Richard Aldington: An Autobiography in Letters (review)

Alister Kershaw called him “the Human Book-of-the-Month Club” (234). His prodigious literary output justifies that description, as it does the more traditional phrase “man of letters.” One of the three original Imagistes, Richard Aldington has been so eclipsed by the reputations of Pound and H. D. that he is widely perceived as one of the “also-rans” of modernism. One of the many virtues of this volume is to reintegrate Aldington into the history of the modernist movement.

Aldington loved and admired H. D., saying that her poetry was the only modern English poetry for which he really cared. His relation with Pound and, later, Eliot was more ambivalent. He thought them “professeurs manqués” (250) and favored poetry “not written from the attitude of the Bard condescending, but of the ordinary man in and out of a pickle” (149). His admiration for both poets shows clearly in this book, as does his felt rivalry with both men.

No such ambivalence existed in his relation with H.D. Although the First World War destroyed his nerves and their marriage, his lifelong devotion to his “Dooley” is evident throughout the volume. After their child was stillborn, Aldington started a long-term affair with Dorothy Yorke, and H. D. had an affair and a child with Cecil Gray before meeting Bryher in 1918. Bryher’s father, Sir John Ellerman, introduced Aldington to editors and publishers after his return from the War, and these connections allowed him to reestablish himself professionally.

Aldington wrote, “the War, which for years destroyed me as an artist, gave me my revenge with Death of a Hero” (140). That novel, published in 1929, was acclaimed for its honest portrayal of the effects of war and became a bestseller. Other successful novels followed, as well as the volume he considered his best work of poetry, A Dream in the Luxembourg (1930). He also enjoyed a long tenure as the anonymous reviewer of French literature for the Times Literary Supplement.

Aldington came to the United States with his second wife, Netta, and their daughter Catherine at the start of the Second World War, “writing acknowledged trash for the movies” (203). He counseled Eric Warman about breaking into the Hollywood film industry: “you have to turn up with a flourish of strumpets—or trumpets, whichever is more practical” (206). After the war he and his family returned to Europe, settling in France. He had begun to write biography, and he will be remembered for his controversial lives of D. H. Lawrence (1950) and T. E. Lawrence (1955).

Aldington had been friends with D. H. Lawrence, whom he considered both the most interesting human being he had ever known and the greatest writer of his time. “In his life and work he most courageously went for most of the essential problems which concern us” (137). Despite his admiration, Aldington’s life of D. H. Lawrence offered a frank and balanced appraisal of its subject’s character and achievement, to the surprise of mutual friends who expected hagiography.

With Lawrence of Arabia he played devil’s advocate, exposing the British hero as a charlatan and shameless self-promoter. The angry reaction to Aldington’s debunking of a national myth caused him considerable financial hardship when publishers refused to reissue his books. Loyal friends, such as Alister Kershaw, who loaned him a cottage to live in; Mr. and Mrs. Geoffrey Dutton; and Bryher, who made substantial gifts to both Aldington and his daughter, ensured his comfort during his later years. He was fêted on his seventieth birthday as a guest of the Soviet Writers’ Union in the U.S.S.R., where his fiction had long enjoyed considerable critical and popular success. Shortly after his return to France, Richard Aldington died suddenly on 27 July 1962.

This book started as a collaboration of its editor, Norman T. Gates, and the late Miriam J. Benkovitz, whose contribution to it is generously remembered...