Friday 26 July 2019

Review - Richard Aldington 1930-1962 by Vivien Whelpton

Richard Aldington seems to have missed out in the First World War centenary bonanza that certain other writers have been enjoying in the past five years. Not exactly a household name to begin with, he is about as well-known now as he was when Vivien Whelpton began her two-volume biography in 2014. This is strange: Aldington, in his time, was a highly-regarded poet and novelist, yet now I can't find anyone outside war poetry circles who has even heard of him. What went wrong?

This second volume of what is and will continue to be the definitive biography, Richard Aldington: Novelist, Biographer and Exile, follows Aldington from 1930, and it does assume, from the start, an acquaintance with his life up to and including the publication of Death of a Hero in 1929. There is little concession to the casual reader: people who figured in the writer's earlier life are mostly mentioned only by surname and the index is not as comprehensive as I would have liked. On the other hand, the Introduction does cover all the salient events of volume 1, and the writing as a whole is tighter than in that first volume.

By 1930, Aldington was living with Brigit Patmore, who comes across as a curiously colourless character here. It can hardly be denied that Aldington himself was colourful enough for both of them. Vivien Whelpton, despite her obvious admiration for her subject's work, both poetry and prose, does not shrink from describing his many faults as fully as she does his virtues. The amount of research that went into this comprehensive biography is both staggering and highly commendable, putting it on a par with Jean Moorcroft Wilson's spectacularly successful two-volume biography of Sassoon.

One thing I don't find helpful is the decision to separate aspects of the subject's life into separate, overlapping chapters; I would have liked to understand the effects of Aldington's private life on his work, and vice versa, as it happened. It is not until Chapter 8, having gone over their (many) travels in the 1930s and then over Aldington's publishing history during those years, that we begin to get under the skin of his relationship with Brigit Patmore and discover that, despite the protestations of undying love in his letters, he was never actually faithful to her. He enjoyed receiving flirty fan letters from female readers, two of whom subsequently became his lovers. Patmore's devotion to her two grown-up sons, Derek and Michael, meant that the couple did not spend as much time together as they might otherwise have done, and it is clear that Aldington was sometimes exasperated by the young men's behaviour. One cannot help speculating how much of his womanising was the outcome of feeling neglected by his partner, who, like all mothers, tended to prioritise her children's welfare.

Patmore must have been particularly hurt when Aldington chose her daughter-in-law, Netta, for his lover, not long after Netta and Michael had got married, and even more so when he managed to get Netta pregnant. Aldington's homophobic tendencies sometimes creep out in his letters, and his belief that Michael was a "pansy" evidently coloured his desire to run off with Michael's wife Netta. It was just as well that Michael's mother had turned down Aldington's offer of marriage, for by 1938 he was married to the already heavily pregnant Netta, after achieving a last-minute divorce from his first wife, the American poet H.D. His ambivalent relationship with H.D. continued throughout his lifetime, but Netta would eventually leave him.

Although she does not merit much mention in this second part of Aldington's biography, his own mother's emotional neglect of him, coupled with her licentious personal conduct, ensured that he was permanently resentful of her, and it was not until 1930 that he claimed to have recovered from the traumas of his earlier life. If anyone ever suffered from war neurosis, it was Aldington, but he used the consequent emotions in his writing in a very different way from Sassoon. Revenge literature never works well, and can easily ruin a novelist's otherwise magnificent work. We see what Aldington was capable of in a poem like "Life Quest":


I saw the rag-clothed skeletons of Loos
I saw my own body lying white and helpless 
Belly turned to the sun. 

His books, despite their variable quality, were extremely popular and were well thought-of by critics such as Edmund Blunden, with whom he exchanged favourable reviews.

One of the delights of a book about the literary scene of this period is finding out more about the subject's social circle, and Whelpton does not disappoint, treating us to a literary "Who's Who" of the mid-20th century, with names like Elizabeth von Arnim, Richard Church, C P Snow, Henry Williamson and Alec Waugh representing just a small cross-section of Aldington's contacts. One character that sparkles from the page is the woman who is, I understand, going to be the subject of her next biography. Bryher, a wealthy heiress and novelist, became H.D.'s life companion, but in later life she would be a good friend to the ailing Aldington, supporting him financially and showing no resentment for his earlier conduct towards both women.

Aldington's most successful relationship seems to have been with his daughter, Catha. It seems highly likely that part of the motivation for his decision to marry Netta instead of her mother-in-law was his "almost pitiful desire for a child". Later, Catha, like so many teenagers, would play her parents off against one another and would temporarily reject her mother's company in favour of her father's. There would, however, be a rapprochement with Netta towards the end of his life (somewhat as Hester Sassoon came back into her husband's life in his latter days).

It seems bizarre to me that Aldington's path and Sassoon's should not have crossed, especially when they shared friends such as Blunden, Robert Graves and Osbert Sitwell. This was a period when many writers (including Sassoon) were allowing petty slights and jealousies to facilitate "satirical" works, and Aldington continued his thinly-veiled caricaturing of former friends like Ezra Pound for many years after the Great War. When I checked the contents of the Viking Book of Poetry, which Aldington edited in 1947, it was with some relief that I found Sassoon listed alongside Blunden, Owen and Graves.

The Second World War sent Aldington into a spiral of depression; like Sassoon, he had not dreamed that history would repeat itself so soon. One therefore has to admire his prolific output all the more, particularly when one considers the amount of travelling he did, for he produced not just poetry and novels, but biographies of subjects as diverse as D H Lawrence (who had been a personal friend) and the Duke of Wellington (who had not).


It was one of these biographies that got him into the most trouble. During the 1940s Aldington was already complaining of being ostracised by the British literary establishment, including the BBC; how many of these slights were real and how many imagined is not clear. His expectations were high, and he may have overlooked the disadvantages of living abroad for so many years, at various times in Spain, France, Italy and the United States. At times his story gives us the impression he has no staying power: one moment New Mexico is the greatest place in the world, the next it is Florida, California, or Paris. As a critic, whilst he had a facility of appreciating the work of those who could reciprocate, he had made the common error of expecting other critics to review his work more favourably than he had reviewed theirs, and had thus turned people like T S Eliot and Stephen Spender against him. However, until the fateful decision to write a biography of T E Lawrence, there seems no firm evidence of any plot by his literary enemies to ruin his career.

In 1950, Aldington found himself in serious debt because of payments he had failed to make to his ex-lover, Brigit Patmore. Netta's response to this was to try to build herself a paying career in London as an artist - something for which Aldington judged she had no talent. His evident despair ("EVERYTHING has gone wrong", he wrote to a friend), combined with chronic illness, meant that he was not in the best frame of mind to begin a biography of "the legend". Before he had completed his research, he began referring to T E Lawrence as a "murderer" and a "warmonger". After reading The Mint, he claimed to be "converted", but admitted that he found it hard to get to the "real" T E. By the time he had finished writing, he was calling Lawrence a "little phoney". 

The biography was not even at the printer's when the criticisms began. The revelation of a fact not known to many at the time, that of Lawrence's illegitimate birth, was felt by the publishers to be dynamite, especially when Lawrence's mother was still alive; today it would be obvious that Aldington, once having discovered it, could not repress such a matter. However, Lawrence's statement that Churchill had offered him the position of High Commissioner of Egypt in succession to General Allenby was widely disbelieved and led to a violent controversy that does not seem to me to have been justified. We know from Sassoon's experience that Churchill, in the First World War period, was bombastic and indiscreet, and was ever ready to imply that he had preferments at his disposal.

Naturally, Aldington, an inveterate conspiracy theorist, believed that the rejection of any of his work must be due to the establishment's disapproval of him as a person. His hypersensitivity at any criticism of his novels contrasts with his willingness to ruthlessly satirize real, living people with whom he was acquainted. The relative failure of his last few works sounds like the result, rather than the cause, of his descent into despair and ill-health. The deaths of close friends like Roy Campbell and Frieda Lawrence (wife of D H) were an additional upset. The one bright spot was the popularity of his books in the Soviet Union, where his right-of-centre politics did not seem to be considered a problem. H.D.'s final decline and death were almost the last straw, but preceded a final triumph - Aldington's visit to Russia to celebrate his 70th birthday, just a few weeks before he died of a heart attack. 

By the end of the book I had not come to like Richard Aldington, but there is no doubt that many people genuinely did. The trauma and bitterness of his early years had mostly worn off. Posthumous tributes from acquaintances described him as kind and generous, with a great sense of humour. Taking his life as a whole, he was an accomplished writer, but a flawed man. Fred Crawford, speaking of the Lawrence  débâcle, claimed that Aldington's "passion for truth" drove him on, adding "Had he foreseen the high personal cost of his TEL book, he would have written it anyway."  Personally, I do not think he would have.