Conrad Aiken: The Poet

by R. P. BLACKMUR

1

THE newly collected poems of Conrad Aiken run to so many hundreds of pages no one reader can easily digest them in bulk. Nor can any one reader discriminate the best from the better and the better from the worst with any certainty even of personal choice. Digestion and discrimination must be the gradual labor of many readers. Yet it is good to have all the poems in one place; they make a bulk, and bulk is a great part of Aiken’s quality in much the same way it is part of the quality of Swinburne, or Hugo, or Carducci, or Sir Walter Scott, each in his different way. It is not for isolated poems that these poets are remembered; anthologies cannot do them justice or even give a proper sample taste.

Some poets concentrate, compound, and construct their experience into words. Others, like Aiken, expand and extend and exhaust their experience. Their unity is in all their work, not in single efforts, where indeed the unity may evaporate. This is because such poets, and especially Aiken, work in a continuous relation to the chaos of their sensibilities (Houston Peterson called his book about Aiken The Melody of Chaos), and each separate poem issues with a kind of random spontaneity: the least possible ordering of experience, what is possible within the devices of prosody (such as the couplet, the quatrain, the sonnet, and so on), never the maximum possible ordering under what Coleridge called the coadunative powers of the mind. There is no generalizing power of the mind. Yet all the poems together make a generalization.

Perhaps we cannot say what that generalization is, though we may feel it. Who can say what the sphinx generalizes? — or a change in weather? — or Jacob wrestling in the stream? Yet we know very well, and try our best to say. So with Aiken. We must see if the shifts and alternations in his weather do not make a climate which generalizes them. Luckily Aiken himself supports this effort. If he did not exactly choose he somehow found it necessary to write in the mode of imagination here described.

In his autobiographical narrative called Ushant, Aiken gives an account of a prophecy of his life made to him by an eccentric “Unitarian-ministerand-clairvoyant” one morning in a Bloomsbury boardinghouse. “You have the vision, the primary requisite,” said this gentleman. “You will be a true seer: it is, I fear, in the communication that you will fail. You will always tend to rush at things somewhat prematurely: you will see beyond your years, ahead of your maturity, so that continually, and unfortunately the immaturity of your expression, a certain glibness and triteness, will tend to spoil your excellent ideas, leaving them to be adopted and better expressed — better organized because better understood — by others.”And he went on: “You will touch [life] at almost every possible point; and, if you do die spiritually bankrupt, you will have known at least nearly everything — known and seen it, even if ultimately without the requisite power, or love, or understanding, or belief, to harmonize it into a whole, or set it into a frame. . . . You will want to taste your own spiritual death.”

To this, and the rest of it, Aiken gives full assent: “How devastatingly true!” We all have such an uncle in the cupboard who says such words in our ears, if we listen: it is under such words that we see the divisive nature of our politics, our culture, and our individual selves. Aiken has written one version of the poetry of that condition, just as Eliot has written another version, which Aiken will not quite understand, thinking Eliot’s version a betrayal of his. “That [Eliot’s] achievement was unique and astounding, and attended, too, by rainbows of creative splendor, there could be no doubt. Indeed, it was in the nature of a miracle, a transformation. But was it not to have been, also, a surrender, and perhaps the saddest known to D. in his life?”

D. is Aiken objectively observed, spun out, developed, and coiled round himself as endlessly as possible within a single volume. And that volume, Ushant, is the best key we have to what Aiken the man was up to in creating Aiken the poet. From Ushant, then, it is easy to clarify and support what Aiken (or D.) undertook to believe the prophetic Unitarian from California meant in the Bloomsbury room. At one place Aiken says D. had a bias for form as form, “that inventions of form must keep a basis in order and tradition” and must be related to “a conscious and articulated Weltanschauung, a consistent view.”On the next page he remarks that through Freud “at last the road was being opened for the only religion that was any longer tenable or viable, a poetic comprehension of man’s position in the universe, and of his potentialities as a poetic shaper of his own destiny, through selfknowledge and love.” The combination (of the philosopher and the maker) was expressed in the two volumes of “Preludes” which he here calls “serial essays towards attitude and definition.”

But there are three other sets of remarks which would seem to clarify the way in which Aiken actually approached his double problem. One is where he refers to himself as the priest of consciousness in flight. A second is where he develops the notion that the true theory of art is, necessarily, the unwritten book; that the true aesthetic is of the impossible, where the act of initiation is taken as an end in itself. The third set of remarks summarizes his underlying philosophy: “One must live, first, by seeing and being: after that could come the translation of it into something else. This constant state of his ‘falling in love,’ falling in love with all of life, this radiant narcissism, with its passionate need to emphasize and identify, this all-embracingness, must find something to do with itself. Subject and object must be brought together, and brought together in an apocalypse, an ecstasy, a marriage of heaven and hell.”

It might be supposed that everyone has a little more life — a little more seeing and being—than he can quite manage; but there is no need to quarrel with Aiken about that. What is interesting here is the “radiant narcissism” which is the radical quality of all his acts of apprehension, or at any rate of those which get into his poems and other fictions. His autobiography is itself an act of radiant narcissism. What he writes shines with the expanded light — perhaps the idiopathic light, perhaps the light of self-healing or idio-therapy — of what he has seen and been; and the hope is that, with the aid of the traditions and forms of poetry, it may be light for others also.

Aiken’s life is a self-feast mediated in poetry, and what is so attractive about his poetry is that each of us, by letting his own egoism shine a little, may eat of himself there. This is also why he can speak of his world as a “rimless sensorium,” and why the Unitarian prophet was right in telling the young Aiken that he would never set life into a frame.

But not everybody needs to make frames. If Aldous Huxley complained in 1920 that Aiken would have to find “some new intellectual formula into which to concentrate the shapelessness of his vague emotions,” he was not reminding us of Aiken’s obligation so much as he suggested our own. So long as this Narcissus remains radiant it will be our business to find a frame or frames for the radiance. The Narcissus is only ourselves at a desirable remove: the heightened remove of poetry in which even our worst selves seem authentic and our best impossible of attainment. For it is poetry like this which teaches us we could never put up with our best selves.

2

WHAT then does Aiken do — what is his radiance — between the double blows of life and theory? What is his music and how does he sing it? He sings on two trains of thought or themes and he sings like the legendary bard, improvising old tunes as if they were his own by discovery or inheritance, or both. To expand into clarity and towards judgment these phrases will be the remaining task of this essay. What are the themes and how does a bard sing?

One theme is the long, engorged pilgrimage of the self coming on the self: the self creating the self as near objectively as possible. The second theme has to do with the dramatization — in theatrical terms, so far as a poem can be a theater — of the selves of others. The Jig of Forslin edges towards a fusion of both themes: where the self comes on a dramatization of the self, full-fledged and self-creative. Turns and Movies, his next set of poems, represents the second theme; Senlin, a few years later, represents the first. If there is a single theme in Aiken’s work, it is the struggle of the mind which has become permanently aware of itself to rediscover and unite itself with the world in which it is lodged.

When the soul feels so greatly its own flux — the flow of itself recalling and eddying upon itself — it becomes very difficult to reassess the world other people inhabit. Very difficult and of absolute necessity. Bertrand Russell wrote his most lucid book, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, while in prison during the First World War as a conscientious objector to that world. In Aiken it is the self that is such a prison; one bursts out of it without ever leaving it, and one bursts into it without ever having been there. It is the contest of our private lives with the public world.

No theme could be closer to us; almost every mode of the modern mind tends to make the private life more intolerable and the public life more impossible. Only what used to be called ejaculations of the spirit suggests the blending of the tolerable with the possible. Arnold thought poetry could do the job of religion, but Arnold had never heard of psychology (psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychosomatics). Aiken could not help having Arnold for an uncle, but he had “psychology” for his other self, the hopeful and destructive brother of his heart.

In his poems there is always the cry: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” But it is both brothers who cry, not one: sometimes they cry alternately, sometimes together. The attractive force of Aiken’s poetry lies in these joined cries; they make the radiance of this Narcissus. Narcissus is only the personal, anecdotal, and legendary form for that frame of mind known as solipsism: the extreme subjective idealism that believes the mind creates the world when it opens its eyes. It lies in the background of the whole movement in modern art called expressionism (the feeling that what one says commands its own meaning) and is related to make the artist or outsider, as such, the characteristic hero of modern literature. Solipsism is the creative egoism, not of the primitive savage who believes in nothing he does not see, but of the civilized and excruciated consciousness which claims credence for everything it does see and, by the warrant of sincerity of feeling, everything it might see.

This is why we speak of so many levels of consciousness, all of them our own, and for that reason all valid; but none of them dependable for others, none of them showing to others any surety of motive. Dostoevsky invented buffoons who acted out of caprice. Gide invented criminals who made actes gratuites. Kafka invented his hero “K” who could not act at all. Aiken’s work belongs in this train of thought with his deliberate egoism, his structure by series and repetitions and involutions, his preludes to attitude and definition, the emphasis on the incomplete or aborted act of the incomplete or aborted ego. Your solipsist, because for him no action can ever be completed, is bound to be violent in expression.

Readers of Aiken’s novels will easily understand the application of these remarks to all his work. Indeed the long poems will come immediately to seem themselves novels in a philosophico-lyric mode. The chaos under the skin of perception has become both part of the body, its bloodstream, and united with the mind, its creative matrix. For the mass of Aiken’s work is deliberately pre-morphous; it is prevented from reaching more than minimal form. He attempts to preserve the chaos he sees and he attempts to woo the chaos he does not see. The limit of form which attracts him is the form just adequate to keep the record with grace: the anecdote, the analysis, and the prelude. He has the sense that as things are finally their own meaning (as he is himself), so they will take up immediately their own form.

This is true with the poems, and increasingly so from the earlier to the later volumes. Turns and Movies is a series of dramatic monologues, hard, rapid, and anecdotal, rather like Satires of Circumstance or Time’s Laughing-stocks by Thomas Hardy, full of murder, open and hidden hatred, wrong marriages, and burning infidelities: an effort to grasp the outside world by its violent sore thumbs. Punch, the Immortal Liar, the next volume, is Aiken’s first conscious effort to fuse the two halves of his theme, and we get the violence of the inner man seizing that of the outside world. Senlin, four years later, is philosophical, meditative, musical, and repetitive, the free onward solipsism of the pilgrim trying to come on himself.

Something like one of these sets of attitudes can be applied to any of the original volumes. Festus is part of the pilgrimage. The Charnel Rose is a kind of theatrical or Turns and Movies version of romantic love. In John Deth we have the solipsist working towards annihilation, as in Osiris Jones we have him working towards epiphany. Priapus and the Pool is free erotic expressionism moving into philosophy. The Kid is an historical version of Turns and Movies, a frontier version of the civilized soul, remarking tradition as he goes. And in the Human Heart is an effort to make the inner violence transform the outer through love. The Preludes of Attitude and Definition exhibit in infinite variety both the tension and the distension of the two violences, what keeps the soul together in every moment but the last in its lifelong series of fallings apart.

The attitude breeds the vital chaos of definition. (Which may remind some readers of Aristotle’s remark that there is an optimum definition for any point at issue, and one should never define more than necessary. In Aiken’s preludes the right amount is reached when the vitality of the chaos is reached.) Lastly, though not last in chronology, the Brownstone Eclogues most clearly fuse, join, and crystallize the two violences of Aiken’s theme, and it is from them therefore that an example will be drawn.

But a single quotation will not be enough. There is a poem in Aiken’s mid-career which is a kind of anterior example of the meaning of the passage chosen from the Eclogues. The earlier poem has a lucky title for the purpose. It is classical, Freudian, and as anomalous as the next breath of air you breathe: altogether universal is “Electra” in the human heart. In “Electra” is the trespass of one human upon another; in the eclogue is the trespass into the human of the nonhuman out of which everything human is made. Here is the passage from “Electra”: —

This is what humans make when their egoisms trespass impossibly into each other’s flesh. Here is the passage from Brownstone Eclogues; it is the complete poem called “Dear Uncle Stranger":

This is what trespasses into the human, “the bloodstream coiling with its own intent,” and it is precisely what makes possible the creation of “the finest tact of flesh.” The one trespasses upon as it illuminates the other. The two together make the original warrant for the ego to make whatever artifacts it can. Narcissus is not all of us but at some sore point we are all of us Narcissus. Aiken’s theme is his radiance.

3

SO FOR his theme, How does the bard sing? In the easiest language and the easiest external forms of any modern poet of stature, He sings by nature and training out of the general body of poetry in English. He writes from the cumulus of cliché in the language, always, for him, freshly felt, as if the existing language were the only reality outside himself there were. There is hardly ever in his work the stinging twist of new idiom, and the sometimes high polish of his phrasing comes only from the pressure and friction of his mind upon his metres.

It is hard to make clear, in a period where so many poets play upon their words and so many readers think the play is all there is, that this superficially “easy” procedure with language has long since and will again produce poetry — even the difficult poetry of the soul wrestling with itself. But it is so with Aiken, and it is worth while to end these remarks by trying to make this matter clear. Aiken depends on the force of his own mind and the force of metrical form to refresh his language. The cumulus upon which he really works is the cumulus of repetition, modulation by arrangement, pattern, and overtone. He writes as if the words were spoken to let the mind under the words sing. He writes as if it were the song of the mind that puts meaning into the words.

Thus, as in popular songs, the words themselves do not matter much, yet matter everything and nothing to those who sing them and those who hear them. This is to say Aiken takes for granted that his words are real; he never makes his words real except by the agency of the music of their sequence. No method works all the time, and when Aiken’s method fails, you get the sense of deliquescence in his language, as if any words would do because none would work. To understand the successes of the method takes time and familiarity. In his language, but not in his conceptions, he depends more on convention than most poets do in our time, almost as much as Dryden or Pope. The point is, if you look into his conventions you will find them right, just, genuine, and alive. What more do you want? You have brought with you what was required.

Finally — for poetry is an affair of skill at words — Aiken demands of you, at a serious level, the same skill that newspaper poets demand at no level at all. Your newspaper poet merely wants to say something to go with what he feels. Aiken is looking hard to find, and make real, the emotion that drives, and inhabits him. Aiken, as Croce might say, has a vast amount of the same talent the newspaper poet has so little of. The amount of talent makes all the difference. The existence of poets like Aiken make poetry possible.