Word: aikens
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This much is fairly easy to grasp in Aiken's "autobiographical narrative'' Ushant; thereafter, the going gets harder. For much of Ushant is cryptic self-psychoanalysis, and is to be fully understood, perhaps, only by Aiken himself. Yet Ushant is no more difficult than the earlier chapters of James Joyce's Ulysses, and one of the fall's favorite games in U.S. highbrow circles will be trying to untangle...
Love Affair with Britain. In skeleton form, Ushant is the story of a New Englander's love affair with Britain. As a boy, Aiken lay on the floor and was entranced by English poetry. He grew into a young man who fell "incurably, hopelessly and fatuously in love" with what he calls "Ariel's Island." But as he remained no less American at heart, his life became a tense, two-way stretch "of instability, restlessness and dissatisfaction." Aiken was "one minute the American correspondent for an English journal, the next the English correspondent for an American journal...
Along the way, three wives, identified only as Lorelei I, Lorelei II and Lorelei III, and numerous off-course mermaids got caught up in Aiken's voyage. He was never able to stay settled down for long in one country or the other; his way of life, as a young woman once told him, hardly provided the sort of homestead a woman dreams of-"roses peeping in, you know, and babies peeping...
What was at the bottom of his Anglo-American tussle? Aiken is clearest and most direct when he tries to explain. He was drawn to England by the particular genius it represented, of which "the facets and fragments . . . sparkled everywhere, on every level." Its common base was "love of life . . . vivid intelligence and gusto"; its expressions ranged from sublime poetry to low ribaldry. Aiken heard it in the dialogue between two dear old English ladies watching lambs at play...
English ways. Aiken was always drawn home by the American idioms, the revivifying air, the "half-wild individualism," the "purity and singleness of purpose," the "entire naturalness...