Aldington, Richard,
1892-1963
Richard Aldington Collection
1913-1963
TXRC99-A29
2 boxes (.83 linear feet)
and 1 galley folder
Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center,
University of Texas at Austin
The collection contains a
few examples of Aldington's poetry and a typescript of
Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical
Enquiry(1955), but is composed primarily of correspondence between
Aldington, 1892-1962, and fellow poets, publishers, editors, and friends. An
Englishman, Aldington left his homeland in 1928 and divided his time between
France and Italy with a brief stay in the United States during World War
II.
English.
Biographical Sketch
Born in 1892 in Portsmouth, England, Richard Aldington, the son of a
middle-class lawyer, grew up with an unwavering devotion to literature. After
reading Keats's
Endymion at fifteen, he spent two years
absorbing major English poets and the complete canon of Elizabethan drama. A
sudden decline in his family's fortune in 1911 forced Aldington to select his
career path at an early age. Leaving the University of London after one year,
Aldington began to actively pursue a literary career.
Getting his start as a sports reporter, Aldington soon made friends and
contacts in the literary world. He wrote reviews and essays, worked on
translations, and finally began selling his own poems. He soon made friends
with a group of three other young poets: Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, and
Harold Monro, editor of the
Poetry Bookshop. Aldington married Hilda
Doolittle, or H.D. as she was known, in 1913, and in the years before World War
I, they traveled to Paris and Italy and made themselves known to the larger
literary world. During this period, Aldington became associated with the
burgeoning modernist movement, largely through his
association with Ezra Pound. His poetry appeared in Pound's 1914 anthology
Des Imagistes and in Amy Lowell's annual
anthology
Some Imagist Poets, (1915, 1916, 1917). He
published his first volume of poetry,
Images (1910-1915), in 1915.
In 1916 Aldington enlisted in the British Army, saw active combat, and
emerged in late 1918 with a captain's commission and severe shell-shock.
Shortly after his return to London in 1919 he divorced Doolittle and by the end
of the same year had left the hustle and bustle of city life for a more
aesthetic lifestyle in a Berkshire village. He continued to write poetry,
publishing
Images of Desire (1919) and
Exile and Other Poems (1923) but with a
changed style expressing his negative experiences during the war.
By 1928 Aldington's writing provided him with enough income to allow him
to leave England and lead a life of expatriatism, mostly in France and Italy.
During the 1930s he turned his energies away from poetry and towards fiction
and satire. With World War II looming at the end of the decade, Aldington found
satire to be ignoble and wrote his memoirs,
Life for Life's Sake (1941).
Aldington waited out the war in the United States, settling first in
Connecticut and then in Hollywood where he wrote film scripts. In 1946 he
returned to France and turned his pen to biographies, writing about his good
friend D.H. Lawrence in
Portrait of a Genius, But... (1950) and
producing a blunt volume about T.E. Lawrence named
Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical
Enquiry(1955). Both of these volumes were controversial and offended
many readers and the reaction to the T.E. Lawrence book left Aldington bitter
towards the English literary establishment. However, he continued to write and
encourage other writers. In 1962 he visited Russia at the invitation of the
Soviet Writer's Union, an invitation by which he was deeply honored. Two weeks
after his return to France from Moscow, Aldington contracted an undiagnosed
illness and died suddenly.
Scope and Contents
Correspondence makes up the bulk of the Richard Aldington Collection,
1913-1963, with the addition of typescript works and a number of memoranda of
agreement. The collection is organized into four series, with materials
arranged alphabetically by author and chronologically where possible: Series I.
Works, 1926-1956 (.5 box); Series II. Correspondence, 1913-1962 (1 box); Series
III. Legal Documents, 1934-1954 (2 folders); and Series IV. Third Party Works
and Correspondence, 1936-1963 (3 folders). This collection was previously
accessible through a card catalog, but has been re-cataloged as part of a
retrospective conversion project.
The Works Series contains a typescript of
Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry
and typescript and galley files of
Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot: A Lecture. Also
found in this series are a number of typescript poems including
Dusk at the Louvre,
Fatigues,
Journalism in the Seventeenth Century, and
The Silent Age. Individual titles are all
listed in the Index of Works at the end of this guide.
The Correspondence Series is divided into two sections, Outgoing and
Incoming. The Outgoing Correspondence section contains letters from Aldington
to Pascal Covici, Giuseppe Orioli, Brigit Patmore, and others. a number of
Enclosed with Aldington's letters to Covici are a number of reproductions of
drawings by M. André Rouveyre and a second copy of
A Tourist's Rome. The smaller Incoming
Correspondence section holds letters from Rémy de Gourmont, Ottoline Morrell,
Leonard Woolf, and other friends and associates. Individual correspondents are
listed in the Index of Correspondence at the end of this guide.
The Legal Documents Series is composed of Memoranda of Agreement between
Aldington and Albatross Verlag in addition to legal notes and agreements
between Aldington and William Collins Sons & Company, Ltd.
The Third Party Works and Correspondence Series is also organized into
two sections, Works and Correspondence. The Works section contains typescript
reviews and notes on Aldington's Lawrence biography, as well as a description
of his later years by Harry Moore. Individual titles are listed by author in
the Index of Works at the end of this guide. Correspondence in this series is
composed primarily of letters between legal firms and publishers as well as
friends and associates of Aldington.
Individual correspondents are listed in the Index of Correspondence at
the end of this guide.
Elsewhere in the Ransom Center are over 200 travel photos in two photo
albums in addition to a dozen individual photographs located in the Literary
Files of the Photography Collection. There are five Vertical Files containing
newspaper clippings with biographical information and literary criticism in
addition to published articles by Aldington.
Acquisition
Purchases, 1962-1966 (R1202, R1611, R2088, R2722, R3082, R3319,
R3660)
Access
Open for research
Processed by
Chelsea S. Jones, 1999
Index Terms
Correspondents
Gourmont, Remy de,
1858-1915
Holroyd-Reece, J.
(John)
Lawrence, Frieda von
Richthofen, 1879-1956
Morrell, Ottoline Violet
Ann Cavendish-Bentinck, Lady, 1873-1938
Subjects
Authors, British--20th
century
English Literature--20th
century
English poetry
Document Types
Galley proofs
Other materials associated with Richard Aldington may be found in the
following collections at the Ransom Center:
- Armstrong, Terence Ian Fytton
- Church, Richard
- Croft-Cooke, Rupert
- Cunard, Nancy
- Dahlberg, Edward
- Eliot, Thomas Stearns
- Flint, Frank Stewart
- Garnett, David
-
Harpers
- Hughes, Glenn Arthur
- Huxley, Aldous Leonard
- Hynes, Samuel Lynn
- Joyce, James
- Lawrence, David Herbert
- Lawrence, Frieda
- Lawrence, T.E.
- Lehmann, John
- Lewis, Wyndham
- Lindsay, Philip
- Maugham, William Somerset
- Morrell, Ottoline Violet Ann, Lady
- Murry, John Middleton
- Nehls, Edward
- Norman, Charles
- Orioli, Guiseppi
- Patmore, Brigit
- Patmore, Derek
- Pound, Ezra
- Sitwell, Osbert, Sir
- Woolf, Virginia Stephen
Source
Dictionary of Literary Biography -- Volume 20:
British Poets, 1914-1945. Donald E. Stanford, Ed. (Detroit: Gale
Research Company, 1983).
Richard Aldington Collection--Folder List
Series I. Works,
1926-1956
1
1
A-Z
1
2
Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot: A
Lecture, typescript with author emendations,
1939, 24pp, two sets of galley proofs,
1954, 16pp (galley proofs removed to galley
folder)
1
3-5
Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical
Enquiry,typescript bound into three volumes,
nd,
672pp
1
6
A Tourist's Rome, page proofs with
corrections,
nd,
24pp
Series II. Correspondence,
1913-1962
Outgoing Correspondence
1
7
A-Z
1
8
Atkins, John,
1957-1958
1
9
Barnes, M.W.,
1958-1960
1
10
Covici, Pascal,
1927-1962
1
11
Harrison, Michael,
1957-1962
1
12
Johnson, martyn,
1917-1919
2
1
Orioli, Giuseppe,
1931-1938
2
2-4
Patmore, Brigit,
1928-1935
2
5
Titus, Edward W.,
1929-1932
2
6
Incoming Correspondence, A-Z
Series III. Legal Documents,
1934-1954
2
7
A-Z
2
8
William Collins Sons and Company, Ltd.,
1953-1954
Series IV. Third Party Works and Correspondence,
1936-1963
Works
2
9
A-Z
2
10
Moore, Harry T.,
Richard Aldington in His Last
Years, typescript,
1963
24pp
2
11
Correspondence, A-Z
Richard Aldington Collection--Index of Correspondents
Box and folder numbers are followed by a number in parentheses which
indicates the number of items by that person. A single item is indicated where
there is no number in parentheses following the box and folder number. Where
there is correspondence from Richard Aldington, the number in parentheses is
followed by the phrase from Aldington. So in the
example:
Kershaw, Alister--1.7 (from Aldington), 2.11 (13)
there is 1 letter from Aldington in Box 1, folder 7 and 13 letters from
Kershaw in Box 2, folder 11.
- Atkins, John Alfred, 1916- --1.8 (15 from Aldington)
- Barclays Bank--2.5 (with letter to Edward Titus)
- Barnes, M.W.--1.9 (7 from Aldington)
- Bird, Alan--2.11
- Blaber, -, Mr.--1.7 (from Aldington)
- Cockburn, Frank B.--2.11 (2)
- Collins (Firm: London, England)--2.11
- Covici, Pascal, 1885-1964--1.10 (5 from Aldington), 2.6
- Eliot, Vivien, 1888-1947--2.6
- Gamble, Peter, fl. 1938-1.7 (from Aldington)
- Gourmont, Jean de, 1877-1928--2.6
- Gourmont, Rémy de, 1858-1915--2.6 (38)
- Hall, Babette Plechner--see Hughes, Babette
- Harrison, Michael--1.11 (4 from Aldington), 2.6 (2)
- Heinemann (Firm)--2.11
- Holroyd-Reece, J. (John)--1.7 (3 from Aldington), 2.6, 2.11 (7)
- Horne & Birkett (Firm)--2.11 (7)
- Hughes, Babette, 1906- --1.7 (from Aldington)
- Johnson, Martyn--1.12 (4 from Aldington)
- Joynson-Hicks (Firm)--2.11 (3)
- Kershaw, Alister--1.7 (from Aldington), 2.11 (13)
- Lawrence, Frieda von Richthofen, 1879-1956--1.8
- Loving, Pierre, 1893- --1.7 (from Aldington)
- Morrell, Ottoline Violet Ann Cavendish-Bentinck, Lady,
1873-1938--2.6
- Orioli, Giuseppe, 1884-1942--2.1 (8 from Aldington)
- Palmer, Herbert E. (Herbert Edward), 1880- --1.7 (from
Aldington)
- Patmore, Brigit, 1883-1965--2.2-4 (150 from Aldington), 2.11
- Patmore, Derek, 1908- --1.7 (from Aldington)
- Pound, Ezra, 1885-1972--1.7 (from Aldington)
- Sharman, A.--2.11
- Titus, Edward W., 1880- --2.5 (20 from Aldington, 3)
- Walker, C.C.--2.11
- William Heinemann, Ltd.--see Heinemann (Firm)
- Woolf, Leonard, 1880-1969--2.6
Richard Aldington Collection--Index of Works
- Aldington, Richard
-
The Berkshire Kennet--1.1
-
Dusk at the Louvre--see Four Poems
-
Everyman's Poets. Robert Burns: The Natural
Man--1.1
-
Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot--1.2;
Galley Folder 1
-
Fatigues--1.1
- Four Poems--1.1
-
In the Trenches--1.1
-
Journalism in the Seventeenth
Century--see Four Poems
-
Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical
Enquiry--1.3-5
- The Love Poems of Myrrhine and Konallis--1.1
-
Regrets--see Four Poems
-
The Silent Age--see Four Poems
-
A Tourist's Rome--1.6, 1.10
- Gourmont, Rémy de
- La Casane--2.9
- Moore, Harry T.
-
Richard Aldington in his Last
Years--2.10
- Patmore, Derek
-
The Poetry and Prose of Richard
Aldington (radio broadcast)--2.9
- Unknown Author
- Reader's report and notes re
T.E. Lawrence: A Biographical--2.9
-
Enquiry
- Review of
T.E. Lawrence: A Biographical Enquiry
by Richard Aldington--2.9
- Summary of Wills and Settlements made by various members of
the Chapman family--2.9