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