Following the blog

As I know there are a variety of ways people engage with the blog, I thought I’d post this reminder about how to follow the site if you would like to receive notifications when new writing is posted.

You don’t have to have a WordPress account to follow the NCLSN blog; you can do so by e-mail.  When you click on the link to the newsletter site, you should see a “follow” button at the bottom right of the screen.  If you click on that, the site will prompt you to enter an e-mail address.  You will then receive notifications to your e-mail when there’s a new post.  It’s quick and easy to do!

The WordPress information on how to follow a blog is here:

https://en.support.wordpress.com/following/

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Richard Aldington in Leningrad

Michael Copp writes the below, which includes his own translations of extracts from and a précis of an article about one of Aldington’s visits to Russia late in his life.  –AF

D. Moldavsky, ‘Richard Aldington in Leningrad’, Neva, No.5, 1963, pp. 164-67.

We had already read him before the war. The first book of Richard Aldington to reach us was the novel, All Men are Enemies. This was a book full of hatred of war, of a terrible, concentrated anger, and also of love. Love was an oasis in the desert of human feelings. Then we read Death of a Hero and Very Heaven. Richard Aldington stood before us as an exposer of the petty bourgeois of all scales and dimensions. We perceived him as one of the most truthful and the closest to us of Western authors.

Moldavsky was surprised when Aldington asked to see the work of traditional artists such as Levitan. Aldington also expressed a wish to get hold of an album of Rublev [the great icon painter]. He enthused over Russian icons, and compared them favourably with the masterpieces of the Renaissance.

Richard and Catha spent several days in Leningrad. They visited the Kirov stadium, new housing quarters, the Summer Garden, and saw the famous statue of the Bronze Horseman. Aldington commented that only Parisians and Leningraders expressed such love of their city. In the summer garden Aldington showed Catha the statue of Krilov and recounted one of his fables for her benefit.

After a visit to the Russian Museum, Moldavsky presented Aldington with a volume of Russian lubki [popular Russian prints] of the XVII to XIX centuries. Aldington was greatly appreciative of this

extremely interesting book, illustrating Russian folklore.

Aldington was pleasantly struck by the news that his books were widely known and appreciated in Russia. People came up to him to voice their appreciation of his work in the Summer Garden, in the Authors’ Bookshop, and in the Hermitage.

When Aldington heard English voices in the Museum, he seemed to do his utmost to avoid meeting them. Once inside the Hermitage, Aldington paused in the middle of a room and proceeded to identify the painters, not only the famous masters, but also those considered second-rate. Moldavsky refers to Catha as ‘Kat’ throughout, and comments on her vivacity, as a contrast to her father’s more subdued manner. Richard was particularly at home in front of the Italian masters, giving Catha an informative commentary. He was delighted to see so many works by Frans Hals, Raphael, Van Dyck, Rembrandt and Rubens.

When questioned, Aldington dismissed abstract art as rubbish. When asked about Salvador Dali he said that Dali began as a talented artist, and then indulged in all sorts of tricks. Catha disagreed with this verdict. They went the following day again to the Hermitage, this time to see the French section. First, Poussin and Houdon’s statue of Voltaire, standing next to which he was photographed. Then to the rooms of modern art. Moldavsky notes that Aldington was in raptures, faced with so many Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces: Monet, Degas, Van Gogh, etc. Richard sat for a long time in the Picasso room where he told Moldavsky that he had met Picasso on two occasions. They toured this room twice.

Aldington met writers at the House of Creativity in Komarov, went to the ballet, and appeared on television, in front of a group of young people. He told his young audience not to waste time, to take advantage of their opportunities, to use their leisure profitably: study Art, read books. Moldavsky notes that this hectic schedule was tiring for Aldington, and he was taken back to his hotel to rest.

They went to a record shop. Aldington wanted Mussorgsky, Catha wanted the song, ‘Moscow Nights’. Moldavsky recounts the episode here, when a brusquely impatient American customer, anxious to buy a complete set of Beethoven symphonies, demanded to be served first because he was in a hurry. When Aldington asked him why he was in such a hurry, the American replied that he only had three days. Aldington’s reply:

That’s three days more than is necessary.  I’d have thrown you out of here on the first day. You are giving a dreadful impression of your America here. You simply don’t understand where you are.

Just before Aldington died he sent a package to Moldavsky. It was his two-volume translation of the ‘Decameron’. It had been posted the day before Aldington’s death. A month later Moldavsky received the following from Catha:

I will not forget my visit to Leningrad, nor the fact that my father was happy there.

Michael Copp

 

Contributions to NCLSN

Do you have a favourite bit of Aldington that you’d like to highlight? What’s your connection to Aldington and why is he important to you?  Is there a story, poem, or novel that you think is unjustly neglected and you’d like to say something about why? Do you have a rare edition, or think you’ve uncovered something previously unknown? If you can write a few hundred words about it, that would be great!

I would be really glad to receive contributions from members, readers and followers.  I’m keen to widen the spread of contributors – I don’t know whether you’ve noticed but Mike Copp and I generate a lot of content! – and believe that the blog offers a great way to do so.  I can either add you to the blog as an author, or you can e-mail me your piece to afrayn [dot] ac [at] gmail.com.

Andrew Frayn

Aldington and Denison Deasey

Louisa Deasey recently got in contact to tell me about the connection between her father, the author Denison Deasey, and Richard Aldington.  She wrote:

I recently found hundreds of my dad’s diaries and letters in the library in Victoria. There is a lot of correspondence with / diary entries around his time in St Clair when Aldington lived at Aucassin – 1948-1951 particularly. Aldington influenced my dad’s life very strongly, inspiring him to become a writer and draft his first books, encouraging him and writing to him an awful lot until his death in 1962. My dad wrote the memoir “Lunch At The Villa” which was published in 1981, in the Bulletin. It was based on the time he met Aldington and Kershaw was working as his secretary in the south of France.

Louisa is writing a book about her discovery of this archive, which will be published by Scribe in 2018.  She continues:

What set me on the whole treasure hunt for Aucassin / Aldington’s granddaughters was that i found a small pil of black and white photos of Aldington and Catha in France in the 40s and 50s in  dad’s collection. I’d never known who they were of… until I started looking into the library material…

As part of my research, I travelled to St Clair in March. I met a lovely man named Raphael Dupouy there, and he took me to the Villa Aucassin, where Aldington lived, and where dad stayed in 1948/49/50.  I also met Sylvain – Alister Kershaw’s son – in Paris. He really wanted to come with me to Aucassin (he would have been so welcome, as he works as a French/English translator and, as it was, Raphael and I had much difficulty communicating!) but he’d already booked a trip to Spain for the dates I was in Saint Clair.

Raphael Dupouy is the cultural director for Lavandou Tourisme, and he is writing an article on my trip / the Aldington links, which will be published in August. It will be in French, in a publication called Figue Libre – he took some photos of me at Aucassin, too.

That article can be found at the Figue Libre website.  It’s on page 4 of the current issue (no. 39).  You’ll have to dust off your French, though, as Louisa says!

Andrew Frayn

Caroline Zilboorg lecture, Duquesne University

Caroline Zilboorg, NCLSN correspondent and editor of the Aldington – H.D. letters, writes with details of a forthcoming lecture at Duquesne University on 29 September (see image below).  This will be on her current project, a life of her father Gregory Zilboorg, an influential psychoanalyst:

“My current work and these lectures aren’t actually Aldington-related.  However, my father and RA were contemporaries.  The war certainly shaped both their lives and both men were Europeans to the core.  Both men were also very linguistic.  My father spoke and could work in Yiddish, Russian, German, French, Dutch, English, Spanish and Italian.  He was most at home in Russian, French and English.  He had good Latin, too, but unlike Aldington, he had no Greek– his education as a Russian Jew under the Tsar was about as far as from public schools in the UK as one could get.  He was ‘modern’, yet because of life choices (his decision to become a psychoanalyst), he wasn’t really ‘modernist’ (although one could, of course, argue that all of psychoanalysis from Freud through Lacan was and is modernist in the extreme).

“Yet the drama he championed in the late teens and early 20s was certainly modernist– his translation of Andreyev’s quite modernist play He Who Gets Slapped  was first published by The Dial Press in 1921.  Bryher thought my father was fascinating (he was– and charismatic, too, from the podium and in real life).  When she heard my father speak in April 1934 at the International Psychoanalytic Congress in Lucerne, Bryher wrote H.D. that he “spoke brilliantly on suicide.” (Letter from Bryher to H.D., 30 April 1934, in Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher,  and Their Circle, ed. Susan Stanford Friedman, New York: New Directions, 2002, p. 415).  And both RA and GZ were difficult men and easily angered; they both cared so passionately about so many things.”

Michael Copp and family in the 1940 blitz

Not Aldington-related, but NCLSN correspondent Michael Copp writes this fascinating reminiscence of Christmas 1940 in a blitz shelter.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/jul/29/family-life-bomb-shelter-party-want-take-higher-baked-bean-spaghetti

 

An Imagist Footnote

Perhaps the most obscure name to whom the loose label of Imagist can be applied is that of Max Michelson. He is not included in Peter Jones’s Imagist Poetry (1972) or in Bob Blaisdell’s Imagist Poetry: An Anthology (1999). The only modern anthology in which he is represented is William Pratt’s The Imagist Poem: Modern Poetry in Miniature (2001):

Midnight

Midnight. The air is still,

And yet there seems to be a sound

Brooding in it, tearing. I hear it

With all my quivering body

But not with my ears.

Suddenly it bursts – muffled, hoarse, detached

From any earthly object.

It is spring

Charging through the night.

Michelson (1880-1953) had a short-lived connection to Imagism. For example, a few of his poems were first published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in 1915, and in Others. In The Egoist, Vol. 3, December 1916, there were seven of his poems, then in January 1917, three more.

The account of his life and work is to be found in a slim book edited by his grandson, Peter Michelson: The Extant Poetry and Prose of Max Michelson, Imagist (1880-1953) (Edwin Mellen Press, 2000). In a biographical sketch he tells us that his grandfather’s already fragile mental state disintegrated completely in 1920 and he was interned for the next 33 years of his life in a state mental hospital. This sad story is fleshed out by Peter Michelson with the complete extant poems, and a handful of articles, reviews and letters – just 113 pages in total.

Michael Copp

The Alfred Wallis factor

Former NCLSN Associate Editor David Wilkinson will speak tomorrow (19 July) at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, on The Alfred Wallis Factor in St Ives Art.

Wilkinson’s book The Alfred Wallis Factor: Conflict in Post War St Ives Art was published on 29 June by Lutterworth Press.

An Interview with Richard Aldington

Louise Morgan’s Writers at Work, published in 1931 by Chatto & Windus in their Dolphin Books series, consists of her interviews with eight writers. Apart from RA the others are: W.B. Yeats, Sinclair Lewis, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Edgar Wallace, Wyndham Lewis, Somerset Maugham and A.E. Coppard. Here are some extracts taken from this 7-page interview:

---

It is not often that England has seen Richard Aldington since the War. On his rare visits he stays at Garland’s, that little old-fashioned hotel near Trafalgar Square so adored by the few Americans who know about it. His last visit coincided with the only bit of prolonged sunshine we had during the season.

            ‘Bad weather is most depressing,’ he said. ‘I’d like to live in a perpetual Mediterranean summer in a city as large and artistically alive as Paris. That would be ideal. I wish to heaven civilization would return to its normal place, the shores of the Mediterranean. These northern countries are impossible.’

Supposing the sun always shone in London, would you like to live and write here?

            ‘No. England is spiritually hostile. It has always distrusted the artist. In turn, the artist doesn’t feel at home here. But it’s probably all because the sun doesn’t shine!’

Richard Aldington’s laugh is boyish, like all the rest of him – except his shoulders, which are extraordinarily broad. He looks as if he had just come in from a school Rugby match. His skin and hair, both tanned to a bronze gold, gleam with vitality. His clear blue eyes shine with the excitement of living. He gives the impression of exuberant health and well-being, of a man who spends the greater part of his time in the open air. One is struck by his irrepressible good humour as well – his smile is always just below the surface, and his habitual expression is one of repressed amusement and mischief.

Do you use the typewriter altogether?

            ‘Not for my poems. I write them often in pencil, especially those midnight ones that occur in sleepless nights.’

Did you make any corrections when you were writing Death of a Hero?

            ‘No. It was the first draft that went to press. Part of it I wrote on a Spanish typewriter that belonged to D.H. Lawrence, where the exclamation and question marks were upside down. Part of it was written at Rapallo on a typewriter belonging to Ezra Pound.’

Have you any idea how long it took you to write the whole of it?

            ‘Yes, I can tell you exactly. The actual time was: Prologue and Part I, ten days; Part II, twenty days; Part III, twenty-two days. Total, fifty-two days. The last chapter was written in a single sitting of seven and three-quarter hours.’

Is there anything in particular that gets you into a writing mood?

            ‘I like to play classical music on the gramophone before starting work – I mean this seriously! If I’m working especially hard, I drink wine.’

Do you smoke much?

            ‘Yes – generally a pipe – while I’m writing,’

What do you do as a change from writing?

            ‘Usually more writing! But I like travelling, conversation, gluttony and wine-bibbing, swimming, the movies. I like, too, architecture, painting, and sculpture as “objects of contemplation.” I like walking. And, above all, I like making love.’

One is apt to forget that Richard Aldington has turned out such an immense amount of work, because it has been in so many different directions. [. . .] But this considerable weight of achievement lies lightly on him. He has time to enjoy life to the full. At present he is living in a small villa in the South of France. Its walls are brightly washed in colour in true Provençal style, and it stands at the top of a slope of pines through which one can wander down to sands that are really golden because they are full of mica. He has a little boat moored on the shore, and spends many of the sunny hours swimming and rowing. The sun, he says, is getting into his writing more and more. And love, he adds. Love and the sun, after the shadows of war, will be the determining influences of his work in the future.

---

Michael Copp

 

2018 Richard Aldington Conference

X INTERNATIONAL ALDINGTON SOCIETY &
VI INTERNATIONAL IMAGISM CONFERENCE

in joint sponsorship with

THE ELIZABETH MADOX ROBERTS SOCIETY

JULY 30 – AUGUST 1, 2018

Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, France

 

The X International Aldington Society & VI International Imagism Conference will return to its conference headquarters in Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, France, July 30 – August 1, 2018.

The International Richard Aldington Society was founded and its first conference held at the home of Catha Aldington in Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the summer of 2000. In 2007 and 2010, the first two Imagism Conferences were held at Brunnenburg Castle in Italy, with the Aldington Society and the Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society as joint sponsors of the 2010 conference. In 2018 the Roberts Society will hold its first-ever annual conference abroad, in conjunction with the Aldington/Imagism meeting.

Since many potential Aldington/Imagism conferees will be participating in the International Hemingway Conference in Paris, July 22 – 28, 2018, we stress that our conference activities will begin right after the Hemingway Conference ends, allowing two days for relocation from Paris to the South of France. Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer is an ancient beachfront and seaside pilgrimage village on the Mediterranean, in the heart of the numinous Camargue.

As always, we welcome papers that focus on Richard Aldington and his colleagues and contemporaries (Pound, H.D. et al) or on Imagism. Thus we invite papers that deal with any aspect of the life and work of Aldington, or with the “Imagist Movement;” Aldington and the Imagists (Pound, H.D., F. S. Flint, Ford Madox Ford, Amy Lowell, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, et al). And since 2018 is the year of the Great War Centenary and France will be at the heart of the global commemoration, possible topics include Aldington, Pound, Roberts, the Imagists (et al) and the Great War. We also welcome papers related to the engagement of these writers with France. And given the time and place proximity of the Aldington and Hemingway Conferences, we invite papers that deal comparatively with, for example, Hemingway’s writing on the Great War (e.g., the two major World War One novels of 1929—Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Aldington’s Death of a Hero). We also stress that all approaches and all topics dealing with Aldington/Imagism/Roberts are welcome.

2018 will be the year of a truly once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to participate in First World War Centenary events and what the French call Le tourisme de mémoire—Remembrance Tourism (before, during, and after our conference)—as well as an extraordinary chance to combine two conferences in two of the world’s most enchanted places—Hemingway in Paris and Aldington/Roberts/Imagism in the Camargue. Mark your calendars now, watch for forthcoming CFP details, and plan to be in France in the summer of 2018.

{Address any questions regarding all events described above to the Co-Directors of both the Aldington/Imagism/Roberts Conference and the Hemingway in Paris Conference—Matthew Nickel <mattcnickel@gmail.com> and H. R. Stoneback <hrs714@gmail.com>.