Ushant, an Autobiographical Narrative, by Conrad Aiken. Duell, Sloan and Pearce. $4.50.
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Ushant is a long lotus sleep, and as the title suggests, it is not only anti-epical, but a florid, comic pun. "To utter a mere jest ornately is like beautifying an ape," one ancient rhetor remarked. When the life is finished, and the work one's bourne is over, the poet grows garrulous and tired. Great autobiography has a conscience that is so gifted that drops its blood continually. It is wise analects, the confession of one's ideas, impenitence and perversities; but Ushant is an archive of piddling obscenities, and is a loose-anecdotal recollection of puerile eroticisms.

Conrad Aiken has selected Henry James as his master. As he himself is a residual, Jamesian hyphenate, what he requires are not the panicky, indecisive velleities of the old master, but a stable, and more roughly-hewn tripod. James is altogether anti-epical, and his irresolute style is canonical gabble. Virgil took as his guide Homer, and Humboldt modeled his Travels upon Pliny, but Aiken prefers "Ariel's Isle," England, to America, though neither this dying Helicon nor James is what the author of Ushant requires.

A poet ought to seek a genius or locality suitable to his nature and without his own foibles. It would have been better for the poet to have given his homage to a wild pear log, or to crude stones, or the cacao god and the peccary, an aboriginal feculent sow, than to Henry James. What profit were it for Rabelais to have gone to the dung-hill or to mealy-mouthed Thersites?

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The Autobiography is glutted with pinchbeck, primal cries that are solely decorative, such as, "beginning without beginning, water without seam," "Whale, blow your conch, lost fisherman off the dangerous shores of Ushant." The book is a museum wrack of kelp, gulls, sandpipers, cormorant, trulls, and all composed of the dregs of Joyce, Eliot, and Hart Crane. There is a plethora of the stage dithyrambics of the romantics and of amateur art words, like, "particles of the soul's landscape," "mulberry-colored red medallion of Chinese brocade," "the beer and iced coffee, in the Bloomsbury window," "magnification of rain," "a quite horrible verisimilitude," "preternaturally luminous nuclei," and "full of flux and reflux, coil and moil." All this is specious Genesis, sham, primordial sea-weather, and a Beacon Hill class in still-life imagery. There are the old salon art locutions of the Rossetti and Burne-Jones milieu. Aiken wavers between sybaritic adjectival nouns, the "rootedness of earth-living," and contemporary perversions of Joyce. Ushant is in the Corinthian mood and the verbs are soft, medic adjectives. He teases the ear but does not invigorate the intellect; he is too sensual, and his words do not fall properly, or arrange themselves by felicitous accident, which is what Demetrius called "skill in love with luck, and luck skill." The book is choked with the poetaster's atticisms, "mythopeic," "palimpsest," "narcissism," "Heraclitean," and "mythos" which call to mind the "epos," "cthonic," "hubris," and "ethos" of the spurious, hellenic, academic mummer. The misuse of words induces evil in the soul, said Socrates.

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The scatalogical in Ushant is aprioristic word sport, or logomachy, and is as much the toy and triffle of an idle brain as the phlegm of frogs and the spittle of newts, which are factitious and not riggish. The modern scatologist should heed the Ion of Euripides who takes his bow and aims it at the swan for dropping its ordure upon the statues.

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It is not a blemish in a poet to imitate somebody; only a humbug original derives from no one, since we are not, as Homer reminds us, begotten of stocks and stones. Aiken's defect is not that he has been influenced by others, but that his work is an ill-concealed cento. Each book, no matter what it owes to other authors, should be as distinct as was Artaxerxes whose arms reached down to his knees. A poet is the slyest of dissemblers, and, like Hobbes, who carried a pen and inkhorn in his cane, must rush to his own afflatus to rewrite with as much heat as possible the thoughts of Herodotus, Seneca, or of Statius.

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Whether a book is a virgin or a matron only wise Democritus can tell, who, when he saw a girl pass him after daybreak, said, "Good morning maiden," but when she returned at dusk greeted her, "Good evening, woman." This is not a pardon for low-born clodpates who either steal from bad writers, or who have too pelting an imagination to reseethe their purloinings. Once we grant as Cicero said, that honor nourishes the arts, we will allow any man to do as he pleases, provided he entertain us, care for justice, and has not a mastiff's heart.

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Ushant is based upon sensibility and imagery, and the ruttish joys of the ear instead of the mind. It is given over to the senses which sleepily recollect the sheets of Aphrodite and her fragrant cestus. The book is entirely too much in bed, for as the hedonist Solomon advises, do not give your strength to women, by which he means, not all of it.

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The more austere divinities are seldom present in this work and men require the congealed bosom of Diana which is chaste thought, and the cold, blue eyes of Pallas Minerva which are the fountains of wisdom and strife, and we cannot court these continent deities without will and striving. A book should be as chaste as it is rammish, which should enable one to understand Antisthenes when he exclaims, I would rather go mad than feel pleasure. Homer himself detests venery as much as he is drawn by it, for he has feculent Vulcan drop his seed on the thigh of Pallas Minerva, which is a fable the priapic acolytes of D. H. Lawrence, Cocteau, and Wilde have never properly understood.

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All the panicky, Jamesian hiatuses are the result of impotency. However, there are many critics of the Jamesian ilk who are young and virile, and who can close a door without being nervous at all, but who write as though they had sustained the same injury as their master. They remind one of the pickthank friends surrounding Dionysius, the tyrant, who inclined their heads to one side in the same manner as the despot, though they did not suffer his deafness.

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Unless we can go through a door without it being a torment or open a window without making a dilemma of it in nine modifying clauses, American letters is doomed. We must return to the näive heart, without minding what is banal and average, and relating it in clear sentences. If we don't, in another generation no one will have the bravery to get through the mangling Jamesian syntax to go to the door.

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The book has too little will in it, as the title suggests. Ushant signifies not deep mortification or failure, but precautionary reluctance to risk the deeps of chagrin. A book is not Ushant, but I WILL. The author is placeless and is as ungraspable as Proteus because he is in no single element, character or will. He is loose water, and all the glyphs, mementoes, and reminiscences are written on the unstable surfaces of the sea.

Excerpts from Edward Dahlberg's review, Poetry, February 1953, vol. 81 no. 5.

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