Word: aikens
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...introduction to this dramatized version of Mr. Arcularis, Conrad Aiken traces its origins back to his remembrance of a small, shabby man, met on an Atlantic liner many years ago. This man was the real Mr. Arcularis, of whom Aiken says, "there was something pathetically indrawn and remote about him; he talked little to me or to anyone else... and almost from the outset I thought of him as some how having the air of a somnambulist, a sleepwalker." From the suggestion offered by this contact with a real person has grown, during the intervening years, a character who walks...
Over the years Harvard has turned out far more than its share of a nation's major literary figures, in both critical and imaginative writing. In this century the University has left its mark on Conrad Aiken, Robert Benchley, e.e.cummings, John Dos Passos, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, John Marquand, Eugene O'Neill, Edward Arlington Robinson, Robert Sherwood, Wallace Stevens, and Thomas Wolfe, to name an even dozen. While this may be due to the undeniable attraction of a Harvard diploma for the talented, an examination of specific cases indicates that the University did not pass these...
...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...
...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...
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...