Vol. 38, No. 1 Spring, 2010
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* * * * * * * * * *
The last NCLS noted that playwright T. J. Edwards had completed a new play in verse of Candide, and asked whether RA’s Candide was still in print. Your editor referred him to Catherine Aldington for this information; meanwhile, here are his comments on RA’s Candide: “Mr. Aldington’s was clearly superior in every way; it should be in print for students to read (though perhaps not with the marvelous prints in the book, which are tad racey for Puritan American tastes). … One hopes that we have great success over the next several years and this generates interest to have Mr. Aldington’s translation reprinted.”
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Correspondent Shelley Cox responded to Edwards’ query about RA’s Candide as follows: “Since thanks to the original publisher of that Candide, Random House, there are no restrictions on using the translation without crediting the translator or paying any kind of fee to him or the publisher, this translation is reprinted in very cheap editions or in collections. It was also the one chosen by Modern Library, which is still in print? Usually if there is a translation of all or part of Candide, and no translator is listed, the chances are good that it is RA’s translation. There are certain phrases and turns that identity it, and distinguish it from the more lumpen and respectful scholarly translations. Something that I always wanted to know was how much of RA’s translation was used in the popular Broadway productions by Bernstein & Co. Most of the principals of those productions are deceased. But I wish someone would pin it down for scholarship. At the time, the RA translation would have been the one most readily available and cheaply reprinted, although there were at least two scholarly translations that did not have the sparkle and daggers of the RA one, which still readily appeals to modern readers.”
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Correspondent Caroline Zilboorg asks whether any of our members might have access to photographs of Dorothy Yorke and Cecil Gray. You can e-mail Caroline at caroline.zilboorg@orange.fr.
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Do any of our members know the mailing address of Robert Spoo? The Newsletter sent to him at the address that I have, 3627 S. Yorktown Place, Tulsa, OK 74105-3451, is returned as “not deliverable.”
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Associate editor David Wilkinson sends the following:
During week ending 23rd January 2010, BBC2 broadcast a two-part television program, “The Legacy of Lawrence of Arabia”. Part 2, broadcast on 23rd January, was described as follows: “Harvard Professor and former soldier and diplomat Rory Stewart concludes his survey of T. E. Lawrence's legacy in the Middle East. Stewart finds political resonance as he makes a camel trek through the desert of Wadi Rum, tours Damascus, the ancient capital Lawrence hoped to make the center of the new Arab nation, and goes on foot patrol with the U. S. Army around Baghdad. Again he is brought back to Lawrence's final conviction that foreign military interventions in the region will founder.” Stewart tells us that Lawrence is still required reading in the U. S. Army command. He believes that at the end of WWI, had the British and French created the Arabia that Lawrence sought rather than divide the region by the Sykes-Piquot Line, then the circumstances in the Middle East today would be entirely different.
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Jessica Weare will speak about Richard Aldington at the Stanford Humanities Center on Wednesday, March 3, 2010, at 6:00 p.m..
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It is with the great sadness that we have to the report the death of NCLS Member Michael Garrety. Michael Garrety was formerly in charge of English and Cultural Studies at Brunel University where he was a colleague of fellow NCLS Member Dr. John Morris. He specialized in First World War Studies and was a particular admirer of Richard Aldington and his poetry. Michael died on 21st December at the age of the age of 82. He leaves a widow, Christine, who has asked that we continue to send her this newsletter.
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Associate editor David Wilkinson reports that there is a newly burgeoning industry publishing out of date early twentieth century fiction and other often notable works. These new editions are scanned by computer and contain any number of typo errors. Pagination altered by the system but they are generally readable and provide useful access to an increasing number of facsimile, out of print titles. Kessinger Publishing, for example, offers Love Letters that Caused a Divorce by RA’s mother, May Aldington. Click here for the Kessinger’s web site: http://www.kessinger.net/
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Correspondent Michael Copp noticed that the Spring catalogue of Clearwater Books, London (ww.clearwaterbooks.co.uk) lists five RA items:
Fifty Romance Lyric Poems (1st US edition, signed)
Death of a Hero (1st UK edition, with Paul Nash’s dust wrappers)
Roads to Glory (1st edition, with Paul Nash’s dust wrapper)
A.E. Housman & W.B. Yeats (1st edition)
The Dearest Friend (1st edition)
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Michael Copp noted yet another example of an hostile reaction to, and a strangely perverse mis-reading of, RA’s Death of a Hero that is provided by Margaret Anderson in her My Thirty Years’ War (New York: Horizon Press, 1969, 260-261): “The American edition of another book came to me the same post with “A Farewell to Arms.” It too is a book about love and war. It too is written of one of the Little Review contributors. It is by Richard Aldington and it is called “Death of a Hero”.
There is something wrong with this book. Either it is the story of an artist by an artist, or it is the story of a plain man by a plain man. If it is meant to be by the former, one cannot reconcile the hero’s incapacity to love, to compel love. There has never lived an artist who hasn’t been a symbol of love—usually for the love of many people. The women who are supposed to love George Winterbourne are hard dry women, unchanged by their contact with him. His love for them is unmarked by imagination. This is not what happens to the artist in any environment—even is middle-class England.
George does not create his environment, he is created by it. He does not make his experience, he is the victim of his experience. The artist may be regarded as the victim of victims, but at least he never feels that way about it. His illusion may be his limitation—it is certainly his definition. The antagonizing factor about this book, the element that made the critics uncomfortable, is that Aldington is known as a poet and has produced a book that is not a poet’s.
If Aldington wanted to debunk the artist’s contribution to life, he should have told the story of a higher, not lower, vibration than the artist’s.”
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Michael Copp writes that two novels of John Cournos, Babel (1922) and Miranda Masters (1926) are romans-a-clef in which the Imagists and their circle appears under false names..
In Babel: Gombarov = Cournos; Tobias Bagg = Ezra Pound; Briggs = F.S. Flint; Raftery = W.B.Yeats; Winifred Gwynne = Dorothy “Arabella” Yorke; Jan Mazscishek = Gaudia-Brzeska; Daniel Gordin = Jacob Epstein; and Hugh Rodd = T.E.Hulme. The Imagists become the Primitivists, and the Egoist becomes Self. R.A. and H.D appear as “Mr.And Mrs. Hector Cowley, otherwise known as Heracles and Hylas, because of the Greekishness of their poetry.”
In Miranda Masters: Gombarov = Cournos; Winifred Gwynne = Dorothy “Arabella” Yorke; and Jan Mazcishek = Gaudier-Brzeska (these as before). R.A. and H.D. became Arnold and Miranda Masters; Roy Christopher = John Gould Fletcher; Richard Ramsden = D.H.Lawrence; Wilfred Rennell (an artist, not a musician) = Cecil Gray; and Max and Ruth Stern = Carl ad Flo Fallas.
And, of course, in 1960 H.D.was to include many of the above, plus some others in Bid Me to Live: Rafe = R.A.; Julia = R.D.;Rico and Clara = D.H. and Frieda Lawrence; Morgan = Brigit Patmore; Bella = Dorothy “Arabella” Yorke; and Vane = Carl Fallas.
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Correspondent Caroline Zilboorg writes: “I’ve just been asked by my editor at University Press of Florida to complete a questionnaire for publicizing my edition of H.D.’s Bid Me to Live (due out in autumn 2011). I suggested that the press approach ‘Shakespeare and Company’ in Paris, the English-language bookshop which takes its name from Sylvia Beach’s bookshop famous in the 1920s and 1930s for championing Modernist writers of all sorts. H.D. was particularly close to Beach and her French partner, Adrienne Monnier, so I’m very much hoping to give a reading there someday. Indeed, if Andrew Frayn, whose companion edition of Aldington’s Death of a Hero is due out from Florida at the same time, joins me—something I’ve also suggested—I think we could make a really interesting combined reading and book signing in Paris. For anyone interested in learning more about the current ‘Shakespeare and Company,’ the bookshop has a fascinating website at: http://www.shakespeareandcompany.com
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Zilboorg also adds: “I would be very interested in knowing if any of the readers of the NCLSN or any of their friends or colleagues would consider teaching Aldington’s Death of a Hero and/or H.D.’s Bid Me to Live when the two novels come out in the critical editions Andrew Frayne and I are preparing. The University Press of Florida, which will publish both books initially in hardcover in 2011, is considering the possibility of future paperback and ebook publication and would like to hear of possible courses for which these books might be useful. I am compiling a list of interested people, and I’d be delighted to hear from anyone who wants me to put their name down. Please feel free to contact me at: caroline.zilboorg@orange.fr
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Correspondent Archie Henderson sends details about a prose contribution by RA to the Cerebralist (for his poetic contributions, see NCLSN 14.1.2 and 14.3.2): “In ‘Imagisme,’ first drafted by [Ezra] Pound and then rewritten by F.S.Flint, Flint reported that that ‘they’ (meaning Pound) ‘held also a certain ‘Doctrine of the Image,’ which they had not committed to writing; they said that it did not concern the public, and would provoke useless discussion.’ Twenty-five years later Flint would remark that ‘we had a doctrine of the image, which none of us knew anything about.” Only a very select few knew the secret. Pound did commit the doctrine to writing and then unveiled it in ‘Ikon,’ a prose poem published in the December 1913 issue of the Cerebralist. ‘Ikon’ is preceded in the Cerebralist by a long article that was probably written by Richard Aldington. Many of Pound’s readers have suspected that some kind of visionary impulse lurks behind the clipped precision of Imagist poetics and while Aldington’s essay rehearses the litany of Imagist ‘Don’ts,’ ‘Ikon’ makes the visionary impulse of Pound’s own work clear.” (James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988), p.31).
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The web site abebooks.com tells us that The Double: A National Magazine from the South [July 1922, Vol. IV, No. 19] features “editorials and poems by Richard Aldington” and others. The item is available from Beach Leave Books, LA.
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Associate editor David Wilkinson feels the following might promote discussion:
We all know Aldington as an acknowledged authority on Eighteenth-Century literature, particularly of the French variety. But there are times when future biographers may need to reconsider the obvious; that the link between RA and 1890 Victorian Decadence is closer than many of us may have imagined. RA’s interest was sparked by the cosmopolitan Dudley Grey who had once dined with Oscar Wilde and RA later collaborated with Arthur Symons, one of the then few surviving ‘Nineties decadents. After the First World War RA became the principal reviewer of French Literature for the Times Literary Supplement. In the mid-twenties he was appointed General Editor for The Broadway Library of XVIII Century French Literature, a series published by Routledge and Sons, and in 1946 he edited Oscar Wilde: Selected Works with Twelve Unpublished Letters. RA tells us in Life For Life’s Sake that when he was a lad his father had just received his latest parcel of books. He doesn’t say so but RA’s description amounts to a coded reference to the emblematic, beautifully bound, publications from the exemplary sub rosa decadent, Leonard Smithers, spanning the entire gamut from entirely respectable to the outright pornographic. As a solicitor, Albert Edward Aldington had rooms at The Temple and during the late ‘Nineties may well have bought under the counter at Smithers’shop in the Royal Arcade. RA tells sardonically that on: “Coming into the library one afternoon I found on the table a dozen or more handsomely bound white books. I knew at once that they were the new limited edition of Oscar Wilde and one of my father’s economies, about which there had been some discussion. I had never heard of Mr. Wilde until this purchase, but from one or two remarks in the discussion about it, I judged there was something mysterious to be learned.” Besides their Wilde connections, Smithers and his gang pioneered publication in English of what was then questionable French literature under the mantle of the Lutetian Society. The only difference was that much of what the Victorian’s would hide from their servants had become totally acceptable in RA’s time; but his aims were the same.
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NCLS member Andrew Frayne called our attention to the fact that member Max Saunders’ new book, Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford University Press), includes a chapter on “Satirical Auto/biografiction: Richard Aldington and Wyndham Lewis.” The volume also covers many other early twentieth-century authors, who may be of interest to Aldingtonians, such as James, Conrad, Ford, Joyce, and Pound.
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Correspondent Michael Copp noted that in the Ford Madox Ford Society Newsletter. No. 16, March 2010, there is an announcement about the forthcoming publication of Max Saunders’ new book, “Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction and the Forms of Modern Literature. It suggests that the chapter on Aldington and Lewis will be of interest to RA students and scholars.
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Member Max Saunders himself invites us to a party for the publication of his new book at The Anatomy Museum, 6th Floor, Strand Building, King’s College London, The Strand, London WC2R 2LS on Thursday 22 April 2010, 5.30 to 8.30 pm
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Member Frayne noted that NCLS member Cy Fox was interviewed for the 11 March online newsletter of book search website ABE Books. The interview reports on Fox’s donation of his Wyndham Lewis collection to the University of Victoria, B.C., Canada and discusses a number of volumes by Lewis.
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Correspondent Stephen Steele has published “Cocteau-Pound-Breton: une etude des environs,” Mélusine: Cahiers du Centre de Recherche sur Surréalisme 30 (2010): 300-322. The article includes remarks on Aldington in connection to Dada, Pound, Aragon and Cocteau.
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