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”.
Moreover, there is Aldington’s disdain for “professional novelists” (odd in someone so fastidious), compounded by his bombshell outburst of 1937 that “in the conditions of life to-day all art tends to the condition of journalism”. After putting down Ford Madox Ford (author of No More Parades) in the essay leading off the present volume, Aldington argues that “the ‘War writers’ should utterly ignore the technique” of such novelists.
Still, he was in some ways, as already indicated, a pronounced traditionalist. This, to a degree, accounted for his initial revolt against Modernism. Even while assailing Victorianism in Death of a Hero, he could not help but remain a product himself of the age in which he had spent his first nine years of life. Thus George Winterbourne’s praise for the manliness of the battle veterans encountered on their way down from the front (“very pure and immensely friendly and stimulating… lean and hard and tireless”) has a ring to it of that assiduous perpetuator of Britain’s 19th-Century military ethos, Baden-Powell.
On the other hand, it bears contrasting with the delineation of the ideal warrior provided by another of the ‘14-‘18 war writers, Ernst Jünger. While perhaps sharing the German’s admiration for military leanness and grit, Aldington halted at the point where Jünger began advocating a new breed of soldier, who would ruthlessly wield Machine-Age weaponry on the principle that “life can only assert itself in its own destruction”. This, Aldington asserted in an all-out 1930 attack on Jünger’s creed, was death worship, the idolatry of destruction.
He had written the story of George Winterbourne, we may take it, to defeat that kind of “low and vile” conception. He also wrote it as a warning that unless the values of the civilization he assailed were changed, another great war would erupt before long. “The next one,” he affirmed 10 years prior to its outbreak, “will be much worse.”
C.J. Fox, Toronto 1998
NOTES ON THE WAR NOVEL
by Richard Aldington
I
SINCE it is impossible to be wise before the event, one may as well try to be so afterwards.
I find writers – almost invariably those who have not written War books – asserting that the “boom in War books is already collapsing.”
I don’t know. So far as England is concerned, I find the War books easily ahead of all others in sales, while the advance Spring lists of the English publishers are fuller than ever with books of this sort.
Why?
There are many explanations. So far as England is concerned, I think a very simple explanation may be found. The English novel, once the world’s boss, (like other things English) has become conventional and unreal. Many are nothing but mild sexual titillations, a feebly decorous erethism. Through a peep-hole the reader watches the process of tumescence in hero and heroine, and leaves them, mildly worked up, outside the bridal chamber.
Others again are fairy-tales of action, mystery, crime and detective stories, mostly as false as the sugar erotics. One or two novelists attempt style and acquire decorous reputations. One or two, like Lawrence and Joyce, try to tackle modern human life; and are immediately suppressed.
I think people do not realise the significance of this new phase of suppression in England. It is the fear of truth in a race which is losing its grasp on reality.
Only one subject evades this taboo – the War. The War novels would have been suppressed in England, if the suppressors had not been perfectly aware that their action would create immense opposition. The ex-Service men are so smoulderingly enraged by the deceptions practised upon them, that any attempt to suppress a War novel would create a hell of a row.
But the War was a terrific experience. Consequently the “War novel” has let a breath of life into the fetid absurdities of the Humme, Bugge and Co. “novelists”, who supply England’s fiction. I have no doubt whatever that Humme, Bugge and Co. will triumph in the end; but meanwhile we can have our say. If “Death of a Hero”, which is a plain, unvarnished and scrupulously accurate picture of English middle-class life, had not been a “War” book, it would immediately have been prosecuted and suppressed. As an amusing illustration of this, I may say that a “respectable” firm of English printers refused to print an absolutely innocuous poem by that wicked writer, and that the said writer is making a collection of the threatening and abusive letters received from his virtuous countrymen and countrywomen…
All this by the way. There seem to me very good reasons why the books (I won’t say “literature”) arising from the events of 1914-18 should continue to occupy public attention. Writers in the past have denounced War academically – no one has ever done it better or more wittily than Voltaire. But for the first time in history a war has been recorded as it happened by those who took an active part in it. And consider the following points.
Apart from diplomatic and journalistic bunk, has anyone a clear idea of why the War was fought, and what issues were settled by it?
July 1914 saw a crisis of international fear of the most abject kind. Everybody was afraid of everybody else, and plunged into War as a refuge from ignominious fear. Each group thought it was defending itself from the aggression of the other group.