Aldington, Richard (1892-1962) novelist, poet, critic, biographer, translator, screenwriter

Richard Aldington was born in Portsea, England, to Albert Edward Aldington, a lawyer’s clerk, and Jessie May Godfree Aldington. Although he was named Edward Godfree Aldington, he early chose to be called Richard. His family was not well off, and he had to leave University College, London, because of lack of funds. His brilliance in languages and literature was manifest early on, however, and by the age of 20 he was publishing elegantly written poetry. Aldington, Ezra Pound, and Hilda Doolittle (“H. D.”) became the leaders of the imagism movement, which Aldington defined: “To present an image (hence the name, imagist). We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous.” He married H. D. in 1913.

About this time Aldington became literary editor of The Egoist, a London magazine; published substantial amounts of poetry; and, as secretary to the novelist Ford Madox Ford, transcribed the latter’s novel The Good Soldier. He enlisted in 1916 as a private in the army but was rapidly commissioned and saw combat as an officer. After the war he devoted himself to the literary life, continuing to publish poetry and book reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, as well as criticism and translations of French and Italian works. He worked with T. S. Eliot on The Criterion but, becoming restless, he began to travel abroad. Death of a Hero (1929), a novel based on his war experiences, made Aldington an instant celebrity.

He continued to publish almost to the end of his life. Significant works include several novels (Death of a Hero, 1929, and All Men Are Enemies, 1933); many poems; his autobiography Life for Life’s Sake (1941); a biography of Waterloo’s hero, Wellington (1946), which won the James Tate Black Memorial Prize; biographies of D. H. Lawrence and the French poet Frederic Mistral; translations of Greek and Latin poets; and Hollywood screenplays while he lived in the United States from 1935 to 1947. He nearly ruined his reputation with his controversial biography of T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), which attempted to prove that Lawrence was not the hero that he was believed to be.

Aldington spent three weeks in Russia as a guest of the Soviet Writers Union in 1962 and died suddenly upon his return to France. Critic Richard Smith stresses the difficulty in summarizing Aldington’s literary career: “Though he began his career as an imagist poet, his subsequent writings are the work of a strong individualist whose attitudes and techniques cannot be consistently identified with a particular school or movement.”

A Work about Richard Aldington:
Smith, Richard E. Richard Aldington. Boston: Twayne, 1977.