Word: aikens
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...weakness as an author," Conrad Aiken asks in Blue Voyage, "that I appear incapable of presenting a theme energetically and simply. I must always wrap it up in tissue upon tissue of proviso and aspect; see it from a hundred angles . . . producing in the end not so much a unitary work of art as a phantasmagoric world of disordered colors and sounds; a world without design or purpose...
...this characteristically brutal self-appraisal, Aiken almost dispels the need for further criticism of his work. Conrad Aiken is not a great novelist. By every time-honored (or shall we say time-worn) criterion of criticism--characterization, plot, style--he is a failure...
...Aiken knows and understands himself, but no one else. The autobiographical character in each of his five novel emerges clearly from the "phantasmargoric world." But the author suffers from the plight of his central characters, such as the insane hero of King Coffin who flatly states, "It was true that no human being could ever achieve a real contact with anything or anyone." Aiken's characters are always distant and blurred for author, protagonist, and reader...
Plot--if we define it as things which happen in the course of a novel--is not overabundant in Aiken's works. In Conversation, a man and his wife have drifted apart, and finally drift back together. In Blue Voyage, a man discovers that his former lover is traveling on a ship with him and that she is now engaged. These would seem to be unsubstantial pegs on which to hang several hundred pages of prose...
...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...