Vol. 37, No. 2 Summer 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* * * * * * * * * *
Fortunately, your editors are able to send the Newsletter to most of our members by e-mail, which saves considerable time and expense. If you receive your copy by regular mail, but could receive it by e-mail, please send us your e-mail address to either of our e-mail addresses above. On the down side, sometimes members change their e-mail addresses and forget to notify us; if you have made a change recently, please let us know.
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In our last issue, Vol. 37, No. 1, on page 1, item four, line 3, please change “close to realism” to “close to surrealism”.
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Heather Hernandez calls our attention to an article in Guardian about a celebration she would like to join. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/25/hulme-modern-poetry-ezra-pound-imagists
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Correspondent Stephen Steele found an article that RA published in 1940:
In Volume 1, Number 1 of J. Kerker Quinn’s Journal Accent: A Quarterly of New Literature (Autumn 1940), Aldington is introduced as a “noted British poet and novelist, now liv[ing] in Connecticut. The Atlantic Monthly is serializing his life story, Farewell to Europe.” Aldington’s “Amateur Painters” appears in Accent (pp. 9-11) and begins with his typical understatement and overstatement “Now that two enormous explosions within a quarter of a century have destroyed the playground of Europe, I find myself thinking of it with a certain tenderness. Now that it is dead, it acquires the spurious charm of period pieces. And for some reason I can’t explain, that vanished age of play from Waterloo to Munich is at the moment symbolized by the amateur painters, two of whom, Hitler and Churchill, have attained a dangerous eminence in other fields.” (p.9)
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Correspondent Michel Copp’s Aldington, Imagists and Others: Letters to and from F.S. Flint has been accepted for publication by The Lutterworth Press, Cambridge. Contracts have been exchanged, with a possible date of publication in late 2009, or, more likely, early 2010.
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Website Editor Paul Hernandez notes that in 2008 the RA website imagists.org/aldington received 2,842 page loads, 2,455 unique visitors, and 189 returning visitors.
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Correspondent Michel Copp reports on his celebration of the birth of Imagism.
It is remarkable that one can pinpoint a particular date and place and assert with total confidence that modernist poetry began just then and there, but that is precisely what happened on 25 March 1909 when a group of poets that included T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, and Edward Storer gathered for dinner in the Tour Eiffel Restaurant in London. These Proto-Imagists, joined a month later by Ezra Pound, were responsible for giving the impetus to a new kind of poetry. Exactly 100 years later, on 25 March 2009, Richard Richardson (co-editor with William Pratt of Homage to Imagism, AMS Press, 1992) organized a celebratory dinner in honour of these men. It was held in the same building where the 1909 dinner was held, now called the Bam-Bou. A collection of writers, scholars, academics, curators, composers, etc. spent a stimulating and convivial evening. Several of us had been invited beforehand by Robert to make our own contributions, and during the course of the meal poems and letters were read, statements about early Imagism were made, and many toasts were drunk. Three large portrait photographs of Hulme, Flint, and Pound adorned the room. Earlier in the day Robert had guided some of the diners on an Imagist walk that included many of the sites and buildings associated with the above-mentioned poets and with other Imagist poets. Apart from Robert and myself those present included Sam and Belma Baskett, Rebecca Beasley, Susan Cory-Wright, Mark Haworth-Booth, W.S. (Sam) Milne, Judith Palmer, Joe Phelan, and Michelene Wandor. All who attended this unforgettable evening are deeply indebted to Robert.
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NCLS member Gemma Bristow contributes the following: Flight, an aviation magazine includes the following in its Personals column for 20 October 1921: “Vivian Arthur Watkins, late of Lord Strathcona’s Horse and R.F.C., was married on October 6, by special licence, to Jesse May, widow of A.E. Aldington, Solicitor, of Edgbaston.”
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NCLS member F-J. Temple’s recent book Beaucoup de jours (Actes Sud publishers) includes many references to Richard Aldington. Temple was co-editor with Alister Kershaw of Richard Aldington: An Intimate Portrait (Southern Illinois University Press, 1965).
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Correspondent Michel Copp writes “I have been rereading A Survey of Modernist Poetry by Laura Riding and Robert Graves. Their acerbic comments do not spare RA (see the 2002 Carcanet edition, pp, 106-107). They quote four brief poems, RA’s ‘October’ (‘Epigrams’), plus three others (‘Epitaph’ by William Carlos Williams, ‘Alba’ by Ezra Pound, and ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ by Wallace Stevens). They write:
‘Richard Aldington, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens are the so-called authors of these poems. These might pass as legitimate instances of correspondence and not be suspect as parasitical inter-imitativeness, were any of the poems themselves of separate poetic importance; were any of the poems, and many more like them, closely dependent on one another – were they private individuals, and not members of an institution; and were not the Imagist school, to which all these poets at one time or another belonged, a notoriously self-advertising institution. These things being so, we are provoked to ask questions that we need not ask in the case of legitimate instances of correspondence. Such as: who was the inventor of the style of the first two pieces, Mr Aldington or Mr Williams? Or yet H.D. or F.S. Flint? Is not Mr Williams at least suspect for his later obvious imitation of T.S. Eliot, e.e cummings, Edith Sitwell? Is not Mr Aldington suspect as the husband of H.D.?’
They carry on with some more rhetorical questions aimed at debunking all the poets named.”
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There are references to RA in Rod Rosenquist’s Modernism, The Market and the Institution of the New (Cambridge University Press, 2009), including a few quotations from RA’s essay, “The Poetry of T.S. Eliot” in his Literary Studies and Reviews.”
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Correspondent Shelley Cox reports that the Morris Library was officially opened on April 16, but that many of its books are still in storage. Special Collections, which is custodian of the fine Aldington collection, also does not have all of its books currently available. NCLS members who wish to consult books from this collection are advised to telephone or e-mail in advance to be sure of seeing what they want.
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NCLS member Anne Powell’s just published new book (her fourth), Women in the War Zone, includes May Sinclair among the fifty-one women whose wartime careers are discussed. RA is mentioned in the “Biographical Note” about Sinclair.
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Member Powell also writes that there are six pages on RA and Irene Rathbone in an excellent book published by Viking in 2007, Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War, by NCLS member Virginia Nicholson, granddaughter of Vanessa Bell.
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Correspondent Stephen Steele writes that Aldington is mentioned several times in François Buot’s biography Nancy Cunard (Paris:Pauvert-Fayard, 2008), with few surprises for the reader.
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NCLS member Andrew Frayn sends us the following two items that are, among other things, indicative of the continued interest in RA and his work.
“Further to Caroline Zilboorg’s notes in the last Newsletter on her edition of Bid Me to Live, I’m pleased to say that I am working on an edition of RA’s Death of a Hero for the same publisher. My dateline is also 1 July this year, and both DH and BML, are scheduled to appear in early 2011. The edition will include a critical introduction, unexpurgated text, RA’s ‘Notes on the War Novel’ article from the Sunday Referee (thanks to Cy for this idea), and a full table of the expurgations from both the UK and US first editions.”
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“Helen Carr’s new book, The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H.D. and the Imagists contains many references to Aldington as a key member of the Imagist group. It’s pleasing to see nearly three columns of references to RA in the index. Other oft-ignored figures such as Flint and Harold Monro are also given their due in the large (982 pages) volume, which brings together the story of the extended Imagist group.”
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Correspondent Stephen Steele contributes the following: “An Aldington letter, dated August 30, 1940, to a ‘Mr. Taupin,’ mentioned in NCLSN (28.4), is seemingly addressed to the critic René Taupin (Pound’s friend) who was trying with the help of Yvan Goll and Louis Zukofsky, in the summer of 1940, to establish a quarterly publication under the name of ‘La France en liberté.’ According to David Wilkinson’s NCLSN entry, Aldington’s letter discusses an ‘article’ he had prepared ‘about France.’ The article may have been intended for ‘La France en liberté,’ whose ‘prospectus’ listed Aldington as a member of the advisory board. See Barry Ahearn’s edition of The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams & Louis Zukofsky (Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2003), p. 273n. The magazine’s founders were divided on the question of limiting its pages to political or cultural content, and their differences put an end to ‘La France en liberté’ before it ever appeared.”
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Correspondent Archie Henderson notes that a letter from RA to Ezra Pound, 29 July 1920, is quoted in Rebecca Beasley, Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism ([Cambridge] Cambridge University Press [2007]), pp. 165-66.
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Associate Editor David Wilkinson contributes the following: “On Saturday 6th June, as part of the BBC’s Poetry Season (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/poetryseason), BBC2 broadcast ‘Arena: T.S. Eliot’. This was billed as an ‘. . . in depth look at the life of one of the 20th century’s most important literary figures. . . .In a television first, his widow, Valerie, with whom he spent the last years of his life, opens her personal archive, which includes the private scrapbooks and albums in which he documented their life together.’ We saw archive film of TSE reading excerpts from significant poems as well as the film of Ezra Pound from 1959. Various contemporary poets including Auden, Spender et al discussed the poet and his work. The original transcript to The Waste Land, heavily edited by Pound, was ‘rediscovered’ and re-edited by Valerie in 1968. I was intrigued to learn that Valerie went to St. Anne’s Convent in Caversham on the northern outskirts of RA’s nearest town, Reading. Considerable stress was laid on Eliot’s abandonment of his first wife, Viv, whom Eliot’s cousin praised highly. The ‘listings’ journal, the Radio Times, also featured an article on ‘The secret lives of T.S. Eliot.’ This programme was directed by Adam Low. This was one of a series of similar programmes edited by Anthony Wall. A few weeks ago I watched a similar programme on the last days of Wilfred Owen but whether it was from the same series, I cannot recall.”
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Correspondent Henderson also noticed numerous references to RA in Rod Rosenquist, Modernism, the Market and the Institution of the New ([Cambridge] Cambridge University Press [2009]).
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Correspondent Shelley Cox contributes the following review of The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1: 1929-1940. Edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld & Lois More Overbeck. CUP, 2009:
Despite the title, which sounds all-inclusive, this is a highly selected edition of Samuel Beckett’s letters, with only 2500 being published and another 5000 quoted in notes. Given Richard Aldington’s well-known connection with Beckett, beginning before 1929, one would think that there would be some letters to RA, but there are none. There are, however, over 100 to their mutual friend, Thomas McGreevy, and some thirty to Charles Prentice, RA’s editor at Chatto & Windus and friend. RA appears in notes and the infrastructure, as friend, supportive colleague, literary mover and shaker, as well as in his letters that are mentioned or quoted in notes. Since RA was a frequent host to McGreevy, Beckett asks to be remembered to his host—but apparently also describes some lines of RA’s poetry as “really the most lamentable stuff.” [p. 90]. The editors note that a carbon typescript of a Beckett poem was found in the RA papers at Southern Illinois University Carbondale; certainly evidence of a collaboration between the two men [p. 235]. Yet Beckett never seems to mention RA respectfully-- “Isn’t Aldington straight out of the Chester cycle?” [p. 351]. And one of his lady friends is described as a “vache,” which the ever-helpful editors describe as French slang for “bitch.” What respect that Beckett seems to have had ends with what he describes as “Aldington’s bad tempered review of Finnegan[s Wake]?’ [p. 660]. Beckett does not seem to recognize that RA has a different and valid literary view in his review of Finnegan’s Wake; rather he seems to think that Aldington’s comments are simply spleen, not judgment.
Despite relegation of RA to the footnotes, this is still a massively useful work, with the previously unpublished writings of a man who seems to be incapable of writing a boring—or conventional—line of prose. The editors, who have spent over ten years so far on this project, have tracked every comment, no matter how multilingual and obscure, and filled in the background for readers of every level of expertise. With index, chronologies, biographical essays—RA’s most laudatory—and a magisterial introduction.* * * * * * * * * *
Correspondent Archie Henderson found the following reference to RA. On 15 August 1952, Ezra Pound wrote to Olivia Rossetti Agresti, “As for the remains of ang/sax or ang/frog culture/ I don’t suppose Aldington will budge out of France/ but if he ever does come to Romaaaa, you and Helen might gather a few echoes of Londres d’Antan.” (“I Cease Not to Yowl”: Ezra Pound’s Letters to Olivia Rossetti Agresti, edited by Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Leon Surette [Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press (1998)], p.91).
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Associate editor David Wilkinson tells us that the New York Passenger Lists, 1820-1957 on the ancestry web site, http://www.ancestry.co.uk/default.aspx record that RA [travelling under his birth name of Edward Godfree Aldington], having departed from Port of Spain, Trinidad, arrived in New York on 6th June 1935 on board the ship, the “American Legion.” [Microfilm Serial: T715. Microfilm Roll: T715-5653. Page No: 103].
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