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Editor: Norman T. Gates 520 Woodland Avenue Haddonfield, NJ 08033-2626, U.S.A. e-mail: ntgates@worldnet.att.net |
Associate Editor: David Wilkinson The Old Post Office Garage, Chapel Street, St. Ives Cornwall TR 26 2RL, U.K. e-mail: books@book-gallery.co.uk |
Correspondents:
Catherine Aldington, Michael J. Copp, C.J. Fox, F.-J. Temple, Caroline Zilboorg.
Correspondent and Bibliographer, Shelley Cox.
Biographer, Charles Doyle
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Associate Editor David Wilkinson reports: "The Air Ministry has just released files that shed further light on the life of Lawrence of Arabia, according to an illustrated article in the Guardian of 29th May 2002. Most of the article is taken up with speculation about TEL’s views of Alexander Korda’s 1930s attempts to make a film of his life and of his anonymity in his later years. But one or two points might have interested RA. When TEL was ‘...stationed at RAF Cranwell he arranged for two shillings out of his daily three shillings to be paid to Miss Ruby Bryant of 31 Portland Street in Newark upon Trent--a woman not mentioned in any Lawrence biography. The payments lasted from September 1925 to November 1926. On the day they ended, they were replaced by an order to pay 6d (2.5p) to another mystery character, W.J. Ross of 76 Marcham Street in London, which also continued for [a] year. // Lawrence’s medical record file reveals that the RAF doctors recorded “scars on his buttocks” [that] possibly offer new evidence for his account, which is disputed, of being raped ..., however some could be the result of beatings he paid a soldier to administer while in the Tank Corps after the war."
Shelley Cox has posted the following to ExLibris, which is a group of about 1500 rare book and manuscript librarians, book dealers, and others interested in this area: “Special Collections, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, has several author collections that are quite complete, the most extensive of which is the collection of books by and about Richard Aldington. This includes books by him, translations of his books, books edited by him, books translated by him, books with a contribution from him, and books with an introduction by him, as well as secondary literature. We also have an extensive collection of manuscripts, notes, correspondence and other papers, and a selection of books from his personal library.”
Correspondent Cox also notes in her posting that while the nexus of this collection has been on site for nearly forty years, more strenuous efforts to acquire all editions of his work have been made since she started to work on Aldington’s bibliography in 1994. Currently she has over 700 files relating to individual editions, with about 20 in the “to do” file. Almost all of the remaining titles missing are late reprints or foreign translations.
Correction: the first item on the Checklist addenda given on p. 4 of our last issue should show “Hampstead” as the address from which the letter was mailed rather than “Padworth.”
Welcome new NCLS member Nigel Jones, writer and assistant editor of BBC History Magazine, who is working on a book entitled “Edwardians” to be published by the BBC. For this book, he is doing research on Richard Aldington, in particular his pre-war career and his WWI service. Mr. Jones has already written three books touching on the war: The War Walk (1884, 90) to be re-issued next year by Pen & Sword; Hitler’s Heralds: the story of the Freikorps 1918-23 (Murray, 1987); and Rupert Brooke: Life, Death & Myth (1999) which the BBC are republishing in paperback next year. He is also attempting to induce publishers to re-issue RA’s Death of a Hero, and in May of next year will be leading a tour of the Western Front “in the footsteps of the war poets” that will feature RA.
Did you know that if you ask “Google,” the Internet search tool, for references to “Richard Aldington,” it will come up with 4,250 entries. The first two of these will be Heather and Paul Hernandez’s website, http://www.imagist.org -- certainly a good way to start research on RA.
On of the reasons for the success of our 1992 Richard Aldington Centenary Conference, which was held in Montpellier, France, at the Université Paul Valéry, was the fact that it was scheduled near to the date of that year’s Lawrence Durrell Conference in nearby Avignon, and therefore attracted some of our NCLS members who are also Durrellians. A number of NCLS members, including Shelley Cox, Ian MacNiven, Karl Orend, and Peter Christensen, participated in the Special Pre-Conference Program for Graduate Students and the Multicultural Durrell program at this year’s On Miracle Ground XII: International Durrell Conference, “Durrell & Co: A Multicultural Circle,” in Ottawa, Canada, 20-24 June, 2002.
By the time that you receive this autumn number of the Newsletter, Michael Copp’s book, An Imagist at War: The Complete War Poems of Richard Aldington should be in the bookstores. The following review combines paragraphs from my original appraisal and from the dustjacket (within quotation marks):
NCLS member Copp has combed through Richard Aldington’s writings and brought together all of the poetry that deals with Aldington’s wartime experience. What emerges from this collection is not only a clear picture of a young poet’s experience of war, but also the effects of that experience on him and on the generation of young Englishmen who participated in the Great War.
“For the first time all the war poems of Richard Aldington have been brought together. This collection is intended to reaffirm Aldington’s position as a significant voice in the literature of the First World War. ... Mr. Copp makes the case that this is arguably the most coherent and comprehensive of all the collections of war poetry.”
The introductory material alone is very valuable. Copp deals with Aldington’s later prose writings about the war, gives an outline of Aldington’s war service as expressed in letters and prose writing, tells of his relationship with H.D., the American poet to whom he was married, and of the role Aldington played in the development of Imagism.
“A substantial introduction seeks to set these poems and Aldington’s 1929 war novel, Death of a Hero, and his 1930 collection of war stories, Roads to Glory, against the background of the publishing flood of war literature. ... Michael Copp also devoted time to tackling the question of the disgraceful neglect and ostracism from which Aldington subsequently suffered in his later years. ... Each of the five groups of poems is preceded by a short introduction containing analyses of, and comments upon, some of the key poems so as to bring out the qualities and concerns of Aldington’s war poems.
The range and achievement of Aldington’s war verse, now seen here in its entirety, when linked to his war prose, will serve to testify to the major position he should occupy as one of the most important voices of the First World War. Michael Copp’s book makes a considerable contribution towards the process of reestablishing Richard Aldington.”
Owing to cancellations Hugh Cecil and Anne Powell decided to postpone the Dinner planned for Thursday 25 July 2002. The new date is Monday 14 October 2002. The Dinner will be held at Le Columbier, 145 Dove House Street, Chelsea Square, London, SW3 at 6:30 p.m.. The price is estimated at £35.00 per head. Provided we have sufficient numbers this will include a Private Room, aperitif, three course set dinner (with separate choice for vegetarians) and house wines. We plan readings from Richard Aldington’s works during the evening. We must have final numbers by Monday 30 September 2002 please to Anne Powell: e-mail Palladour@powellj33.freeserve.co.uk Telephone and Fax: 44(0)1239 811 658. Home address: Hirwaun House, Aberporth, Near Cardigan, Ceredigion, SA43 2EU, United Kingdom.
NCLS member Cy Fox sends us an article, “The legend of Lawrence lives on,” from the “Travel” section of Financial Times (London), Weekend July 13/July 14 2002. “Jordan is turning to a dead English war hero to help its tourist industry--a strategy that will only get it so far, says [author] Justin Marozz.”
Member Michael Pharand will be spending the next academic year as visiting research scholar at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.
Our Associate Editor, David Wilkinson, is preparing a “Directory of Members of the New Canterbury Literary Society.” Printed copies of the completed directory will be sent to existing members and deposited in appropriate libraries. The up-to-date directory will then be made available on the Richard Aldington Website edited by Paul Hernandez (http://Imagists.org/). Members are therefore urged to contribute their own entry along the following lines:
WILKINSON, DAVID Until 1993, lived for twenty-two years in Malthouse Cottage, Padworth, Berkshire, UK., Aldington’s home from 1920-28. As a result now holds a major archive of Aldingtonia. Undertook an unpublished study of the real people and places in Aldington’s novel, The Colonel’s Daughter, culminating in a meeting with the heroine. An exhibition from his collection was on display at the 1986 Richard Aldington Symposium at Reading University that he helped organize. Contributed essays in the published Papers from Reading and Montpellier. Wrote the introduction to the Imperial War Museum’s celebratory re-issue of Aldington’s Roads to Glory in 1992. Associate Editor of The New Canterbury Literary Society Newsletter. Abandoned a career in architecture to open a second-hand bookshop in 1993. Address: The Book Gallery, 2 Bedford Road, St Ives, Cornwall. TR26 1SP. Tel: 01736793545. E-mail: books@book-gallery.co.uk
NCLSN Correspondent Caroline Zilboorg is now living in Sains, France.
Associate Editor David Wilkinson reports that in his book that studies the business aspects of authorship, Victor Bonham Carter lists RA alongside Blunden, Brittain, Graves, Owen, Sassoon and Williamson as those “...writers who took the lid off the war.” See Authors by Profession, Volume Two: 1911-1981. The Bodley Head & The Society of Authors, 1984.
Shelley Cox noticed that Tyrus Miller in Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction and the Arts between the Wars (University of California, 1999) suggests that Beckett may first have encountered the idea of the Russian clowns in RA’s “Epilogue” to The Colonel’s Daughter. Miller goes on to indicate that the clowns themselves may have come from a book by René Fülop, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism, which was quoted in the second issue of The Enemy. [This is not the first mention in the NCLSN of Beckett’s use of RA’s clowns. Can anyone locate the previous one--I would like to cross-reference, but can’t find the previous reference.]
Anthony Rota, in Books in the Blood, discusses his bookselling career. There are several mentions of RA in connection with sales of collections that included his letters, notably the John Gawsworth papers. Rota also thanks Correspondent/Bibliographer Shelley Cox in his acknowledgements and discusses his sale of Durrell’s papers to Southern Illinois University in 1969 and 1998.
Ford Madox Ford, in “Literary Portraits-XXXV. Les Jeunes and Des Imagistes” (Outlook, 33 [9 May 1914], 636,653), writes “And here again is a poem by Mr. Richard Aldington that would come almost exactly into the canons of my school, if I had founded a school.” Ford then quotes RA’s poem “Aux Vieux Jardins,” which appears in The Complete Poems under its translated title, “In the Old Garden.” Ford’s essay is included in recently published collection of his essays, Critical Essays (Carcanet Press, Manchester, 2002), edts. Max Saunders and Richard Stang. NCLS member Saunders, who last year contributed the entry for RA to the New DNB and recently gave a paper on Eliot and RA at a Symposium on The Criterion, invites you to visit the Ford Madox Ford website at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/ip/maxsaunders/
SIU has ordered a new book by Dierdre Pettipiece, Sex Theories and the Shaping of Two Moderns: Hemingway and H.D. (NY:Routledge, 2002), which should contain some RA references.
Jason Harding’s The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-war Britain (Oxford, 2002) has just been received by SIU. Shelley Cox writes that, as would be expected, there are many mentions of RA. She has excerpted some of these for us; a few appear below, others will be given in our next issue.
“In 1921, Eliot’s predecessor at the Egoist, Richard Aldington, complained to the poet and man of letters, Thomas Sturge Moore, a good friend of W.B. Yeats, that aside from the Times Literary Supplement there was a complete absence of serious periodicals to which one could contribute lengthy articles of literary matters: he added that the London Mercury was too dreadful.” (p.7)
“Aldington, initially the Criterion’s assistant editor ‘at a very modest salary’, [in 1922] withdrew a solicited article after Eliot suggested some revisions. He added a characteristically spiteful remark about the quarterly’s imperious title (apparently chosen by Eliot’s wife, Vivien, although Pound had earlier proposed the title for a never realized review.) ... Both Aldington and Pound complained that the Criterion’s rate of payment (10 pounds for 5,000 words and 1 pound, 1 shilling per page of verse) was not worth their trouble.” (p.11)
Correspondent and bibliographer Cox has almost finished her extraction of RA material from TLS Online which provides a searchable database of all issues of the periodical from its founding in 1902 through 1990. She found 891 contributions, from 1919 through 1957, with nearly all clustered from 1919-1929. Of these, 15 were letters, either signed or signed with pseudonyms. (This database used the periodical’s own marked files to identify contributors from 1902 to 1963 when all contributions were anonymous except signed letters.) There are also 71 reviews of RA’s books from 1919 through the late 1950s. Not all books are reviewed. NCLS members interested in further information about this mass of RA material should e-mail scox@lib.siu.edu
T.E. Notes, Vol. XII, No. 1 (2002), is a 40 page issue and is mailed with a 24 page “List of Articles 1990-2002” that should be of great value to scholars as well as anyone interested in Lawrence of Arabia.
The paperback edition of Caroline Zilboorg’s Richard Aldington & H.D., that will combine the early and later letters previously published in individual hardback volumes, has a publication date of April 2003.
Cy Fox found NCLS member Hugh Cecil’s review of Brian Bond’s The Unquiet Western Front: Britain’s Role in Literature and History in The Spectator (London), 10 August 2002, p. 35. RA is mentioned in Cecil’s review, “A lovelier war,” as being among those writers, embittered by the war, who presented the view that Bond attempts to refute. Both RA and Sassoon, however, Cecil notes, “were not consistently anti-military.”
David J. Holmes Autographs (P.O. Box 90, Hamilton, NY 13346) in his Catalogue Seventy-eight lists an inscribed copy of RA’s A Tourist’s Rome in the original Melissa Press edition with RA’s {?} corrections.
NCLS member David Richards writes that the September 2002 issue of Firsts: The Book Collector’s Magazine (a special issue on WWI) includes an article by Peter Coveney entitled “Classics of World War One Literature” in which a paragraph is devoted to RA’s Death of a Hero.
[Catherine Aldington, who, as many of you know, lives in Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, suggested that our members might like to read the following poem written by Professor H.R. Stoneback and included in his Cafe Millennium and Other Poems (Portals Press, 2001 ). Professor Stoneback was one of the prime movers in the establishment of the International Richard Aldington Society.]
The Mystery and Memory at Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer
(for Eric Forbeaux)
It is the wind, not just any wind,
Only the Mistral that blows away memory
Blows it far out on the vast estranging sea.
It is the wind, not just any wind
That seems to destroy short-term memory
Here in the Camargue, in Les Saintes-Maries,
Where we note this in the discourse of friends.
After two months of intermittent wind
We feel it begin inside, this daily loss
Of memory which is, perhaps, not a bad thing,
Not like forgetting the words when you sing.
More like approaching a familiar-
Roads, and suddenly forgetting which way
To turn. At first we thought it was the vin de pays,
The Vin des Sables du Golfe du Lion
(Lions playing on the far beaches of Memory)
But now we know it is more fundamental,
It is the wind, the daily, weekly wind
Roaring down the Rhône with the weight of all
Europe, it is the Mistral. Then this begins:
As short-term memory recedes, true memory arrives,
Coming from the sea with Les Saintes Maries--
Mary Salomé, Mary Jacobé,
Mary Magdalene, utterly alive,
Landing here in this bright white wall of wind
Near two thousand years ago: this vision
Lives in the eyes of gardians and gypsies
Who still see the Holy Marys and Sarah landing
Here in the wind, not just any wind,
Only the Mistral that blows away brief memory
That clears the mind for the winds of history
Here in the wind, not just any wind.