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RICHARD ALDINGTON’S “DEATH OF A HERO”

1. Richard Aldington (8 July 1892 – 27 July 1962), born Edward Godfree Aldington, an English writer and poet created his novels mostly in the first part of the 20th century.

He was born into a family of a solicitor. He studied at Dover College, and for a year at the University of London.

In 1913 he married Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961), an American poet, novelist and memoirist.

He joined the army in 1916 and participated in the First World War. Later he was wounded on the Western Front. While fighting in the War, his wife married another man and had a child from that man. Aldington had tried to marry her again, but it was in vain. Then she was seen in lesbian relationships with a woman. Almost all his adult life Richard Aldington suffered from the influences of the War. He never completely recovered from his war experiences, and may have continued to suffer from the then-unrecognized phenomenon of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. After that he married several women. His former wife, by the way, was no married only once.

As one of the prominent authors of his time, Richard Aldington was excellently educated. Also he was busy with translation of various texts and was well-known for his bright biographies. For the biography of the duke Wellington (1946) he was awarded with the James Tate Blake’s prize.

Richard Aldington died in France on the 27th of June, 1962.

His main works are: “Death of a Hero” (1929) and “A Life of Wellington: The Duke” (1946).

Richard Aldington belonged to the Imagists’ group, the trend of the early 20th century which included Anglo-American poetry that favoured precision of imagery and clear, sharp language, thus rejecting the sentiment.

Aldington wrote his works with an acid pen. He is known for his roughness in describing various spheres of life, such as people’s relationships, religion, etc.

2. The text under study is the marvelous Richard Aldington’s novel, named “Death of a Hero” (1929). This outstanding novel represents a great value for the Literature in general, and is regarded as one of the most perfect novels about war.

It is noteworthy that in “Death of a Hero” Richard Aldington demonstrates the negation of the traditional structure of novels. The novel has no denouement itself and already in the prologue of the book the readers know how it will be ended.

In the introduction, which, exclusively in this book, also plays the role of the denouement, Isabel, George Winterbourne’s mother receives the note telling that her son, a young amateur painter and journalist, who joined the army later, is “killed in action” in the First World War. The author reveals the fact that actually George’s senseless standing up against the machine-gun’s bullets is a suicide. Isabel, a woman of low morals, though being married to George’s father, George Augustus, has “twenty-two lovers”. The effect of her son’s death on her temperament is “strangely enough, almost erotic” and she “copulates” with one of her sheiks. George Augustus, a person of low will, being highly religious, weak and sentimentalish is abashed and constantly prays for his son’s soul.

George has a wife, Elizabeth and a lover, Fanny. While Fanny cries for his death, Elizabeth doesn’t care much about it. But, it must be mentioned, that neither of them loves him. Moreover, George being alive, they, knowing about themselves, struggle each other for George’s affection. This fact can not but irritate George in his life time.

In the chain of events the author represents the history of George’s not well-off family. George Augustus in his childhood is never allowed to have his own opinion under his rather cruel pagan mother’s guidance. Even George Augustus’s father is dominated by her strong will and despotism. But, once George Augustus, having studied for a solicitor, manages to escape his home and sets off for a journey, where the whole world opens to him. While travelling he meets his future wife, a common girl out of a military family, Isabel, marries her and they begin to lead a married life. Soon, in great torments of Isabel the child is born into the world. Being quite lazy and possessing of almost no life experience George Augustus produces some rather useless literary work and earns money occasionally. Isabel revolts against it and provides for her husband a well-paid job as a solicitor, which brings a considerable success to the family. When the boy grows up enough, they send him to the gymnasium. George shows his love for art, nature and freedom. Then, by his parents’ decision he is sent to the O.T.C., a special department, concerned with the military education for boys. There the efforts are produced to make George a “thoroughly manly fellow” and to teach him how to kill. All these efforts are ineffective, since George is always independent and has his own mind and inner world. Though being young, after falling in love with the girl Priscilla, George begins to get acquainted with the constitution of a woman’s body very early. While George’s father neglects his job, George makes plenty of walks by feet. Having grown up, George leads the life of a free man. He achieves the small job of article writing and once comes home rather late. His mother, for whom constant dramatizing of life is peculiar, makes a scandal and his father tells him to leave the house. Young, poor, unsuccessful painter and an insignificant journalist, George struggles through torments in his life. Having met Elizabeth, George falls in love with her and for some time lives happily. Then he meets Fanny and they fall in love with each other, but soon the War begins and George joins the army. Though regarding the War as senseless and terrible, he expresses the wish to go to the front line and fight together with ordinary soldiers. In the front line he dislikes the War more but gets accustomed to it and shows great persistence and determination. The War changes him completely. His life is divided into two parts for him: one before the War and one after his joining the active service. After that, as a noble man, he studies at special courses and becomes an officer. Returning to the front line he commands the soldiers. All the while he notices a multitude of uglinesses of the War, which becomes almost unbearable for him. His body shivers and trembles with constant fear. In his mind he is absorbed in thinking about aimlessness and horror of the War. His heart and soul are full of pain for other people.

Eventually, winning, almost in the end of the War, having most of his comrades killed, George rises to his feet and dies when “the line of bullets smashes across his chest…”. This moment is the climax of the novel.

3. The composition of the book is remarkable and special. The mood of the text is sorrowful. The text is written in the objective, rather sarcastic (different people’s vices are mocked at) manner. Sometimes, when the author expresses his disagreement towards the imperialistic government’s policy and towards people’s psychology, the text sounds even aggressive. On the one hand, the tonality of the text is tranquil and on the other hand it is acidic, full of criticism of the country, of the government, and of the War. The book consists of three parts, a prologue and an epilogue. In the prologue factually the end of the novel is given. Though the parts of the book are not strictly divided, the sense of their content can be generalized. Thus, the Prologue tells about the attitude of George’s parents, the wife Elizabeth and the mistress Fanny concerning the news of George’s death. The first part is devoted to the history of George’s family. The second part describes George’s independent peaceful adult life. The third part represents mostly George’s fighting in the War. And in the epilogue, a poem about life and war “Eleven years after the fall of Troy…” is given. In this poem, where the uselessness of war and the continuity of life are revealed.

The text represents the large canvas of reminiscences of the author who is also a narrator. The main character of the novel, George, is told about in the third person singular. The author declares that he is a confidential friend of George. He participates in the War together with George. On the one hand, the author is a minor character (e.g. when he tells, that he can’t but listen to George’s stories in the trenches), but on the other hand he is omniscient as he seems to be able to provide readers almost with every detail of George’s life. So, the text is mostly the narration in the third person singular (the Past Indefinite Tense dominates), but the snatches of George’s dialogues with other people are also given (the Present Indefinite Tense prevails) and in this case the text is the narration in the first person singular.

The author describes his characters both directly, e.g. “Something seemed to break in Winterbournes’ head. He felt he was going mad, and sprang to his feet” and indirectly, e.g. “… he’s done for. He’ll never be able to recover, So we may as well accept it. What was rare and beautiful in him is as much dead now as if he were lying under the ground in France” (Elizabeth’s words).       

On the one hand, the speech of the highly educated author is literate, e.g. he uses such words as “a prosperity”, “insoluble”, “a consummate dissimulation”, “a pertinacity”, “a delirium” etc. And on the other hand his text, owing much to his discontent of the War, reeks with rough and even vulgar words, e.g. the word “an imbecility” is used extremely often. Also he uses such vulgar words and phrases as: “a fag”, “bitch-mothers”, “damned”, “sons of bitches”, “an amusement of wife-beating”, etc.

In the book some bright examples of foreign words can be found, e.g. “a privet”, “an intelligentsia” (Russian), “a cupola” (Italian), “a motif” (French).

Various examples of onomatopoeia help Richard Aldington to make the text more entertaining for reading and help the readers to draw bright pictures of the proceeding events, e.g.: “Ah! said the Corporal, “did you tell ‘em – puff – all about the wicked Huns – puff – and say…” (the man smoking), “boom”, “Crump, Crump, Crump”, “Zwiiiing, crash, crash, claaang”, “A shell dropped short… with the curious phut” (the sounds produced by different bombs), “There’s a curious smell about here, sir (sniff, sniff)…” (George smelling), “Let me see, let me seee…” (a man absorbed in thinking), “The German machine-guns were tat-tat-tatting at them” (the imitation of the sound of machine-guns), “Pe-e-e wit, - said the plunging plovers, - pee-e-ee-wit” etc.

Since the book deals with the War, a special attention must be paid to the changes in the text arousing out of this fact.

Firstly, as in any war (especially in the trenches) there is no great opportunity to talk (the bullets are whistling, the bombs are crashing, the wounded need to be taken back in a great haste), the language is being mutilated greatly, e.g. “Oo are you?”, “Some o’ you’s clicked for a Pioneer Batt.”, “Yer in the Army now” (the change of spelling).

Secondly, owing much to the fact that mostly plain, not very educated people fight in the trenches and are taken to wars, the text is full of different vulgarisms, e. g. “muckin’” (which is often repeated in the text as like as the word “chum”), “a bloody old fool”, “the planes pooped…”

Thirdly, the text reeks with military terms.

Actually, the text has no lack of terms. The terms can be divided into three main parts: 1) science (psychology and medicine); 2) war terms; 3) terms dealing with art. E.g.: 1) “degenerate”, “sadism”, “masochism”, “lesbianism”, “sodomy”, “Freudianism”, “eugenics”, “Theology”, “a subconscious”, “a paroxysm”, “a shell-shock”, “an anxiety complex”, “a cretin”, “a hebetude”, “pleurisy”, “crystallisation”; 2) “a camouflage”, “a duck-board”, “an artilleryman”, “a shell splinter”, “an out-march”, “a trench-mortar”, “a salvo”, “a shrapnel”, “a gas bombardment”, “a trigger”, “a drum-fire”, “a bandolier of cartridges”, etc.; 3) “Suprematism”, “Pre-Raphaelite idealism”, “symbolism”, “Concavism”, “the Allied Artists”, “Cubists”. 

4. The theme of the text is the life and the death of George Winterbourne, a young amateur painter and journalist sent to the First World War.
5. Among several novel’s characters, only George’s character deserves the most thorough attention and research. The other characters: Elizabeth, Fanny, Evans, George Augustus, Isabel, George Augustus’s mother, Mr. Upjohn, though help to understand George’s character, are temporary and not very significant. Through George’s character the author communicates with the readers and through this character, which most evidently has a prototype in real life, the author expresses his discontent towards life in general, people’s mentality, and imperialistic policy in particular. The author respects and appreciates George. It is not in vain that he calls him a hero and gives him the name of George. This name bears a link to the well-known saint with the same name, whose life is connected with the history of Great Britain. The author declares that George’s death is a symbol for him. He regards George’s life as a sickening bloody waste, the damnable stupid waste and torture (epiphora/bathos) and that’s why he begins to think about that “poor old bag of decaying bones” (periphrasis).

Cogitating about George’s fate, Richard Aldington writes: The death of a hero! What mockery, what bloody cant! What sickening putrid cant! (anaphora).

Isabel saves his life (young George is born with giant efforts of his mother) for a Germany machine-gun (sarcasm) in a dull hotel, in a dull little town on the dull South Coast of dull England (repetition). George is rather different from his parents in many ways. Physically he looks like them both – in every other respect, he may be fallen from the moon for all the resemblance he has to them. It is a regular mystery of Udolpho (allusion on Radcliffe Ann (1764-1823), the author of the horror and mystery novels) how George managed to be so different from his parents and the family.

He is not confident. In fact, he has a strong dose of shyness. George’s mother lets him down so badly time after time when he is a boy that he is all tight inside and can’t give confidence to his wife or his mistress or a man in the future. Isabel saps his self-confidence abominably – which makes him seem rather conceited and very aloof (epithets). Having no person to talk openly, his only real friends are the English poets and the foreign painters. He often feels isolated and hate-obstinate.

The substance of George’s individuality is heterogeneous.

He has imagination and wonder, nut too unregulated, too bizarre, too quaint, too credulous (repetition). While at school George reads little primers on Botany and Geology and the Story of the Stars and collects butterflies, and wants to do Chemistry, and hates Greek (polysyndeton).

He is sensitive.

Like most sensitive people he is subject to moods. He can pass very rapidly from a mood of exuberant gaiety almost to despair. He broods a great deal and oscillates between moods of hope and exultation and moods of profound depression.

George is to be treated gently. The effect of mother’s negative guidance mutilates him. The whole immense drama goes on in front his parents’ noses and they never perceive it.

George’s speech is vulgar. He damns the older generation and has such a dislike for his mother (when he is grown up), that he doesn’t see her five times in the last five years of his life.

George behaves himself as an independent personality. He always has his own opinion, his own inner world.

He is regarded as capable to make something in the world. He wants to be a painter, but instead of that he is blindly put at studying in order to be a “thoroughly manly fellow”. Once he picks up the rifle (as he is said to do) and wounds a bird, but doesn’t kill it. After that he decides to deprive it of pains and agony and exerts himself in efforts to screw its head. But, then a catastrophe happens – he screws poor bird’s head off. This is his turn of tide. Since this moment he begins to reject shooting, killing, wars, everything connected with violence. He is convinced that if he had a small income and could do what he wants, he could be far happier than if he made a great deal of money doing what he hated. 

George is capable of love.

He falls in love with Elizabeth. One of the few tender scenes of the book is the moment when George while in a bus puts his hand on Elizabeth’s hand, thus establishing the delicious and dangerous contact (oxymoron). Then, George and Elizabeth are enclosed in the clear oxygen of desire (metaphor). In spite of his cynicism this time of his life gifts him a real love, a true happiness. For once in a blue moon he is happy. He and Elizabeth talk and argue, and laugh, and make plans and reform the world and feel important (God knows why!) and hold hands and kiss when they think no one is looking…And yes, they are happy (polysyndeton). George even gets asleep with the words about Elizabeth on his lips: Good-night, Elizabeth, good-night, sweet, sweet, Elizabeth, good-night, good-night (repetition). The readers are forced to contemplate the fact that George is over head and ears in love with Elizabeth.

George and Elizabeth prefer to live in Complete Sexual Freedom, inviting a special Triumphal Scheme, which says that it is not obligatory for them to marry each other and have children. Men must be free and women must be free. None can possess another, none can be possessed. Is it possible to give, is it possible to take? (Rhetorical question). Why get married except for the sake of the unfortunate little bastard? (Rhetorical question/periphrasis). George understands such a wise thought that for people it is not normal to have embodiments in human bodies and live tormented lives on the sinful Earth. It is far more better to fly somewhere in ethereal world. Why born a child and let him endure the disgusting life which is full of various uglinesses? Actually, he bears no disagreement concerning children, but expresses the idea that a man and a woman must be thoroughly prepared for it. The people should plan their children more. He finds having a child after a year of marriage ab-so-lute-ly idiotic (change of spelling). Later, thinking about the causes of the War he brings himself to a conclusion that there’s always a deep primitive physiological instinct – men to kill and be killed; women to produce more men to continue the process (paradox). Hunger and Death are the realities, and between those great chasms flits a little Life. Reproductive instinct rules all living things. You encourage, you force (George hurls at British government) people to have babies, lots of babies, millions of babies (gradation). If George lived nowadays, probably he would say: “300 000 rubles for the second child. OK. Copulate! Over one billion people living only in China? Perfect. Go on pullulating!” But for sure, he would have been glad at the present situation: Absolute Sexual Freedom, the girls walk in the streets almost naked, lots of opportunities for art and no mass world wars.  

Through George Richard Aldington awakes great sociological problems. And like rats we pullulate, and like rats we scramble for greasy prey, and like rats we fight and murder our kin (simile/polysyndeton). Go on, breed, you beauties – breed in column of fours, in battalions, brigades, divisions, army corps (gradation/irony of situation). To make the long story short, - increase and multiply (the link to the Bible/criticism of the Bible) while the world is an inverted pyramid based on the bowed shoulders of the ploughman – or the steel tractor – on the land (paradox).

So, Richard Aldington sees through George the main cause of the war in bread and babies, babies and bread (anadiplosis).

There is a lot of people and a few loaves of bread in the world. That’s why people fight wars – in order to rob one nation of bread for their own survival. George and Elizabeth have no children and they should be regarded as a national hero and heroine in this respect (irony of situation).

 Returning to George and Elizabeth, it should be said that also, they are allowed to have lovers and should live in different places. The essence of freedom is the disposal of one’s own time in one’s own way, and how can two people do that if they are living on top of each other? (Rhetorical question/hyperbolized metaphor).

Though, Elizabeth regards him as full of moral indignation, he loves her tenderly, truly, as truly as he loves Fanny. It means Complete Sexual Freedom. But he seems to have more affection for Fanny (if this is possible) in his heart of hearts. Later in the trenches he goes over Elizabeth and Fanny and himself, and himself and Fanny and Elizabeth (polysyndeton/anadiplosis). They both appear to be the only one thing which makes him hold on in the War. And then, due to the Complete Sexual Relation they choose another confidential friends and little by little forget George. It seems that neither of them no more believes in the Complete Sexual Relation. They all are changed. This is the woeful problem of the lost generation of the XXth century beginning, to which belonged George, Elizabeth and Fanny. They fill themselves with sophisticated but useless ideas and then turn out to be just ordinary people. To prove this fact, the author draws for the readers’ judgment the situation with Elizabeth’s false pregnancy. She suspects that she is pregnant and in panic falls back from the Complete Sexual Relation on the old-cut-and-dried solution. She sinks her heart into her boots at the thought of the public opinion condemning her as perverted and flies to social safety and the registrar. Eventually, she makes George marry her.      

George is naïve.

He believes that people are invited to parties for their own sake, but it turns out that people meet in order to discuss other people and make remunerative offers to each other. Till the beginning of the War George believes, that the War is not likely to happen. He tells one soldier that the seal of the special War orders would not be broken until the angels in the Apocalypse arrive (hyperbole). But George is wrong – the War is inevitable. His Country wants his blood (metaphor). 

Having reconciled himself with his inevitable fate, he expresses the wish to go exactly to the front line and fight with common soldiers. There he is saved from the latent homosexuality which lurks in so many Englishmen (paradox), since there he gets acquainted with the true male comradeship: they’d meet on trench duty, and volunteer for the same trench raid, and back up each other’s lies to the inspecting brigadier, and share a servant, and stick together in a battle, and ride together when on rest and talk shyly about their wives in England, if officers (polysyndeton). In the War George becomes fond of leave men: “I swear I’ll die with you rather than live in a world without you”. True warriors, they show him what a man must be. George is taken aback by their truthfulness, their mannish manners. It is a notion of paramount importance that they struggle through the War not hating the enemy, but forming a true comradeship among themselves. George manages to build such a comradeship with Evans, his officer, but then Evans sends him for the courses in England and they never meet again.

George keeps on worrying. Owing much to the nature of his character George suffers much.

From the very beginning of the war he gets into the habit of worrying, and this develops with alarming rapidity. The War brings him a permanent cough and cold. George is weakened by the prolonged diarrhea. He suffers mentally; suffers from the shock of the abrupt change from surroundings… He suffers from the communal life of thirty men in one large hut. He suffers because he broodes over Elizabeth and Fanny… and suffers abominably (anaphora). He realizes that the monotony, the imbecile restrictions, the incredible nagging of military pedants crush him into a condition of utter stupidity. He hate to be shepherded somewhere (metaphor). They are drilled and marched and marched and inspected from dawn to evening… (polysyndeton). George endures what no half-man (a homosexual one) cannot endure (sarcasm). He can’t believe that death can be so deathly (tautology). He lives in a sort of double nightmare – the nightmare of the War and the nightmare of his own life (anadiplosis). Thinking that he is a murder-robot, a wisp of cannon-fodder (periphrasis), George degenerates terribly since joining the army, and is going down to the depths of Tommydom (lingvocreativity/metaphor). All George’s existence now is monotony, depression, boredom (asyndeton). He feels himself like a sheet of paper dropping in jerks and wavering though grey air into abyss (simile). He is horribly afraid of being afraid (tautology). George starts every time a bomb falls. His nerves are certainly all to pieces. Building a majestic ruin (oxymoron) he makes worms’ meat of himself (periphrasis).