Vol. 35, No. 4 Winter 2007-08
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, website editor, and list manager:
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* * * * * * * * * *
Correspondent Michael Copp writes: “For NCLS members like myself who participated in the Imagism Conference held in Brunnenburg Castle, Dorf Tirol, Italy, on 2-4 July this year, a brief piece by Perdita Schaffner, describing her visit to the castle in 1962, is particularly interesting. It is entitled ‘Merano, 1962,’ and is to be found in Paideuma. Vol. 4, Nos. 6 & 7, Fall & Winter 1975, pp. 513-518. She describes the difficulties of the journey there, the approach to the castle, being met by Mary de Rachewilz, meeting her husband, Boris, her children, Walter and Patrizia, Dorothy Pound, and Ezra, who was not in good health.”
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Bibliographer Shelley Cox is back at the Southern Illinois University Morris Library working on a temporary basis doing cataloguing.
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NCLS member W.C. Pratt reports on the Imagist Conference at Brunnenburg in July as follows: “It was held at Mary de Rachewiltz’s castle at Dorf Tirol in the Dolomites on July 2, 2007. The Conference Director was H.R. Stoneback who organized the program. Mary, Ezra Pound’s daughter, gave a brief introduction and then we had 6 short papers on Imagism by William Pratt, Ian McNiven, Emily Wallace, Michael Copp, Daniel Kempton, and Marie-Brunette Spire. H.R. Stonebach and John Gery made concluding statements to end the conference, which lasted about two hours, from 10:00 a.m. till noon. There were about 25 in the audience, all devotees of Imagism. Ian McNiven, who is an editor at New Directions, spoke on “Aldington, Pound, H.D., and Imagism” and Michael Copp talked about F.S. Flint as “The Fourth Imagist.” There was general agreement that Imagism was still a potent force in world letters, particularly as a spur to young poets in writer’s workshops. The conference was a spin-off from the 22nd Ezra Pound International Conference in Venice, from June 26-29, with 75 papers in four days on the island of San Servolo in the Venetian lagoon. The next Pound Conference will be held in Rome in 2009.”
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On Tuesday, October 2, Shelley Cox gave a reading at the Banned Books Week celebration held in the Barnes and Noble bookstore in Carbondale, Illinois, one of four readings held from October 1-3. Cox read from Death of a Hero, the censored passage about George Winterburne’s lack of knowledge about women’s sexuality, and the passage near the end about the description of the battlefield right before the hero’s suicide, with the rotting bodies and skeletal parts, as evidence of what was NOT censored. Cox also passed around the censored text, a 1930 Chatto & Windus Phoenix edition, and the picture of RA that she found in another copy of Death of a Hero that she bought on e-Bay in 2003.
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As announced on the H.D. list, an e-newsletter for those interested in H.D.’s work and life will be edited by Maria Stadter Fox and produced by Heather Hernandez on the joint RA and H.D. website, imagists.org. For complete details see http://www.imagists.org/hd/hdsweb If you would like to receive e-mail when the issues are published, send your e-mail address to Heather Hernandez at hh@imagists.org
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The Marianne Moore Society and the H.D. International Society invite papers to be delivered at a joint panel at the American Literature Association Conference in San Francisco, May 22-25, 2008.
Marianne Moore and H.D. met at Bryn Mawr and later reconnected when Moore submitted poetry to the journal The Egoist, for which H.D. was acting as an editor. That connection grew into a significant literary friendship that lasted well beyond the Second World War. This panel seeks papers that present new readings of the biographical and/or textual connections between these two modernist writers.
Please send abstracts of 250-500 words for the ALA panel by January 18 to Robin Schulze (rgs3@psu.edu), Annette Debo (adebo@wcu.edu), and Laura Vetter (lvetter@uncc.edu); no attachments please.
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Don’t forget to put your name on the RA Listserv that was discussed on page one (last item) in the Autumn Newsletter. Also if you have some information that you want to get to our members quickly, rather than wait for the next number of the NCLSN to come out, post it on the RA Listserv. Your note will also reach me, since I am on the Listserv, and I can include it in the next Newsletter.
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Correspondent Michael Copp noted in the Christmas issue of “Postscript,” a mail order firm selling quality books at reduced prices, the following: Caroline Zilboorg’s Richard Aldington and H.D.: Their Lives in Letters at £6.99, Their website is www.psbooks.co.uk
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Copp also calls attention to Wyndham Lewis’s essay “’Detachment’ and the Fictionist” (The English Review, Parts I and II, LIX, October 1934, 441-52; Parts II and IV, November 1934, 564-73) in which he wrote about RA: “When you take up a book of fiction and have a read—I do not mean a Vicki Baum or Edgar Wallace, but say a book of Aldington’s (The Colonel’s Daughter or Death of a Hero) . . .You are proposing to yourself a certain type of enjoyment. . .” Compare any novel with the film that is subsequently made of it. . .The book is at least twice as romantic as its cinematographic double. All Men Are Enemies or Farewell to Arms may be cited as illustrations.”
Copp writes: “I have not seen the 1934 film version Wyndham refers to—has anyone seen it? It does not seem to have been a great artistic or commercial success. Halliwell’s Film Guide, 8th edition, 1991, dismisses it as follows: ‘Tedious romantic drama which failed to make a Hollywood star of its British lead” (Hugh Williams). It was directed by George Fitzmaurice, with a script by Samuel Hoffenstein and Lenore Coffee.”
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Associate Editor David Wilkinson on a recent trip to Venice, Italy, visited Carlo Goldoni’s birthplace. RA translated Goldoni’s The Good-Humoured Ladies. A Comedy for publication in London in 1922. In a letter to Alison Palmer dated 8 February 1962 he writes that he was sending a copy of the book to New York, adding “if by chance it is reissued I must go over it carefully.” (It was not reissued. See p.318 in Richard Aldington: An Autobiography in Letters.)
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Lisa Gilby of Rosica Colin writes: “We are pleased to advise that we have now concluded a retrospective authorization/and agreement for a reissue of Meshcheryakov Publishing Houses’s Russian language edition of Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero in Nora Gol’s Russian language translation.”
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Catherine Eisner calls our attention to a novel by Christopher Sykes, Answer to Question 33, in which she believes there is a satirical reference to RA: see pages 54-60. Sykes wrote the “Introduction” to RA’s Lawrence of Arabia, seven years after RA’s death and fourteen years after the first edition.
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The Penguin Book of First World War Stories, mentioned in the Summer number of the NCLSN, is now in print. It is edited by Barbara Korte, who writes an excellent “Introduction,”and Ann-MarieEinhaus, who is currently working on a PhD project investigating the canonization of First World War short stories in Britian. There is a short biographical sketch of RA and the other authors, maps of the Western Front, and footnotes to the various stories that include RA’s “Victory.” This is the most recent publication of any of RA’s writings. In her “Introduction” Korte notes: “Of the ‘classic’ representatives of the war’s literature, only Richard Aldington had a volume of stories still in print in the 1990s, and only because the Imperial War Museum decided to republish Roads to Glory (1930) in 1992.”
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NCLS members Jeremy and Anne Powell recently issued Palladour Books’ Catalogue Number 43, Autumn 2007, “Literature and Poetry of the First World War.” The catalogue begins with a summary of the Battles of Ypres and a short biography of the life of Captain Bruce Bairnsfather, a cartoonist some of whose works are offered. Among the 150 items listed are two by RA: “A Fool i’ the Forest: A Phantasmagoria” and The Colonel’s Daughter: A Novel. The catalogue also offers works by two writers besides RA who are included in The Penguin Book of First World War Stories (see above): John Buchan and Robert Graves.
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In the weekly series “Writers on Writers” in the Guardian (10 November 2007), William Carlos William writes about H.D. in his Autobiography (1951): “She asked me if, when I started to write, I had to have my desk neat and everything in its place, if I had to prepare paraphernalia, or if I just sat down and wrote. I said that I like to have things neat. Ha, ha! She said that when she wrote it was a great help, she thought and practiced it, if taking some ink on her pen, she’d splash it on her clothes to give her the feeling of freedom and indifference toward the mere means of writing.”
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We remind all of our members again that we depend on them for a large part of the news that makes up the four pages of the NCLSN quarterly. Our Correspondents do their best, but we need your help. Remember to send any news items on RA as well as other Imagist poets (including, of course H.D.), and their period.
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Correspondent Michael Copp contributes the following good news: “In the recently published anthology of First World War poetry, The Winter of the World, edited by Dominic Hibberd and John Onions (Constable), RA and his circle of colleagues and friends are quite well represented, among the familiar canonical poets and some unfamiliar ones, RA has three poems, ‘Concert,’ ‘The Last Salute,’ and ‘Trench Idyll.’ The others include F.S. Flint (1), John Gould Fletcher (1), T.E. Hulme (1), Harold Monro (3), Ezra Pound (1), Ford Madox Hueffner (Ford) (1), Frederic Manning (3), and Herbert Read (2). After so many instances of recent anthologies with no RA poems, this is a welcome publication.”
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NCLS member Gemma Bristow writes to say that her PhD thesis, “The Making of Imagism,” has been deposited in Cambridge Library. It’s an historiographical study of the development and appropriation of the “Imagist” label. The first half is about the presentation of Imagism in the 1910s (with chapters on Poetry, The Egoist, The Little Review and the Imagist anthologies), and the second half is about Imagism’s treatment in secondary literary histories (with chapters on Hulme, Pound and H.D.).
Bristow will be giving a paper at De Monfort University, Leicester, UK, as part of a conference devoted to homoerotic fanfiction (“slash”) and related texts. Her paper is called “Saffic” as modernist fantasy: Richard Aldington’s Myrrhine and Konallis.” (“Saffic” is a fanfiction term for stories with a female/female pairing, derived from “fanfic” + “Saffic”.) The conference will be on 25 June 2008.
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In a letter to his wife Sylva [sic], dated 18 January 1933, Edmund Blunden referred to RA as “our piebald contemporary Richard Aldington: now an excellent author now a dervish.”
Blunden wrote the following reviews of books by RA:
1. Collected Poems, in the Nation and Athenaeum, 20 July 1929 (359-540).
2. Death of a Hero, in the Times Literary Supplement, 19 September 1929 (713).
3. Roads to Glory, in the Times Literary Supplement, 11 September 1930 (714).
4. A Wreath for San Gemignano, in the Bookman Annual, Christmas 1946 (43-45).
5. Great French Romances in the Times Literary Supplement, 11 May 1946 (223).
6. Poetry of the English Speaking World, in the Bookman Annual, Christmas 1947 (30-32).
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Correspondent Stephen Steele writes, “I am attaching a few long quotes from two letters Aldington sent to Ernest W. Tedlock, the Lawrence scholar. The letters are from the E.W. Tedlock papers, the University of New Mexico. The general context is Aldington enlisting Tedlock’s help to locate an American publisher for “Pinorman” and Tedlock asking for contributions to a Lawrence Fund. The initial letter in the correspondence dates from 1947, Aldington having been asked by the University of New Mexico Press to provide a reader’s report of Tedlock’s study of the Lawrence manuscripts. The correspondence concludes in February 1957 with a letter addressed to Aldington from the University of New Mexico Press asking him to submit an outline of “Pinorman” to judge its suitability for publication.”
“Extracted from the letter dated 30th December 1956: You may have seen my book ‘Pinorman’ which gives a personal account of Douglas and Orioli, and goes very thoroughly into the Magnus-Douglas affair in justification of DHL. It has not been published in the USA—the commercial publishers don’t understand it, New Directions says proudly they ‘don’t print personal narratives’ and the only chance seems a university press. But which? The book is largely first-hand and part of the DHL saga, and it seems absurd to deny it publication when rather dreary second-hand ‘analyses’ are brought out in the US and England. […] This is really my nunc dimittis so far as DHL is concerned, although I have some introductions to the new Penguin set in press.”
“Extracted from letter dated 30th January 1957:
Douglas’s English ‘friends’ raised a howl about [‘Pinorman’], and wrote abusive reviews and letters. My book completely deranged their project of making N.D. a grand old man, largely at the expense of Lawrence. They all imagined themselves gentlemen and far superior to such lower-class creatures as D.H.L, and myself. But they never really knew either Douglas or Orioli, who were on their best behavior with such people, while they were themselves with DHL, Frieda and me. […]
I fear I have no Lawrence script I could give to the [DHL] fund. I did have quite a number, which he accidentally left with me after he occupied the rooms belonging to H.D. and me at Mecklenburg Square. They included the first version of Women in Love written in those five-cent school ‘exercise books’ he used. I gave them back to him in the fall of 1926 when he and Frieda came to stay with me in Berkshire, England. Very characteristically he remarked that he should not have expected such honesty! Frieda often talked about giving me some of his scripts whenever I did something for his memory, but I always evaded it, as I felt she might someday need to sell them.”
“In a postscript to the same letter:
Pino did not write anything against Frieda, but he talked plenty, and he and N.D. tried hard to put me against her. I never told Frieda this, for she and DHL were very fond of Pino, and it would have hurt her deeply. You must remember he was quite subservient to Douglas’s unscrupulous will.”
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Correspondent Shelley Cox contributes the following: “The play, “Dangerous Liaisons,” by Choderlos de Laclos, translated by Christopher Hampton, will re-open in New York after the new year’s holiday. This play, which originally opened in the West End of London with Alan Rickman as Valmont, moved to Broadway in the 80s and was an enormous success, which led to the 1988 movie starring John Malkovich [born and raised in Benton, IL, an SIU reference.] RA, of course, did a famous and very popular translation of the original Les Liaisons Dangereuses, originally published in 1924 and much reprinted. Although never acknowledged, Hampton’s witty dialogue seems to own far more to RA’s fluid and idiomatic translation than to most of the scholarly editions. Sadly, no Wikipedia reference to the book, play or movie mentions RA as translator.”
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The latest in the series, “Writers on writers,” in the Guardian of 8 December 2007 is
Ezra Pound on Henry James A Draft of XXX cantos (1930)
And the great domed head, Grave incessu, drinking the tone well-formed fingers
Con gli occhi onesti tardi of things, Lift no latch or bent bronze, no
Moves before me, phantom with And the old voice lifts itself Empire handle
Weighted motion, weaving an endless sentence […] Twists for the knocker’s fall; no
But the suntanned, gracious and voice to answer.
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