Richard Aldington

1928

The contemporary novel often reflects the actions of a 12-year-old with the "hard heart of a child," and few of the pleasing graces. The other day a boy aged ten, annoyed because his brother who slept in the same bed had pulled the covers during the night, got up in the dark, went to the kitchen, returned with his father's hunting gun, and shot off his brother's head. That active temperament is reflected in grown-up art. A high degree of violence is now necessary to excite us, and our artists. Violence is a substitute for emotional depth.

To understand our art, to "spectate" it properly, requires a flare for it, or the analysis of history and ethics, the human behaviour that produces it.

To legislate art it is necessary to begin as one would with crops, with nature, human nature. People who live deeply and profoundly produce profound art. So one begins with the social temper of the time. To change art it is necessary to change the laws and more under which people live and behave. Aesthetics begins with congress and every change in the status book produces another kind of fig leaf in the statues. The congressional approach sees art from the outside, the objective and non-romantic side, something both Romanticks and anti-Romanticks often omit.

The social group is mightier than the pen. It is the pen in the hands of one who can write. This age cannot produce

the old art. It should aim at stopping any art that is not
useful or decorative. We want information, not art; facts,
not imagination. That is, we prefer facts to imagination.
The "art" we produce is crime. The Dostoievsky story without
the Dostoievsky human depth. Dostoievsky started a character
off as a wreck, and in the end showed you a man. Our charac-
ter ends as he starts, a wreck.

South Wind is becoming increasingly significant as the
last of the old novels. One character-- the Bishop-- ended
differently than he began. At the finish he was not the in-
trospective Bishop he was at the start, and he condoned murder.

RICHARD ALDINGTON

XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Paris, 1929

Have been thinking of the quote you cited from Montesquieu: "Good writing is the art of omitting transitional thought."

The craft of poems includes elision of transitional minutes and might be described as the adventure of language in arrested time. For the term "arrested time," consider the following example:

A troop train is scheduled to pass through Xenia, Ohio, on the way to an embarkation camp. A man who has a son on board arrives at the station about ten o'clock to wait for the train and a possible glimpse of his son. Before the train arrives, two hours are measured very slowly by the father.

Freights puff in and out, people come and go. To the station master station activities are proceeding at the clock time rate of one minute per minute. To the father the clock is moving slowly. Waiting for that one particular moment when his son's train will pass, he measures the movement of other three dimensional objects at a retarded space. For him, time is moving slowly, or, from the point of view of his mind, we might say his thoughts are moving quickly against the slow motion of the station clock.

Two hours after the train was due, as the town bells are ringing noon, the train passes along the plat-

Time 2

form. From the engineer's point of view the train crawls along the platform a minute until the signal is given for a clear track. Then the train proceeds. Meanwhile, the father has caught sight of his son leaning from a window. He runs toward him. There is time only to shake hands.

"Well, son! How're they treating you ?

"Not bad, how's crops ?

"So-so, could be better...they're keeping wheat too low! Here- your Aunt Clara sent these.(Knitted socks pass).

"That's mighty fine of her...Well-- goodbye, Father.

"Good-bye

"Good-bye...

O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee.

The train has pulled out. The Father turns to leave. The station clock gives the time as 12:01.

What time is it ?

Sa'day

Richard Aldington

(February, 1930)

Dear Rich,

Only this - and for the sake of the record, and the ghost of
a conversation :

I have been slightly haunted (echoes) by a fogginess on my
part when we held forth the other day about the Guggenheimers. And
as we must make everything extremely clear before we leave this
terrestrial paradise to walk forever with Dante (not Homer for me,
I am afraid-- at least, not unless I last a bit longer, and at least
learn how to pronounce the syllables) : to wit:

I suddenly connected with the name of Mary Column. I consider
her a distinguished critic and thoroughly approve of her getting an
award. Ditto Krutch. I'm sure, too, that the hundred odd professors
who get the award are up to their standard of these two.

I most thoroughly disapprove of the awards for creative writing.
I would a thousand times prefer never to be allowed even to apply
for an award - I'd give half my library - etc etc etc - (I don't
know how the grammar of this sentence is coming out) - rather than
see the "creators" that the Gug. subsidized this year encouraged
to keep on writing.

I enclose the list (let me have it back some time). I rather
think you'll agree with me. I know the work of all except the two
lady novelists. Davison and Wolfe are flaming genuises compared to
the others. I really think the awards this year for creative writing
are a scandal; they make me think that Tate and the little Adams
girl are Homer and Sappho. As for Hart Crane, and others, they are
simply of the age before Sappho and before Homer.

'S'nuff.

Richard Aldington

February, 1930

Nancy says you have something on Thomas, the Stoins Eliot. If
you still have, it will save it for me ? I'd like to see it.

I, too, have swept the strings. If the pages of SOME DEATHS
ever get all typed out, you will find (at least, I hope you will find)
a tiny little ode tucked away.......but no ! It will be more fun
for each to see each others before we see each others....if you get
what I mean!

(in the middle of innumerable lines and followed by innumerable
lines.......

O the dead world of the air
thoroughly dry and small

Song gone

to a dry cactus and a small spine

A small spine on a small dryness

A small cactus in a dry mind.

O the scratch of the small quill
on the dry brain

O the dry birth of the small thing

O the small old born dead

O an ode for the dry dead
the small poem of the dry dead.

Show Eri...or as the distinguished René Taupin calls her
Madame Patmore.

Love,

Walter

Richard Aldington

Paris, 1931

If you can't dismiss such a book, as some have tried to dismiss Celine's *Voyage a Bout de la Nuit*, by saying this isn't the world, just its asshole and nearby sex. It's the very quality of your artist that he catches and crystallizes and stresses the dominant element in the world around him, just that element that element that most of us pass by. Because we pass it by, it's often difficult for us to realize the true picture the book shows. We say it's a caricature of reality, not the whole story. But the stress, the caricature, is necessary because of our very indifference to the reality the artist sees, and symbolizes, by the anus. The less we are alive to the artist's reality, the more warped, from the average point of view, that reality appears.

Thus, primitive art is not "realistic" in our sense, for one reason that a mere indication of the subject is all that's necessary-- everyone knows what the representation of fecundity stands for, or whatever the subject happens to be. All the audience needs is a non-representational indication, they fill in the balance themselves.

* Mac chapters of Henry Miller's *Tropic of Cancer*

2

Today, when we have gone dead to the reality around us,
the author has to scream at us if we are to catch the faint-
est echo. Miller screams "Death, Fuck, Filth". It is the
human organism reduced to the spider level, each spider for
himself. It's the actual anarchy around us, not the theo-
retical traditionalism of Eliot; not what the world ought
to be, or ought not to be; but as it still is, magnified on
the author's retina so that you too see the morgue of
individualism, the death here beyond the death throes, the
corpse stretched out, and no one to claim it.

It's to save oneself from this complete disorganization
that some try to find a communal philosophy, from Marx to
the Catholic Church. But we never will until we realize
what a mess we have made of our "freedom". Actually, I
think if we had nothing but Tropic of Cancer to read we
might all go out and change the world overnight. Perhaps
for that very reason we have few books like this. The world
doesn't change overnight, or perhaps it does, but the night
is a <u>perpetuam dormienda</u> for those this book leaves behind...

Sa'day

Dear Rich,

I have been slightly hauhted (echoes) by a fogginess on my part when we held forth the other day about the Guggenheimers#: And as we must make everything extremely clear before we leave this terrestrial paradise to walk forever with Dante ( not Homer for me, I am afraid - at least, not unless I last a bit longer, and at least learn how to pronounce the syllables) : to wit:

I suddenly connected with the name of Mary Coúmn. I consider her a distinguished critic and thomghly approve of her getting an award. Ditto Krutch. I'm sure, too, that the hundred odd professors who get the award are up to their standard of these two.

the
I most thoroughly disapprove of awards for creative writing. I would a thousand times prefer never to be allowed even to apply for an award - I'd give half my library - etc etc etc - (I don't know how the grammar of this sentence is coming out) - rather than see the name "creators" that the Gug. subadized this year encouraged to keep on writing.

I enclose the list ( let me have it back some time). I rather think you'll agree with me. I know the work of all except the two lady novelists. Davison and Wolfe are flaming geniuses compared to the others. I really think the awards this year for creative writing are a scandal too large; they make me think that Tate and the little Adams girl are Homer and Sappho. As for Hart Crane, and others, they are simply of the age before Sappho and before Homer.

'shuff.

Nancy says you have something on Thomas, the Stoins
Eliot. If you still have it will you save it for me ?
I'd like to see it.

I, too, have swept the strings. If the pages of some deaths ever get all typed out, you will find (at least, I hope you will find) a tiny little ode tucked away ... but no! It will be more fun for each to see each other before we see each other ... if you get what I mean.

Over

(in the middle of innumerable lines and followed by
innumerable lines........

O the scroach of the small quill
on the dry brain

Show Bri....or as the distinguished René Taupin calls
her Madame Patmore.

Love,

Walter

16 Rue Denfert Rochereau
Paris, December 21st, 1930.

Dear Richard,

I think about you very often, and think of writing you but
that has gotten difficult because I feel that I've pretty effect-
ually squelched our friendship. Not by anything in particular, per-
haps, but by a series of attitudes extending over the last year or
so. Perhaps you are even cold to that now, and there's every reason
why you should be; however, I am not. And I feel more than ever
badly about it because I feel more and more a sense of obligation
to your friendship and the things you gave me through it. My X have
curse is the time it takes me to grow up and I have am afraid that
I have put you through some of the birth pangs, or tried to, or at
any rate, had a wet nurse attitude.

I often recall snatches of conversation, and now I am developing
along lines to which you were steadfast, and have been, and then
it is a pain that through my own fault we are not friends....The
curious thing is that as I write this the utter impossibility of
saying anything becomes overwhelming. I mean that it would re-
quire a book, and an extremely subjective one, to give any sense
to the sort of thing I've gone through over the last year - because
it is the overtones of that which have come between us. That year
is over, but not what I have put between myself and you, and which
I should like not to be there.

There is, of course, no answer to this. Things will either
happen, or not. It is possible, too, that I exaggerate, but I
think not. Forgive me if you can, and let us be friends.

As ever,

Douglas tells me you are in Florence so I suppose this address
will reach you.