Richard Aldington - Later Life

Later Life

He went into self-imposed 'exile' from England in 1928. He lived in Paris for years, living with Brigit Patmore, and being fascinated by Nancy Cunard whom he met in 1928. After his divorce in 1938 he married Netta, née McCullough, previously Brigit's daughter-in-law as Mrs. Michael Patmore.

Death of a Hero, published in 1929, was his literary response to the war, commended by Lawrence Durrell as 'the best war novel of the epoch'. It was written while he was living on the island of Port-Cros in Provence as a development of a manuscript from a decade before. Opening with a letter to the playwright Halcott Glover, the book takes a variable but generally satirical, cynical and critical posture, and belabours Victorian and Edwardian cant. He went on to publish several works of fiction.

In 1930, he published a bawdy translation of The Decameron. In 1933, his novel titled All Men are Enemies appeared; it was a romance, as the author chose to call it, and a brighter book than Death of a Hero, even though Aldington took an anti-war stance again. In 1942, having moved to the United States with his new wife Netta Patmore, he began to write biographies. The first was one of Wellington (The Duke: Being an Account of the Life & Achievements of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, 1943). It was followed by works on D. H. Lawrence (Portrait of a Genius, But..., 1950), Robert Louis Stevenson (Portrait of a Rebel, 1957), and T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Inquiry, 1955).

Aldington's biography of T. E. Lawrence caused a scandal on its publication, and an immediate backlash. It made many controversial assertions. He was the first to bring to public notice the fact of Lawrence's illegitimacy. He also asserted that Lawrence was homosexual. Lawrence lived a celibate life, and none of his close friends (of whom several were homosexual) had believed him to be gay. He attacked Lawrence as a liar and a charlatan, claims which have colored Lawrence's reputation ever since. Only later were confidential government files concerning Lawrence's career released, allowing the accuracy of Lawrence's own account to be gauged. Aldington's own reputation has never fully recovered from what came to be seen as a venomous attack upon Lawrence's reputation. Many believed that Aldington's suffering in the bloodbath of Europe during World War I caused him to resent Lawrence's reputation, gained in the Middle Eastern arena.

Aldington died in Sury-en-Vaux, Cher, France on 27 July 1962, shortly after being honoured and feted in Moscow on the occasion of his seventieth birthday and the publication of some of his novels in Russian translation. He didn't approve of the Communist "party line", though, and the Russians didn't succeed in making him endorse it. His politics had in fact moved far towards the right — opinions he shared with Lawrence Durrell, a close friend since the 1950s — but he had felt shut out by the British establishment after his T. E. Lawrence book. He lived in Provence, at Montpellier, Aix-en-Provence and Sury-en-Vaux.

On 11 November 1985, Aldington was among 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner. The inscription on the stone is a quotation from the work of a fellow Great War poet, Wilfred Owen. It reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."