Richard Aldington

• 1. Introduction

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  Richard Aldington was born Edward Godfree Aldington in Portsmouth on the 8th of July 1892, into a household where books lined every wall and both parents wrote for publication. His father sold stationery on Portsmouth High Street before drifting into clerking and amateur authorship. His mother published fiction under the name Mrs A. E. Aldington and kept the Mermaid Inn at Rye. Neither parent achieved lasting recognition, yet together they handed their son a library stocked with European and classical literature and a stubborn conviction that writing was a serious human enterprise.

  By the time Aldington died on the 27th of July 1962, he had produced 143 separate titles and reviewed more than 1,350 books. He had helped launch a movement that cracked Victorian verse wide open, survived the trenches of the First World War, written one of the most debated war novels of the century, and provoked one of British literary life's loudest biographical scandals. He outlived his reputation several times over and spent his final years in the village of Sury-en-Vaux in France, celebrated in Moscow and largely ignored in London. How a boy from Portsmouth arrived at all of that is a story about genius, bitterness, loyalty, betrayal, and the long damage that a world war can do to a sensitive mind.

• 2. A Poet's Formation

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  Dover College and then the University of London gave Aldington his formal schooling, but debt ended the degree. His father's speculations had collapsed, the family's finances with them, and the young man was left to support himself on a small allowance while working as a sports journalist. He channelled the spare hours into poetry and into London's literary circles, where he encountered William Butler Yeats and Walter de la Mare.

  In 1911 he met the society hostess Brigit Patmore, and through her made two introductions that would shape the next decade of his life. Ezra Pound and the American poet H.D., whose full name was Hilda Doolittle, entered his orbit at a single stroke. Pound and Doolittle had previously been engaged to each other; by the time Aldington arrived, that engagement had dissolved. He was described at the time as tall and broad-shouldered, with thick blondish hair, very bright blue eyes, and a determined mouth.

  Aldington and Doolittle grew closer through shared enthusiasm for new ideas about poetry, feminism, and philosophy. In 1913 they travelled together through Italy and France, returned to London in the summer, and moved into separate flats in Churchwalk, Kensington. Doolittle took number 6, Aldington number 8, and Pound settled at number 10. With Pound and the Doolittle family present, the couple married. They moved to 5 Holland Place Chambers, though Pound soon reappeared across the hall. Both the togetherness and the intrusion would become defining textures of Aldington's early adult life.

  His language learning, begun in childhood alongside butterfly collecting and hiking, continued into these years. He mastered French, Italian, Latin, and ancient Greek, giving him direct access to the classical and continental sources that would feed both his poetry and his eventual career as a translator.

• 3. Imagism and Its Aftermath

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  Ezra Pound coined the term imagistes for H.D. and Aldington in 1912, naming a movement dedicated to minimalist free verse, stark images, and the expulsion of Victorian moralism. Aldington shared the conviction that experimentation with traditional Japanese verse forms could point avant-garde English literature forward, a view he held in common with the critic T. E. Hulme.

  Pound sent three of Aldington's poems to Harriet Monroe's magazine Poetry, and they appeared in November 1912. Monroe identified him publicly as "a young English poet, one of the Imagistes, a group of ardent Hellenists who are pursuing interesting experiments in vers libre." She singled out the poem "Choricos" as his finest work, calling it "one of the most beautiful death songs in the language" and "a poem of studied and affected gravity."

  Aldington's verse forms almost one third of the Imagists' inaugural anthology Des Imagistes, published in 1914. That same year, the couple met Amy Lowell, who introduced them to D. H. Lawrence, a writer who would become a close friend and mentor to both. Between 1914 and 1916 Aldington served as literary editor and columnist at The Egoist, working under Dora Marsden alongside Leonard Compton-Rickett. He reviewed Wyndham Lewis and helped Ford Madox Ford with a propaganda volume and took dictation for The Good Soldier.

  H.D. became pregnant in August 1914. The pregnancy ended in a stillborn daughter in 1915, traumatising both of them; H.D. was 28 and Aldington 22. The couple relocated from Holland Park to Hampstead, seeking calm near D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda. The war's outbreak that same year deepened the fractures already forming in the marriage. Aldington, unhappy, began affairs, including one with Florence Fallas. He helped T. S. Eliot by persuading Harriet Shaw Weaver to appoint Eliot as his successor at The Egoist, and in 1919 introduced Eliot to Bruce Richmond, the editor at The Times Literary Supplement.

• 4. The Trenches

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  Aldington joined up in June 1916 and was sent for training at Wareham in Dorset. He found the regimented physical grind alien; he described feeling fundamentally different from the other men around him, more drawn to intellectual pursuits than to the unending labour that left him no time to write. H.D. followed him from posting to posting, first to Wareham, then to a camp near Manchester. Their sporadic meetings were emotionally wrenching.

  When he was sent to the front in December 1916, the relationship became epistolary. He wrote to H.D. that despite digging graves, he had completed twelve poems and three essays since enlisting and was working toward a new book. He wrote of living with lice, cold, mud, and almost no sanitation. Gas on the front would affect his health for the rest of his life.

  He was given leave in July 1917 and spent it with H.D. In November 1917 he joined the 11th Leicestershires and was later commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Sussex Regiment. He finished the war as a signals officer and temporary captain, being demobilised in February 1919.

  The war's damage was not merely physical. He felt an unbridgeable distance from old Imagist friends like Pound, who had not endured the front and could not, as Aldington saw it, imagine the living conditions there. The collections Images of War and Images of Desire, both published in 1919, carried the weight of that experience, suffused, as his critics noted, with a new melancholy. Exile and Other Poems in 1923 returned to the trauma, and the story collection Roads to Glory followed in 1930. After that point his focus shifted toward criticism and biography, the long poem giving way to longer prose.

• 5. Death of a Hero

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  Aldington called Death of a Hero a "jazz novel" when it appeared in September 1929. He had started writing it almost immediately after the armistice, developing the manuscript mostly while living on the island of Port-Cros in Provence. It opens with a letter to the playwright Halcott Glover and takes a satirical, cynical stance on Victorian and Edwardian values, arguing that Victorian materialism was itself a cause of the war's tragedy and waste.

  The central character, George Winterbourne, is loosely based on Aldington as an artist, though Winterbourne is a painter rather than a writer. One of the novel's fictional locations, named "The Chateau de Fressin," closely resembled a real castle Aldington had described in a letter to H.D. By Christmas 1929, more than 10,000 copies had sold in England alone. The book arrived as part of a wave of war memoirs and novels by writers including Remarque, Sassoon, and Hemingway.

  The novel was quickly translated into German and other European languages. In Russia it was read as an attack on bourgeois politics and praised by Gorky as a work of fundamental challenge. Aldington's later fiction also gained large Russian distribution, though he remained, by his own account, fiercely non-partisan despite his passion for iconoclasm and feminism.

  Censorship complicated the publication. Rather than cut or alter objectionable passages, Aldington replaced banned words with asterisks, a deliberate choice meant to make the censoring visible on the page. Lawrence Durrell later described Death of a Hero as "the best war novel of the epoch." Aldington had also written A Fool i' the Forest: A Phantasmagoria in 1924, framed explicitly as his reply to Eliot's The Waste Land, which gives some measure of how actively he was engaging with, and pushing back against, the literary fashions of the day.

• 6. Exile and Biography

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  Aldington went into self-imposed exile in 1928, settling in Paris and living for a period with Brigit Patmore, the society hostess through whom he had originally met Pound and H.D. In 1938, following his formal divorce from H.D. after a separation that had stretched since the end of the war, he married Netta Patmore, who had previously been Brigit's daughter-in-law. That same year he and Netta had a daughter, Catherine. In 1950, Netta left him to raise Catherine alone.

  Aldington had suffered a breakdown in 1925, and his animosity toward Eliot's growing celebrity had calcified into a sustained literary resentment. He had satirised Eliot as "Jeremy Cibber" in Stepping Heavenward, published in 1931. His novels more broadly contained thinly veiled portraits of Eliot, Lawrence, and Pound, and, as one critic put it, the friendship did not always survive the portrait.

  After relocating to the United States with Netta in 1942, he turned in earnest to biography. His study of the Duke of Wellington, first published in 1943 and revised as Wellington in 1946, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He followed it with biographies of D. H. Lawrence in 1950, Frédéric Mistral in 1956, Robert Louis Stevenson in 1957, and T. E. Lawrence in 1955. Under financial pressure he also worked as a Hollywood screenwriter.

  In 1947 he met the Australian writer Alister Kershaw in Paris. Kershaw became his secretary and moved in with Aldington and Netta at their house in Saint Clair Le Lavandou in the south of France. Kershaw would later edit Aldington's selected critical writing and compile a bibliography of his work. By 1958 Aldington was living in Sury-en-Vaux in the Cher department, where he would remain until his death.

• 7. The Lawrence Scandal

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  Aldington's biography of T. E. Lawrence, published in 1955, triggered the loudest literary controversy of his later career. In the spirit of the iconoclasm he had practised throughout his writing life, he became the first to bring public notice to Lawrence's illegitimacy and argued that Lawrence was a homosexual, a liar, a charlatan, an "impudent mythomaniac", a "self-important egotist", a poor writer, and even a bad motorcyclist.

  The reaction was fierce. Robert Graves, a friend of Lawrence, wrote that instead of a careful portrait of his subject, the book read as "the self-portrait of a bitter, bedridden, leering, asthmatic, elderly hangman-of-letters." Robert Irwin, writing in the London Review of Books, offered a cooler reading, suggesting Aldington's spite was driven by jealousy and a feeling of exclusion by the British establishment. Lawrence had attended Oxford; his father was a baronet. Aldington had bled in the trenches of Europe while Lawrence accumulated a heroic reputation in the Middle Eastern theatre and became an international celebrity.

  Irwin also acknowledged that Aldington was industrious and that the portrait was grounded in careful research. Christopher Sykes, writing his introduction to the Collins edition in 1969, reprinted in Pelican Biographies in 1971, concluded that for the first time the awkward questions about Lawrence had been faced squarely and that Aldington's book had "cleared the ground of rubbish, efficiently and thoroughly." Foreign and War Office files concerning Lawrence's career were released during the 1960s, and subsequent biographies continued to grapple with the questions Aldington had forced into the open.

  Aldington's obituary in The Times in 1962 had already found the right phrase for him: "an angry young man of the generation before they became fashionable... who remained something of an angry old man to the end."

• 8. Legacy and Memorial

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  On the 11th of November 1985, Aldington was among sixteen Great War poets commemorated in stone at Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner. The inscription on the stone was drawn from Wilfred Owen's "Preface" to his poems: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."

  Alec Waugh took the view that Aldington worked off his bitterness in novels like The Colonel's Daughter rather than letting it corrode his personal life. Douglas Bush described his career as "a career of disillusioned bitterness." Lyndall Gordon characterised the sketch of Eliot in Aldington's 1941 memoir Life for Life's Sake as "snide."

  His relationship with H.D. outlasted the marriage, the affairs, and the formal divorce of 1938. They remained friends for the rest of their lives, though Aldington destroyed all the couple's pre-1918 correspondence. He had championed her as the major poetic voice of the Imagist movement and helped her work reach international audiences; that advocacy survived everything else.

  Aldington died of a heart attack on the 27th of July 1962, shortly after being honoured in Moscow on the occasion of his 70th birthday and the translation of several of his novels into Russian. He is buried in the cemetery at Sury-en-Vaux. His daughter Catherine, child of his second marriage, survived him and died in 2010. The correspondence he left behind has proven as substantial as his published output; approximately 8,000 letters have been located since his death.