Word: aldington
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Lurid Moment. This omnibus is welcome if only for the reissue of Company K, which belongs in trench literature with Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That, Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero and John Dos Passes' Three Soldiers. When it was published (1933), one critic called it a sort of Spoon River Anthology of the war. The form was the same, in the sense that each character spoke with his own voice to compose a harsh recitative for a community. But March's community was made up of the doomed dogfaces of Soissons...
Ehrenburg & Franco. When Lawrence of Arabia, Richard Aldington's deflation of the legendary T.E. Lawrence, raised a storm in Britain. Regnery latched onto the book for publication in the U.S. Russell Kirk (The Conservative Mind, Academic Freedom) is one of his proudest discoveries. One of the stranger Regnery books was Soviet Novelist Ilya Ehrenburg's The Thaw (TIME, Oct. 10), which anti-Communist Regnery published as an example of the workings of the Soviet mind...
With Lawrence the man thus disposed of, Biographer Aldington proceeds to attack his place in history by denying 1) that Lawrence played a major part in the Arab revolt in the desert, and 2) that the revolt itself was a significant aspect of the war. "All the preliminaries which led to the rebellion," he writes, "occurred before Lawrence ever reached Cairo, [and they] would certainly have occurred if Lawrence had never existed...
...Told Them Lies. Few of the Lawrence fans, old friends and old Middle East hands who rushed to his defense last week bothered to challenge Aldington's facts one by one. All of them professed to have long known that Lawrence was illegitimate, but based their objections on the propriety of saying so while his 93-year-old mother was still alive. Most of them also conceded that Lawrence was an incorrigible ham, who loved to posture and pose in his outlandish Arab regalia and often embroidered the truth. "Finding they wouldn't believe it," Lawrence himself once...
...wisest words in the dispute were spoken by crusty old Lord Vansittart, a distant cousin but no partisan of the hero. Lawrence's part in the Arabian revolt, wrote Vansittart, "was not titanic, but it was considerable. Mr. Aldington cannot reconcile-nor did Lawrence himself-faults and gifts, purple and dust, Dichtung und Wahrheit, bravery and inaccuracy, daring and brusquerie, delicacy and cheek...