Lorelei Two: My Life with Conrad Aiken

This sometimes painful memoir is written by the second of Conrad Aiken's three wives. From the point of view of literary history, it provides a candid account of the poet-novelist's almost psychotic misogyny and fierce self-destruction urges during the period when he was wrestling with the material that went into his major work. Her story of her life with Aiken spans the years from 1926-1936 and also of some years following the end of the marriage, discussing the question of feminism and, in her view, possible wasted female years. Her book also provides a look into the literary and art worlds of the twenties and thirties and some of the colorful characters of the times: Malcolm Lowry, John Gould Fletcher, Hilda Doolittle, Paul Nash, among others.