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Death of a Hero (extract 1)

Richard Aldington

1892 - 1962

Novelist, poet and biographer. Aldington was born in Hampshire and educated at Dover College and London University. He married the American poet Hilda Doolittle in 1913 (divorced 1937) and was a member of the group which introduced imagism. Richard Aldington began his literary career as a poet. His first collection of poems, Images 1910-1915, was published in 1915, and his Collected Poems appeared in 1928. In later years Aldington devoted himself more to prose and produced several deservedly successful novels: Death of a Hero (1929), The Colonel's Daughter (1931), which satirized English village life, All Men are Enemies (1933), Very Heaven (1937) and some other books.

During World War I Aldington served in the British Army. He suffered the effects of gas and shell-shock, and his powerful anti-war novel, Death of a Hero, constitutes a savage indictment of the social and intellectual climate of the pre-war era. The 'hero' is so disgusted by his corrupt and wasteful society that he invites his own death by exposing himself to enemy fire. The novel is dedicated to the so-called "lost generation". The core of Aldington's outlook is a deep-rooted disillusionment in a world seized by suicidal and homicidal madness. The novelist calls his book a threnody, a song of lamentation for the dead of the generation that went through the horrors of war.

After the end of the war he lived in London, in Italy, France and Switzerland. He became a residentof the USA in 1939.

Aldington also translated Julien Benda's La Trahison des Clercs as The Great Betrayal (1928). He compiled an anthology of D.H. Lawrence's prose, The Spirit of Place (1935); his biography of Lawrence, Portrait of a Genius, But... (1950) caused considerable controversy. His scathing opinion of Ò.Å. Lawrence found expression in Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry (1955), which savaged commonly accepted interpretations of Lawrence's character and achievements. An autobiography, Life for Life's Sake, appeared in 1941, and his correspondencewith Lawrence Durrell, Literary Lifelines, was published posthumously in 1981.

Aldington treats his subject-matter as experienced by the sensitive nature of an artist, which makes the whole intensely humane and vividly passionate.

Some characteristic features of his style can be defined. The subtle lyricism, the rich imagery, the musical rhythm of the description turn the landscape into a passionate rhapsody. There are masterly touches in rich and vivid epithets. For the greater part the epithets are combined with metaphors. The richness of imagery is developed in effective similes. The manner in which individual words are chosen and combined into units of sound and meaning is extraordinarily impressive. The choice of words is remarkable for their sonorous quality. The alliterations make the text particularly musical. The emotional colouring is made definite by words naming or expressing emotions.



The syntactical structure helps to create a mood of enraptured contemplation, many sentences beginning with adverbials of place. This brings inversion, which slightly elevates the style. There are several cases where inversion is represented by the postposition of attributes. In these cases inversion is more definite, and its effect is to give a solemn ring to the whole. This is also enhanced by pauses introduced into some sentences (by the ellipsis of link-verbs or subjects) which make the rhythm more pronounced. Another feature also producing a rhythmical effect is the arrangement of attributes in pairs.

The refinement of learned classical allusions is also characteristic of Aldington. Aldington brings the contrast between the peaceful beauty of nature and the bitterness, avarice and despair in the world of men. The sharp contrasts, as well as the emphasis laid on the effect the transitory moment produces upon the heroes' senses, the refined metaphorical imagery comparing things in nature to man-made objects of luxury - all these combine to bring Aldington's word-painting close to the Impressionist school.

The lyrical intensity of Aldington's descriptions largely depends on the combination of the direct imagistic method, i.e. presenting things in a series of images almost physically palpable and real - with the author's own comments, bitter or sad.


Death of a Hero

(extracts and the examples of the analysis)

R. Aldington

Death of a Hero (extract 1)

But more than words about things were things themselves. You looked and looked at them, and then you wanted to put down what they looked like, rearrange them in patterns. In the drawing-class they made you look at a dirty whitish cube, cylinder, and cone, and you drew and re-drew hard outlines which weren't there. But for yourself you wanted to get the colours of things and how they faded into each other and how they formed themselves - or did you form them? - into exciting patterns. It was so much more fun to paint things than even to read what Keats and Shakespeare thought about them. George spent all his pocket-money on paints and drawing-pencils and sketch-books and oil-sketching paper and water-colour blocks. For a long time he hadn't much to look at, even in reproductions. He had Cruikshank and Quiz illustrations which he didn't much care for; and a reproduction of a Bouguereau which he hated; and two Rossetti pictures which he rather liked; and a catalogue of the Tate Collection which gave him photographs of a great many horrible Watts and Frank Dicksees. Best of all, he liked an album of coloured reproductions of Turner's water-colours. Then, one spring, George Augustus took him to Paris for a few days. They did an 'educative' visit to the Louvre, and George simply leaped at the Italians and became very Pre-Raphaelite and adored the Primitives. He was quite feverish for weeks after he got back, unable to talk of anything else. Isabel was worried about him: it was so unboyish, so - well, really, quite unhealthy, all this silly craze for pictures, and spending hours and hours crouching over paint-blocks, instead of being in the fresh air. So much nicer for the boy to be manly. Wasn't he old enough to have a gun licence and learn to kill things?

 

So George had a gun licence, and went out shooting every morning in the autumn. He killed several plovers and a wood-pigeon. Then one frosty November morning he fired into a flock of plovers, killed one, and wounded another, which fell down on the crisp grass with such a wail of despair. 'If you wing a bird, pick it up and wring its neck,' he had been told. He picked up the struggling, heaving little mass of feathers, and with infinite repugnance and shut eyes tried to wring its neck. The bird struggled and squawked. George wrung harder and convulsively - and the whole head came off in his hand. The shock was unspeakable. He left the wretched body, and hurried home shuddering. Never again, never, never again would he kill things. He oiled his gun dutifully, as he had been told to do, put it away, and never touched it again. At nights he was haunted by the plover's wail and by the ghastly sight of the headless, bleeding bird's body. In the daytime he thought of them. He could forget them when he went out and sketched the calm trees and fields, or tried to design in his tranquil room. He plunged more deeply into painting than ever, and thus ended one of the many attempts to 'make a man' of George Winterbourne.

 

The business of 'making a man' of him was pursued at School, but with little more success, even with the aid of compulsion.

 

``The type of boy we aim at turning out,'' the Head used to say to impressed parents, ``is a thoroughly manly fellow. We prepare for the Universities, of course, but our pride is in our excellent Sports Record. There is an O.T.C., organised by Sergeant-Major Brown (who served throughout the South African War) and officered by the masters who have been trained in the Militia. Every boy must undergo six months' training, and is then competent to take up arms for his Country in an emergency.''

 

The parents murmured polite approval, though rather tender mothers hoped the discipline was not too strict and ``the guns not too heavy for young arms.'' The Head was contemptuously and urbanely reassuring. On such occasions he invariably quoted those stirring and indeed immortal lines of Rudyard Kipling which end up, ``You'll be a man, my son.'' It is so important to know how to kill. Indeed, unless you know how to kill you cannot possibly be a Man, still less a Gentleman.


R. Aldington


Date: 2015-12-11; view: 1495


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