Vol. 37, No. 3 Autumn 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* * * * * * * * * *
NCLS member William Pratt writes on the eve of his departure for Rome and another Ezra Pound International Conference: “I will be seeing Bob Richardson at a second conference in Portugal later in the summer, and will assume he has read the kind remarks of Michael Copp about the celebration in London at the Centennial Birthday of Imagism. I believe that you have already noted that there is to be a second Imagist Symposium at Brunnenburg next summer. Imagism lives!”
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Correspondent Michael Copp contributes the following review of the most comprehensive work to date of the period when RA was involved with Imagism. Helen Carr’s The Verse Revolutionaries (Jonathan Cape, 2009) surpasses in scope, detail, and number of protagonists considered all previous narratives/histories of Imagism (880 pages, with notes and index producing a book only just short of 1,000 pages. Her subtitle, Ezra Pound, H.D. and the Imagists, indicates clearly that she sees them as two crucial figures of the inception and development of Imagism. Carr spends some time on their years in America and their coming to London. Also, no other commentator has devoted so much space to analyzing so exhaustively the importance of the “School of Images” that met in the Tour Eiffel restaurant. Previous histories have done little more than list those involved, but Carr examines thoroughly the contribution and significance of Storer, Fitzgerald, Campbell, Tancred, and Florence Farr, as well as, of course, of Hulme, Flint, and Pound. No other writer (with the possible exception of Cyrena Pondrom in her The Road from Paris) has given such recognition and prominence to the roles of F.S. Flint, that extraordinary working-class autodidact, publicist, polemicist, and authority on the current French poetry scene, as well as by no means negligible poet (see my The Fourth Imagist: Selected Poems of F.S. Flint), many of whose contributions, innovations, and achievements pre-dated those of Pound.
Carr is excellent on the complex emotional and professional relationships of the leading figures: Pound -Margaret Craven; Pound - H.D.; Pound - Dorothy Shakespear; R.A. - H.D.; Pound - Flint; R.A - Flint; Pound- Amy Lowell, etc Carr is scrupulously fair in her judgements of the personalities involved in these often convoluted alliances, friendships, entanglements, and disagreements.
Having learned in advance how big this book was, I feared that it might end up submerged under the weight of detail and a plethora of minutiae. My qualms proved to be unfounded. This is a justifiably ambitious, meticulously researched, and adroitly organized book that elevates and reanimates Imagism and the Imagists, both the main protagonists and those on the fringe.
(That said, I must disagree with Carr’s unwarranted dismissal of Death of a Hero as “almost mawkishly self-justifying.” Also, on p.549, and in the index, the name of the publisher given as “Max Goshen” should be “Max Goschen.” And again in the Index, p. 961, instead of Frank Stuart Flint, he has become oddly misnamed as Frank Stock Flint.)
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Associate Editor David Wilkinson writes: “I am alerted by Ebay [on 12 July 2009] that the Saturday Review of 18 January 1958 [Vol. XLI, No. 3] contains an article by Aldington entitled ‘The Gullibility of the British.’”
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All Aldingtonians will be interested in consulting a recently published reference book, The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Volume I. Britian and Ireland 1880-1955 (955 pages).
It includes essays on all British modernist magazines that RA contributed to. The succeeding volumes (to be published) should prove equally useful: Volume II. North America and Volume III, Europe.
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Here are two items from Correspondent Michael Copp. 1. Sadly, I have to report another negative and depressing superficial misreading of RA’s Death of a Hero. I refer to Paul Edwards’s essay, “The Great War in English Fiction” (in The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth Century Novel, edited by Robert L. Caserio, and published by Cambridge University Press, 2009). Edwards writes: “Death of a Hero, despite vivid evocations of the soldier’s experience in France, is an uncontrolled tirade by the narrator, who is undistinguishable from the omniscient author of the novel though he supposedly writes about Winterbourne with the limited knowledge of recent military acquaintanceship.” Thus Edwards joins the long list of readers and critics such as Bernard Bergonzi who fail or refuse to appreciate what Aldington was about in this novel.
2. Margaret Anderson’s My Thirty Years’ War and Jane Lidderdale & Mary Nicholson’s Dear Miss Weaver both include a photograph of RA showing him standing in front of a half-open doorway, wearing a belted coat, and holding a hat. Where and when was it taken? It has a hint of farewell and departure about it, so possibly the late 1920s (?).
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Correspondent Stephen Steele writes: “The Bibliothéque Nationale’s copy of Hark the Herald (The Hours Press, 1929; Number – Hors Commerce; Printed for Nancy Cunard and signed Richard Aldington) contains the inscription:
Dear Jesus
Please make Nancy a
Bad little girl and put
Plenty of gin in her bitter
Life which has its ups
And downs and lights and…
Thank you, Darling Nancy,
For printing my poem
All about God for God’s
Birthday.
A-men.
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Heather Hernandez calls attention to the interesting post in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review blog on Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism: http://www.bmcreview.org/2009/08/20090820.html
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This and the next four news items were contributed by Correspondent Archie Henderson: A note on a collection of letters addressed to the novelist Sydney Schiff states that RA’s letters to Schiff “are particularly entertaining and abound in splendid examples of his best knockabout style.” RA is quoted on Huxley and Wyndham Lewis from letters of 4 Feb. 1932 and 6 Aug. 1931. The letters quoted are on p. 25 of M.A.F. Borrie, “The Schiff Papers,” British Museum Quarterly, London, XXXI.1/2 (Autumn 1966), pp. 24-26 (with “Appendix: List of Schiff Papers,” pp. 26-27).
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An excerpt from a letter from RA to Ezra Pound, 8 Dec. 1918, written from Belgium, is quoted in Pound/Williams: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, Edited by Hugh Witemeyer ([New York] A New Directions Book [1996]), p. 36 n
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A letter from RA to John Rodker of 6 Aug. 1928, thanking him for a copy of The Lay of Maldoror by Comte de Lautréaumont, translated from the French by Rodker with “Introduction” by Remy de Gourmont (1924), is quoted on p. 99 of Ian Patterson, “Writing on Other Fronts: Translation and John Rodker,” Translation and Literature, XII.1 (Spring 2003), pp. 88-113. Rodker’s inscription in the copy sent to RA, dated July 1928, is quoted in NCLSN, 14.3.1.
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In A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem from Wilde to Ashbery (Amherst, Mass., The University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), Margueritte S. Murphy discusses T.S. Eliot’s article “The Borderline of Prose” (New Statesman, 19 May 1917) as an attack on RA’s prose poems, which to Eliot were not “pure prose” like Rimbaud’s Illuminations but “seem to hesitate between two media” (pp. 52-53).
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In “Suffragism, Imagism, and the ‘Cosmic Poet’:Scientism and Spirituality in The Freewoman and The Egoist” (Little Magazines & Modernism. New Approaches, edited by Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible ([Aldershot] Ashgate [2008]), pp. [119]-31), Bruce Clarke discusses RA’s “anti-cosmical” line of argument in “Modern Poetry and the Imagists” (The Egoist, I.11 (1 June 1914), p. 201). Clarke sees poets as Horace Holley, Huntly Carter, and Edward Carpenter as “Cosmic Poets” who were real-life Hugh Selwyn Mauberleys disparaged by RA.
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Here are two more RA news items found by Archie Henderson. Jonathan Atkin writes of RA in his book A War of Individuals: Bloomsbury Attitudes to the Great War (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press; New York: Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 2002). In a chapter entitled “Writers in Uniform,” Atkin starts off with RA (pp. [105]-5) and quotes from his wartime correspondence with Amy Lowell, H.D., F.S. Flint, and John Counos. The ending of an unpublished poem by RA is quoted on p. 103.
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Bruce Clarke, in his book Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science (Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press [1996]), prints two letters from RA to Dora Marsden, n.d. [Dec.1913?] and n.d.[late Dec.1913?], pp. 137-138. These letters were previously noted in NCLSN. 15.3.2.
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Caroline Zilboorg has just finished editing H.D.’s Bid me to Live and Andrew Frayn has finished editing Aldington’s Death of a Hero. They submitted their work in mid-September to the University Press of Florida, under the terms of their advance contracts. The projects will go out to readers for peer review later this month and they hope both will review favourable responses. They are crossing their fingers for news in time for Christmas, but the review process can take time. Both books are conceived as parallel projects by the editors (Caroline and Andrew) and by the Press, who would like them to go in tandem through the printing process, with a simultaneous publication date in 2011. Each novel has a substantial introduction and extensive notes glossing people, places, quotations, allusions and much else. Both books will include a number of photographs as well. Perhaps in future issues of the NCLSN, they can give readers a ‘taste’ of what they have done; and would certainly welcome readers’ reactions. From Florida’s previous publication of work by H.D., these books should look wonderful and they are much looking forward to the continuing editorial process as the projects move through to publication. Although Florida has published several books by H.D., including Jane Augustine’s edition of The Mystery, which is due out in October, this will be Florida’s first publication of a work by Aldington.
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Catherine Aldington has just received copies of a new edition of her father’s most popular book, Death of a Hero, printed in Russian.
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Archie Henderson noted that Miriam Benkovitz’s article “Richard Aldington and His Postscript” (Columbia Library Columns, 33.1 (Nov. 1983), pp. 11-22 (mentioned in NCLSN, 11.3.1) is available online in a PDF of that issue at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/digital/collections/cul/texts/ldpd_6309312_033/ldpd_6309312_033.pdf.
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Imagist Dialogues: Letters between Aldington, Flint and Others by Michel Copp (ed.) is scheduled to be published November 2009. The following is from the publisher’s advanced information sheet.
“In this book Michel Copp introduces and annotates a collection of letters, almost all most unpublished, documenting the lives, concerns and ambitions of many of the leaders of early-twentieth century literary modernism during the crucial period around the First War.
The names of Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, T.E. Hulme, Ford Madox Ford, H.D., Amy Lowell, and Harriet Monroe stand out for their stature while creating the perfect background to the in depth analysis of two English Imagists poets: Richard Aldington and F.S. Flint.
A fascinating collection of letters rescued from oblivion which will add significant value to the scholarship of this period, the Imagist movement and its protagonists.
The letters here gathered span exactly sixteen years, from 1909 to 1925, thus covering the time when early Anglo-American literary modernism developed its identity and both Aldington and Flint played an important role in the Imagist circle.
Thank to his judicious selection of letters, his scholarly commentary and informative footnotes, Copp makes a valuable contribution to the study of the movement.
This book would appeal to undergraduate students attending courses in early-twentieth-century literature, modernism and Imagism.
The Author:
Michael Copp worked for many years as a tutor for the Board of Continuing Education of Cambridge University, teaching courses on the literary response to war in the twentieth century. His previous books include From Emmanuel to the Somme: the War Writing of A.E Tomlinson (Lutterworth, 1997), An Imagist at War: The Complete War Poems of Richard Aldington (2002) and The Fourth Imagist: Selected Poems of F.S. Flint (2007).
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Correspondent and website editor Paul Hernandez advises that the Beinecke Library started uploading images from their collection onto flickr,com in June of 2008. They have recently scanned and uploaded H.D.’s scrapbook, at least one page of which has a few pictures of RA. All of the images on their site are posted under a Creative Commons “Attribution, Non-commercial” license, meaning that we can reproduce and use those images so long as we do not sell them and we acknowledge the Beinecke. Here is the website address: http://www.flickr.com/photos/beinecke_library/3885135306/sizes/l/
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Caroline Zilboorg writes that David Wilkinson has been helping her try to locate where along the west Cornish coast H.D. was while on the walk she describes in detail in Bid Me to Live. “He’s sent me some wonderfully precise ordinance survey maps and we’re working on them together. If all goes well, I maybe able to include some photos taken of exactly the views she describes. Of course a lot has changed since between 1918, when she walked these hills, and now, but some of those rugged landscapes are almost exactly the same.”
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