The Editor writes: please note my new contact details above. I’m delighted to say that from 1 August 2015 I will be Lecturer
in English at Edinburgh Napier University. This appointment should also
facilitate the regular appearance of the NCLS, as I will more consistently be
undertaking academic work. I thank you all for your patience in waiting for
newsletter updates in the last eighteen months.
**********
The noted scholar of war poetry Jon Stallworthy
died in November 2014. Professor Stallworthy was a particular supporter of
Wilfred Owen and Louis MacNeice, and made many valuable contributions to the
discussion of First World War poetry. NCLS member Adrian Barlow responds to
Stallworthy’s death and his thoughts on ‘war poetry’ as a category on
his blog (CTRL + click links).
Obituaries in major UK newspapers can be found
as follows: Guardian;
Telegraph;
Independent.
**********
Vivien
Whelpton’s biography was reviewed
by Robert Crawford in the London Review of Books (vol. 37, no. 2) on
22 January 2015. If you register for free, you can access the review (and all
other online LRB material) for 24 hours.
**********
It was pleasing
to note that in
a recent blog, Times Literary Supplement assistant editor Michael
Caines discussed RA’s ‘Knowledge and the Novelist’, his penultimate article for
the magazine he served with such distinction through the 1920s as its French
Literature correspondent. Caines engages sympathetically with Aldington’s
searching test of novelists’ understanding of the world in which they lives,
and discusses the response to the article in correspondence.
**********
RA’s work
continues to be read, discovered and co-opted in disparate places. One website
which returns to Aldington’s work on a regular basis is the campaign website
Stop NATO, which opposes global militarism. The organisation’s head, Rick
Rozoff, has posted a number of selections from Aldington’s writings about war,
both poetry and prose. A recent post on the site collects
links to RA’s work.
A useful pointer
can also be found at Little
Review Reviews, which looks at many of the influential journals of the
early twentieth century a hundred years on.
**********
Professor
Vincent Sherry (Washington University in St Louis) referred to Richard
Aldington in a talk at Grinnell College, Iowa, as reported
in that institution’s newsletter. Sherry, perhaps best known as the author
of the seminal The Great War and the Language of Modernism (Cambridge
UP, 2003) and a former President of the Modernist Studies Association, also
discusses RA’s Imagist poetry in his
recent book Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence (Cambridge
UP, 2014).
**********
Editor Andrew
Frayn touched on RA’s Death of a Hero in his paper ‘Counting the Cost: The First World War, Calculability and
Rationalism’ at Aftermath: The Cultural Legacies of World War I, a
conference organised by NCLS member Max Saunders (21-3 May 2015, King’s College
London). Professor Shawn Tucker of Elon University spoke on ‘The
Wasteland as War Literature: Verdenal, Aldington, Survivor Guilt, and Freudian
Defence Mechanism Humour’. Correspondent Caroline
Zilboorg presented on ‘Gregory Zilboorg’s The Passing of the Old Order:
A Russian Jewish Psychoanalyst’s Struggle for Perspective’.
**********
H.D. and Feminist Poetics
September
17-19, 2015
To commemorate the
sesquicentennial anniversary of Lehigh University, the Department of English
will host a conference that celebrates the life, works, and legacies of
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania's own Hilda Doolittle. The conference will also feature
an "H.D. and Biography" roundtable that showcases new and emerging
biographical projects focusing on H.D. herself or on individuals who
were significant in her life.
In related news, the English Department
at Lehigh University is delighted to announce that H.D. will
be awarded a posthumous honorary degree at the spring commencement
ceremony. One of H. D.’s relatives, Beth Wolle McKay, who was herself among the
cohort of first women at Lehigh in the 1970s, will accept the degree on H. D.’s
behalf. We look forward to celebrating this honor at the H.D. and Feminist
Poetics conference in September.
Please contact Jenny Hyest at jehc@lehigh.edu
for further details.
**********
Notice was given
in the last NCLSN of the publication of Lucy McDiarmid’s Poets and the
Peacock Dinner. The book was also reviewed in
the New Yorker on 24th February. List members and Aldingtonians
may well take issue with the notion that RA is ‘all but forgotten’, as the reviewer
Dan Chiasson suggests.
Book
Reviews
Lucy McDiarmid, Poets and the Peacock Dinner: The Literary
History of a Meal (Oxford UP, 2014)
Lucy McDiarmid has used a legendary photograph, taken
on 18 January 1914, to embark on an intriguing literary and cultural journey.
From this apparently small event she has coaxed some fruitful insights into the
rivalries and collaborations of the seven men caught by E.F. Shipley’s camera.
The dinner to honour Wilfrid Scawen Blunt took place at his Sussex home,
Newbuildings, and was a self-conscious effort by a group of younger poets to
link themselves with an exemplar of an older generation.
‘The Peacock Dinner’ photograph first
caught my attention many years ago at The Harry Ransom Research Center, and
subsequently I was shown, and allowed to handle, another copy of it at the home
of F.S. Flint’s son and granddaughter. It is reproduced regularly in
biographies and in critical and literary histories of twentieth century
modernism.
The dinner came about as the result of the
collective efforts of Ezra Pound, Lady Augusta Gregory, W.B. Yeats, and Blunt.
There is, thus, a strong Irish element to the background of this story, and no
one is better placed or qualified than McDiarmid, with her deep knowledge of
Irish cultural history, to unravel and clarify the details and complexities.
McDiarmid stresses the importance of the intimate friendships that existed
between Blunt and Lady Gregory, between Lady Gregory and Yeats, and between
Yeats and Pound. McDiarmid examines the sonnets that Lady Gregory wrote after
her affair with Blunt had ended, and indicates that from then on “[t]heirs was
no longer an intimacy between lovers but between writers.” It was Pound who
strongly wanted to meet Blunt, and the original idea was for Blunt to be
invited up to London for a dinner at the Dieudonné Restaurant, but in the end
“the mixed bag of London poets that Yeats and Pound were able to round up”
[Yeats and Pound, plus Richard Aldington, F.S. Flint, Sturge Moore and Victor
Plarr] made their way to Newbuildings. Instead of attending an avant-garde Soho
get-together Blunt would host them on home ground in an upper-class English
manor house. What were the motives behind this desire to make some sort of
connection with Blunt? A crucial factor was his provocative and outspoken
anti-imperialism. One example of Blunt’s domestic political activism occurred
in 1888, when his public protest against the eviction of Irish tenants led to
his being sentenced to a two-month jail sentence. The visiting poets too were
in turn being provocative since they would be sharing in his notoriety, and
challenging the literary establishment. McDiarmid points out that they were not
so much drawn to the literary conservatism of his conventional poetry as to his
scandalous glamour, a major source of which was his link to Byron (he married
Byron’s granddaughter). Pound was intrigued by Blunt’s “potent mix of sex,
politics, aristocracy, and poetry” (Blunt was a serial womaniser).
Lady Gregory was behind two of the
most significant elements of the dinner: the peacock on which they would all
dine and the marble box that would contain poetic offerings from the visitors.
As McDiarmid points out, Lady Gregory would have been innocently unaware of the
fact that the peacock served to emphasise “the display of male courting
behaviour” and that the gift of the presentation marble box carved by
Gaudier-Brzeska and decorated with a blatantly nude female figure “embodied a
message about the sexual implications of the dinner and anticipated the sexual
and professional rivalry of its three celebrity poets”.
Speeches were exchanged and poems
were read – opportunities for conflict and competition. Turning to the
photograph, McDiarmid emphasises that “the jostling for status, the oblique
antagonisms, and the hierarchical alignments are visible . . .” The photograph
presents a very neat symmetry, with its conspicuous “celebrity gap between the
center and the margins”, and one wonders how this might have been vitiated had
Frederic Manning and John Masefield attended. Even more disruptive would have
been the presence of H.D. as a woman and as another modernist poet. Chapter 5,
‘Alliances and Rivalries’, provides a detailed and fascinating analysis of the
various means by which the participants jockeyed for position, or did not, as
in the case of Flint: “he hadn’t used women for professional advancement”.
Flint also resented the fact that he felt, probably correctly, that he had only
been invited to act as minuting secretary/reporter by taking down notes in
shorthand of the event.
Towards the end of her scholarly and
engaging investigation into this event, McDiarmid writes: “The peacock dinner,
then, should not be seen as a discrete event, an eccentric gathering of random
poets for a unique and peculiar testimonial occasion, but as one point in a
long continuum, a series of interlocking personal connections . . . The
photograph freezes the moment when the seven male poets, professional poets in
seven different ways, stood in their symmetrical arrangement, together and
apart.”
Michael Copp
**********
Vivien Whelpton, Richard Aldington: Poet, Soldier and Lover,
1911–1929. Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2014. 414pp. ISBN 978 0 7188
9318 7. PB £30.00; EPUB £23.86; PDF £31.80.
Twenty-five years after Charles Doyle’s previous biography, Vivien
Whelpton’s compendious new life of Richard Aldington covers the most important
phase of his career, from aspiring poet to successful novelist via his military
service. Whelpton’s impressive research for Richard Aldington: Poet,
Soldier and Lover, 1911–1929 draws on and makes available in print for the
first time a vast array of archival material, as well as making use of the
myriad romàns a clé by the Imagist circle and their many acquaintances.
The volume adds to Doyle’s less detailed but more comprehensive volume,
expanded and embellished by valuable editions of correspondence that were not
available to Doyle including Norman T. Gates’s Richard Aldington: An
Autobiography in Letters (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992),
Michael Copp’s Imagist Dialogues: Letters between Aldington, Flint and
Others (Lutterworth Press, 2009), and Caroline Zilboorg’s two selections of
the Aldington–H. D. Letters, combined as Richard Aldington and H. D.: Their
Lives in Letters, 1918–61 (Manchester University Press, 2003). These all
work, implicitly or explicitly, to correct unfair and inaccurate portraits of
Aldington that derive from selective (mis)readings of him and his work in a
number of biographies of H. D., notably Janice S. Robinson’s H. D.: the Life
and Work of and American Poet (Houghton Mifflin, 1982) and Barbara Guest’s Herself
Defined (Doubleday, 1984).
Whelpton continues this tradition of treating Aldington
more sympathetically. Even where many previous accounts of these situations
have seen him as culpable or antagonistic, here he gets a fair hearing.
Whelpton notes that in the case of H. D.’s pregnancy by Cecil Gray, Aldington
‘was agonisingly aware that it was his behaviour that had caused this mess’
(189). While he is not excused, as the memorable description of John Cournos
as ‘the emotional refuse bin for both Aldingtons’ demonstrates (127), it is
refreshing to read an empathetic account, one which realises that decisions
about relationships and sexual conduct are not taken lightly, however easy they
are to judge as such in retrospect. This is particularly pertinent given
Aldington’s sensitive and thoughtful approach to life and love, even if that
approach came at times from unusual positions and arrived at unorthodox
conclusions.
The volume begins by moving briskly from Aldington’s
south coast childhood through his brief time at the University of London,
getting promptly to his burgeoning literary career and mature relationships.
This material will be familiar to readers of previous biographical works such
as Helen Carr’s magisterial The Verse Revolutionaries (Jonathan Cape,
2009), although Whelpton gives interesting additional detail in showing his
journey to finding a literary identity. Situating him in terms of the older
and more settled Pound and Flint is revealing. The volume reminds us that
Aldington was still growing up and finding his feet as a man as well as a
literary figure: it’s all too easy to forget that he was only twenty years old
in 1912 when his first poems were published in Harriet Monroe’s
recently-founded Poetry magazine.
Whelpton posits that Aldington’s military experiences
and their subsequent impact have been neglected by previous biographers (19),
and works to address this. The focus on the effect upon him of the First World
War is of course timely, as centenary commemorations show little sign of
abating. A maelstrom of contradictions and conflicting emotions characterises
the period after Aldington’s enlistment, as Whelpton notes: he was ‘robust and
healthy’ (130), but repulsed by the grime of army fatigues; chaotically busy in
service but able to find serenity at weekends and on leave with H. D.; the
sensitive, sensual, romantic, thoughtful poet, repelled by the coarseness of
intoxication and misogynist sexuality central to military relaxation, but also
showing ‘a genuine delight in his fellow men’ (129) at their kindnesses and
willingness to make the best of the situation. Aldington also served for an unusually
long time in the lines and was in France, barring training periods, for almost
two years, during which he endured gas bombardment. He was physically and
mentally affected by the war during it, immediately after it, and also long
after the explosions of the subsequent global conflict faded. Whelpton
addresses this well, and it will surely be a key aspect of her projected volume
on the latter part of Aldington’s life.
Poet, Soldier and Lover
makes it clear that, in addition to his well-known expertise as poet,
translator, editor, later novelist and biographer, Aldington was an acute
critic of industrial modernity. From the 1912–13 ‘Letters in Italy’ in The
New Age journal, their tone not unfairly described by Whelpton as ‘that of
a 20-year-old aspiring to be cosmopolitan, witty and knowing’ (61), Aldington
is alert to the problems of mass culture, his brash critique suffused with a
youthful verve that has its own charm. Even at such an early age, he was a
perceptive commentator. But it is his assessments of the war and its aftermath—his
journalism written in the shadow of the conflict as he was struggling to write
creatively—that really show him as engaged fully with the world. The
quotations from his 1920–22 articles in Poetry show the extent of his
post-war struggle. He complains in a 1920 ‘Letter from London’ that ‘the whole
of Europe is in an ungodly mess as a result of the war [...] almost the whole
life of the nation has become commercialised; [...] art and artists are in a
lamentable state of disorder and neglect’ (242). Pleasingly, Whelpton devotes
a reasonable amount of analysis to the works of the post-war decade such as A
Fool i’ the Forest (1924), and returns to the quotation on the original
dustcover to situate the poem (presumably with Aldington’s input?) as ‘the contest
between the ideals of the old Art civilisation and the new Trade civilisation’
(265). Aldington sees the creative act as inextricable from wider
circumstances. As a professional writer without financial patronage, who
consequently really needed the money from his commissions, he was more than
many other modernist writers subject to the caprice of the market. The
post-war situation in the UK was even more precarious for many without
Aldington’s literary skill and contacts.
Indeed, the sections dealing with the war and the 1920s
are the volume’s strongest. Whelpton’s biography really shines when Aldington
is necessarily the focus. When Aldington is part of a group he often manages
both to be pivotal and operate on its fringes. At least, he often saw himself
as marginal in groups where to others he seemed central. His youth put him in
the awkward position of feeling a need to show deference to elders in a
modernist group prizing youthful iconoclasm. He also felt out of step due to
his unstable upbringing and lack of a university education. Negotiating these
issues while his character was being formed led to a personality that was
collegial but determinedly individualistic. During the war Aldington continued
to write and edit but his situation, both geographical and emotional, meant
that he became increasingly detached from his pre-war networks. Whelpton draws
out well the ways in which his experiences set him apart from figures such as
H. D., F. S. Flint and Ezra Pound. They did not or could not fight and, while
all were largely sympathetic to the others’ literary aims, Aldington was
singular in his approach. That increasing separation allows him to shine for
himself and not be compared to others, rather than paling in comparison to the
spare beauty of H. D.’s Imagist verse or Pound’s brio as Imagism’s P. T.
Barnum. The end of the 1920s is evoked well, particularly the personal
maelstrom that Aldington suffered as he had the burst of productivity and
explored the painful memories that saw the manuscript of Death of a Hero
finished.
I find the book most problematic in its literary
judgments. Notions of what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ poetry do not seem to have a
clear rationale, and Aldington is sometimes found wanting where I would prefer
a more empathetic reading of the text, an attempt to understand his writing
rather than holding him to account and subject to evaluative aesthetics. For
example, Aldington’s city poems such as ‘Cinema Exit’ and ‘In the Tube’ are
deemed Aldington’s ‘least satisfying’ by Whelpton (96). However, to me this is
just the point of the poem. It is not meant to satisfy; it is meant to jolt
the reader into a realisation of the potential problems of industrial
modernity. Whelpton concludes that he does not reconcile the worlds of what
John Gould Fletcher describes as ‘a sense of the sordidness of existence, of
the wayward and casual beauty with which nature decks that sordidness’ (96).
This I read as a sophistication of Aldington’s poetry, and part of the
modernist belief that poetry should be didactic and engaging, rather than
determinative: he invites readers to consider their own position and find their
own solutions. Aldington’s project is a different one to those of poets such
as Eliot, Graves and Sassoon, to whom he is implicitly or explicitly compared
and found wanting (e.g. 208). He seeks to avoid reinforcing the discourse of
the English elite. While he is most often analysed in terms of the tenets of
Imagism (here and generally), he was quickly dissatisfied with that mode and
its focus on precision and distance, values which fed into the critical model
for the analysis of literature that was being formalised in essays such as
Eliot’s germinal ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919). Aldington is a
more emotional poet who is prepared to defend that position, as Whelpton notes,
although we see him wrestling with this position in correspondence with Herbert
Read in 1925 (259). He is also prepared to recognise the value of this in
other works, such as when he describes Journey’s End as ‘Bad art,
perhaps, but the stuff of life & deep emotion’ (324).
Whelpton’s volume would also benefit from drawing
further attention to the previously-unpublished manuscripts that are included
and quoted from. Material is present all the way through the volume that has
previously been unavailable outside of research libraries not always easily
accessible. One wonders if the location of the Aldington archive at Southern
Illinois University has contributed to its neglect, although the Morris Library
have been excellent keepers of these valuable works. I draw attention here
particularly to instances such as the poem beginning ‘It is bitter, watching
the bright leaves fall’ (239) that meditates on love and separation but is
presented suggestively at the end of the chapter detailing his split from H.
D. An attempt at dating and some analysis of the poem would enhance the
availability of this delicate, elegaic and previously-unknown work.
Whelpton’s
account is formidably thorough, and a valuable addition to the biographical
resources previously available to the Aldington scholar; it will also be useful
to students of the First World War, modernist literature, and the early
twentieth century. NCLS members will welcome this new account, and those with
institutional affiliations should certainly order the volume for their
libraries. Poet, Soldier and Lover is a well-finished, attractive book
even if the main print is a little small. This is almost certainly due to the
pressures of producing a manageably-sized physical object from the wealth of
information it contains. The photographs give a real sense of the people and
places that feature. However, in the digital world, I find it hard to
understand how a pdf file can be more expensive than a paperback book,
particularly when most presses now produce pdfs in the proofing process. I
hope that when the initial pressing sells out and the volume has broken even, a
lower pricing point might appeal to a greater readership while the First World War
and its literature are highly visible. Vivien Whelpton has made an important
contribution to Aldington scholarship, and I await the proposed volumes
detailing Aldington’s early and late years with interest.
Andrew Frayn