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
WithAldington’s Essay: NOTES ON THE WAR NOVEL and a Foreword by C.J. Fox
The Golden Dog PressOttawa – 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 —
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