Vol. 32, No. 1 Spring 2004 Editor: Norman T. Gates Associate Editor: David Wilkinson 520 Woodland Avenue, The Old Post Office Garage, Chapel Street, St. Ives
Haddonfield, NJ 08033-2626, USA Cornwall TR26 2RL U.K.
E-mail: ntgates@worldnet.att.net e-mail: books@book-gallery.co.uk
RA and H.D. Website: http://Imagists.org/ Correspondent and website editor: Paul Hernandez
Correspondents: Catherine Aldington, Michael Copp, C.J. Fox, F.-J. Temple, Caroline Zilboorg
Correspondent and Bibliographer: Shelley Cox. Biographers: Charles Doyle, Jean Moorcroft Wilson
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If you are receiving your copy of the NCLSN by mail, it is important that you keep us informed of any address changes, and if your Newsletter comes to you by e-mail be sure to give us your new e-mail address if it is changed; otherwise, you are lost to us as many members are each year who change addresses.
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An extract from the Introduction to Jean Moorcroft Wilson's Selected Poems of Isaac Rosenberg was published in the Guardian review section 8 November 2003. "The response from the public was overwhelming." Dr. Wilson also writes that she has so far acquired nearly twenty RA titles in preparation for her new RA biography.
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NCLS members will want to see the working draft of Louis Silverstein's "H.D. Chronology" that Heather Hawkins has put on-line at the RA and H.D. website, http://www.imagists.org/hd/hdchron.html While this "Chronology" concerns itself primarily with H.D., it inevitably includes a great deal about RA that will interest NCLS members. E-mail Heather with comments or suggestions at hh@imagists.org
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Michael Copp found The Dearest Friend. A Selection from the Letters of Richard Aldington to John Cournos, 1st ed., one of 110 copies, "a near fine copy" listed in the latest catalogue (No. 107) of Clearwater Books (clearwater.books@dial.pipex.com) at £55.
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Associate Editor David Wilkinson recently acquired a copy of Ranger Gull's undated book The Ravenscroft Horror in the back of which, among the publisher's advertisements, he found Love Letters to a Soldier by May Aldington. The publisher was T. Werner Laurie, and May's book is featured in their list of "Shilling Books," implying that Love Letters is a paperback issue. Doyle gives the publication date of this book as 1915.
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NCLS member Stephen Steele has found letters to and from RA in the Ernest Warnock Tedlock Papers at the University of New Mexico. The Papers also contain what Professor Steele believes to be original Frieda Lawrence letters to RA purchased by Tedlock for his book, Frieda Lawrence: Memoirs and Correspondence. There are two letters from Tedlock and one from the Director of the University of New Mexico Press to RA. The letters from RA are given below in Checklist form since none of them is included in the Checklist, although other letters to Frieda Lawrence are listed there.
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Checklist addenda:
Lawrence. Frieda (wife of D. H. Lawrence [her second husband] and later Mrs. Angelo Ravagli); 1 letter
1 - 8 November 1948 - tls, Le Lavandou, University of New Mexico.
Tedlock, Ernest Warnock (Professor at the University of New Mexico and author of Frieda Lawrence: Memoirs and Correspondence), 3 letters
3 - 25 November and 30 December 1956, 30 January 1957 - tls, Montpellier, University of New Mexico.
University of New Mexico Press; 1 letter
1 - 13 October 1947 - tls, Le Lavandou, University of New Mexico.
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On a visit to St. Deiniol's (a residential library founded from the bequest of former Prime Minister William Gladstone in Harwarden, near Chester, England) NCLS member Andrew Frayn found quite reasonable RA holdings including The Mystery of the Nativity, translated from the Liegeois of the 15th Century, Four English Portraits, Portrait of a Rebel, Remy de Gourmont: Selections, and Voltaire. There were also a good number of works by contemporaries such as Ford, Sassoon, and Robert Graves.
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Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961 edited by Carlos Baker (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1981) includes references to RA on pages 188, 192, and 594.
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Associate Editor David Wilkinson is exploring the relationship between C. Ranger Gull, whose life he is researching, and Baroness Orczy both of whom were known to May Aldington. If anyone has further, more positive links, please contact David at either his mail or e-mail address given on our masthead.
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Heather Hernandez, in an e-mail to members of the H.D. Society, announced that another of Charlotte Mandel's articles is now available on the H.D. website at http://www.imagists.org/hd/hdcmfive.html
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Daily Bleed, an on-line calendar (http://www.recollectionbooks.com/bleed/0125.htm), remembers Gérard de Nerval, whose Aurelia RA translated in 1932, on the anniversary of his death, 25 January: "GERARD DE NERVAL walked his pet lobster on a blue ribbon through the streets of Paris, 'because it does not bark & knows the secrets of the sea.' Visionary, great poet, suicide." For more on Nerval and to read some of his poetry in French see http://www.odyssee.net/pcbcr/nerval.html
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RA bibliographer Shelley Cox (who contributed the above item), also sent us the following news. "Aldington on e-Bay: A Saga. On January 15, I received an e-mail from NCLS member Michel Pharand, alerting me to the sale on E-bay, the online auction house for everything, of an early printing of the Covici Friede edition of Death of a Hero. This edition is not particularly rare, but the seller had noted that there was a picture of Richard Aldington glued in on the half title page, and the illustration with the sale page showed a handsome RA contemporary with the publication date, standing on a balcony high above a city. Since the purchasing agents of SIU cannot sully their hands with e-Bay, I bid personally, and was surprised to get it for $17.26, including postage.
The item itself is well worth ten times the price. The picture is a faded snapshot, 11.1 x 6.9 cm, candid, showing RA standing on a balcony which looks over to another building. Here's the good part. On the back is written: Richard Aldington \ taken in Paris \ June 25, 1930 in RA's handwriting!! I know the dealer did not know what he had!
Even better, a little sleuthing in NCLS member Caroline Zilboorg's selection of RA-HD correspondence shows that Aldington had been staying at the Select Hotel from March until June 29, 1930. HD had visited him, and socialized with RA and Brigit Patmore several times during the week of June 23-29. On June 30, RA and Brigit left for Paris. This picture could have been a keepsake to HD. How the book got into the hands of someone named Gladys, with such bad handwriting that I cannot read the rest, or into a small country bookshop in Winchester, VA, is a complete mystery.
I have not been able to get the photo entirely removed from the book, as we do not want to take a chance on damaging it, so for now we cannot scan the inscription. More to come when we can."
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NCLS member Ashley Chantler writes: "I am currently co-organising a conference on 'Ford Madox Ford and Englishness,' but proposals for papers on modernism and Englishness will be warmly welcomed. I would very much like Aldington's and H.D.'s presence felt." The conference will be held in Manchester 17-18 December 2004. Write Dr. Chantler, Department of Humanities, De Havilland Campus, University of Hertfordshire, College Lane, Hatfield AL10 9AB, England, or e-mail him at a.chantler@chester.ac.uk for a copy of the "Call for Papers."
* * * * * * * * * NCLS member and Correspondent Caroline Zilboorg's new book, Women Writers: Past and Present (Cambridge U.P., 2004), has just been released, and in it she refers not only to H.D. but also to RA. In discussing the ancient Greek poet Sappho, Zilboorg quotes RA's translation entitled "To Atthis." "Male writers like Richard Aldington," she writes "also use translation as a way of situating their work within a larger historical context and within the established literary tradition."
Professor Zilboorg also quotes from H.D's "Fragment Thirty-Six," noting that: "Like 'To Atthis,' 'Fragment Thirty-Six' seems to be about both love and music, but unlike Aldington, who anchors his translation in a specific Classical time and place, H.D. chooses to focus her version of Sappo on an inner conflict. While Aldington's poem stresses the speaker's relationship with a female friend, in H.D.'s poem the gender of the speaker and particularly of the sleeping lover are unclear."
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The Enchanted Guest of Spring and Summer, a reassessment of the life and work of Dorothy Richardson, 1873-1954, by Eva Tucker, was published in 2003 by the Hypatia Trust to become number four in the Women of Cornwall Series, The Hypatia Notebooks. This fourth Notebook includes sixteen extracts from letters that Dorothy Richardson wrote to Bryher between 1924 and 1950. For additional information write to the series editor NCLS member Melissa Hardie at Trevelyan House, 16 Chapel Street, Penzance, Cornwall TR18 4AW, England, or e-mail her at info@hypatia-trust.org.uk Tel. 01736 366597; FAX 01736 330704.
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When RA set off to join the 11th Devonshire Regiment base at Wareham, Dorsetshire in June of 1916, he was accompanied by his good friend Carl Fallas. Today, Carl Fallas's daughter (Mrs. Barbara Clask) lives within ten miles of the Malthouse Cottage where RA lived in the twenties and where David Wilkinson made his home before he moved to St. Ives, Cornwall. Both David and Charles Doyle, author of Richard Aldington: A Biography (1989) keep in touch with Mrs. Clask.
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Catherine Aldington reminds us that the III International Aldington Society Conference will be held In Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, France, and July 6-8. See NCLSN, 31.4.3 for complete details and call for papers.
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NCLS member Andrew Frayn of the Department of English and American Studies, University of Manchester, has published on the Internet the paper, "'Not Yet Diagnosed Nervous,' Richard Aldington, Psychology and War," that he gave at his departmental conference in Manchester. The URL is http://www.art.man.ac.uk/english/manuscript/backiss/fraynald.html
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Member Frayn has also had a paper accepted for presentation at the III International Aldington Society Conference to be held in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, July 6-8. (See above.)
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NCLS member Michel Pharand has accepted an appointment to the faculty of the department of
English at Hokkaido Bunkyo University, 196-1 Kogane-machi, Eniwa, Hokkaido 061-1408, Japan. Both member Pharand and his wife and two children lived in Japan about ten years ago when he was a member of our society. For information about Morikimi Megata, who corresponded with RA and was out first member in Japan, see Index to the NCLSN: Volumes 1 - 30, Compiled by MaryAnn K. Crawford and Norman T. Gates, p. 15.
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As most of our members know, your editor does not gather the news for the NCLSN, but simply puts in Newsletter format news items sent to him by Society members and especially by our "Correspondents." There has never been a subscription charge for the Newsletter, but we usually explain to prospective members that, in its stead, we hope that they will send us occasional references to RA that they run across as well as news about themselves or their activities. With this number we begin the thirty-second year of our publication. We hope that we can count on your continued help to keep the Newsletter a viable, useful reference to Richard Aldington, his work, his associates, his period, and the scholars who have been interested in him.
* * * * * * * * * Shelley Cox presented a paper entitled "A Bolt from the Blue: Lawrence Durrell's 'The Magnetic Island'" at the 32 Annual Twentieth-Century Literature Conference at the University of Louisville.
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NEW CANTERBURY LITERARY SOCIETY NEWS David Wilkinson's research into C. Ranger Gull (aka Guy Thorne and mentioned in Life for Life's Sake) shows that he wrote around a hundred novels. " I have so far managed to track down and read about half. Among those I find that he has used 'Dr. Aldington' and 'Mrs. Aldington' as fictional characters. I may be reading too much between Gull's lines but I can detect images of May Aldington's time at The Mermaid. And Margery Aldington's family nickname of 'Mollie' crops up as does 'Richard' in a manner that suggests familiarity with RA That said, nothing of significance can be attached to Gull's frequent habit of allowing friends and acquaintances to make Hitchcock-like, passing appearances in his novels."
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Associate Editor Wilkinson also noted six references to RA in the "Index" to the catalogue of an exhibition, Paris-New York: Echanges litteraires au vingtieme siecle, Pompidou Center, 1977.
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Southern Illinois University received their copy of the Encyclopedia of Modernism, ed. Paul Poplawski, which was referred to in NCLSN, 31.4.4. Shelly Cox reports that Caroline Zilboorg's entry for RA was "a great and sympathetic article, especially given the space constraints that she probably had to work with. All authors seemed to get the same amount of space, at least the big guns, and RA is treated as a big gun!"
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A new book by Wyndham Lewis scholar Paul O'Keefe, Gaudier-Brzeska: An Absolute Case of Genius (Allen Lane, £29.00) makes use of, and praises in its acknowledgments, David Wilkinson's research into Gaudier's life. During his research, O'Keefe contacted Wilkinson who gave him his entire file of information.
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NCLS member and Correspondent Michael Copp is half way through his month's stay at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin. He is reading the RA letters, which the Checklist numbers at two hundred and thirty-nine, to Frank Flint, English Imagist poet, essayist, and translator. Copp writes that he is being "fascinated, entertained and stimulated" by these letters that were written between 1912 and 1924, when Flint was among RA's closest friends.
Copp was also fortunate in the timing of his visit since there is at present a fine exhibition at the Center: "Make it New: The Rise of Modernism," presented in five thematic sections: "Portals of Discovery, "Forms and Technologies," "Invisible Worlds," "The City, " and "Marketing the New." Among the wide range of exhibits were some items of particular interest: two photographs by Man Ray of RA and H.D.; a copy of Images open at pp. 22-23 ("In the Tube" and "Cinema Exit"); a letter from H.D. to Glenn Hughes (late 1920s); a letter from Robert Frost to F.S. Flint (2 June 1913); the celebrated photograph of the six poets honoring Wilfred Scawen Blunt, including, of course, Ezra Pound, RA and F.S.F. (is this the only photograph of RA and F.S.F. together?); a letter from Pound to Milton Bronner (21 September 1915): "Whether he [Rupert Brooks] was better than Aldington I don't know. I am afraid Aldington's head will petrify, but then English heads do."
Copp was also able to attend a two-day Symposium, "The State and Fate of Modernism." Papers were given by a roster of scholars, professional librarians, archivists, publishers, editors, collectors, and booksellers, who offered their assessment of the origins and legacy of Modernism. There were memorable contributions from, among others, Margorie Perloff, Susan Stanford Friedman, Morris Dickstein, George Bornstein, and Mark Morrison.
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The 21st Ezra Pound International Conference will be held July 4-7, 2005, in Rapallo, Italy, Pound's home during most of his Italian years. Participants will have the opportunity to visit many of the places in Rapallo that were important to Pound during his years there.
Proposals are invited for papers on or related to the topic "Ezra Pound, Language and Persona." "Language and Persona (or Mask) are at the center of Ezra Pound's work, from his first commercial volume, Personae (1909) to his last Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII (1968)." Papers should be timed for 30 minutes delivery and 15 minutes discussion. Proposals should be no more than a page in length, and should be sent by Oct. 1, 2004, via regular mail, air mail (outside the USA) or email, to the Conference Secretary, William Pratt, Department of English, Miami University, Oxford OH 45056 USA. Email address: prattwc@muohio.edu Anyone interested, with or without a proposal, should write to the Conference Secretary.
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The Richard Aldington web site, revised March 15, 2004. Address comments to Paul Hernandez, paul@imagists.org