Sorcerer’s apprentice - Meeting Conrad Aiken

By Hugh Cecil

 

January 11, 2019

 

I  first came across the work of Conrad Aiken in the late 1950s in a volume edited by Dashiell Hammett entitled Modern Tales of Horror, which I read at school at the age of sixteen. Aiken is perhaps known today as much for his associations with Malcolm Lowry and T. S. Eliot as for his own writing – Eliot and Aiken were colleagues at Harvard and edited the Advocate together – but the short story I read in Hammett’s anthology, “Mr Arcularis”, struck me by its extraordinary treatment of death. It also evoked the childhood that I was leaving behind. It was the beginning of a fascination with Aiken that was to graduate into a friendship.

 

A few years later, in 1962, while an Oxford undergraduate, I plucked up the courage to write to Aiken. I was delighted to receive a reply: “You have a good eye!” he wrote back, referring to my praise of several of his works of fiction. “You’ve managed to pick, with one exception, my own favourites.” The exception was his novel A Heart for the Gods of Mexico (1939) but I persisted in liking it; its theme and treatment of a loved woman facing death had impressed me greatly. Later he wrote to me: “Your defence of Heart F T G o M has so shaken me that I’m suggesting to my publishers that they include it in the Collected Novels, which will come out next year”.

 

I had thought that was the end of our acquaintance, but one day in 1967 when I was a Harkness Fellow at Harvard, I wandered into the celebrated Grolier Bookshop. Its owner, Gordon Cairnie, told me, when I asked if he had anything by Aiken, that the writer had just recovered from a heart attack. I hadn’t yet written to Aiken to tell him that I was in the US, but as soon as I got this news I wrote. A visit was arranged, at the traditional New England clapboard house where he lived in Brewster, Cape Cod. It was called Forty One Doors, “an old small house with lots of room”.

 

I found a short, stocky man, bald, with a prominent belly, clad in a linen bathrobe due, I was told, to a skin infection. Aiken was seventy-eight at the time of this first meeting. His outfit, as well as his sharp canine teeth, peaked eyebrows and commanding presence, gave him the air of a sorcerer. While his wife Mary prepared a delicious meal of local clams, he produced a copy of his metaphysical poem, Thee, which had just been published – an affirmative declaration of the meaning and mystery of life and its contradictions. “What do you think of it?” he asked, sitting me down with the book – a difficult question to answer with a powerful martini cocktail in a silver goblet in one’s other hand. Fortunately, the conversation took a less alarming turn as he ran through his views on prominent contemporary poets and writers, not all of whom he admired. He spoke with great affection, however, of his friend and disciple Lowry and of the poet Allen Tate. In the evening, Mary took us out in a run-down old car for what I learned was her husband’s evening ritual: a short journey to a point on Cape Cod Bay where, accompanied by a cool martini served from a thermos, we watched the sun sink below the horizon.

 

Over the following year and a half, I drove over several times from Harvard to see Aiken, and paid two trips to his winter home in Savannah, Georgia. He was the son of a brilliant, unbalanced, New England doctor, but Savannah, that exotic eighteenth-century city, was the place of his birth and childhood. On one of my visits to Savannah, he told me about the tragic end of his parents. I knew the story, but it was devastating to hear about it from the man himself. Early one morning, when he was twelve years old, he heard his parents rowing, as they often did, in the next-door bedroom. He then heard two shots, followed by silence. The little boy ventured into the room where he found their bodies. He then ran barefoot down the street to tell the police. After that, he was taken to live with relations in New England.

 

This cataclysmic childhood experience defined the rest of Aiken’s life. It conferred on his writing, as he said, “the sombre note which gives the chord its power”. It is perhaps what drove him to write, and he was prolific all his life – producing more than twenty major poem sequences or collections of verse, five novels and forty short stories, as well as countless reviews and essays for magazines. By the time I met him, however, I had the impression that he was hungry for an audience, that he felt unnoticed. This was slightly overwhelming for a young graduate student, though I found it flattering that he was so keen to talk. Aiken was terrified of going mad, like his father, and in his earlier years had feared that attention and fame would unbalance him.

 

Despite his indefatigable self-exploration, Aiken was self-effacing, partly because he belonged to no well-known poetic coterie and found half of his friends among psychologists and artists. One of the latter was the English painter Edward Burra, considered marginal at that time. They had met in Rye, Sussex, where Aiken had a house, and in 1937 were to make a trip to Mexico together.

 

Leaving aside his feelings of neglect, I was lucky to meet Aiken in his old age, when he had softened a little, and finally found a woman, Mary Hoover, who could “match him drink for drink”, as he put it, unlike his first two wives, with whom he had had turbulent marriages. (Aiken was married first to Jessie McDonald, between 1912 and 1929, and then briefly to Clarissa Lorenz. One of his daughters by McDonald was the children’s writer Joan Aiken.) I found him an extraordinary mixture of intellectual and homme moyen sensuel, who seemed capable of great happiness and black despair, bold but raw-nerved, generous but touchy, convivial but shy. To me he was an enchanter, with a beautiful, clearly enunciated, husky voice that I still hear whenever I pick up a volume of his poetry. I could see how easily he could exercise a spell over both men and women; he was a creator and manipulator of a world of beauty, sensuality, humour and darkness.

 

Despite his dislike and fear of the limelight, Aiken’s influence has been enormous. He is remembered for the guidance he proffered the young Malcolm Lowry, who wrote to him in 1927 having read Aiken’s autobiographical novel Blue Voyage. Lowry’s parents, concerned for their wayward son, offered to pay the older American writer to mentor him for the summer and help him with his writing. This resulted in an intense and often drunken friendship that paved the way for Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano twenty years later.

 

As for Eliot, a more or less exact contemporary – Eliot was born in 1888, Aiken a year later – and one who, like Aiken, also lived between the US and England, he told me that he felt in continuous competition with him. As we sat with our martinis, he told me that his undergraduate poem, “The Clerk’s Journal”, about the mundane life, loves and worries of “a little stock-sifting clerk”, preceded “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by three years and might have influenced it, though equally they both may have drawn from the same French inspiration.

 

Be that as it may, Aiken seems to have been the first writer of significance to have recognized the quality of “Prufrock”. He brought it to the notice of Ezra Pound, who agitated for it to be published in the Chicago magazine Poetry. In another of our conversations, Aiken told me how H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) had shown Sigmund Freud some of Aiken’s work, including Blue Voyage. He claimed that Freud was so taken by it that he offered him free psychoanalysis. To the dismay of Clarissa Lorenz, then Aiken’s wife, he never took Freud up on his offer, fearing that it would destroy the sources of his creative energies. (I learned this later, from Clarissa’s memoir, Lorelei Two.)

 

What I never found out much about from Aiken himself was the dark period of his early middle age when, following repeated infidelities, financial crises and quarrels with friends, he became suicidal. It happened despite the fact that this was the time of his most striking creative achievements. Until I discovered more about his later life, Aiken had seemed to me to be a fearless explorer of human consciousness, through self-analysis, passionate debate, literary experiment and sexual adventure.

 

In 1998, thirty years after our first encounter, I took my family to Savannah and showed them Aiken’s grave in the Bonaventure cemetery. I had named my eldest son after him. Aiken had asked for his headstone to be engraved with the words he had read in Lloyd’s Register, when looking up a ship he had seen sailing down the Savannah River: “C