Ushant, an Autobiographical Narrative, by Conrad Aiken. Duell, Sloan and Pearce. $4.50.

When a man ceases to strive for his fate, he grows homesick for his past. Ushant is aerial, illimitable isle where the mind, no longer heroic, meanders and sleeps, and supinely remembers. It is a homesick water book. Mnemosyne, which is memory, the mother of the muses, is intellectual force, but nostalgia is the soft, mulled lees of recollection. This lotus-stupor is in every Odysseus. Odysseus weeps for Ithaca, for thee bed of Penelope, his swine and for Telemachus, but the sea is his dominant deity. Man's destiny is his nemesis for which he must struggle to give himself a just fate; Heraclitus says that the erinyes are the handmaidens of justice.

Ushant is a long lotus sleep, and as the title suggests, it is not only anti-epical, but a florid, comic pun. "To utter a mere jest ornately is like beautifying an ape," one ancient rhetor remarked. When the life is finished, and the work one's bourne is over, the poet grows garrulous and tired. Great autobiography has a conscience that is so gifted that it drops its blood continually. It is wise analects, the confession of one's ideas, impenitence and perversities; but Ushant is an archive of piddling obscenities, and is a loose-anecdotal recollection of puerile eroticisms.

Conrad Aiken has selected Henry James as his master. As he himself is a residual, Jamesian hyphenate, what he requires are not the panicky, indecisive velleities of the old master, but a stable, and more roughly-hewn tripod. James is altogether anti-epical, and his irresolute style is canonical gabble. Virgil took as his guide Homer, and Humboldt modeled his Travels upon Pliny, but Aiken prefers "Ariel's Isle," England, to America, though neither this dying Helicon nor James is what the author of Ushant requires.

A poet ought to seek a genius or locality suitable to his nature and without his own foibles. It would have been better for the poet to have given his homage to a wild pear log, or to crude stones, or the cacao god and the peccary, an aboriginal feculent sow, than to Henry James. What profit were it for Rabelais to have gone to the dung-hill or to mealy-mouthed Thersites? Predacious Achilles is patient and tractible in the presence of the refined, Asiatic Priam, and Helen is chaste and of modest carriage when she is beheld by a group of elderly Nestors who admire her without raising her blood. Let a New Englander go to raging Archilochus or to the choleric river Scamader; let him as Themistocles did, drink ox's blood, for what killed the Theban hero would be no more than an ejaculative draught for a writer from Beacon Hill.

The Autobiography is glutted with pinchbeck, primal cries that are solely decorative, such as, "beginning without beginning, water without seam," "Whale, blow your conch, lost fisherman off the dangerous shores of Ushant." The book is a museum wrack of kelp, gulls, sandpipers, cormorant, trulls, and all composed of the dregs of Joyce, Eliot, and Hart Crane. There is a plethora of the stage dithyrambics of the romantics and of amateur art words, like, "particles of the soul's landscape," "mulberry-colored red medallion of Chinese brocade," "the beer and iced coffee, in the Bloomsbury window," "magnification of rain," "a quite horrible verisimilitude," "preternaturally luminous nuclei," and "full of flux and reflux, coil and moil." All this is specious Genesis, sham, primordial sea-weather, and a Beacon Hill class in still-life imagery. There are the old salon art locutions of the Rossetti and Burne-Jones milieu. Aiken wavers between sybaritic adjectival nouns, the "rootedness of earth-living," and contemporary perversions of Joyce. Ushant is in the Corinthian mood and the verbs are soft, medic adjectives. He teases the ear but does not invigorate the intellect; he is too sensual, and his words do not fall properly, or arrange themselves by felicitous accident, which is what Demetrius called "skill in love with luck, and luck skill." The book is choked with the poetaster's atticisms, "mythopeic," "palimpsest," "narcissism," "Heraclitean," and "mythos" which call to mind the "epos," "cthonic," "hubris," and "ethos" of the spurious, hellenic, academic mummer. The misuse of words induces evil in the soul, said Socrates.

There is a pitchless skill and a peccant understanding of the uses of myth and of hyperbole in "grand daedalian secret," or "the less Gordian-knotted." Daedelus signifies intellectual inventiveness, and Socrates was said to have been of the lineage of Daedalus, showing how intricate were his syllogisms. All the poet succeeds in doing is to reduce substantives of strong, legendary, association to weakling epithets, producing as foolish an effect as if one wrote—they played in a Jovian back alley when they were children.

Fables have unusual charm and force in the nominative case, and the reader is still amazed at the labors of Hercules, or at the spectacle of Prometheus's liver devoured by the vulture, especially when these legends are applied to contemporary perplexities of the mind. Active myth dwindles when Prometheus or Baccus become promethean or bacchic, or Icarus and Daedalus, icarian and daedalian. Ushant resembles the grasshoppers of Anacreon who were said to be without grief or blood. Even when the poet risks the scatophagous "cockroach riddled," or "unwashed vomit," it does no sour the gullet or sharpen the mouth with the remembrance of acerbity. The scatalogical in Ushant is aprioristic word sport, or logomachy, and is as much the toy and triffle of an idle brain as the phlegm of frogs and the spittle of newts, which are factitious and not riggish. The modern scatologist should heed the Ion of Euripides who takes his bow and aims it at the swan for dropping its ordure upon the statues.

It is written that Democritus took all from Leucippus, leaving his own folly to Epicurus. At times it is impossible to know whether it is Aiken, James, Eliot, Pound or John Dos Passos who is writing. Aiken, doubly acknowledging his debt to the debile cliche rhymes of James writes: "Just as the oh so precious, the oh so exquisite Madeline, the Jamesian lady of ladies, the enchantress of the Beacon HIll drawing room—who, like another Circe, had made strange shapes of Wild Michael and the Tsetse—was afterwards to be essentialized . . ." Here is another ecstatic Jamesian banality which is supposed to reek with ambiguity and covert allusion: "this radiant narcissim, with its passionate need to emphasize and identify, this all-embracingness." In referring to his childhood he remarks that the stoop, "like everything else" it has been "transitional . . . temporary; but for that it was, it remained paramount." Elsewhere Aiken tells of Aunt Jane—"she was apple pie and coffee cake and homespun clothes." He writes of "aerial flowers," "esurient shadows," and "the most meltingly diaphanous of clouded ceilings."

It is not a blemish in a poet to imitate somebody; only a humbug original derives from no one, since we are not, as Homer reminds us, begotten of stocks and stones. Aiken's defect is not that he has been influenced by others, but that his work is an ill-concealed cento. Each book, no matter what it owes to other authors, should be as distinct as was Artaxerxes whose arms reached down to his knees. A poet is the slyest of dissemblers, and, like Hobbes, who carried a pen and inkhorn in his cane, must rush to his own afflatus to rewrite with as much heat as possible the thoughts of Herodotus, Seneca, or of Statius.

All art is the working over of ideas of others, and whether this be rammish industry of Aspasia, or the cross-questioning Elenchus of Socrates, it matters not. What is important is that Aspasia convince Pericles that though her devices be the same as Cressid's, she can do what she would fain do in a way all of her own. Socrates has the same purpose, for though Prodicus, his teacher, and Gorgias has said more or less the same as the syllogist, he has to prove to Critias and Alcibiades that he is an original, Those who refuse to be duped by Aspasia or Socrates are themselves stale witlings because Socrates and Aspasia are most wondrous deceivers.

Aiken is not a nimble pickpocket of Helicon as were all the pothouse Autolycuses of letters in the days of Elizabeth. We do not assail these men as coney-catchers any more than we find faulty with Ben Jonson who was a very gifted plagiarist, because only the most cunning scholiasts can find him out. Whether a book is a virgin or a matron only wise Democritus can tell, who, when he saw a girl pass him after daybreak, said, "Good morning maiden," but when she returned at dusk greeted her, "Good evening, woman." This is not a pardon for low-born clodpates who either steal from bad writers, or who have too pelting an imagination reseethe their purloinings. Once we grant as Cicero said, that honor nourishes the arts, we will allow any man to do as he pleases, provided he entertain us, care for justice, and has not a mastiff's heart.

Aiken does not sufficiently amuse us because he pilfers from people who are too close to our own generation. By now James, Pound, Eliot, Joyce are dowds, jades and trulls of Parnassus, and we are weary of them. It may be that they will be curios again in some other time, but now they do not provide the spectacle of remoteness so significant in literature. Let a poet send me back to Macrobius , Strabo, Hecataeus, as shock to shake my satiey; ransack Nicholas Breton, or the larders of Chrysostom, for they are far from us and can provide a contemporary book with the aspect of distance. No one can come close to the pyramids of Egypt or the Mayan oratories at Chiapas, for they so overpower the witness as to give home ontological uneasiness which causes one to believe that he may have seen these edifices in another time.

Ushant is based upon sensibility and imagery, and the ruttish joys of the ear instead of the mind. It is given over to the senses which sleepily recollect the sheets of Aphrodite and her fragrant cestus. The book is entirely too much in bed, for as the hedonist Solomon advises, do not give your strength to women, by which he means, not all of it. The American intellect is at its nadir of strength as a wild autochthonic beast. The author of Ushant longs for the cits of Cape Cod, Bloomsbury and Beacon Hill, but this is enervated nostalgia and not the empiric simplicity of Heraclitus who said of his townsmen, May the Ephesians hang themselves. Ushant is a homage to Venus, and she is a very great goddess, for as Parmenides asserts, first of all Eros was contrived, but Eros is what the poet imagines goddess to have been in his youth. He pines again for this deity to sting and whip him.

The more austere divinities are seldom present in this work and men require the congealed bosom of Diana which is chaste thought, and the cold, blue eyes of Pallas Minerva which are the fountains of wisdom and strife, and we cannot court these continent deities without will and striving. A book should be as chaste as it is rammish, which should enable one to understand Antisthenes when he exclaims, I would rather go mad than feel pleasure. Homer himself detests venery as much as he is drawn by it, for he has feculent Vulcan drop his seed on the thigh of Pallas Minerva, which is a fable the priapic acolytes of D. H. Lawrence, Cocteau, and Wilde have never properly understood.

A poem or a book that does not make the reader toil for his fate deprives him of energy, which is his most tragical and valiant weapon against the cosmos, and without which man is neither epic nor universal. A book that weakens human will is inartistic, for all writing is heroic feigning, imagining that though everything perish, a book will be perdurable, Knowing that death is always brushing our backs, we write to forget death.

Everything in literature has to be enlarged to make tragedy or comedy heroic. The fault with the modern poem or novel is that after reading it one is no longer ample enough to go to Philippi, as Brutus did, or has the swollen jocularity to be mistaken for the Persians who were said to void plains. Henry james could hardly shut a door except in a long, panicky sentence; he was too irresolute and weak to push a door to, and his nervous, worn out psyche, like that of Fleda in The Spoils of Poynton, and her name suggests the most alarmed flight, just fell on the floor and screamed as it contemplated a hard, brutal knob.

The most average acts are crucial pain for the Jamesian nature, and all the wheezy parentheses are really avoidances of bestial matter. Syntax has become very circuitous and hesitant, which is another word for sensitive, and which has given us so many involved, stammering clauses, that all any reader now prays for is that a writer begin a sentence in the nominative case closely followed by a verb. This sort of plain resolute banality makes us understand that when Ajax hurls a rock at the head of Hector he does it to kill him as fast a possible, and not because the stone tempted him or had hindered his childhood. Similarly, going to the door for Henry James was the dreariest incubus, and the reasons he could not do it as promptly as any burly pedestrian Ajax could, is that he had an injured prostate gland. All the panicky, Jamesian hiatuses are the result of impotency. However, there are many critics of the Jamesian ilk who are young and virile, and who can close a door without being nervous at all, but who write as though they had sustained the same injury as their master. They remind one of the pickthank friends surrounding Dionysius, the tyrant, who inclined their heads to one side in the same manner as the despot, though they did not suffer his deafness. One argute critic, drawing upon a letter by Alice, the sister of Henry and William James, said that William James had built a house with fourteen doors, all of them swinging outward, and that this showed that he was a sane, outdoor nature. A more homely explanation is that a man who puts up a house containing fourteen doors wanted to get out of it very badly, and being a man of some rough sense, realized that he would be likely to run out of his home at any moment, and that if the doors swung toward instead of away from him, he would knock out his brains. Unless we can go though a door without it being a torment, or open a window without making a dilemma of it in nine modifying clauses, American letters is doomed. We must return to the näive heart, without minding what is banal and average, and relating it in clear sentences. If we don't, in another generation no one will have the bravery to get through the mangling Jamesian syntax to go to the door.

The new seers of Parnassus have robbed the muses of their strength, and though the modern cicalas are supposed to sing a street-gamin patois, their voices are too weak because they are undernourished. There is no table, hearth, or the cruets so dear to Saturn, in modern American literature. Dickens is the last writer in English to feed his characters. There was an Epimenedes, a Greek cynic of the sect of Diogenes, who kept his food in the smallest scrip so that he would have meager droppings. The characters in Ushant, or in any present day book are never at meal, and the result is that they are too dispirited and feckless to perform the most ordinary acts.

The book has too little will in it, as the title suggests. Ushant signifies not deep mortification or failure, but precautionary reluctance to risk the deeps of chagrin. A book is not Ushant, but I WILL. The author is placeless and is as ungraspable as Proteus because he is in no single element, character or will. He is loose water, and all the glyphs, mementoes, and reminiscences are written on the unstable surfaces of the sea.

A poet should write a tree, ground, tarn, ravine, or stone book to give it one sort of character and weather. However, it is easier for Peter top walk upon the sea to Christ than it is for the reader to tread this volume. The poet is homeless, and his lament is that, unlike Poe, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, he has not seeded his psyche in America. These piecemeal reveries—a paragraph on Brattle Street at Harvard, a fugitive encounter with a whore on Russel Square, a moment of venery with a French girl on a channel boat, a moiety of his grammar school days at South Yarmouth—are a far cry for the genius of locality. But he won't let a single memory be in one place long enough to ripen or season; he has never taken the time to bury his memories in an orchard, or in some profound loam, to give them pious sepulchre.

Remembrance is a torn, placeless ghost raw and wandering, unless we bury our griefs and pains in one specific ground, region and sod. Ghosts, too, must be seeded like fruit, rains, and despair, if they are not to return to make of our hears their Acheron, for hell is going to and fro in the earth, and having no landmarks, or country or epitaph to define our souls.

February 1953

From this Issue

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poetry-magazineLight in Autumn

poetry-magazinePray Eros

Table of Contents

Sestina in Time of Winter

Light in Autumn

Pray Eros