Death of a Hero (2 page)

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.

*

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 in Washington. “He was an angry young man of the
generation before they became fashionable,”
The Times
of London declared after his fatal heart attack of July 27, 1962. “He remained something of an angry old man to the end.” The torment which accounted for
Death of a Hero
(and dated from the Great War and earlier) certainly stayed with him to the end. “Hasten to adopt the slimy mask of British humbug and British fear of life, or expect to be smashed,” the novel's narrator cries. Or, he goes on, “you can exile yourself.” And exile it was for Aldington.

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

S
INCE 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.