David Baddiel versus the Holocaust

I have to admit that I generally avoid watching television programmes about the Second World War, particularly if they involve the Holocaust. It is perhaps difficult for someone who is not Jewish to accept the crimes committed against the Jews over many centuries, not only by Fascist governments such as Hitler's but by the native populations of other so-called Christian countries. It happened that I watched one such BBC documentary earlier this week and it came as something of a shock to learn that, in the world as a whole, as many as one in six people don't believe that the Holocaust actually happened. I can't imagine how Siegfried Sassoon would have reacted to that piece of information.

For the benefit of those who don't know him, David Baddiel is a British comedian best known for his participation in light-hearted programmes about football. Like most successful comedians, he is highly-educated, a Cambridge graduate and former PhD candidate. And of course he is Jewish. For him, the business of confronting the "Holocaust deniers" is truly painful. When he described how hard he found it not to get exasperated and angry with them and at the same time not to get involved in arguing with them, he was describing feelings that Sassoon had, in relation to some of his right-wing friends.

"The Case for the Miners" was a poem in which he described those feelings: "And that's the reason why I shout and splutter..." He wasn't talking about the fate of the Jews. He wasn't even talking about the First World War. He was talking about the assumption of a few of his friends that those who were less fortunate than themselves had somehow deserved their fate. The miners weren't so badly off, they argued. Even if they had more money, they wouldn't spend it wisely. Sassoon found himself a one-man opposition to people who were talking what he felt was inhumane nonsense. His response was to get himself a job as a political correspondent so he could visit South Wales and find out what was really going on. Doubting himself as he usually did, he wanted to be 100% sure he was on the side of the truth.

This was also the case with David Baddiel, who felt he had to talk to the Holocaust deniers simply to be sure that they really didn't have any worthwhile arguments to offer. He went on to describe his mixed feelings about the idea of a Holocaust Memorial Day, eventually reasoning that the inhuman conduct of the Nazis towards the Jews and the events he was discussing were unbelievable, which was in itself enough justification for a memorial. To look at it another way, if the Menin Gate had not been built, would anyone today find it possible to believe that over 50,000 men died in the Ypres Salient without their bodies ever having been recovered?

It brings to mind a scene from Sebastian Faulks's novel Birdsong, when Stephen's granddaughter Elizabeth, looking at the names on the Thiepval Memorial, exclaims,"Nobody told me. My God, nobody told me." Until now she has had no idea of the enormity of the Western Front's catalogue of death.

And so Sassoon and Baddiel are brought together by a desire to ensure that no one can excuse their present behaviour by claiming a lack of awareness of the terrible deeds of the past. Sassoon would have liked the First World War to be the war to end all wars, but within twenty years he was seeing history repeat itself, as Britain went to war with Germany for a second time. He did not favour it, but the gradual realisation that, as a Jew, he would have been one of those earmarked for torture and extermination by the Nazis must have been a severe blow to his belief in humankind.

As so often, there is no conclusion to this post. I have no answers to the questions faced by these two men. I can only say that I admire them both.

Old Age

"It doesn't come alone."

As the years go by, I find myself saying this more and more. My contemporaries and I used to discuss the problems we were having with our children, and the various amusing things they had said and done. Now we discuss the problems we are having with our aging relatives, and the various amusing things they have said and done. I recall Margo Blunden telling me that her father, Edmund, used to talk about his friend, the aged Siegfried Sassoon, in much the same way during the 1960s. "Poor old Sig..."

It happens in life and is reflected in literary societies, and indeed in all kinds of voluntary organisations. You've probably heard someone, somewhere, in the past few months, complaining about being unable to get younger volunteers to keep services going, to participate in committees, and so on. Few and far between are the young singles who want to spend their spare time in the company of old fogeys like us, and equally hard to acquire is the help of those with young children, who have very little time to spare for anything other than the daily grind. Equally, those who work full-time don't often want to spend their evenings doing clerical work for those who can't pay them to do so (although they sometimes like to spend their leisure time attending events of the kind we continue to organise).

Just recently I've once again found myself discussing the question of subscription rates, a matter that comes up regularly in all the societies I'm involved with. Should we do away with the "seniors" rate, since most members are seniors? Should we change the age limit from 60 to 65 or even 70? In some cases I'm now paying the seniors rate myself, and I don't relish the idea of having to pay more when I'm living on a pension. In terms of the SSF, we've always striven hard to keep our membership rates affordable, preferring not to build up a massive bank balance we can't justify - but other societies sometimes feel it necessary to have that cushion there for security. For who knows what the economy is going to be doing this time next year, let alone in ten years' time?

To return to Sassoon, his latter years were a time of self-examination. In his twenties and thirties, he had achieved much, although he chose to belittle himself. In January 1918, with his best times still ahead, he wrote in his diary, "I am home again in the ranks of youth - the company of death". In middle age he revisited his early years, as well as his army career, eloquently describing, in The Weald of Youth, the mixed feelings that had caused him to join up in the first place. He came late to marriage and parenthood, something that often indirectly leads to failure on one or both fronts, and he was very aware of the impending danger of a loss of physical and/or mental faculty, hence the enjoyment he felt in the company of younger people, and his determination to play cricket into his seventies, even if it meant having a runner.

His letters to Dame Felicitas Corrigan were full of self-examination (as though he had not done enough of it when writing his memoirs), but we know from Dennis Silk's account that he had not lost his wry sense of humour. His friendship with Ronald Knox during the 1950s was a meeting of like minds; Sassoon commented that he enjoyed Ronald's more light-hearted works, such as Let Dons Delight, which he had already read five times by 1962. Knox, of course, was only 69 when he died; Siegfried was already 71 when he converted. But, unlike Lady Acton, one of Knox's younger and more serious-minded converts, who threw one of Knox's detective novels over the side of a cruise ship because she found it too frivolous, Sassoon appreciated both sides of a person's character, and perhaps even preferred the frivolous. Dom Sebastian Moore, the monk who actually gave him his instruction in the Catholic faith after Knox's death, suggested that he had little interest in topics such as transsubstantiation and the immaculate conception, preferring simply to accept these as an excuse to chat with Moore for hours on their bench in the rock garden at Downside.

The darker side of Sassoon's old age is revealed by Dennis Silk's recordings of the elderly poet reading his war poems. After meeting him for the first an only time, in 1964, the poet and artist David Jones said, "However much he tried he could never get that 1st War business out of his system, which is exactly the case with me". Felicitas Corrigan felt that the "egocentricity" of Sassoon's latter years, though undeniable, was not a problem, and his last published poem, "A Prayer for Pentecost", reveals that he had achieved at least a degree of inner peace. May we all be granted that.

"A Very Perfect, Gentle Knight"

No sooner had we received the news, in June, of the death of Dennis Silk, one of Siegfried Sassoon's greatest friends, who for the past ten years had been President of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship, than obituaries, reminiscences and photographs were flooding the web. It was hard to find anything useful to say in this blog on the subject of Dennis and his reputation. Having just returned from attending his memorial service at Southwark Cathedral, I have realised how much more there is to say about him.

Dennis was a multi-talented man who excelled in many things. Few sportsmen can claim to be intellectuals, but he was both an exceptional cricketer (as well as a useful rugby player) and a great scholar. His thirty-five-year career as a schoolmaster, much of it as Warden of Radley College, won him many friends and admirers; I've lost count of the number of men who have spoken with pride of their time as one of his pupils. One doesn't need to approve of the public school system to be able to recognise that Dennis's motivation throughout his career came from what he saw as the opportunity to give boys the advantages of the good education his missionary father had managed to obtain for him despite lack of funds. Radley is considered by many to be "different" from the other boarding schools at the top end of the market, and much of this can be attributed to his personal influence.

I first met Dennis in 2000, when he spoke at the famous "Marlborough Day", as a result of which the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship was founded, but it was some years before I got to know him well and realised what a charming and accomplished man he was. His great contribution to Sassoon studies was that he managed to persuade the elderly Sassoon to record some of his poems on tape during the 1960s. Since the few recordings Sassoon made for radio no longer exist, Dennis's private tapes are unique and invaluable. Through Dennis we heard funny stories about Sassoon, and these have been recorded by the biographers when they might otherwise have been lost to posterity.

At his memorial service on 19th November, over a thousand people filled Southwark's relatively small cathedral to share their memories of Dennis, and Radley's school choir provided most of the musical inspiration - I can't omit to mention that a jazz sextet from Christ's Hospital (the school Dennis himself attended) played us out with a Glenn Miller tune. In addition, there were teachers and pupils from Marlborough College, another school where Dennis taught. Because of the numbers present, big screens were used to ensure that the whole congregation had a view of what was going on at the front, as well as displaying old photos of Dennis - as a schoolboy, as a young man going out to bat, enjoying quiet moments with his wife Diana, and of course on special occasions. In almost all of these, he was grinning broadly in the way we all remember. An anonymous caricature of him in his Radley days adorned the back of the order of service, emphasising the prominent chin that was most of his most distinctive physical features.

As one might expect, everyone who spoke or read - family, friends, former colleagues and teammates - did so with warmth and admiration, but some of the most moving tributes were readings from literature. Sassoon's poem "Dreamers" was a great favourite of Dennis's, and was read with feeling by his son Tom, but perhaps even more touching was the reading by the actress Jill Freud, wife of Dennis's late friend Sir Clement Freud, who commented that Geoffrey Chaucer, when writing the preface to the Knight's Tale, "didn't know at the time that he was talking about Dennis". I think that it is apt to include the whole quotation here, as a way of summing up what Dennis means to us.

A knight there was, and that a worthy man
Who from the day on which he first began
To ride abroad had followed chivalry,
Truth, honour, generousness and courtesy.
He was of sovereign value in all eyes,
And though so much distinguished, he was wise
And in his bearing modest as a maid.
He never yet a boorish thing had said
In all his life to any, come what might.
He was a very perfect, gentle knight.

"Mad Jack": a Wednesday Play

In Britain, The Wednesday Play was a series of original dramas broadcast by the BBC on - you've guessed it - Wednesday nights, between 1964 and 1970. At home, it usually signalled the turning off of the TV, and for many years that was my bedtime. The Wednesday Play and its successor, Play for Today (which was on a Thursday) were usually deemed "unsuitable for children" because they contained references to sex or worse. Some of them, such as the famous "Cathy Come Home", dealt with social issues; another, "The War Game", dealt so realistically with the threat of nuclear war that it was not broadcast on television until 1985. More often, the plays were simply what my mother used to call "way out".

I do not think my parents watched "Mad Jack", the play about Siegfried Sassoon that was broadcast in 1970, only three years after the death of the man himself. They would certainly not have thought it suitable for children, although I was fifteen by then and would probably have been allowed to watch it had I expressed a wish to do so. But I didn't, either because I didn't know what it was about or because I simply wasn't interested.

The play was written by a moderately successful screenwriter called Tom Clarke, who died in 1993. Clarke was born a few days before the end of the First World War, which may well explain his interest in the subject. In the Second World War, he had served in both the Royal Air Force and the Royal Artillery. His obituary suggests that he was something of a "character" and perhaps had a few personality traits in common with Sassoon. I doubt that they ever met.

In this production, the role of Sassoon is played by Michael Jayston, who at the time was an up-and-coming TV actor of 35. He spends much of the action staring into the middle distance on a beach, listening to the voice in his head, and the effect of this is oddly moving. Jayston has done great things in his career, but I would never have thought of him for Sassoon - he has a kind of gravitas that I suspect did not come naturally to the real Siegfried, though no doubt he was able to put it on when required, just as he could assume a false jollity in the company of his wartime comrades - which we also witness in the play. In the scenes where he approaches other hotel guests talking random nonsense summoned up by his nightmares, we see the more excitable, neurotic side of the character and we begin to understand the reasons why he was sent to Craiglockhart, but there is no denouement as such. We never get to meet Rivers or find out what happened next.

Nor do we ever get under the skin of Robert Graves, played by Michael Pennington (a former pupil of Dennis Silk and now a patron of the SSF). Pennington was then 27 but looked considerably younger, like the overgrown schoolboy Graves was in real life. Since Graves himself was still living, the character is disguised under the name "Geoffrey Cromlech". Cromlech spends his time observing the other officers with a mildly cynical air, and only comes into his own in the later scenes when he arrives to persuade Sassoon to go before a medical board. His motivation remains unclear.

Knowing as much as we do, from Sassoon's own account, about the real events behind the action, we might have expected more from the play, but the author may have been restricted by the sensibilities of Sassoon's family and friends. The performances of the two lead actors are difficult to fault, and several of the poems are worked neatly into the action. The play is currently available on Youtube. How long the BBC will allow it to stay there is anyone's guess. Make the most of the opportunity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5ZZ134kjnY

The Joy of Podcasts

Whenever we have a long car journey ahead of us, my husband usually gets out his iPod (or whatever you call it) and connects it to the in-car power supply so that we can listen to his huge collection of podcasts en route. Our interests don't exactly coincide so we sometimes begin with an argument about which one to listen to.

On one recent occasion, I favoured "Bess of Hardwick" but Husband liked the sound of "Indians in World War I". Was he surprised when, on hearing the speaker's voice, I immediately said "That sounds like Santanu Das"! As the podcast continued, he was discomfited to find Santanu's talk, focusing on the experiences of Indians who fought in, or were affected by, the First World War, veering away from the subject of military history into the realms of social history and even, dare I say it, literature.

Santanu Das is, of course, an old friend of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship. His book, India, Empire and First World War Culture, was published in 2018, and you can actually still hear the podcast we listened to by going to https://www.historyextra.com/period/first-world-war/indians-in-world-war-one/  (you have to get past a short advert first). If you do, you will understand why I found it so fascinating and what makes Santanu such a valued member of the war poetry community of scholars.

The experiences of the Indian sepoys are in many ways typical of First World War infantrymen as a whole, but there are important differences. Without going into too much detail, one important difference is the way they were looked on by their white commanding officers and comrades, often with a kind of condescending affection, much like the feelings recorded by junior officers like Sassoon about the working-class soldiers under their command. It is easy for the mind of an educated 21st century reader to be disapproving of some of their comments and attitudes, but to forgive Sassoon and his generation, we have to understand something of the world they lived in.

Jared Diamond is an American historian and anthropologist you may not have heard of. His contribution to the set of podcasts describes his approach to analysing historical events through psychology, but his best-known work is 1997's Guns, Germs and Steel, a trans-disciplinary work which won a Pulitzer Prize. In it, Diamond explained why certain civilisations have dominated and survived where others have failed. Diamond's analyses of the influences that cause societies around the world to react differently to crises are well worth examining.

Also interesting, and in some ways a natural progression from Santanu Das and Jared Diamond, was a podcast recorded some time ago by former politician and soldier, the late Paddy Ashdown, who had at the time just published his last book, Nein!: Standing Up to Hitler 1935-1944, which dealt with the numerous failed attempts to unseat the Fascist dictator before he could destroy the future of Europe.

Lord Ashdown's credentials as a warrior were second to none; perhaps it was because of this that he understood the political landscape, both international and domestic, better than most. Having been born in British India and spent part of his childhood in Northern Ireland, he recognised the colonial mindset and its inevitable consequences. Nevertheless, it came as a bit of a surprise to hear him say that, had he grown up as a Roman Catholic in the province during the 1950s and 1960s, he might well have become a member of the IRA; he understood the circumstances that led to the Troubles.

Siegfried was acquainted with an earlier Ireland, one that was beset by its own troubles and heading towards the long-denied independence, but he did not become a rebel until 1917. It was not in his nature to defy authority unless he was moved to do so by personal experience, and the losses of so many friends, combined with what we would now call PTSD, pushed him into his protest. Who can say whether, under other circumstances, he might ever have considered more drastic action?

A Classic Re-telling

Until recently I had not heard of the British novelist John Harris, although I had heard of his novel The Sea Shall Not Have Them, which became a famous film starring Michael Redgrave and Dirk Bogarde. There will be many reading this who have a better knowledge of his literary output than I have. In the early 1960s, when Harris wrote his novel about the Battle of the Somme, Covenant with Death, the public was still coming to terms with the knowledge that poor planning and inept actions on the part of some commanding officers had resulted in rather a lot of unnecessary deaths during the First World War. 

Harris was not born until 1916, the year of the Somme debacle, so he could not have witnessed the carnage at first hand (though he did serve in the RAF during the Second World War), but his telling of the story of a "Pals" battalion consisting of local newspaper reporters from a Yorkshire city puts the reader absolutely on the spot, which is why it has been called one of the five best novels about warfare ever written.. Perhaps his own background, as a reporter on a paper in the Rotherham area, helped him get under the skin of the men who sign up eagerly at the start of the war and, like Siegfried Sassoon, spend many months being trained and drilled, impatient to get to where the action is, only to find themselves abandoned to a fate their skills and bravado cannot change, however determined they may be.  

I often wonder how many of today's young men would have agreed to go into battle against an enemy under such conditions. It is one thing to have the odds stacked against you, but quite another to know that the battle is already lost because those in authority lacked the foresight and/or intelligence to muster their resources sensibly and humanely, still less the moral courage to call it off when it became clear that failure was inevitable. It could all have turned out so differently at the Somme, a campaign that could have been won quickly and easily if more attention had been paid to the evidence of their own eyes and less to traditional beliefs and methods.

Men are no longer shot for desertion; regardless of that, I cannot imagine that the better-educated youths of the 21st century, who have almost lost their awareness of the class distinction that prevailed a hundred years ago, would have obeyed their commanding officers so unquestioningly. They may be willing to take risks, but those risks are nowadays calculated and understood much better than they were in times when poor communications between the top and bottom of the hierarchy meant that those leading the campaign had little appreciation of front-line conditions. Siegfried Sassoon was not one of those who were called upon to go over the top. His duties on the first day of the Somme were barely dangerous, let alone suicidal. Perhaps it was worse for him, having to watch it all without being able to make a difference. It took a year, but eventually he felt he had to try to put a stop to it all. After his protests were ignored, he agreed to return to duty, not because he thought it was the right thing to do, but because it gave him a degree of power to help his comrades which he could not have as long as he stayed at Craiglockhart.

The drawback of writing about historical events is that the reader knows, from the beginning, how things turn out. The moment Mark Fenner joins up, in the early chapters of Covenant with Death, we can anticipate the deaths of most of his comrades; the only thing we don't know is which few will survive. When watching old films about the Second World War, we instinctively know that the boy who lied about his age and the one that keeps talking about his girl back home are going to be among the casualties, but somehow the First World War generates a different kind of guessing game. I particularly liked the ending, or non-ending, of John Harris's novel, which holds back from the usual sentimental reunion of the survivor with his loving family. This is a cut above the average formulaic war story. If you can find a copy, read it.

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.