Lee M Jenkins. Great War Modernists: D.H. Lawrence, H.D. and Richard Aldington

In Great War Modernists: D.H. Lawrence, H.D. and Richard Aldington, Lee M. Jenkins combines the trio as the Mecklenburgh Square authors because they all lodged at number 44. Jenkins also intermittently slips into the mix the writer, translator, and co-inhabitant John Cournos. This gathering sparks scholarly interest; yet Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, lodged in H.D.’s living room for a short stint from October 20 to 30 November 1917, while H.D. stayed near Aldington’s barracks. The Lawrences departed when H.D. returned. In this sense, Lawrence was only a minor householder at 44 Mecklenburgh Square. At that time, Cournos was tasked with an assignment in Russia. Hence, none of these four writers occupied the premises simultaneously. This is not to say that the inhabitants’ writings were not influenced by each other’s lives and works, and Jenkins does a fine job showing their interconnections in this monograph, part of the ‘Historicizing Modernism’ series.

As a whole, the book centres on Lawrence, for whom Jenkins displays deep homage, almost a fixation, tying Lawrence to everything and everyone. In Chapter 1, ‘Life Studies’, Jenkins plants Lawrence firmly in the landscape of larger modernist projects, particularly the transformation of the visual arts and his relationship to painter Mark Gertler. Exploring Women in Love and The Rainbow, she ascribes to Lawrence with a genius for crossing multiple literary genres, combining and reworking the roman à clef, autobiography, biography, biofiction, and criticism while regenerating the novel. Jenkins pronounces Lawrence the father of life writing, crowning him as the first to take ‘real men and women’ and imaginatively transform them into fiction. In Chapter 1, it is Lawrence’s show, the other writers not yet seriously addressed.

In Chapter 2, ‘The House of Fiction’, Jenkins focuses on Mecklenburgh Square. This spotlight is welcome as it gathers Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod together with Aldington’s Death of a Hero, beside H.D.’s Bid Me to Live. This second chapter crystallizes this creative nexus, exposing that the messy lives of the book’s key protagonists in their relationships and epistolary writing had a direct impact upon the fiction they produced. Jenkins boldly argues that both Aldington and Lawrence, in their biofiction, share a key untruth: that H.D. had the initiatory affair with Cecil Gray rather than Aldington with Dorothy Yorke. She also makes the case that Bid Me to Live acts as a repository of her ‘interpersonal and intertextual relationships with the male writers in her circle’.

Still, for Jenkins, Lawrence leads the way with Aaron’s Rod: she asserts that the triangular imaginations at 44 all deal with 1917, the worst year of the war for civilians and that their three novels should be read as a trilogy or ‘composite text’. However, Jenkins views Bid Me to Live and Death of a Hero as contingent upon Aaron’s Rod, existing more as responses to Lawrence, in spite of her recognition of H.D.’s corrective truth-telling. Jenkins lauds Aldington for recognizing Lawrence as the greatest living English novelist, but paints him as cruel in his portrait of Lawrence as ‘trading upon his working-class origin and his indigestion, of which he had been dying for twenty years’. Jenkins points out that Lawrence died shortly after the release of Aldington’s novel.

Transcending personalities, Jenkins discerns in the sparse three pages paid to Aldington that he grapples with the world’s guilt through Greek tragedy, particularly the Oresteia as a ‘drama of the double’, in which the hero must navigate the nightmare of war along with his own personal nightmares. Jenkins devotes five pages to Bid Me to Live, cast as a feminist rescripting of Lawrence’s characters, particularly the one based on H.D. herself in Aaron’s Rod. Jenkins seeks to weave the tangled Mecklenburgh Square lives together in a kind of Freudian repetition compulsion: the scenes of Lawrence’s rejection of H.D. as a lover, like Christ’s of Mary Magdalene, and H.D.’s discovery of her husband’s infidelity, would reverberate over the course of her life. Bid Me to Live, it’s revealed, is replete with quotations from Lawrence’s letters—letters burned by Aldington, but which were so ingrained in H.D. that she reproduced them from memory.

Weaving the war into the trio’s poetry, Jenkins’s third chapter, ‘Between the lines: Imagism and the Great War’, is the most instructive in the volume. Taking each author separately, Jenkins concisely puts together their travels into a hellish wartime underworld, their search for resurrection, and their exploitation of images to that effect. Lawrence revisits Dante and the Greeks; Aldington and H.D. the Greeks. She further shows that this trio incorporated biographical events into their poems, although Jenkins occludes the influence of H.D.’s beloved and companion of over 40 years, Bryher, and their love story, on H.D.’s adaptation of Sappho’s fragments, written while Bryher courted her in 1918. Showcasing Aldington’s translation of a Sappho fragment in Some Imagist Poets in 1917, she thinks of H.D.’s of the same ‘Fragment 113’ as necessarily in conversation. Both reflect a wartime drama of a marriage in pieces, though Jenkins discounts H.D. and Bryher’s romance, whose rejection of the heterosexual binary is encoded in Sappho’s ‘Neither honey nor bee for me’.

In the fourth chapter, ‘Translation, Global Modernism and the Great War’, Jenkins addresses problems of converting one language and culture to another as well as how the Greeks guided H.D. and Aldington to wrench such poems out of international turmoil, as in Lawrence’s translation from the German of ‘All of Us’, a collection based on Heinrich Schafer’s rendering of Egyptian fellaheen folk songs—in effect, ‘translations of translations’.

In the ‘Coda: Squaring the Circle’, what began as a study of war writing at 44 Mecklenburgh Square turns into a reconstituting paean for Lawrence. Admittedly, H.D. clearly was influenced by Lawrence, but Jenkins does not seem to consider that her works also stand on their own. In Jenkins’s view, Lawrence the genius was almost lost to readers by 1975, but with H.D.’s resurrection through the offices of Susan Stanford Friedman, Jenkins claims Lawrence too was resuscitated. Lawrence, in fact, stands on H.D.’s shoulders in the twenty-first century and has been rescued by new handmaidens, among them Lara Feigel and Frances Wilson. Feigel’s 2022 ‘bibliomemoir’ (Look! We Have Come Through!) stands out in its declaring that Lawrence’s ‘repetitions and circlings were the rhythms of female thought’. This book, like Feigel’s, attempts to wrest Lawrence from his own misogyny.

Jenkins repeats, circles and meanders with great erudition at times, and at others with delicious gossip, in this uneven but worthwhile monograph.