As ever, please be in touch with any
reports of Aldingtoniana; information about the wider Imagist circle is also appreciated.
The newsletter depends on the input of all its readers.
**********
Correspondent David Wilkinson writes: The
web site 'Find My Past' has put up digitised copies of a large number
of regional newspapers offering information rarely available to biographers
from other published sources. In that context I have unearthed the following article
from The Cornishman newspaper of 11 October 1917.
LIGHTS
AT PENDEEN
HEAVY
PENALTY ON HOUSEHOLDER
At West Penwith Petty Sessions at Penzance
on Wednesday, before Mr David Howell (in the chair).
A
HEAVY FINE
Cecil Wm. Gray,
of Bosigran, Zennor, was charged with failing to obscure lights in his dwelling
house, at 9.45 p.m. on September 19. Deputy Coast-Watch Officer N. E. Cooke
said he had received complaints about lights having been seen coming from the
defendant's window on several occasions. On the Wednesday evening he went to
Bosigran about 9.30. There he met two coast-watchers, who had seen lights the
previous evening. For a while they went to the western side of the house, but
saw nothing. They worked their way round to the north or seaward side of the
house, and at 9.45 or thereabouts, saw a light at the upper window pass across
and back again three times. When witness interviewed defendant, he said his new
housekeeper had come that week. On that night she had just gone to bed and the
light was probably caused by her.
Defendant said
previous to the coming of the housekeeper the part of the house in which the
light was seen, was unused.
The Chairman:
You describe yourself as an artist? - No, a musician.
Mr. Cooke said
he had received a great many complaints from inhabitants of the locality.
The Bench
retired to consider their verdict, and on their return, the Chairman said they
regarded it as a very serious offence indeed.
Defendant would
be fined £20.
----------
Incidentally, I believe that Mr Benney, the
auctioneer from whom DHL bought the odd stick of furniture, had his office in 2
Bedford Road, St Ives, that in recent times has been the home of The Book
Gallery.
**********
Editor Andrew Frayn writes that there are a
few brief mentions of RA in The History of British Women’s Writing,
1920-1945, vol. 8, ed. Maroula Joannou
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Jane Dowson’s article on ‘Poetry,
1920-1945’ discusses both Aldington and H. D., and Bonnie Kime Scott talks
about H. D. in her chapter on ‘Gender in Modernism’.
**********
Correspondent Michael Copp reminds us that
there is an article by Alfred Satterthwaite, ‘John Cournos and “H.D.”’ in Twentieth
Century Literature, 22:4 (1976), 394-410.
It is available online at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/440582.
[CTRL + click all links]
**********
Editor Andrew Frayn draws your attention to
the last few days of a Kickstarter campaign for further funding for the
excellent Paul Lewis’s documentary about RA’s friend Ford Madox Ford. Paul is
truly passionate about his subject, and the documentary features, among others,
NCLSN member Max Saunders. There is a teaser for the documentary on the page.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/643139056/ford-madox-ford-a-man-mad-about-writing
**********
Jeff Grieneisen
and Courtney Ruffner Grieneisen write: The proceedings of the joint III
International Imagism/VII International Aldington Society Conference that was
held in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer on June 1-3, 2012 is due out in mid-to
late-May 2013. Titled, Ghosts in the Background Moving: Aldington and
Imagism, the proceedings are edited by Daniel Kempton, Matthew Nickel, and
H. R. Stoneback. The volume is a special issue of Florida English and Courtney
Ruffner Grieneisen and Jeff Grieneisen, associate editors of the journal, are
producing the volume. The cover art, a photograph of a very recognizable icon
of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer was provided by conference participant Anderson
Araujo.
Contributors to the volume include:
Anderson Araujo (University of British Columbia, Okanagan), Christos
Hadjiyiannis (University of Edinburgh), Daniel Kempton (SUNY New Paltz),
Jessica Conti (SUNY New Paltz), Justin Kishbaugh (Duquesne University), Anthony
Ozturk (Les Roches-Gruyère University), Jeff Grieneisen (State College of
Florida), Roy Verspoor (Suffolk County Community College), Alice Bailey Cheylan
(Université du Sud Toulon-Var), Valerie Hemingway (Montana State University,
Billings), H. R. Stoneback (SUNY New Paltz), Jared Young (SUNY Albany),
Courtney Ruffner Grieneisen (State College of Florida), and Matthew Nickel
(SUNY New Paltz).
**********
REVIEW: Bradshaw,
Melissa. Amy Lowell, Diva Poet. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 2011
Melissa Bradshaw’s 2011 publication, Amy Lowell, Diva Poet,
from Ashgate Publishing attempts to recontextualize the life and work of Amy
Lowell by viewing her through the critical lens of a cultural “diva.” While Bradshaw’s
book focuses on the ways in which Lowell’s physical demeanor and sexuality
affected others’ opinions of her and her work, and how Lowell’s unflinching
desire to become a celebrity ultimately undermined her position as a poet, Amy
Lowell, Diva Poet also makes numerous references to Lowell’s fellow Imagist
poet, Richard Aldington. Although the majority of these references simply
service Bradshaw’s recounting of Lowell’s role in the development and
popularization of Imagism—as well as her contentious relationship with Ezra
Pound—two interesting and potentially significant interactions between Lowell
and Aldington do bubble to the surface.
The
first of these interactions takes shape in a letter Lowell wrote, concerning
her belief in the necessity of World War I and her particular role in the war
effort, to Aldington while he was serving in the British Army. In that letter,
Lowell states:
For us women who cannot fight, and who are
handicapped in other ways from taking any active part, I feel that the truest
thing we can possibly do is just this … . We must keep the world going for the
rest of you when you come back. We must keep alive the spirit of beauty, of
gentleness, and of idealism. It may be that the war will go on so long that
these things will perish perforce for a time, but the whole strength of my mind
is now turned towards poetry—not that it always was not so, but the thing has
taken on a higher meaning and a greater reality, if that were possible, and I
think that when you come back from the army, the world you will have to work in
will be more inclined to listen than it ever was before. (qtd. 84)
Bradshaw goes
on to posit that Lowell’s belief that her writing of poetry could aid the war
effort might have served as the impetus behind her lecture series and book on Tendencies
in Modern American Poetry, which took the educating of Americans on how to
appreciate poetry as its purpose (84). For my part, however, the most
interesting aspect of this exchange between Lowell and Aldington concerns my
curiosity as to how Aldington—then actively serving in the Army—would have
received this letter from Lowell wherein she both states that “[n]obody can
hate war worse than I do, but I believe in this war with my whole heart and
soul, in the absolute necessity of it—melancholy as this is” and views herself
as actively supporting the Allied (and “associated”) forces by writing poetry
(qtd 84). Personally, I found myself left wondering how much this letter from
Lowell might have affected Aldington’s later view of his own poetry and poetry
in general.
The
second of these interactions between Lowell and Aldington that I find
particularly interesting involves Lowell’s criticism of the explicit sexual
themes and content found in both Aldington’s and D. H. Lawrence’s work.
Bradshaw states that “[t]hough much of the drama from [Lowell’s] poetry comes
from themes of adultery and sexual longing,” Lowell cautioned Aldington and
Lawrence that they would undermine their own success if they alienated the
average reader with those topics (55). Bradshaw interestingly goes on to argue
that
while Lowell’s concerns are in part
commercial (as editor of the Some Imagist Poets anthologies she “[felt] the
weight of responsibility as the go-between the poets on one side, and the
publishers and public on the other”) they are also grounded in the need to
express a sexuality that doesn’t fit within heterosexual paradigms, a desire to
articulate a queer eroticism that goes beyond the straight sexual “realism”
male modernists like Joyce, Lawrence, and Aldington so bravely portray (130).
Yet, even
though I validate and champion this reading of Lowell as a poet striving to
present a cultural countercurrent to the dominant heterosexual forces of her
time, I find Lowell’s overwhelming concern with success and becoming a
celebrity quite interesting in regards to her understanding and valuing of
Imagism. Specifically, these warnings to Aldington and Lawrence seem to suggest
that despite the amount of work Lowell put forth championing Imagism and
creating an audience for it, she—unlike Aldington and Lawrence—understood
success and popularity as more valuable than “direct treatment of the thing.”
Overall, I found Bradshaw’s
book intriguing and entertaining. It certainly does very good work analyzing
Lowell’s poetry, career, and involvement with Imagism. For those interested in
reading this book in order to discover new information on Aldington, though,
most of the references to him tread over the same well-worn paths. I, for one,
however, take solace in the fact that even when Aldington serves as a figure on
the sidelines of the major narrative, one can still find his presence within
and interactions with that story as illuminating.
Justin
Kishbaugh
**********
London-based NCLSN members might be
interested in the following public event, aimed at all readers. You don’t have
to be a critic, just interested in reading Ford. -AF
‘Reading
Ford’
King’s
College London, Room S2.39
2.30
p.m. 20 April 2013
All are welcome at ‘Reading Ford’, an open event organised by the
Society. With Ford currently attracting numerous new readers, it is an ideal
time to explore the book-group approach to reading him as well as more
individual experiences of his work.
Five speakers have been confirmed – honorary member Oliver Soskice,
Hilary Green, Michael Goldman, Walter Hall and Sally Kirkwood – and we hope
there will be the opportunity to have a more general discussion among those
present.
If you have any
queries, please email Sara.Haslam@open.ac.uk
**********
25th Ezra Pound International Conference: Ezra Pound
and Modernism
Dublin, Ireland, July 9 – 13, 2013
The 25th Ezra Pound International
Conference will be held in Dublin, a place Ezra Pound knew well, though he only
visited there briefly in February 1965. The conference’s main host will be
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland’s oldest university institution, founded in
1592 and located in the city centre. Our second host and other conference site
on Thursday, July 11, will be Mater Dei Institute, the college close to what
was Leopold Bloom’s residence at 7 Eccles Street.
The 2013 EPIC will open at
Trinity College Dublin on 10 July with a Welcoming Address by the Nobel
laureate Seamus Heaney. Individual plenary talks by distinguished
scholars throughout the week will be on such topics as Pound and Irish
Poetry, Pound and other writers (Beckett, Coleridge, Joyce, and Yeats), The
Cantos Project, New Translations of Pound’s poetry into German and Italian, the
Drafts & Fragments Notebooks, and Doing Justice to Pound. There
will also be four days of paper sessions and discussions on a wide range
of topics related to Pound’s works, life, and influence, as well as Poetry
Readings by Irish Poets and by Poundian Poets, and of course the popular EPIC
dinner (this time at the Gresham Hotel). Following the conference, 14-15
July, there will be an overnight excursion to Sligo, which will include
a stay at the 4-star Glasshouse Hotel in Sligo.
http://ezrapoundinternationalconference.uno.edu/
**********
Please consider giving an RA-based paper at
this conference! -AF
‘The
Good Soldier Centenary Conference’
Organised
in Association with the Ford Madox Ford Society
Swansea
University, 12-14 September 2013
Call
for Papers
Proposals are invited for an international conference on The Good
Soldier. Long regarded as Ford’s greatest early achievement, The Good
Soldier is one of the finest modernist novels in English. This conference
seeks to widen our comparative assessment of Ford’s first masterpiece, whose
centenary in 2015 will be marked by a special volume of essays in the annual
series of International Ford Madox Ford Studies.
We are keen to receive proposals from graduate students as well as
established scholars, and we especially welcome papers discussing The Good
Soldier in relation to Ford’s other writing: his essays, novels, short
stories, poetry, and life-writing.
A paper would be welcome on the 1981 television adaptation directed
by Kevin Billington and starring Jeremy Brett, Robin Ellis, Susan Fleetwood,
and Vickery Turner.
Connections might be made with the work of other writers who were
active in the years before the First World War or who later wrote about that
time. The pre-war period might also be extended to include the early years of
the war itself, a time, as David Jones suggested, when there was still ‘a certain
attractive amateurishness, and elbow-room for idiosyncrasy that connected one
with a less exacting past’.
Other writers
whose work might be considered alongside The Good Soldier include, for
example, Richard Aldington, Vera Brittain, Elizabeth Bowen, Joseph Conrad,
H.D., T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Oliver Madox Hueffer, Violet Hunt, Henry
James, David Jones, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Rose Macaulay,
Marcel Proust, Siegfried Sassoon, May Sinclair, Edward Thomas, Rebecca West,
Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf.
Other papers
might consider the novel’s ‘afterlife’: its influence and echoes from 1915 to
the present day.
Please send proposals of up to 300 words for 20-minute papers to the
conference organiser, Geraint Evans, by 3 May 2013: Geraint.Evans@swansea.ac.uk
Further
information will be posted on the conference’s website:
http://goodsoldier2013.weebly.com/