Volume 1, Number 12 · February 6, 1964
Rhapsody In Blue
By R.W. Flint
The Collected Novels of Conrad Aiken
with an introduction by R.P. Blackmur
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 575 pp., $7.95
Conrad Aiken is one of the Saturnians, the giants who bring their golden ages with them, who are consequently, in their venerable years, always being hailed as the last of the last, the last true Bostonian, the last full-scale man of letters. Graham Greene calls him 'perhaps the most exciting, the most fully satisfying of living novelists.' Aiken is thoroughly New England in the Hawthorne sense—says 'yes/O at lightning and lashed rod,' knows as well as Hopkins that 'the mind, mind has mountains: cliffs of fall/Frightful, sheer, no-man fathomed. Hold them cheap/May who ne'er hung there'—but R. P. Blackmur's somewhat funereal Introduction to this most welcome collection of Aiken's five novels is considerably more so, more grimly, mytho-psychologically New England than the novelist, as if the least fearful lineament of this atra cura of the northlands were too precious to be overlooked or undervalued. So be it; Blackmur has his own authority as critic of an old friend whose work he generously admires. He writes excellently of 'the finding, declaration, and loss of the self or psyche among the melodramas of love and jealousy, death and immolation, personal power and the frustrate abyss which in their fragments assault his sensibility.' The essential form of the novels, Blackmur finds, is the journey. 'It is the combination of the form with the material that makes the innovation. The form is the picaresque, the material that of psychology or the conditions of life which a particular psychology points at. Let us call the combination the Psychological Picaresque.'
Review, 1363 words
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