Vol. 33, No. 1 Spring 2005
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
* * * * * * * * * *Correction: please note that the review copy of Death of a Hero referred to on page two, item four, of the Winter NCLSN is a part of Shelley Cox’s own library rather than the library at SIU, Carbondale.
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Remember that if for any reason you should miss your e-mailed copy of the Newsletter you can read it or print it out by going to http://imagists.org which is maintained by our website editor Paul Hernandez.
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Referring to the note on Clearwater Books in NCLSN, 32.4.3, Associate Editor David Wilkinson writes that he only recently learned that the proprietor Stephen Francis Clarke had died. Former NCLS member Frank Harrington acknowledged Clarke’s help in putting together his collection.
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Wilkinson also notes that he has bought quite a number of RA books from the collection of the late William Cooper, a former NCLS member who attended the 1985 Symposium in Reading, England. The titles that Wilkinson has will be put on the internet eventually; meanwhile, NCLS members are welcome to e-mail him regarding individual volumes in which they may be interested.
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Correspondent Michael Copp writes: “We are all familiar with the celebrated incident when Pound edited poems by RA and HD before sending them off to Poetry. But where exactly did this significant encounter take place? There are two competing versions. Which one is the correct one? A footnote in Peter Brooker’s Modernity and Metropolis, Palgrave, 2002, reads:
‘H.D. and Richard Aldington, for example, argue that the birth of Imagism and herself as “H.D. imagiste”took place at the British Museum café, not in Kensington. Such is the way in which significant moments are mis-remembered or elided, their personal and cultural value making them objects of competing narratives.’
Pound remembered this moment as taking place in a café in Holland St., Kensington—his London area.” * * * * * * * * * *
RA figures prominently in Lynette Felber’s Literary Liaisons. N. Illinois U.P., 2002.
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In his research on Ranger Gull, David Wilkinson came across the website for the Basil Dean Archive, http://rylibweb.man.ac.uk/date2/spcoll/dean/. “It includes 11,000 items of correspondence with figures such as Richard Aldington… .”
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NCLS member Dmitry Urnov calls our attention to Wesley D. Camp’s What a Piece of Work Is Man (Prentice Hall, [1990]), “Camp’s Unfamiliar Quotations from 2000 B.C. to the Present.” That includes the quotation, “Forgetting is woman’s first and greatest art” from RA’s The Colonel’s Daughter, 1931. Urnov notes that Adelphia University, where he is on the faculty, “is in possession of a very representative collection of books by and on RA.”
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Correspondent Stephen Steele, who has found RA material for us in a number of libraries, reports that the following items are in the Department of Literary and Historical Manuscripts of the Pierpoint Morgan Library.
1. 6 letters to Carlos Linati (1878-1949), Italian critic and translator. There is one ALS dated November 21, 1932, and there are five TLS written between 1931-1932. The subject of the correspondence is identified as “literary matters.”
2. A DHL manuscript, his poem “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” n.d., 4 p. Note by RA, asst. editor, on p. 1 of the manuscript, mentions the poem’s publication history.
3. An RA manuscript, “False Start of Death of a Hero,” 1925, inscribed in 1932, 1 and ½ pages. Indicated as “removed from a notebook.”
4. 1 TLS to “Dear Malcolm,” January 15, 1938. Villa Koeclin, Le Canadel, Var.
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Welcome new NCLS member Karis McLarty who writes: “I am writing a play based on the love, or at least the romance, between Irene Rathbone and Richard Aldington in the thirties. I have some original material and the reciprocal poem Rathbone wrote to Aldington’s “A Dream in the Luxembourg … I would be very grateful if you could shed any light or insights you may have onto the relationship between the pair, if you have any.” Karis McLarty, whose e-mail address is KMcLarty@milbank.com, would appreciate hearing from any or our members who may have helpful information.
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NCLS member Andrew Frayn calls our attention to two recent books from Manchester University Press. Neither refers to RA specifically, but they will be of interest to scholars in the field.
Anthony Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics from Pound to Prynne, in the Angelaki Humanities series published by MUP. This refers to H.D. passim in several places, though no mention is made of RA.
Jeffrey S. Reznick, Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain during the Great War. There is a particularly interesting chapter on writing in hospitals and about recovery in hospitals, e.g. the production of hospital magazines.
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Correspondent Steele also discovered RA letters in collections at the University of Edinburgh library to Arthur Barriedale Keith (1879-1944), Professor of Sanskrit and Lecturer in Constitutional History at the University of Edinburgh (one letter dated 1923), and Charles Sarolea (1870-1953), Professor of French at the University of Edinburgh, political extremist and ideologue (one letter dated 22 October 1914).
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Correspondent Michael Copp reports that the latest Wyndham Lewis Society Newsletter, No. 22 (Summer/Autumn 2004) includes two references to RA:
1. “…no-one has doubted that Blast was published in the last days of June, because Richard Aldington wrote in the issue of The Egoist for 1 July that it was ‘at last actually out’.”
2. “Gaudier goes off to the Front twice, the first time comically escaping treatment for desertion, and besides an hysterical Zofia, those seeing him off included Epstein, Wyndham Lewis, T.E. Hulme and Richard Aldington.
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Correspondent Copp also found references to RA in two recent books published by Cambridge University Press:
1 – The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Literature, edited by Laura Marcus & Peter Nicholls
(CUP, 2004).
2 – The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War, edited by Vincent Sherry (CUP
2005).
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NCLS member Ashley Chantler sends the following report on the recent Ford Madox Ford Conference:
The “Ford Madox Ford, Englishness, and Modernism” conference (Manchester, 17-18 Dec. 2004) was a great success, attracting scholars from Britain, Germany, Finland, Japan, and America. A wonderful keynote address – “The Saving Remnant” – was delivered by Professor Philip Davis (University of Liverpool). Most papers were devoted to Ford; other writers discussed included Stevenson, Kipling, Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, and Wells. Dr. Andrzej Gasiorek (University of Birmingham) quoted Ford’s description of an encounter in London with “D.Z.” (Wyndham Lewis) – “Finished! Exploded! Done for! Blasted in fact. Your generation has gone,” – which prompted Ford to note: “D.Z., Ezra, H.D. the beautiful poetess, Epstein, Fletcher, Robert Frost, Eliot were all Transatlantically born from the point of view of London. […] They had all become Londoners because London was unrivalled in its powers of assimilation – the great, easy going, tolerant, lovable old dressing gown of a place that it was then but was never more to be.” (pp.311-12, Return to Yesterday (Carcanet.)).
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NCLSN Correspondent Mike Copp writes: “I am constantly being surprised by finding references to RA in the most unexpected places. For example, in Bruce Arnold’s biography of the Irish painter, Jack Yeats (published by Yale U.P., 1998), I came across the following on p. 245:
‘At the time, [Thomas] MacGreevy was himself writing his first book. It was a study of T.S. Eliot’s poetry. It had been commissioned by Charles Prentice, an editor of Chatto and Windus responsible for a new series of monographs on writers. Prentice was a friend of Richard Aldington, at the time MacGreevy’s closest companion in Paris, and both men did work for Prentice’.”
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NEW PLACES, the proceedings of the Third International Richard Aldington Conference (France 2004), is forthcoming from Gregau Press (scheduled for March publication). The editors, Daniel Kempton and H.R. Stoneback, are pleased to announce that, in addition to conference papers, this volume features a hitherto unpublished Aldington children’s story—“New Places Are Fun”—and 15 previously unpublished letters from Aldington to his daughter Catherine. Copies may be ordered ($20 includes S&H), checks payable to Daniel Kempton, IRAS treasurer, from Daniel Kempton, Department of English, SUNY-New Platz, NY 12561 USA. IRAS members receive a 10% discount; contributors to the volume receive a 20% discount. Copies of WRITERS IN PROVENCE (proceedings of IRAS Conferences I & II) are still available—with the purchase of NEW PLACES—FOR $10. Direct all inquiries to, <kemptond@newplatz.edu>
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Bibliographer Shelley Cox sends us the following report:
“Last November and December I visited the Beinecke Library at Yale University, New Haven, Ct. to continue working on the Aldington bibliography. Since I have been to so many large collections of Aldington materials—SIU, Temple University and UCLA, plus the Library of Congress and the British Library—I did not really expect to find a lot of books that I had not previously seen. The Beinecke Library, however, is home to the substantial collection of Aldington books owned by H.D. at the time of her death, which was given to the Beinecke by Norman Holmes Pearson. In addition, there are the usual items acquired by Yale through regular purchases; since they have been one of the primary libraries in the United States, they have always bought almost all current literary publications. And then there are also the collections of papers given to Yale and the Beinecke, which began with the Bryher Collection, go on through the Dial/Scofield Thayer Papers, and end I do not know where, because I did not finish reading within my allotted one week.
“Probably the most interesting new item for me was the 1947 Italian translation of Very Heaven, Un Vero Paradiso, published by Arnoldo Mondatori Editore, complete with perfect wrappers. Unfortunately, finding this item also meant finding that this is the 4th printing of a title originally published in 1938, which remained in print through the war, and that I have never seen the 2nd and 3rd printings and probably never will.
“There were so many things that I found that I know there is not room in this or any single issue of NCLSN to report them. There were beautiful dust jackets that I did not know existed, the wonderful addition and changes to A Tourist’s Rome made by H.D.in her copy, given to her hot from the sloppy presses of Count Potocki de Montalk, and the many wonderful letters that RA wrote to Crosby Gaige. A very exciting one for anyone who
NEW CANTERBURY LITERARY SOCIETY NEWS reads French would be the copy of the first French edition of Lawrence of Arabia, Lawrence L’Imposteur (Paris: Amiot-Dumont, 1954) inscribed to Peter Russell, and with hundreds, perhaps a thousand or more corrections in the French text by RA himself, in his tiny, precise hand. Most are grammatical or spelling errors, as far as my lame French can tell, and a few are problems in translation from idiomatic English into French. But there are a few that may be of real importance to the textual history of this important volume, but which I did not have time to finish.
I have so many interesting items copied from RA’s letters, but I think that this is the most interesting:
From RA’s letter to Eunice Black, dated 24/6/32, from Isola di Capri: “And then having a book is like writing a baby. And then the tussle of it, and the feeling that it is sort of a physical weight, going to bed with it and getting up with it, the sickening consciousness that it’s all going wrong, that it’s nowhere near what you wanted, that in fact it’s all rot.” [Eunice Black Gluckman letters, folder 11] All writers have felt this, but few have put it better!
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The Beinecke Library at Yale University has put some interesting RA pictures and papers on the Internet at http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/ Type “Aldington” in the blank when the page comes up.
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The editors of T.E. Notes in their latest issue, Volume XIV, No 2, Autumn, give an extensive report of the Eighth T.E. Lawrence Society Biennial Symposium held last September in Oxford.
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Correspondent Michael Copp writes: “RA thought highly of Fredrick Manning’s war poems which appeared in his collection, Eidola (1917). In a P.S. to a letter of 16 June 1948 to H.D. he wrote: “I have been reading Fred Manning’s Eidola. His war poems are strangely akin to mine, sometimes on identical themes. His are very much better of course. I am glad to have re-discovered them.” (See Gates, Richard Aldington: An Autobiography in Letters, p. 237.)
“Verna Coleman, in her The Last Exquisite: A Portrait of Frederic Manning (Melbourne Press, 1990), discusses the personal and literary relationship between the two men in some detail.
“In a letter to F.S. Flint, dated 18 February 1917, RA wrote: ‘I carried your poem [‘Otherworld’] and Manning’s poems [Eidola] in my pack for I know not how many kilometers—what more devotion to literature can you ask?’”
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NCLS members will be interested in Lucy McDiarmid’s article, “A Box for Wilfred Blunt,” in PLMA, Vol.120, No. 1, January 2005, pp. 163-180. Professor McDiarmid tells the story of the famous “Peacock Dinner” and the box of poems presented to Wilfred Blunt by the poets W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, T. Sturgis Moore, F.S. Flint, and Victor Parr. Included in the article is a picture of the “box” and of Blunt’s home, a reproduction of an article describing the affair from the Times 20 January 1914, and the well-known photograph of the poets, in which RA is standing next to his friend F.S. Flint, the second from the right. RA’s poem, “In the Via Sestina,” is given in full, and there are a number of quotations from his essay, “Presentation to Mr. W.S. Blunt,” from Egoist 2 February 1914, pp. 56-57.
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Paul Hernandez writes: “Our library’s director, Dan Krummes, came upon a reference to RA in a novel he’s currently reading, Three Minute’s Silence by Georgi Vladimov. Originally published in the USSR in 1969 and translated into English by Michael Glenny for Quartet Books, UK, in 1985. It’s a story about life aboard a fishing boat. An excerpt from page 93 follows:
‘Quiet,’ whispered the trawlmaster, ‘he’s reading!’
But I wasn’t reading any longer; I was staring at the deckhead immediately above my face. Then I carefully shut the book, put it under my pillow and took out another one: Short Stories by Richard Aldington. I read one and started another, but somehow this Richard Aldington didn’t grab me. It was all argument and no action. I’d been a fool to pick the book. There are about eighty books in the ship’s library, and everyone naturally grabs the thickest one he can find, so that he reads just one book for the whole trip. They don’t like books with plots that jump all over the place either; you get in a complete muddle about who’s married to who and so on.’”
“Lustration? Atonement?” For Richard Aldington on the Anniversary of Death of a Hero”
You demand atonement for your generation.
Purge the poison, wash away the “blood-guilt,”
“atone to the dead,” appease the soldiers killed.
You walk the fine line between lustration
And atonement: lustrate, purify, banish
the evil regime. The oldest, saddest dream—
That we can lift the curse, make evil vanish.
Each new generation must make its own
Rites of atonement and expiation,
redemption and reconciliation.
War generations must urgently atone.
It may be folly to think we can redeem
the time, it is not for us to pardon.
I speak these words in your daughter’s garden
in another century you have not seen,
after many wars you have not known:
You are not alone, I read, I am your child—
At-one-ment, all dead heroes reconciled.
Writing is all we can do to atone.
H. R. Stoneback
Written for Richard & Catherine Aldington
And first read in Catha’s garden, Mas les Pellegrins,”
Les-Saintes-de-la-Mer, France 6 Jullet 2004
III International Richard Aldington Conference.