Death of a Hero

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

W
hen
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

D
eath 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 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.