Early life, World War I

Aldington was born in Portsmouth and educated at Dover College and the University of London; he was unable to complete his degree because of the financial circumstances of his family. He met the poet H.D. in 1911 and they married two years later.

His poetry was associated with the Imagist group, and his work forms almost one third of the Imagists' inaugural anthology Des Imagistes (1914). At this time he was one of the poets around the proto-Imagist T. E. Hulme; Robert Ferguson in his life of Hulme portrays Aldington as too squeamish to approve of Hulme's robust approach, particularly to women. He knew Wyndham Lewis well, also, reviewing his work in The Egoist at this time, hanging a Lewis portfolio around the room and (on a similar note of tension between the domestic and the small circle of London modernists) regretting having lent Lewis his razor when the latter announced with hindsight a venereal infection (Paul O'Keefe, Some Sort of Genius, p.164). Going out without a hat, and an interest in Fabian socialism, were perhaps unconventional enough for him (John Paterson, Edwardians). At this time he was also an associate of Ford Madox Hueffer, helping him with a hack propaganda volume for a government commission in 1914, and (more honourably) taking dictation for The Good Soldier when H.D. found it too harrowing.

In 1915 Aldington and H.D. moved within London, away from Holland Park very near Ezra Pound and Dorothy, to Hampstead, close to D. H. Lawrence and Frieda. Their relationship became strained by external romantic interests and the stillborn birth of their child. Between 1914 and 1916 he was literary editor of The Egoist .

He answered the national call for service in the army, and served on the Western Front in 1916–18. Aldington never completely recovered from his war experiences, and although it was prior to an official diagnoses of PTSD, he was likely suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Aldington and H. D. attempted to mend their marriage in 1919, after the birth of her daughter by a friend of writer D. H. Lawrence, named Cecil Gray, with whom she had became involved and lived with while Aldington was at war. However, she was by this time deeply involved in a lesbian relationship with the wealthy writer Bryher, and she and Aldington formally separated, both becoming romantically involved with other people, but they did not divorce until 1938. They remained friends, however, for the rest of their lives.


Relationship with T. S. Eliot: rise and fall

He helped T. S. Eliot in a practical way, by an introduction to the editor Bruce Richmond of the Times Literary Supplement, for which he reviewed French literature. He was on the editorial board, with Conrad Aiken, Eliot, Lewis and Aldous Huxley, of Chaman Lall's London literary quarterly Coterie published 1919-1921. With Ottoline Morrell, Leonard Woolf and Harry Norton he took part in Ezra Pound's scheme to 'get Eliot out of the bank' (Eliot had a job in the international department of Lloyd's, a London bank, and well-meaning friends wanted him full-time writing poetry). This manouevre towards Bloomsbury came to little, with Eliot getting £50 and unwelcome publicity in the Liverpool Post, but gave Lytton Strachey an opening for mockery.

Aldington made an effort with A Fool I' the Forest (1924) to reply to the new style of poetry launched by The Waste Land. He was being published at the time, for example in The Chapbook, but clearly took on much hack work just to live. His interest in poetry waned.

His attitude towards Eliot shifted, from someone who would mind the Eliots' cat in his cottage (near Reading, Berkshire, in 1921), to a supporter of Vivienne Eliot in the troubled marriage, and the savage and jealous satirist on her husband in Stepping Heavenward (1931). By that time he had been in Paris for years, living with Brigit Patmore, and being fascinated by Nancy Cunard whom he met in 1928. On his divorce in 1938 he married Netta, nee Macnab, previously Brigit's daughter-in-law as Mrs. Michael Patmore.


Later life

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'. He went on to publish several works of fiction. In 1930 he published a bawdy translation of The Decameron. 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). His biography of Lawrence made many controversial assertions now acknowledged to be true, but its iconoclastic nature was a blow to his own popularity in England, from which his reputation has never fully recovered.

Aldington died in France in 1962, shortly after being honoured and feted in Moscow on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. His politics had in fact moved far towards the right-wing — 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 and Aix-en-Provence.


A savage style and embitterment

He could write with an acid pen. The Georgian poets, who (Pound had decided) were the Imagists' sworn enemies, he devastated with the accusation of a little trip for a little weekend to a little cottage where they wrote a little poem on a little theme. He took swipes at Harold Monro, whose Poetry Review had published him and given him reviewing work. (On the other side of the balance sheet, he spent time supporting the alcoholic Monro, and others such as F. S. Flint and Frederic Manning who needed friendship.)

Alec Waugh (The Early Years) described him as embittered by the war, and offered Douglas Goldring as comparison; but took it that he worked off his spleen in novels like The Colonel's Daughter (1931), rather than letting it poison his life. His novels in fact contained thinly-veiled, disconcerting (at least to the subjects) portraits of some of his friends (Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Pound in particular), the friendship not always surviving. Lyndall Gordon characterises the sketch of Eliot in the memoirs Life for Life's Sake (1941) as 'snide'. As a young man he enjoyed being cutting about W. B. Yeats, but remained on good enough terms to visit him in later years at Rapallo.