Vol. 35, No. 1 Spring 2007
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 Adrian Barlow has a new appointment as Director of Public Programmes at the Institute of Continuing Education, Cambridge University. He is also editing further books in the series “Cambridge Contexts in Literature” to which Correspondent Caroline Zilboorg has contributed two volumes (American Prose and Poetry in the Twentieth Century and Women’s Writing Past and Present). C.P.U. has also commissioned Barlow to write a book on teaching literature in context—provisional title, World and Time.
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NCLS member Alan Byford’s last name was misspelled in the second item on p.4 NCLSN.34.4.
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Associate Editor David Wilkinson recently visited Malthouse Cottage, RA’s home for a number of years. Wilkinson reports that “Padworth is now being surrounded by new housing developments. . . . All in all I believe that practically all the changes that have taken place in Padworth since RA left have occurred in the last ten years.”
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Correspondent Michel Copp writes: “I have just compared the two editions of The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. In the 1979 edition, edited by Jon Silkin, we find the following RA poems: ‘Field Manoeuvres,’ ‘In the Trenches,’ ‘Trench Idyll,’ and ‘Resentment.’ The 2006 edition, edited by George Walter, includes ‘In the Trenches,’ ‘Bombardment,’ ‘Soliloquy ll’ and ‘Reserve.’ With so many anthologies ignoring RA, it’s good to see him well represented in this latest one.”
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The second item in NCLSN.34.3 tells of an interesting RA typescript offered for sale by the Sanctuary Bookshop. David Wilkinson has been in touch with this bookseller and will report further details later.
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There are three references to RA in Philip Bagguley’s Harlequin in Whitehall: A Life of Humbert Wolfe Poet and Civil Servant 1885-1940. London: Nyala Publishing, 1997.
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NCLS member Helen Bowman writes to say that she found an essay on RA and Lawrence Durrell in Paddy Leigh Fermor’s Words of Mercury. The essay is rather critical of RA but towards the end says “…and one suddenly likes him.”
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A footnote to a letter H.D. wrote to RA in October of 1948 reads in part: “Cravens killed herself on 1 June 1912; H.D. and Aldington learned of her suicide when they arrived for tea at her Right Bank apartment on 2 June and were informed by the maid what had happened.” (Richard Aldington & H.D.: The later years in letters, by Caroline Zilboorg , p.134, footnote 3). Correspondent Zilboorg writes that her second son works at 44 Boulevard des Champs Elysées at the intersection of Rue du Colisées, the street where Margaret Cravens lived, and promises that when she next visits her son she will “definitely stroll once more down this very posh street,” and perhaps write us a note about her impressions during this and her previous visit, three years ago, to take photos for NCLS member Robert Spoo of the buildings where Cravens once had apartments.
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NCLS member H.R. Stonebach recently sent out the following e-mail notice: “This is a preliminary announcement of the program to be held at Brunnenburg Castle in Italy this summer, a few days after the International Ezra Pound Conference in Venice. It is a one-day, two-event program that will take place on July 3rd (exact times to be specified). Participants should plan to arrive by the evening of July 2. You may want to stay at Hotel Mair am Ort, Dorf Tirol (near Merano)—see Pound Conference website. The program will be hosted by Mary de Rachewiltz and the program coordinator is H.R. Stonebach. The two events are:
1) ‘A CONVERSATION ABOUT IMAGISM’ (invited participants include Catherine Aldington, John Gery, Valerie Hemingway, William Pratt, Mary de Rachewiltz, Marie-Brunette Spire, Emily Wallace, Rosanna Warren et al. Moderator H.R. Stonebach).
2) ‘POETRY READING: FOR EZRA POUND AND MARY DE RACHEWILTZ’—Reading of Poems by speakers listed above and other invited poets. (Poems will be published in chapbook/anthology to commemorate the event.)”
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We regret having to note the death of NCLS member Barbara Clark who was the daughter of RA’s good friend Carl Fallas. See p.4 for further details.
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Robert Hart, who with his wife, NCLS member Marilyn Gates Hart, accompanied me to France for the RA Centennial Celebration held in Montpellier in 1992, calls our attention to a number of references to RA in Noel Riley Fitch’s Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation. “Joyce had been, as Sylvia humorously remarks, ‘discovered by Ezra Pound, a great showman and leader of a gang that hung around the Egoist [in London] and included such suspicious characters as Richard Aldington, H.D., T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and others almost as bad.’” (p.58). “Joyce sent proofs and copies to Frank Budgen, Robert McAlmon, Harriet Weaver (often through Ezra Pound), Claud Sykes, and Eliot (who with Aldington was writing a review).” (p.106). “ With Bryher . . . Aldington, Macpherson, and their various friends, Perdita grew up in a confusing environment without playmates.”(p.266). “ The English poet Richard Aldington (H.D.’s former husband) made many visits to Paris after 1927.” (p.266) “Aldington, who had not been in Paris since 1913, was surprised at the changes … .(p.266). There are numerous references to H.D. and most of the other celebrities who frequented Paris in the 1920s and 1930s.
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Dr. Philip Tew, Professor of English at Brunel University is now the new joint managing editor of Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary & Cultural Studies. In an e-mail to the H.D Society he extended an invitation to a sixth biennial conference at Brunel University in July 2007. He also indicated that they are interested in academic submissions for the journal. Check their website http://www.symbiosisonline.org.uk for details about the conference and submissions for the journal.
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The NCLSN, 34.3.1 included a notice that Paul Skinner, who will edit Vol. 6 of International Ford Madox Ford Studies, was particularly interested in a paper on RA and FMF. For additional details see the website http://www.rialto.com/fordmadoxford_society/otherevents.html
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We are indebted for this and the two following items to member Archie Henderson:
More on a letter mentioned in NCLSN (Vol.31, No. 2): The Sir Shane Leslie Papers at the Georgetown University Libraries contain, in Box 1, Folder 5, an ALS to RA signed A.M. [Alan Moore], dated 2/17/49. Excerpts are quoted at http://gulib.lausun.geotgetown.edu/dept/speccoll/fl/fl63%7d1.htm “Dear Sir: I have read with interest your amusing Four English Portraits. I venture to write as the son of (Charles) Waterton’s young friend (Sir) Norman Moore, 1847-1922. . . .When Waterton died his son Edmund offered my father the first folio Shakespeare which had been acquired ... because a Waterton is mentioned in Richard II.”
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Phil Stephenson-Payne’s web site mentions RA was among the contributors to Greenwich Village (absorbed by Bruno’s Weekly) in 1915. The editor was Guido Bruno. The magazine was issued semi-monthly. See http://www.philsp.com/data/data144.html
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The papers of Harold Beken Thomas (Cambridge University Library: Royal Commonwealth Society Library, Papers of H.B. Thomas, RCMS 150) contain, in RCMS 150/2/3/3, “The Child Is Father of the Man” (1966), an article on Dover College, including remarks on Richard Aldington and Sir Frederick Ashton.
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NCLS member and Correspondent Shelley Cox accepted, on a part-time basis, a position in the Cataloging Department of the Morris Library. Before her retirement, she had been with Special Collections (home of the RA Collection) for many years.
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Correspondent Mike Copp found the following interesting RA reference in the chapter “Cultural Codes and Languages of Mourning” in Jay Winter’s Sites of Memory Sites of Mourning (1995): “A similar anger is active in Richard Aldington’s poems, but its echoes are almost all Old Testament in character. Here his work was symptomatic of a broader sensibility at work among English soldier-poets. The accusation that the young had died while the old stood back was commonplace during and after the war. Aldington voiced it in ‘The blood of the young men,’ where he presents soldiers
Crying for our brothers, the men we fought with,
Crying out, mourning them, alone with our dead ones;
who point an accusing finger at the ‘old men’ who ‘will grow stronger and healthier’ feasting on the ‘Blood of the young, dear flesh of the young men.’
The image of human sacrifice is unmistakably that of ‘Akedah,’ the legend of Abraham and Isaac.”
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Robert Hart (see above p.2) when reading Paris: A Literary Companion (New York, 1988) by Ian Littlewood noted the following reference to RA. In discussing the area of Paris around the gibbet of Montfaucon in the fifteenth century Littlewood refers to a poem by François Villon saying “Richard Aldington’s translation of the poem is less well known than Swinburne’s, but it catches something of the spirit of these two verses”. Both of the verses in RA’s translation that Littleton refers to are quoted in full; the first one beginning with the line “Brothers among men who after us shall live,” and the second one with the line “The rain doth weaken all our strength and lave”.
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Correspondent Michel Copp writes: “I have just bought a second-hand copy of E.L. Black’s anthology, 1914-18 in Poetry. It was first published in 1970, and my copy is the sixth impression in 1980. It was aimed at the senior classes in British secondary schools and at students in colleges of education. RA is represented by one poem, ‘Bombardment.’ This textbook would have been read by generations of students in the 70s, 80s, and, probably, the 90s.” Can any of our British NCLS members tell us if it is still in use?
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Correspondent Stephen Steele felt that the following letter would interest NCLS members: Irene Rathbone to Douglas Goldring (letter dated Nov. 7, 1954): “Richard. You can imagine Nancy’s fulminations about his book [Pinorman]! ‘Swine! Traitor! Traducer of the dead! Ought to be a libel action against him!’ And so on. The roof came off. The divine Norman written about in this way! Well, Douglas, I liked the book. If R. felt as he did about Norman, why shouldn’t he say so? He hands him many bouquets, but he is not going to present him as a saint. Of course if you think that no biography of a dead man should be anything but laudatory throughout, you have a right to be disgusted (or at least put off) by R.’s book. I’m uncertain myself of the ethics of the biography business. Anyhow, R.’s effort is extremely vivid, far ‘better’ than Nancy’s [Grand Man] in all ways except the ethical – if one includes that standard among other standards. And, too, when he is not talking about Norman, but about his dear friend Prentice, what affection, what warmth R. shows! It isn’t that he is capable merely of denigration. And just as Nancy’s press rather overpraised her book, Richard’s press very much underpraised his – to my mind. The critics saw & seized this opportunity to jump on him; he had been too successful for too long.” (Special Collections, University of Victoria; cited with the kind permission of Pat Utechin)
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The Guardian for 17 February, in the weekly series, “Writers on Writers,” included the following extract, accompanied by a photograph of Ezra Pound:
HD on Ezra Pound
I found Ezra waiting for me on the pavement outside the house, off Oxford Circus, where I had a room. His appearance was . . . unexpected, unpredictable. He began, “I as your nearest male relation,” and hailed a taxi. He pushed me in. He banged with his stick, pounding (Pounding) . . . “You are not going with them” [a friend and her husband, who were going to the Continent].
. . . Awkwardly, at Victoria Station, I explained . . . that I wasn’t coming. Awkwardly the husband handed me back the cheque that I had made out for my ticket. Glowering and savage, Ezra waited till the train pulled out.
End to Torment (1979)
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For its June seminar, “The Writer’s Reputation,” the Durrell School of Corfu would find particularly welcome studies of Oscar Wilde, Djuna Barnes, Lawrence Durrell, Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, David Gascoyne, and Doris Lessing. For additional information e-mail http://www.durrell-school-corfu.org/cfp2007_wr.htm
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NCLS member Dmitry Urnov and his wife Julia Palievsky have retired from teaching and moved to Berkeley, California, to be near their son.
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See http://how2calls.blogspot.com/ for a call for papers/creative work on “women and eco-poetics.”
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In Janet Flanner’s Paris Journal, Volume II 1965-1971, edited by William Shawn (Atheneum, New York, 1971), pp. 338-339, Flanner, quoting from Nancy Cunard’s These Were the Hours, retells the story of the publication of Samuel Beckett’s “Whoroscope,” which was written in response to an offer by Cunard and RA of “£10 for the best poem up to 100 lines, in English or American, on Time (for or against). Entries up to June 15, 1930.”
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Mrs. Barbara Clark died in Basingstoke in October 2006. Mrs. Clark was the daughter of RA’s close friends, Carl and Florence Fallas. Carl and Flo’ were among the coterie of close friends to exile themselves in North Devon to await their conscript call to arms in the spring of 1916. When their time came Aldington and Fallas joined up and went on their first tour of duty together. In recent years Mrs. Clark was in correspondence with RA’s biographer, Mike Doyle. It is hoped that the NCLS will be able to keep in touch with Mrs. Clark’s daughter, Mrs. Stella Garden.
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Our Associate Editor, David Wilkinson, is moving house again. Future space demands that he may have to let go of his Richard Aldington collection that he is in the process of cataloguing. In view of the proximity of Aldington’s Berkshire home during the 1920s, Wilkinson has always hoped that his archive might end up at the University of Reading. Sadly he cannot afford to donate this significant resource, and the University has informed him that they cannot raise funds for the suggested price. Any suggestions on an exit strategy from this dilemma would be warmly appreciated. See out masthead for contact details.
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David also writes to say that he came across the undated sheet music for “After Two Years” with words by RA and music by Peter Warlock. David Googled “after two years warlock” to see whether he could discover the date. As a result he found an Amazon site on which he could play the track recorded by Vaughn Williams. “RA’s poem comes home!”
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