Vol. 34, No. 3 Autumn 2006
Editor: Norman T. Gates
520 Woodland Avenue
Haddonfield, NJ 08033-2626, USA
E-mail: ntgates@worldnet.att.netAssociate 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* * * * * * * * * *
NCLS member Susan Schreibman responded to the note in our last Newsletter (Vol.34.2.1) about scholarship on RA’s writings by calling our attention to an article published in The New Yorker for June 19, 2006, entitled “The Injustice Collector: Is James Joyce’s grandson suppressing scholarship,” by D.T. Max. You may also read this article on the Internet at http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/
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Karl Orend advises that Michael Haag is doing a new biography of Lawrence Durrell. If any of our members has information, etc., they can contact Haag at 81 Belsize Lane, London NW3.
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Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal is seeking essays relating to Henry Miller and his circle, especially Anais Nin, Lawrence Durrell, Michael Fraenkle, Alfred Perles, etc They would welcome an essay on the relationship between Miller, Durrell and Aldington as well as other topics. Maximum length 6000 words in MLA format. No fee paid. Deadline end of March of each year for publication the following January. Send submissions and inquiries to Dr. James Decker, 915 Crestview Drive, Sherrard, Il 61281.
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The Ford Society is putting together a volume on Ford’s literary contacts, and would like very much to include something on Aldington. Volume 6 of The International Ford Madox Ford Studies, to be edited by Paul Skinner, will be a varied volume, making room for both biographical contacts and literary “influences” (understood as including figures influencing Ford, and those influenced by him). But the editor would especially like to include a piece on Ford and Aldington, so please contact him if you would like to offer one: paul@pgskinner.wanadoo.co.uk
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Palladour Books Catalogue Number 41, Summer 2006, is titled “To Commemorate the Ninetieth Anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, 1st July, 1916 – 19th November, 1916.” The Catalogue is introduced by extracts from the Introduction to NCLS member Anne Powell’s The Fierce Light: The Battle of the Somme July-November 1916, Palladour Books, 1996. To be republished by Sutton Publishing in October 2006.
None of RA’s works is listed, but books by present or former NCLS members Hugh Cecil, Fred D. Crawford, and Anne Powell are included in this Catalogue.
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Les Editions du Clown lyrique viennent de publier Le Désarroi, roman inédit de Remy de Gourmont, avec une postface de Nicolas Malais. Tous les details sur: http://www.clownlyrique.com
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NCLS member Archie Henderson found an article on Gourmont that discusses (and attacks) RA briefly: “Jennifer Birkett, the author of ‘Chapter 14. Fetishizing Writing: The Politics of Fictional Form in the Work of Remy de Gourmont and Joséphin Péladan,’ pp. [268]-88 in Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence, edited by Liz Constable, Dennis Denisoff, and Matthew Potolsky (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), writes (pp. 278-79) that ‘Gourmont is not just the idealist he is usually labeled. In English-speaking countries particularly, we owe that interpretation of his work to its enthusiastic dissemination by Richard Aldington, the novelist, poet, and critic who worked with Ezra Pound on the New Freewoman (later the Egoist) and helped place there translations from Gourmont’s novel Les Chevaux de Diomède (New Freewoman, September-December 1913; Egoist January-March 1914). Aldington’s own stylistic and political partialities (and, be it said, the middling nature of his own talents) colored his perceptions of the nature and importance of Gourmont’s work. His selections of extracts from Gourmont’s work, still to be found on the shelves of libraries and secondhand bookshops, give minimal space to the French writer’s investigation of questions of language and style. It concentrates rather on presenting the dreamer, the individualist, the leftist, advocate of liberties and denouncer of herds and mediocrities, the Nietzschean man of passion and the great writer of the erotic.’”
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Congratulations to NCLS Correspondent Michael Copp whose book, The Fourth Imagist: Selected Poems of F.S. Flint has been accepted for publication by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (Associated University Presses). No publication date as yet, but probably it will be Winter 2006-2007.
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Correspondent Copp writes: “The IV Richard Aldington Conference at Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer was once again a most successful and enjoyable event. It was good to meet up with many familiar faces, as well as to get to know the new contributors. On this occasion there were some innovatory features. The first occurred in Catha’s garden during the reception on the first evening. H.R. ‘Stoney’ Stoneback had invited a number of people to write a poem to be included in a booklet that was presented to Catha. Contributors who were present then read their poem. Secondly, there were two new venues for the papers. The first was the Mas de la Cure. The second was the Clos de la Barque. To get to this latter we went by boat some distance up the Petit Rhone. After the morning’s papers we had a delightful paella picnic before returning to Saintes-Maries by boat once more. Thanks and congratulations for organizing the Conference so well go to Stoney, Daniel Kempton, and Eric Forbeaux.”
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Paris Press announces the publication of two books by Bryher: The Heart to Artemis: A Writer’s Memoirs and The Player’s Boy: A Novel. E-mail janfreeman@parispress.org for further information.
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Professor H.R. Stoneback sends us the following announcement: “At the fourth International Aldington conference in les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer (July 6-8, 2006), the Aldington Society surprised Catherine Aldington with a volume of poems dedicated to her: A GARLAND OF POEMS FOR CATHERINE ALDINGTON. This limited edition volume has an ‘Imagist’ motif, with poems by the daughters of two of the original Imagists—Catherine Aldington and Mary de Rachewiltz (daughter of Ezra Pound) as well as poems by NCLS members Michael Copp, Dan Kempton, H.R. Stoneback, and Caroline Zilboorg. Other contributors include Valerie Hemingway, Donald Junkins, Ian MacNiven et al. A few remaining copies of this limited edition are available to NCLS members for $11 (single copy, or 2 for $20). Send orders (with check payable to H.R. Stoneback, 28 Maple Avenue, Highland, NY 12528. Also available while they last: copies of the first two volumes of Aldington Conference proceedings—NEW PLACES ($15) and WRITERS IN PROVENCE ($10). Other inquiries re: these volumes may be sent to Dan Kempton <kemptond@newplatz.edu>”
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The Ford Society’s 2006 volume, Ford Madox Ford and Englishness, edited by the late Dennis Brown and NCLS member Jenny Plastow, will be sent to subscribers at the end of August. For further information see: http://www.rialto.com/fordmadoxford_society/
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Correspondent Michael Copp writes: “In Andrew Thacker’s Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester University Press, 2003) there is, in chapter 3, ‘Imagist Travels,’ an interesting discussion of Imagist poems that treat the experience of mass urban transport. Apart from RA’s ‘In the Tube,’ Thacker examines Flint’s ‘Tube,’ Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’ and ‘Dans un Omnibus de Londres,’ and John Gould Fletcher’s ‘London Excursion’.”
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Correspondent Copp also contributed the following: “While in Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer for the IV IRAS Conference in July, I bought a copy of RA’s Dream in the Luxembourg, that is, the little volume that also gives Catha’s French Translation and Marcel Audema’s Provençal translation. I found it fascinating to work through the Provençal, constantly referring to the English and French. This sent me back to re-acquaint myself with Edgell Rickword’s 1930 review in the Sunday Referee, parts of which read as follows:
There are a few bigots of the old school left, of course, who would anathematize Aldington because he renounces any formal scheme; . . . the theme of the poem, as I read it, is the pathos of man under the law, ‘the wearisome condition of humanity,’ that he may have no hold on the moments that he has known himself most surely and purely alive; not merely that he may not keep them, but that he may even have to wonder if they ever happened. . . . and though I admire the clean, direct phrasing of Aldington’s poem, I think that in discarding artifice he is unnecessarily detracting from the vividness of his revivification. But a poem which reflects such sensitiveness, which in construction is so well-balanced, cannot fail to be moving, and its refusal of all adventitious effect, is a challenge to true appreciation.”
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Catherine Aldington, writing of the last IRAS Conference, notes the presence of Caroline Zilboorg, Penelope Durrell, and Valerie Hemingway. She also says that she was presented with a book of poems by the Conference members including some by Ezra Pound’s daughter, by RA, and by Catherine herself. “I was very moved by this as you may imagine.”
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Correspondent Michael Copp contributes this personal anecdote:
One of my day activities is working as a professional guide in Cambridge. On Thursday 27 July I was taking a group of Dutch, German, Spanish, Canadian, and American tourists around. A young American told me she was from Texas. She asked had I ever been there. I told her that two years ago I spent some time in Austin doing literary research into the papers of two English writers, Richard Aldington and F.S. Flint. At the mention of RA’s name her eyes lit up –“Wasn’t he the husband of H.D.?” she asked. Normally whenever I mention the names of RA and FSF to anyone outside the rather limited circle of those with a professional interest in early 20th century literature I am met with a blank, uncomprehending stare. But here was a young American woman, neither a teacher nor student of English Literature, who had heard of RA and HD!* * * * * * * * * *
Website editor Paul Hernandez says that he has just started keeping statistics on the RA website. In August the site had 198 unique visitors. Four of these were returning visitors and 194 were first timers. A few of those looked at more than one page for a total of 215 page loads.
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Rowolt sent Catherine Aldington a copy of a new edition of RA’s D.H. Lawrence that includes additional photographs that she had never seen before: Aldous Huxley, Katherine Mansfield, John Ruskin.
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On September 15 Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, B.C., Canada, presented a dramatized lecture about H.D. prepared and performed by Professor Sasha Colby and members of the SFU English Department.
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Shelley Cox writes: “For those who would like to read about one of RA’s most vehement foes see The Meinertzhagen Mystery: The Life and Legend of a Colossal Fraud which is coming out in October.” The publisher writes: “ The astonishing life of an extraordinary liar.” For complete information, see Amazon.com.
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Shelley also noticed that poems by RA that appeared in the Illustrated London News of June 4, 1932, are being offered on e-Bay, although without a guarantee by the seller that all of the articles are complete.
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According to the online index of the Times Literary Supplement, the first book review published by Richard Aldington was : “The Poetry of M. Andre Spire,” a review of Spire’s Le Secret (Novelle Revue Française, 1919) which appeared in the May 15, 1919, issue of TLS, p. 261.
Until the online index of TLS was released around 2000, the book reviewers were not identified in published reviews, from the beginning of publication until the 1960s. Part of the work done to prepare this index involved searching the Times’ records to see who had written these early reviews. This has been a great deal of help to bibliographers such as Shelley Cox since RA wrote a great deal for the TLS.
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Penguin Classics are planning to issue a volume of short stories in early 2008 that will be edited by Barbara Korte and Ann-Marie Einhaus of Universität Frieburg; Professor Korte will also write the introduction. The editors hope to include some of RA’s stories and at this writing are seeking to arrange permissions. Further news about this will be included in our Winter number.
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NCLS member Gemma Bristow has completed her doctoral thesis on the history of Imagism.
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Members Caroline Zilboorg and Andrew Frayn are submitting a proposal for a joint edition of RA’s Death of a Hero and H.D.’s Bid me to Live (A Madrigal).
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Correspondent Shelley Cox writes: “Although Michael Copp noted in NLSN, 34.1, that RA was mentioned several times in Peter Howarth’s British Poetry in the Age of Modernism (CUP, 2005), a closer examination shows that Howarth uses RA to build his argument about the development of British modernism. As Howarth postulates initially, RA is to be included with the ‘Georgians’ stylistically, largely because his early work was published by the Poetry Bookshop. Howarth seems to borrow this distinction from Ezra Pound, who bemoans the shortage of ‘French Modernists,’ who ‘would be with us rather than with the Poetry Bookshop and the Georgian anthologies.’ [P. 6, from EP to John Quinn, 1918]. Yet Howarth uses RA’s definition: ‘Free verse is the opposite of rhetoric, for Aldington, because nothing would impede “some real observation, some accurate expression of emotion.”’ [P.33, from RA’s ‘Free Verse in England.’ 1914.] ‘Free verse permits the poet all his individuality because he creates his cadence instead of copying other people’s, therefore with precision, and all his style because style consists in concentration, and exactness which could only be obtained rarely in the old forms.’ [P. 30, ibid.] After using RA to determine what exactly free verse is, Howarth then goes on to ignore all poetry written by RA since 1920, and thus [considers him] not an important poet in the British modern canon. Once again, RA becomes the invisible man, whose theories can be borrowed but whose work does not meet the definition he helped to create.’
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Southern Illinois University purchased the RA letters to Henry Williamson two years ago, but they have not been released for use, because they have not been catalogued yet. Bibliographer (she has two titles) Shelley Cox is going to ask permission to write a brief note about them for the Winter Newsletter.
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Here is an excerpt from Margaret Atwood’s review, taken from The New York Review of Books electronic edition, of H.D.’s friend Bryher’s Visa for Avalon.
The novella-length fiction Visa for Avalon by the writer who called herself Bryher was
first published in 1965 and was reissued by the Paris Press in 2004, before the US
presidential election of that year. Since it is set in the future—a future in which violent
mass movements are causing uproar and a controlling government is restricting the freedom
of ordinary citizens—it was seen by both its publisher, Jan Freeman, and by its introducer,
Susan McCabe, as a book with a lot to say about the squeeze being put on liberal democracy
by such draconian measures as the Patriot Act in the United States, and by similar tendencies
elsewhere.
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