Richard Aldington - Relationship With T. S. Eliot

Relationship With T. S. Eliot

He helped T. S. Eliot in a practical way, by persuading Harriet Shaw Weaver to appoint Eliot as his successor at The Egoist (helped by Pound), and later in 1919 with an introduction to the editor Bruce Richmond of the Times Literary Supplement, for which he reviewed French literature. He was on the editorial board, with Conrad Aiken, Eliot, Lewis and Aldous Huxley, of Chaman Lall's London literary quarterly Coterie published 1919–1921. With Lady Ottoline Morrell, Leonard Woolf and Harry Norton he took part in Ezra Pound's scheme to 'get Eliot out of the bank' (Eliot had a job in the international department of Lloyd's, a London bank, and well-meaning friends wanted him full-time writing poetry). This manoeuvre towards Bloomsbury came to little, with Eliot getting £50 and unwelcome publicity in the Liverpool Post, but gave Lytton Strachey an opening for mockery.

Aldington made an effort with A Fool i' the Forest (1924) to reply to the new style of poetry launched by The Waste Land. He was being published at the time, for example in The Chapbook, but clearly took on too much hack work just to live. He suffered some sort of breakdown in 1925. His interest in poetry waned, and he was straighforwardly jealous of Eliot's celebrity.

His attitude towards Eliot shifted, from someone who would mind the Eliots' cat in his cottage (near Reading, Berkshire, in 1921), and to whom Eliot could confide his self-diagnosis of abulia. Aldington became a supporter of Vivienne Eliot in the troubled marriage, and savagely satirized her husband as "Jeremy Cibber" in Stepping Heavenward (Florence 1931). He was at this time living with Arabella Yorke (real given name Dorothy), a lover since Mecklenburgh Square days. It was a lengthy and passionate relationship, coming to an end when he went abroad.