(Vivien Whelpton’s biography; Louisa Garrett Anderson:
https://www.londonremembers.com/subjects/dr-louisa-garrett-anderson )
Yesterday, pausing from doggedly extracting nails and staples from the newly exposed floorboards in the old kitchen, I took a crowded train to London, in the company of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy—always impressive but we’ll never be close friends.
I went to the Authors’ Club in London for an event entitled ‘Writing, Healing and the First World War’. There were three panellists: Sara Haslam, Chair of the Ford Madox Ford Society and author of—among other things—Fragmenting modernism: Ford Madox Ford, the novel and the Great War; Vivien Whelpton, who published a recent biography of poet, novelist, translator and biographer Richard Aldington; and Sunny Singh, novelist and lecturer in Creative Writing and English Literature.
Sara Haslam talked about her recent research: first, into the Endell Street Military Hospital started by Louisa Garrett Anderson and Flora Murray, doctors and suffragettes, run and staffed entirely by women and dealing almost exclusively with male patients, revolutionary facts in the context of that time; then into the War Library started by Helen Mary Gaskell to distribute free books to wounded servicemen, a scheme that produced a staggering number of volumes donated by the public, with one individual contribution of 35,000 titles and huge deliveries of new stock that often brought traffic to a standstill.
Vivien Whelpton talked very knowledgeably and engagingly about Aldington, particularly his poetry and his 1929 novel, Death of a Hero; also his marriage to H. D., and association with Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, T. S. Eliot and others, damaged, as was so much else in Aldington’s life, by his experience of war. His 1955 book on T. E. Lawrence, then still idolised by many, effectively wrecked Aldington’s standing with the literary establishment in this country and his autobiography, Life for Life’s Sake, published in the United States in 1941, finally emerged here in 1968.
Sunny Singh discussed a tale by Chandradhar Sharma Guleri, later translated as ‘The Troth’—famous among a domestic audience though little known in this country—apparently the first short story in Hindi, published early in the war (1915) and highly suggestive in its handling of the complex issues around Imperial subjects fighting in a war which did not directly affect them, highlighting too the often degrading treatment suffered by the Indian troops. Perhaps as many as a million and a quarter Indian soldiers served on the Western Front and in Africa, a huge majority of those in combat roles, almost 75,000 of whom were killed.
A fascinating – and informative – evening.
Sara Haslam talking about Endell Street Military Hospital: A Suffragette story, in a short Open University film, is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEDRAv9NlY0
Her recent essay, ‘Reading, Trauma and Literary Caregiving 1914-1918: Helen Mary Gaskell and the War Library’, appeared in the Journal of Medical Humanities: http://oro.open.ac.uk/54285/
Reconstructionary Tales 