Death of a Hero Read online

  DEATH of a HERO

  Books by Richard Aldington

  — Biography —

  VOLTAIRE

  WELLINGTON

  FOUR ENGLISH PORTRAITS

  THE STRANGE LIFE OF CHARLES WATERTON

  PORTRAIT OF A GENIUS. BUT… (Life of D. H. Lawrence)

  PINORMAN

  LAWRENCE OF ARABIA: A BIOGRAPHICAL ENQUIRY

  INTRODUCTION TO MISTRAL

  FRAUDS

  — Novels —

  DEATH OF A HERO

  THE COLONEL’S DAUGHTER

  ALL MEN ARE ENEMIES

  WOMEN MUST WORK

  VERY HEAVEN

  SEVEN AGAINST REEVES

  REJECTED GUEST

  THE ROMANCE OF CASANOVA

  — Short Stories —

  ROADS TO GLORY

  SOFT ANSWERS

  — Poetry —

  A DREAM IN THE LUXEMBOURG

  COMPLETE POEMS

  — Essays —

  FRENCH STUDIES AND REVIEWS

  LITERARY STUDIES AND REVIEWS

  D. H. LAWRENCE

  — Anthologies —

  POETRY OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD

  FIFTY ROMANCE LYRIC POEMS

  THE RELIGION OF BEAUTY (the English Aesthetes)

  — Translations —

  EURIPIDES: Alcestis

  MEDALLIONS: Anyte. Meleager. Anacreontea. Renaissance Latin Poets

  BOCCACCIO: Decameron

  FIFTEEN JOYS OF MARRIAGE (15th Century French)

  MYSTERY OF THE NATIVITY (15th Century Liégois)

  CYRANO DE BERGERAC: Voyages

  VOLTAIRE: Candide

  CHODERLOS DE LACLOS: Dangerous Acquaintances

  JULIEN BENDA: The Great Betrayal

  A WREATH FOR SAN GEMIGNANO

  DEATH of a HERO

  Richard Aldington

  With

  Aldington’s Essay: NOTES ON THE WAR NOVEL and a Foreword by C.J. Fox

  The Golden Dog Press

  Ottawa – Canada – 1998

  © The Estate of Richard Aldington 1929, 1957

  Richard Aldingion is hereby identified as author of this work in accordance with Section 77 of the (U.K.) Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus 1929.

  This text derives from the unexpurgated Hogarth Press edition of 1984 which was offset from the Consul edition of 1965. The text of “Notes on the War Novel” is drawn from This Quarter Vol II, No 2, Oct/Nov/Dec 1929.

  All rights reserved.

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Aldington, Richard. 1892-1962

  Death of a hero

  Canadian ed.

  ISBN 0-919614-78-7

  I Title.

  PR6001.L4D4 1998 823’.912 C98-900848-7

  Foreword © C.J. Fox.

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  The Golden Dog Press wishes to express its appreciation to the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council for current and past support of its publishing programme.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword (C.J. Fox)

  Notes on the War Novel (R. Aldington)

  — Death of a Hero —

  Prologue

  Part I

  Part II

  Part III

  Epilogue

  Regarding Richard Aldington and Death of a Hero

  When Death of a Hero was published in 1929 its publishers, Chatto & Windus, decided that some of the language in the novel was inappropriate for those times and proceeded to censor the text. An angry Aldington insisted on a “Note” in the published volume in which he protested at what he felt strongly was an improper and high-handed act to which he bowed reluctantly.

  Interest in Aldington’s considerable contribution to Twentieth Century writing is fostered by the New Canterbury Literary Society through its “Richard Aldington Newsletter”. Aldington published his autobiography, Life for Life’s Sake in 1941. Richard Aldington: An Autobiography in Letters (1992) edited by Norman T. Gates offers much useful information, as does Caroline Zilboorg’s two-volume (1992 and 1995) edition of the correspondence between Aldington and his first spouse, the imagist poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.).

  FOREWORD

  Death of a Hero is a highly autobiographical work. Like the ironically styled “hero” George Winterbourne, whose life the book recounts, Richard Aldington (1892-1962) was born the son of a bookish provincial English lawyer and his domineering wife. (Aldington once confessed that the fictional Winterbournes represented a “satirical onslaught” on his own family.) The Aldingtons moved early-on from their child’s first home—near the southern naval city of Portsmouth, instead of the story’s Sheffield—eastward to Dover, which was replicated in the novel as the “middling-sized, dreary coast town” of Dullborough.

  Rebelling against the constrictions of Victorian domesticity and schooling, Aldington frequently vanished, as George did, to delight in the “twenty-mile sweeps of undulating Down fringed by the grey-silver sea” which bordered his childhood town. In the process, Richard (he adopted this forename in preference to his original “Edward Godfrey”) became an enthusiastic naturalist and a proudly independent, romantic adversary of the Machine-Age blight already vanquishing what remained of Old England as the Twentieth Century dawned.

  Although Childe Richard was always the budding writer rather than ever contemplating George’s course into painting, the lines taken by his later teens resembled those of his fictional creation and part of him did die in the 1914-18 war as surely as George’s universe “exploded darkly into oblivion”. Yet, whatever the Winterbourne-like oppressiveness of young Aldington’s home life, he did benefit from having highly literate parents, both becoming published authors and the redoubtable Mrs Aldington particularly cultivating book-world connections.

  Thus, when “Rollicking Rick the Railer” (as he later dubbed himself) finally began circulating in London at age 17 after a family move to the capital, he showed the qualities of a literary prodigy. He quickly broke into newspaper print with poems and translations as well as plunging deeper into the Greek and Latin classics with studies at University College. But, again like George Winterbourne, Aldington suffered a truncation of his formal education through his father’s financial misadventures. This prompted a career-defining plunge into the cultural ferment then beginning to grip extramural London.

  Aldington’s role in this revolutionary turbulence immediately preceding the Great War was much more central than the place he allowed Winterbourne, through whom the scene is fictionally satirized in Death of a Hero. The marginal George merely witnesses the verbal antics of emerging avant-garde stars in social mode (the characters lampooned as Shobbe, Bobbe and Tubbe, for instance, being inspired by Ford Madox Ford, D.H. Lawrence and T.S. Eliot respectively).

  The real-life Aldington, by contrast, played a leading editorial role in one key journal of literary radicalism, The Egoist. Moreover, he was sufficiently formidable a poet to merit being dragooned into the much-vaunted Imagist movement by Ezra Pound, self-appointed impresario as well as archetypal practitioner of the new verse. And Aldington, already prolific as both critic and poet, was a signatory to that climactic 1914 declaration of cultural revolt, the Vorticist manifesto. He jibbed, however, at what he deemed to be the excessive partiality of the Vorticists for the Machine Age, formed as he’d been by rural Kent and the pastoral luminosity of Graeco-Latin literature.

  By this time, the dashingly handsome Aldington had taken up with a poet-intimate of Pound’s from America, Hilda Doolittle (“H.D.”), whom the 21-year-old married in 1913. H.D., six years his senior, had herself been inducted into the Imagist camp. But, more than that, she rapidly became an all-pervading pres
ence in his poetic and emotional world, although a partnership between the sexually assertive Aldington and the bisexual Doolittle was bound to be tortuous. Even after the effective end of their marriage in late 1918, correspondence between them—published in two volumes (1992 and 1995) under the editorship of Caroline Zilboorg—persisted and “Dooley”, as Aldington addressed H.D., must rank as the love of his life.

  Yet, if Death of a Hero is plainly autobiographical on so many counts, how can this attachment be reconciled with the sometimes scathing treatment given George Winterbourne’s wife Elizabeth in the book? Aldington himself (“disingenuously”, in the eyes of his 1989 biographer, Charles Doyle) assured Hilda in 1929 that Elizabeth and Winterbourne’s extramarital girlfriend, Fanny, were drawn not from herself and a real-life companion of his named Arabella Yorke but from two other women, one the writer-publisher Nancy Cunard. Caroline Zilboorg insists that it is a misreading of Death of a Hero to see George’s love life as an indictment by Aldington of H.D. and Arabella. “Despite the pain caused by his relationship with each woman, he never blamed either of them for the war or for his own suffering during 1914-18,” Zilboorg says.

  In any event, H.D.’s version of the home-front imbroglio which also involved Arabella, Lawrence and other equally dedicated amorists during Aldington’s army service is reflected in her own novel, Bid Me to Live (first published in 1960, the year before she died). Rarely can two novels have complemented one another so perfectly in drawing on the same domestic crisis. They not only embody the viewpoints of the two separate and very different marital protagonists but are also at opposite poles stylistically. Death of a Hero is direct, harsh, even technically crude or (see Aldington’s essay preceding the present printing) “stripped of footling conventions”. Bid Me to Live is softly oblique but incandescent. The first book, combining literary realism and polemic, is traditionalist apart from its explicit recording of vernacular obscenity. The second is the novel of sensibility compounded by the intricacies of what now is referred to as the “Modernist” mode, all consummately honed. Read in tandem, the two works provide a unique insight into human and literary variance.

  In its oblique fashion, Bid Me to Live is as much a “war novel” as is, in part, Death of a Hero, however exasperating the way H.D.’s personae seem content to pursue bedroom rivalries as thousands are slaughtered in the mud barely 150 miles away. Aldington’s war scenes derived from his own Western Front ordeals, in early 1917 as a non-commissioned semi-engineer and runner of battle messages and later as an officer. But unlike the painter George Winterbourne, he somehow managed to maintain cultural links with the civilian world by way of essays and the first of the trench poems—“Images of War” pulsating with descriptive candour and protest—which earned him a place among the 1914-18 poets memorialized in Westminster Abbey some 70 years later.

  Though physically unwounded in the maelstrom, Aldington emerged the classic case of shell-shock, racked as well by a feverish awareness of his own “murdered self… violently slain, which rises up like a ghost/ To torment my nights”. In 1919, while an army teacher in Belgium, he tried to start a novel on the war but abandoned it before returning to civilian life in Britain. For the next nine years, living in the serenity of rustic Berkshire with Arabella Yorke, he concentrated on earning a livelihood as a translator (de Bergerac, Laclos, Julien Benda), biographer (Voltaire), pillar of the Times Literary Supplement and unremitting contributor to numerous other journals. Then there was more poetry, free of, as he saw it, the arid, pedantic and haughty Modernism establishing itself in the 1920s, through Eliot and Pound, as a new orthodoxy.

  Later in the decade, Aldington resumed work, at first sporadically, on the book that was to be Death of a Hero. In 1928, he abandoned his Berkshire life as cottage-based man of letters (years which poems like “The Berkshire Kennet” show as primarily a time of healing from his shell-shock). Indeed, he renounced altogether what seemed to him the self-serving parochialism of the London literati, to the point of opting instead for a life in France. There he ended his relationship with Arabella Yorke. Meanwhile came whirlwind sessions of “Hero-writing” on the Riviera island of Port Cros (fellow-visitor D.H. Lawrence was horrified on being shown the furious Prologue) and in Paris. The book was completed in, according to one editor, a hardly-corrected, single-spaced typescript on May 10, 1929, after which, so Aldington told his new consort Brigit Patmore, “I sort of collapsed nervously”.

  The critical reactions were extreme enough—for but often against—to make the book an event. Within three months of its September 1929 publication by Chatto and Windus, the burgeoning sales of Aldington’s first novel had already passed 10,000 copies in England alone. Its success marked the peak of the 1928-30 boom in books about the Great War, which also extended to the stage with R.C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End. After a full decade, the war had resurfaced in a reluctant public memory and provoked Anglo-American publication of searing memoirs and novels by the likes of Blunden, Sassoon, Graves, Remarque, Jünger and Hemingway as well as Aldington who for a time was famous. Death of a Hero quickly went into German and other European translations.

  For their part, Communist Russian ideologues seemingly concluded that, in its assault on the whole gamut of Victorian values and its portrayal of the war as the inexorable culmination of these precepts, Death of a Hero was a salutary attack on the “bourgeois” system as such. (Aldington himself wrote that the war was no sudden misfortune sprung on an innocent world but “the inevitable result of the life which preceded it”.) The novel was hailed in 1932 by Maxim Gorky, before he lost his influence with Stalin. Praising it as “harsh, angry and desperate”, Gorky exclaimed: “I would never have thought that the English could produce a book like it.” Death of a Hero duly received a huge Russian printing and, along with subsequent Aldington works, was vouchsafed sustained mass circulation in the USSR, however modest the rouble rewards for its author.

  *

  The irony was that, throughout the radical 1930s, Aldington remained firmly non-Communist, in fact non-partisan altogether, though loudly iconoclastic. He followed up Death of a Hero with further polemical fiction—notably pro-feminist and youth-extolling novels like The Colonel’s Daughter and Very Heaven and near-libellous stories of literary dissimulation in the Modernist camp (Soft Answers). Yet the romantic in him found unabashed expression in such verse as A Dream in the Luxembourg where the austerities of Eliot and the grim fervour of the rising political poets were blithely ignored. Aldington also continued to pour out literary journalism of great verve and insight, mostly forgotten today. Some was written on his extensive travels, along with vivid correspondence, and was a response to financial need in an increasingly alien age when his book sales had faltered.

  The responsibilities of a second marriage—scandalously, to the daughter-in-law of his mistress, Brigit—and the birth of a daughter in 1938 forced him to seek work in America, where he spent the war years as freelance author and disgruntled Hollywood screenwriter. The publication there of his vigorous autobiography Life for Life’s Sake, a sweeping anthology of English-language poetry and a prize-winning life of Wellington set the stage for further literary anthologies and biographies after his return to France in 1946. His candid portrait of D.H. Lawrence and reminiscences of Norman Douglas provoked big storms but Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry (1955) proved the final straw for the British establishment, debunking as it did a national hero.

  For the remaining years of his life, Aldington held on precariously in his French exile. He was snubbed in Britain and only honoured on his 70th birthday in 1962 with a reverential reception in the Soviet Union whose masters he privately abominated as much as their Cold War antagonists in Washington. “He was an angry young man of the generation before they became fashionable,” The Times of London declared after his fatal heart attack of July 27, 1962. “He remained something of an angry old man to the end.” The torment which accounted for Death of a Hero (and dated from the Great War and earlier
) certainly stayed with him to the end. “Hasten to adopt the slimy mask of British humbug and British fear of life, or expect to be smashed,” the novel’s narrator cries. Or, he goes on, “you can exile yourself.” And exile it was for Aldington.

  But the escape did not prevent his central protest book from being censored in its first trade editions “by those very institutions Aldington had singled out for attack in the novel”, as the critic Christopher Ridgway put it. Some earthy expletives used by his characters were deleted or modified in the Chatto edition as were phrases or whole sentences bearing mainly on biological basics or intimacy, innocuous though they seem today. The 1936 Penguin edition was only slightly less bowdlerized and even a 1985 Soviet reprint in English bore the same cuts—including a phrase, surely music to Communist ears, relating Queen Victoria to “prehistoric beasts”. Aldington successfully insisted that Chatto use asterisks to show specifically where words had been excised and a preliminary note by him made clear that his book had been “mutilated”.

  In 1930, an “authorized unexpurgated edition” of Death of a Hero was issued in Paris by Henri Babou and Jack Kahane in two volumes, limited to 300 numbered copies. And, in 1965, the British firm, World Distributors, published as a Consul paperback what was called “the complete novel, unabridged”, with all cut or altered words restored. The late David Arkell, a scholarly admirer of Aldington, participated in that edition’s preparation. Arkell wrote in a preface that it was “based on the original typescript MS, made available to CONSUL BOOKS through the courtesy of Aldington’s friend and literary executor Alister Kershaw”. Arkell added: “Death of a Hero appears for the first time in its entirety.” In 1984, The Hogarth Press of London issued the novel as a paperback offset from the Consul version, and this constitutes the present edition.

  But is Death of a Hero a novel at all? Aldington himself, in his exuberant dedicatory letter to the playwright Halcott Glover, goes so far as to suggest not—or at least to affirm that he was one to break every rule of poetry or the novel in order to say what he had to say. This would explain—if not excuse, for anyone caring about form—the often strident intrusiveness of Death of a Hero’s narrator in all but Part III, its war-focused “adagio”. If the book’s jaggedness is intentional and not simply a result of its tempestuous composition or sheer artlessness, then “Jazz novel”, one Aldington term for it, seems apt, or something akin to an Expressionist scream. At any rate, Death of a Hero is a book with special appeal for the insolently young, even in present-day “cool Britannia”.