Sirens & Symbols

USHANT (365 pp.)--Conrad Aiken--Duell, Sloan & Pearce-Little, Brown ($4.50).

Approaching Brest at night, the Atlantic traveler gets his first winking, warning sign of his destination from the lighthouse of He d'Ouessant, better known as Ushant. Poet Conrad Aiken has never seen Ushant, but he has thought & thought about it. To him it stands for Europe, the wide world, a life of physical and spiritual voyaging.

This much is fairly easy to grasp in Aiken's "autobiographical narrative'' Ushant; thereafter, the going gets harder. For much of Ushant is cryptic self-psychoanalysis, and is to be fully understood, perhaps, only by Aiken himself. Yet Ushant is no more difficult than the earlier chapters of James Joyce's Ulysses, and one of the fall's favorite games in U.S. highbrow circles will be trying to untangle it.

Love Affair with Britain. In skeleton form, Ushant is the story of a New Englander's love affair with Britain. As a boy, Aiken lay on the floor and was entranced by English poetry. He grew into a young man who fell "incurably, hopelessly and fatuously in love" with what he calls "Ariel's Island." But as he remained no less American at heart, his life became a tense, two-way stretch "of instability, restlessness and dissatisfaction." Aiken was "one minute the American correspondent for an English journal, the next the English correspondent for an American journal."

Along the way, three wives, identified only as Lorelei I, Lorelei II and Lorelei III, and numerous off-course mermaids got caught up in Aiken's voyage. He was never able to stay settled down for long in one country or the other; his way of life, as a young woman once told him, hardly provided the sort of homestead a woman dreams of--"roses peeping in, you know, and babies peeping out."

What was at the bottom of his Anglo-American tussle? Aiken is clearest and most direct when he tries to explain. He was drawn to England by the particular genius it represented, of which "the facets and fragments . . . sparkled everywhere, on every level." Its common base was "love of life . . . vivid intelligence and gusto"; its expressions ranged from sublime poetry to low ribaldry. Aiken heard it in the dialogue between two dear old English ladies watching lambs at play:

"Oh, aren't they little darlings!"

"Yes, and wouldn't they be good with mint sauce!"

He found it in the pretty girl who ruefully described herself as a "piece de non-resistance."

Forever on the Floor. The genius of America seemed of quite another order. It was that of "pioneers, solitaries, outlaws," who "preferred to seek, and find, alone." No matter how much he reveled in

English ways. Aiken was always drawn home by the American idioms, the revivifying air, the "half-wild individualism," the "purity and singleness of purpose," the "entire naturalness."

At 63, it has dawned on Aiken that it was precisely his split feelings that made him a poet. Moreover, he says, "All this astonishingly intricate come-and-go, this mazelike pattern . . . was really the ... equivalent of one very simple thing: it had been the stratagem by which he could remain forever on that floor . . . reading, for the first time, a passage of verse."

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