A guest post by Lee Jenkins, on her new book Great War Modernists: D.H. Lawrence, H.D., Richard Aldington.
My interest in Richard Aldington goes back to the early 1990s, when I was researching the Irish modernist poet Thomas MacGreevy, whose 1930 monograph, Richard Aldington: An Englishman, remains required reading for Aldington scholars. I encountered Aldington again much later, in the course of research for my book The American Lawrence (University Press of Florida, 2015). I presented a paper at the 2017 Lawrence in London conference on Lawrence’s relationships, in 1917 at 44 Mecklenburgh Square in Bloomsbury, with H.D. and Aldington: this paper was the germ of my new book, Great War Modernists: D.H. Lawrence, H.D. and Richard Aldington.
The book explores the three-way collaborations—and tensions—between these modernists in time of war in chapters which address their autographic or biographical fictions—Aldington’s Death of a Hero, Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod and H.D.’s Bid Me to Live; their co-operation in the Some Imagist Poets anthologies of the war years; and their work as poet-translators during and in response to the First World War.
Of the three writers I discuss, Aldington has fallen out of the critical conversation and one of my main aims in the book is to put him back in the literary historical context of the Great War and post-war decade in which he belongs and which, as an editor and poet, novelist and translator in his own right, he did much to shape.
Aldington is routinely vilified in much H.D. scholarship and yet as Caroline Zilboorg has shown, the collaboration between H.D. and Aldington—their intertextual relationship—would outlast their fraught interpersonal relationship and is key to understanding the work of both writers. With significant exceptions such as Andrew Frayn’s 2014 study Writing Disenchantment, Aldington himself is an absent presence in recent scholarship, falling between the stools of modernist and First World War studies: he is mentioned only in passing in both Vincent Sherry’s The Great War and the Language of Modernism (2007) and Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975).
My book attempts to bring these scholarly fields together by recuperating Aldington as a combatant-modernist whose poetry shows that Imagism, after its pre-war origins, could be repurposed as an effective mode of First World War verse in which experiment and experience are mutually reinforcing rather than mutually exclusive categories.
Aldington’s experiments with the prose poem and faux translation in the war years, in the poems of Reverie and The Love of Myrrhine and Konallis, merit fresh attention, I argue, by scholars of modernism and translation/classical reception. New editions of Aldington are surely called for: a selected poems and an unexpurgated and annotated edition of Death of a Hero would be welcomed by those of us who teach and research Aldington and who encourage our students to write about him.
Lee M. Jenkins
Professor of English, University College Cork
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