Richard Aldington

The Lost Generation.

John Boynton Priestley

Evelyn Waugh

Richard Aldington

The Lost Generation.

LITERATURE BETWEEN THE TWO WORLD WARS

“The lost generation”

Questions:

1.3 Sean O' Casey

All European countries and the USA were affected by World War I as thousands of young men were killed on the battle fields; others came home to die slowly of wounds. Even those who were not crippled physically suffered greatly from other effects of the war.

The mood of the young generation that had gone through the horrors of war was reflected in the works of the writers who were closely united under the name of the “Lost Generation”. Lost Generation is a group of expatriate American writers residing primarily in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. The group never formed a cohesive literary movement, but it consisted of many influential American writers, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Carlos Williams, Thornton Wilder, Archibald MacLeish, and Hart Crane. The group was given its name by the American writer Gertrude Stein, who, in a conversation with Hemingway, used an expression she had heard from a garage manager, "a lost generation", to refer to expatriate Americans bitter about their World War I (1914-1918) experiences and disillusioned with American society. Nevertheless this term is also referred to English writers who experienced the same about the war and the life after the war.

From the artistic point of view these writers didn’t make a great contribution to literature. It’s rather a social phenomenon. The term “Lost Generation” can be applied both to the writers and their characters. Almost all the writers of the lost generation had witnessed and experienced the atrocities of the World War I. They wrote about the generation which had gone to the war either voluntarily or being drafted full of romantic beliefs that it was their duty to take part in the fighting. The war made them lose these illusions. It destroyed the whole system of values and left them hollow and devastated spiritually. Those who came back from the war couldn’t adjust themselves to the new life and as a way of self-defense they developed a cynical approach to life or/and indulged in hedonism.

Among the younger generation of writers who carried on the tradition of England’s great realists was Richard Aldington.

Aldington, Richard (1892-1962) original name Edward Godfree Aldington poet, novelist, critic, and biographer who wrote fiercely and sometimes irritably of what he considered to be hypocrisy in modern industrialized civilization.

Aldington was educated at Dover College and London University. He early attracted attention through his volumes of Imagist verse. In 1913 he married Hilda Doolittle, the American Imagist poet.

He joined the army in 1916 and was wounded on the Western Front. Aldington never completely recovered from his war experiences, and was likely suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Aldington’s family life wasn’t very happy as while he was at war his wife got involved in relationships with other people, and she and Aldington formally separated but they did not divorce until 1938. They remained friends, however, for the rest of their lives.

Aldington's contribution is difficult to assess. His best and best known novel, Death of a Hero (1929), to which All Men Are Enemies (1933) was a sequel, reflected the disillusionment of a generation that had fought through World War I. In The Colonel's Daughter (1931) he satirized pretentiousness and literary preciousness so outspokenly that two lending libraries refused to handle the novel. However, in his long poems A Dream in the Luxembourg (1930) and A Fool I’ the Forest (1925) he critisized the mechanization of modern man more lyrically, with bittersweet romanticism. His translations from ancient Greek and Latin poets showed his love for earlier civilizations. His book of recollections, Life for Life's Sake, was published in 1941.

Aldington's critical works are uneven in quality. They included Literary Studies (1924), French Studies and Reviews (1926), and biographies of Voltaire, D.H. Lawrence, Norman Douglas, and Wellington. Lawrence of Arabia (1955), one of his last books, was an uncompromising attack on T.E. Lawrence. Late in life Aldington became a best-seller in the U.S.S.R., where he celebrated his 70th birthday. A Passionate Pilgrim: Letters to Alan Bird from Richard Aldington, 1949–1962 was published in 1975

Aldington died in France in 1962, shortly after being honoured in Moscow on the occasion of his seventieth birthday.

Death of a Hero is Aldington’s most important novel which he had planned to write straight after the war but was able to finish it only in 1929.

It is the story of a young English artist named George Winterbourne who enlists in the army at the outbreak of World War I. The book is narrated by an unnamed first-person narrator who claims to have known and served with the main character. The novel consists of three parts all written in a different emotion.

The first part details George's family history. His father, a middle-classed man from England's countryside, marries a poor woman who falsely believes she is marrying into a wealthy family. After George's birth, his mother takes a series of lovers.

George is brought up to be a proper and patriotic member of English society. He is encouraged to follow in his father's insurance business, but he fails to do so. After a quarrel with his parents, he moves to London to pursue art and live a socialite lifestyle.

This book is both ironical and lyrical. On the one hand it describes the stuffy atmosphere in which the main character was brought up, and on the other hand the author describes a very sensitive and touchy nature of the boy.

The second section of the book deals with George's London life. He joins the socialite society and engages a number of trendy philosophies. The book describes bohemian London with its preferences and loose morals (свободные нравы).

After he and his lover, Elizabeth, have a pregnancy scare, they decide to marry. Although they do not have a child, they do not divorce. They decide to leave their marriage open. George takes Elizabeth's closet friend as a lover; however, their marriage begins to fall apart. Just as the situation is becoming particularly heated, England declares war on Germany. George decides to volunteer for the front.

Book III is very dramatic and tragic at the end as it tells about the events of the war in which Richard Aldington took part himself.

George trains for the army and is sent to France. (No particular location in France is mentioned. The town behind the front where George spends much of his time is referred to as M---.) He fights on the front for some time. When he returns home, he finds that he has been so affected by the war that he cannot relate to his friends, including his wife and lover.

The casualty rate among officers is particularly high at the front. When a number of officers in George's unit are killed, he is promoted. Upon spending time with the other officers, he finds them to be cynical and pragmatic. He loses faith in the war quickly.

The story ends with George standing up during a machine-gun barrage (заградительный огонь). He is killed. But his death is not heroic at all. The title of the novel sounds ironical. The hero didn’t die as a hero, he committed suicide.

At the end of the book there is a poem written from the point of view of a veteran comparing World War I to the Trojan War. Aldington calls it a monument to the generation which suffered and died at the front.

Aldington, a veteran of World War I, claimed that his novel was accurate in terms of speech and style. It contained extensive colloquial speech, including swering, discussion of sexuality, and graphic descriptions of the war and of trench life. There were extensive censorship laws in England at the time, and many previous war novels had been banned or burned as a result. When Aldington first published his novel, he redacted a number of passages in order to ensure the publication of his book would not be challenged. He insisted that his publishers include a disclaimer (отклонение, отказ) in the original printing of the book which included the following text:

“To my astonishment, my publisher informed me that certain words, phrases, sentences, and even passages, are at present taboo in England. I have recorded nothing which I have not observed in human life, said nothing I do not believe to be true. [...] At my request the publishers are removing what they believe would be considered objectionable, and are placing asterisks to show where omissions have been made. [...] In my opinion it is better for the book to appear mutilated than for me to say what I don't believe.”

Дата добавления: 2014-01-06