Books: Full Circle

Full Circle REJECTED GUEST—Richard Aldington —Viking ($2.50).

Against World War I and the world that put up with it, Poet Richard Aldington has nursed one of the most protracted literary angers of his time. Like other English writers who fought and survived, he was unable to bring his mind fully to bear on his war experience until years afterward. His first novel, Death of a Hero, was written in one grim satiric gust in 1928. Ever since then, in novel after novel, Aldington has pointed the contrast he sees between the hope of a good life and literature which animated his generation, and the fog of death and deathly stupidity that moved in on it.

Rejected Guest is at once a cracking, to-hell-with-it summary of Aldington’s grievances and a fable which brings the wheel full circle, from war to war. Its hero is a “War baby,” the by-blow of a high-minded 1914 romance between an aristocratic infantry subaltern (later killed) and the belle of a small industrial town. Brought up by his maternal grandparents after his shamed mother leaves town, little David finds out what he is when he is knocked down, kicked and called a bastard on his first day at school. When he is 18, his embittered grandfather dies, leaving him $500 and some advice: “Don’t look for happiness, there isn’t any such thing. Above all, don’t expect it from women, they can’t give what they haven’t got.”

An earnest seeker of truth, which he thinks he has found in science, David pulls out for London to live on his grand-patrimony while he studies biology. Strapped before his third year is out, David braves old Sir Thomas Danby, his father’s father, who has had no notion of his existence. The bastard’s ordeal turns into an idyll. He finds himself on the Riviera, with an allowance of a thousand pounds a year, chaperoned by a worldly-wise epigrammatist, soon in bed with an authentic beauty named Diana, to whom he writes verses. War talk is just a bore at first. But that autumn is the autumn of 1938.

Before David is tossed skallyhooting out of his paradise and his ephemeral inheritance, some excellent war talk is heard from, among others, an aged and resigned Italian prince. None of it is more interesting than the implication of the book itself: that the pre-1914 ideals of scientific truth and romantic honor, handed on to David in his father’s good English blood, made him an unwelcome guest in the period between wars. Richard Aldington’s bright, reckless style has improved since Death of a Hero, his epigrams are neater (though subject to an appalling tendency to show off his Greek), but his grasp of real experience is weaker.