Literature of the Lost Generation. Richard Aldington his life and work. Death of a Hero. Plan: Introduction 3

2.1 Aldington's excoriating biography of T. E. Lawrence caused a scandal on its publication in 1955
Aldington's excoriating biography of T. E. Lawrence caused a scandal on its publication in 1955. In the spirit of iconoclasm, he was the first to bring public notice to Lawrence's illegitimacy and asserted that he was a homosexual, a liar, a charlatan, an "impudent mythomaniac", a "self-important egotist", a poor writer and even a bad motorcyclist.^[37][38] The biography dramatically coloured popular opinion of Lawrence.^[39] Foreign and War Office files concerning Lawrence's career were released during the 1960s and further biographies continued to analyse the 'British hero'.^[39] There was speculation that Aldington's spite was driven by jealousy and a sense of exclusion by the British establishment. Lawrence had attended Oxford, and his father was a baronet; Aldington suffered in the bloodbath of Europe during the First World War while Lawrence gained a heroic reputation in the Middle Eastern theatre and became an international celebrity, a homosexual icon, as Aldington saw it.^[40] Robert Graves noted in a review of the book, "instead of a carefully considered portrait of Lawrence, I find the self-portrait of a bitter, bedridden, leering, asthmatic, elderly hangman-of-letters."
Aldington lived in Sury-en-Vaux, Cher, France, from 1958.^[41] His last significant book was a biography of the Provençal poet and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Frédéric Mistral (1956).^[1]
Aldington died in Sury on 27 July 1962, shortly after being honoured in Moscow on the occasion of his seventieth birthday and the publication of some of his novels in Russian translation. He was fêted in the USSR, "even if some of the fêting was probably because he had, in his writings, sometimes suggested that the England he loved could, in certain of its aspects, be less than an earthly paradise."^[42] He is buried in the local cemetery in Sury. He left one daughter, Catherine, the child of his second marriage; she died in 2010.^[6]
Legacy
On 11 November 1985 Aldington was among 16 Great War poets commemorated in stone at Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner. The inscription on the stone is a quotation from the work of a fellow Great War poet, Wilfred Owen. It reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."^[43]
Style and bitterness[edit]
Alec Waugh described Aldington as having been embittered by the war, but took it that he worked off his spleen in novels like The Colonel's Daughter (1931) rather than letting it poison his life.^[44] Douglas Bush describes his work as "a career of disillusioned bitterness."^[4] His novels contained thinly veiled portraits of some of his friends, including Eliot, Lawrence and Pound; the friendship not always surviving. Lyndall Gordon characterises the sketch of Eliot in Aldington's memoirs Life for Life's Sake (1941) as "snide."^[45] As a young man, he was cutting about Yeats, but they remained on good terms.