Overtaken Pioneer

THE COLLECTED NOVELS OF CONRAD AIKEN. 575 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $7.95.

Consider the case of Conrad Aiken. His credentials as a man of letters are impeccable--40-odd volumes of prose and poetry, a tour of duty as consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress, a slew of literary prizes (Pulitzer, Bollingen, the gold medal for poetry of the National Institute of Arts and Letters). He has been a fixture on the literary scene as long as any living American poet. But Aiken, now 74, wryly acknowledges that he is "a dubious horse in the Pegasus sweepstakes."

This new Aiken collection suggests why. Consisting of four novels previously published in the U.S., together with one--A Heart for the Gods of Mexico--published in England in 1939 but new to U.S. readers, it is presented with an all but impenetrable introduction by Critic R. P. Blackmur ("These snippets of anecdote make minor eclaircissements of who-knows-what").

Spent Cascade. Heart for the Gods is virtually impenetrable itself, although the plot is simple. A young woman learns that she has a heart condition that will kill her within six months. She confides in her old friend Blomberg (a thinly disguised portrait of Aiken himself) and explains that, in the short time left, she wants to go to Mexico to get a divorce from her estranged husband and to marry the man who has loved her for years. Blomberg, the woman and her intended husband travel by day coach from Boston to Mexico City. The night after they get there, the girl suffers a final, fatal heart attack.

In Aiken's mind, the trip stood as a symbol of both the expanding American frontier and the expanding American consciousness, moving from innocence to experience (a theme that preoccupied him in his fictionalized autobiography, Ushant). But story and symbol never meet, with the result that cascades of imagery and torrents of metaphor are expended on events that have all the inherent drama of a railroad timetable. The train pulls into the town of Galion, Ohio, and Blomberg is jolted awake: "Galion! They had come to Galion; this point in chaos and eternal night was Galion." To Blomberg, the trip signifies that she is "taking her heart as an offering to the bloodstained altar of the plumed serpent."

The same abstruse prolixity floods all of Aiken's novels. Their action is mostly interior: in Blue Voyage, a playwright broods upon and confirms his own sense of inferiority during a voyage to England; in King Coffin, a paranoid ponders a murder for a hundred pages and then decides not to commit it.

Lost Force. At his best, Aiken can suggest a mental atmosphere with compelling force. He was one of the forerunners of the still-current rage for Freudian fiction, an early psychological novelist who explored neurotic fear and sexual antagonisms with extraordinary restrained sensuality. Rich in inner soliloquy, barren of drama, his writing is most successful in evocative short stories (notably Silent Snow, Secret Snow, The Last Visit and Mr. Arcularis), where he is able to embody a single emotion in a single carefully worked image.

As for his poetry, it too often loses its force in what Aldous Huxley called Aiken's "coloured mists" of sound. Reread today, Aiken seems a classic case of the experimental writer whose experiment is outmoded. He finds himself disconcertingly immured in some Smithsonian Institution of prose when he had aspired to the National Gallery, and viewed with respect only by those who remember that he was a pioneer in territory that has now been settled.

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