NCLS member Justin Kishbaugh has kindly
agreed to become Associate Editor. Justin is a doctoral candidate at Duquesne
University and has presented at a number of Aldington conferences. His
dissertation is on Imagism and Imagist anthologies, entitled ‘Imaging Imagism:
The Imagist Anthologies and the Concretization of Modernist Poetry’. Please
feel free to contact either of us with information for the newsletter. I hope
that once again having a North American point of contact will help the
newsletter continue to flourish.
If you meet people with an interest in
Aldington, please put them in touch with us – the imagists.org archives are
easily searchable on the internet.
**********
Correspondent Simon Hewett has a letter
from Aldington which discusses his pleasure in the production quality of the
Overbrook Press edition of A Dream in the Luxembourg.
The TLS from Aldington to Altschul dated
20/6/35 on Hotel Fairfax, New York City notepaper:
Dear Mr. Altschul,
I have been in America several
days, but the rush of meeting people and a long but over-occupied week-end with
old friends in the country have kept me from writing to you.
Many thanks indeed for the copy
of the beautiful edition of A Dream in the Luxembourg. It was very
delightful to be greeted on arrival here by your kind letter and by this very
handsome compliment to my poem. I like your edition better than the original
American edition, which was designed by Bruce Rogers.
If I express myself
inadequately it is because I don't know how to find the words.
Yours sincerely
Richard Aldington
**********
NCLS member Patrick Quinn writes: I was in
Copenhagen recently and met one of the foremost film critics of modern Scandinavian
film, Dr. Peter Schepelern. We were
speaking of each other's academic interests, and I mentioned my love of Richard
Aldington's prose and poetry. Much to my surprise, Peter said with the
reflective hesitation of a true scholar, “Ah, I know the writer”.
He then proceeded to point out an Aldington
citing of which I was totally unaware between the famous Danish director Karl
Theodore Dreyer and Aldington. Peter averred that “Dreyer, of course, is the
classic master of Danish cinema, known for his The Passion of Joan of Arc,
Day of Wrath and Ordet (The Word). His last film, Gertrud,
premiered in 1965 and was received as an anachronistic melodrama by some and as
a revelation by others” (admired also very much by the current controversial
Danish director Lars von Trier). It is based on a Swedish play about a woman
who loves a number of men, but, looking disillusioned back on her life, she
concluded that men always consider work more important than love. In the small
program accompanying the film (as was usual then), Dreyer wrote a brief
commentary, which he concluded by saying:
“What is Gertrud about? Certainly not about sex – but about love and
eroticism. This makes me think of three verse lines by the English poet Richard
Aldington:
A man or woman might die for love
and be glad in dying.
But who would die for sex?”
As any good Aldington scholar would recognize, the lines come from Aldington's
under-valued and often overlooked poem The Eaten Heart (1931).
**********
David Wilkinson reports the sad news of the
passing of NCLS Member John Quinton Mayes at his retirement home in Neuvic,
France on 26 October 2012 at the age of ninety-one. Wilkinson and Mayes became
friends in Cornwall in the mid 1990s over their shared concern over the
environmental impact of a plastic oil storage tank at The Tower House at Zennor
occupied briefly during the First World War by John Middleton Murry and Katherine
Mansfield, and subsequently by D. H. Lawrence. Mayes was intrigued to find a
contact with the world of Richard Aldington and D. H. Lawrence in nearby St
Ives. John Mayes was related to the painter David Bomberg.
**********
Associate Editor Justin Kishbaugh notes
that Melissa Bradshaw’s recent Amy Lowell: Diva Poet (Ashgate, 2011)
contains a number of references to Aldington. He will write further about this
in the next issue.
**********
Correspondent Simon Hewett was put in touch
with Wendy Mauermann by the late NCLS Founder, Norman Gates. Wendy Mauermann is
the daughter of Mary Anne Hughes Mauermann, the daughter of RA’s friend Glenn
Hughes and Babette Hughes, and RA’s literary “goddaughter.”
Wendy Mauermann has shared a letter written
to her mother in 1972 by Babette Hughes, which refers to Aldington's break-up
with Arabella Yorke: “…when Aldington let us use his cottage at Aldermaston,
that peaceful little village, with not even electricity, which is now a nuclear
center, he and Arabella went with Lawrence and Frieda to stay on some island
off the coast of Italy. Something happened there—a lot of quarrels—I remember
Richard talking about them. Anyway, when he came back, Lawrence was sick, and
Aldington was through with his life as a country squire with Arabella typing
his articles and reviews, making all his shirts—by the light of an oil lamp,
and cooking for him. At that point he left her and went to Paris where he lost
30 pounds or more and bought a trench coat and wrote Death of a Hero.”
Wendy Mauermann also shared a copy of a
receipt for a meal at the Grand Hotel Savoia in Rapallo on Tuesday 29 January
1929. The participants in the dinner are noted as “Yeats/ Pound (Mr. &
Mrs.), Aldington, Mrs. Patmore, Bab and G. Hughes.”
Wendy Mauermann additionally provided
copies of photographs taken on Glenn & Babette Hughes’ visit to England in
1928, including photographs of Aldington, Hughes, Brigit Patmore and Arabella
Yorke. Included amongst these photographs are (i) Arabella Yorke and Babette
Hughes, and (ii) Aldington, Hughes and Patmore, and (iii) Brigit and Babette on
a beach.
Finally, Wendy Mauermann permitted Hewett
to acquire the silver bracelet given by Aldington to Mary Anne Hughes
Mauermann. This was actually his military identity bracelet engraved “2nd Lt.
R, Aldington, C. of E., Royal Sussex Regt.” On the back is engraved “ARABELLA.”
The above have been added to the Aldington
archive now maintained by Correspondent Hewett.
**********
Correspondent Simon Hewett notes that the
prospectus for Routledge's Broadway library of Eighteenth-Century French
literature, which was edited by Aldington in Memoirs of Marmontel (1930)
announced that an edition of Letters of Voltaire and Madame du Deffand to
be translated by Aldington and with an introduction by Aldington was in
preparation, as was a translation of Royal Prisoners of the Revolution,
also with an introduction by Aldington. Neither appears to have been published.
Aldington had reviewed an edition of Madame du Deffand's letters to Voltaire in
the TLS of 22 March 1923.
**********
David Wilkinson was saddened to learn of
the death of Dominic Hibberd [NCLS News. Vol. 40., No. 3., Autumn 2012] who
inscribed a copy of his biography of Harold Monro to mark the occasion when
Monro fell and cut his head on one of the flints bordering RA’s garden path at
Malthouse Cottage. In the early 1990s Hibberd gave Wilkinson a letter of
introduction to Canon Roland Bate who served alongside RA in the 9th Royal
Sussex Regiment. Wilkinson met and recorded a significant conversation with
Bate enabling Bate’s actions on 4 November 1918 to be read between the final
lines in RA’s Death of A Hero.
**********
The Eliot-Aldington Letters
(Part II)
The second
volume of The Letters of T.S. Eliot includes 30 letters from TSE to RA,
covering the period January 1923 to December 1925. As the following selection
of letters reveals, their mutual respect and appreciation during this part of
the Criterion years could not be higher or more sincere.
29
January 1923: ‘Thank you very much for your letter of the 21st inst.
with the statement you have prepared.’ This refers to RA's latest financial
statement about the Bel Esprit fund to which so far eleven individuals had
contributed varying sums of money.
4
May 1923: ‘I am very much obliged to you for having settled matters with
C-Sanderson, and with such discretion. . . . It is unnecessary to say that your
prompt action has saved N. 4 [of the Criterion], as you must know that.’
RA, as assistant editor, had held the fort for the Criterion while TSE
was forced to spend time away from London at Fishbourne because of his wife's
severe health problems. TSE too was under great stress and exhausted.
11
May 1923: ‘I feel a special obligation to write to you because you are one of
the very few people who have the constancy to persist in writing to me whether
I answer or not.’
27
May 1923: ‘I have now seen Lady Rothermere and have pleasure in confirming the
proposals which I made to you the other night. . . .You will be offered a
consideration at the rate of £50 a year to act as secretary, managing editor,
or some similar designation [with] the following duties and any other work
agreed upon between you and myself: To take charge of the translation of
manuscript accepted in foreign languages, to read the proof and fit together
the accepted material, to write a page or so of editorial matter for each
number over your initials.’
20
September 1923: ‘I was very much pleased and flattered by receiving your
translation of Cyrano with the inscription. It is a book which I should
have wanted to possess even without the pleasure of receiving it as gift, and I
congratulate you on such a scholarly piece of work and such an interesting
introduction.’ RA's Voyages to the Moon and Sun was the first modern
translation of Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac.
6
November 1924: ‘I am looking forward keenly to your new poem [A Fool i’ the
Forest], about which I have heard most interesting rumours.’
24
November 1924: ‘Thank you very much for your letter and for honoring me with a
sight of the proof of your poem [A Fool i’ the Forest]. . . . What I have
lookd at I liked immensely.’
6
January 1925: ‘I should welcome anything that relieved you from the necessity
of doing so much editing and translating which seems to me to have reached a
point beyond which it will only be a hindrance to your more important
activities.’ RA had informed TSE that his mother had transferred to him his
father's books, some old pewter, and some shares, being the ‘first step towards
economic independence.’
8
April 1925: ‘I have just seen the new Vogue, and re-read your article,
and am more than ever overwhelmed by your “generous pleasure in praise” . . . .
I think it is a most marvellous eulogy. What a man you are.’ This refers to
Richard Aldington’s article, ‘T.S. Eliot, Poet and Critic: A Scholarly and
Austere Modern Classicism and Coherent Thought is of Serious Importance to His
Generation’, in Vogue, 65:7, April 1925.
15
April 1925: ‘I feel that I have failed to express my appreciation of
your kindness in writing this article for Vogue – I do indeed realise
the thought and generosity which have gone into it. Incidentally, it says just
what I should like to be said.’
(The
letters of Volume III will be considered in the next Newsletter)
Michael
Copp
**********
Now that David Wilkinson has stepped down
as Associate Editor, we are reviewing the way that the newsletter is
distributed. A number of subscribers still receive the NCLSN in hard copy by
post. There are no funds to subsidise this, and for many years Norman Gates,
David Wilkinson and, recently, Norman’s daughter Meredith have done this from their
own pockets.
If you are still receiving the NCLSN in
hard copy, we ask: firstly, is it possible for you to receive the letter by
e-mail? If so, please could you message one of the editors at the addresses on
the head of the newsletter? Secondly, if you wish to continue to receive a
paper copy, we’d be very grateful if you would mail a reply stating this to
your local editor.