Death of a Hero

R. Aldington's condemnation of war

Richard Aldington (1892-1962) is one of the most outstanding English writers of the XXth century. He was born in Kent, England, and eduated at Dover College and London University. He began his literary career as a poet on the eve of the First World War. He belonged to the romantic trend.

Like many of his contemporaries, Aldington took part in World War I and the bitter experience he gained at the front never left him. His war experience greatly influenced his world outlook and brought him to regard the duty of a writer in a new light. He broke away from romanticism and came to appreciate only those books which were written “out of man’s guts” and showed life as it really was.

In 1919 a collection of poetry “Images of War” was published, based on the author’s own experience, and describing war as a crime against life and beauty.

In 1925 Aldington published his prominent poem "A Fool i' th' Forest". Literary critics highly appreciated it stressing its close connection with his first and best novel "Death of a Hero", written in 1929. This is a powerful anti-war novel, a vehement protest against the inhumanity of war, its horrors, its senseless waste of all human values, of life itself. It is permeated with the author's sympathy for man, it displays his profound understanding of contemporary life and British bourgeois society.

In this book Aldington describes the rotten order of things in his country and expresses his passionate protest against the horrors of the war which he knew intimately from his own experience. In the preface to his most prominent novel “Death of a Hero”, he wrote: “I have recorded nothing which I have not observed in human life, said nothing I do not believe to be true…”

In the preface he also wrote "I should love to live in an age that was passionately creative, when society was so deeply stirred by high achievements of the creative spirit as it is now by trade, war and invention.”

Aldington's condemnation of the war is seen throughout the book. Describing the war he makes use of vulgarisms "bloody", "damned", numerous words with negative connotation, to stress the idea that war is a ghastly calamity. More than once he makes use of the word "murder", suggesting that war is something criminal – war is a crime.

“Death of a Hero” is not only an anti-war novel. It is a history of the spiritual growth of those “who spent their childhood and adolescence struggling, like young Samsons, in the toils of the Victorians; whose early manhood coincided with the European War…. This book is really a 'threnody [погребальнаяпеснь], a memorial to a generation which hoped sincerely, strove honestly, and suffered deeply…”

The composition and the style of the novel are remarkable. The novel is built, like a musical piece, with a change of the tempo from quick to slow as the plot is developing to its final tragic episode. "Death of a Hero" is lyrical, pathetic, sometimes ironic and satirical. But it is always sincere and highly emotional. Written on the eve of the thirties, it remains one of the greatest novels of the XXth century.

Anyone in touch with 20th century literature knows Richard Aldington to be a writer of great gifts. You can read scarcely any of his work and remain indifferent. It produces that immediate impact which is a mark of the most intense writers. His writing is full of life. No one can read him for ten minutes without feeling a glow of power and vitality. We get an impression of some one seeing things ten times more vividly and being both hurt and delighted ten times more intensely, than most of us can ever manage.

The lost generation (in literature, as a social phenomenon)

“Death of a Hero”, like many literary works of the post-war period, is dedicated to the so-called “lost generation” which hoped sincerely, strove honestly, and suffered deeply. These were the people who suffered all the horrors of the war which carried away millions of lives and inflicted physical and moral wounds upon those who managed to survive.

The post-war generation is commonly called the "lost generation", implying those who came out of the war dazed, weary, depressed, with the taste of death and bitter reality in the mouth. They felt actually lost. They were injured mentally, psycologically and spiritually. The war turned them into moral invalids.

Their prospects after demobilization were indeed uncertain, mostly because after the years of great hardships, years of mental discomfort and physical exhaustion, after all they had endured in the war they were unable to face those everyday problems which occupy civilian minds. Reconversion appeared too painful for them, because they felt unfit for peace-time activities. They couldn't adjust themselves to the post-war life, since without capital, without influence, without training they could do nothing. Thus, they were met with unemployment. They felt themselves 'misfits [неприспособленныйкжизничеловек, неудачник].

They were lost because they found themselves in a somewhat different wold. All the past life seemed a dream, all the vital interests had become utterly indifferent, all ambitions were dissolved, the old friends seemed incredibly remote and unimportant. Friendship itself aquired a different kind of meaning. They had got to know war friendship – a peculiar kind of friendship, none of which exists in peace-time – a real and beautiful and unique relationship. It was a human realtion, a comradeship, an undemonstrative exchange of sympathies between ordinary men racked to extremity under a great common strain in a great common danger. They had retained and developed a certain essential humanity and manhood, and that's why they never turned into brutes.

This motive of frontline comradeship is very typical of the “lost generation literature” because it was this “manhood and humanity” that helped people who fought for the ideals to endure the horrors of the war.

It's true that their minds had degenerated in certain ways, they got coarse and rough and a bit animal. They weren't able to enjoy subtleties of beauty and anything intellectually abstruse. The war appeared a knock-out blow from which they could not possibly recover.

They needed rest, tranquility, reassurance, companionship, but got human indifference, hostility, and loneliness. They took refuge in alchohol, gambling. Future had nothing in store for them, and even suicides were common.

The reality which awaited former soldiers upon thir return home was perhaps even more harsh than that they had to face in the war. The atrocities of the war made way to the callousness and cruelty of the post-war. The secure tranquility of peace-time was terrifying for them.

All of them were mentally and physically drained by the war, and therefore unable to rebuild their lives. They were discouraged, disgusted with life, cynical, desparing, and chaotic. The war became their life, with no past and no future. Depression, monotony, and boredom were all around them. Many felt such an apathetic weariness of mind that they would be glad to have died in the war rather than go back home. In fact, no one had been as profoundly affected by the war and no one felt as miserable as those who came out alive.

Describing the lost generation, the author emphasizes the general idea of the novel – war is an appalling catastrophe, a massacre that turns a man into a cannon soldier.

George Winterbourne

George Winterbourne, as depicted by Aldington, was an ordinarily young man, sensitive and proud, deeply humiliated, easily subject to shame. He was aware of his own loneliness, but when he even felt assured that he wa liked, the barriers came down in an instant. Just as his pride was great, so was his happiness and surrender in love and friendship.

George Winterbourne was an unassertive young man with no money and few friends, about whom nothing was out of the ordinary. He must have had no great shucks, neither was there anything uncommon about his looks. He was an ordinary young man, a not very successful painter, and a rank-and-file British soldier.

George was born into a typical middle class family, where philistine hypocrisy prospered, and he might have achieved much in his life had he not been constantly bullied and nagged by his mother, who had sapped his self-confidence abominably, and turned him into a shy, aloof young man. He had very early developed his habit of irony as a protection and as a method of being scornful with seeming innocence. And he never got rid of it. As a result, he was all tight inside, and by the end of his life he turned cynical and desparing and angry and chaotic.

Like most young people of that time he was swayed by ideas of 'grandiose [s] ‘social reform’ and resented the middle class culture with its conventions and family dogmatism. He had seen in his own home the dreadful unhappiness and suffering caused by Victorian, and indeed Edwardian, ignorance and domestic dennery and swarming infants; and he reacted violently against it.

Narrating the history of George Winterbourne’s life the author wants to expose those forces in the social life of pre-war England that made it possible for a whole generation to perish in the flames of the First World War.

The retrospective description of George Winterbourne’s life, which is shown in close association with the social life of England at the beginning of the century motivates the plot of the novel.

The narration begins with a broad but very precise picture of “an England morally buried in great foggy wrappings of hypocrisy and prosperity and cheapness.” With biting satire, the author describes the school which brought up obedient soldiers – "the Empire’s backbone". The aim of such "education" was 'to know how to kill', to bring up 'thoroughly manly fellows'.

George, though he didn’t realise it then, wasn’t going to be a bit of any "damned Empire’s backbone, still less, part of its kicked backside."

The stifling [ai] atmosphere of the school suffocated the boy, but he did not feel at ease in the family either, aware of the fact that lies and hypocrisy formed the basis of his parents’ relations. Young Winterbourne found consolation in art and literature. Books and paintings were his only true freinds. It was the concept of Beauty that he opposed to the repelling and primitive schemes of the bourgeois frame of mind.

The years spent at the front mark a definite evolution in George’s views, the war made him leave his individualistic seclusion and look more closely at his fellow soldiers. He hated the War, but he liked the soldiers, because they had endured great hardships and dangers with simplicity, because they developed a comradeship among themselves. They had every excuse for turning into brutes, and they didn’t. They had saved manhood and comradeship, their essential integrity as men.

George came to think about the destiny of his fellow soldiers and about the stupidity of the causes of the war. “But what were they really against? Who were their real enemies? ... the fools who had sent them to kill each other instead of help each other. Their enemies were the sneaks and the unscrupulous: the false ideals, the unintelligent ideas imposed on them, the humbug, the hypocrisy, the stupidity… It was the leadership that was wrong – not the war leadership, but the peace leadership.”

George Winterbourne's parents

The Winterbournes were a typical middle-class family who unhesitatingly accepted the prejudices, conventions, and rules of the society. They seemed grotesque because neither of them could adjust to the tremendous revolution in everything, of which the war was a cause or symptom. The whole immense drama went on in front of their noses, and they never perceived it. They only worried about their rations.

Their view of the British Empire was that it should continue the war as a holy crusade for the extermination of all ‘foreigners’, making the world safe for Englishmen. They learned nothing from the war.

As far as George's death goes, the parents did not care much about it, being wrapped up in their own problems. Their response was much more conditioned by the conventional patterns of behaviour than by deep personal feeling which they lacked. In fact, nobody much minded that George was killed.

The Winterbournes had never done a damn thing in their lives, and were as stuffily, frowsily ['frauzili], mawkish-religiously boring as a family could be at that time. They were, however, pretty comfortable middle class.

G. Winterbourne's father was a thumb-twiddler, an inadequate sentimentalist. He had a genius for messing up other people’s lives. He messed up his wife’s life by being weak with her; messed up his children’s lives by being weak and sentimentalish with them and by losing his money – the unforgiveable sin as a parent; messed up the lives of his friends and clients by honestly losing their money for them: and messed up his own most completely.

He was hoplelessly ignorant. He knew nothing about ... things indispensable to a married man. He was so scared by the war, so unable to adjust himself to a harsh, intruding reality – he had spent his life avoiding realities – that he took refuge in a drivelling religiosity. The one thing he wanted in life was to be pretty comfortable.

He was a born mucker. And, since Isabel was ignorant, self-willed and over-ambitious, and turned sour and sharp under the tender mercies of dear Mamma, she came a mucker too – through George Augustus.

G. Winterbourne's mother was "a particularly virulent specimen of the human scorpion". She had let George down so badly time after time when he was a boy that he was all tight inside. George had such a dislike for his mother that he hadn’t seen her five times in the last five years of his life.

She was rather pretty, in a florid, vulgar way, and was having regular affairs with young "sheiks" [∫eik].

She was as sordid, avaricious, conventional, and spiteful a middle-class woman as you could dread to meet. Like all her class, she 'toadied [ou] to her betters and bullied her inferiors. But, with her conventionality, she was, of course, a hypocrite.

She never soared much about tippling, financial dishonesty, squabbling, lying, betting, and affairs with bounderish young men.

She had very little belief in the value of prayer in practical affairs. But then, her real objection to religion was founded upon her dislike for doing anything she didn’t want to do, and a profound hatred for everything distantly resembling thought.

She was fascinatingly ignorant, even to the none too sophisticated George Augustus.

She had a strength of character, idealism and ambition, physical health and complete lack of intellectual complexity.

Elixabeth and Fanny

Elizabeth and Fanny were not grotesques. They adjusted to the war with marvellous precision and speed, just as they afterwards adapted themselves to the post-war. They thought themselves practical women, and were guided by Freudian ['froidjən] and Havelock Ellis ['hævlok 'elisiz] theories. They considered themselves wise women, with no sentimental nonsence about them. They knew all about family problems, and how to settle them. They knew that freedom, complete freedom, was the only solution.

None of them was deeply upset by George's death. The two women who had figured largely in his life had never loved him, and found quick consolation after his death.

The point is that they only fought for George in a desultory way as a symbol, more to spite each other than because they wanted to saddle themselves with him. When George was drafted to the army, they had acquired a sort of mythical and symbolical meaning for him. They resented and deplored the war, but they were admirably detached from it.

They did not quite realise the strain under which he was living, and did not perceive the widening gulf which was separating the men of that generation from the women. How could they? The friends of a person with cancer haven’t got cancer. They sympathise, but they aren’t in the horrid category of the doomed.

On the whole, they were very much alike, but Elizabeth lived in and on herself, and Fanny was a whole-hearted extravert. While Elizabeth hesitated, mused, suffered, Fanny acted, came a cropper, picked herself up gaily and started off again with just the same zest for experience.

But for them both George was very soon forgotten, as well as for his parents. His father took it out in religiosity, his mother in the sheik, Elizabeth in ‘unlicenced copulation’ and brandy, and Fanny in tears and marrying a painter.