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Wednesday, February 08, 2006
Cosmos Mariner - Destination Unknown
It is difficult to place Conrad Aiken in the poetic firmament, so difficult that one sometimes wonders whether he deserves a place there at all. Mr. Aiken himself seems to be somewhat uncertain as to his role - he comes to the rehearsal, so to speak, still fumbling in his pockets for his part. Sometimes the radicals please him and he plays with the radicals; sometimes he plays with the shell-backs [veteran sailors?]. And even when apparently most single-minded he carries on clandestine flirtations.
This is a serious weakness. It points to a fundamental lack of conviction, in Mr. Aiken’s mind, as to poetic values. If he is consistent as regards his material, sticking fairly closely to a preference for an objective psychological method in poetry, he is hopelessly confused as regards the problem of poetic form. In Turns and the Movies he willfully sacrified his ability to write in smooth involute curves for a dubious gain in matter-of-fact forcefulness. In The Jig of Forslin he recanted , and, with occasional sops to downright and rigid realism, abandoned himself to a luxuriation in romantic virtuosity. And now, in Nocturne of Remembered Spring, he is more clearly than ever a schizophrenic ...
From a review, by Conrad Aiken, of Aiken’s Nocturne of Remembered Spring, reprinted in Collected Criticism
What you really want is Selected Poems [
I. HIS DARK ORIGINS
1
Senlin sits before us, and we see him.
He smokes his pipe before us, and we hear him.
Is he small, with reddish hair,
Does he light his pipe with meditative stare,
And a pointed flame reflected in both eyes?
Is he sad and happy and foolish and wise?
Did no one see him enter the doors of the city,
Looking above him at the roofs and trees and skies?
‘I stepped from a cloud’, he says, ‘as evening fell;
I walked on the sound of a bell;
I ran with winged heels along a gust;
Or is it true that I laughed and sprang from dust? . . .
Has no one, in a great autumnal forest,
When the wind bares the trees,
Heard the sad horn of Senlin slowly blown?
Has no one, on a mountain in the spring,
Heard Senlin sing?
Perhaps I came alone on a snow-white horse,--
Riding alone from the deep-starred night.
Perhaps I came on a ship whose sails were music,--
Sailing from moon or sun on a river of light
Skipping to the next section:
II. HIS FUTILE PREOCCUPATIONS
1
I am a house, says Senlin, locked and darkened,
Sealed from the sun with wall and door and blind.
Summon me loudly, and you’ll hear slow footsteps
Ring far and faint in the galleries of my mind.
You’ll hear soft steps on an old and dusty stairway;
Peer darkly through some corner of a pane,
You’ll see me with a faint light coming slowly,
Pausing above some gallery of the brain ...
Another bit is known for one phrase’s subsequent appearance as the title of a children’s book:
- It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning
- When the light drips through the shutters like the dew,
- I arise, I face the sunrise,
- And do the things my fathers learned to do.
- Stars in the purple dusk above the rooftops
- Pale in a saffron mist and seem to die,
- And I myself on a swiftly tilting planet
- Stand before a glass and tie my tie.
Now a bit from The House of Dust:
PART I.
1
The sun goes down in a cold pale flare of light.
The trees grow dark: the shadows lean to the east:
And lights wink out through the windows, one by one.
A clamor of frosty sirens mourns at the night.
Pale slate-grey clouds whirl up from the sunken sun.And the wandering one, the inquisitive dreamer of dreams,
The eternal asker of answers, stands in the street,
And lifts his palms for the first cold ghost of rain.
The purple lights leap down the hill before him.
The gorgeous night has begun again.‘I will ask them all, I will ask them all their dreams,
I will hold my light above them and seek their faces.
I will hear them whisper, invisible in their veins . . .’
The eternal asker of answers becomes as the darkness,
Or as a wind blown over a myriad forest,
Or as the numberless voices of long-drawn rains.
If Thus Spoke Zarathustra reads this well in the original German, I retract my complaints. The inscription on Aiken’s tomb in Savannah is nice, too. You already read it. It’s the title to this post. Speaking of toeing a fine line between tragedy and parody, via metaphysical poetry, I took the trouble of transcribing the following from Collected Criticism. It apparently ran under the title, "A Poet’s Dream" in Chicago News, 4th December, 1918.
Boston, November 30, 1918.
Dear Henry: Excuse breathlessness of this letter. I have run all the way from Cambridge.
You see, it was this way. Conrad and I were to have our third informal conference on midsummer housing at 1 o’clock. As I opened the door I found him stuffing a manuscript into the fire. Knowing how many masterpieces had already been sacrificed on the altar of his modesty I seized it - and here it is. Oh, Henry, you wouldn’t believe how fast Conrad can run. But I have it. Henry. I have it.
Affectionately.
BOB
P.S. Be sure and send an issue in which this appears to every member of the Poetry Society. If you haven’t a list I will supply it.
It will stir them up.
Z-z-z-z-z-
Dear Henry: the other night after you had asked me to review The Charnel Rose, as I sat with a copy on my knee and wondered how it was that I happened to write such a good book, I must have fallen asleep, for on the parlor clock’s striking sixteen I awoke from a very remarkable dream. As I recollected it I began to write it down, and it astonished me as I did so to perceive that the well-known personages of my dream were in many cases making remarks which I knew them actually to have made in real life. You will see that I have given the dream a dramatic form. This I did because such a form saved space, and seemed also to preserve the best the singularly detached way in which everything, my own self not excluded, therein appeared. It might, indeed, have been merely my astral body which I saw in the obscurity approaching its fellow poets and offering for them the supreme sacrifice. The scene was somewhat vague. Was there a street lamp in the center? I think so, and I remember that in addition to the poets who actually talked there were others, such as Frost, Sandburg, and Lindsay, more remote and loftier, as if reclining on clouds, and watching with a kind of bored silence. The proceedings started a little disconcertingly with a remark, quite unwarranted, by -
- KREYMBORG: Charnel houses no longer exist, do they? Perhaps, then, the nearest sewer would be the most suitable place for The Charnel Rose.
FIRKINS: But would the system be equal to it?
KREYMBORG: No: you are right. It would be indigestible. We had better tear it to pieces first, had we not?
CHORUS OF POETS (joyously)" Ah, by all means!
MASTERS (a little way off on a cloud): Did some one mention immortality? Now, in my next poem, "The Afternoon of a Forn- " (falls asleep)
MISS LOWELL: The trouble with Aiken -
BODENHEIM: Is that he is an eclectic ... The cloud delicately absorbs light. The wind peripatetically absorbs moisture ... There are artists who, like pawnbrokers -
FIRKIN: Et hock genus omne -
BODENHEIM: Live on the borrowed faintly abraded trinkets of spirits wearily indigent. The cloud takes its shape from the many-hurrying jingles of the pilgrim winds.
KREYMBORG: Aiken is not a poet: he is a critic.
MISS MONROE: But is the subject really worth discussion? Now , Vachel -
FLETCHER: The trouble with Aiken is that he is a lyric poet and doesn’t know it. He is obsessed with narrative, which he can’t manage. He should write lyrics.
BRAITHWAITE: Aiken is a * great poet! Perhaps one of our ** greater poets! He may not be the *** very greatest, but should we not put him among the *** greatest?
MISS LOWELL (in mid-distance, on a cloud like a divan): Aiken should let himself go! His technique is superb, but he is insincere. As for me - I sit on the dictionary and make poems - big words and little ones, flat words and then soft ones, pale words that writhe like vermicelli and round words with holes in the middle like doughnuts. I sit on the dictionary and make poems. What a pity that some words are pointed and blue like new tacks!
MISS MONROE: I think the subject is hardly worth discussion.
WILLIAMS: The poems of Aiken are like split B.V.D’s, basted.
BODENHEIM: The cloud absorbs light wearily: it has no soul of its own **** Has Aiken any individuality? Does he exist?
MISS MONROE: He is an echo of Masefield and of Gibson. The Jig of Forslin is like Owen Meredith’s Lucile. Turns and Movies is like Hiawatha. The Charnel Rose is like the Old Oaken Bucket.
POUND: (wearily): Swinburne plus Fletcher minus Aiken equals Aiken.
UNTERMEYER: Eliot plus Masters minus Aiken equals Aiken.
HERVEY: Baudelaire plus Evans plus De Nerval plus Verlaine plus Mallarmé plus Rimbaud minus Aiken equals Aiken.
KREYMBORG: Didn’t you leave out somebody?
BRAITHWAITE: the subliminal is peculiarly unconscious. It is evanescently through the impalpable that the immanent becomes imminent. In 1872 I prophesied that Aiken’s true genius was as a philosophical poet. Senlin carries one to breathless heights of the ideal: it is a roseate apoplexy of vision.
FIRKINS: A psychic hemorrhage!
PHELPS [?]: Aiken was a poet once - in Earth Triumphant. How he has changed!
FLETCHER [?]: Aiken will be a poet- if he lives long enough. Forslin contains passages which I would be glad to have written myself. Aiken knows how to write, but his range is too limited.
OPPENHEIM: His poems are merely monotonous.
FIRKINS: Immoral.
CLEMENT WOOD: Dish-rags and lace.
BRAITHWAITE: Trite.
MISS LOWELL: Artificial.
UNTERMEYER: Prematurely decadent.
MENCKEN: Long.
KREYMBORG: But we had forgotten The Charnel Rose!
ELIOT: Pound, who is Aiken? The name sounds familiar. Is he an Englishman?
BODENHEIM: He is a distillation of old hours, of leaves worn meekly smooth by the fingers of gently-stooping readers in the public library.
MISS LOWELL: Nonsense! He is a frog-hearted technician.
MISS MONROE: But is the subject vital? And besides in Chicago -
KREYMBORG: It is more delightful, verily, as in New York and the Zoo to search with delicate absorbed fingers through the long fur of our Me’s. Why waste time on the trivial?
MISS LOWELL (hurriedly drawing her cloud about her): My God, boys, here he comes!
KREYMBORG: Isn’t he the quaint delicious long legged red headed whimsically melancholy smut-loving bird!
MISS MONROE: Good heavens, I have an appointment - excuse me if I hurry!
AIKEN (approaching timidly): Hullo! Something important being discussed?
KREYMBORG: Well, no, not exactly - we were discussing The Charnel Rose. Perhaps, Conrad, you will tell us something about it - what it means, for example, and how you came to write it.
MISS LOWELL: I refuse flatly to listen. Aiken is still adolescent. As for me - I sit -
AIKEN: Well, you have all been very generous to me, an d in consequence I think I will tell you my secret.
ALL: A secret!
AIKEN: Yes - you have been wiser than you knew. For I am not really a poet at all. I am a mathematician. I have discovered that poetry can be written by calculus -
ALL (delighted): Ah, that explains it!
AIKEN: And I have found a little machine which, if fed words from a dictionary at one end, turns out the finest metrical verse at the other, quite indistinguishable from the genuine article. Now, in The Charnel Rose -
ALL: YES!
AIKEN: It simply happened that by mistake this little engine was fed a volume of Havelock Ellis -
BODENHEIM: Or Freud!
AIKEN: And in Senlin -
ALL: Yes! Yes!
AIKEN (bursting into tears): I am ashamed to admit it - it was Alice in Wonderland.
MISS LOWELL (after a sympathetic silence): Well, never mind, Conrad! Now that we KNOW you’re not a poet, I think we’re all going to like you much, much better. (She taps him playfully with her fan: he collapses. The poets step away one by one over his prostrate body.)
As you see, Henry, the dream is absurd, and you would not expect me to vouch for the veridity of all its details. Fancy O.W. Firkins descending to such trivial puns, for example, or Miss Lowell being so foolish as to talk polyphonic prose in her sleep! Then, too, Miss Monroe’s attitude throughout! These things should not be permitted to pass without comment - though, indeed, Henry, I could have trusted serenly that your native good sense would have made allowances for the irresponsibilities of a mere dreamer, who, as it happens, is yours forever,
CONRAD AIKEN
Comments
How refreshing to read Literature quoted on this organ. I’m off to the library to get me some Conrad Aiken!
Reading Aiken’s best work, I understand why Eliot initially referred to him as “il miglior fabbro.” From “Preludes for Memnon”:
X
But you and I, Charybdis, are not new;
And all that flows between us is dead…
-Thus Scylla, the scarred rock, sad child of time,
Benumbed with barnacles and hung with weed,
With urchins at her feet, and on her brow
Foul nests of cormorants, adressed her moan
To hoar Charybdis, who, beyond the whirpool,
Lifted a hornèd crag to God and Nothing.
And still the salt sea sucked between them, bearing
The bones of ships and bones of humans, white
The one as other, and as little worth.
Where is this corner of the crumbling world:
Where are these rocks, beloved, that cry out
Their hate and fear of time, their bitter sadness
At past, and passing, and the sense of past?
It is between ourselves these waters flow.
It is ourselves who are these self-same rocks,-
And we it is whom time has cracked and hung
With frost and filth. The sea-gull’s is our voice;
The wail of mariners; the cry of wind.
And all that flows between us is dead.
No need to go to Lethe, nor to Sibyl,
To memory, or forgetfulness, or both,
To find such horror, or such richness, mixed,
As we can find who smile here face to face.
The waters of the human soul are deep.
We are the rocks that rot above those waters.
We are the rocks on whom the times have written.
We, the recorded sadness of the world.
What marvels, then, for us, who know already
All that the waters of the Godhead give?
Let us desist from this forlorn attempt
To wring strange beauty from a world well known.
Patience is all: so Shakspere might have said.
Let us be patient, then, and hear at night
The flux and reflux of the whirpool, borne
Restless between us; submit, since needs we must,
To sad remembrance; but remember also
That there was nought before remembrance was.
Thanks, Richard. I’ve never read “Preludes”. With my preference for metaphysical poetry, I probably should.
Glad to be of service, Dehua. (I’ve seen quite a few of your films. If you are THAT Liu Dehua.)
Welcome, John. Eliot’s oevre aside, “Preludes” is probably the finest example of post-symbolist poetry in English—definitely worth checking out.
Didn’t Eliot call Pound “il miglior fabbro,” in the dedication to the Waste Land? Did he also compliment Aiken the same way?
I think Eliot first used the phrase to describe Aiken—I wouldn’t say Aiken was a better poet than Pound or Eliot, only that he’s a good poet who’s been unduly neglected.
I did not know it was recycled for old Ez. What a cagey old Possum.
That’s great! I can see the party scene after Eliot has passed through, dispensing compliments. ‘I’m il miglior fabbro!’ ‘No, I’m il miglior fabbro!’ ‘I’m il miglior fabbro and so’s my wife!’
To quote the first line of a review by Conrad Aiken (1936): “Mr. Eliot is nothing if not thrifty.”