The work week’s nearly finished, at least technically; barely a few hours left. Truth is it was over the moment you went to lunch. What are you accomplishing? You’re not getting anything done between now and quitting time. Cut out and stop pretending. Make it a POETS Day and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.
First, a little verse.
***
Conrad Aiken was born in Savannah, Georgia and had the good sense to get out of there. His father, an eye surgeon and respected member of the community, shot his mother and then himself at their home on Oglethorpe Ave., causing the suddenly parentless eleven year old to come running from elsewhere in the house to investigate the noise. By the abrogated right of Savannah to hector visitors and new residents with stories of any success or famous deeds attributable to its citizens, as if all good emanates from the eastern terminus of I-16, Aiken is a Savannah success story.
The Hostess City, as Savannah is called by civic boosters, has seen its share of impressive doings and accomplishments. UPS was founded by someone from or living there. Juliette Gordon Lowe, founder of the Girl Scouts of America, was born three blocks west of where Aiken’s father orphaned his son. There’s some cockamamie tale that’s no doubt grown in the telling about an emissary company of prominent Savannahians (there is no melodious way to say that word) sent out to impress upon Sherman the architectural beauty that would be lost if their city were put to flame like Atlanta. So moved was the Union General that he agreed to spare their city. The less glamorous telling is that Savannah surrendered without firing a shot and Sherman headquartered on whatever they called Johnson Square at the time.
Aiken was taken in by relatives briefly in New Bedford, and then by other relatives in Cambridge, where he spent the remainder of his youth, save climatically foolish summer trips back to his birthplace, and then as a student at Harvard.
He gave an interview to Paris Review in September of 1963. The setting was his New England home, a farmhouse called—named houses are one of my favorite affectations—Forty-one Doors which, add-ons excepted, dates back to the 18th century according to the interviewer, Robert Hunter Wilbur. Wilbur put to Aiken, “I see you listed occasionally as a Southern writer. Does this make any sense to you?” to which Aiken responded:
“Not at all. I’m not in the least Southern; I’m entirely New England. Of course, the Savannah ambiente made a profound impression on me. It was a beautiful city and so wholly different from New England that going from South to North every year, as we did in the summers, provided an extraordinary counterpoint of experience, of sensuous adventure. The change was so violent, from Savannah to New Bedford or Savannah to Cambridge, that it was extraordinarily useful. But no, I never was connected with any of the Southern writers.”
I grew up idolizing a handful of Southern writers. Faulkner, of course, followed by O’Connor, Twain, and a grip of one hit wonders like O’Toole and Lee. I’m currently in a platonic relationship with a few of Walker Percy’s books. It’s a strange thing to read someone distancing themselves from the elect, but Aiken lived in Savannah. I did that, too, and can testify that three years assaulted by the city’s Potemkin charm and Las Vegas clean Southern Experience (TM) is enough to send anyone running for the hills, or whatever the proffered Southern stereotype’s opposite; the filth of Chicago with its “genie soul,” “Misery, misery, son of bitch of all miseries,” where a man “may find himself No one and Nowhere,” to borrow a few characterizations from blessed Percy? (Aiken went to New England instead of Chicago, but Percy writes so viciously about Chicago and I like his descriptions so much I’ve decided it’s sufficient that both places share the trait of not being Southern, and so apt.) Behind the curtain, Savannah’s a cesspit. At least it was when I lived there a year and a half on either side of the century turn.
The damnedest thing about Savannah is that we made friends and had a good time despite. There’s a great dive bar called Pinkie Masters a block or so—they split blocks oddly to access the precious squares—away from Low’s original Girl Scout Headquarters, Vinnie Van Go-Go’s serves fantastic pizza by the slice, and Elizabeth on 37th (nominated by the Dalai Lama for the Nobel Peace Prize) is the best fine dining establishment this side of presumptuous. I don’t know if Juarez is still open, but it served as a cheap margarita and salsa anytime hangout for years, including a somber September 11th afternoon when none of us knew what to say. I suspect they still do symphony in the park and that Tybee is still an affordable day trip—though around the time we left, Sandra Bullock bought a place there and rumors of Hollywood coming and higher property prices bounced around. There are escapes from living in Savannah, and I’d gladly go back as a term limited tourist, but living there does need escaping.
For reasons I can’t explain, in his later years the damn fool Aiken established a second home in Savannah with his third wife. Incredibly, he bought the house adjacent—his former house on Oglethorpe Avenue shares walls like Georgetown townhouses—to the murder house where he grew up. I read that he spent winters there, which I commended him for after the counterintuitive seasonal split of his youth leaving him snowed in through New England winters and suffocating in swamp spit humidity through coastal Georgian summers. I commended too fast. He may not have been so clear minded about the weather as reported. Aiken died as result of a heart attack, struck while walking with his wife through the Savannah streets in oppressive mid-August.
He’s buried in Bonaventure Cemetery, the one made famous by “The Book,” as Savannahians call Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. So despite identifying himself as a New Englander, he came and went in Savannah. They get to claim him, much as it irks me.
He’s a hell of a prize to claim. Aiken served as both Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (the office currently known as Poet Laureate Consultant to the Library of Congress) and Poet Laureate of the State of Georgia. He won the Bollinger, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Gold Medal, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the Poetry Society’s Shelley Prize, to name a few. His nomination for the Nobel was withdrawn upon his death.
He was known as a master of but not a stickler to technique. One student tells of an exercise where he was told to write in blank verse, moving the caesura a syllable forward each line and then back again, an exercise Aiken found invaluable himself. It wasn’t that strict adherence to meter was beyond him. It appears he aimed for or preferred blank verse but refused to be slave to form. There are irregularities enough to point and ask if what you’re reading isn’t free verse at times. From EBSCO’s increasingly impressive research starter site:
“Technically speaking, insofar as it is possible to divorce technique and substance, Aiken is usually unexceptional. By far his favorite prosodic form is blank verse, befitting of course his epic intents; this form is punctuated by cacophonies, metric irregularities, and free rhythms which provide variety of movement and counterpoint.”
He wrote mostly long poems made up of shorter numbered parts. I won’t go into the whole of any of them. The samples reprinted here are to demonstrate and hopefully interest. (If you are interested, Amazon has a $0.99 Kindle collection of “greatest hits.” There’s a great deal of greatest hits. It’s good read.)
Here’s a hint of his blank verse with “cacophonies.”
from Discordants
Conrad Aiken (1880-1973)III
Dead Cleopatra lies in a crystal casket,
Wrapped and spiced by the cunningest of hands.
Around her neck they have put a golden necklace,
Her tatbebs, it is said, are worn with sands.
Dead Cleopatra was once revered in Egypt,
Warm-eyed she was, this princess of the South.
Now she is very old and dry and faded,
With black bitumen they have sealed up her mouth.
O sweet clean earth, from whom the green blade cometh!
When we are dead, my best beloved and I,
Close well above us, that we may rest forever,
Sending up grass and blossoms to the sky.
While living in his preferred New England as a Harvard student, he co-edited the Advocate with TS Eliot. I don’t know that that’s how they met, only that they became very good friends in college and that the friendship lasted their entire lives.
Poetry magazine published Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in its June 1915 issue. Aiken’s “Jig of Forslin” appeared in 1916. Both works involve introspection, a dreamlike setting, and an alienated persona. Aiken was upfront. Eliot “influenced me a great deal” and added that he “shamelessly” borrowed.
from Jig of Forslin, Part I
I
In the clear evening, as the lamps were lighted,
Forslin, sitting alone in his strange world,
Meditated; yet through his musings heard
The dying footfalls of the tired day
Monotonously ebb and ebb away
Into the smouldering west;
And heard the dark world slowly come to rest.
Now, as the real world dwindled and grew dim,
His dreams came back to him . . .
Now, as one who stands In the aquarium’s gloom, by ghostly sands,
Watching the glide of fish beneath pale bubbles, —
The bubbles quietly streaming
Cool and white and green . . . poured in silver . . .
He did not know if this were wake or dreaming;
But thought to lean, reach out his hands, and swim.
It’s asserted but not assented to that Aiken in turn influenced Eliot’s The Waste Land. Most assertions rely on stylistic and tonal similarities between “Forslin,” some of Aiken’s intervening work, and The Waste Land, but those are brushed away as an inspired Aiken’s poetry subsequent “Prufrock” running parallel to a course Eliot was already on rather than a recursive influence. A bit is made about a tarot pack in “Forslin” presaging the tarot scene in The Waste Land. It’s an unresolved debate at the moment.
There is one claim to inspiring The Waste Land Aiken makes himself, and it is fairly convincing. I found, in Fred A. Crawford’s “Conrad Aiken’s Cancelled Debt to T. S. Eliot” (Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Sep., 1979), an interesting anecdote.
“During the winter of 1921-22, Eliot confided to Aiken that he suffered a writer’s ‘block,’ asking Aiken whether he had encountered the same problem. Aiken replied that he had not, but worried about Eliot,
he mentioned the problem to Dilston Radcliffe, who in turn mentioned it to Homer Lane, an American lay-analyst with whom Radcliffe met regularly. In Aiken’s account, Lane’s opinion was blunt:‘Tell your friend Aiken to tell his friend Eliot that all that’s stopping him is his fear of putting anything down that is short of perfection. He thinks he’s God.’”
Aiken wrote,
“…when I told Eliot of Lane’s opinion, he was literally speechless with rage, both at Lane and myself. The intrusion, quite simply, was one that was intolerable. But ever since I have been entirely convinced that it did the trick, broke the log-jam. A month or two later he went to Switzerland, and there wrote The Waste Land.”
Crawford thinks Eliot’s anger at Aiken was cause for what he sees as parodying of Aiken’s work at places in The Waste Land. He may be right. In any case, Aiken has a pretty good claim to inspiring the great work, even if it’s not the type of inspiration he took from Eliot.
I’ll leave a bit more from “Forslin” for form’s sake. I’d not encountered the poem before. It really is worth a full reading if you get the chance.
from The Jig of Forslin, Part II
II
If we should rise from whirl to silver whirl,
Through yellowing light to a faintly chiming surface,
And shatter the film . . . what discords should we hear? . . .
Monstrous shadows blot and disintegrate;
The stars above our earth are cold and clear;
And we walk, as we have walked a thousand times,
Past trees and curbs and gutters,
Mark how the arc-lamp dims and starts and sputters,
Muse bewitching scandals, ponder crimes,
Laugh with a friend, concealing what we think,
Or sit, to chat and drink.
Someone has been to have his fortune told —
With Tarot cards. The pentacles and wands
Tell him he hates the women, and is cold.
He laughs, we laugh, — we wonder if he lies,
Watching a wizened question in his eyes.
And if he lies, and if last night he slept
With some flushed harlot, or his latest lover,
We muse upon him, and marvel what it is
That yields his banal soul these ecstasies:
Is it his voice that sets a woman trembling,
The hesitant speech, the sidelong trick of eyes,
The heavy brow, the dead white skin?
Or is he all the while dissembling, —
Like us, though starved, incapable of sin?
We chronicle his speech, and afterwards
Confer upon him . . . We ravel out his brain.
We have remembered certain curious words
He uttered once when drinking: these explain . . .
Priests of dissection are we: we dissect him.
It is ourselves have pain, but pleasant pain.
And so, good-night. The white clouds gulf the stars,
Dust blows down the street,
Through divers moonlit canyons glide our feet.