Images, Lost and Found, 1915–16

Abstract

Aldington’s efforts to aid Gourmont now began to go awry. Prompted by him, Amy Lowell had arranged publication of a series of the Frenchman’s articles in the New Republic, but the magazine refused to print two of them. Nor did the signed manuscript of Gourmont’s Nuit Au Luxembourg, promised to Lowell in response to a gift of $200, arrive. She was good about the manuscript, but Herbert Croly, who had refused the articles for the New Republic, was treated to a furious letter from Aldington, who also informed Lowell that ‘Any American paper should be satisfied to pay $six [dollars] a time for [Gourmont’s] signature’. Later, rejoicing in his ‘slanging’ of Croly, Aldington declared (not altogether seriously) that he had ‘a profound contempt for all things American!’¹ A young man’s breezy tactlessness, but Croly had to be placated. Lowell, who had agreed more readily than Harriet Monroe to help Gourmont, now offered Croly apologies, characterising Aldington as ‘only twenty-two, exceedingly prejudiced and as far as America is concerned exceedingly ignorant’.² Another Philadelphia friend of those times, the translator James Whitall, good-humouredly portrays him as revelling in bad imitations of the American accent.