Aldington/Imagism conference, 22-24 June 2024, Sury-en-Vaux, France (proposal deadline 2 Feb 2024)

The work of the Imagist Society will continue, and is being formalised as a Society.

The Imagist Society has previously co-hosted conferences on Richard Aldington, and will do so for a final time as its first event in 2024. I’m grateful to them for hosting this event, which was planned for summer 2020. The venue, in France’s beautiful Sancerre region, will be held at Chavignol, and will include a trip to Sury-en-Vaux, where Aldington lived for the last years of his life and is buried.

The event details can be found here. It’d be great to see plenty of papers on Aldington; the deadline for proposals is 2 February 2024. Submission details are at the preceding link.

Andrew Frayn

Survival to Exile: programme

SURVIVAL AND EXILE

Richard Aldington’s response to his war

Saturday 2 December 2023

Richard Aldington’s Exile and Other Poems was published on 29 November 1923.  This one-day conference celebrates its centenary, along with the publication of a new edition by the Renard Press, edited and annotated by Aldington scholars Elizabeth Vandiver and Vivien Whelpton. 

Aldington (1892-1962) was one of the original Imagist poets, and the only Imagist who became a combatant. His name heads the list of the sixteen poets of the First World War commemorated in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey.  He was one of only three of those sixteen who survived the war, had extensive combat experience, and suffered serious shell-shock, which would have profound long-term physical, mental and social effects.

The venue is Northeastern University London, Devon House, 58 St Katharine’s Way, London E1W 1LP. It is fully accessible.

The registration fee is £75 and covers the cost of venue hire, tea and coffee, lunch, and a copy of Exile and Other Poems.

It will be possible to attend and present remotely; there will be a charge of £10 for online attendance (a copy of the book can be added to this for a further cost which covers volume, post and packing).

Those attendees wishing to book an overnight stay on the 1 or 2 December (or both nights) can access a discounted rate at the Tower Hotel (St Katharine’s Way, London E1W 1LD) here: The Tower Hotel

To register for the conference, click here: Survival to Exile registration

Conference programme

10.00              Registration and coffee

10.30              Welcome and introduction: Dr. Catherine Brown and Professor Elizabeth Vandiver

10.40              First panel: Narrative and Time

                        Introduction: Dr Andrew Frayn

10.45              Dr Lizzie Hibbert: ‘Deep Time in Death of a Hero’

Philip Chester: ‘Richard Aldington’s ‘Compensation’: Paradigmatic Event and Symbolic Extrication’

Michael Copp: ‘Paris, Parallax and the Parthenon: Aldington and the Modernist Long Poem’

Professor Max Saunders: ‘“My own murdered self”: Aldington’s Anger’

12.45              Lunch and launch of the new edition of Exile, published by Renard Press

1.45                Second panel: Bodies and Minds

                        Introduction: Dr Kate Kennedy  

1.50                Rory Hutchings: ‘”Wobbling carrion roped upon a cart…”: anti-commemoration and the corpse in Richard Aldington’s poetry’

                        Professor Daniel Kempton: ‘Richard Aldington’s “Bones”’

Dr Olga Shvailikova: ‘Aspects of war neurosis in Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero and Pat Barker’s Regeneration’

3.20                Coffee

3.35                Third panel: Richard Aldington and His Contemporaries

                        Introduction: Dr Jane Potter

3.40                Dr Caroline Zilboorg: ‘Bridging the War: Dramatic Fools in the Work of Richard Aldington and Gregory Zilboorg’

Dr Susan Reid: ‘Murdered selves: Richard Aldington and Rachel Annand Taylor in 1923’

Professor Lee Jenkins: ‘Richard Aldington, An Englishman and Thomas McGreevy, An Irishman: Great War Imagists’

5.10                Closing remarks

Speaker biographies

Philip Chester is a retired high school teacher and Aldington enthusiast living in Deep River, Ontario. Last July, he gave a paper at the International D.H. Lawrence Conference in Taos, New Mexico as an independent scholar on Lawrence’s poem ‘Whales Weep Not’.

Michael Copp has an MSt in Modernist Studies. He has presented conference papers on Aldington, Imagism, Pound, Sassoon, and F S Flint. Among his books are: An Imagist at War: The Complete War Poems of Richard Aldington; The Fourth Imagist: Selected Poems of F. S. Flint; Imagist Dialogues: Letters between Aldington, Flint and Others. He has translated the war poems of Apollinaire and Cocteau and the war novels of Léon Werth.

Dr Lizzie Hibbert recently completed a PhD on the idea of deep time in English fiction published in the aftermath of the First World War at King’s College London. She has published a two-part history of the critical reception of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End in Last Post: A Literary Journal from the Ford Madox Ford Society , an article on war and extractivism in The Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, and a biographical portrait of Richard Aldington.

Rory Hutchings is a PhD student in the school of English at the University of Kent. His main research interests are animal studies and modernism. He is a member of the Kent Animal Humanities Network and edits the University of Kent’s peer-reviewed postgraduate journal Litterae Mentis.

Professor Lee Jenkins is Professor of English at University College Cork. She is the co-editor of three Cambridge University Press collections, Locations of Literary Modernism, The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry and A History of Modernist Poetry. Her monograph, The American Lawrence, was published in 2015. She is currently completing a book for Bloomsbury’s ‘Historicising Modernism’ series on Lawrence, H.D. and Richard Aldington.

Professor Daniel Kempton taught for many years in the English Department of SUNY New Paltz. He co-directed seven biennial conferences devoted to Aldington and his circle (2002-2014) and coedited four volumes of proceedings. He has delivered conference papers on various aspects of Aldington’s work and edited several of his unpublished essays as well as his Russian journal.

Dr Susan Reid is the editor of the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies. She is the author of D. H. Lawrence, Music and Modernism and co-editor of the Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, the essay collection Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism and the journal of Katherine Mansfield Studies (2010-12). She is currently writing a novel about Rachel Annand Taylor.

Professor Max Saunders is Interdisciplinary Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life; Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature); Imagined Futures: Writing, Science, and Modernity in the To-Day and To-Morrow Book Series, 1923-31; and Ford Madox Ford: Critical Lives.

Dr Olga Shvailikova is a Senior Lecturer at Francisk Skorina Gomel State University, Belarus. She has published on Pat Barker, Sebastian Faulks, the Great War, trauma studies and contemporary British writers. Her academic interests include fiction interpretation, the British contemporary novel, modernism and postmodernism.

Dr Caroline Zilboorg is a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, and a scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council. Her books include Richard Aldington and H.D.: Their Lives in Letters, The Masks of Mary Renault: A Literary Biography, a biography of the psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg and the novel Transgressions. She lives in Brittany.

Organiser and chair biographies

Dr. Catherine Brown is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Graduate Research School at Northeastern University London. Her research is mainly in the fields of modernism, D. H. Lawrence, Anglo-Russian relations and vegan literary studies. She is a Vice-President of the Lawrence Society, and in 2020 co-edited with Susan Reid The Edinburgh Companion to D.H. Lawrence and the Arts. She recently wrote the chapter on ‘Modernism’ in The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies, 2022, and is writing a chapter on ‘D.H. Lawrence: Proto-Vegan’ for the forthcoming The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Anthropocene.

Dr Andrew Frayn is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture at Edinburgh Napier University and Past Chair of the British Association for Modernist Studies. He is author of Writing Disenchantment: British First World War Prose, 1914-30 and has written a number of chapters and articles on related authors including Richard Aldington, Ford Madox Ford, and C. E. Montague. 

Dr Kate Kennedy is a Supernumerary Research Fellow of Wolfson College, and Co-Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing. She publishes and broadcasts widely on music and literature of the First World War, including as editor of The Silent Morning: Culture, Memory and the Armistice 1918, and author of Dweller in Shadows- A Life of Ivor Gurney (2021). 

Dr Jane Potter is Reader in Publishing at Oxford Brookes University. She works on early twentieth-century writing by women, popular fiction, publishing history, and First World War writings. Her books include Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women’s Literary Responses to the Great War 1914; Working in a World of Hurt: Trauma and Resilience in the Narratives of Medical Personnel in Warzones (with Carol Acton, 2015); Handbook of British Literature and Culture of the First World War (ed. with R. Schneider, 2021). Her new edition of the selected letters of Wilfred Own is to be published shortly.

Professor Elizabeth Vandiver was, until her retirement, Clement Biddle Penrose Professor of Latin and Classics at Whitman College. She is the author of Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War. She has published numerous articles on classical reception in early 20th-century English poetry. She is currently completing a book on classical receptions in Richard Aldington’s works from the 1910s, 20s, and 30s.

CfP: Survival and Exile: Richard Aldington’s response to his war, London, Sat 2 Dec 2023

Richard Aldington’s Exile and Other Poems was published on 29 November 1923.  This one-day conference celebrates its centenary, along with the publication of a new edition by the Renard Press, edited and annotated by Aldington scholars Elizabeth Vandiver and Vivien Whelpton.  This will be the first UK conference devoted to Aldington since 1986, and the organisers are keen to encounter and encourage new scholarship on this neglected author.

Aldington (1892-1962) was one of the original Imagist poets, and the only Imagist who became a combatant. His name heads the list of the sixteen poets of the First World War commemorated in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey.  He was one of only three of those sixteen who survived the war, had extensive combat experience, and suffered serious shell-shock, which would have profound long-term physical, mental and social effects. (The other two were Edmund Blunden and Robert Graves.)

Aldington dealt with the trauma of his wartime experience in both verse and prose. The verse includes his Images of War (1919), Exile and Other Poems (1923)and the long poem A Fool I’ the Forest (1925); in prose both his best-selling satirical novel Death of a Hero (1929) and the moving collection of short stories, Roads to Glory (1930) dealt directly with the war, while the aftermath is addressed less overtly in many of his subsequent novels and non-fictional works. The bitterness with which his war experience left him was still evident over twenty-five years later in his controversial biography of Lawrence of Arabia (1955) from which, arguably, his reputation has never fully recovered.  Exile was his first substantial attempt to process the trauma of his war experience in poetry, to that point his dominant creative form.

The organisers welcome papers on the following topics:

• the poetry of Exile and/or A Fool i’ the Forest
• the representation of war trauma in Death of a Hero, All Men Are Enemies and/or Roads to Glory
• comparisons between Aldington’s postwar writing and others in his network (e.g. H.D., D.H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford)
• comparisons between Death of a Hero and other war novels of the late 1920s
• comparisonsbetween the poems of Exile and the aftermath poetry of other surviving First World War poets
• shell shock (or post-traumatic stress) and poetry

While the focus of the conference is on Exile, the aftermath of war, and related issues, submissions of abstracts for papers relating to other aspects of Aldington’s work will also be considered.

Abstracts should be no more than 250 words for a 20-minute paper. Please send your abstract and a brief biography (no more than 100 words) to Dr Andrew Frayn at a.frayn@napier.ac.uk. 

The closing date for submissions is Friday 28 April 2023.

Notification of acceptance of proposals will be communicated by Tuesday 30 May 2023. All submissions will be read and adjudicated by Dr Catherine Brown, Associate Professor of English, Northeastern University London, UK; Dr Andrew Frayn, Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture, Edinburgh Napier University, UK; Professor Elizabeth Vandiver, Professor Emerita of Classics at Whitman College, WA, USA.

There will be a registration fee, which will include tea and coffee, lunch, and a copy of Exile and Other Poems.  We will keep this fee as low as possible, but will not be able to finalise it until a later stage.

The venue is Northeastern University London, Devon House, 58 St Katharine’s Way, London E1W 1LP (Google Maps link).  It is fully accessible.

It will be possible to attend and present remotely; we hope that this will open the event up to Aldington scholars and enthusiasts across the globe.  There will still be a small charge for online attendance.

Organising committee: Dr Catherine Brown, Dr Andrew Frayn, Professor Elizabeth Vandiver, Vivien Whelpton (Aldington Biographer).

Separately, following the tradition of biannual Richard Aldington/Imagist conferences prior to the pandemic, plans are underway for a new association, The Imagist Society.  This will host a summer 2024 Imagist Society Conference where the works of Imagist writers such as Aldington, Ford, Pound, Doolittle, Lowell and others can continue to be researched and studied in a formal setting.  For details, please contact Dr Courtney Ruffner Grieneisen at ruffnec@scf.edu.

In memoriam: H.R. Stoneback

It is with sadness that we announce the death of H. R. (“Stoney”) Stoneback on December 22 at his home in Highland, NY.

He taught at SUNY New Paltz for 50 years, retiring in 2019, and in 2004 earned the rank of SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor. He was an internationally renowned Hemingway scholar, author of Reading Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (Kent State UP, 2007), former president of the Hemingway Society, and organizer of two International Hemingway Society conferences.

While planning the first of these, in les Stes-Maries-de-la-Mer in 1998, he met Catherine Aldington, and out of their conversations about her father came the idea for a conference on Richard Aldington. The conference was held in June 2000 in Catha’s living room, at Mas les Pellegrins, drawing a small but committed group of scholars and students. (The mentorship of students was supremely important to him, and many have themselves gone on to academic careers.) The conference was such a success that plans were made to hold another in 2002, and Stoney would eventually co-direct nine biennial conferences, from 2002 to 2018, with steadily increasing attendance of conferees from the United States and Europe.

No doubt, some of you reading this notice made the delightful trip to the south of France and participated in these conferences. Or perhaps to Brunnenburg Castle, Venice, or Philadelphia, where the conference, in an expanded format including the Imagists, was held in later years. Stoney co-edited Imagism: Essays on Its Initiation, Impact, and Influence (Ezra Pound Center for Literature Book Series 5, 2013), which collected papers from the 2012 conference in Brunneburg, as well as five other volumes of conference proceedings (Gregau Press and Florida English).

Notable in these volumes is the appearance for the first time in print of Aldington papers from the Morris Library of Southern Illinois University and Aldington materials in Catha’s personal collection. Stoney’s contributions to the study of Aldington and literary Modernism are invaluable.

Of course, he was also a poet, singer, and raconteur par excellence. His intelligence, charm, conviviality—his passion for living—will be greatly missed.

Daniel Kempton

Vivien Whelpton on Richard Aldington in Frances Wilson’s Burning Man (2021)

Frances Wilson’s biography of D H Lawrence, Burning Man (Bloomsbury 2021), is a provocative and enthralling read. However, her account of Richard Aldington’s role both in Lawrence’s life and in writing about him is one that those who know Aldington will find not merely controversial but just plain wrong! Early on in the book, Wilson refers to him as Lawrence’s ‘so-called friend’ so the reader is prepared for the adverse assessment that follows – very shortly afterwards!

Aldington, we are told, resembled Middleton Murry, as both were ‘handsome and priapic intellectual opportunists who would make a career out of knowing Lawrence.’ The difference between them, however, is that ‘Murry and Lawrence had at least been friends, but Aldington, who met Lawrence on no more than a handful of occasions and never liked him, became the self-appointed guide to his life and work.’ (The comment is perhaps a dangerous one for any biographer to make. What are we but self-appointed guides?) Wilson continues: ‘While Lawrence had nothing much to say about Aldington, Aldington was incontinent on the subject of Lawrence.’ (The italics are mine.)

Let’s address these assertions:

… met Lawrence on no more than a handful of occasions:

Aldington and Lawrence in fact had a close relationship. Here are the occasions of their meetings:

1. 30 July 1914: Amy Lowell’s dinner at the Berkeley to introduce Lawrence to Aldington and H.D. Subsequently (27 August) Lowell took H.D. and Aldington with her to visit Lawrence and Frieda in Chesham. 

2. Hampstead August – December 1915: there was much closer contact between the two couples when they were living only five minutes’ walk away from each other, between August and December of 1915. This was the period in which Lawrence and H.D. became close. Julia in Bid Me To Live says: ‘He was the only one who seemed remotely to understand what I felt when I was so ill’ (the ‘illness’ being the still birth of her child in May and the consequences of that trauma). In 1933 Aldington told a correspondent that Lawrence was the only person who had understood what was wrong between himself and H.D. at the time, but added,’ I couldn’t talk of it to him – it was too painful.’ He and H.D. also supported Lawrence through the aftermath of the Rainbow trial. (Aldington’s accounts of this in both Life for Life’s Sake and Portrait of a Genius, But … are hugely sympathetic.) When Lowell – in her New England puritanism (and also her snobbery: she wrote to Aldington: ‘I think perhaps the peasant type of mind is not at its happiest in speaking of erotic subjects.’)  – wanted to remove Lawrence from the projected 1916 Imagist Anthology because of the Rainbow scandal, it was Aldington who opposed her.

3. Autumn 1916: Aldington was in training and Lawrence was in Cornwall, but there was a regular correspondence between H.D. and Lawrence. This is when she revealed to John Cournos how frightened she was by Lawrence: ‘For the spiritual vision, his thoughts, his distant passion has given me, I thank God…But … there is yet another side – if he comes too near I am afraid for myself … I do not want [him] to die. He has a great gift. He is ill! – But I must be protected.’ She was one of the few people whom Lawrence trusted to read the manuscripts of Look, We Have Come Through and Women in Love – although, as he told Catherine Carswell, he wasn’t happy with her responses! 

4. October 1917: when the Lawrences had to leave Cornwall, H.D. – then living in Lichfield near Aldington’s officer training camp – offered them her large bedsit in Mecklenburgh Square. She had previously lent it to Dorothy Yorke, but the latter was able to move upstairs to Cournos’s small room, because he had gone to Russia.  The incident between ‘Julia’ and ‘Rico’ that is related in Bid Me To Live would have taken place in mid-November when H.D. had to visit London for a week-end on business. When Aldington began his post-training leave at the end of the month the Lawrences moved into an apartment in Earls Court owned by Cecil Gray’s mother, but – until just before Christmas when they moved to Dollie Radford’s cottage in Berkshire – there was a hectic and complicated social life at Mecklenburgh Square involving the Lawrences, H.D, Aldington, Yorke – with whom Aldington was now having an affair – Gray and Brigit Patmore and her current lover. (Wilson tells us that H.D. and Gray shared a bed at Mecklenburgh Square, a supposition for which there is no evidence; her relationship with him was quite tentative on her side and almost certainly not consummated until sometime after she moved to Bosigran. Bid Me To Live would seem to confirm this.)

5. November 1918: Lawrence and Aldington met in London when Aldington was briefly on leave after the Armistice. Lawrence’s reported to Lowell: ‘He [R.A.] is very fit – looking forward to peace and freedom. Hilda is also in town – not so very well. She is going to have another child it appears. I hope she will be all right. Perhaps she can get more settled, for her nerves are very shaken and perhaps the child will soothe her and steady her. I hope it will.’ This sympathetic stance seems to contradict H.D.’s report in Advent that Lawrence had written to her: ‘I hope never to see you again’, but then Lawrence was writing to Lowell, who was very fond of the Aldingtons. Wilson quotes his comment in December: ‘Feeling sorry for her, one almost melts. But I don’t trust her.’ What she doesn’t tell us is that this comment was in a letter to Selina Yorke, Dorothy’s mother: the Lawrences were fond of Dorothy and played a part in bringing her and Aldington together, so here he was warning her mother to be on guard lest H.D. win Aldington back!  

6. Autumn 1919: the two men met in Koteliansky’s flat at a time when Lawrence and Frieda were living apart. In Life for Life’s Sake Aldington conflates this meeting with the one they had in the same setting in November when Lawrence was meeting him to ‘hand over’ the cottage in Hermitage and was about to leave the country – which explains why he talks of Lawrence’s ‘peculiar mood’ and of his not caring whether he ever saw Frieda again. He corrects this in Portrait of a Genius, But … where Lawrence in the later meeting ‘was his friendly and unaffected self, without any bitterness or bravado about going away.’

7. 1926: for Aldington two life-changing meetings with Lawrence took place: the Lawrences’ visit to Malthouse Cottage over a long week-end in early August and the return five-day visit of Aldington and Yorke to the Villa Mirenda in October. In preparation for the Lawrences’ visit, Aldington re-read his work and realised how much he had under-rated him. His admiration for both the man (although he was well aware of Lawrence’s less appealing qualities!) and the work (and again it is not unqualified admiration) really begins there. As importantly for Aldington, the contact with Lawrence made him look at his own life and realise that it had to change. From then until his own departure from England two years later he was restless.  There is an unpublished poem addressed to Lawrence in which he writes about this revelation. Lawrence reinforced this in May 1927 when he wrote to Aldington, on receiving a copy of D.H. Lawrence: An Indiscretion, ‘What ails thee lad? Why do you write on the one hand as if you were my grandmother – about sixty years old and forced to apologise for the enfant terrible in the family … And on the other hand why do you write as if you were on hot bricks? … I never knew a man who seemed more to me to be living from a character not his own.’ (Of course, we might think predictably, Aldington’s moves to change his life were – initially at least – destructive for himself and several other people, notably Yorke and Jessie Capper.)

8. 1928: Aldington was involved in the summer in distributing copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and then spent a month – it was to have been longer, but Lawrence became too ill to stay – from mid-October until mid-November on the Mediterranean island of Port Cros with the Lawrences, Yorke and Brigit Patmore. There are accounts of this holiday in Lawrence’s and Aldington’s letters, in Patmore’s memoirs and in Life for Life’s Sake and it was again a very intense and complicated time!  It was Lawrence’s stern disapproval of Aldington’s conduct there that drove the latter to create the savage portrait of Lawrence in Death of a Hero, which he began to write on the island (and to write to H.D: ‘[Lawrence] is really malevolent and evil and I hope I never see him again.’) But his The Eaten Heart was an attempt to challenge Lawrence’s view – which was expressed by the latter in a letter to Huxley and in ‘I Know a Noble Englishman’ (one of the only two poems that were removed for obscenity reasons from Pansies).

9. 1941: the final connection between the two men took place after Lawrence’s death! The Aldington family spent two months living at Kiowa Ranch and there is a moving unpublished essay by Aldington about the connection he felt there with Lawrence.

[Aldington] never liked [Lawrence]:

Aldington – like most other people who knew Lawrence (and his biographers, Frances Wilson included) – recognised the two sides of his personality. Hence Portrait of a Genius, But …! .   In Portrait … Aldington writes: ‘Long ago I wrote that being with him was like moving from an ordinary atmosphere into one of oxygen. Everything became more exciting and vivid. But he – and we – paid for this unique self of his by the existence of his antithetical self, perverse, destructive, hating, hateful, conceited as a gutter Lucifer.’ For Aldington Lawrence would always be the most exciting person he had ever met and his writings finer – despite the faults he identified – than any other writer of the day. It was the view also of Aldous Huxley, expressed in his introduction to the Penguin edition of Lawrence’s Selected Letters (edited by Aldington).

[Aldington] would make a career out of knowing Lawrence [and] became the self-appointed guide to his life and work … While Lawrence had nothing much to say about Aldington, Aldington was incontinent on the subject of Lawrence.

The argument that Lawrence had nothing much to say about Aldington we can easily dismiss: apart from his Studies in Classic American Literature, Lawrence did not produce literary criticism. He had plenty to say about Aldington the man in his correspondence (and caricatures him in Aaron’s Rod). Being incontinent on the subject is a gross misunderstanding of Aldington’s output – and of the motivation behind his editions of Apocalypse, Last Poems (both at the request of Frieda) and The Spirit of Place, and the two monographs (the second to accompany the new editions of Lawrence’s works in 1950). The biography and the seventeen twentieth anniversary introductions were written at the behest of Alexander Frere of Heinemann and Allen Lane of Penguin Books. What his publishers realised in 1949, as I indicate in my biography of Aldington, was that he was the best-placed person to do this work because of his clear-eyed awareness of the complexities of Lawrence’s personality and because he was a discerning literary critic with a thorough familiarity with the totality of Lawrence’s output. (The only other writer they might have approached would have been Huxley.) Portrait of a Genius, But … is not an offhand biography, as Wilson opines, but a measured, searching – and profoundly touching – portrait. For so many people that I know it is their favourite work by Aldington and it was well received at the time. As for the opinionated introductions – well, that is a matter of opinion! They are certainly short by modern standards but I find each one (as I say in the Aldington biography) beautifully crafted to inform the reader of the personal context out of which each text emerged, to convey an understanding of the writing process behind the work and to provide an insight into the uniqueness of Lawrence’s vision, particularly his ‘perception of beauty’. Weaknesses are identified but the emphasis is on the originality, freshness and vitality of Lawrence’s writing.

There are other minor errors or misunderstandings in Burning Man: 

Wilson tells us that Aldington destroyed the correspondence between H.D. and Lawrence and rebukes him for not mentioning in Portrait of a Genius, But … the fact that the Lawrences stayed at Mecklenburgh Square in 1917.  Much is made of these facts: It is the biographer’s remit to edit those facts that don’t fit (Is it? Is Wilson being ironic here?), but what are we to make of this sudden silence in the unstoppable flow of Aldington’s authority? The irony is heavy. In fact the Lawrence’s stay at Mecklenburgh Square at the invitation of H.D. is mentioned in both Life for Life’s Sake (page 232) and Portrait of a Genius, But … (page 199) What is not mentioned is the crisis reached in the relationship between H.D. and Lawrence. This omission is easy to explain.  I do not think Aldington knew anything of it until the publication of Bid Me To Live in 1960 (and he still felt that she had misread the situation, as we all do!) I don’t find any evidence that he clearly agreed with H.D. that Lawrence was in love with her – although this statement allows Wilson some further irony: After all, why would Lawrence want a fat German Christmas pudding who was always mocking him when he could have a thin American goddess who took him entirely seriously? (Aldington’s own respect for the Lawrence marriage and his affection for Frieda make this comment seem particularly tasteless.)

As for the destruction of the correspondence: the letters were in a trunk containing all the correspondence between Aldington and H.D. (he sent her own letters back for her to keep) until her departure for Cornwall in March 1918, as well as her letters from others, including Cournos and Lawrence. She had left the trunk at Mecklenburgh Square and Aldington took it with him to Hermitage, as he had been asked to clear out their possessions.  I don’t think he opened it: he couldn’t bear to read the correspondence between himself and H.D. When he moved again, he asked the woman who lived next-door at Hermitage to burn the contents of the trunk. (I find it significant that he couldn’t do it himself.)

Wilson does not distinguish between actions and comments by fictional characters (chiefly in Aaron’s Rod and Bid Me To Live) and the actions and comments of real people. Like her, I drew extensively on these novels in writing my Aldington biography (and attempted to justify the practice in the introduction to the first volume). However, in quoting from the novels, Wilson always uses the ‘real’ names never the character names (H.D, never ‘Julia’, Lawrence, never ‘Rico); it is only by consulting the notes that one discovers when the source is a novel rather than a letter, memoir or journal. Nor does she always indicate, when quoting from a letter, to whom the letter was written. Since letter writers tailor information, comment and tone according to their audience (as in the example I give above of Lawrence’s letter to Selina Yorke) this seems to me an important omission.

Burning Man is an exhilarating and absorbing read and an illuminating and challenging study of Lawrence – the man and his work. However, it is a pity that it fails to represent Richard Aldington justly and accurately.

Vivien Whelpton

July 2021

Review: Louisa Deasey, A Letter from Paris (Scribe, 2018)

I’m finally catching up on some Aldington posting, having had a hectic last few months – as, I suspect, have many of us.  So, over the coming weeks I’ll be posting some pieces of varying lengths about recent Aldington-related publications.  First up is Louisa Deasey’s A Letter from Paris (Scribe, 2018).  I was glad to meet up with Louisa in Melbourne in the summer of 2018 (the British summer, that is).  This review focuses on the Aldington connection, while also addressing the book as a whole to some degree.

A Letter from Paris focuses on Louisa’s search to find out more about and connect with her father Denison Deasey, a writer who died in 1984 when she was still young. Louisa intertwines her literal and figurative journey to discover what his writerly life had been like with her father’s travels in postwar Europe (see p. 98) and both of their wrestling with what it is to make a living as a writer.  Her memory of his chaotic industry is striking:

            In dad’s house, he always had a big notebook by his side.

His bookshelves were full of spilled-out folders, with papers stacked high, under and over hardback books.  Even the smell of the library took me back to him, that sense of academia, the fascination with higher concepts mixed with amusement at the mundane, scribbling away on any piece of paper he could find – the backs of envelopes if they were nearby and he found it too painful to get out of bed or his chair. (p. 57)

Denison Deasey was an Australian author, publisher, and literary figure.  He published as the Oberon Press, and his most substantial publication was Education Under Six (Croom Helm, 1978); Louisa records at the start of her journey a sense that her father left a lot lots unfinished, created by comments and even obituaries (p. 46).  She discovers that her father was part of an Australian cultural elite, taking in figures such as Arthur Boyd, David Boyd, Geoffrey and Ninette Dutton, Barry Humphries, Alister Kershaw (who discusses their relationship in The Pleasure of Their Company (University of Queensland Press, 1986)), Mirka Mora, Albert Tucker. He was also well connected in postwar Europe, meeting poets and writers such as Roy Campbell, Dylan Thomas, Louis Macneice, F-J Temple and Richard Aldington.

Deasey remembers his relationship with Aldington in an article ‘Lunch at the Villa’, published in the Australian journal The Bulletin (1981; quoted by Whelpton, vol. 2, pp. 188-9).  Vivien Whelpton describes how:

the impulsive, engaging, accident-prone and physically delicate Deasey became a surrogate son towards whom Aldington felt protective. […] Deasey shared Aldington’s historical and aesthetic interests and, perhaps more importantly, had also been scarred by his wartime experiences. (Whelpton, vol. 2, p. 194)

The connection between Aldington and Deasey came about through their mutual acquaintance Alister Kershaw, who had moved in with Aldington at Le Lavandou, France (p. 68) and wrote to Deasey to encourage him to join them in the south of France; Kershaw would later be the literary executor for Aldington’s estate until his own death in 1995. After Deasey returned to Australia in 1955, Aldington wrote to H.D. of him as ‘a very cultivated man (as the Aussies sometimes are) and a prof’ (19 June 1956; Zilboorg, TLIL, p. 372). Whelpton traces their sometimes complex relationship, particularly between Kershaw and Deasey (vol. 2, p. 194).

A key question for Louisa becomes working out the relationship with Aldington was so important to her father:

The Writer, he called him grandly, feeling an affinity with Aldington almost like a father-son relationship.  Aldington had also been affected by the war, exiling himself from England to France to get away from the ‘wreckage and the waste’. (p. 95)

The meaningful introduction to Aldington for Deasey, and in the book (p. 137), is at the Villa Aucassin, where Aldington lived from 1947 to 1951.  Louisa’s trip to the Villa is part of the denouement, the chapter in which she arrives entitled ‘La clé’ (the key) (ch. 28, p. 287). The letters between Aldington and Deasey in Canberra become in themselves a tempting but distant resource (p. 121); it is clear that the two writers were kindred spirits, committed to their craft, often generous to other writers while being far from infallible. The spirit of the Canberra letters is encapsulated by Louisa’s précis:

Aldington was intimate, affectionate, detailed and forthcoming.  He was endlessly cheering dad on, congratulating him on any moves forward, confiding literary facts and details that implied a relationship based on mutual trust and deep companionship. […] Aldington hadn’t just loved dad’s company as a friend and companion.  He’d seen dad’s potential as a writer and a creative. (p. 144)

Their connection, which Louisa dovetails with her own writerly development, is about living well, but also the hardships of being a writer and the commitment, the ruthlessness required in doing so.  This shared mindset ensured a continuing intimacy by correspondence even after Deasey left France in 1955, having played a key role in researching Aldington’s infamous Lawrence of Arabia (1955; see p. 151).

It’s a shame that Aldington’s voice couldn’t come through more in this charming volume; there are always difficulties with bringing previously unpublished material into print, and the letters haven’t even been excerpted in any of the major publications on Aldington.  He is, as it stands, an absent presence at the centre of the volume.  That is no fault of the author, however, and A Letter from Paris is an engaging and touching story which has certainly made me keen to rectify a gap in my knowledge about Aldington’s Australian connections.

Andrew Frayn

 

 

Michael Copp’s new translation of Léon Werth, Private Clavel: Patient in War

NCLSN correspondent Michael Copp has translated Léon Werth’s Private Clavel: Patient in War (click to order).  Below is the publisher’s blurb:

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At the outbreak of World War One, Léon Werth, aged 36, began his service in the French army, from August 1914 to August 1915. This novel is the sequel to his earlier book, Private Clavel’s War on War. In both books, Clavel, acting as Werth’s mouthpiece, expresses his anti-militaristic views (although, in the earlier book we see him conscientiously carrying out his duties as a telephonist/radio operator).

After serving in one of the worst sectors of the front, he was wounded and invalided out, to spend many months being treated and assessed in various hospitals and convalescent homes, interspersed with short spells of leave. Werth portrays Clavel’s fellow-patients, nurses and doctors in these establishments, together with his Parisian friends, including his girlfriend, Valentine, all of whom have contrasting views on the war. Clavel quickly realises that he must conceal his anti-war attitude, that he must avoid any injudicious comments which might lead to his being informed on by a fellow-patient, a nurse or a doctor, with the result that he would be returned to the front, irrespective of his physical fitness. 

Michael Copp’s finely judged translation enables us to become acquainted with another neglected, but remarkable, anti-war modernist masterpiece. 

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Order Private Clavel: Patient in War

Order Private Clavel’s War on War

Recent Aldington-related publications

I’m slowly catching up on Aldington-related reading.  I’m not writing a lot about Aldington academically at the moment so, as ever, I’d appreciate anyone else’s thoughts, comments, posts, and reviews.

Here, though, I want to outline some recent publications that are about Aldington, or at least touch on his work.  I’m hoping to write longer pieces on these; if you’ve read them and would like to write about any of them yourselves, then please drop me a line – afrayn [dot] ac [at] gmail.com.

A reminder that the second volume of Vivien Whelpton’s biography was published last summer.  I’m working on a review of this and hope to post it soon.

Louisa Deasey’s A Letter From Paris is a charming account of her search to find out more about her father, Denison Deasey, who was a friend of Aldington in France after the Second World War.

Matt Foley’s Haunting Modernisms: Ghostly Aesthetics, Mourning, and Spectral Resistance Fantasties in Literary Modernism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) draws on Aldington, particularly in a reading of Death of a Hero in his first chapter, ‘Haunted Images, Deadness and Impossible Mourning.’

Vincent Trott’s Publishers, Readers and the Great War: Literature and Memory since 1918 (Bloomsbury, 2017) looks at Death of a Hero and its reception in chapter 3, ‘Marketing Myth: Richard Aldington, Vera Brittain and the Memory of the First World War’.

Chris Forster’s Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity (Oxford University Press, 2018) addresses the expurgation of Death of a Hero.

Oliver Tearle’s book The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem (Bloomsbury 2019) contains a chapter on ‘A Fool i’ the Forest’. I reviewed the book for the Review of English Studies.

Andrew Frayn

TLS review of Vivien Whelpton’s Richard Aldington

There’s an extensive review of Vivien Whelpton’s volumes Richard Aldington biography in the Times Literary Supplement of 20 March 2020:

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/richard-aldington-vivien-whelpton-review-anna-girling

While not uncritical, the review treats the biography seriously, praises the use of archival materials, and is particularly moved by the account of Aldington’s final years.

Aldington/Imagism conference cancelled

I’m sure it won’t surprise readers to know that the Richard Aldington / Imagism conference scheduled for this summer has been cancelled.  Like most events at the moment, we’ll have to wait and see before thinking about possible revised dates.

Please do continue to get in touch with your Aldington-related news.