A number of significant anniversaries for
the NCLS take place this year. First of all, as you will see from the
masthead, this is the start of the fortieth year of the newsletter, testament
to the enduring interest in Aldington from around the world, now facilitated by
the ease with which communications can take place in the ether. Secondly, and
more importantly, it is the 120th anniversary of Richard Aldington’s
birth, on 8 July, and the fiftieth anniversary of his death, on 27 July. Both
of these anniversaries will take place between our second and third numbers of
the year.
Andrew
Frayn
Biographer Vivien Whelpton writes: In
honour of the fiftieth anniversary of Richard Aldington’s death, a special
luncheon will be held on Saturday 28 July this year in Padworth, Berkshire,
where he lived from 1920 until he left England for France in 1928.
Individual invitations have already been sent to those who participated in the
wonderful dinner ten years ago in London in honour of the fortieth anniversary,
organised by Anne and Jeremy Powell and Hugh Cecil, as well as to many of those
who attended the 1986 Reading Conference and the 1992 conference in
Montpellier in honour of the centenary of Aldington’s birth. If there are
other NCLS members who would like to attend this year’s festivities, please
contact Vivien at v.whelpton@btopenworld.com
**********
Associate editor David Wilkinson writes to
say that on 20 December 2011 he received a letter from Mrs. Ruth Nicol, the
Archivist of St. Margaret's History Society [Dover, Kent] with whom he made
contact in recent years. Mrs. Nicol included a press cutting from the Dover
Mercury of 10th November 2011 on the topic of 'The Return of the Unknown
Warrior'. This explains how the choice of a body was made for the grave of the
Unknown Warrior. The opening paragraph explains that this is the second article
by Lorraine Senicle. 'Last week she wrote about Dover's patron saint, St.
Martin, and poet Edward Aldington ...' In this article she says that 'Following
the First World War, Edward Aldington adopted the name Richard ... Richard's
brother Tony became a solicitor, practising at 25 Castle Street, Dover. The
business was absorbed by Knocker Elwin and Lambert, one of the firms that went
on to become the present day Bradleys. ... Richard ... was one of the 16 Great
War poets and commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's
Poets Corner.'
*********
NCLS Member John Worthen will be giving a
talk with the title ‘Being Aldington’ at the University of Nottingham (Weston
Gallery) on Thursday 5 July 2012. He will discuss RA’s commissioned article on
D. H. Lawrence in a Supplementary Volume to the Dictionary of National
Biography, which apeared in 1937; Worthen was asked to do the same job for the
new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and was sent the RA entry to
assist him (hence the title of his talk). Are RA scholars aware of this piece
of writing by RA?
**********
Our Russian Correspondent, the translator and editor Ludmilla
Volodarskaya, wrote offering New Year greetings to Associate Editor David
Wilkinson. Between partaking of the occasional cup of coffee, Ludmilla is
currently engaged in translating Will Self’s The Butt (2008). Ludmilla
came to the NCLS through her neighbourhood connection with our late friend
Professor Urnov with whom she co-edited Yeats for Russian readership. In 1995
Ludmilla gave a Paper at the Robert Graves Centenary Celebration in Palma de
Mallorca. In 2002 she translated into Russian The Blessing of Pan by the
Irish writer Edward Dunsanay. We heard from her in Autumn 2003 [NCLSN, Vol. 32,
No. 3] when she had translated Anaïs Nin’s 1959 book, Cities of The Interior
and Lawrence Durrell’s Revolt of Aphrodite on which she collaborated
with V. Minushin. In 2004 she translated The Weaver’s Grave and Other
Stories by another Irish writer, Seamus O’Kelly. Ludmilla reports that Russian
interest in Aldington has waned in recent years.
Ludmilla would welcome contact with NCLS members and can be
contacted at lvolodarskaya@mail.ru
**********
Correspondent Michael
Copp writes: When RA's The Romance of Casanova appeared in 1946, a
reviewer in the Montreal Gazette was not impressed:
‘Richard Aldington is,
indisputably, one of the most important of contemporary writers in English. Death
of a Hero was one of the most significant books of its era. The Colonel's
Daughter, All Men are Enemies - even, Very Heaven - are
fine examples of modern English prose, generous in concept, original in idea,
brilliant in execution. His current volume, The Romance of Casanova, is
an annoyance, doing the author a literary disservice, and providing a source of
considerable distress to his enthusiastic admirers.’
**********
Lynden Easterbrook, one of Carl and
Florence Fallas’s grandchildren, has recently become a member of the NCLS. He
writes that ‘I have inherited an intriguing story, which continues to draw me
in, and it has awakened an interest in the Imagists, and Richard and Hilda in
particular. I too am aware of the impending anniversaries for the Imagists; I
wonder if there will be a resurgence of public interest... it would be nice to
think so.’ We all, I think, share that sentiment.
**********
Correspondent Caroline Zilboorg, via her
friend Allison Meinhold, reminds us that RA is featured in the little magazine The
Exile. Meinhold noticed this on a copy held at the Hemingway House in Key West, Florida.
Aldington was, of course, in Florida from 1941-2.
**********
Correspondent Michael
Copp writes: The latest catalogue from Clearwater Books contains the following
item: Natalie Clifford Barney, Selected Writings, edited by Miron
Grindea, Adam Books, 1963 (1st ed.), at £400. This is a limited edition
of 100 numbered copies signed by Barney. Apart from selections from
Barney's works, there are contributions by various writers, among them RA. Does
anyone know what exactly RA's was?
**********
Book
reviews
H.D., Bid Me to Live (ed.
Caroline Zilboorg). Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2011.
H.D.'s
multi-faceted, dream-like roman à clef, written and reworked over many years, is a distinctive
piece of autobiografiction in which she presents and interprets her various
relationships with the key figures and events of her life in London during the
early years of the First World War: herself (Julia Ashton), her husband,
Richard Aldington (Rafe Ashton), Ezra Pound (Lett Barnes), D.H. Lawrence
(Frederick/Rico), Dorothy (“Arabella”) Yorke (Bella Carter), Frieda Lawrence
(Elsa Frederick), Brigit Patmore (Morgan), John Cournos (Ivan Levsky), and
Cecil Gray (Cyril Vane/Vanio). Zilboorg provides a useful potted biography of
all these characters, as well as photographs of some of them, and of some of
the places where they lived.
H.D.
structures her book around a series of polarities: innocence and knowingness,
city and countryside, devotion and betrayal, hesitancy and determination,
reality and dream, objectivity and imagination, tight descriptions and fleeting
impressions.
Apparently
trivial and everyday objects in Julia's room in Mecklenburgh Square assume
significant dimensions – cigarettes, a gas ring, the Spanish screen, a tea box,
a bookcase with the Elizabethan madrigals, copies of the Mercure de France,
and Rafe's watch, among them. All of them represent permanence and security.
H.D.'s
treatment of her relationship with D.H. Lawrence is especially noteworthy.
Written long after the key war years of their relationship, and after her
contact with Freud, are the parts in which she endows Lawrence with a specific
aura; not only does Rico stand for Lawrence, he is also a vividly seen
archetypal poet/writer with his 'pale face and the archaic Greek beard and the
fire-blue eyes in the burnt-out face' (p. 29).
Another
character, one that appears in the latter part of BMtL, is the composer,
Cecil Gray (Vanio), with whom Julia goes to live in Cornwall. This was a
transitory and unsatisfactory relationship with a particularly unsatisfactory
person. As Zilboorg puts it: 'Gray was [. . .] a neurotically disengaged man
incapable of mature commitment or deep response' (p. lxiv).
H.D.
peppers her work with numerous quotations and allusions, mostly literary, some
biblical. Zilboorg's detailed footnotes on these matters are extremely helpful.
Even more important is her lengthy introduction which stands as a model
narrative of the background and salient moments of the lives of the two main
protagonists.
In
her scholarly treatment of H.D.'s book, Zilboorg brings together the fruits of
the years of painstaking research and writing that she has devoted to the lives
and works of H.D. and Richard Aldington, and, in so doing, she provides the
reader of this remarkable modernist work with the careful annotation and
coherent exegesis it demands.
Michael
Copp
**********
Caroline
Zilboorg, Transgressions (Writing From Here, 2011)
Transgressions, Caroline Zilboorg's historical novel, concentrates on the key
early years (1911-1916) of the relationship of RA and HD. Apart from chapters 2
and 3, which, in turn, sketch out the earlier years of HD (1886-1911) and of RA
(1892-1911) the rest of the book devotes over 300 pages to the period just
before the war and the first years of the war. Zilboorg has for a long time
sought to promote a more balanced version of this relationship than had often
been the case, with certain feminist critics attacking RA for his supposedly
crudely bullying and unfeeling treatment of a victimised HD. This nuanced
equilibrium emerged particularly clearly in Zilboorg's earlier editing of their
correspondence. Zilboorg has skilfully interwoven the known facts, as far as
they can be drawn from their letters and autobiographical novels, as well as
from the writings of others such as Ezra Pound and John Cournos, with her own
imagined contribution, that is, her intensely intimate interpretation and vivid
depiction of their relationship, their sex life, and their sexual encounters
with others, such as Frances Gregg, Flo Fallas, and Brigit Patmore. All this
makes for a fascinating and extremely convincing picture of the subtleties,
complexities, and problems of their intimate lives, together and apart from one
another. Their life in London, their travels to France and Italy, plus the
roles of their friends and colleagues, such as Pound, Flint, Cournos, Lawrence,
Amy Lowell, and others, ensure that the foregrounded figures of RA and HD are
firmly embedded in various convincingly detailed contexts: social,
geographical, emotional, and professional.
This
fine work of biografiction bears out its subtitle: 'Her story, his story, a
love story, a war story', all intelligently interwoven to give a richly rounded
portrait of these characters, in these places, at this particularly important
stage in their lives.
Michael
Copp
**********
Editor Andrew Frayn also reviewed Transgressions
for the Newsletter of the Ford Madox
Ford Society. That review should be available in full online shortly;
Frayn concludes that ‘Transgressions is a superbly detailed and accurate
historical novel, drawing on a career’s worth of research, and Zilboorg is
sympathetic to all her characters. There are no easy caricatures of heroes or
villains of modernism, but an appreciation of the fragility and flaws of
individuals and their relationships, and the differing social and political views
which are the foundations of the fascination which the early twentieth century
continues to hold.’
Transgressions is now available for
Kindle, and also as
a paperback. Unfortunately, the hard copy is available only on amazon.com
– it will need to be imported by UK and European readers.
**********
CALL FOR PAPERS
Ford Madox Ford's Parade's
End: Modernism and the First World War
Institute
of English Studies, University of London, 27-29 September 2012
'There
are not many English novels which deserve to be called great:
Parade's
End is one of them.' W. H. Auden
Proposals are
invited for an international conference on Ford Madox Ford’s First World War
tetralogy, Parade’s End. First published as Some Do Not. . .
(1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up– (1926) and Last
Post (1928), Parade's End has been described by Anthony Burgess as
‘the finest novel about the First World War’, by Samuel Hynes as ‘the greatest
war novel ever written by an Englishman’, and by Malcolm Bradbury as ‘a central
Modernist novel of the 1920s, in which it is exemplary’. In 2010–11, Carcanet
published the volumes as major critical editions, providing for the first time
reliable texts, detailed annotations and discussions of the textual histories.
Also in 2011, the BBC and HBO embarked on a five-part adaptation, scripted by
Sir Tom Stoppard. As we approach the centenary of the start of the Great War,
this conference will examine and celebrate Ford’s First World War modernist
masterpiece.
Keynote
Address:
Adam Piette, author of Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry
1939-1945 (1995) and The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam (2009)
Special
Guest:
Susanna White, BAFTA award-winning director of Parade’s End (2012,
forthcoming), Bleak House (2005), Jane Eyre (2006), and Generation
Kill (2008)
The conference
aims to examine Parade’s End from a wide a range of critical, historical, and
theoretical perspectives. Possible topics might include:
Parade’s End and
modernism (including comparisons with other modernist novels)
Parade’s End and
the literature of the First World War (fiction, poetry, memoirs)
Parade’s End and
Ford’s other fictional and non-fictional war prose (such as No Enemy, The
Marsden Case, When Blood Is Their Argument, Between St. Dennis and St. George,
and the material collected in War Prose)
Parade’s End and
Ford’s War poetry
The contexts of
Parade’s End: class; women; marriage; family; bureaucracy; politics (radical
toryism, communism, and the suffrage movement); music hall; cinema
The techniques
of Parade’s End: style; narrative; point of view; time; memory; stream of
consciousness; character; humour; fairytale and romance; Literary Impressionism
Influences on,
and the influence of, Parade’s End
We are keen to
receive proposals from graduate students as well as established scholars, and
we especially welcome papers discussing Parade’s End in relation to other
writers’ works, including (but not limited to): Richard Aldington; Henri
Barbusse; Vera Brittain; Edmund Blunden; H.D.; John Dos Passos; T. S. Eliot;
Robert Graves; Graham Greene; Ernest Hemingway; David Jones; James Joyce; D. H.
Lawrence; Wyndham Lewis; Frederic Manning; R. H. Mottram; Marcel Proust; Erich
Maria Remarque; Siegfried Sassoon; May Sinclair; Rebecca West; Virginia Woolf. Speakers
will be invited to submit papers for publication in International Ford Madox
Ford Studies vol. 13, which will be published in 2014 to mark the centenary of
the outbreak of WWI.
Please send
proposals of up to 300 words for 20-minute papers to the conference organisers
Rob Hawkes and Ashley Chantler (fordmadoxford@hotmail.co.uk) by 1 May 2012.