Vol. 37, No. 1 Spring 2009
Editor: Norman T. Gates
520 Woodland Avenue
Haddonfield, NJ 08033-2626, USA
E-mail: ntgates@worldnet.att.netAssociate Editor: David Wilkinson
2B Bedford Road, St. Ives
Cornwall TR26 1SP 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, Stephen Steele, Archie Henderson, Caroline Zilboorg
Correspondent and Bibliographer: Shelley Cox.
Biographer: Charles Doyle* * * * * * * * * *
Correspondent Michael Copp found that one of RA’s more inconsequential poems, “Vates, The Social Reformer,” which first appeared in the tailpiece, “Documents,” to Des Imagistes, was used by Frank MacShane as an epigraph to the chapter “Poet and Novelist” on page 93 in his The Life and Work of Ford Madox Ford (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965).
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In the NCLSN, 36.4.1, Correspondent Copp called attention to a volume of English poetry translated into Finnish and published by Otava Publishing Co., Ltd. Having received a copy of this book, Copp has listed for us the 27 Imagist poems it included: RA; “Epigrams,” (“New Love,” “October”), “Evening,” “The River”; H.D.; “Oread,” “Lethe,” “Helen”; Pound: “Alba,” “Pan is Dead,” “In a Station of the Metro”; Flint; “Swan,” “Eau-Forte”; T.E. Hulme; “Autumn,” “Above the Dock.” Other poets with poems in the Imagist section were: D.H. Lawrence (2), Amy Lowell (2), John Gould Fletcher (2), Allen Upward (4), Skipwith Cannell (1), and William Carlos Williams (2). Copp managed to translate this information with the aid of a Finnish-English dictionary, but wonders whether any of our members knows Finnish and would be able to evaluate for us the translations of these Imagist poems?
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The impressive and ever-expanding series of booklets, The War Poets, published by Cecil Woolf Publishers, and edited by NCLS member Jean Moorcroft Wilson, has now reached a total of twenty-four titles. Among the most recent ones are: Frederic Manning: Soldier-Aesthete, by Correspondent Michael Copp, Rupert Brooke: Myth and Reality, by NCLS member Alan Byford, and Leslie Coulson: a Singer Once, by NCLS member Vivien Whelpton.
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Correspondent Stephen Steele gives us in Checklist style information on a new RA letter. He also quotes some interesting passages from the letter.
Roditi, Edouard 1910-1992; poet and translator, close to surrealism)
1 – 20/7/46 – tls; c/o Royal Bank of Canada, Montego Bay, UCLA.
Here is an excerpt from the letter in which a wanderer’s voice may be heard wandering back to Paris:
“Europe does indeed sound lamentable, but, as you will see from this address, we have found that America and above all Hollywood could not be endured any longer. Indeed, we are thinking of moving to Paris if we can find transport and if a friend’s studio is available, as we hope.
Paris I hear from several friends is slowly improving though, doubtless, it will never again be the Paris of the 20s and 30s. But then I am old enough to have lost a still more amiable Paris, that of 1910-13, so that – profiting from earlier misfortunes – I may not feel so poignantly the present déchéance.”
And here an old soldier’s voice may be heard:
“Your descriptions of Germany are vivid and poignant, but really I cannot feel any sympathy for Germans. Whatever the faults of our people they did not want war either in 1914 or 1939; and the Germans simply insisted on it. I don’t want them punished, but I do hope that they are militarily occupied as long as I live. They can be gemülich to each other, and leave us to whatever of European civilization they haven’t destroyed.”
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Correspondent Michael Copp sends the following excerpt from Scrapbooks: An American History,
(Yale U.P.), by Jessica Helfand:
"[…] The American imagist poet Hilda Doolittle (known as H.D.) was perhaps […] inspired by experimenting with her own self-image in the pages of her album. She kept a scrapbook that merged her interest in ancient Greece with a kind of deliberate musicality, quite possibly derived from the imagist principles that informed many of her early poetic pursuits. Her book also embodies a kind of willful incongruity, with pages that are at turns symbolic and surreal. There are nudes; a snake; photographs of buildings and ruins; a roulette wheel. Many pages include collaged items—often photos of H.D. herself cut out and superimposed onto landscapes and friezes—and there is at least one page of silhouetted images intermingled with Greek statuary. H.D.’s life and career were likely more mercurial than the pages in this scrapbook would attest, but there remains something fascinating about the experimental nature of these pages. Shifting scale, flexible space, and a kind of willful approach to depth of field make her collages oddly disturbing, reserved—even bleak. Sitting flatly on black oversized pages, they nevertheless possess a kind of poetic charm, sequenced without captions and thereby revealing little of autobiographical information about the poet herself. Because this book is undated, it is difficult to place it precisely within the chronology of H.D.’s work, but the enduring attention to formal rhythm suggests that is likely to have been produced earlier rather than later, when her outspoken views on feminism, her association with Freud, and her eccentric lifestyle (she shared a Bauhaus home with her companion and daughter, as well as numerous cats and monkeys) are likely to have led to more radical page compositions—and expositions of self.
"Throughout the book, too, there are indeed hints of other preoccupations—some sexual, others political—that would surface over the years in H.D.’s work. (One page simply shows a naked Doolittle gazing up at a silhouetted clipping of a Greek ruin.) It is also interesting to note the degree to which this scrapbook, belonging to a writer, in fact contains a scarcity of words. In this view, the abstract placement of disparate images allows the scrapbook page to become its own kind of experimental canvas; image driven, playfully cryptic, and open to multiple interpretations."* * * * * * * * * *
The Guardian and The Observer have been running a seven-part supplement, “1000 Novels Everyone Must Read.” In volume 7, “War & Travel”, they include RA’s Death of a Hero.
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The H.D. International Society is planning its annual panel for the American Literature Association Conference to be held in Boston May 21-24. E-mail Laura Vetter at L.Vetter@uncc.edu for further details.
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Correspondent Caroline Zilboorg is working on a new edition of H.D.’s Bid Me to Live for which she has a July 1 deadline. She also returned to Cambridge for a week in early February to teach for the University’s continuing education division, where NCLS member Adrian Barlow is head of English.
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Cambridge University Press published Adrian Barlow’s book, World and Time: Teaching Literature in Context, in January. The book includes two extended discussions of RA’s poetry.
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Because of incorrect information on our membership lists, some of our members may not have received some recent numbers of the Newsletter. If this has happened in your case, please do not hesitate to ask for back numbers. Also remember that all recent editions of our Newsletter can be read or printed at the Internet website http://Imagists.org/
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As of July 1, 2009, NCLS member Patrick Quinn will become Dean of Wilkinson College of Humanities & Social Science, Chapman University, Orange, California.
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The VI International Richard Aldington Society Conference—also known as the II International Imagism Conference—will be held June 20-22, 2010, at Brunnenburg Castle (home of Mary de Rachewiltz, poet, Pound scholar, translator, and daughter of Ezra Pound) in Dorf Tirol, Italy. This early preliminary announcement arrives to allow ample time for potential conferees to plan, mark calendars, and avoid conflicts. The Call for papers invites proposals related to the conference theme—“Imagism and Ezra Pound: Richard Aldington, H.D., Ernest Hemingway, Elizabeth Madox Roberts & Others.” (Topics should address the connections of one or more writers—not limited to those writers named in this conference rubric—to the matter of Imagism and Pound.)
Primarily under VI International Aldington Conference sponsorship, this conference also has the affiliated sponsorship of The Nick Adams Society and the Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society. (Limited travel awards for graduate students participating in this conference may be available. Please inquire when you submit your conference proposal.)
We will begin considering conference proposals on September 1, 2009 (although earlier proposals are welcome). The final deadline for all proposals will be January 15, 2010.
(N.B. Since many prospective attendees will be at the 14 International Hemingway Conference in nearby Switzerland, please note that the dates of the Hemingway conference—June 25 to July 3—do not present a conflict and allow for unhurried progress from one conference to the other.)
We look forward to seeing you in the glorious mountains of northern Italy, in one of the most extraordinary conference venues in the world—Brunnenburg Castle—in June 2010!
H.R. Stoneback
For the Aldington Society
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Yahoo search results on the Internet lists 441,000 entries for “Richard Aldington,” many of which, however, are of no use to a researcher, but simply record a reference to his name.
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Cassandra Laity’s H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siecle (Cambridge University Press, 1996) just came out in paperback. It joins the two other CUP books on H.D. that are also available in paperback: Eileen Gregory’s H.D. and Hellenism and Diana Collecut’s H.D. and Sapphic Modernism.
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Correspondent Stephen Steele writes that Boston University, in addition to the letters to Alex Waugh and Osbert Sitwell listed in the Checklist, has nineteen letters to Somerset Maugham in the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center.
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Correspondent Archie Henderson found the following for us: Donald Gallup, T.S. Eliot & Ezra Pound: Collaborators in Letters (New Haven, Henry W Wenning/C.A. Stonehill, Inc., 1970), mentions RA on pp. 8, 21, 22, and 30. On p.21, Gallup writes, “Richard Aldington reported from London to Pound in Paris that ‘Eliot was going to pieces and for gawd’s sake could . . .[he] do something, anything.’ Pound, with characteristic energy, threw himself into renewed, frantic efforts to get his scheme going to subsidize Eliot and thus enable him to give up his job at the bank. May Sinclair, Aldington and Natalie Barney agreed to help.”
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An excerpt of a letter from RA to Leonard Woolf, 4 Mar. 1926, is quoted by George Spater and Ian Parsons, A Marriage of True Minds: An Intimate Portrait of Leonard and Virginia Woolf (New York and London, Harcourt Brace Janovich [1977]), p. 114.
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Correspondent Caroline Zilboorg is “hard at work” editing H.D.’s Bid Me to Live, which she hopes she has finished in time to speak about it and HD at the 2010 RA Conference in Italy mentioned above. She has nearly completed both notes to the novel itself and the prefatory note on the text. This edition will be based on the 1960 Grove edition, which HD herself, with the help of Norman Holmes Pearson at Yale, prepared for publication. Zilboorg writes: “I have not yet written very much of the substantial introduction that I am projecting; that work lies ahead of me, but I am thinking about it a lot and have a number of ideas I want to develop. There will also, of course, be a key to the characters, glossing the important figures in this roman à clef. I am intending to include photos of all central ‘players’—H.D., Aldington, DH Lawrence, Frieda, Arabella Yorke, Cecil Gray, John Cournos. I wish I could find a good photo of Cournos c. 1917 and a good one of Cecil Gray and Dorothy Yorke, too. If any NCLS readers can help me to find something I’ve not already seen, I’d welcome email suggestions.” (You can reach Caroline at: caroline.zilboorg@orange.fr)
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Correspondent Shelley Cox writes that a new movie has opened in independent theaters, “La Belle Personne.” It is based on the 1678 novel of Madame de Lafayette, La Princesse de Cleves, which RA collected in Great French Romances (London & NY, 1946). Although he did not do the translation, his choice of this book for re-publication brought it, and the other works, to the attention of the general public again, rather than being translation exercises for French students. The movie is a modern interpretation, and the review in the N.Y. Times (March 6, 2009) says it is not a fully integrated interpretation of the original novel.”
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The Morris Library at Southern Illinois University, where a fine collection of the works RA is housed in Special Collections, will be reopened on April 17 after major construction. The reopening celebration will include a lecture by Nicholas Basbanes, well-known scholar in the rare book field.
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Associate Editor David Wilkinson has read somewhere that RA’s mother, May Aldingtin, knew—or was acquainted with—Baroness Orczy. Can anyone help pin down this connection. See our masthead for contact details or email: books@book-gallery.co.uk
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Correspondent Cox also informs us that The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Vol. 1, 1929-1940 (CUP, 2009) has finally been published. The compilers, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, have been working on this edition for at least ten years, and were frequent guests in Special Collections over these years. There are many Samuel Beckett letters in the collections at Morris Library, but quite a few were from the Aldington papers, as well as the Joyce collections and other Irish writers of the early 20th century. Cox expects that RA will be well represented as a recipient of many letters written during Beckett’s early career, which, of course, began with Whoroscope, RA’s and Nancy Cunard’s choice of best poem submitted in 1928. Cox has ordered a copy of this new Beckett collection and will be paging through it for RA references.
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Here are some additional listings of RA material that Correspondent Archie Henderson has found.
There is a large section on “Imagism” in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vol. 74, ed. Jennifer Gariepy (Detroit, New York, Toronto, Gale [1998]), pp.259-454.
Newspaper reprints of RA poems: “The Last Salute” was reprinted from the Anglo French Review, I.4 (May 1919) in the New York Tribune, June 13, 1920, p. A1. “The Poplar” appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, Apr. 28, 1922, p. 17. “Life Goes On” was published in The Observer, May 27, 1934, p. 18.
RA letters to the editor of newspapers: “’Rousseau and De Ligne’”[printed under the heading “To the Editor”], The Observer, Jan. 15, 1928, p. 6; “Disclaimer by Mr. Aldington” [printed under the heading, Letters to The Times”], New York Times, May 28, 1940, p. 21; “Dryden and Sitwell” [printed under the heading “Letters to the Editor”] New York Times Book Review, Dec. 14, 1941, p. 18; and “Pater’s Style” [printed under the heading “Books of the Week”], The Irish Times, Oct. 9, 1948, p.6.
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As you know, the NCLSN depends on its Correspondents and other members for the items that fill its pages every three months. While our Correspondents, as you can see, have been active contributors, we do not get the amount of information about RA, his friends, fellow writers, activities, writings, etc., from our membership that we hope for. Please do take the opportunity, at least a few times each year, to e-mail us information (including comments on your own activities) that you feel will be of interest to your fellow NCLS members. In this way we will be creating a lasting source of information for all writers and scholars interested in RA, his times and work.
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