ABSTRACT
Richard Aldington was one of the lesser poets of the First World War, and his principal contribution to its literature is his novel Death of a Hero, which achieved instant success when it was first published in 1929. Its timing was fortunate, precisely hitting the wave of revived interest in the Great War
already evident in the recent prose writings of Blunden and Graves and
Sassoon. The Hogarth Press edition differs from the original in that the
supposedly obscene words which Aldington had to indicate by asterisks can
now be printed, thus giving a proper sense of the texture and cadence of
soldiers' speech, for which he had a very good ear:
prose is relentlessly convincing, offering what reads like a total and detailed
recall of front-line life and death, including the poison-gas bombardments
which were a horror peculiar to the First World War. Occasionally Aldington
relieves the realistic narrative with metaphorical passages which spring from the more conventionally poetic side of his literary sensibility, as in the bravura description of a heavy artillery bombardment by the British guns:
Mostly, though, Aldington keeps the account sober and colloquial, whether he
is concerned with battle or day-to-day events and privations. Death of a Hero invites comparison with that masterpiece of war fiction seen from the private soldier's point of view, Frederic Manning's Her Privates We. But the comparison suggests the ways in which Death of a Hero is more than a war novel. Her Privates We - or The Middle Parts of Fortune, as its unexpurgated version is called - presented the war as a total, enveloping experience, and did not attempt to look beyond it, or argue a case. In Aldington's novel, by contrast, the war itself takes up little more than the final third of the book, the greater part of which is concerned with George Winterbourne's early life and his experiences as a young painter in the bright bohemia of pre-1914 London. What unites the pre-war and wartime sections of Death of a Hero is the energy of ressentiment. It is very much a roman a these, though it is not easy to say just what the thesis is. George Winterboume is more than an individual trapped in the impersonal war machine. From the beginning he is presented as a type,
an essential victim, struggling in his early years against the hypocrisies of Victorian family life, then victimised by artistic snobs and women, until he is finally caught up in a meaningless war. His death seems pre-ordained, as he deliberately exposes himself to German fire a week before the war ends in
November 1918. It is significant that Aldington's narrator refers approvingly to the 'nightmare' chapter of Lawrence's Kangaroo. This expresses with unique intensity Lawrence's own ressentiment about the war and the sense that it had been declared against him personally. A similar spirit pervades Death of a Hero, even though Winterboume's sufferings were much greater than Lawrence's and he was a courageous soldier, like real-life rebels and internal emigres at the Front.
