Donal Bereaved

A Work in Progress 
8

So memory swings on the hinge of time

turns Fridays to Saturdays to Sundays

adds one more day to what was always known

making all of time one day older

and Friday the 1st becomes Saturday the 2nd 

and Donal looked up 1954

and saw it was somewhat as he remembered

a New Year’s party that Friday night

turning into a Saturday when his parents didn’t come home 

and then first light on Sunday the 3rd his mother came home a widow 

& 

after that 

his father no longer existed

except as a photograph

where he was by his motorbike 

with the sidecar

Donal could imagine

another ending

that night his father left for the party

and never came home

that he traveled away

like Odysseus

and

might yet still return

Donal went in search of missing words

casting imagery onto Achilles’ shield

summoning a storm to greet Aeneas

invoking Pound’s Cantos

Dido he knew Carthage personified

Hawaii where Merwin sailed

Venice for Pound

Donal felt the call of his peers

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                       2025

Donal

A Work in Progress 
7

…in a library aisle 

                         a scroll newly added

telling of Donal standing between two shores

not wanting to get where he thought he was going

he’d surprised that flint eyed black clad boatman coming on board

taking two coins off his own aware eyes 

amazed

for he’d stepped ashore in New York instead 

of where he thought was going

nineteen sixties New York

where he first found love 

then love absent

first realized poems accepted sometimes liked

New York City’s so full of life death spills over its edges 

an overflowing Hippocrene in the West

where river sent candle lit wreaths 

first meet an incoming tide

first light ricochets from windowpanes 

dawn carpet-bombs skyscrapers ahead 

seen from the Staten Island ferry

Christine and Alan were there to see that sight 

before cancer took her away

where death still spills over

Michael March was there sipping espresso

in a coffee house courtyard mid-town Manhattan

Sami Al Banna lived in Butler Hall

Inderjit Badhwar and Shama

Virginia and Jimmy

she was there too

     playing piano in Barnard Hall

         a visitor from Philadelphia 

            H.C.

            but he did not know her then

                 or H.D.

when he stepped ashore, he’d come to New York

Bruce Choppin was there and John Hall

The Who performed Tommy at The Filmore East

when Donal lived in Northumberland

Bruce visited Roughside with Rachel

only a few did that

It was 1969

Gilbert Peaker got mugged on Morningside Heights

John Tukey with a bad back lay across desks 

at an IEA/UNESCO meeting

at Teacher’s College, Columbia University

Forrest Baskett was there from Stanford

Bruce brought together math guys     

statisticians     

computer scientists 

Donal who was a poet

before he was a programmer

for a mighty machine

IBM’s 360/91

Forrest said Assembly Language was too low level

impractical for IEA

he would choose to write FORTRAN

instead

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                       2025

When in Rome revisited

A Work in Progress 
6

 

 

The three men who ruled strode onto the dais

felon financier and famous for good fortune 

Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey the Great

we saw conjured

before our eyes slyly woven tissues of brazen lies

a new religion resisting definition

mass delusion manufactured by mercenaries

propelled through media 

by a man wanting to conquer Mars

standing next to a would-be Jupiter

an all-white triumvirate fostering fear

with fascist salutes

outrageous demands

a new kind of ism

many shades of truth

peddled by a felon financier and follower

not frightened of consequences when voters speak

intent on dictatorship

on imperial power

one mass produced bibles

acting as a god

another wanted Greenland given in gift

while the third ruled the Senate

distraction and deception ruled by rumor

popular people got paid for podcasts 

everything just a matter of opinion 

in a world where one of the nine 

slipped a trump card into the decision deck 

a get out of jail free card

for breaking the law what the heck

a reusable get-out-of-jail card

used to trump Jack Smith

overt legal power 

immunity

the shape of things to come

awake to the rule of kings

with divine right and then some

for lives can be made forfeit 

estates proscribed

just as was once described

by Sallust

in the time of Caesar’s adopted son

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                         2025

Glenn Hughes: an imaginary lecture

A Work In Progress 
5

Glenn Hughes gave the students some more information about Aldington. 

 

“He was only nineteen when Pound introduced him to Hilda Doolittle. She was six years older than Aldington.  They were both interested in classical literature and mythology, and they were both poets nurtured by Ezra Pound.  They got married after a honeymoon in Capri when he was 21.  H.D. was a very striking woman!  She looked fragile to the outside world, but inside she was sparkling with joy.  She was like Calypso once you had entered her space.  You could never leave until she let you go once you had started talking to her.  They had been separated about ten years when I was in Paris with them in 1928. They got on very well together then, she said he reminded her of his old pre-war self.  She wrote to me about it after she left Paris.  I was doing a book on the Imagists then and I had wanted to meet her in person.  Babette, my first wife, and I were staying in Aldington’s country cottage in England at that time and I’d come over to Paris to meet H.D.  She normally lived in Switzerland then.”

“It’s just unfortunate that birth control was more hit and miss in those days.  She humiliated Aldington by having a child with another man while he was off fighting in the trenches.  Their own child had been stillborn.  She also competed with her husband as a poet.  She compared herself to Ariadne being abandoned by Theseus in one of her poems.  She told me that Pound visited her once in the maternity hospital and said: 

“My only real criticism is that this is not my child. This tells you how close Pound and H.D. had been when they lived in Philadelphia.  In our screenplay, Pound can be the Bacchus character who rescues Ariadne.  Do you remember the myth?  Theseus had slain the Minotaur and taken Ariadne away by boat but then he abandoned her.  Let’s draw a triangle on the board.”

He took chalk and drew a triangle.  Against the points of the triangle, he wrote the names of Aldington, Pound, and H.D.   

“Now, H.D. compared herself to Ariadne.” He added Ariadne to the same point of the triangle as H.D.  “So. Theseus can go with Aldington and Bacchus with Pound,” he said, adding their names to the board.  Let’s play with this idea a little.  Can we make a screenplay out of it?  Can we embed a mythic story?  Can we be relevant to today’s world?

“I brought up Catullus before.  He once wrote a long poem that embedded the story of Theseus and Ariadne inside another myth, one about a marriage which set the stage for the Trojan War and at the end of his poem he wrote some lines that could be interpreted as highly critical of an impending marriage in Rome, that of old Pompey and Caesar’s young daughter, a marriage to cement the First Triumvirate in the last days of the Roman Republic.

“In his epyllion, Catullus embeds the story of Theseus and Ariadne within the story of Peleus and Thetis.  These are classical myths and less well known today but his, probably small, audience of highly educated readers would have known them well.  The poem starts.” Hughes explained, “by incorporating another famous story, the Argonautica, the one about Jason and Medea.  First, the Argo, supposedly the first wooden ship, on its voyage to Colchis inspires wonder in the nymphs who make themselves visible to the Argonauts.  Catullus envisages nymphs naked to the waist treading water as they admire the ship.  This causes, an Argonaut, Peleus, to fall in love with Thetis, a nymph so beautiful Prometheus was compelled to warn Zeus to leave her alone; it was destined Thetis would have a son who would be mightier than his father.  You’ll remember that turns out to be Achilles.  

"When it occurs, the wedding of Peleus and Thetis is a momentous occasion well attended by the gods.  Catullus would have assumed his audience knew the back story well.  An uninvited guest, Eris, goddess of discord, introduces a golden apple into the festivities inscribed with the words “For the Most Beautiful.”  I think you all know the story.  The resulting Judgement of Paris leads to Helen’s abduction by Paris.  This was revenge for Jason’s abduction of Medea if you believe Herodotus.  The Trojan War that followed soon thereafter led to the death of Achilles, child of Peleus and Thetis.  So, you can see, this poem becomes much more interesting if you understand the allusions Catullus is making.  He concludes by saying that the gods no longer deign to mix with mortals.  

Before he gets to this stark summary of current Rome, he has given us an analog description of the world he lives in by weaving three mythic stories together which reference three heroes, two abductions and a marriage.  Now”, he asked the class: “At the time that Catullus was writing, why was a marriage myth of interest?  We can only surmise but it seems quite likely to me that this poem has something to do with the First Triumvirate taking power in Rome where the deal was sealed with a marriage, the marriage of Caesar’s young daughter to Pompey, a man thirty years older.”

“If Catullus was born in 84 B.C., he would have been 24 at the time of the First Triumvirate in 60 B.C., a political alliance that was confirmed by a marriage.  There are records of Caesar dining at the Verona house of his father.  If his father invited Caesar to dinner and Catullus was present, that would make Catullus privy to the state of Roman politics.  Is it possible he had met Caesar’s daughter?  An interesting thought! Julia was about 18 years old when she married.  At the marriage of Pompey and Caesar’s daughter, Julia, Catullus and his father may have been present.  If they were present the Parcae, the Fates, instead of foretelling the glorious exploits of Achilles during the Trojan War, as in the Catullus epyllion, might now be predicting an imminent Civil War that would replace the Roman Republic with an Empire.  Jason, Peleus and Theseus have transformed into Crassus, the richest man in Rome then, Pompey, a war hero, and Caesar, another hero.  It is the marriage of Pompey and Caesar’s daughter, Julia, that is being celebrated without participation by any of the gods.  Of course, this is just my surmise, but,” and here he stopped to ask his class: “Don’t you think this could make a good movie?”

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                   2025

Notes for a Screenplay

A Work in Progress 
4 

 

Gods were watching who’d win a game of chess, 

in a peaceful Parisian scene below

where sunlight weft its way through plane trees 

pruned to perfect a harmonious light.

an impressionist scene they both thought to say,

watching through windowpanes against their bed

which slipped and slid losing its bedspread,

as they enacted their improvised one-act play.

Sunlight slotted by slanted wood blinds,

shadows painted on a mottled white wall,

hands moving pieces driven by minds,

that probed that parried chess pieces stood tall,

there where they saw them bathed in light below,

Dionysian light such as gods would sow.

 

Then, there and then, when coexistence twined

their eyes engaging passing on the stairs

when he realized composing those lines

vines might climb together never be one

when they exchanged bright words for brief seconds

enough time to enthrall that morning when

a trout stirred for a naiad in the fronds

her image firmly embedded in him

when he saw her in Springtime on those stairs

forever rising upwards till time’s end

kept en prise captivated held so still

put your fingers on your temples find it

where in memory they’ll always exist

a portal to paradise entered in bliss

 

She was nineteen, he was eleven years older,

Aphrodite personified as Babette.

She told how she climbed stairs in Denny Hall

for a tryst with her poetry professor.

I climbed those stairs ninety-four years later,

for classes with Classics Professor James J

Clauss, who also taught cinema and drama,

who gave me an A for a paper that

imagined Glenn Hughes using Catullus'

poem on the marriage of Thetis and Peleus

and the tale of Theseus and Ariadne

to teach a screenplay class about Paris

with Babette meeting Aldington and H.D.

I remember the Sixties and Let It Be.

 

When times were good before that first world war

they rehearsed their honeymoon in Capri,

watching blooms licked wildly by honey bees,

embracing in moonlight living their law.

They got married when he was twenty-one,

it was not so happy as once before,

their child stillborn with nothing to be done.

He joined the Army to face disaster,

in gas mask fighting for France thinking Greek.

Came home not to a warm marital bed,

French poxed by death lacking courtesy,

telling H.D. of Arabella's allure.

When I think of Aldington and H.D. 

I think of the Sixties and Let It Be

 

Let us seek Medea, 

where the sun rises but doesn't set 

where the eye goes on forever never finding

where Medea vanished in the end

like peering back in literary time 

past incunabula that survived,

watching fragments of parchment

scattered by the breeze

vanish down

dry

drought ridden gutters

 

 

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                    2025

Aldington and T.E. Lawrence

A Work in Progress 
3

Richard Aldington published his book debunking T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, in 1955, a year after my father died, when I was ten.  I had a job delivering newspapers in the morning then and already an avid reader of Atticus in the Daily Mirror and familiar with the headlines on the front pages of the Daily Mail, The Sketch, and The Telegraph.  If anybody took The Times, it would have been Dr. Bronowski, a notable customer on my Camberwell, South London route who lived where Knatchbull Road intersected McDowall Road and whose address was the first delivery on my route.

I went to the newsagents early each morning to pick up the stack of newspapers I'd carry in a sack slung from on my shoulder.  Sometimes, I'd wait while the newsagent finished assembling my deliveries, marking the address on each newspaper and I'd have time to read the headlines on the papers for sale spread out on the counter. Aldington’s revelations were headline news.  The dead hero Lawrence of Arabia was a legend.  Schoolboys my age knew of him.  Winston Churchill was one of his biggest admirers.  Aldington pulled Lawrence off his pedestal and among other revelations exposed him as a likely homosexual, at a time, 1955, when homosexuality could be cause for imprisonment.  This generated much newspaper commentary but also aired the topic of homosexuality, something I'd been unaware of until that morning my mother got into a discussion about the news about Lawrence with our next-door neighbor and abruptly changed the subject when our neighbor, a French lady, said that she didn't think homosexuality should be a crime.  My ten-year old ears perked up.  I already had a vague notion to beware of men hanging about near public toilets. Was that what it was called?  Once, when I was smaller, I’d gone into a public toilet in a public park and a man had wanted to help me undo my zip.  

When in my teenage years I started reading the literary pages and came across mention of Aldington as a poet, I remembered his name because of that controversy.  H.D. was not in vogue in those days.  That she and Aldington had once been passionate lovers totally escaped me.  I was already desperately in love with a girl who lived in a house that took the Daily Sketch.  And I had discovered T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock and suddenly realized I would write poetry.

When Glenn Hughes gave his lecture in 1958, after the April release of Ezra Pound, I was almost fourteen, working a paper round I'd taken over from Philip, my older brother.   He was three years older than I and he had preceded me at school where I had many of the same teachers.  His name was on the Honors Board.  Our father had been a soldier.  We had his regimental book on the history of his regiment.  He'd written inside the flyleaf a very short history of his jobs before joining the Army.  He'd once been fired from a factory in Dagenham for fighting.  Besides his book there was a sharpshooter's medal from Bisley.  There were boars’ tusks and brass trays brought back from India where he'd once served.  He'd been at Dunkirk.  All we knew of the war was that he'd been in the rearguard and that he'd come home from France on a sailboat.  My brother was conceived after Dunkirk.  Then my father fought in North Africa where he was blown up by a mine in Tunisia, lost the sight of an eye and had to wear a special boot on his left foot thereafter.

I remember walking beside my father one morning.  I was five or six years old.  It's the only time I remember walking with him.  He was easy to keep up with.  He had been in the Royal Fusiliers (City of London) Regiment.  He may have had a walking stick.  I remember him telling me to keep on his left side where he could see me as we crossed the road.  We were going to the lock-up garage that he had just rented in preparation for buying a car before he learned his injuries denied him a driving license.  He'd been on the garage waiting list for ages.  We already had a motorcycle with a sidecar.  That was kept in a railed-off archway under the railway lines near Camberwell Green.  When the Southern Rail trains passed overhead there was a terrific rumbling sound.  I saw a big rat there once.  The rented garage was closer about a half mile from where we lived.  There were several bombsites from the war, where houses had been demolished, along the way.  

Our route took us past an Army barracks.   The main gate was some way from the busy main road.  A detachment of soldiers marching in rows suddenly came into sight going towards the barracks.  They were marching in the road carrying a flag.  Not the Union Jack but a regimental flag.  My father stopped as the soldiers passed, faced the road and stood to attention, taking off his hat as the flag passed by.  Other people just kept on walking.  An officer appreciated my father's gesture.  He called out something like:

  "Thank you, sir.  It's good to see someone showing respect."

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                        2025

Glenn Hughes teaches screenwriting

A Work in Progress

2

In 1958 Glenn Hughes was approaching the end of his University of Washington career.  He retired as director of the School of Drama in 1961.  While giving a lecture to a class on screenwriting he allowed himself to reminisce prompted by recent news of Ezra Pound’s release from an insane asylum.   Asking his students if they were aware of Ezra Pound, now a 72-year-old American poet, he described his own interactions thirty years before with Pound, a poet he described in an essay as “the Don Quixote of modern literature.”   

“To appreciate Pound’s poetry, especially The Cantos,” he said, “a reader needs a wider breadth of education.  We equip students with some knowledge of the classics, sufficient for them to enjoy a movie like Orphée,” he remarked, mentioning a Cocteau film he insisted his students see.   

“Orphée stands on its own.  If the audience knows the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, they may enjoy the movie more.  To understand Pound, his readers need, not only a mastery of the Classics, but also a knowledge of Asian languages and culture among many other things.” 

Remembering to that time when he knew Pound, three poets out of the many he met stood out: Richard Aldington, H.D. and Pound.   He thought they were exceptional.  His intention for this class was to demonstrate how a screenplay might be made of their lives.   He’d been a young poet himself.   He now thought cinema was becoming predominant as an art form and was taking the place of epic poetry.  That was why he was teaching this class.  

He described how he and Babette, his first wife, in 1925 had been in England and visited Aldington and his mistress, Dorothy Yorke, in their cottage in England in 1925.   How three years later, they went back again funded by a Guggenheim grant.   How during his visits he came to know Aldington, H.D. and Pound very well.  He had been spent long, happy evenings in nightclubs in Paris socializing with them and people like Nancy Cunard.    

He cited Aldington and H.D. as being typical of an age-old love story like Orpheus and Eurydice, Jason and Medea, Theseus and Ariadne, Aeneas and Dido, all couples where the man had abandoned the woman.  A screenplay about Aldington and H.D. couldn’t be told without alluding to Classical literature.  Both were steeped in it, particularly H.D.  Their poetry was full of allusions to Greek myth.  But if not a myth, a screenplay could link instead to a more recent love story.  Why not explore the story of Catullus and Lesbia?  Catullus was a poet who was writing at the time of the First Triumvirate in Rome.  He had written many poems about a love affair with a woman he called Lesbia. 

“It is easy to go back and forth in time in the cinema.  So, for a screenplay we can choose parallel stories.  One set in Rome and the other in London or Paris.  We can use Catullus and Lesbia as the leading characters in Rome and Aldington and H.D. in London.  We’ll cut back and forth between the two stories as we think best to tell the story.”

Both Aldington and Catullus were young poets.  Both were in the avant garde.  We know much more about Aldington than Catullus, he told them.  Aldington survived trench warfare in France and made his living as a writer.  Because we know so little about Catullus, we have an opportunity to suggest a fictional, yet not entirely impossible, back-story for him.  

“After all,” he said, “this was how myth developed over time.  Old stories were continually adjusted to meet the needs of a current generation, so a modern screenplay is entitled to put a new spin on an old myth.  We’ve already mentioned Cocteau’s Orphée.  In the core myth, Eurydice was abandoned because Orpheus looked back.  Anyone aware of the tale only from Cocteau’s adaption, in Orphée, might have missed that fact.

 “Yes, that’s correct,” he said, answering a quibbling student anxious to get on with the syllabus.

 “Catullus is historical not mythical.”  

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                        2025

 H.D. and Richard Aldington

A Work in Progress

1.

Who was he who took her virginity?

Did he snip off a lock of her pubic hair

to burn for far off Olympian gods

while he poured on the floor a splash of stout

to please prominent friends, a Latinate?

It was Hilda Doolittle with Richard Aldington

all this surmised from reading what survives

in archives from that previous era

in those paper and ink days, pre digital.

He was going to be a soldier soon

in a world knowing dative kissing French

in a world where H.D. took another lover

while he was in no man’s land lit by a moon

he'd volunteered almost died in a trench

I think of Glenn Hughes who knew them both.

He was a professor from the USA

who got a grant to interview Imagists,

traveled to the UK stayed with wife Babette,

in Aldington's book lined country cottage

diligently interviewed those names now common,

in anthologies, in Paris danced with H.D 

met Nancy Cunard, was Hemingway in town?

In 1929 when the dollar was strong 

Americans in Paris swept into the vortex 

Babette wrote a novel about being seduced,

he kept menus from places friends introduced

while they were on a Guggenheim doing research

while she was making mental notes for her book

Stanford Press would publish his Imagism soon.

He won’t portray Aldington and H.D.

as Alcaeus and Sappho but he scents

there is something so Babette teases Richard

to confirm he’s not gay if we believe Babette’s fiction

Glenn Hughes acts as a kind of script doctor

working with Dick on Death of a Hero

Glenn Hughes and Richard will later fall out.

the Penthouse Theater bears Glenn Hughes’ name

for a career success there is no blame.

Two boxes remain of Glenn Hughes' effects.

University of Washington Special Collections 

shows on request: many restaurant cartes from Paris

an acrimonious letter about money

surprisingly not sent from Richard Aldington 

with the letters I would have liked to have read

between Glenn Hughes and those famous poets

sold for what seems now a trivial amount to

Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center

Texas.  There's Babette's original manuscript:

of Last Night When We Were Young, and

a doctoral thesis on Glenn Hughes impresario.

A few lines mention the Imagists.

He was nineteen, she was six years older.

I think of the Sixties and Let It Be

when they married in Kensington as did, we 

six decades later son of a soldier

I gave occupation poet, did she?

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                        2025

 Questions of a Waxing Moon

News comes of Ukraine’s forces 

boldly attacking across frozen ground

by the light of a new moon

when the moon is full 

how far will they have gone?

will they have overthrown armies

taken supply routes

jeopardized Putin’s power?

will they have moved east 

then turned south

to strike at the rear of their besiegers?

when the moon is full

may good news come 

when the moon is full

how far will they have gone?

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                        2025

Standing Stones

Why do giant standing stones draw us nearer them?

once we have noticed them standing between two worlds

a lintel above them they baulk our progress

won’t let us see what they guard

not a landscape but some secret long forgotten  

how important a secret we do not know

wind & water hone the stone

acid rain

dew bathing old wounds 

where sandstone was cut from the north facing crags

beyond Hadrian’s Wall in the borderlands

drystone walls dividing small fields

a spring on the hillside

metallic tasting water

keeping grass lush 

with its steady flow 

silence

then a curlew’s cry

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                     2025