Pathetick Passion

GREAT CIRCLE--Conrad Aiken--Scrib- ner ($2). Though Author Aiken takes his title from geometry (great circle: a circle on the surface of a sphere, whose plane passes through the centre of the sphere), his motto from Elizabethan John Marston ("O frantick, fond, pathetick passion! Is't possible such sensuall action should clip the wings of contemplation? . . . Fie, can our soule be underling to such a vile con-troule?") and his subject from everyday life (a deceived husband), yet his method is modern, cinematic, "stream-of-consciousness." Poet of involved psychological states, he is usually not at his best in the comparative bluntness of prose. And in modern poetry, which has come far from Robbie Burns, gutlessness may be an advantage; in novels, however, it is still a defect. Conrad Aiken's prose-people are shadowy, unsubstantial; but in the hero of Great Circle he has concentrated such emotion that the other characters seem temporarily real enough. Written with more ability than most U. S. prosemen can command, with more care than most would be bothered to employ, Author Aiken's second novel is a distinct addition to U. S. letters. In any list of ten best U. S. novels of the year, Great Circle would have to have a place. Hero Andrew ("One-Eye") Gather is not prepossessing at first sight. A private tutor in Cambridge, Mass., Harvard graduate, intellectual in his late 30's, with a glass eye (unexplained), an increasingly unhappy marriage and a correspondingly increasing tendency to drunkenness, he has in his cosmos not only too much ego but too much untethered intelligence and the haunting, still unlaid nightmare of a childhood tragedy. At outs with his wife for the past six months, he has suspected her and his best friend of being more than friendly. Acting on a candid letter from another friend, Gather is cutting short a (rip to Manhattan, hoping and fearing to find proof of his suspicions on his unexpected arrival home. Everything turns out just as he thought it would; he finds that foreknowledge makes the fact no easier. As he took the precaution of coming home drunk, he acts the part of injured husband with more malice than dignity. (An interlude, a flashback, shows him as a small boy at Duxbury, where his family went in the summer, with his flirtatious mother and two uncles, his father and some sinister secret usually out of sight in the background. The secret comes nearly out when his mother and his Uncle David are drowned in a storm and he finds the sunken boat with their trapped bodies.) Next few days Gather spends in trying to keep drunk; he ends up in the room of a friend who is an amateur psychoanalyst, keeps him up all night by his brilliantly unhappy monolog. When he comes to, next evening, Gather feels better about things: he meets his wife at a concert, lays the groundwork of a reconciliation, and goes off to Duxbury by himself to think everything over. The Author, like his hero and unlike many of his death-possessed colleagues, has a personal reason for his bias towards grave thoughts. When he was n he saw his father kill his mother and then commit suicide. Harvardman (1911), Conrad Aiken was Class Poet, in a college generation that included such notables as Thomas Stearns Eliot, the late Alan Seeger, Van Wyck Brooks. Walter Lippmann, the late John Reed, Heywood Broun. Dedicated to literature, Aiken was never sidetracked into writing for money (he has an independent income). Native of Savannah, Ga. he was early transplanted to New England, continued to live in Cambridge (though he traveled widely) till three years ago, when he took his second wife and three children by his first marriage to England, because he thinks it a better literary climate. Sandy-haired, bespectacled, excessively shy and silent with strangers--and occasionally defensively ironic--Conrad Aiken looks like what he is: a literary man whose intelligence pains him. Other books: John Deth and Other Poems, Selected Poems (Pulitzer Prize, 1929), Preludes for Memnon, The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones, Costumes by Eros, Blue Voyage.

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