Vol. 36, No. 2 Summer 2008
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* * * * * * * * * *
Shelley Cox writes: “I’ve had a chance to look through A. David Moody’s Ezra Pound: A Portrait of the Man & His Work: Vol. 1 The Young Genius, 1885-1920 from the point of view of an Aldington scholar, and find it very thin pickings. Despite the fact that the entire study of Pound, which includes another volume from 1920 through Pound’s death, is going to be something like 800 pages plus notes, there is very little mention of those in Pound’s circle except as they might directly encounter the great master. RA is introduced as ‘a wide-eyed young poet newly on the scene.’ [p. 180] There is a footnote giving the barest info on RA. From then on he appears only as someone in Pound’s vortex of power, or who disturbs its flow, as when he takes over the editorship of the New Freewoman in 1913. RA is mentioned as one of the Imagists, but there is no indication of why he was chosen or what elements or individual poems Pound deemed ‘imagistic.’ Moody is ill-served by his indexer, and many mentions of other people in Pound’s circle are not covered in the index. [There is also the too frequent appearance of index citations where nothing actually appears on the cited page.] I would gather that Moody thinks his readers will have read other biographies of Pound and works describing the literary and cultural climate of the era, and will not need background. In addition, Moody seems to be as clueless as everybody else as to the reasons for Pound’s abrupt shifts in literary interests, and thus seems to be portraying him as the unique and unexplainable genius that Pound always projected to the world. Surely this man who denies influences must have had some?!”
“I was far more impressed by the review of the book in the April, 2008, Atlantic Monthly, by Christopher Hichens, which is well written, draws on sources other than Moody to make sense of Pound, and praises the book for its strengths. But as an RA scholar, the best part of the review was the reproduction of the wonderful photo of Pound, RA, Victor Platt, T. Sturge Moore, W.B. Yeats, Wilfred Scawen Blunt and Frank Flint, taken in January, 1914. This photo is well known to scholars of any of the authors in the photo, but rarely seen outside of the world of literary criticism. It’s an iconic photo of each man, and RA, heavily mustached, is strikingly intense and handsome. Even more delightful is the fact that Hichens, in the article below, feels that the only two men in the photo who need to be mentioned in addition to Pound are RA and Yeats, which puts RA into a very exclusive circle of talent and genius indeed.”
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Daphne Fielding in Those Remarkable Cunards, tells of Nancy’s private printing press where three of RA’s works were printed: Hark the Herald, The Eaten Heart, and Last Straws.
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Here is F.R. Leavis’s review of Death of a Hero in The Cambridge Review, Vol. LI, No. 1245, 25 October 1929, p. 61: “ ‘To me the excuse for the novel,’ writes Mr. Aldington in a prefatory letter, ‘is that one can do any damn thing one pleases.’ It is nevertheless difficult to think of an excuse for Death of a Hero. Most of the things that it has pleased Mr. Aldington to do are bad, whether the book is judged as a work of art or as a personal document, a self-purgation (if, indeed, the judgements are separable). ‘The whole world is blood-guilty, cursed like Orestes, and mad, and destroying itself, as if pursued by a legion of Eumenides. Somehow we must atone, somehow we must free ourselves from the curse—the blood-guiltiness ... That is why I am writing the Life of George Winterbourne, a unit, one human body murdered, but to me a symbol. It is an atonement, a desperate attempt to wipe off the blood-guiltiness.’ That is the pretension. It is not altogether surprising that a scholar’s offer at self-expression should be excessively literary and derivative, that we should so often find ourselves considering Mr Aldington’s tributes to Samuel butler and Mr Aldous Huxley rather than his own reactions to life. We are not more than amused when we come across a patch of H.G. Wells: ‘Then, when Priscilla somehow drifted away, there was another, much slighter, more commonplace affair with a girl named Maisie. She was a slightly coarse, dark type, a little older than George and much more developed. They used to meet after dark in the steep lanes of Martin’s Point, and kiss each other. George was a little scared by the way she gobbled his mouth and pressed herself against him. . . .’; or of D.H. Lawrence: ‘George made no answer. He just went hard and obstinate, and obeyed with sullen, hate-obstinate inside ... He just went hate obstinate, and obeyed with sullen, hate-obstinate docility. He didn’t disobey, but he didn’t really obey, not with anything inside him. He was just passive ...’
But the crudity of the attitudes and accents, mimicked or personal, is, in a critic of Mr Aldington’s distinction, surprising and shocking. The satire is of the cheapest Sitwellian quality: “Thank God, there can be no doubt about it – apart from pure literature of the Sheik brand and refining pictures in the revived Millais tradition, and English family can still be relied upon to present a united front against any of its members indulging in the obscene pursuits of literature or art. Such things may be left to the obscene Continent,’ etc. etc.
The only parts of the book which it is possible to read without embarrassment are the transcripts of war experience; these, indeed, are good. Elsewhere there are many kinds of crudity to make us wriggle: ‘As the bullying urbane Head reproved, did he know that the sullen, rather hard-faced boy in front of him was not listening, was silently reciting to himself the Ode to a Nightingale, as a kind of inner Declaration of Independence? ... ’
That kind of thing does not merely record adolescent attitudes; it is itself painfully adolescent. So are Mr Aldington’s audacities with naughty words and topics, and his asterisks: we are reminded of Mr Terence Gray’s cock-snooking at the Censor.
Death of a Hero will probably enjoy much favour among adolescent intellectuals.” [Correspondent Michael Copp found this article; considering the success of the novel, there must be a great many “adolescent intellectuals.”]
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Correspondent Archie Henderson sends us the following: “The online ‘Guide to the Ford Madox Ford Collection, [ca.1850]-1973’ at Cornell University Library http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/EAD/htmldocs/RMM04605.html describes the following RA related material: a letter from William Carlos Williams to Ford, Jun. 26, 1929 [Rutherford; My dear Mr. Ford: Richard Aldingtion has written asking me to urge upon you the importance . . .]; a photograph taken with Derek Patmore and another with Sir Osbert Sitwell; the last two chapters, less the first two typed pages (leaves 342-376) of an apparently complete manuscript of ‘The Saddest Soldier,’ in what looks to be RA’s hand, according to Thomas C. Mosher; a letter from Ford to Charles F.G. Masterman, Oct.10, 1914, in RA’s hand; a copy of part of a letter from F.S. Flint to RA, Mar. 7. 1917 (original at the University of Texas); and a check for 15 shillings from Violet Hunt to RA, July 16, 1914, with RA’s signature on Verso.”
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Correspondent Henderson also found this potentially useful information. Here is his writeup:
The “Calendar of Manuscript Material and Correspondence of Other Writers” in Wyndham Lewis: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscript Material in the Department of Rare Books, Cornell University Library, Compiled by Mary F. Daniels (Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Library, 1972), p. 128, online at http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/EAD/pdf_guides/RMM04612_pub.pdf mentions 23 letters from RA to Wyndham Lewis [n.d.]-1936. Also described in the catalogue are three letters from Lewis to RA: ALS [init.] to Richard Aldington [post World War I/prior to 1932] [n.p.] [My dear Aldington I am glad you thought the article would be useful] 1 leaf; AL [draft] to Richard Aldington April 24, 1934 [London] [My dear Aldington I feel I ought not to impose on your extreme generosity] 2 leaves [Rose no. 207]; and TL [frag.] to Richard Aldington September 3, 1935 London [My dear Aldington A brief note only today, to say I have received your letter] 1 leaf [Rose no. 222].
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A bilingual (English/Spanish) of H.D.’s Trilogy has been published by Random House/Mondadori Spain, ISBN 978-84-264-1655-1. For further information e-mail: Natilia.Carbajosa@REC.UPCT.ES
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Using Princeton University Library Finding Aids at http://diglib.princeton.edu/ead/index.html Correspondent Henderson found considerable RA material that is summarized as follows:
New Review Correspondence of Samuel Putnam, 1927-1933: 26 letters; 1 document
Dora Marsden Collection, 1907-1961 (bulk 1909-1914); RA Box 1 Folder 12
Ellen McCarter Doubleday Papers, circa 1930s-1978; RA, 1935-1944 Box 1 Folder 2
Raymond Mortimer Collection, 1905-1979 (bulk 1925-1970): RA, 3 TLsS, [19]26, (3 pp.) Box 1 Folder 5
Sylvia Beach Papers, 1887-1966 (bulk 1920s-1950s), RA Box 182, 1 formal portrait by Yevonde; 2
portraits, seated at table, 3 portraits, seated outside on a low brick wall all in Box 252 Folder 1
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Shelley Cox reports that the Special Collections Research Center presentation to the AEGIS Conference was held on Saturday, 4/5/08, at 11 AM. Randy Bixby, Curator of Manuscripts, discussed the acquisition of four of the manuscript collections, James Joyce, Richard Aldington, Kay Boyle and the Abbey Theater. She also had brought material from these collections to display in an exhibit case, and showed a number of other materials via computer on a screen during her talk. Although she mostly focused on the Joyce collections, because their back story is related to the southern Illinois area, she also discussed the Aldington collections—the major collection that SIU acquired from Catha Aldington in 1965, as well as more than 40 smaller collections of his manuscripts and letters, acquired since then. Most of these were gifts from his friends. Ms. Bixby was able to make the point of how to use multiple collections to trace chains of correspondence by using letters and documents exchanged by Aldington and his publisher who was, at the time of the Lawrence of Arabia biography, Collins of London. It is interesting to note that his advances, which seemed to be very small amounts of money by today’s standards, were divided into three equal portions, one of which he did not receive until the book was published. So he really did have to wait for the last payment, something that is very evident in his letters and biography of the time.
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Our Website editor, Paul Hernandez, reports that 2007 was the first full year for which he tracked
statistics. For that year the Aldington portion had, 3156 visitors—169 visited multiple times. You will also find a form with which to order copies of the proceedings of the IRAS biennial meetings in France.
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Michael Copp sends us these two extracts from Erik Svarny’s The Men of 1914: T.S. Eliot and Early Modernism (Open University Press, 1988):
1. It is hard to dispute Aldington’s verdict on Pound’s contributions to Blast, when he states in The Egoist [15 July, 1914, p. 273] that they “ are quite unworthy of their author,” and suggests that “this enormous arrogance and petulance and fierceness are a pose. And it is a wearisome pose.”
2. As [Herbert] Read states, “The group that rallied round [T.S. Eliot] was unique in that it never questioned his leadership—but there were two that held back: Richard Aldington, who had developed an intense jealousy of Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis, who, though pressed by Eliot to collaborate, preferred as always to cut his own aggressive swathe.”
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Member Simon Hewett noted a comment on RA by T.E. Lawrence in a letter from Lawrence to Ezra Pound dated August 20, 1920. Lawrence writes “…each day I read a new name of a contributor to The Dial: but surely there is no place for me in that galaxy? Of course, Joyce can write (and does, just occasionally): you can write (and do): T.S. Eliot…perhaps;...
…Where can I see The Dial because I’m broke to the world, and I can’t buy it: surely R Aldington and W.B. Yeats are no good? T.E.L..”
The letter was published in issue Number 4 of NINE (Summer 1950), which also contains translations by Roy Campbell and a review of Portrait of a Genius, But… by Gilbert Phelps.
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In 1928, Random House launched its imprint with a sumptuous edition of Voltaire’s Candide. Illustrated by Rockwell Kent, the edition was limited to 1505 copies signed by Kent, of which 95 copies were colored in Kent’s studio. The translation is by Aldington, and was first published in 1927. Although Aldington is not identified as the translator, the introductory note to the book does refer to Aldington as Voltaire’s “latest biographer”. Laid into NCLS member Simon Hewett’s copy is a clipped (but unsourced) review of the publication by Frederic Warde, the typographer, who was an associate of Crosby Gaige (publisher of Aldington’s Fifty Romance Lyric Poems), and who was himself the designer of the 1930 Covici Friede edition of Aldington’s A Dream in the Luxembourg. In concluding his review, Warde notes “The book lacks only the author’s signature,” omitting any reference to the lack of attribution of the translation! Kent subsequently illustrated the dust jacket and text of the 1932 Doubleday Doran edition of All Men Are Enemies, and the 1949 Garden City Press edition of Aldington’s translation of The Decameron.
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Correspondent Michael Copp writes that in The Guardian for Saturday 17 May, in the “Review” section, there is a full page article (p. 21) entitled “Home from Home.” The sub-heading reads: “Ezra Pound moved to London 100 years ago, filled with zeal to overthrow the old guard. James Campbell maps the poet’s movements across the city that provided his inspiration.” Campbell mentions H.D., F.S. Flint, Ford Madox Ford, William Carlos Williams, and D. H. Lawrence, but not RA.
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Associate Editor David Wilkinson writes: “Lytton Strachey’s reference to Aldington [NCLSN, Vol. 36, No. 1, Spring 2008] is particularly interesting. Strachey is presumably referring to Death of a Hero, written after RA left Padworth. Twelve months earlier and Strachey may have had second thoughts. Strachey and Dora Carrington lived at Tidmarsh Mill on the main A340 road between Theale and Pangbourne and no more than five or six miles from Padworth. As far as I have been able to discern, there was never any contact between these near neighbors.”
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The Aldington Archive of Associate Editor David Wilkinson now resides in Manhattan. Prompted by the first pilgrimage to Malthouse Cottage, Padworth, by our Editor, Norman Gates, almost exactly thirty years ago, Wilkinson promised to put together his conclusions on reading RA’s novel The Colonel’s Daughter. Fifty years after RA left Padworth, Wilkinson succeeded in tracking down someone from the household of almost every one of RA’s neighbours and recording their recollections. Six years later Wilkinson presented our editor with a draft 400-page typescript of his findings. In 1986 Wilkinson’s expanding archive formed the backbone of the exhibition that accompanied the RA Symposium at the University of Reading, and in 1992 selected items illustrated talks marking the centenary of RA’s birth at his despised Dover College. Wilkinson expanded his collection over the years, but his most recent move to a smaller house proved decisive. He was overwhelmed with Aldingtonia. NCLS member Simon Hewett heard of Wilkinson’s dilemma, flew to England, and drove to distant Cornwall. It was agreed over a lunch and a handshake that the Wilkinson Archive of around 2,000 items would sit well with Hewett’s collection. Earlier this year the collection was shipped to Manhattan. In the fullness of time Wilkinson intends to complete a catalogue of the collection. Anyone interested should get in touch with him.
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NCLS member Alan Byford writes of seeing RA’s name three times in his recent reading. In Memories of an Edwardian, Edgar Jepson, 1937, p. 211: “The Neo-Georgian group used to dine at a little restaurant, discovered by Ezra Pound, which boasted the worst cook and the worst cooked food in London, so that I have been careful to forget its name. Among the group were Mr. T.S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, Mr. and Mrs. Aldington, Violet Hunt, Ezra Pound ...” In The Lyttelton/Hart Letters, Vol. 3, 1986, p. 78, of T.E. Lawrence: “I don’t wonder that many of far less spirit than Aldington have been allergic to him.” In The Land Unknown, Kathleen Raine, 1975, p. 31: “The Imagism of the new American poets reached Cambridge in the early works of Eliot and Pound (also H.D., Richard Aldington and other forgotten names).”
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