|
|
康拉德·艾肯(出生于乔治亚州的萨凡纳，1889——1973)
当他12岁的时候，康拉德﹒艾肯就成为一个最重要的源头性的和现代美国诗人中的一个，以这样的诗行开始写下一首诗：
整天隐藏在缠结的草丛里
狮子蹲伏于为捕食的等待
因为这首诗学校授予一枚刻着他名字的金质奖章。他决心成为一个诗人。
此后很短时间，他的父母亲都突然不幸辞世，他被带到马萨诸塞州新贝德福德，在那里他跟他的曾姑奶奶一起生活，有一个像小了望塔一样的房间，面朝大海和海港里的鱼腥味。这儿他读诗人们的诗，梦想“大海里的城市”。
当他进了哈佛大学，他仍然写着诗，学院出版印刷了它们。一首诗花费了他十天时间。当局反对他旷课十天（在那儿他的声望高）。这位诗人被激怒了，离开学院六个月，利用这个时间到意大利旅行。此后1911年他回到哈佛，成了一个校园诗人，在一个学院的一代人里包括范威克﹒布鲁克斯，沃尔特﹒李普曼，T﹒S﹒艾略特，晚一点的艾伦﹒西格，约翰﹒瑞德,和海伍德﹒布朗。
自从他有独立的收入，他从来没觉得有必要仅仅为钱写作。他到处旅行,而一次次地回到剑桥。他出版了十六本诗集，一本选集，一些短篇故事和小说，很多批评文章。他曾经写了一个残忍的人，一个匿名的人评论他的书《记忆的春天夜景》，揭露他文学上的错误。他出版过艾米莉﹒迪金森诗选的英语版本，他说这著作“也许是一个女人用英语写的最好的。”
1930年他带着他的第二个妻子和三个孩子到了英国，在苏塞克斯的那儿买了一所房子。1940年他勉强地逃脱轰炸。在此期间他用笔名写作，为纽约写“伦敦来信”。
现在他带着第三个妻子艺术家玛丽﹒胡沃﹒艾肯转回美国；“装模作样地自豪于在海德角丛林的最中间，一块八英亩有毒的常春藤的种植园。”
艾肯先生一个重要贡献是在现代诗歌创造了中心主题，“混乱的旋律”，休斯顿﹒彼得森说。
他的书有：《地球胜利》（1914年），《车床和电影》（1916），《弗斯林的吉格舞曲》（1916），《记忆里的春天晚祷》（1917），《莎奈尔玫瑰》（1918年）；《约翰 德斯》（1930年）；《布朗斯顿田园诗》(1942);《士兵》1944年）；《羊圈山》（1957年）；《您》（1968年）。小说《科芬王》（1935年）和《谈话》（1940年）。《阿善特随笔》（1952年）是一部自传性作品。
Biography
Early years
Aiken was the eldest son of William Ford and Anna (Potter) Aiken. In Savannah, Aiken's father became a respected physician and eye surgeon, while his mother was the daughter of a prominent Massachusetts Unitarian minister. On February 27, 1901, Dr. Aiken murdered his wife and then committed suicide. According to his autobiography, Ushant, Aiken, then 11 years old, heard the two gunshots and discovered the bodies immediately thereafter. After his parents' deaths, he was raised by his great-aunt and uncle in Cambridge, Massachusetts, attending Middlesex School, then Harvard University.
At Harvard, Aiken edited the Advocate with T. S. Eliot, who became a lifelong friend, colleague, and influence. It was also at Harvard where Aiken studied under another significant influence in his writing, the philosopher George Santayana.
Adult years
Aiken was strongly influenced by symbolism, especially in his earlier works. In 1930 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Selected Poems. Many of his writings had strong psychological themes. He wrote the widely anthologized short story "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" (1934), partially based on his childhood tragedy.
Other influences were Aiken's grandfather, Potter, who had been a church preacher, as well as Whitman's freestyle poetry. This helped Aiken shape his poetry more freely while his recognition of a God grounded his more visually rich explorations into the universe. Some of his best-known poetry, such as "Morning Song of Senlin", uses these influences to great effect.
His collections of verse include Earth Triumphant (1914), The Charnel Rose (1918) and And In the Hanging Gardens (1933). His poem "Music I Heard" has been set to music by a number of composers, including Leonard Bernstein, Henry Cowell, and Helen Searles Westbrook. Aiken wrote or edited more than 51 books, the first of which was published in 1914, two years after his graduation from Harvard. His work includes novels, short stories (The Collected Short Stories appeared in 1961), reviews, an autobiography, and poetry. He received numerous awards and honors for his writing, though for most of his lifetime, he received little public attention.
Though Aiken was reluctant to speak of his early trauma and ensuing psychological problems, he acknowledged that his writings were strongly influenced by his studies of Sigmund Freud, Carl G. Jung, Otto Rank, Ferenczi, Adler, and other depth psychologists. It wasn't until the publication of his autobiography, Ushant, that Aiken revealed the emotional challenges that he had battled for much of his adult life. During the 1920s Freud heard of him and offered to psychoanalyze him. While aboard a Europe-bound ship to meet with Freud, Aiken was discouraged by Erich Fromm from accepting the offer. Consequently, despite Freud's strong influence on Aiken, Aiken never met the noted psychoanalyst. As he later said, "Freud had read Great Circle, and I’m told kept a copy on his office table. But I didn't go, though I started to. Misgivings set in, and so did poverty."
Personal life
Aiken had three younger siblings, Kempton Potter (K. P. A. Taylor), Robert Potter (R. P. A. Taylor), and Elizabeth. After their parents' deaths, the four children were adopted by Frederick Winslow Taylor and his wife Louise, their great-aunt. His siblings took Taylor's last name. Kempton helped establish the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.
He was married three times: firstly to Jessie McDonald (1912–1929); secondly to Clarissa Lorenz (1930–1937) (author of a biography, Lorelei Two); and thirdly to the painter Mary Hoover (1937–1973). He fathered three children by his first wife Jessie: John Aiken, Jane Aiken Hodge and Joan Aiken, all of whom became writers.
Aiken married Jessie McDonald in 1912, and the couple moved to England in 1921 with their older two children; John (born 1913) and Jane (born 1917), settling in Rye, East Sussex (where the American novelist Henry James had once lived). The couple’s youngest daughter, Joan, was born in Rye in 1924. Conrad Aiken returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a tutor at Harvard from 1927 to 1928. For many years, he divided his time between Rye, New York, and Boston. In 1931 he was introduced by the artist Paul Nash to Edward Burra, a painter also living in Rye. That year Burra painted his gouache "John Deth", inspired by Aiken's poem of that name and originally intended to illustrate a projected edition that was never realised. Nevertheless, the two men maintained a lifelong friendship thereafter.
In 1936, Aiken met his third wife, Mary, in Boston. In the following year the couple visited Malcolm Lowry in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where Aiken divorced Clarissa and married Mary. The couple moved to Rye, where they remained until the outbreak of World War II in 1940. The Aikens settled in Brewster, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, where he and his wife Mary later ran a summer program for writers and painters named after their antique farmhouse, "Forty-One Doors". Despite living for many years abroad and receiving recognition as a Southern writer, Aiken always considered himself an American, and, in particular, a New Englander.
Over the years, he served in loco parentis as well as mentor to the English author Malcolm Lowry. In 1923 he acted as a witness at the marriage of his friend, poet W. H. Davies. From 1950 to 1952, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, more commonly known as Poet Laureate of the United States. In 1960 he visited Grasmere in the Lake District, England (once the home of William Wordsworth), with his friend Edward Burra.
Bench at grave of Conrad Aiken in Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia
The Aikens lived primarily at their farmhouse in West Brewster, and wintered in Savannah in a home adjacent to his early childhood house.
Aiken died on 17 August 1973 and was buried in Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia on the banks of the Wilmington River, and so was Mary after her death in 1992. The burial site was featured in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt. According to local legend, Aiken wished to have his tombstone fashioned in the shape of a bench as an invitation to visitors to stop and enjoy a martini at his grave. The bench is inscribed with "Give my love to the world", and "Cosmos Mariner—Destination Unknown".
A primary source for information on Aiken's life is his autobiographical novel Ushant (1952), one of his major works. In it, he wrote candidly about his various affairs and marriages, his attempted suicide and fear of insanity, and his friendships with T. S. Eliot (who appears in the book as the Tsetse), Ezra Pound (Rabbi Ben Ezra), Malcolm Lowry (Hambo), and others.
Awards and recognition
Named Poetry Consultant (now U.S. Poet Laureate) of the Library of Congress from 1950 to 1952, Aiken earned numerous prestigious writing honors, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1930 for Selected Poems, the 1954 National Book Award for Collected Poems, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Gold Medal in Poetry, and a National Medal for Literature. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1934, Academy of American Poets fellowship in 1957, Huntington Hartford Foundation Award in 1960, and Brandeis University Creative Arts Award in 1967. Aiken was the first Georgia-born author to win a Pulitzer Prize, and was named Georgia's Poet Laureate in 1973. He was the first winner of the Poetry Society of America (PSA) Shelley Memorial Award, in 1929.
In 2009, the Library of America selected Aiken's 1931 story "Mr. Arcularis" for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American fantastic tales.
Selected works
Poetry collections
Earth Triumphant (Aiken, 1914) (available online at archive.org)
Turns and Movies and other Tales in Verse (Aiken, 1916, Houghton Mifflin) (available online at archive.org)
The Jig of Forslin: A Symphony, 1916
Nocturne of Remembered Spring: And Other Poems (Aiken, 1917) (available online at archive.org)
Charnel Rose (Aiken, 1918) (available online at archive.org)
The House of Dust: A Symphony, 1920
Punch: The Immortal Liar, Documents in His History, 1921
Priapus and the Pool, 1922
The Pilgrimage of Festus, 1923
Priapus and the Pool, and Other Poems, 1925
Selected Poems, 1929
John Deth, A Metaphysical Legacy, and Other Poems, 1930
The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones, 1931
Preludes for Memnon, 1931
Landscape West of Eden, 1934
Time in the Rock; Preludes to Definition, 1936
And in the Human Heart, 1940
Brownstone Eclogues, and Other Poems, 1942
The Soldier: A Poem, 1944
The Kid, 1947
The Divine Pilgrim, 1949
Skylight One: Fifteen Poems, 1949
Collected Poems, 1953
A Letter from Li Po and Other Poems, 1955
Sheepfold Hill: Fifteen Poems, 1958
The Morning Song of Lord Zero, Poems Old and New, 1963
Thee: A Poem, 1967
Collected Poems, 2nd ed., 1970
Short stories
"Bring! Bring!"
"The Last Visit"
"Mr. Arcularis"
"The Bachelor Supper"
"Bow Down, Isaac!"
"A Pair of Vikings"
"Hey, Taxi!"
"Field of Flowers"
"Gehenna"
"The Disciple"
"Impulse"
"The Anniversary"
"Hello, Tib"
"Smith and Jones"
"By My Troth, Nerisa!"
"Silent Snow, Secret Snow"
"Round by Round"
"Thistledown"
"State of Mind"
"Strange Moonlight"
"The Fish Supper"
"I Love You Very Dearly"
"The Dark City"
"Life Isn't a Short Story"
"The Night Before Prohibition"
"Spider, Spider"
"A Man Alone at Lunch"
"Farewell! Farewell! Farewell!"
"Your Obituary, Well Written"
"A Conversation"
"No, No, Go Not to Lethe"
"Pure as the Driven Snow"
"All, All Wasted"
"The Moment"
"The Woman-Hater"
"The Professor's Escape"
"The Orange Moth"
"The Necktie"
"O How She Laughed!"
"West End"
"Fly Away Ladybird"
Novels
Blue Voyage (1927)
Great Circle (1933)
King Coffin (1935)
A Heart for the Gods of Mexico (1939)
The Conversation (1940)
Other books
Scepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry (1919)
Ushant (1952)
A Reviewer's ABC: Collected Criticism of Conrad Aiken from 1916 to the Present (1958)
Collected Short Stories (1960)
Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken (1965)