froze it into a lasting pattern. Since it was the last and grisliest scene of the poet's boyhood in Savannah, it should be presented in his own words:

…after the desultory early-morning quarrel came the half-stifled scream, and then the sound of his father's voice counting three, and the two loud pistol shots; and he had tiptoed into the dark room, where the two bodies lay motionless, and apart, and, finding them dead, found himself possessed of them forever.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the dead New England parents took possession of Conrad and that he was to spend the rest of his life coming to terms with them. There was to be a third experience, however, that also helped to shape his career, though it was partly a sequel to what happened in Savannah. When he was about to be graduated from Harvard in 1911, he was elected class poet. He refused the honor, resigned from college in something close to panic, and fled to Italy. "He had known, instantly," he says in Ushant, "that this kind of public appearance, and for such an occasion, was precisely what the flaw in his inheritance would not, in all likelihood, be strong enough to bear…. It was his decision that his life had to be lived off-stage, behind the scenes, out of view." In the next sixty years he did not change his mind. Conrad never, to my knowledge, gave a public lecture, read his poems to a women's club (or any other live audience), or appeared on a platform to accept an honorary degree.

Partly as a result of his remaining off-stage, he has been more neglected by the public than any other major American poet since Herman Melville, who was privately printed, and Emily Dickinson, who didn't bother to put her poems into books. Conrad had those fifty published titles, but not one of them was a bookseller's darling choice. In 1934 I asked him for nominations to a list that was going to be printed in The New Republic, of "Good Books That Almost Nobody Has Read." He nominated Kafka's The Castle—that was long before the Kafka boom—then added a postscript: "Might I also suggest for your list of Neglected Books a novel by c. aiken called Great Circle, of which the royalty report, to hand this morning, chronicles a sale of 26 copies in the second half year? and Preludes for Memnon, which I think is my best book, and which has sold about seven hundred copies in three years."

Although the books had little sale, they won him many prizes and official honors; and Conrad accepted these, on condition that they didn't involve a public appearance. In 1929 he received a Pulitzer Prize for his first Selected Poems, as well as the Shelley Memorial Award. From 1950 to 1952 he was Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. He received the Bryher Award in 1952, a National Book Award in 1954, the Bollingen Award in 1956, the Fellowship of the American Academy of Poets in 1957, the Gold Medal for Poetry of the National Institute in 1958, and the National Medal for Literature in 1969. Two years later he reported that his Collected Poems: Second Edition, containing the work of a lifetime, had a sale of 430 copies in its first half year.

Before the spate of prizes in the 1950s, Conrad wrote me from England, "Appraisals of my work have been rare or brief or nonexistent whether in periodicals or books on contemporary poetry: in me you behold an almost unique phenomenon, a poet who has acquired a Reputation, or a Position, or what have you, without ever having been caught in the act—as it were, by a process of auto-osmosis. At any given moment in the Pegasus Sweepstakes, in whatever Selling Plate or for whatever years, this dubious horse has always been the last in the list of the also-ran—he never even placed, much less won, nor, I regret to report, have the offers to put him out to stud been either remunerative or very attractive. Odd. Very odd."

For the neglect of his work by the public, one can give several explanations, though none of them seems adequate. In his early days Aiken's poetry was too modern and experimental for him to share in the enormous popularity of Amy Lowell and Vachel Lindsay; then in the 1920s it seemed not experimental enough, or at least not eccentric enough. In the 1930s it was rejected as having no social or revolutionary meaning; in the 1940s it wasn't rich enough in images: (Aiken's work has always been musical rather than visual and music was becoming the lost side of poetry); in the 1950s it was rejected again as not being "close enough in texture" to suit the intensive reading methods of the new critics (but what about the Preludes?); and in the 1960s it was scorned as being written mostly in iambic pentameter, a measure that had fallen out of fashion. Aiken has followed his own fashion and his work has developed by an inner logic which was not that of the poetry-reading public.

All this is true, and yet I suspect that the long neglect of Aiken's work is also due to policies more or less deliberately adopted by the author. In his heart he didn't want to become a celebrity. He refused to cultivate the literary powers, if such persons exist, and instead went out of his way to offend them. Always for the best of reasons, he bickered with editors, jeered at anthologists, rejected his own disciples, and made cruelly true remarks about fellow poets who would take their revenge by reviewing his books. He must have expected those reviews, familiar as he was with literary folkways. They made him angry—but did they also give him a somehow comfortable assurance that he would continue to live off-stage, obscurely, and would follow his own bent? Was it part of the same pattern as his resigning from Harvard in preference to writing and reading the class poem?

I last saw Conrad in January 1972. By then he had made the great circle and was living in Savannah only a few doors from the house where he had spent his childhood. He was suffering from the ills of human flesh, including some rare ones whose names I had never heard, but he still made puns while his beloved wife mixed martinis. We talked about the literary world, not so excitedly as at our first meeting half a century before. He had done his work and knew it was good. He had never compromised, and he could feel certain that, for all his hatred of intruders, the great world would some day come round to him.