Faintly Bitter

THE SHORT STORIES OF CONRAD AIKEN (416 pp.)--Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($5).

Last week Georgia-born Poet-Novelist Conrad Aiken, 61, began a one-year term as consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress. For Aiken, as for other U.S. writers who have held the $5,000-a-year post,* the appointment was both a public honor and a chance to write new poems and stories without having to worry too much how they sell.

Bestsellers have never been Conrad Aiken's forte. He reached the peak of his reputation during the '20s, when he wrote long and languid narratives about sexual decadence, blending the theories of Sigmund Freud with the tone of Edgar Allan Poe. In 1930, his poetry won him a Pulitzer Prize. Since then, Aiken has increasingly found himself in the painful position of the good minor writer who has ceased to be a novelty, his name well known but his work little read. Never one to cater to literary fashion, Aiken has continued to write as he sees fit. Since his first book of verse in 1914, he has written some 30 volumes of poetry and fiction, all marked by integrity and patent earnestness.

Reread today, Aiken's poems seem spotty. All too often his narrative poems, dealing with such subjects as a tailor's affair with a vampire and a Roman emperor's gloating over the dissection of an Eastern princess, seem more ridiculous than horrible. And his reflective poems frequently sink into a mindless musical torpor, in which occasional brilliant passages are overwhelmed by loose, undisciplined globs of language.

Ideal & Reality. Though his reputation has been largely based on his poetry, Aiken may well be remembered most for his short stories. In his latest book he has brought together 29 of them; the result is an impressive handful of fiction.

Almost half of the stories are wry, faintly bitter variations on the theme of betrayed love. Men, implies Aiken, are unable to live up to their own romantic ideals, and from the tension between ideal and reality comes much of their misery. Through weakness and self-indulgence, Aiken's characters repeatedly destroy the love that promises them happiness: a man who loves a young girl lets himself be snared by the flattery of a more sophisticated woman; a nurse who knows all the shabbiness of her employer allows him to dominate her.

The Edge of Sanity. The best of Aiken's stories deal not so much with betrayed love, however, as with those strange happenings which take place on the edge of human consciousness and sanity.

He portrays psychological abnormality not through odd characters but through characters who seem quite ordinary, for he judges that in every man there is a dimension of disease. In Mr. Arcularis he shows the terror of death through the emotional disintegration of an old man; in The Disciple he tells a weird story of a meeting on Easter Eve between two quiet chess addicts who turn out to be Ahasver, the "eternal Jew," and a reincarnated Judas; and in Bow Down, Isaac! he brings to the climax of murder a story of religious fanaticism and family hatred in New England.

The masterpiece of the collection is Aiken's Silent Snow, Secret Snow, a terrifying portrait of a twelve-year-old boy who escapes from his real world to a daydream world of falling snow, then loses the real world completely in the ever-narrowing dreams of schizophrenia. It has long been an anthology piece, should long continue to be.

*Among his predecessors: Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Robert Lowell.

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