The Last Journey

MR. ARCULARIS: A PLAY IN Two ACTS (83 pp.)--Conrad Aiken--Harvard Uni versity ($2.75).

Anesthetist: He's ready now, Doctor.

Dr. Alderton: Pulse?

Anesthetist: Still ninety . . .

Dr. Alderton: Right. (With emphasis.) We're off.

The patient whose heart is about to be bared and repaired is Mr. Arcularis, originally the sad, gentle hero of a taut, understated Conrad Aiken short story which first appeared in T. S. Eliot's Criterion in 1932. Fourteen years later, dramatized with the help of British Actress-Writer Diana Hamilton, it achieved a four-week run in London. Now, still haunted by what the play might have been, Pulitzer Prizewinner Aiken has performed the dramatizing operation all over again, this time singlehanded, and with excellent results.

Why does Mr. Arcularis' heart need refurbishing? While the surgeon is working away at it offstage, Author Aiken is explaining onstage. The play shows Mr. Arcularis recovering from the operation (or so it seems) and boarding a ship for a convalescent's cruise. The ship's engines throb as they drive the vessel over the waves--and it is suddenly clear that this throb is really the heavy pounding of Mr. Arcularis' heart as it struggles under the surgeon's knife. For the operation is still going on, and the "cruise" is only Mr. Arcularis' ether dream. His "fellow passengers" are really the surgeon and his assistants, with two notable exceptions: Mr. Arcularis' mother and her lover, who have been dead for nearly half a century. In this dreamworld of his own anesthetized devising, Mr. Arcularis falls in love with a pretty shipmate, but in the darkness of night he keeps sleepwalking gruesomely to the ship's refrigerating plant and tries to pry open a coffin: "And I'll kneel there, looking down at my own dead face."

Dr. Alderton: Pulse?

Anesthetist: Fifty-eight, fiftysix, fifty-four . . .

Dr. Wetheril (listening with stethoscope): He's going . . . No no

heart .

Subtle, intriguing and full of originality, the play recalls other writers who, steering by Freud with a list to Oedipus, showed man haunted by the ghost of his mother, and combined the pursuit of love with a longing for death. But Aiken is first and foremost a poet with an intricate set of symbols all his own. He has long been fascinated by ships, voyages, wandering and exile. No other major U.S. writer is more traditionally American than he--and yet no other gives a stronger feeling of being an explorer beyond his own land. In Ushant (TIME, Nov. 10, 1952), an indefinable sort of stream-of-consciousness auto biography, Aiken's American steered his way over the Atlantic towards a distant light, amid the crying of seagulls and the clanging of bells--and the same hand is at the helm of Mr. Arcularis. The result is poignant, eerie, fateful, with highly dramatic moments. No other living poet, using heartbeats and a coffin as his props, could convey a grimmer impression of man's syncopated march into the bosom of death.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.