Word: aikens
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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 éclaircissements 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...
...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...
...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...
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...