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 presence 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.
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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