Biographer Vivien Whelpton writes that her
proposal (with three completed chapters of the intended seventeen) has been
‘packaged off’ to her agent. The book is provisionally titled Richard
Aldington, poet, soldier and lover: the years 1911-1929. Whelpton hopes
to be able to publish a second volume in the future, covering the rest of his
work and life, but feels that the pressing requirement at the moment is to
bring before a wider public Aldington the poet and early Modernist, Aldington
the poet and novelist of the First World War and Aldington the man, a survivor
of that war. So it is with the earlier years of Aldington’s adult life that
her volume is concerned, ‘the years.’ (to quote from her preface) ‘in which he
figured as one of the Imagist poets, the years in which he fell in love with,
and married another of them; then the war years in which his personal and
literary life fell apart; the post-war years in which he painfully tried to put
his life together again and to re-establish his literary career; and, finally,
the weeks at the end of the twenties in which he wrote Death of a Hero, his
blistering attack on all that had made that terrible war possible, and his own
‘goodbye to all that’. Although the book starts in 1911, there is to be a
chapter on his childhood and family background – but it won’t be at the
beginning!
Apart from the ‘unity’ that this approach
gives the volume, Whelpton is very conscious of the problem of length (and
demands on the reader’s perseverance) in a literary biography covering an
output of fifty years or so. Faced with a similar problem, Jean Moorcroft
Wilson went for a two-volume approach (‘The Making of a War Poet’ and ‘The
Journey from the Trenches’) in her biography of Sassoon and this seems the
right solution.
If anyone would like to contact Vivien
directly about her forthcoming biography, she would be glad to hear from you at
v.whelpton@btopenworld.com.
**********
Editor Andrew Frayn notes that discussion
of RA's 'In the Tube' and F.S. Flint's similar poem is included in an article
in the most recent Modernism / Modernity journal. Dave Ashford
discusses a variety of modernist literature about the Tube, combining this with
plans, maps, posters and diagrams in an interesting interdisciplinary study.
Reference: Dave Ashford, 'Blueprints for Babylon: Modernist Mapping of the London Underground 1913 - 1939', Modernism / Modernity 17, no. 4 (Nov 2010): 735 -
764.
**********
Associate Editor David Wilkinson tells us
that there are a number of references to RA in The Red Sweet Wine of Youth:
The Brave and Brief Lives of the War Poets by Nicholas Murray [Little,
Brown. 2010. £25]. See the following details: http://www.littlebrown.co.uk/Title/9781408700044
**********
Editor Andrew Frayn notes that the call for
papers deadline for the September conference of the International Ford Madox
Ford Society (with whom we share a number of members) has been put back to 31st
May. Papers are welcomed comparing Ford to his Edwardian contemporaries, on
Ford's Edwardian writings, or on his writings about that period. The
conference website is here: http://fordmadoxford-conference.weebly.com/
**********
Correspondent Michael Copp writes:
Kate McLoughlin's Authoring War (Cambridge
University Press, 2011) is a short (under 200 pages of text), but wide-ranging
and originally argued book that covers a wealth of written material about war,
from the distant past to the immediate present. McLoughlin's chosen writers
vary from Homer to Spike Milligan, and from Shakespeare to Carol Ann Duffy. She
looks at the ways writers have risen to the challenge of representing the
violence, chaos, and loss of war, and what forms and literary devices they have
employed in doing so.
As she writes in her
Introduction: 'War [. . .] resists depiction, and does so in multifarious
ways.' And she describes her aim in writing this book: '[It] does not seek to
give a normative account of war writing – [. . .] – but rather to show what
writing can do with the ineffable and intractable.'
The six main chapter headings
indicate her method. 'Credentials' looks at the challenge of believability, how
to achieve plausibility when war is so vast, unfamiliar, and complex. 'Details'
considers the problem of the scale of the phenomenon of war. 'Zones' tackles
the representational challenge posed by the alien nature of war. The
representational problem dealt with in 'Duration' is that when a war is in
progress it is impossible to know when, how, or even if it will end.
'Diversions' discusses the challenge of finding adequate words to represent
conflict. 'Laughter' pursues the proposition that 'warfare often makes no
sense to the individual caught up in it since its prosecution appears inimical
to human needs'.
Unsurprisingly, Death of a
Hero is one of the texts discussed, and McLoughlin illustrates her argument
with five passages (page references are for the Chatto & Windus 1st
ed., 1929). From 'Details':
Winterbourne
heard them constantly using the phrase 'three hundred thousand men,' as if they
were cows or pence or radishes . . . The phrase 'Division smashed to pieces'
rang in his brain. He wanted to seize the people in the room, the people in
authority, everyone not directly in the War, and shout to them: 'Division
smashed to pieces! Do you know what that means?' (417-18)
Also from 'Details':
. . .
how could the Army individually mourn a million 'heroes'? How could the little
bit of Army which George knew mourn him? How can we atone for the lost
millions and millions of years of life, how atone for those lakes and seas of
blood? . . . Headstones and wreaths and memorials and speeches and the Cenotaph
– no, no; it has got to be something in us. . . That is why I am writing
the life of George Winterbourne, a unit, one human body murdered,
but to me a symbol. (31-2)
From 'Duration':
To
Winterbourne as to many others, the time element was of extreme importance during
the war years. The hour-goddesses who danced along so gaily before, and have
fled from us since with such mocking swiftness, then paced by in a slow,
monotonous file as if intolerably burdened. People at a distance thought of the
fighting as heroic and exciting, in terms of cheering bayonet charges or little
knots of determined men holding out to the last Lewis gun. That is rather like
counting life by its champagne suppers and forgetting all the rest. The
qualities needed were determination and endurance, inhuman endurance. It would
be much more practical to fight modern wars with mechanical robots than with
men. . . the trouble is that men have feelings; to attain the perfect soldier,
we must eliminate feelings. To the human robots of the last war, time seemed
indefinitely and most unpleasantly prolonged. The dimension then measured as a
'day' in its apparent duration approached what we now call a 'month.' And the
long series of violent stalemates on the Western Front made any decision seem
impossible. (307-8)
Also from 'Duration':
For
Winterbourne the battle was a timeless confusion, a chaos of noise, fatigue,
anxiety, and horror. He did not know how many days and nights it lasted, lost
completely the sequence of events, found great gaps in his conscious memory.
(376)
From 'Laughter':
'They
went down like a lot o' Charlie Chaplins,' said the little ginger-haired
sergeant of the Durhams. Like a lot of Charlie Chaplins. Marvellous metaphor!
Can't you see them staggering on splayed-out feet and waving ineffective hands
as they went down before the accurate machine-gun fire of the Durhams sergeant?
(227)
**********
In researching an article in preparation on
the idea of 'the masses' in Aldington's city poems in Images, Editor
Andrew Frayn found that H.L. Mencken refers, briefly, to RA in an article on
'The New Poetry Movement'. Mencken writes:
Miss Lowell is the schoolmarm of the
movement, and vastly more the pedagogue than the artist. She has written
perhaps half a dozen excellent pieces in imitation of Richard Aldington and
John Gould Fletcher, and a great deal of highfalutin bathos. Her "A Dome
of Many-Colored Glass" is full of infantile poppycock, and though it is
true that it was first printed in 1912, before she joined the Imagists, it is
not to be forgotten that it was reprinted with her consent in 1915, after she
had definitely set up shop as a foe of the cliché.
Reference: H.L. Mencken, 'The New Poetry
Movement', in Prejudices: First Series (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1919), pp. 83 - 96 (p. 87). Thanks to Tom Nevin for the suggestion to look at
Mencken's work.
**********
Associate Editor David Wilkinson received
an email on 9th March from Carolyn Krueger imparting the sad news that her
father, long-standing NCLS Member Keith V. Krueger, passed away on 15th
February 2011, three days after his eighty-seventh birthday. Keith made contact
with Norman Gates some years ago. He was a retired paediatrician in Long Beach, CA (Los Angeles area). Three years ago Keith wrote that: ‘I have had a
long-time reading interest in T. E. Lawrence, World War I poets, Robert Graves
and Richard Aldington. My interest in RA was aroused when I picked a copy of A
Passionate Prodigality: Letters to Alan Bird from Richard Aldington, 1949-1962
off the new book shelves at the local public library in 1975 or 1976. I have
continued to read about him since.’ Members may care to access Keith’s online
obituary here.
**********
The NCLSN is sorry to hear of the death of
member Paul Sherr, in January 2010. If anyone wishes to pass on their
condolences to his widow, Virginia, please contact the editor, who will put you
in touch.
**********
Members may be aware that there are still a
handful of colleagues who, over the years, have asked to receive hard copies of
the Newsletter. Our associate editor sends out those to our European members
and Norman Gates' grand daughter Meredith Gates-Hart has taken on the role of
sending out the American ones. Meredith emailed on 6th March confirming that
once again certain mailings have fallen on stoney ground. Those who appear to
have moved on without trace are Kathleen Crown [ex Dept. of English. Rutgers
University]; Ms. Maura K. Grady, 329D Street, David, CA 95616 and Charlotte
Ward, Calle Concordia, # Altus, St. Juan, 00907-3510, Puerto Rico. We have
therefore removed their names from our membership lists. If anyone knows of
contact details (ideally electronic) for these members, we would be glad to
continue to send them the newsletter.