Conrad Aiken's Perceptive View Of "The Silences Around Us"

"Is it my 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. . ."

In 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.

Lack of external action in a novel is certainly no cardinal sin and hardly a unique characteristic in twentieth century literature. But when plot development stalls in Wolfe and Durroll, their brilliant use of language sustains our interest. The language in Eliot's poetry is hypnotic even when rational comprehension of his writing eludes us completely. Aiken, however, lacks the stylistic mastery of an Eliot or a Wolfe.

Aiken's virtue as a novelist is not the way he writes, but the way he sees. Durrell has asked, "What is life but the way we interpret the silences around us?" Aiken interprets the silences of our lives and compels us to feel their pain. "Psychological novel" would be the term to describe the type of book Aiken writes, but no academic categorization or paraphrase can capture the poignancy and depth of his perception.

In one part of Blue Voyage a man and a woman sit and talk about nothing in particular. No action: yet under Aiken's incisive eye the scene comes alive:

We talked frantically, Incessantly, and as impersonally as we could. Absolutely nothing personal was said: and yet the personal tension was every second becoming more unbearable. I was aware, of course, that she agitated me--but I couldn't make out whether she was agitated; and I was determined to avoid a false step. What really happened was that we were both in that state, but neither wanted to take the responsibility of declaring it: the ghost of respectability, perhaps, but also the fear of rebuff and making fools of ourselves. ... The fire began to die and the room to get cold. Should I put a coal on the fire? It would seem to suggest too coarsely that I took it for granted we were going to continue sitting there. . . . So I didn't.

Such piercing introspection is Aiken's greatest talent, as well as the framework on which he hangs his personal Weltanschauung. For he believes that the real nature of human existence manifests itself not in overt actions but in painful silences.

Throughout Aiken's writing we witness the human tendency toward self-destruction. "We specialize in smash-ups," says Andren Cather, the drunken hero of Great Circle. "If there's anything we dearly love, it's a nice little smash-up." This aspect of life is sharply portrayed in Blue Voyage. The hero, Demarest, speaks of a love he will never recapture: "There's no concealing the suffering it has brought, that frightful and inescapable and unwearying consciousness of the unattainable."

Again and again Aiken's novels echo the idea that love means pain, although his heroes still invariably heed the call of the Sirens. Why the love-pain equation? Like the lovers in Blue Voyage, we are unable to communicate, and must therefore bottle up our desires and the things we want to say. But what if the perfect communication were achieved? "What if it were at last possible to talk of everything with a woman? To keep no secrets, no dark recesses of the mind, no dolors and dunks, which could not be shared with her? But then she would have ceased to be attractive." Aiken develops this idea further in Conversation:

By god, no matter how much you love a woman, the time comes when you don't want to sleep with her. ... But how are you going to manage it? You can't say to your wife, Darling, I'm fed up with you--I know your body too well--the toes, the knees, the flanks, the moles, the hollows under the clavicles, the asymmetrical arrangement of your breasts, the pink patch of eczema on your side. . . . Who knows, one fine night ... everything might suddenly become beautiful and strange once more. You would be a stranger to me and I to you.

Although in Conversation this sort of temporary isolation saves a faltering marriage, Aiken points out that to isolate ourselves within the shell of the ego is no way to avoid pain. In King Coffin, Jasper Ammans, a young, insane intellectual who lives on Plympton Street in Cambridge, walls himself up within himself; he decides to kill a total stranger--"the final action by which he would have set the seal on his complete freedom." Ammans observes and analyzes his victim, Jones, so intensely that Jones' life, Jones' frustrations, Jones' pains become Ammans' own pain--and self-destruction. Involvement with others, Aikens seems to be telling us, is an inevitable part of life.

Thus all the exits are closed. Communication, lack of communication, love, isolation--all lead to pain