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Ushant: An Essay
An autobiographical narrative.
365 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1952
5 people are currently reading
167 people want to read
About the author
Conrad Aiken
303 books82 followersKnown American writer Conrad Potter Aiken won a Pulitzer Prize of 1930 for
Selected Poems
.
Most of work of this short story critic and novelist reflects his intense interest in psychoanalysis and the development of identity. As editor of Selected Poems of Emily Elizabeth Dickinson in 1924, he largely responsibly established her posthumous literary reputation. From the 1920s, Aiken divided his life between England and the United States and played a significant role in introducing American poets to the British audience.
He fathered gifted writers Joan Aiken and Jane Aiken Hodge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad_...
Most of work of this short story critic and novelist reflects his intense interest in psychoanalysis and the development of identity. As editor of Selected Poems of Emily Elizabeth Dickinson in 1924, he largely responsibly established her posthumous literary reputation. From the 1920s, Aiken divided his life between England and the United States and played a significant role in introducing American poets to the British audience.
He fathered gifted writers Joan Aiken and Jane Aiken Hodge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad_...
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 2, 2012
My only regret is that by believing this book was an autobiography, I fought too long against drowning in the swirling narrative. It wasn't until I surrendered to the way the book wanted to be read that I fully came to appreciate and understand it.
The first paragraph of this book is one of the most beautiful I have ever read. Throughout the book Aiken swims through reminiscences without ever yielding to a strict timeline. The educated reader (more educated than I who took 200 pages to understand who Tsetse was) will no doubt find intimate references to many famous characters. But the beauty of the book is in Aiken's control over the reader's immersion--just when I would think I was lost to the deep, he would rescue me with a witticism or insight so concise and perfect I felt I was saved.
I have never read anything else by Aiken and was introduced to him only through an old edition of the Paris Review Interviews. When I saw this beautiful book in the clearance portion of the used section of the U Bookstore, I knew I had to have it, but I didn't really understand why. I am so glad I purchased it and more glad that I perservered. I feel I must have learned more about the fictive dream (though this is not fiction) from Aiken than I even yet know.
The first paragraph of this book is one of the most beautiful I have ever read. Throughout the book Aiken swims through reminiscences without ever yielding to a strict timeline. The educated reader (more educated than I who took 200 pages to understand who Tsetse was) will no doubt find intimate references to many famous characters. But the beauty of the book is in Aiken's control over the reader's immersion--just when I would think I was lost to the deep, he would rescue me with a witticism or insight so concise and perfect I felt I was saved.
I have never read anything else by Aiken and was introduced to him only through an old edition of the Paris Review Interviews. When I saw this beautiful book in the clearance portion of the used section of the U Bookstore, I knew I had to have it, but I didn't really understand why. I am so glad I purchased it and more glad that I perservered. I feel I must have learned more about the fictive dream (though this is not fiction) from Aiken than I even yet know.
October 6, 2016
The primary thing I learned from reading Ushant is that Conrad Aiken was an autobiographical writer from the very beginning. His poems, his novels, and his short stories (even his most famous story, the psychologically spooky "Silent Snow, Secret Snow") were all, to some extent, autobiographical. Aiken put his life down on paper. Not in the way that, say, Updike did (to quote David Foster Wallace, who was, in turn, supposedly quoting some generic literary reader, "Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?"*)--for Aiken was not nearly as prolific--but thoughtfully, and honestly.
Or mostly honestly, anyway. In Ushant, Aiken makes it clear that his early semiautobiographical novels were based on experience, but were nonetheless false in that he had omitted important facts: for example, at no point in Blue Voyage does the lovesick, heartbroken narrator (i.e., Aiken) mention that he's married with two children.
But Ushant is, in some ways, Aiken's apology for this dishonesty. It's his most autobiographical work, if still not quite an autobiography. But he nonetheless tries to set the record as straight as he's capable of setting it. Whether he has been, finally, completely honest or not is something for scholars to argue. All I know is that it reads far more deeply personal than any other work by Aiken that I've read.
It's also a work that explores the genesis of a writer's creative mind. Aiken recollects the moment, or series of moments, in which he became aware that there is an occupation called "poet," and that he could become one. He recalls the creation of his first poem, as a young boy, and the thrill that this creation caused within him. In this way, Ushant is a book about the joys of writing.
Which brings me to the writing: In his novels, Aiken's prose is at its best when he's channeling the likes of Joyce and Woolf. His more straightforward, realist prose is very good, but not particularly memorable. Ushant reads like an extended daydream of autobiographical recollection. Of course, I realize that the average reader wouldn't want to read a transcript of, say, my daydreams, or any other schmoe's daydreams. But Aiken is a professional poet, so his daydreams are something worth reading. And there is method to his meanderings: on page 325 he reveals the grand algebraic scheme with which he has attempted to construct the structure of very book you are reading. Yes, Ushant gets a bit meta at times.
I'm baffled that Conrad Aiken's oeuvre is almost entirely out of print, and has been for decades.** Well, no, of course I understand why his work's out of print. Even at the height of his popularity, he never caught the public's eye quite the way that his colleagues T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound did. It's even possible that his poetry is not as objectively good or--perhaps more importantly (from a longevity point of view)--groundbreaking as Eliot's or Pound's. His novels are OK but, perhaps aside from Great Circle, not particularly great. Would I recommend A Heart for the Gods of Mexico or Conversation to someone, anyone else? Certainly not. No publisher in its right mind would republish either of these works today.
But Ushant deserves to be in print. (As do Great Circle, Blue Voyage, and a carefully curated collection of Aiken's short stories.) It's understandable but unfair that Conrad Aiken, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1930, the National Book Award in 1954, the National Medal for Literature, and a Guggenheim Fellowship would be so thoroughly unknown today. The copy of Ushant that I borrowed from a major university's library was last checked out in June 2000. Before that? December 1989. That makes me sad.
Conrad Aiken! I still remember you. The Cosmos Mariner—Destination Unknown.
______________________
POINTLESS FOOTNOTES
* Were Aiken more widely read, he would no doubt fit into DFW's pantheon of "Great Male Narcissists," for Aiken's work explores the same themes as Updike's and Roth's: chiefly the self, sex, and death.
** All that's currently in print is a (comparatively) short collection of his poetry.
Or mostly honestly, anyway. In Ushant, Aiken makes it clear that his early semiautobiographical novels were based on experience, but were nonetheless false in that he had omitted important facts: for example, at no point in Blue Voyage does the lovesick, heartbroken narrator (i.e., Aiken) mention that he's married with two children.
But Ushant is, in some ways, Aiken's apology for this dishonesty. It's his most autobiographical work, if still not quite an autobiography. But he nonetheless tries to set the record as straight as he's capable of setting it. Whether he has been, finally, completely honest or not is something for scholars to argue. All I know is that it reads far more deeply personal than any other work by Aiken that I've read.
It's also a work that explores the genesis of a writer's creative mind. Aiken recollects the moment, or series of moments, in which he became aware that there is an occupation called "poet," and that he could become one. He recalls the creation of his first poem, as a young boy, and the thrill that this creation caused within him. In this way, Ushant is a book about the joys of writing.
Which brings me to the writing: In his novels, Aiken's prose is at its best when he's channeling the likes of Joyce and Woolf. His more straightforward, realist prose is very good, but not particularly memorable. Ushant reads like an extended daydream of autobiographical recollection. Of course, I realize that the average reader wouldn't want to read a transcript of, say, my daydreams, or any other schmoe's daydreams. But Aiken is a professional poet, so his daydreams are something worth reading. And there is method to his meanderings: on page 325 he reveals the grand algebraic scheme with which he has attempted to construct the structure of very book you are reading. Yes, Ushant gets a bit meta at times.
I'm baffled that Conrad Aiken's oeuvre is almost entirely out of print, and has been for decades.** Well, no, of course I understand why his work's out of print. Even at the height of his popularity, he never caught the public's eye quite the way that his colleagues T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound did. It's even possible that his poetry is not as objectively good or--perhaps more importantly (from a longevity point of view)--groundbreaking as Eliot's or Pound's. His novels are OK but, perhaps aside from Great Circle, not particularly great. Would I recommend A Heart for the Gods of Mexico or Conversation to someone, anyone else? Certainly not. No publisher in its right mind would republish either of these works today.
But Ushant deserves to be in print. (As do Great Circle, Blue Voyage, and a carefully curated collection of Aiken's short stories.) It's understandable but unfair that Conrad Aiken, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1930, the National Book Award in 1954, the National Medal for Literature, and a Guggenheim Fellowship would be so thoroughly unknown today. The copy of Ushant that I borrowed from a major university's library was last checked out in June 2000. Before that? December 1989. That makes me sad.
Conrad Aiken! I still remember you. The Cosmos Mariner—Destination Unknown.
______________________
POINTLESS FOOTNOTES
* Were Aiken more widely read, he would no doubt fit into DFW's pantheon of "Great Male Narcissists," for Aiken's work explores the same themes as Updike's and Roth's: chiefly the self, sex, and death.
** All that's currently in print is a (comparatively) short collection of his poetry.
December 16, 2018
Extraordinary; amongst the best autobiographical writing I have read. It is billed as an autobiographical essay, and although it does vaguely follow a logical sequence, its more to do with his psychological states and experiences, rather than an objective account. So, very enigmatic, impressionistic, expressionistic, jumping back and forth through time, spiralling around some of the key formative events of his life, which often aren't fully revealed all at once; some of which are quite shocking --- one happens to him as a child, and is only fully revealed late in the work, as if in passing, but it and its consequences reverberates through his life, and the book. Apparently he rarely mentioned it, if at all, even to people close to him. But he does seem to find some peace towards the end, finally feeling at home back in the USA after having lived on and off in Rye for a number of years, crossing back and forth across the oceans, third class, often in sweaty cold shared quarters.
January 23, 2023
It doesn’t help, at all, that Conrad Aiken’s 1952 USHANT begins with some of his most turgid prose, and unfortunately this turgidity keeps returning throughout the book. It’s as if Herman Melville, James Joyce and Thomas Wolfe have somehow been amalgamated and the resultant monster turned loose with pen, paper and a thesaurus. I would categorize the book as an autobiographical novel. Aiken called it an essay, perhaps because he was trying so damned hard.
That said, any reader who knows Aiken’s background will surely advance him considerable sympathy and license. When he was 11 years old, his father murdered his mother and then committed suicide. The young Aiken heard the shots and discovered their bodies. That’s more trauma than all but the most unfortunat among us have had to handle. USHANT is in part Aiken’s attempt to fathom that event and its effect upon his subsequent life.
For this reader the turgid language first clears around page 30, when Aiken attempts to capture the visual and tactile experience of early infancy, including fascination with levels of light, darkness and shadow. That stunning endeavor concludes: “Root and stem, one was consciously a tropism of exquisite response in the very center of one’s own world, coiled about the source of one’s own delight.” (I was reminded of Aiken’s widely anthologized, indelible short story “Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” in which an older child may be accelerating into autism or schizophrenia.)
When as a young man the narrator spends a summer in New York City, he comes across an old painter named Yeats who, when asked if he is the father of the great Yeats, says “I AM the great Yeats!” If only Aiken had cared less about stylistic ambition and focussed on lively details such as that, or on deft characterization such as this of a grandmother:
“ … she was again, like Aunt Jean, an old woman, or an aging one, she represented the past, she came out of the past. She was a farm in upper New York State; a plain country girl, the eldest of twelve children; she was apple pie and coffee-cake and homespun clothes; she was a slate-pencil and a slate, little used, for her schooling was brief; she became, with her mother’s death, the fury-driven head of a family at thirteen; and this slavery she had merely exchanged for another when, at eighteen, with forlorn hopes of escape, she had married the stern, abstractly intelligent, puritanical but libidinous martinet of a schoolteacher, who was to make her life one long misery of despotism. Poor grandmother — she had conceived and borne her two children without pleasure, had raised them only that she might store up grief; Deena, the daughter, she had hated, to be hated in return; and the beautiful son, her golden-haired Apollo, her genius, her beauty, was early marked as one of those whom the gods would destroy.”
But oh what you have to drudge through in order to come to passages of any interest or at least bearability.
After eight decades of being a dutiful finisher of almost any book undertaken, I am at last able to set a book aside when sufficiently annoyed or confounded. I gave up on this one about halfway through. A general reader might understandably throw it across the room long before that.
That said, any reader who knows Aiken’s background will surely advance him considerable sympathy and license. When he was 11 years old, his father murdered his mother and then committed suicide. The young Aiken heard the shots and discovered their bodies. That’s more trauma than all but the most unfortunat among us have had to handle. USHANT is in part Aiken’s attempt to fathom that event and its effect upon his subsequent life.
For this reader the turgid language first clears around page 30, when Aiken attempts to capture the visual and tactile experience of early infancy, including fascination with levels of light, darkness and shadow. That stunning endeavor concludes: “Root and stem, one was consciously a tropism of exquisite response in the very center of one’s own world, coiled about the source of one’s own delight.” (I was reminded of Aiken’s widely anthologized, indelible short story “Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” in which an older child may be accelerating into autism or schizophrenia.)
When as a young man the narrator spends a summer in New York City, he comes across an old painter named Yeats who, when asked if he is the father of the great Yeats, says “I AM the great Yeats!” If only Aiken had cared less about stylistic ambition and focussed on lively details such as that, or on deft characterization such as this of a grandmother:
“ … she was again, like Aunt Jean, an old woman, or an aging one, she represented the past, she came out of the past. She was a farm in upper New York State; a plain country girl, the eldest of twelve children; she was apple pie and coffee-cake and homespun clothes; she was a slate-pencil and a slate, little used, for her schooling was brief; she became, with her mother’s death, the fury-driven head of a family at thirteen; and this slavery she had merely exchanged for another when, at eighteen, with forlorn hopes of escape, she had married the stern, abstractly intelligent, puritanical but libidinous martinet of a schoolteacher, who was to make her life one long misery of despotism. Poor grandmother — she had conceived and borne her two children without pleasure, had raised them only that she might store up grief; Deena, the daughter, she had hated, to be hated in return; and the beautiful son, her golden-haired Apollo, her genius, her beauty, was early marked as one of those whom the gods would destroy.”
But oh what you have to drudge through in order to come to passages of any interest or at least bearability.
After eight decades of being a dutiful finisher of almost any book undertaken, I am at last able to set a book aside when sufficiently annoyed or confounded. I gave up on this one about halfway through. A general reader might understandably throw it across the room long before that.
July 13, 2025
Reading Conrad Aiken is like putting together a puzzle. One obtains many of the pieces from reading his novels and his short stories and then ultimately when one wants to complete the puzzle one turns to this autobiography. Many fascinating insights into the man's life written in the only way Conrad could write it. I'm definitely glad I read his novels first as well as Under the Volcano as he does briefly detail his time spent in Cuernavaca with Mr. Lowery. Also there is some what I would call boring writing in parts hence only 4 stars. It really is like solving a riddle, all his ideas for his novels and short stories get explained. Overall a beautiful book, he poured his life into the pages.
Also all 3 of his children became writers, how cool is that.
Also all 3 of his children became writers, how cool is that.
September 11, 2014
Conrad Aiken is a beautiful poet. He is not a memoir writer. This book is strung together chapters of a poetic stream of consciousness. His life story is intertwined and it vacillates between a present narrative and his past. As he pointed out in one interview, "it is not for everyone." But it would be a shame if you did not give it a fair shake.
April 7, 2017
Though the least accessible memoir I have ever read, Aiken's epic-length essay pulls me back every so often as if to say, "Oh, come on. You can do it. Finish the book this time." And I try. And I fail. But one of these days... (Which is what I keep saying about Moby Dick and Don Quixote.)
The book's obtuse nature aside, though, it is full of prose that is by turns mysterious and beautiful, surreal and stark, tender and brutal. Like many of Aiken's stories, you are entering a world you won't soon forget, the events compelling, even more so if you study about Aiken's life before tackling Ushant. In the end, I believe it was very brave of Aiken to bare his life to the world- even if it's sometimes done by way of riddles, ciphers and symbolism. That's one of the reasons this book is so fascinating and rewarding.
To get a fuller picture of Aiken's style and talent, check out the novel Blue Voyage. Similar themes and style, but more straightforward... well, most of the time...
The book's obtuse nature aside, though, it is full of prose that is by turns mysterious and beautiful, surreal and stark, tender and brutal. Like many of Aiken's stories, you are entering a world you won't soon forget, the events compelling, even more so if you study about Aiken's life before tackling Ushant. In the end, I believe it was very brave of Aiken to bare his life to the world- even if it's sometimes done by way of riddles, ciphers and symbolism. That's one of the reasons this book is so fascinating and rewarding.
To get a fuller picture of Aiken's style and talent, check out the novel Blue Voyage. Similar themes and style, but more straightforward... well, most of the time...
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews