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RICHARD ALDINGTON:A BIOGRAPHY Also by Charles Doyle JAMES K. BAXTER WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS: THE CRITICAL HERITAGE (editor) *WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS AND THE AMERICAN POEM WALLACE STEVENS: THE CRITICAL HERITAGE (editor) *Also published by Palgrave Macmillan Richard Aldington: A Biography

CHARLES DOYLE

M MACMILLAN © Charles Doyle 1989 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1989 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended), or under the terns of any license permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33-4 Alfred Place, London WC1E 7DP.

Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

First published in 1989

Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Doyle, Charles, 1928- Richard Aldington: a biography. 1. English literature. Aldington, Richard, 1892-1962 I. Title 828' .91209

ISI3N 978-1-349-10226-6 ISBN 978-1-349-10224-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-10224-2 To Alister Kershaw Contents

Listof Illustrations ix

Acknowledgements Xl Introduction xiii 1 Chrysalis, 1892-1911 1 2 Pound and H. D., 1912-13 13 3 Egoists, 1914 26 4 Images, Lost and Found, 1915-16 38 5 War, 1916-18 54 6 Aftermaths, 1919-20 68 7 Malthouse Cottage: Working at the Writer's Trade, 1921-25 77 8 Malthouse Cottage: Eliot, 1919-27 90 9 Malthouse Cottage: The Late 1920s, 1926-28 106 10 Port-Cros and After, 1928-29 119 11 A Careeras a Novelist, 1929-31 138 12 1931-33 151 13 1933--36 164 14 1937-38 177 15 Farewell to Europe, 1939-40 191 16 1941-42 206 17 1943--46 215 18 1946-50 230 19 1950-54 245 20 TheT. E. Lawrence Affair, 1950-55 261 21 1954-57 275

vii viii Contents

22 Maison Salle, 1957-59 289 23 1959-61 300 24 1962 313 Notes 326 Bibliography 355 Index 370 • List of Illustrations

1. Richard Aldington in 1905. (Estate of Margery Lyon Gilbert.) 2. Richard Aldington aged 19, 1911. (Morris Library, Southern Illinois University.) 3. Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) in 1913. (Beinecke Library, Yale University.) 4. A group of fellow-poets visit Wilfred Scawen Blunt, . (Courtesy of the Rt. Hon. Earl of Lytton, aBE.) 5. A multiple photograph of Dorothy (Arabella) Yorke. (Estate of Professor Alfred Satterthwaite.) 6. Richard Aldington as an army officer, 1918. (Beinecke Library.) 7. D. H. Lawrence's portrait painting of Dorothy Yorke. (Beinecke Library.) 8. Brigit Patmore as a young woman. (Estate of Professor Alfred Satterthwaite.) 9. Osbert Sitwell and Richard Aldington in the gardens at Montegufoni. (Morris Library.) 10. Richard Aldington, by Man Ray, late 1920s. (Beinecke Library.) 11. Richard Aldington, photograph taken for a Harrod's window display in the late 1920s. (Vaughan and Freeman photo. Estate of Margery Lyon Gilbert.) 12. Richard Aldington (photograph by Madam Yevonde). According to Brigit Patmore, this was taken shortly after publication of Death of a Hero in 1929. 13. Aldington and Brigit Patmore in the South of France, early 1930s. (From Brigit Patmore's My Friends When Young.) 14. Richard and Netta Aldington in the late 1930s. (Courtesy of Catherine Aldington Guillaume.) 15. Richard and Netta Aldington in the early 1940s. (Beinecke Library.) 16. Henry Williamson and Alister Kershaw, 1949. (Courtesy of Alister Kershaw.) 17. Aldington in Montpellier, 1955. (Courtesy of F.-J. Temple.) 18. H.D. in 1956. (Beinecke Library.) 19. Richard Aldington, , Henry Miller and Jacques Temple. (Courtesy of F.-J. Temple.)

ix x

20. Aldington with his daughter Catherine in Leningrad, lateJune 1962. (Courtesy of Catherine Aldington Guillaume.) 21. Aldington and Catherine in the gardens of Petrodvorets, 1962. (Courtesy of Catherine Aldington Guillaume.) 22. Aldington broadcasting in Russia, 1962. (Courtesy of Cather­ ine Aldington Guillaume.) 23. At Valentin Kataev's dacha, at Peredelkino near Moscow. Kataev is on the left, Aldington next to him, Catherine in the centre. (Courtesy of Catherine Aldington Guillaume.) 24. Aldington with a group of his Maison Salle neighbours, 1962. (Courtesy of Catherine Aldington Guillaume.) Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Alister Kershaw, Literary Executor of the Estate of Richard Aldington, for his assistance and for giving me the opportunity to write this book. Particularthanks for theirassistance to Dr Norman T. Gates, most devoted of Aldington scholars, and to Mr David Wilkinson, author of a valuable unpublished study of the context of Aldington's life in Berkshire in the 1920s. Grateful acknowledgements to: the Morris Library, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale; Mr Donald Gallup, former curator, Mr Louis Silverstein and Miss Marjorie Wynne, Research Librarian of the American Literature Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University; the McPherson Library, University of Victoria; the Manuscript Division, the British Library; Mrs Ellen Dunlap andthe Humanities Research Center, University of Texas; Dr Lola Szladits, Curator, and the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the National Library of Australia, Canberra; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the University of Chicago Library, Dergenstein Collec­ tion; University of Arkansas Library; Library of the University of California, Los Angeles; University of Illinois Library; University of Iowa Libraries; Library; University of Toronto Library; The All-Union State Library of Foreign Literature, Moscow; The Foreign Commission, Soviet Writers' Un ion, Moscow; Copyright Agency of the USSR, Moscow; Lockwood Memorial Library, State University of New York at Buffalo; Dartmouth College Library; University of Reading Library; the Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Boston University Library; Cornell University Library; Temple University Library; Princeton University Library; India University Library; New York University Library; Mr Roger Smith and William Heinemann Ltd ; Mr Mark Bonham-Carter and William Collins & Sons; Chatto & Windus Ltd ; New Directions Publishing Corporation; the Viking Press; Antony Alpers; the late Mrs Netta Aldington; John Arlott; Robin Ancrum; Professor Helen Bacon ; the late Dr Miriam Benkovitz; Professor Peter Buitenhuis; ProfessorFred D. Crawford; the late W. Denison Deasey; Lawrence Durrell; Mrs T. S. Eliot ; Constantine Fitzgibbon; C. J. Fox; Mrs Catherine Aldington Guillaume; Mrs Eunice Gluckman; James Hanley; the late Dr

xi xii Acknowledgements

Selwyn Kittredge; Lady Kathleen Liddell Hart; the late Mrs Margery Lyon Gilbert; Professor Frank McShane; Lawrence Miller; the late Professor Harry T. Moore; Malcolm Muggeridge; Michael Patmore; Dr Lawrence Clark Powell; Benedict Read ; the late Professor Alfred W.Satterthwaite; Mrs Perdita Schaffner; the late C. P. Snow (Lord Snow); Philip Snow; the late Vernon Sternberg;M. F-J. Temple; Professor Mikhail Urnov and Mr Eric Warman. Special thanks are due to Sue Mitchell for typing the manuscript. Introduction

'A writer of great gifts'-thus Richard Aldington, poet, editor, translator, critic, novelist and biographer, was adjudged by C. P. Snow in the late 1930s.1 'No one can read him for ten minutes without feeling a glow of power and vitality.' A quarter of a century later, after Aldington's death and notlong before his own, T. S. Eliot told a correspondent that 'something more permanent and extensive should be written about Richard Aldington, whose place in the literary world of my time in London is or ought to be secure'? Shortly thereafter, in an obituary notice on Aldington, Eliot said: 'We were on the same side for a long time and I was the first to give offence, although unintentionally .. .,3 Snow, too, had more to say about Aldington, in the middle of a 1966 essay on Stalin: 'There was a break in our friendship because, without doing anything at all or saying a word, I found that I was part of a conspiracy against him. We were, I am glad to say, reconciled before he died'." At different times Eliot and Snow were good, even close, friends of Aldington. Both are on record as perceiving in him a brilliant but difficult individual. From the mid-1950s until recently Aldington has been almost forgotten in the United States while in Britain a not clearly deserved reputation for making virulent and intemperate ad hominem attacks has largely overborne any sense of his considerable literary merits. But there are signs of a revival of interest in Aldington's life and work. In 1975 the New York Public Library published his letters to the scholarAlan Bird, which focus largely on the research done for Aldington's biography of Lawrence of Arabia": in 1981 the Viking Press published his correspondence with Lawrence Durrell." At present a 'Selected letters' is in preparation and a volume of Aldington's correspondence with Pound. Aldington's earliest literary avocation was as a poet. By the time he was 19 he had experimented successfully with free verse. He deserves an honourable place as an innovator in this medium. Besides being one of the official founders of in 1912, once the Poundian phase of the Imagist movement got under way Aldington was the most effective English Imagist. Through his work as apologist and editor he was instrumental in sustaining the English end of the movement during its shortlife and was the prime

xiii xiv Introduction mover behind the 1930 anthology which was the movement's summing-up? As he saw it, the aim of Imagism was 'to correct certain tendencies, and to foster others'," by which he meant banishing Victorian moralisms and 'poetical' flourishes. Signifi­ cantly, part of his own purpose was to circumvent those kinds of artist 'who, of necessity, write, think and paint only for each other, since there is no one else to understand them'." But perhaps his chief service to Imagism was his early recognition of the greatness of Hilda Doolittle's talent and his encouragement of her. Along with F. S. Flint and (a little later) T. S. Eliot, Aldington was largely responsible for infusing the influence of contemporary French poetry into English. As literary editorof , one of his aims was 'a revolt against our intellectual provincialism'v'" In practice, this revolt became a concentration on French literature, and an awareness of 'international consciousness' acknowledged by Eliot as editorial successor to Aldington at the EgoistY Aldington sustained his role as cultural 'good European' and proponent of cross-fertilisation throughout the 1920s in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. All this occurred during a period when Aldington saw himself as recuperating psychologically from experiences in the First World War. 'There are two kinds of men, those who have been to the front and those who haven't', he wrote in his memoir, Life for Life's SakeP His first literary response was in poems, Images of War,t3 charged by Bernard Bergonzi with expressing 'a purely personal revulsion from the scenes of war',14 a judgement which might equally well characterise the poetry of . But Aldington broke away from the conservatism of his life and writing in the 1920s with a larger statement about the warand an individual contribution in another medium. Death of a Hero, which he called a 'jazz novel', claims the musical form Eliot and Pound linked with poetry, and is one of the most powerful works of fiction dealing with the First World War. Since its first publication in 1929 it has been in print almost continuously, most recently in the 1984 Hogarth Press edition. 'I would never have thought that the English would produce a book like it!', wrote in 1932.15 The Russians' immediate response to Aldington's 'bitter realism' quickly expanded into intense interest in his work in general. Confirmation that this engagement continues was provided recently by the participation of a member of the Soviet Writers Union, Professor Introduction xv

Mikhail Urnov of the Moscow Institute of Printing Arts, at the University of Reading's'Aldington Symposium' in July 1986. Since the appearance of Evgeny Lann's review of Death of a Hero in Navy Mir in September 1931:

Richard Aldington has always been accepted in Russia, and still is, as a many-sided figure, a rounded personality. Articles have been written about him as a poet and a novelist, a translator and a critic, a man and a writer ... articles, studies, reviews and notices about him have appeared in works published in Moscow and Leningrad, in journals and in newspapers published in other cities.... His books have reached every part of the country."

A 1930s English critic, A. C. Ward, saw that the novel 'proclaimed that the war had been fatal to a whole generation of youth by inflicting death either morally or spiritually, or both, even when it had spared the fighters' bodies'.17 For Aldington, the causes of this mass fatality were Victorian materialism, humbug and philistin­ ism, which he attacked here and in his later fiction. As an aesthete, he felt that the arts should be a life-giving alternative to destructive bourgeois social values but, from Death of a Hero on, the social snobbery and artificiality of the London literary world were, among his prime targets. Much of the opprobrium which Aldington has suffered derives from the perception that many of his bitter and angry assaults were directed with personal venom against individuals. As to that, his friend Alister Kershaw once observed:

There's no denying that Richard had an impressive muster of aversions, ranging from left-wing bigots to the Catholic church, but, as Roy Campbell says, his hatreds were jovial and, so to speak, generous; they were never spiteful or vicious. Besides, he rather enjoyed his own tirades and had a lot of fun making his hatreds seem more ferocious than they were.IS

The question of the quality of Aldington's personal animus comes up with redoubled force in relation to his biographies. In that genre he exhibited great range, from his succinct and still valued study of Voltaire in the 1920s to his sketch of (which he hoped would provide material for others engaged in full-scale biographies of Douglas) to his rigorously­ documented 'biographical enquiry' into the life of Lawrence of xvi Introduction

Arabia. What Aldington added to the art of biography, particularly in the 1950s, is an unusual amalgam of substantiated objective fact with a subjective element which often enlivens the 'portrait' he is making. Although he set out to give a full-scale acount of the Duke of Wellington, he soon abandoned the idea of writing definitive or exhaustive biographies in favour of what he termed 'portraits'. Portraitof a Genius, But . .., his study of D. H. Lawrence, is one of the best works on its subject and remains in print. If Aldington's reputation finally foundered because of his enquiry into the life of the 'other Lawrence', the desert soldier, no one has yet demons­ trated that its major assertions are, in any important particular, at variance with the truth. Early in his career, Ald ington observed that:

This question of criticism is of the very essence of ourliterature. It needs constant discussion.A man of parts who could really work out an original, sincere criticism could determine the literary taste of the next twenty years.l?

The 'man of parts' turned out to be Eliot, but Aldington also wrote a great deal of effective literary criticism, ranging from numerous book reviews in the Sunday Refereeand Vogue, to the Times Literary Supplement, Poetry, and the Criterion. Some of his best criticism is to be found in the introductions to various anthologies. Perhaps the most useful remark on Aldington's competence in this medium is Selwyn Kittredge's:

How refreshing it is to be able to cast aside both the ponderous scholarly study and the falsifying popularization and find a critical commentary, such as Aldington's introduction to the Portable Oscar Wilde,20 which is lucid, informed and gracefully written, yet full of balanced critical insights such as only a lifetime of reading for pleasure can unfold.P

Aldington had the instincts of a scholar, even if he was strictly and determinedly amateur, and he read deeply and seriously through a lifetime intensely preoccupied with literature, but he also said, in his introduction to The Religion of Beauty: Selections from the Aesthetes: 'If we cannot take Art and Literature with a certain lightness, among the many pleasures of life, let us take to grave-digging as a relaxationF' Introduction xvii

Largely self-educated, in the Greek and Latin classics and in several languages, he was widely read both in world literatures and general subjects. Kershaw, in a broadcast, has listed tongue-in­ cheek the formidable variety of Aldington's interests in the 1940s and later: 'Ethnography, botany, astrology, entomology, anthropol­ ogy, butterflies, bushmen, beetles; music, sculpture, painting; architecture, history; Purcell, Kant, Hokusai, Piranesi, Newton, Wren'. In other words, he was a person of lively and open intelligence. It was this intelligence which moved him from his early days to fight off the narrowing influence of a provincial English environ­ ment. Although from another social background, this was a matter in which he could instinctively sympathise with D.H. Lawrence. But Aldington was of a different cast of mind. In his 'teens he formed the ideal of the 'good European', that is, the individual steeped in the literature and civilisation of the European past. (Here, of course, he found common ground with Pound and Eliot.) Otherwise, he discovered for himself, as he tells us in his memoir Lifefor Life'S Sake, a philosophy which he came to see as Epicurean: 'What I wanted to do was to enjoy life, to enjoy my life in my way; and that in no wise depended on the three fatal vices, the exercise of power, the possession of property, the esteem of other featherless bipeds'. 'Live your life with gusto', a mentor advises the hero of Aldington's All Men Are Enemies. Art, too, requires 'gusto' most of all. It has been said that Aldington had 'no fund of larger ideas', but he had anticipated this charge and answers it explicitly in the 'Author's Note' to Artifex: Sketches and Ideas (1935)where he observes that there are, lingering in the consciousness 'the clouds of ideas or pseudo-ideas which dim the mental landscape of our epoch. They are unsatisfactory material for the artist, who is concerned with life rather than with mental abstractions about life'. In Death of a Hero, and indeed in all his effective fiction, he attributes contemporary social problems (of the early 20th century) to the British caste system and moral values set in the previous epoch. The title essay of Artifex advances the proposition that historical explanation should evolve from a tracing backwards, step by step, to the roots. As to 'progress', this results from a series of quantum leaps, most of which have originated in the imagination of one individual:

I think the history of civilization in its essentials might be written xviii Introduction

in a few hundred biographies, perhaps less . It would be simply an account of the various kinds of impetus given by exceptional individuals to the mass.P

Yet Aldington is ambivalent about these individuals, especially in their modem form:

with the aid of these transcendent scientific geniuses we shall either wipe each other out, or we shall make the world a desert in pursuit of imagined gain, or we shall make it an ant-hill of virtuous Socialists. (p. 9)

He deplored the control theologians and scientists have over our lives, although the theologian had lost real influence and had created instead 'the useful little bogeyman of respectability'. In contrast, the scientist's expertise had been put at the service of militarism. Neither theologian nor scientist has power 'where it is most needed-over the military man and the predatory exploiter of the earth and other human beings'. Against these 'modem colossi' stands the 'small, dejected and nervous figure' of 'Artifex, servant of the life impulse, maker of myths, music and images' (p. 11). This figure, puny in our era, attempts to celebrate the 'otherness' and 'wonder' of the world, which is 'to be enjoyed and revered' (p. 18), though the whole idea of an anthropocentric universe is to be questioned. Artifex, the independent artist, has little to do with fashionable contemporary art:

Certainly there is art now, but it is the art of hyperaesthesia, the art of exasperated neurasthenics. The latest aesthetic giggle, the new petit frisson-anything, anything to seem original. The music of atonality, the painting and sculpture of super-realism [that is, ], the literature of the stream of consciousness, the aestheticism of concrete and cocktails-neurasthenia and self-destruction. Intellectual snobbishness is the very essence of its appeal to the gangs and cliques of Paris and London. Ifit were not inaccessible to common sense they would not want it . . . As to the swinish multitude--abandon them to the venal, the vulgar and the mediocre. (pp. 33-4)

A thinly veiled attack on what later came to be called '', this implies Aldington's sense of the nature of his own reader, the Introduction xix

adequately educated sensible person who sees the point in conserving and enjoying what is best in the European tradition. Aldington then compares the peasant and the industrial worker, favouring the former's realism and independence, his capacity for adapting to the rhythms of life, for an approach which is also Aldington's:

There isn't any paradise, either here or hereafter; there isn't any solution of the 'problem of life', because it isn't a problem. The only thing to do with life is live it, put up with the tough breaks and enjoy the alleviations. To me the arts are among the highest of the alleviations-they are more than that, an indefinite prolonging and intensifying of life here and now. If they do not enrich experience of life both in artist and spectator, I see no point in them. (pp. 40-1)

A summing-up is provided in 'A Splinter of America', Aldington's responses to a first encounter with the West Indies. Once again rejecting theological or scientific overviews of human experience, he says:

there might be another attitude to life, based on an acceptance of life's mystery and on reverence for its many forms, a more modest conception of man's place in nature, and abhorrence of every kind of greed and destruction. One seems to get glimpses of it in the more ancient civilizations, in the lives of some men, in some poets and even in a few philosophers. (pp. 56-7)

But the world is now too populous and too chaotic for anyone successfully to teach such a philosophy, so that all any individual can do is to follow his own daimon as far as circumstances allow. Both in his life and writing this is what Aldington attempted, and this accounts for his fascination with such a figure as Charles Waterton, the squire naturalist, an eccentric, which is to say, one who 'is supremely the man who knows what he wants to do, and simply and openly does it. He never thinks of gain or applause, but of the satisfaction of doing, the supreme peace which comes from the object attained-whether it be riding a live alligator on the banks of the Essequibo or standing on one foot on the topmost pinnacle of the Castello de Sant' Angelo in Rome 'r" Introducing The Complete Poems of RichardAldington in 1948, he xx Introduction wrote, /1 claim no share whatever in the so-called 'revolution of 1912/. Itwas a mere accident thatwhatI was writing then chanced to meet with the approval of the verse revolutionariesF' Thus he repudiated his connection with Imagism, the one literary move­ ment associated with his name. Apart from it/ during a 50-year literary careerhe went his independent way, riding more than a few alligators of his own. All this led to his last difficultyears in a cottage in the Sancerrois region of France, but an interesting and varied life ends on no dull note and, instead, is wreathed in ironies, most notably a triumphal tour of collectivist Russia. Aldington's last important book was a study of the life and works of Frederic Mistral, the Provencal poet, the value of whose work derives from the fact that he was deeply rooted in his own community.