Word: aikens
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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...
...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...
...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...