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NEW CANTERBURY LITERARY SOCIETY NEWS

(The Richard Aldington Newsletter)
Vol. 33, No. 2                  Summer 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

  
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                        Correspondent Michael Copp writes: “Here is one more instance of coming across a reference to RA in an unexpected context.  The book: Kevin Jackson, Humphrey Jennings.  London: Picador, 2004.  In this excellent biography of the outstanding British and Cambridge-educated documentary film-maker, the author writes about a remarkable student magazine, Experiment (a complete set is held in Cambridge University Library).  It was edited by Jacob Bronowski and Hugh Sykes.  Besides Jennings, local contributors included Malcolm Lowry, William Empson, Kathleen Raine, Henri-Cartier-Bresson and Julian Trevelyan.

‘Contributions from outside Cambridge were even more impressive: somehow or other, the editors      managed to solicit work from the likes of Conrad Aiken, Richard Aldington, Paul Eluard, James Joyce, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Boris Pasternak.’ (p.71).

Like most student magazines it was short-lived, the first issue coming out in November 1928, and the seventh and last in Spring 1931.  RA’s contribution, a spoof literary review, appeared in No. 6, October 1930, pp. 20-23. 

This is probably the first publication of this essay that later was published with “Balls” by E. Lahr in 1930 as Blue Moon Booklet No. 7, and in American Aphrodite, Vol. Five 1955 Number eighteen.  An excerpt follows.

                                                ANOTHER BOOK FOR SUPPRESSION

                                                  By OUR MORAL EXPERT IN LITERATURE

            Something must be done to stop this flow of obscene books which issue from the Press with the persistence of a gorged cloaca.  Once more I raise my voice in protest, with the belief that the immense public which applauds all my utterances will eventually force the authorities to take action and suppress all books not approved by me and my family.

            There has recently fallen into my hands a loathsome work of this disgusting nature, by a writer who is presumably young, bitter and filthy minded, whose name shall not sully my pen.  Why, indeed, should these upstart indecent purveyors of filth reap the fame, which is the mead of older and better writers?  Suffice to say that this disgusting and futile composition is entitled Songs and is alleged to be poetry.  Poetry, forsooth, this tissue of indecencies and moral turpitudes!

            This author’s morbid preoccupation with sex, crime and pessimism is such that he cannot write about spring without dragging in “pretty country folks” (pretty indeed!) to “lie between” the broad acres of our noble land.  Nay, he must needs sully our daffodil meadows by a perverse and affected evocation of his “doxy” (gypsy slang for trull) and by the incredible statements that the exquisite strains of our pure English thrush, lark and jay (the last evidently dragged in for the sake of the rhyme):

                                                “Are summer song for me and my aunts

                                                            When we lie tumbling in the hay.”

The full disgusting meaning of this can only be grasped by educated experts like myself, who know that “aunts” is a cant term among the low for women of the prostitute class.  Is it surprising that this author in the same “song” merely thinks of theft when confronted with the bleaching of linen of the hard-working housewife?

[RA’s “review” continues for several pages more and concludes: “How much longer will Scotland Yard delay in taking stern action in this flagrant case?  Pour copie conforme,  RICHARD ALDINGTON.”]  A footnote explains that Songs is by William Shakespeare.  [If you would like a complete copy of this essay, e-mail me at ntgates@worldnet.att.net or Michael Copp at Mikejcopp@aol.com]

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                        Shelley Cox found RA’s translation of The Garland of Months, by Folgore Da San Gemignano.  Cleveland: The Clerk’s Press, 1917, selling on eBay at $308,  “the highest RA price I have seen on eBay.”

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                        Our newest NCLS member, Stephen Toft (Stephen_toft@btinternet.com), is interested in sources of information on the life and work of RA’s good friend F.S. Flint.

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                        John O’London Weekly, June 10, 1938, authors parade, 1000th number, includes a caricature of RA.

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                        Bibliographer Shelley Cox sends us this: “On Tuesday, March 8, 2005, a new production of the Leonard Bernstein musical, ‘Candide,’ opened in New York at the New York City Opera.  The original version, which opened in 1956 on Broadway, had a book adapted from Voltaire’s Candide by Hugh Wheeler.  At this time, RA’s translation of Candide, originally published by Random House, was widely available in many different editions, from a limited edition in a silk slipcase issued by The Folio Society, to a pocket size version sold by The Peter Pauper Press.  I have not yet gotten to the point of very closely comparing Wheeler’s version with RA’s translation, but I have often wondered if his English translation, so free and idiomatic, was the basis for the lyrics in the show.  There are a few unique phrasings that only RA uses, and the more scholarly version available then seems a bit ‘clunky’ in comparison.  Needless to say, RA received no recognition and no royalties from any of the Bernstein productions.  This staging has a limited run, for the remainder of March.  The parts of Voltaire and Dr. Pangloss are played by John Cullum, who the more popular culture-oriented of us might remember from TV’s ‘Northern Exposure.’”

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                        Michael Copp writes: “I have just acquired a copy of A Fool i’ the Forest (a most elegant bookplate informs me that the previous owner was ‘Beatrice Eleanor [Paget], Countess of Pembroke).’  I see that RA’s introductory note in the 1925 edition ends with a sentence omitted from the note as given in The Complete Poems.  It reads: ‘Several quotations are woven into the piece; the two longest are from Aristophanes and Anatole France.’  Unlike, say, as in Eliot’s the Waste Land, we are not given copious, learned footnotes.  Can anyone identify and locate these two quotations, not to mention the others, hinted at by RA?”

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                        A note from Stephen Steele says: “I obtained a copy of an Aldington manuscript (1 ½ pages) from the Pierpoint Morgan Library in New York.  The manuscript belonged to Kenneth A. Lohf, who gave it to the library in 2001.  The library describes it as: ‘Removed from a notebook; Inscribed in 1932.’  The inscription on the manuscript reads: ‘False start of Death of a Hero (1925); Frere from Richard; 1932.’”  Correspondent Steele has transcribed this manuscript for us and would be interested to know whether anyone recognizes it in Death of a Hero or in another piece of writing.  Several paragraphs of the manuscript are given below, e-mail ssteele@sfu.ca  or ntgates@worldnet.att.net for a copy of the complete transcription.

            “In September and the early part of October I was at a Corps Signals school.  There, we heard of the great advances of the Allied armies, but received the news with a pessimism, justified by many former disappointments.  We were ignorant of the true state of affairs in Germany and believed peace would not be made until the German armies were annihilated and Berlin captured.  We credited the Germans with a desperate resolve to ‘carry on’ equal to that of our own armies and fully expected another two years of war, which none of us expected to survive.  In this mood we received orders to rejoin our battalions, about the middle of October.

            I left the Corps school under something of a cloud; chiefly because I had expressed the opinion that a staff colonel’s harangue to the officers resembled in spirit the utterances of Treitschke and because I had been found by the adjutant on the evening before our departure, supporting in a friendly manner my servant, who was extremely drunk.  The adjutant threatened me with a court martial for conduct unbefitting an officer; but this threat was not, however, carried out.”

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Member Rod Allison, who is reading Osbert Sit well’s autobiography, Left Hand, Right Hand notes a reference to RA as having been a contributor to Sitwell’s magazine, Art and Letters.  Note the confirmation of this in NCLSN, in 14.3.2, which quotes Herbert Read, joint literary editor with Osbert Sitwell, as writing that “he had secured the invaluable cooperation of Lewis and Eliot along with ‘a jolly open-faced’ young English poet called Richard Aldington.”

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                        Catha Aldington writes that during the classification of her RA books an edition of Rachel Annand Taylor’s The Hours of Fiammetta turned up.  On one flap was the inscription:” Richard Aldington ex dono[?] May Sinclair 1947.”  Opposite this was a note under which RA had written: “This nonsense is in the handwriting of Ezra Pound. RA.” 

                                                            Boccacio’s Comment

                                    Come drown out your conscience with your thuribles

                                    & comfort us by lacking principles

                                    until at last this gay & mortal sickness

                                    has closed us in its circumambient blackness

Catha writes: “At least this is what I could make out of it.”

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                        NCLS member Andrew Frayn asks whether any of us remembers where in RA’s All Men Are Enemies one of the characters mentions the World War I novel Disenchantment by C.E. Montague.  If you remember this, e-mail Frayn at afrayn@yahoo.co.uk

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                        Shelley Cox sends us this quotation from Julian Mitchell & Gene Andrewski, “Talking Jolly Glibly,” 23 April 1959.  Reprinted in Lawrence Durrell: Conversations.  Edited by Earl Ingersoll (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), p.23.  [Lawrence Durrell being interviewed on his influences:]

“… but, you see, the heroes of my generation, the Lawrences, the Norman Douglases, the Aldingtons, the Eliots, the Graves, their ambition was always to be European.  It didn’t qualify their Englishness in any way, but it was recognized that a touch of European fire was necessary, as it were, to ignite the sort of dull sodden mass that one became, living in an unrestricted suburban way.  …As for me, I have joined the Common Market, as it were.  But, mind you, that doesn’t qualify one’s origins or one’s attitudes to things.  I mean, if I am writing, I am writing for England—and so long as I write English it will be for England that I have to write.”

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            NCLS member Gemma Bristow has discovered three early poems by RA published in 1912 in a

 London suffrage journal, The Englishwoman.  Two of the poems (“Night” and “Helas!”) are original, and one is a translation of a Greek epigram (Theaetetus).  Bristow’s article reproducing the poems and setting them in the context of RA’s career at the time has been accepted by English Literature in Transition, and is scheduled to appear in January 2006.

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                        Gemma has created an Aldington “fanlisting”: see http://www.helical-library.net/byronic/

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                        If you have not already heard from him, e-mail NCLS member Max Saunders at max.saunders@kcl.ac.uk regarding the invitation to submit contributions to a new volume of the International Ford Madox Ford Studies that will deal with writers such as RA who influenced or were influenced by Ford.

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                        Correspondent Mike Copp writes: “I have commented more than once on the extraordinary manner in which several recent anthologists have completely ignored RA’s war poems.  Here is the latest example, perpetrated by none other than our Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion. His First World War Poems, just reissued in paperback by Faber & Faber, includes examples by over 30 poets, and still manages to omit RA.”  Fortunately, we have An Imagist at War: The Complete War Poems of Richard Aldington by Michael Copp that should be required reading with any of these incomplete anthologies.

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                        We are happy to report that Copp’s book will be available in paperback this November from the publisher Cecil Woolf, 1 Mornington Place, London NW1 7RP, Great Britain at £6.95, $12.00, C10.00 postpaid.  Aldington’s war poems will be in the first batch of books in Cecil Woolf’s War Poets Series of which member Jean Moorcroft Wilson is the General Editor.  Wilson is also collecting RA books preparatory to writing a new Aldington biography that will be underway soon.

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                        NEW PLACES, the proceedings of the Third International Richard Aldington Conference (France 2004) is now available.  See the NCLSN, Vol. 33, No.1, p. 3 for ordering details (if you do not have your copy of this last issue, check on our website, http://Imagists.org, where the NCLSN is posted).  Following an “Introduction” by editors Kempton and Stoneback, NEW PLACES includes seventeen contributions.  Two of these are unpublished writings of RA, one a charming story written for Catherine when the Aldingtons were in Florida (see my “Richard Aldington in Florida” in this same book), and the other a collection of unpublished letters, “Aldington’s Letters to His Daughter (1957-1962).”   Nine of the contributions are directly concerned with RA, and were written by NCLS members Stoneback [two articles and a poem], Copp, Frayn, Gates, Kempton, and Zilboorg..  The remaining essays are connected with RA or the Camargue.  For anyone interested in the life and work of RA, this book is a “must read,” especially the heretofore unpublished writings by RA.

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                        NCLS member Jennifer Plastow is now Dr. Jennifer Plastow.  Both her MA and Doctoral thesis will shortly be on her website.  The doctoral thesis is about Ford Madox Ford, but there is considerable mention of RA in chapters seven and eight.  Plastow’s master’s thesis is about RA and H.D.

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                       NCLS member H.R. Stoneback is the author of a new book, Homage: A Letter to Robert Penn Warren.  “In this extraordinary poem Stoneback pays tribute to one of America’s great writers while pushing deeply into the role of art and evoking many times and places… .”  To order: send check payable to Portals Press ($15 per copy.) 4411 Fontainebleau Dr., New Orleans, LA 70125, or on line at www.portalspress.com

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                        Our newest NCLS member is Robert Smith (RHSMITH@RC.com), a lawyer “with an avocational bibliographic interest—esp. 19th 20th Anglo/American literary/cultural history.”  He owns several RA firsts, and is on the boards of museums and libraries.

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                        NCLS member Alan Byford found a reference to RA in Leonard Woolf’s autobiography, Down Hill All the Way (Readers Union edition, 1968, pp. 133-134).  Woolf writes of RA: “He became a regular reviewer for me, the kind of reviewer who is a godsend to literary editors.  He could and would write me a good review of almost any book I sent him…”  In the end, RA refused to review for Nation, saying “…he could not write in the same paper as the man who had run off with his wife.”  Presumably, RA refers to Cecil Grey and H.D.

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                        Correspondent Michael Copp writes: “At last!  A modern anthology of war poetry which includes RA!  Poetry of the First World War, edited by Peter Harness, and published by Collector’s Poetry Library, London, 2004, contains RA’s ‘The Lover,’ and ‘Bombardment.’  It also includes F.S. Flint’s ‘Lament’—rare to find FSF in any such anthology.”

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                        Shelley Cox reminds us that SIU Library’s Special Collections (where The RA holdings are kept) will be closed sometime this summer.  For information about using these collections, e-mail specoll@lib.edu (or better, telephone 618-453-2516).  While she is no longer on the library staff, Cox will be glad to help with information on the contents of RA and some related collections.  E-mail her at scox75@verizon.net

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