Theme: modernism in american literature contents: introduction chapter the early twentieth century literature (1901-1939). Modernism

Richard Aldington

1892-1962

Richard Aldington was born in the family of a solicitor at Portsmouth, Hampshire, England on July 8, 1892. He was educated for four years at Dover College and at London University, but did not complete his education at the university because of financial problems of the family. But he provided himself with the informal education due to his father’s excellent library, and studying with his older friend Dudley Grey who was a classical scholar and a traveller.
He was writing (chiefly verse) from about the age of fifteen and never considered any profession except writing. In 1913 he became literary editor of the Egoist whose sponsors were of the same group that later introduced Imagism – a group of poets whose chief concern was “to produce a lasting image”. They sought “absolute freedom of form”. This literary trend arose in England in the first quarter of the XX century, as a protest against abstract poetry.
In 1916, at the age of twenty-four, Aldington entered World War I as a private in the infantry, later becoming an officer. His two and a half year active duty during the war influenced greatly upon his further literary career. However, he had to leave the army with a bad case of shell shock. For some time he worked at The Times literary supplement, reviewing French books. At the same time he translated from Italian and Latin and made his living by criticism. During this time he managed to publish four volumes of poetry which attracted the attention of the leading literary circles. However, he dropped his creative writing in verse to devote all his attention to prose. He lived for varying periods in Italy, France and Switzerland and later settled on the Riviera, where he lived until the outbreak of World War II. Then he went to the USA where he lived for the rest of his life.
War greatly influenced his world outlook and brought him to regard the duty of a writer in a new light. He broke away from decadence and came to appreciate only those books which were written “out of a man’s guts” and showed life as it really was. Few novels are more biting in their analysis or more indignant in their presentation than the Death of a Hero (1929) and The Colonel’s Daughter (1931).
Aldington’s other principal works include: Images Old and New (a book in verse, 1915), Roads to Glory (short stories, 1930), Soft Answers (novelettes, 1932), All Men Are Enemies (a novel, 1933), Life of a Lady (his only play, 1936), Life for Life’s Sake (autobiography, 1941), Portrait of a Genius (a biography of D.H. Lawrence, 1950).
Death of a Hero, dedicated to the so-called “lost generation”, is Aldington’s first and most important novel. Containing a passionate protest against both war and the rotten order of things in his own country, it displays English intellectual and social life before and during World War I.
The book opens with a prologue about George Winterbourne’s death.
“George was killed soon after dawn on the 4th November, 1918, at a place called Maison Blanche. ...He was the only officer in his battalion killed in that action, for the Germans surrendered or ran away in less than an hour... The whole of his company were lying down waiting for the flying trench-mortar squad to deal with the machine-gun, when for some unexplained reason George had stood up and a dozen bullets had gone through him. “Silly ass”, was the Colonel’s comment....”
The author describes how Winterbourne’s relatives receive the news from the War Office which runs – “regret to inform ... killed in action ... Their Majesty’s sympathy...” The telegram “went to the home address in the country, and was opened by Mrs. Winrebourne. Such an excitement for her, almost a pleasant change, for it was pretty dull in the country just after the Armistice. She was sitting by the fire, yawning over her twenty-second lover... Mrs. Winterbourne liked drama in private life. She uttered a most creditable shriek, clasped both hands to her rather soggy bosom, and pretended to faint. ...But the effect of George’s death on her temperament was, strangely enough, almost wholly erotic.”
We get acquainted with the main characters of the book: George Winterbourne’s parents, his wife Elizabeth, his mistress Fanny and George’s friend who is the bearer of Aldington’s views and comments as well. “Elizabeth and Fanny were not grotesques. They adjusted to the war with marvelous precision and speed, just as they afterwards adapted themselves to the postwar.” “At the fatal news Mr.Winterbourne had fallen upon his knees (not forgetting, however, to ring off the harpy)”.
From the very beginning Aldington exposes the moral standards of bourgeois society. The first part of the book opens, after the break of the news about George’s death, with characteristics of Victorian England about the year 1890. The author tells about George’s parents, a petty bourgeois family and a very different England, that of 1890, and yet curiously the same. An England morally buried in great foggy mappings of hypocrisy and prosperity and cheapness. The working class beginning to heave restively, but still moody, still under the Golden Rule of “Ever remember, my dear Bert, you may one day be manager of that concern”.
In the second part the narrator tells us through many flashbacks about George Winterbourne’s life. The author dwells on family relations, love, modern art and criticizes mercilessly modern capitalist society and civilization.
The third part of the novel is entirely devoted to George’s Active Service on the Continent - mainly in France. Here Aldington gives a truthful picture of World War I. He does not describe much the trenches and soldiers in the war. Nevertheless we see the senselessness of the war and fully agree with the author that millions of people are killed for nothing. George suffers at the feeling that his body has become worthless, condemned to a sort of kept tramp’s standard of living and ruthlessly treated as cannon-fodder. He suffers for other men too, that they should be condemned to this; but since it was common fate of the men of his generation he determines he must endure it.
If at the beginning of the book we learn about George’s death as told by his commander, a colonel, so at the end of the book we get to know about the last minutes of George Winterbourne’s life.
The title of the book Death of a Hero is ironical. There was nothing heroic in George Winterbourne’s death, it was quite useless and senseless. “I think that George committed suicide in that last battle of the war. I don’t mean shot himself, but it was so very easy for a company commander to stand up when an enemy machine-gun was traversing” says George’s friend ... “Something seemed to break in Winterbourne’s head. He felt he was going mad, and sprang to his feet. The line of bullets smashed across his chest like a savage steel whip. The universe exploded darkly into oblivion.”
Aldington called his book a song of lamentation for the dead of the generation that went through the horrors of the war, “a memorial in its ineffective way to a generation which hoped much, strove honestly and suffered deeply.”