I want to
consult with the readership about the future of the Newsletter in its current
form. Before any alarm is caused, please let me reassure you that Aldington
news will continue with this name! However, the time required to collect
material for the newsletter – and, indeed, collecting enough material to make a
worthwhile newsletter – is proving increasingly difficult.
My
proposal, therefore, is to shift the primary means of making this research
available to a blog. This, I think, will facilitate the regular publication of
information, which will be helpful to the editors. I believe it will also,
more importantly, be good for Aldington Studies in general: that regular
publication should help to build a profile. That material might then be
collected into a yearly or twice-yearly newsletter, for those who would still
prefer to receive the material in that form. This would enable the excellent
repository provided by Paul Hernandez to continue, for which I know that I am
grateful on a regular basis.
This is a departure from a
long-standing format, of course. I would be grateful to hear any of your
opinions about the proposed change. But I believe that this is a good way to
bring the format of the newsletter up to the date, and to stimulate some more
exposure for Aldington with more regular updates.
**********
In August 2014, Member Adrian Barlow published his 100th post
to his blog, four
years to the day since the first, ‘In Gloucestershire’. He writes: Counting to a hundred: ‘Let it Go!’ is
a reflection on the rewards of blogging. It’s an art I have been learning for
the past six years, for this is also the anniversary of my first post to World and Time, the blog
I wrote at Madingley Hall, Cambridge, between 2009-2011.
Today’s post, I have decided, will be my last
post – hence my title’s nod towards the film Frozen. A
blogger, like any other guest – particularly a self-invited one – should not
outstay his welcome. I hope, though, that we’ll keep in contact, if you would
like to. I shall keep my blog online and in the next few days will publish an
index and inventory for anybody who may ever want to look up a past post. For
those interested in stained glass I shall also continue writing for the Kempe Trust
blog from time to time.
A year or two ago, the novelist Joe Treasure
discussed on his blog the
things that made him uneasy about blogging. I recommend this piece for, much as
I have really enjoyed blogging, some of Joe’s reservations coincide with my
own. He ends, however, with a list of five bad things that a blog
does not do; and in my defence as a persistent blogger, I think these are worth
restating.
A blog, Joe reminds us, will not:
-
create litter.
-
trap you in a corner at a party.
-
interrupt your evening with a loud ringing
noise.
-
stop you from sleeping on the train.
-
drive you from the dinner table in
tears.
**********
While
re-reading Edmund Wilson's
Axel's Castle(1931), Correspondent Michael Copp came across this oblique
reference to RA's A Fool i' the
Forest : ‘And as for "The
Waste Land," it enchanted and devastated a whole generation. Attempts have
been made to reproduce it – by Aldington, Nancy Cunard, etc. – at least a dozen
times.’
**********
Correspondent David Wilkinson notes that one or two of
Arabella's illustrations for class=apple-converted-space> The
Art of Lydia Lopokova can be found on line by Google image search with the terms ‘Lopokova’ and ‘Beaumont’.
**********
Correspondent David
Wilkinson, until recently our associate editor, has three books in the
pipeline. The first, Arthur
Greening: That Damned Elusive Publisher (Rivendale Press, 2016) is published
this month. It is a biography of the late-Victorian / Edwardian publisher
Arthur Greening (1865-1938) who, as the title implies, published Baroness
Orczy's Scarlet Pimpernel. Greening began publishing as Lawrence
Greening & Co. in 1897 and was brought down following a foolish court case
over a personal dispute between one of his partners and T. W. H. Crosland, the
litigious partner of Lord Alfred Douglas and their Academy magazine.
Of
greater personal significance, Wilkinson's second book describes his six-year
quest to detail RA’s time in Berkshire. It is currently in prepartion with Pen and Sword books and due for
publication in July or August 2016. It is being timed to coincide with the International D. H. Lawrence Conference
at Tregenna Castle Hotel in St Ives next September, barely a mile from
Wilkinson's current address.
Although seemingly disconnected,
Wilkinson’s books follow a sequence set in motion by our late editor. The
Curious Reader began as notes for Professor Norman T. Gates, following his
first visit to Padworth in June 1978. Wilkinson's first book was a biography of
Cyril Ranger Gull, a name he first encountered in Aldington's Life For
Life's Sake. 'Guy
Thorne': C. Ranger Gull: Edwardian Tabloid Novelist and his Unseemly
Brotherhood was published by Steven Halliwell’s Rivendale Press in
2012. Wilkinson was talking to Halliwell about Gull’s publisher, Arthur
Greening. ‘Now there's a man I would be interested in’ Halliwell declared;
hence the forthcoming title. Aldington's friendship with Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
has led Wilkinson to write Henri Gaudier-Brzeska: Sculptor: The London Years
1911-1914, which has been accepted for publication by the Lutterworth
Press, who also published the first
volume of Vivien Whelpton’s RA biography.
**********
Correspondent Caroline Zilboorg is pleased
to report that her edition of
H.D.’s Bid Me to Live (University Press of Florida, 2011) is now
available in paperback. The paperback is priced at a very reasonable $19.99
(currently £13.75). This makes the text accessible to a more general market,
and offers the possibility of using this, the definitive edition, as a teaching
text.
**********
Book Review
Edmund Blunden, Undertones
of War, ed. by John Greening
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)
It is intriguing to find the gentle Georgian
pastoralist, Edmund Blunden, reacting positively to the combative, scathing
enemy of cant, Richard Aldington. Soon after the appearance of Death of a
Hero, Blunden wrote to Siegfried Sassoon (22 September 1929): ‘R.
Aldington’s war book is excellent fury, and his bombardments &c are real.’ In
a later letter to Sassoon (12 December 1937) he wrote in approving terms about Very
Heaven: ‘R. Aldington has a smack at bogus artists and intellectuals in a
new novel which amuses me a great deal. He has been watching the creatures with
some care.’ Blunden, then, admired not only Aldington’s potent and authentic
depiction of war but also his forceful and satirical debunking of hypocrisy.
[Blunden reviewed Death of a Hero favourably for the Times Literary
Supplement, as Aldington and Charles Prentice were corresponding lamenting
that prospect.—Ed.]
Undertones of War stands out
among the crop of memoirs published in the years around 1928 as an unusual
juxtaposition of prose chronicle and accompanying poems. It rapidly became an
established classic, as Sassoon was among the first to realise. In a letter to
Blunden (5 May 1929) he declared: ‘It cannot not be a classic.’
Greening’s book is almost certainly
the most comprehensive treatment that Undertones has received. Apart,
obviously, from the prose memoir and the accompanying supplement of poems,
Greening opts to give us a further supplement of thirty-two more of Blunden’s
war poems. He justifies this decision as follows:
‘They offer another line of counterpoint to the narrative of Undertones. My
choices would not have been Blunden’s, but I do not think that he necessarily
went for the best poems so much as the most suitable: he seems to have seen the
selection appended to Undertones as a commemoration, even if that meant
the inclusion of his more hyperbolical elegies.’
There are extensive and detailed Notes on the prose text,
and on the ‘Supplement of Poetical Interpretations and Variations’. The Notes
to the memoir include a judicious selection of extracts from three key Blunden
texts which Greening rightly considers as relevant and helpful adjuncts. The
texts he draws on are: A Battalion History, De Bello Germanico,
and his 1917 Diary.
An interesting innovation is the
insertion of the titles of what Greening considers to be related poems at the
beginning of each chapter. For instance, one of the three poems listed for
Chapter XX, ‘Like Samson in his Wrath’ is ‘Vlamertinghe: Passing the Château,
July, 1917’. The relevant extract in this chapter, mentioning the extraordinary
and unexpected colourful floral display, is countered by the poem, which after
a rhapsodic reaction to this splendour, ends with the down-to-earth vernacular
of:
‘But if you ask me, mate, the
choice of colour
Is scarcely right; this
red should have been duller.’
Greening acknowledges the original work first
carried out in this respect by Martin Chown (the husband of Margi, one of
Blunden’s daughters) in his privately published A Companion Guide to Edmund
Blunden’s Undertones of War.
Greening cites Blunden’s ‘Into the
Salient’ as atypical, given that it approaches the Imagist treatment:
‘Blunden
employs free verse here to suggest the fragmented town and does so to powerful
effect (somewhat in the manner of the war poet Richard Aldington).’
One aspect of Undertones that
is neglected by Greening is Blunden’s treatment of guidebooks and maps as
trustworthy interpreters of topography. The poem, ‘The Prophet’ is a key text
in this respect, as Blunden ironically juxtaposes the old guidebook’s out of
date descriptions alongside the present reality. Regarding the fallibility and
untrustworthiness of war maps and the obstacles to the process of anything like
accurate and useful mapping, in Chapter XI ‘Very Secret’, Blunden writes:
‘The
situation southward in the wide battlefield “remained obscure.” One afternoon,
when some tremendous attempt was being made to clear it up, smiling Geoffrey
Salter and myself sat on the chalk-heaps in the most easterly sap of our
incomprehensible line – was it Pêche Street, or Louvercy? – with orders to
record what could be seen of the battle. A moorland overwhelmed in a volume of
tawny and blue smoke, thunderously murmuring, in which innumerable little
lights in ones, twos, threes, white, green, red, purple, were thrown up like
coloured waterdrops, was not easy to tabulate. Salter’s pencil travelled at
speed, but in vain. The battle died away into ordinary bad temper. The
situation remained obscure.’
In his Select Bibliography Greening fails to
list Mark D. Larabee’s Front Lines of Modernism: Remapping the Great War in
British Fiction. Awareness of and reference to Larabee’s analysis of this
problematic area would have added a further and valuable aspect to his
discussion. Apart from this omission Greening has tackled Undertones and
its related texts with great thoroughness, and his book re-establishes beyond
doubt the position of Blunden as a major war writer and Undertones of War as
a major war book.
Michael Copp
**********
Member Gemma Bristow found an RA reference in an unlikely
place: Georgette Heyer:
Biography of a Bestseller by
Jennifer Kloester (London: Heinemann, 2011), pp. 263-5. According to Kloester,
Georgette Heyer was the uncredited picture editor for the British publication
of RA’s Wellington biography.
RA and Heyer were both friends and clients of
A.S. Frere at Heinemann. When, in 1945, Frere was planning to bring out the
Wellington biography (already published in the U.S.A.), he asked Heyer to read
the book and suggest illustrations. Heyer had written two novels featuring
Wellington and was known for her meticulous research. She made a list of
possible illustrations, proposed a design for the cover and also suggested some
revisions to the text. Aldington rejected the revisions (which Frere
diplomatically concealed from Heyer), but agreed to her suggestions for the
illustrations and cover. These duly appeared in the first British publication
of Wellington (1946).
**********
The
Eliot-Aldington Letters (Part V)
Volume 5 of The
Letters of T.S. Eliot covers the years 1930 and 1931. In these two years
there is only one letter from TSE to RA (13 May 1930). In it TSE expresses his
anxiety that he and RA are moving apart: “It is very long since I heard from
you or you from me; but we were friends when we last communicated; and I hope
that your feelings towards me have not changed since then; as certainly my
feelings towards you are always those of affection and gratitude.” He then
discusses the question of what to do about the Poets’ Translation Series, and
concludes, “I am afraid it is hopeless to revive the Poets’ Translation Series
at present”. The moving apart develops into a serious rift, as the following
exchange of views between Geoffrey Faber (of Faber & Faber) and Harold Raymond (of Chatto & Windus) reveals.
Before considering those letters it is worth mentioning
a letter from TSE to F.S. Flint (4 May1931) with this P.S. “From what you say
about Richard’s novel, don’t you think that it would be only decent for the Criterion
to ignore it completely?” The footnote on p.560 identifies the ‘novel’ as At
All Costs. This is clearly wrong. At All Costs is a short war story,
not a novel, and is not about “recognizable people in the village”, nor is
there a “semi-seduction”. The controversial ‘novel’ referred to must be Stepping
Heavenward, the subject of the following letters.
In a letter (11 November 1931) from Faber to Raymond,
the former describes RA’s Stepping Heavenward as “a bitter and
malevolent attack on Eliot [which] will, of course be immediately obvious to
everybody with any knowledge of contemporary letters. . . . Aldington permits
himself – and you permit him – to air in public his own opinions on the
relationship between Eliot and his wife. . . . It is an unpardonable
interference with the lives of two people.”
In his reply to Faber (20 November 1931), Raymond
writes: “I am sorry that you regard it as so bitter an attack. I fear that I
personally am not in a position to gauge its bitterness, as I do not know
Aldington well enough, and Eliot not at all. But with regard to the passages
which you mention as particularly distressing, I can hardly think that
Aldington intended them to apply in the manner you suggest. . . . I feel that
the issue really lies between Aldington and Eliot, and not between you and me.”
Faber to Raymond (23 November 1931: “Aldington is, or
was, a friend of Eliot’s and knows those circumstances as well as anybody; it
is simply not conceivable that he was not intentionally using them to edge his
satire. . . . So perhaps there was some justification for my suggesting that
the publishers might have had something to say. Don’t you sometimes warn an
author that he’s on dangerous ground?”
Raymond to Faber (3 December 1931): “We must agree to
differ on the question what is a publisher’s job, and what isn’t. We still do
not feel it is our problem; we still feel that the issue lies between Aldington
and Eliot.”
Faber to Raymond (4 December 1931): “I could do no more
than point out to you, as Aldington’s publisher, that his story contains at
least one passage which I and others think to be not only a libel, but a
peculiarly unpleasant libel. To which you reply, in effect, that it’s no
business of yours – a view of a publisher’s responsibilities from which I, most
respectfully, dissent. And there, so far as I am concerned, the matter ends.”
Michael
Copp
**********
IX
INTERNATIONAL ALDINGTON SOCIETY
& V INTERNATIONAL IMAGISM CONFERENCE
June 30 – July 2, 2016, The Franklin Inn Club, Philadelphia
And the
Franklin Inn club...
and young
fellows go out to the colonies
but go on
paying their dues
—
Ezra Pound, Canto LXXX
“Making Pacts: Before & After Imagism”
I make a pact
with you, Walt Whitman—
I have
detested you long enough.
—
Ezra Pound, “A Pact”
Thursday 30
June @ 5 PM
Opening Reception at the Franklin Inn
Club Poetry Reading, Cocktails and Dinner
Keynote Address:
Emily Mitchell Wallace, “Imagists in Philadelphia: H.D., Ezra Pound and William
Carlos Williams”
Friday 1
July
9am-5pm Academic sessions at the Franklin
Inn Club
5.30pm Cocktails
& Dinner (with speakers)
Saturday 2
July
Field trips to
Walt Whitman House and/or Ezra Pound House & Presentation of Historical
Marker
Conference
Co-Directors: Matthew Nickel & H. R. Stoneback
Suggested
topics: The Imagists in Philadelphia (EP, H.D., WCW), Imagist “Pacts” with
Whitman, Aldington & H.D. (or Pound, Williams, Whitman), H. D. & Pound
(or Aldington, Williams, Whitman), Pound & any of the above topics.
Treatments of any other writer considered under the rubric of Imagism (e.g.,
Ernest Hemingway, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Lawrence Durrell, et al).
150-word
abstracts to be sent to Matthew Nickel (mattcnickel@gmail.com)
and H. R. Stoneback (hrs714@gmail.com) by
30 January 2016.
The "don't-miss
once-in-a-lifetime" conference held in an extraordinary venue, the
legendary Franklin Inn Club in the heart of Old Philadelphia. Send abstracts
and register early—the capacity at the Franklin Inn Club is limited and
registration will be closed when the maximum number is reached.