Vol. 32, No. 4 Winter 2004-05
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 2LR 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, Stephen Steele, F.-J. Temple, Caroline Zilboorg
Correspondent and Bibliographer: Shelley Cox. Biographers: Charles Doyle, Jean Moorcroft Wilson
* * * * * * * * * *Jean Moorcroft Wilson writes that she is chairing an event at the Imperial War Museum based on the book that she and her husband Cecil Woolf edited, Authors Take Sides on Iraq and the Gulf War. “We have managed to get Harold Pinter, Tony Benn, Beryl Bainbridge and three other well-known writers to participate.”
Wilson is also revising her 1975 Rosenberg biography and will be general editor of a War Poet Series that Cecil Woolf, Publishers, has decided to launch. (NCLS members who are interested in submitting a proposal for this Series should write to the publisher at 1 Mornington Place, London NW1 7RP for details. Michael Copp has already suggested a condensed version of his An Imagist at War.) “But I am most definitely committed,” she writes, “to a full-scale biography of RA as soon as Rosenberg is finished.”
* * * * * * * * * *
Shelley Cox found a few not very enlightening references to RA in Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939 (Viking Penguin, 2002) by Virginia Nicholson, daughter of Quentin Bell and granddaughter of Vanessa Woolf Bell. RA’s autobiography, Life for Life’s Sake, seems to have been the source of most of the comments on RA as “bohemian.”
* * * * * * * * * *
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, recently added to their RA collection a copy of H.D’s What Do We Love, London: Privately printed by Brendin Publishing Co. [1950], which the seller described as: “One of an edition of approximately fifty copies printed for the author’s distribution as a holiday greeting. The first book publication of three poems (‘May 1943,’ ‘R.A.F.,’and ‘Christmas, 1944’) sympathetic to, but no elements in, the trilogy. A copy of exceptional association interest, inscribed: ‘Richard from H.D. Christmas, 1950.’ The recipient was Richard Aldington, who H.D. married in 1913, and from whom she was finally divorced in 1938, after many years of separation.”
* * * * * * * * * *
Your editors apologize for an error in the sixth news item in NCLSN, 32.3.2 which Shelley Cox quotes in line one writing: “A new version of my copyright duration chart for archivists… .” The “my” should, of course, be “the.”
* * * * * * * * * *
NCLS member Bill Pratt writes: “I’m still roaming the world on behalf of Ezra Pound, and on August 11 in London I had the privilege of speaking at the unveiling of a Blue Plaque for Ezra Pound at 10 Kensington Church Walk, where he lived while instigating Imagism with Richard Aldington and H.D. It was mentioned that they lived across the courtyard from each other. Mary, Pound’s daughter, unveiled the plaque erected by the English Heritage Society, and Valerie Eliot was present and supported the event from Old Possum’s Practical Trust. The event was reported in the London papers and from them around the world. A banner day for the Imagists.”
* * * * * * * * * *
Any NCLS member now receiving the Newsletter by regular mail but who has e-mail would save your editors considerable time and expense if he/she would give us permission to send future issues of the NCLSN via e-mail. You will also receive your quarterly number much more quickly. E-mail: ntgates@worldnet.att.net
* * * * * * * * * *
NCLS member John Worthen has completed a new biography of Lawrence entitled D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider that will be published by Allen Lane (Penguin Press) in March 2005, and will contain a number of references to RA. In his biography Worthen suggests that RA’s statement to Lawrence biographer and former NCLS member Harry T. Moore that Lawrence was impotent from 1926 onwards was largely responsible for the idea having become “a kind of fact in contemporary biography and criticism.” Worthen further suggests that Lawrence’s attack on RA in his poem “I know a Noble Englishman” may have been one of the reasons that RA made his comment to Moore.
* * * * * * * * * *
Member Worthen has also written the entry on D.H. Lawrence in the brand-new New Dictionary of National Biography, replacing the one written in the former Dictionary of National Biography by RA, which, according to Worthen, “has been extremely influential since 1937 (when it first appeared).”
* * * * * * * * * *
Lawrence Durrell and the Greek World edited by Anna Lillios includes Ian and Susan MacNiven’s interview with Durrell’s sister, Margaret.
* * * * * * * * * *
SIU, Carbondale, has obtained a review copy of Death of a Hero with the review notice from the publisher laid in, and two pictures of RA, one in uniform (which Shelley Cox had not seen previously), enclosed.
* * * * * * * * * *
Among the 7,000 books on a CD rom offered by eBay is RA’s translation of Alcestis, by Euripides, London, Chatto and Windus, 1930.
* * * * * * * * * *
T.E. Notes, Vol. XIV, No. 1, includes the article, “T.E. Lawrence” (pp. 22-29), by June Turner first published in American Imago: Studies in Psychoanalysis and Culture, 48, no.3 (Fall1991: 395-416. The bibliography includes RA’s Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry.
* * * * * * * * * *
Bibliographer and Correspondent Shelley Cox writes to say that her last official act at SIU was Aldingtonian: on 30 September, from 4 to 6, there was a Banned Books Week Reading for which she read comparative selections from the 1929 Chatto & Windus and Covici Fried editions of Death of a Hero, to illustrate that censorship is not the same from country to country. Some words the Americans allowed the British did not, but “youthful sexuality was heavily censored by the Brits but not so heavily by the Americans.”
* * * * * * * * * *
[Sincere thanks to all of you who sent 90th birthday greetings, a fact that it seems was “leaked” by our otherwise trustworthy Associate Editor.]
* * * * * * * * * *
Catherine Aldington writes to say that a student of Professor Stoneback, Mathew Shilling, is classifying her holdings of RA’s books “so we can have a complete list. This should have been done long ago but I’d never had the chance to get a professional before.”
* * * * * * * * * *
Please welcome new NCLS member Rod Allison who comes to us via Paul Hernandez and the RA website. The following is excerpted from his application e-mail:
“I live in Mexico and went to Britain on holiday during most of September, among other things looking for books about the interwar period by people who lived through it, particularly World War I. …[My] interest in the First World War poets was stoked up by the collection Up the Line to Death edited by Brian Gardner. It has a few poems by Richard Aldington and a potted biography about him. He sounded interesting and I looked up more about him on the Internet. I was particularly interested in reading his novel Death of a Hero and his biography of T.E. Lawrence. … Anyway, I haven’t got into Richard Aldington’s works yet, but hope to do so in the next month. It never fails to amaze me how brilliant writers like Aldington become forgotten, except by a few. My interest in him stems from the belief that he was one of the few people who kept the debate about the injustice of war boiling throughout his life.”
* * * * * * * * * *
NCLSN member Stephen Steele notes an early letter from RA to Alice Corbin Henderson (1881-1949) that is not included in the Checklist. The date is given as 4 January 1914. Henderson is described as an American poet, editor, and regional writer.
* * * * * * * * * *
Member Steele found another unlisted letter from RA to Herberth Herlitschka dated 25 May 1950. This letter, discussing the publication of RA’s Lawrence biography, is held by the University of Reading, UK, in the Papers of Herberth Herlitschka, who was a translator, Austrian-born, naturalized Briton, and died in 1970.
* * * * * * * * * *
A colleague of member Andrew Frayn at the University of Manchester, Rachel Connor, has recently had H.D. and the Image published by the Manchester University Press. An early version of a part of this book is available at http://www.art.man.ac.uk/english/manuscript/home.html Vol. 2.1, 1997. The book makes little mention of RA, but may be of interest to H.D. scholars.
* * * * * * * * * *
Frayn is currently writing about C.E. Montague, and more particularly his book Disenchantment. If anyone has insights into this, he will be glad to hear from him/her at afrayn@yahoo.co.uk There is a reference to RA’s All Men Are Enemies; does anyone know whether RA had further knowledge of or even meetings with Montague?
* * * * * * * * * *
Correspondent Michael Copp contributes the following: “In RA’s poem, ‘The Parrot,’ RA writes: ‘I shall buy a parrot,/I shall call it Maude Cambronne.’ ‘Maud Cambronne,’ is of course a punning phonetic disguise for ‘mot de Cambronne.’ At the Battle of Waterloo, when the French general Count Etienne Cambronne found himself and his men hopelessly surrounded, he was invited by the English to surrender, and legend hat it that he responded, ‘Merde!’”
* * * * * * * * * *
Copp also reports that in its final catalogue (No. 111) Clearwater Books in Devon (Clearwater.books@yahoo.co.uk) lists three RA items: Two Stories signed, No. 2 in the limited edition [Copp bought this] Soft Answers, the specially bound deluxe edition, signed; Love and the Luxembourg, deluxe edition, signed by RA and Frederic Warde, the designer,
* * * * * * * * * *
In The Guardian of 13 November 2004 Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s article, “Truths Written in Blood,” includes the text of a previously unpublished Siegfried Sassoon poem she recently unearthed, “Because we are going…,” an early war poem that differs markedly in its attitude to the war from Sassoon’s later scathingly bitter poems. In the course of this article she discusses and quotes from the works of other war poets as well: Brooke, Rosenberg, Sorley, Owen, Blunden, Gurney, and RA. Her brief reference to RA reads: “Richard Aldington is another exception. Sharing Sorley’s intellectual detachment, and also his sense of duty, he was referring as early as March 2 1915 to ‘this filthy and disastrous war’ as a ‘sordid commercial squabble’ and by May 1915 his poetry reveals him ‘tormented, / obsessed,… / With a vision of ruins, / Of walls crumbling into clay.’”
* * * * * * * * * *
We have recently missed Correspondent Cy Fox’s news reports and witty commentary. A telephone call elicited the unwelcome news that he has been “under the weather” for some time. He did have some RA news, recalling a recent item in the TLS on T.S. Eliot that mentioned RA in connection with RA’s essay on Eliot in Soft Answers. We wish you well, Cy, and look forward to seeing your “Dispatches” soon.
* * * * * * * * * *
A seller on E-Bay recently offered a copy of the Library Chronicle of the University of Texas for Spring of 1974. This issue, of which I, of course, have a copy, includes one of my early articles on RA, Richard Aldington and Glenn A. Hughes: An Exchange of Letters. Besides a discussion of these very interesting letters, this article includes a commentary on the holdings on RA that were to be found in the Humanities Research Center when I visited there in the early 1970s.
* * * * * * * * * *
In addition to the above item, we are indebted to Shelly Cox for calling our attention to another RA item being offered on e-Bay, former NCLS member Fred D. Crawford’s Richard Aldington and Lawrence of Arabia: A Cautionary Tale that was published in 1998 by the Southern Illinois University Press.
* * * * * * * * * *
NCLS member Gemma Bristow, replies to a query on the H.D. Society listserv about the novel Miranda Masters by RA’s friend John Cournos, as follows: “ The titular Miranda is based on H.D. Of the other major characters, Gombarov is based on Cournos himself, Arnold Masters on Richard Aldington, and Winifred Gwynne on Dorothy Yorke.”
* * * * * * * * * *
F.S. Flint and RA frequently sent each other their poems and sought the other’s reaction to them prior to submitting them for publication. Among the copies of letters between the two men that Correspondent Michael Copp brought back from the Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas, was one from Flint to RA dated 1 April 1916. RA had recently sent Flint three poems for his comments. Part of Flint’s letter reads:
“As for the poems you sent me Richard, ‘Ave’ [see Gates, The Poetry of Richard Aldington, pp. 174-175] and ‘Stream’ [Gates, pp. 261-262] will do as notations only: ‘Blizzard’ [Gates, pp. 177-178] will be a poem when you have fil[l]ed it a bit. I confess that I do not see any future for poems like ‘Ave’ and ‘Stream’: they lack something essential: ‘Ave’ it is true rams this essential in hurriedly in the last line, but it is too late. If I say that neither is a work of art, you will not hate me for it I know: it is only my loyalty [……] Blizzard is a different case; but I think you should turn it over a little longer.”
* * * * * * * * * *
BLIZZARD
The wind hurls snow against the hills
Piles it in hollows, against crags:
The ice wind rattles like dying breath.
The rush of hard white flakes blinds me;
I am stunned by the whirring air.
Yet I forget it for a moment
And think of your limbs in the firelight
The point of your breast
Crushed under my cheek.
Snow, wind, frost assail me;
I am numb and desperate;
But I grow warm—my face flushes—
Remembering our keen forbidden caresses,
The cleft of your body,
Your closed eyes.
“A carbon typescript of this poem was enclosed with an undated letter to Frank Stewart Flint from Aldington. The typescript is now in the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin. No publication has been located.” The Poetry of Richard Aldington, pp. 177-178.
* * * * * * * * * *
Correspondent Stephen Steele reports that the estate Harold Acton (1904-1994) left to NYU included his extensive collection of personal correspondence. His papers are now almost all processed and are in Florence at the Villa La Pietra. A search of the early letters in the archive did not turn up anything from RA. There are many letters from Nancy Cunard and a close examination of them may find material related to RA.