Aldington Richard(Editor) - Richard Aldington: Imagist Dialogues: Letters Between Aldington, Flint and Others

R ICHARD A LDINGTON

Richard Aldington

Poet, Soldier and Lover 19111929

Volume I

Revised Edition

Vivien Whelpton

Paperback ISBN: 978 0 7188 9546 4

PDF ISBN: 978 0 7188 4796 8

ePub ISBN: 978 0 7188 4797 5

Kindle ISBN: 978 0 7188 4798 2

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Poet, Soldier and Lover

1911-1929

Revised Edition

V IVIEN W HELPTON

The Lutterworth Press

The Lutterworth Press

P.O. Box 60

Cambridge

CB1 2NT

United Kingdom

www.lutterworth.com

Paperback ISBN: 978 0 7188 9546 4

PDF ISBN: 978 0 7188 4796 8

ePub ISBN: 978 0 7188 4797 5

Kindle ISBN: 978 0 7188 4798 2

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A record is available from the British Library

Copyright Vivien Whelpton, 2013

First Published, 2014

Revised Edition, 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this edition may be reproduced, stored electronically or in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Publisher ().

Do we need another biography of Richard Aldington? the current writer was asked in 2008. The answer she gave was a strong affirmative. It is now nearly twenty-five years since Charles Doyles biography, years in which Aldington has become no more familiar to the reading public, even to those who are keenly interested in the literature of the First World War. True, his admirers have done him proud: the New Canterbury Literary Society, an association of Aldington enthusiasts, produces a quarterly online newsletter; the late Professor Norman Gates followed his critical evaluation of the poetry and his checklist of the Aldington correspondence with Richard Aldington: An Autobiography in Letters in 1992; and Caroline Zilboorgs edition of the Hilda DoolittleAldington correspondence, Richard Aldington and H.D.: Their Lives in Letters 1918-1961 (2003), is the most thorough and sympathetic study ever attempted of the relationship between the two poets. But the wider public still remains ignorant of this extraordinary man and writer. This in a period marked by a revival of interest in the literature of the Great War (to which, in both verse and prose, he made a vital contribution), along with the publication of compelling recent biographies of several of its writers, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon and Edward Thomas.

Warmth, passion and vitality characterised the life and work of Richard Aldington. However, he was also that Renaissance figure, a man of letters. (The fact that such personalities are uncommon today is indicated by the fact that there is no gender-neutral term.) For the first half of his life he was a poet, critic and translator; he then became a novelist. In his later years and controversially he was a biographer. Men of letters are often neglected precisely because of the breadth of their achievement. Aldington the young Imagist is familiar to poets and academics and has recently appeared in a fine group biography of those Aldingtons short stories of the war (collected as Roads to Glory ) are also available, and were published by the Imperial War Museum in a new edition by David Wilkinson in 1992.

It is with the earlier years of Aldingtons adult life that this volume is concerned. These were the years in which he figured as one of the Imagist poets and in which he fell in love with, and married, another of them; the war years, in which his personal and literary life fell apart; the post-war years, in which he painfully tried to put his life together again, and to re-establish his literary career; and, finally, the weeks at the end of the twenties in which he wrote Death of a Hero , his blistering attack on all that had made that terrible war possible, and his own goodbye to all that. He would never again be domiciled in England.

I wish to express my gratitude to the estate of Richard Aldington and its agents, Rosica Colin Ltd., for the encouragement I have received since starting this project; in particular from Joanna Marston at Rosica Colin and from the late Catherine Aldington.

Excerpts from the writings of Richard Aldington, as specified in the Bibliography, are reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Richard Aldington c/o Rosica Colin Limited, London.

Richard Aldingtons memoirs, Life for Lifes Sake ( Richard Aldington 1941, 1969); his novels, The Colonels Daughter ( Catherine Guillaume 1931, 1958, 1986), All Men are Enemies ( Richard Aldington 1933, 1960, 1988) and Very Heaven ( Richard Aldington 1937, 1987), the short story Farewell to Memories; Voltaire , D.H. Lawrence: An Appreciation , Portrait of a Genius, But and Pinorman ; Prefaces to Some Imagist Poets 1915 and A Fool i the Forest and the Foreword to War and Love ; Literary Studies and Reviews ; articles originally published in: The New Age , The Sphere , The Egoist , The New Freewoman , Times Literary Supplement , The English Review , The Monthly Chapbook , Poetry and The Little Review ; letters published and unpublished; and poems: from The Complete Poems of Richard Aldington ( Richard Aldingtom 1948), The Love Of Myrrhine and Konallis and Other Prose Poems and Images of War ; and poems unpublished by Aldington: Angelicos Coronation, Beauty Unpraised, To D.H. Lawrence, Blizzard, It is bitter and The Walk.

Extracts from Death of a Hero by Richard Aldington ( 1929 Richard Aldington, 1956 by the Estate of Richard Aldington) are reproduced by kind permission of Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

Excerpts from Bid Me To Live ( 1960 Norman Holmes Pearson), Palimpsest (1968 Southern Illinois University Press), Asphodel ( 1992 Duke University Press), Paint it Today ( 1992 Perdita Schaffner), Tribute to Freud ( 1956, 1974 Norman Holmes Pearson), End to Torment ( 1979 New Directions and the Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust) and from the poems and letters of H.D., published and unpublished, are reproduced by permission of Pollinger Limited and New Directions Publishing Corporation. My especial thanks to Katy Loffman at Pollinger for her kind interest.

Quotations from the letters and works of Ezra Pound ( 1950 by Ezra Pound. 1984, 1991, 1993 by the Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust, 2010, 2013 by Mary de Rachewiltz and the Estate of Omar S. Pound) are used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation, agents.

Quotations from the letters and works of Bryher ( 2013 by The Schaffner Family Foundation) are also used by permission from New Directions Publishing Corporation.

My thanks go to Linda Flint for permission to quote from the letters of F.S. Flint, from an article in The Egoist and the poem, Soldiers , and to David Higham Associates for permission to quote from the writings of Herbert Read.

I am indebted to the following libraries and institutions for permission to quote from or cite unpublished manuscripts in their collections:

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University: Yale Collection of American Literature: H.D. Papers, George Plank Papers, Ezra Pound Papers; General Collection: Bryher Papers, Richard Aldington Papers