By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’: as titles go, it is one of Katherine Mansfield’s more helpfully instructive. This modernist short story from 1922 focuses on Josephine and Constantia, or ‘Jug’ and ‘Con’ as they affectionately know each other, two sisters whose father, the ‘late colonel’ of the story’s title, has recently died, leaving them on their own in the family home.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle celebrates the rough edges of one of modernist poetry’s most rebellious voices
Richard Aldington (1892-1962) is a figure who tends to be mentioned alongside his more famous contemporaries: as an imagist he usually figures less highly in histories of the movement than his sometime wife, H. D., while as a novelist of the Great War he comes behind Ernest Hemingway, Ford Madox Ford, and Erich Maria Remarque. As a poet-critic he is mentioned after people like T. S. Eliot and William Empson. Richard Aldington was many things: poet, editor, critic, biographer, novelist, modernist, anti-modernist. He was a rebel even within the rebellious movement to which he nominally belonged.
Not long after her poetry began to appear in print, H. D. was labelled ‘the perfect imagist’. If that is the case, Richard Aldington might be given the complementary sobriquet, ‘imperfect imagist’. This is not so much because his work lacks polish (although it sometimes does) as because he refused to conform to Ezra Pound’s directives for imagism – his famous ‘A Few Don’ts’ – and instead forged his own looser, rougher kind of verse which
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Virginia Woolf’s distinctive talents did not arrive fully formed in her first published work. One of her very first published pieces of writing was actually produced when she was still very young: it was an obituary for the family dog, Shag. When Woolf published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915, there were a few signs that she would become a great modernist writer, but not many.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Tickets, Please’ was first published in 1918, while the First World War was still raging. But D. H. Lawrence’s short story of love, sex, betrayal, and vengeance is set on the home front rather than the western front, and centres on the battle of the sexes rather than the horrific conflict in northern France and Belgium. You can read ‘Tickets, Please’ here.
In summary, ‘Tickets, Please’ is a story about a man who works on the trams of Nottingham during the First World War. John Thomas – his very name is slang for the ‘male member’, or penis – is a cock of the walk, a jack the lad, a man who thinks he has it all. Curiously, though, this is 1918 and he’s not ‘at the front’: he’s not fighting in the war. Why? Lawrence doesn’t tell us, but it raises interesting questions. Does this cast a shadow over his ‘manliness’?
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The novelist, short-story writer, and poet D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) had a curious relationship with trees. He reportedly liked the climb mulberry trees in the nude to stimulate his imagination. And trees loom large in his work. In ‘Discord in Childhood’, an early poem which he began writing in 1909 when Lawrence was still only in his mid-twenties, Lawrence uses the ash-tree to suggest the discordant relationship between the tree’s supposed healing properties (it was supposed to play a valuable role in children’s health) and the suffering endured by a child listening to its parents arguing.
Discord in Childhood
Outside the house an ash-tree hung its terrible whips,
And at night when the wind arose, the lash of the tree
Shrieked and slashed the wind, as a ship’s
Weird rigging in a storm shrieks hideously.
Within the house two voices arose in anger, a slender lash
Whistling delirious rage, and the dreadful sound