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