Richard Aldington
Stove, R. J.
In an age that worships specializa- tion as abjectly as does ours—when the ability to write a sentence on each of two different topics is generally thought to be evidence of disgusting...
...Doyle seems to have read every surviving print and handwritten document by or about his protagonist, though there is one odd omission in his otherwise excellent bibliography: Kershaw's delightful collection of autobiographical articles, The Pleasure of Their Company (University of Queensland Press, 1986...
...But this did nothing to ameliorate Aldington's last years, which, for those who dream of living by their pens alone, are a cautionary tale...
...a more detailed and accurate one will manifestly not...
...D." with the impersonal enthusiasm of an excited critic, never mentioning that he was briefly married to her...
...A Biographical Enquiry saw the light, The Lawrence Bureau had frenziedly attempted to prevent the work's publication, hoping to disgrace Aldington for good...
...third, that Lawrence's previous biographers— "the T. E. Lawrence Bureau," Aldington called them—had knowingly concealed their idol's falsehoods in their own hagiographies...
...In an age that worships specializa- tion as abjectly as does ours—when the ability to write a sentence on each of two different topics is generally thought to be evidence of disgusting dilettantism—Richard Aldington (1892-1962) was begging for trouble just by drawing breath...
...If a mind may be said to have itchy feet, Aldington's did...
...How much happier the final chapter of Aldington's life would have been if he, like most eighteenth-and nineteenth-century authors, could have brought himself in youth to accept a sinecure in some parish or government office...
...Aldington had so little notion of his duties as a modernist intellectual that he freely described Marxism and British socialism as, respectively, "crap" and "the Hellfare State...
...He had done his research too well...
...No one," wrote Snow, "can read him for ten minutes without feeling a glow of power and vitality: a gusto both of the senses and of the mind...
...but intellectually he was an even greater marvel of cosmopolitan sympathies than his changes of address imply...
...He seemed bent on defying even the most generous estimates of how many subjects anyone can master during a single lifetime...
...he depended to a grievous extent on loans from his ex-wife and few friends...
...by issuing Doyle's book, it maintains its primacy in the field...
...once the book wasactually released (February 1955), hell had no fury like a Lawrence groupie scorned...
...not only did he acquire between these residencies a first-hand knowledge of Spanish, Portuguese, and Austrian life that quite transcended any tourist's...
...Thus Aldington's effective career T managed to end with a bang and a whimper...
...that for his next project he might tackle T. E. Lawrence...
...There is, however, far more to Aldington's legacy than these two books, as Charles Doyle comprehensively shows...
...Demands were voiced for a Royal Commission...
...As with leftist descriptions of the Spanish Civil War, here was history being invented ex nihilo...
...The latter, while spirited, is as reticent as T. E. Lawrence's autobiographies are self-aggrandizing: Aldington describes his fellow Imagist "H...
...Anyone already conversant with all or part of Aldington's output will need Doyle's biography on his shelves as a matter of course...
...Doyle is especially informative on Aldington's artistic nonage among Pound and the Imagists, but it was Aldington's predictably hellish combat experience in World War I that transformed him from a low-pressured poet into an urgent prose chronicler of the RICHARD ALDINGTON: A BIOGRAPHY Charles Doyle/Southern Illinois University Press/400 pp...
...If Aldington disappoints, it is when he lacks a cool head and a steady hand: where he allows his hatred of nature's Pecksniffs to dominate his soul, making him forget Orwell's observation that "bourgeois morality" is but a cacophemism for "common decency...
...Ultimately, the precise opposite happened...
...At the pinnacle of his fame Aldington practiced a dozen different occupations: poet, war novelist, satirical novelist, essayist, memoirist, short story writer, biographer, translator of literary classics from almost every European language, editor, historian, Hollywood screenwriter . . . those familiar with his output cannot help feeling a tad, uh, inadequate...
...As Aldington dug deeper into his source material he was forced to three unpalatable conclusions: First, that Lawrence had been lying with Falstaffian zeal about many of his military exploits in the Middle East...
...Indeed, one would not be far wrong in deeming Aldington a British-born Dreiser, despite Aldington's far greater mental cultivation and freedom from Dreiser's Russophile crackpottery...
...Given that Aldington was personally acquainted with nearly everyone between 1910 and 1960 who had penned anything more ambitious R. J Stove writes for the Weekend Australian, Quadrant, and other publications down under than a shopping list, why is he not in the accredited EngLit pantheon alongside Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and all...
...To the big public it had begun with Aldington's ferocious 1929 war novel Death of a Hero...
...His earlier books had fallen out of print...
...This must have been the quality which made him beloved, notwithstanding his anti-Communism, in the USSR...
...Thirty-five years after the volume first appeared it remains a monument to scrupulous scholarship, its veracity unchallenged by its successors in the field...
...Once these rumbustious publications have aroused the reader's interest in Aldington—and only psychiatric textbooks could properly describe a reader for whom they did not—Doyle may be cordially recommended as a follow-up...
...Nor was Aldington's "glow of vitality" something he reserved for his biggest creations: it is at least as visible in what he regarded as his hackwork, illuminating even a hastily executed late effort like Frauds, as well as the selection of Aldington's literary journalism which Kershaw edited in 1970...
...39.95 R. J. Stove 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1990 century...
...Strangers to Aldington's muse—i.e., most of the human race—are best advised, before approaching Doyle, to tackle the above-cited Kershaw recollections and Aldington's own Life for Life's Sake...
...Nothing could be farther removed from Aldington at the finest than the type of tawny-port-sipping, cobweb-laden antiquary that the phrase "man of letters" connotes: as well call Dreiser a man of letters as Aldington...
...In the beginning Aldington fully expected that his researches into Lawrence's life would confirm The Seven Pillars of Wisdom's essential accuracy and, by extension, Lawrence's heroic repute...
...In 1950, having already produced gratifyingly popular biographies of, among others, Voltaire and the Duke of Wellington, Aldington agreed to a suggestion from his Australian-born friend Alister Kershaw (himself a frighteningly accomplished poet, essayist, translator, memoirist, etc., etc...
...second, that even where Lawrence had not lied outright he had deliberately exaggerated such genuine soldiering feats as he performed...
...Since these adoring friends remained alive and included one W. Churchill, the reception accorded Aldington's revelations when they appeared in book form may be easily predicted...
...worse, despair generally combined with physical illness to stop him writing at all...
...Not only did he live by turns in England, France, Italy, the West Indies, and the United States...
...What went wrong for Aiding-ton, so that nowadays even the culturally literate can go to their graves without once encountering any indication of his existence...
...The problem was, no one could convincingly dispute the truth of Aldington's findings...
...A more outwardly gripping full-length life of Aldington than Doyle's may one day appear...
...appropriately it finished with Aldington administering the kiss of death to another, real-life, hero...
...Well before Lawrence of Arabia...
...Against this failing has to be set an encomium from C. P. Snow, which emphasizes Aldington's greatest merit: sheer ebullience...
...Neither Pound nor Eliot, both as unabashedly generalist as Aldington, doubted his fitness to move in their society...
...British reviewers alternated between generalized carpet-chewing rage and hysterical ad hominem attacks...
...Janet Cooke's Pulitzer-winning tall tales for the Washington Post were models of reportorial honesty beside the trash that Lawrence's adoring friends had asked the world to believe...
...Aldington was denounced as a traitor by the social caste which fawned on Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean, Kim Phil-by, and Anthony Blunt: one article, which should be singled out for its inspired avoidance of mere vulgar lexical precision, went so far as to dub Aldington "a bitter, bed-ridden, leering, asthmatic, elderly hangman of letters...
...Southern Illinois University Press—publisher both of that selection and of Aldington's second-last biography, an introduction to the Provencal poet Mistral—has become the world's main center of (dread phrase) Aldington Studies...
Vol. 23 • August 1990 • No. 8
