Cold Sores
Patrick Leigh Fermor
Literary Lifelines: The Richard AldingtonLawrence Durrell Correspondence ed. Ian S. Macniven and Harry T. Moore (Faber pp. 236, £8.95) Aldington's share in this book came my way at a bad season. Memories of the fine early novels had all been superseded and effaced by the publication of Pinorman — if Aldington was a friend of Norman Douglas's, what need of foes? — and, finally, by Lawrence of Arabia.
Many had felt that Lawrence had piled it on a bit in the Seven Pillars. Temporary folie de grandeur had touched him. He rashly claimed Shereefian rank and rather vainly hinted at honours offered and refused. He had the knack of retreat into the limelight; the Doughty-biblical style, endemic to Arabists, ran riot; the doings at Dera'a were uncorroborated; and his psychological make-up was complex and unorthodox in the extreme. All deplorable, but allowing for a highly strung nature, not to be judged too harshly. His faults, after all, were outweighed by his courage and flair for command, by a mass of strange gifts and by a strong touch of genius. Then came Aldington's book. Muckraking fit for Le Crapouillot and sneers like Peyrefitte at his slimiest were combined with the monomania of a pack of hounds. Hate and relish showed through the veil of sorrowing impartiality and the ensuing revulsion against Aldington was not caused, as he untiringly insists, by his success in felling an idol — Lawrence was no longer quite that — but by the manner of the onslaught. Perversely, all Lawrence's blemishes shrank overnight to peccadillos and the axe, jumping in Aldington's hand as it often does on jobs like this, gashed him to the bone. And the aftermath haunts all these letters.
A few months ago in Damascus I noticed a book in Arabic selling like hot cakes. The cover showed the famous features and the Bedouin headress and I could just decipher the words Laruns and Arabiya. How appropriate for this capital which he had entered with Feisal in that victorious turmoil of neighing and feu de joie! But the book was not the Seven Pillars in translation — the bookseller had never heard of Aamid al Hikme al Sabaa — but the life, by a Mister Aldingtoun, of a wicked western spy: it was on sale all over Islam. Through the following days at Dera'a and Azrak, and Akaba, and Wadi Rum and at all the Lawrence landmarks, I felt perhaps by reaction, that every word of the Seven Pillars, even the most questionable passages, rang true, and left with the conviction that the book was a great work of art and unique. So 1 opened Literary Lifelines dark with prejudice and found most of it justified. Aldington never ascribes his neglect to waning powers or change of fashion: Camarillas are to blame, and collusion and cliques; and there is always `MacSpaunday', a four-man portmanteau not hard to unpack, blocking the way for older poets. 'The Pound-Eliot faction or coterie' — this is 1959 — 'practically blocks ALL literary means of expression except the Communist and the Fascist. Which is why I have taken up with Mosley's lot, not that Hike them or approve, but nothing else will have me.' This is before his Lawrence book. Its publication welds 'the establishment poets, hacks, commies, sods and draught-dodgers' — 'the chairborne warriors of the knife-and-fork brigade' — into an alliance with Lawrence's other champions, 'the Edens and Vansittarts and Wingates and even the Churchills, all his close relations on the wrong side of the blanket . . .' This was roughly the state of play when the correspondence began.
It really began — after a brief 1933 exchange — in 1957. Both of them were settled in different parts of France. Aldington at 64 was out of fashion after wide fame. Durrell at 45, though his poems and novels and his brilliant Greek island books were well-known, was still on the brink of his great success and when it suddenly rose to a flood, we are faced by an old lion in decline and a young one in the ascendant. Henry James would have dealt very well with the situation. (Aldington would have hated this: his scorn of 'Henrietta' was intense).
At last, Aldington could let off steam to someone who did not mind the fixations and the rancour. Durrell comes shiningly out of the exchange, cheering Aldington up, encouraging him to write, tactfully hinting that the persecution and the conspiracy were both chimerical, trying in vain to arrange a comeback in a series of BBC interviews (`You'd have them cold') and then, jubilant but unspoilt, involving him in his own sudden good fortune. In real life, Larry Durrell himself is very lightly peppered with blind spots and perhaps this helped him to deal tolerantly with the cracked invective of Aldington's letters. His brimstone is hurled at random, some of it prompted by envy or disapproval (`Mr Evelyn Waugh/is rather a baw; Mr Evelyn Wuff/writes plenty of guff' etc), painfully feeble. It is a relief when he switches to praise. He is unswervingly loyal to D. H. Lawrence (the right initials at last), to Roy Campbell (with an old sweat's proviso: did he actually fight in Spain?), and to his longseparated first wife and fellow-imagist poet, Hilda Doolittle: her death came as a heavy blow. There is nothing but unstinted rejoicing at Larry Durrell's ascending star. Durrell's buoyancy and encouragement and his fluent and vivifying zest must have utterly changed the last five years of Aldington's life, which is the period the letters cover. The parts that deal with the problems of writing are absorbing. Aldington, in spite of his repellent foibles, is revealed as learned and civilised, devoted to French literature and the Classics and, with his discourse on food and wine and the records of their meetings and feasts and jokes, an unexpectedly warm and genial character begins to surface.
His life had a last ironic climax. The letters bristle with abhorrence of the Left. But the vogue for his books in Russia had never flagged and, out of the blue, the Soviet Writers Union invited him to Moscow to honour and celebrate his 70th birthday, and he went. He revelled in the interviews, the testimonials framed in blue leather, the silver plaques, the banquets and the tributes; but in the last letter before he sets out, he ruefully quotes Tony Weller — 'I don't take no pride on it, Sammy' — and one suddenly likes him. He died a few days after he got back.
It is a remarkable collection, well worth publishing. The heart of one correspondent is firmly in the right place and the other not exactly in the wrong one, but askew.
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