A delightful young lady named Noni has learned from her doctor
that she has only a very short time to live, due to a heart
condition. Since childhood, she's been sweethearts with the
idealistic Gil. As such things often happen, instead of marrying
each other, they married different people, and neither marriage
worked out; Noni's husband skipped out on her (with a good deal
of her family's money) and Gil's wife died of medical complications
while giving birth (the child passed away, as well). Now, with
her own death looming, Noni decides to go to Mexico to get a
quick, official divorce from her first husband and marry Gil
before she dies. Gil is unaware of her illness. Blomberg, a
mutual friend whose own love for Noni is problematically vague,
accompanies them as a kind of chaperone. It is through Blomberg's
eyes that the tale—told in the third person—unfolds.
The story is told in three quite specifically, carefully delineated
milieus: In the first, in Boston bars and restaurants (most
of Aiken's fiction is set in Boston), Blomberg tries to solicit
money for the trip from a skeptical benefactor named Key; in
the second, the three friends make the journey to Mexico by
train; in the third, they rendezvous with a Mexican friend named
Hambo, who tries to help with the legalities of the divorce.
As the novel opens, Blomberg is waiting in Boston Common for
Key to arrive, and, immediately, in the second paragraph, Aiken
makes use of a Freudian symbol, that of a reflection—in
this case, from the water: he "avoided looking at his reflection
in the glassy water of the Frog Pond"; and the sentence
continues, "which he was circling for the fourth time...".
The motif of the circle is another familiar one in Aiken—one
of the novels that captured Freud's notice is called Great
Circle—and we'll come back to it in a bit, but I think
it's profitable for us, as readers, to ask the question, Under
what circumstances does it make sense to say a person is willfully
avoiding looking at his own reflection? There's only one realistic
answer, which is that he doesn't like what he sees (in mythology,
Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection; this is the
opposite). And, so, our curiosity is immediately piqued. As
Blomberg goes on to tell Key about the highly improbable scheme,
the question occurs to Key—as it surely does to every reader—why
does Blomberg have to go on the trip to Mexico? It seems inappropriate.
Key speculates that Blomberg must, too, be in love with Noni:
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So,
you're willing to do all this, at the drop of a hat, and
on a shoestring—practically give up your job, spend
all your savings, run yourself ragged to raise money,
work your head off and generally worry yourself to death,
and all to provide a goody-goody little husband for the
gal you're in love with!
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Blomberg makes a surprising reply, which is that yes, he's in
love with her, but here Aiken has him speak of a kind of love
that is not sexual or romantic in nature but which, rather,
is something close to the meaning of agape from ancient Greek
literature—a sense of truly strong, deep affection, a genuineness
of caring, possibly a super strong Platonic love. (Key is skeptical;
Blomberg says, "Don't smile, such things do happen.")
Blomberg refers to Noni as the "nakedest" soul he's
ever met; she wouldn't avoid her own reflection in the
water. In any case, Key comes through with the money, and it's
off to Mexico.
The train to Mexico assumes the form of several things, not
the least of which is a symbol of life, the process of living,
itself ("the only remaining reality was the train").
It also becomes an anthropomorphic monster, later on, as it
races faster and faster into Mexico. Mexico and its people are
an exotic netherworld to the three Bostonians. After a time,
we begin to focus in on Noni and her plight, and we come to
realize that, in reality, she is going to Mexico not to marry
Gil but to die and thus begin what Aiken calls the Great Circle—birth,
life, death, rebirth. Blomberg thinks "Noni on the great
circle to Mexico, taking her heart as an offering to the bloodstained
altar of the plumed serpent..." Noni is (has always been?)
a sort of unattainable goddess who intends to die well, and
it's suggested that there's a sort of telepathy about this between
her and Blomberg while Gil simply looks on as a clueless, well-meaning
dunce. Preparing for—and accepting—death must be something
Aiken meditated upon constantly; when he was eleven, his father
killed his mother and then himself, in a shooting spree that
reads like one of today's horrific headlines. The shock of it
was obviously something that dominated his life.
This idea of 'taking her heart to the bloodstained altar of
the plumed serpent' is something to which each of us can easily
relate. We've all known someone who doesn't have much time left,
have all had to turn our heads for a moment while we wipe away
the tears we don't want them to see.. It's too sad for words,
unbearable really; and it's only because this kind of grieving
pain is a nearly universal feeling that Aiken is able to challenge
us so strongly with the idea of the Great Circle, with the idea
of the dying person who turns death into the ultimate act of
dignity rather than something to be mourned. This is Blomberg
describing Noni to Key:
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She
plays the piano very badly, but more movingly than anyone
else I ever heard, bar none. Always Bach, nothing but
Bach. Gil can play rings around her—Gil could have
been a professional if he'd wanted to—but it doesn't
mean a thing by comparison. You ought to see her at a
concert—her face opens like a flower—she clasps
her hands flatly together, and leans her face sideways
on them, and goes a million miles away. I just sit and
look at her, it's as good as the music. Better! How do
some people do that—doesn't seem quite fair, Key,
does it, that some people have that astonshing integrity
of living or loving, or seeing and feeling—really
love and feel, while the rest of us poor guys have to
wait and be told when to love.
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In addition to the train, three other things function in preeminently
in the novel. The first is the strangeness of oddish, hircine,
singular Mexico to the three genteel, civilized, innocent New
England souls; the second is a brief scene involving a "baptism"
in the Mississippi River; and the third is the constant, even
obsessive, evocation of the image of the heart—the bloody
corazon of the ancient Indians—that occurs throughout.
And I'd like to quickly mention a concept that appears in all
the critical literature about Aiken which is a bit out of our
scope, here, but which the inquisitive reader should most assuredly
delve into. This is the concept of consciousness, which for
Aiken is synonymous with being human. In one of his plays, Archibald
McLeish wrote: "The only thing that makes a man a man is
his mind. Everything else you can find in a dog, or a pig, or
a horse." That this uncomfortably true observation is a
prime preoccupation of Aiken's in his imaginative literature
is confirmed by a quick perusal of the scholarly books about
Aiken on a site like Alibris—books
with titles such as Conrad Aiken: The Priest of Consciousness
or The Fictive World of Conrad Aiken: A Celebration of Consciousness.
It's not an easy task to weave transcendental philosophical
meditations into a novel in a meaningful way and simultaneously
keep the narrative moving, interesting, on pace. For example,
in the case of this particular novel, quite a bit of exposition
has to be given to the reader via means of the long conversation
between Key and Blomberg that kicks off the book; the reader
learns things at the same time that Key does. Later, when the
majority of the action is limited to the confines of the train,
the same device is employed with much more force, much more
drama, though a case could be still made that things are a little
too talky. Perhaps this is an inevitable consequence of trying
to do philosophy by means of a novel. I don't know that there
are too many American novelists who, like Aiken, have attempted
this (Walker Percy? William H. Gass?). At the same time, even
if the tale seems a little contrived, the images, the evocations,
and the humanization of some weighty convictions make A Heart
for the Gods of Mexico an importunate one, and a good introduction
to our most major unknown writer.
