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 Stephen Steele has located the following RA correspondence:
1. Letter from RA to Edouard Roditi (1910-1992), French surrealist poet and essayist, July 20 1946, Montego Bay, on Aldington’s move from Hollywood and O. Sitwell’s description of postwar Switzerland and Italy. Roditi Papers, UCLA.
2. Fourteen letters and two postcards from Norman Douglas (1868-1952) to RA, spanning May 25 1931 to July 24 1939. Two letters and one postcard are not dated. British Authors Collection, Stanford. This set of letters, quite possibly of interest to the history of Aldington’s literary relations and to Pinorman, may belong to the mountain of correspondence believed lost, misplaced or stolen during Aldington’s many moves.
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Steele has found more RA material among the collections at Stanford University:
1. The Typographical Collection includes four letters and one postcard from “Pino” Orioli to RA: 1931 May 13, ALS; 1932 August 6, ALS; 1934 March 7, ALS; 1936 December 26, ApcS; n.d. March 17, ALS. These letters undoubtedly compliment RA’s 22 letters to Orioli listed in the Checklist. Together they would make an interesting publication.
2. The Healy Collection includes: 1924 November 7, TLS and trans., RA to Editor, New York World; RA photograph by Blackstone, clipping from the New York Herald Tribune, 24 September 1939.
3. Hoover Institution at Stanford, Henry Regnery Papers, Regnery (b. 1912), American businessman and publisher. Correspondence with RA, 1955-1956.
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Over three quarters of our membership receive their Newsletter by e-mail. If you are receiving your NCLSN by regular mail, but have access to e-mail, please send us your address, and let us add you to our e-mail list. Also, if for any reason you do not receive your Newsletter (either by mail or e-mail) please let us know so that we can get your copy to you and check to see that your name is on one of our lists. Remember that you are able to see the current NCLSN as well as back issues to Vol. 30, No.3 on the RA and HD Website listed on our masthead.
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Two NCLS members, Michael Copp and Alan Byford, will be holidaying in St. Ives with their wives this summer, and are planning a visit with NCLSN associate Editor David Wilkinson.
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Michael Copp reports having seen a letter (privately held) from RA to Ruth Flint, and dated 22 April 1934. RA wrote to decline an invitation to speak to a small group of Ruth Flint’s friends. One reason that he gives is that he will shortly be going to Lisbon. The other reason is: “ I do it so badly that since I lectured at Oxford last year I’ve refused all such requests—it is better for me to communicate by the written word.” He also wrote: “. . . until yesterday I was working most of the day on a novel (now finished). . .” This was probably Women Must Work.
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The following website that was found by David Wilkinson has a number of RA’s books on line. You can check it at http://questia.com/library/literature-of-specific-countries/british-literature/20th-and-21st-centuries/richard-aldington.jsp
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NCLS member Jenny Plastow visited Associate Editor Wilkinson in St. Ives recently and David shared his RA archives with her. “I came upon items I had long since put in the back of my mind,” David writes, “such as the brooches that D. H. Lawrence gave to young Hilda Brown who lived in the other half of Chapel Farm Cottage at Hermitage with her parents. And I played Jenny chunks of the three-hour taped conversation I had with Margery and Patricia Aldington in 1982 in their native Rye. To hear Margery talking to me in intimate terms about her brother remains intriguing.”
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Michael Copp sends the following brief quotes from Anne Conover’s Olga Rudge & Ezra Pound: “At Etta Glover’s house in Le Lavandou, she [Olga Rudge] met Ezra’s old friend Richard Aldington, ‘[who] has written another awful novel [Seven Against Reeves (?)] … a sop to suburbia.’
Ezra mentioned that H.D. (once married to Aldington), was ‘all steamed up with kind feelings towards you … wanting to know why she hasn’t been told [about the birth of Mary].’
‘She has nothing against H.D. … it’s H.D. and Bryher I won’t stand at any price,’ Olga retorted (having fallen out with Hilda after she abandoned Aldington to cohabit with Winifred Ellerman.’”
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Heather Hernandez, who posts the H.D. Chronology page at http://www.imagists.org/hd/hdchron.html has added new details about H.D.’s burial discovered by Rev. Jamie Parsley. “According to information I culled from the Nisky Hill Cemetery records, H.D. was cremated on October 2, 1961 in ‘the crematorium of the city of Zurich.’ On October 28, 1961, her ashes were buried in the C.L. Doolittle Lot #53, Section D in Nisky Hill Cemetery.”
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Michel Pharand writes from Japan: “There are a few references to RA in Umberto Eco’s Mouse or Rat: Translation as Negotiation (London: Phoenix, 2003), the published version of Eco’s Weidenfield lectures given at Oxford in 2002. At pp. 47-50, in comparing French translations of Nerval’s novel Sylvie—Halévy (1889), Aldington (1932) and Sieburth (1995)—Eco finds that RA has translated some passages ‘unreasonably.’ And I must say, alas, that I agree with Eco here!”
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Catha Aldington writes: “I’ve done it! Richard Aldington’s A Dream in the Luxembourg is out in Provençal: Pantai dins lou Jardin dou Lussembourg. Publisher, L’aucéu libre, 11 rue des Archives, 75004. Paris.” We have a copy of this charming little book that gives RA’s famous poem in three languages: English, Provençale, and French, and recommend it to NCLS members. The French translation is by Catherine Aldington ; the Provençale by Marcel Audema
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Michael Copp sent this note: “I have just returned from a week’s holiday in the delightful Cornish resort of St. Ives. While there, I was able to meet David Wilkinson and to have a tantalizing glimpse of his extensive collection of RA books, as well as of his wealth of archival material. I should also mention that I travelled to nearby Penzance to see the exhibition, Painting at the Edge: British Costal Art Colonies 1889-1930. For the catalogue of this imaginatively curated exhibition David has written an informative and authoritative essay: ‘St. Ives: The Legendary Quality of Light?’”
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A series of approximately eighty letters written by RA to Henry Williamson between 1951 and 1962, dealing mainly with RA’s biography of T.E. Lawrence, but including many other interesting references, was offered for sale by Sothby’s on 12 July, but were not sold. Williamson’s letters to RA are held by Southern Illinois.
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On Tuesday, 8 November, at the Imperial War Museum, London, there will be the official launch of
the first five titles in a new series of paperbacks on poets of both World Wars, published by Cecil Woolf Publishing, London, with our RA Biographer, Jean Moorcroft Wilson, acting as general editor. Three of these are by NCLS members: Michael Copp (Richard Aldington). Alan Byford (Edmund Blunden), and Anne Powell (Alun Lewis). The other two contributors are Richard Perceval Graves and John Press.
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NCLS member Rod Allison, whose note on the mention of RA in Osbert Sitwell’s autobiography was in the last number of the NCLSN, is now reading a biography of Sitwell by Philip Ziegler. Allison has found a number of references to RA in the biography index, and will have a report on them for us later.
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Correspondent Michael Copp reports: “RA warrants five references in David Goldie’s A Critical Difference: T.S. Eliot and John Middleton Murry in English Literary Criticism, 1919-1928 published by Oxford University Press, 1998.
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Bibliographer Shelley Cox continues the difficult task of preparing a new bibliography of RA’s writings. She needs to write descriptions of books acquired over the years, discover what she is missing, and try to find the items that she does not have.
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Cox also noted references to RA in two recent books about modernism. The first is from Modernism: A Short Introduction, by David Ayers (Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.)
“Aldington and H.D. shared an interest in classical poetry, and they found in Greek poetry—especially the surviving fragments of the Lesbian poetess Sappho—a directness which they felt had no equal in contemporary modes of writing in English. They sought to recreate such writing for themselves as the basis of a new modern idiom, and in doing so helped to provide the basis for a key element in English modernism—neo-classicism. (p. 2-3).”
The following references are from Modernism, ed. By Stephen Matthews. (London: Arnold, 2004.)
“It is this jazz element of the Harlem Renaissance which perhaps suggested to white writers the most potential for cross-over into a new kind of writing. Jazz, of course, resonates through the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also appears as a formal possibility in more unlikely places. Richard Aldington, the original English Imagist poet who was also a novelist and editor, for instance, surprisingly described the technique of his novel partly drawing on his experiences in the trenches of the First World War, Death of a Hero (1929), as ‘jazz’ (p. 52).”
“The irony of this suggested division within the women [Elizabeth and Fanny] themselves, between a verbal openness and sophistication about personal life, and the repression of their own ‘predatory and possessive instincts’, is what the novel reveals. The emotional side of love and sex, the ‘slipslop messes’ which their sophistication and reading in sex theory (Ellis) and psychoanalysis is aimed at avoiding, is of course what entangles them. … Death of a Hero … represents a familiar tension at the time: a new sense of uncertainty about the relations between the sexes (pp. 82-83).”
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NCLS member David Koch, Director, Special Collections Research Center, retired August 1 after
thirty-five years of service. He helped to build Southern Illinois University’s RA collection and was helpful to many of us. If anyone wants to contact Southern Illinois University about using the manuscript collections (or donating any manuscript material), they can contact the Manuscript Curator, Randy Bixby at rbixby@lib.siu.edu
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Associate Editor David Wilkinson bought the original manuscript of May Aldington’s 1909 novel, Meg of the Salt-Pans, in 2000. It is written in ink on a number of lined exercise books, and bound in green, half-calf, buckram. In the novel the grandmother, Delphy, runs the Salt-Pans, an old pub in “Woodlands” in Kent, just as RA’s mother ran the Mermaid in Rye. Delphy, in fact, seems to be May Aldington personified, and her writing and the capable way in which she ran the Mermaid is reflected in some lines directed to one of the characters in the novel: “… You will have to start writing for the Ladies papers. How to make a country cottage into a paradise on threepence halfpenny. Or how to turn a hideous gloomy dungeon into a pretty, bright paradise for fourpence.”
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Michel Pharand found an offering by Bonhams in London (Sale 13394 – The Roy Davids
Collection New Bond Street 3 October 2005 at 11:00) of a portrait of RA. It is
described as a charcoal drawing heightened with color, inscribed by the artist
Juliet Pannett (b. 1911) “Aldy” and “R. Aldington,” 18 x 12 in. Neither
Shelley Cox nor myself have ever before seen this portrait (which does not look
like RA, but could be of him), and wonder whether it is familiar to any of our
NCLS members. The portrait may be viewed on Bonham’s website: http://www.bonhams.com/cgi-bin/public.sh/pubweb/publicSite.r?sContinent=EUR&screen=catalogue&iSaleNo=13394
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Associate Editor David Wilkinson recently visited DHL’s birthplace at Eastwood, near Nottingham. He then walked down the road to Durban House where, as a boy, DHL would collect his father’s pay packet from what was then the mine’s office. On the walls were framed a number of original letters from both sides of the argument at the time the Penguin edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover came to court. One is a typed letter dated 30th September 1960, from Professor Vivian de Sola Pinto (on University of Nottingham notepaper) to solicitor Michael Rubinstein. It begins as follows: “Thank you for your letter of 29th September and enclosed list of books alleged to be hostile to D.H. Lawrence. I certainly should not have included Aldington’s book in the list. I think it has considerable defects as a biography but it does contain notable tributes to Lawrence as a man and as a writer.”
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NCLS member Paul Sherr, on a recent vacation trip to Europe, stopped to visit Catha Aldington at her home in Stes Maries-de-la-Mer. He was intrigued with Catha’s library, especially her comprehensive collection of the works of RA.
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A recent announcement from the Secretary of the Alliance of Literary Societies informs us that the International Richard Aldington Society has recently become a member. See the RA and H.D. Website at http://imagists.org/ for additional details on the I.R.A.S.
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Dr. Archie Henderson of Houston, Texas, recently purchased a copy of the “Index to the NCLSN, Vols. 1-30”, bound with copies of the Newsletter. Dr. Henderson noted many references to Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot in the NCLSN that he wished to see for “his bibliographical work on these two authors.” It is helpful to know that our newsletter is of interest to scholars of modern literature in general as well as specialists in RA’s work. In this regard, Paul Hernandez has contributed greatly by putting the “Index” on the RA website http://imagists.org/ where current issues of the NCLSN (from Vol. 30, No. 3) may also be found.
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Our Associate Editor, David Wilkinson, contributed the chapter on St. Ives to the recently published Painting at the Edge: British Costal Art Colonies 1880-1930 edited by Laura Newton (Sansom & Co., 81g Pembroke Road, Bristol. BS8 3EA. ISBN: I 904537 29 4. Priced at £24.95 in paperback). This work was very favorably reviewed by Brian Stewart in the Folkstone Herald for 25 August 2005 as “…a much needed book, providing great insight into early 20th century British Art. The paintings reproduced in it are a joy.”
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NCLS member Gemma Bristow discovered three early poems by RA, that seem to have been hitherto lost. They were published in 1912 in a London suffrage journal, The Englishwoman. Two of the poems (called “Night” and “Helas!”) are original, and one is a translation of a Greek epigram (Theaetetus). Bristow has written an article reproducing the poems and setting them in the context of RA’s career at that time. Her article, that I found extremely well done, is scheduled to appear in the January 2006 issue of English Literature in Transition. If you are unable to obtain a copy of this article, titled “Brief Encounter: Richard Aldington and the Englishwoman” in ELT, e-mail Bristow at gem.Bristow@ntlworld.com
Bristow has also established a RA “fanlisting”: a directory of people all over the world who are interested in RA. You can find it and add your name to it at http://www.helical-library.net/byronic
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