Word: aldington
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Died. Richard Aldington, 70, controversial British biographer whose 1955 Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry inquired so deeply into the legends surrounding T. E. Lawrence, the World War I hero (in Aldington's view he was a liar and a fraud), that it brought cries of outraged protest from Lawrence fans the world over; of a heart attack; in Sury-en-Vaux, France. An expatriate who spent most of his life in France and Italy, Aldington wrote more than 40 books, including his brilliantly angry look back at World War I, Death of a Hero...
Faulted Hero. But Lawrence's troubled spirit has not been allowed to rest in peace. Six years ago, Novelist Richard Aldington performed a literary autopsy on Lawrence's remains, charged that Lawrence was a downright fraud, possibly a homosexual, certainly a poseur whose role in the Arab revolt had been negligible. Old friends from Winston Churchill down rallied to Lawrence's defense, but the damage had been done. Lawrence's own confessions in Pillars made it clear that he had known from the beginning that the Great Powers intended to carve up the Middle East, that...
...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...
...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...