Richard Aldington

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NEW CANTERBURY LITERARY SOCIETY NEWS

(The Richard Aldington Newsletter)
Vol. 34, No. 1                  Spring 2006

NEW CANTERBURY LITERARY SOCIETY NEWS

(The Richard Aldington Newsletter)

Editor: Norman T. Gates
520 Woodland Avenue
Haddonfield, NJ 08033-2626, USA
E-mail: ntgates@worldnet.att.net
Associate Editor: David Wilkinson
The Old Post Office Garage
Chapel Street, St. Ives
Cornwall TR26 2LR U.K.
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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                        Recent members of the NCLS may be interested in its origin.  The quotation below is from the NCLSN, Vol. I, No. 1, dated August 1, 1973:  “The primary purpose for the revival of Richard Aldington’s C.L.S. is to make it easier for the dissemination of Aldington news to all of you.  Heretofore, I have been trying to keep in touch with everyone by letters in which I passed along the latest news as I received it.

                        The publication (euphemism for Xeroxing at the local library) schedule of The NCLSN, therefore, will be determined by the length of time that passes before I can fill a typewritten page with news received from you.

                        The membership of the New C.L.S. has been arbitrarily decided upon by your editor: our newsletter is being sent to anyone that I know of who has been or is now interested in Richard Aldington.  It will be added to on request or at the suggestion of any present New C.L.S. member.  Select carefully: the membership of the original Canterbury Literary Society was somewhat exclusive: D.H. Lawrence, Frieda Lawrence, A.S. Frere, Thomas McGreevy, Norman Douglas, Pino Orioli, and, of course, Richard Aldington.  To start there are ten of us: the number of copies Frere printed of  Movietones… which Aldington wrote and dedicated to the C.L.S. in 1932.”

                        Of the original ten, only Ruth Galloway and your editor remain among the current members.

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                        Associated Editor David Wilkinson writes: “I received a surprise package this morning from Toby English, an Oxfordshire bookseller that I have known for several years.  Inside I found the following, all from the library of our late NCLS member, George Sims:

A.     George’s copies of the NCLSN; all neatly folded.

B.     Typescript copy of “Richard Aldington and His Postscript,” an article by Miriam Benkovitz [An original member of the NCLS.]  11pp. An autograph note graces the top of p.1, as follows: ‘Dear George, This is the article.  It may have typing errors; if so, please ignore and read on.  Love, / Miriam.’

C.     A photocopy of item B.

D.      “Richard Aldington: Catalogue Number 16” from Palladour Books.  Summer 1992.

E.      The Aylesford Review: A Literary Quarterly.  Autumn 1963.  Features “Richard Aldington: A Note on Lawrence Durrell.”

F   “The Henry Williamson Catalogue.”  [Undated – code-word “Spica”]

      G.  Two Cities: La Review Bilingue de Paris.  15 Avril 1959.  Features “Richard Aldington: A Note on       

            Lawrence Durrell.”                  

H.     “Richard Aldington 1892-1962: A Catalogue of the Collection of Frank D. Harrington, Esq. [deceased               

member of the NCLS] Special Collections Department, Temple University libraries.  1973.”

      I.    “Nine for Reeves: Letters from Richard Aldington” by Miriam Benkovitz.  “Reprinted from The Bulletin

      of the York Public Library.  Volume 69. June 1965. Number 6.”

Wilkinson adds: “Toby’s accompanying note reads: ‘I bought some bits off George Sims’ widow & son.  Would you like these?  Please throw away if not wanted.’”

If any NCLS member would like any of these items (with the exception of the last one listed which Wilkinson wishes to keep) e-mail books@book-gallery.co.uk

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                        NCLS member Max Saunders was the co-signer of an e-mail “call for papers” for a conference on “Ford Madox Ford: the Visual Arts and Other Media” to be held in Genova, Italy, in September 2007.  For further details write Prof. Max Saunders, Department of English, King’s College London, The Strand, London WC2R 2LS, or e-mail him at max.saunders@kcl.ac.uk

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                        Vincent Gogibu, 202 bvd Voltaire, 75011 Paris (vincent-gogibu@wanadoo.fr) is working on the Correspondence Générale de Remy de Gourmont, and has assembled nearly 650 letters so far.  He writes to ask whether we know of any letter, especially to RA, held in libraries or private hands outside of France.

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                        NCLS members may find some data on RA at website http://www.a2a.org.uk/default.asp  Go to the home page, click on “Search” and type “Richard Aldington.”

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                        A friend of NCLS member Marilyn Gates Hart wrote to her: “I just ‘plucked’ a book off the shelf to read and it is Those Remarkable Cunards” (1968) by Daphne Fielding.  I am reading a chapter about Nancy Cunard and the Hours Press she founded.  She printed ‘Hark the Herald’ by Richard Aldington and ‘The Eaten Heart’ in 1928 and 1929 and then ‘Last Straws’ in 1931.”

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                        NCLS member Rod Allison writes: “Last week I paid a short visit to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and took the opportunity to browse through some of its excellent second-hand book stores.  In Schooner Books I came across a copy of Richard Aldington’s book on T.E. Lawrence in mint condition at 10 Canadian Dollars—I thought this very cheap compared with what I paid for it in England in 2004.”

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                        Correspondent Caroline Zilboorg sent a copy of the review, in The Week for 3 November 2005, of Max Egremont’s new biography of Siegfried Sassoon which concludes:  “Egremont is particularly good at showing that rebellion did not come naturally to such a naturally gentle soul: it was ‘forced upon him by the horror of the trenches.’”    Zilboorg suggests that: “Unlike Sassoon, Aldington was a natural rebel.”

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                        Michael Copp reports: “I came across six references to RA in the following: Charles Hobday, A Golden Ring: English Poets in Florence from 1373 to the present day, Peter Owen, 1997.  Most of them are in two chapters dedicated to D.H. Lawrence.”

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                        NCLS member John Morris found the following in Graham Greene’s commonplace book for 1937-39, While Waiting for a War, after an entry for November 30, 1938, about Herbert Read: “The loves of the Patmores.  The red-haired, amusing, rather bitchy mother of Derek Patmore was formerly Richard Aldington’s mistress and now her daughter has followed her.”

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                        In his Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography (1992) Ian Hamilton writes disapprovingly of RA’s contributions as a biographer.  “Lytton Strachey is now routinely credited with having altered the rules of English biography … [he] made the genre more candid, more novelistic, more scurrilous … Strachey spawn[ed] a battalion of small Stracheys in the 1920s, not all of whom we can be grateful for.  Names like Andre Maurois and Richard Aldington spring unappealingly to mind.”

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                        NCLS member Michel Pharand will be Professor of English in the Faculty of Letters at Kobe University beginning in April.  The appointment is for a three-year period.

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                      The International Lawrence Durrell Conference will be held June 25-29 at the University of Victoria.  RA and Durrell were good friends: see Literary Lifelines, an edition of their correspondence edited by former NCLS member Harry T. Moore and present NCLS member Ian MacNiven.

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                        NCLS member Maryanne Crawford, co-editor of “INDEX to the NCLSN: Volumes 1 – 30,” writes “I still edit the SHAW and think about the Lowell Thomas biography.”  The biography was a work-in-progress of Maryanne’s husband, former NCLS member Fred Crawford  (who also edited the SHAW), at the time of his death.

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                        A check of Poetry’s website at poetrymagazine.com lists the titles of the three poems of RA that were published in the magazine’s first year (1912) and twenty more between 1914 and 1934.

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                        English Literature in Translation 1890-1920, Vol. 49, No. 1, 2006, includes, as its lead article, NCLS member Gemma Bristow’s “Brief Encounter: Richard Aldington and the Englishwoman.”

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                        NCLS Correspondent Mike Copp has discovered the following RA short story that I was never aware of, and of which I can find no mention in back issues of the Newsletter.  In B.C. Bloomfield’s An Author Index to Selected ‘Little Magazines’ 1939-1939, London: Mansell, 1976, Copp found a reference to a short story by RA, with the title “Female Thinking Extrovert.”  It appeared in The Programme, “to me, a hither to unknown publication,” Copp writes, which was the Journal of the Oxford English Club, and was published in Oxford.  There were 23 issues, the first on 1 February 1935, and the last in November 1937.  Should anyone be interested in reading this story, Correspondent Copp has sent me a copy that I can e-mail.

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                        Virginia Nicholson (vn@court-house.co.uk) is writing a book about women left single after the First World War.  In connection with this she is interested in information about the relationship between RA and Irene Rathbone.  I have already referred her to NCLS member Caroline Zilboorg, whose essay, “Irene Rathbone: the Great War and Its Aftermath,” appeared in Patrick Quinn’s Re-charting the Thirties, but, if any of our members have suggestions that might be useful to Nicholson, please e-mail her.

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                        NCLS member Paul Hernandez sends the following: “RA’s letters to Henry Williamson, held by SIU, are discussed in a short article by H.R. Woudhuysen on p. 27 of the July 8, 2005 issue of the Times Literary Supplement.  In one letter, RA questions Williamson’s claim that when T.E. Lawrence had his fatal motorcycle accident he was urgently responding to the suggestion that he should meet Hitler.  RA asks, ‘What possible result of a practical nature could come from the meeting between a Megalomaniac dictator of Achzigmillionenvolk and an ex-Aircraftman with thirty bob a week and a melodramatic past?’”

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                         Bibliographer Shelley Cox found RA’s The Decameron (1949) offered on e-Bay at an estimated $80-$120.  She feels the high price for the book without dust jacket and not in prime condition may be due to the Rockwell Kent illustrations.

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                        As of April, NCLS member Michel Pharand will be Professor of English in the Faculty of Letters at Kobe University, Kobe, Japan.  One of his four literature courses will be “Poets of the Great War” where RA will be one of the dozen or so central figures discussed.

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                        Shelley Cox noticed an interesting book offered for sale on e-Bay: 1887 edition of Ingoldsly Legends published by Richard Bentley.  “22 stories of ghosts and legends.  When he [the author, Reverend Richard Harris Barham A.K.A. Thomas Ingoldsby] was a vicar, his church at Snargate was used by smugglers, called the Aldington Gang.  They used his church to hide their loot.”

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                        NCLS member Simon Hewett recently purchased a copy of RA’s All Men Are Enemies that included a letter addressed to Mr. Halsted B. Vander Pool of Oyster Bay Long Island.  The letter is postmarked 5 –9, 33, Le Lavandou, and is in response to a question about the background of Tony Clarendon, the novel’s main character.  RA wrote in part as follows:

“I should say that Tony is certainly not an intellectual.  He was intended to represent the average best of the English upper middle class – by which we mean people of good family who are not titled.  His education came as much from the family and friends like Scrope as from school and college.  [….] I don’t think that you would now find many families like the Clarendons in England.  The older people were financially ruined by the War in which many of their sons were killed   [….]”

                        Also pasted in is a newspaper review of All Men Are Enemies by Louis Kronenberger, who was, as Hewett notes, “distinctly not an admirer of the book”  Kronenberger writes: “…another of those books which are getting more and more common today; an intelligent, educated novelist’s outpouring of miscellaneous information, ideas and sentiments in a pretentious desire to invent man’s salvation in a mixed-up world.”

            Despite Kronenberger’s opinion, the previous owner has noted: “I have always loved this book.”

If you would like a copy of member Hewett’s letter giving RA’s letter in full, we will forward it to you.

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                        NCLS member Gemma Bristow’s article, “Brief Encounter: Richard Aldington and the Englishwoman” was published in the current number of English Literature in Translation 1880-1920, Vol. 49, No. 1, pp. 3-13.  There is a photograph of the Englishwoman on the front cover.  Bristow has offered to share her draft copy via e-mail with anyone who doesn’t have access to ELT.  Her e-mail address is gem.Bristow@ntlworld.com

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                        Ms. Randy L. Bixby, Manuscripts Curator/Archivist SIU Carbondale, writes about Special Collections where RA materials are held.  The reading room, office, and rare books are now located at 1835 University Press Drive, on the southwest side of campus.  The manuscript and photograph collections are stored in another building which is not equipped to serve researchers, so Ms. Bixby asks that researchers intending to use these collections on-site notify her office at least 24 hours prior to the researcher’s intended arrival date to insure that materials can be transferred from storage.  Internet access to Special Collections can be found on the main Morris Library web page http://www.lib.siu.edu/  “Other Library Materials” links to the Special Collections Research Center web page, which provides general information about the Manuscript Collection, Photographs, and Rare Books.  Special Collection’s e-mail address is speccoll@lib.siu.edu and their telephone number is (618) 453-2516.  Ms. Bixby’s e-mail address is rbixby@lib.siu.edu; her telephone number is (618) 453-1449.  The Morris Library renovation is expected to take at least three years; meanwhile, the staff of Special Collections is ready and willing to assist researchers in person, by mail, e-mail, FAX, or telephone.  NCLS member Shelley Cox adds that the storage building where the reading room is located is on the far edge of the university, not within walking distance of the rest of the campus.  The Saluki Express bus runs throughout the town and campus and stops hourly near the Reading Room building.  Parking is available for those patrons who come with cars.  Food isn’t allowed in the Reading Room area, and there are no restaurants nearby, so patrons without cars may want to plan ahead if they anticipate lengthy research sessions.

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                        NCLS Correspondent Michael Copp noted some RA references in the recently published British Poetry in the Age of Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2005) by Peter Howarth.

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                        In his article, “Ezra Pound’s Poetic Anthologies and the Architecture of Reading” (PMLA, Vol. 121, No. 1, January 2006, pp. 170-185) John G. Nichols makes a number of references to RA.  On p. 177, for instance, he writes: “Des Imagistes initiates its argument for a new poetry with its first poem, Richard Aldington’s “Choricus,” which boldly announces a break with the past in its opening line, ‘The ancient songs/Pass deathward mournfully’ (7).”

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                        Our Website Editor, Paul Hernandez, has received a request for the name of a poem by RA about St. Ives.  If any of you can recall such a poem, e-mail Hernandez at paul@imagists.org

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                        Michael Copp’s Richard Aldington: The Selected Poems can be purchased by NCLS members from Cecil Woolf, 1 Mornington Place, London NW1 7RP @ $10. or £6. packing and postage free—checks only.