An English Tragedy

DEATH OF A HERO--Richard Aldington --Covici, Friede ($2.50;)

The Story. Author Aldington lets his audience know at once, as they did at Greek tragedies, that the protagonist is to die at the end. The book begins with the death of its hero. On Nov. 4, 1918, Captain George Winterbourne, exposing himself unnecessarily to heavy machine gun fire, was instantly killed. Attempting to account for that last moment, the rest of the book depicts the life of the hero, of his parents and grandparents.

Hero George was born in the worst sort of airless middle class Victorian household. His parents, blindfolded and swaddled by sexual ignorance and sentimentalism, had tumbled into marriage and lived at leisure in shabby gentility and domestic tyranny. George became a painter, and, in revolt against his parents' ideas, contracted a free and childless union with Elizabeth. Later, when she mistakenly believed herself pregnant, he married her. They agreed that each should be perfectly free to have other affairs, and Elizabeth enjoyed her freedom, until she found that George was enjoying himself with her friend Fanny. Then George went to War, quixotically enlisting as a private. When he returned on leave, exhausted with hardship and tension, he could no longer take his share in the smart, arty conversations of his set, and found both Elizabeth and Fanny doing very well without him. His commission brought only increased nervous strain, so he let himself be killed.

The Significance. Death of a Hero falls into two parts, a condemnation of the Victorians, especially for their sexual obscurantism, and a condemnation of the War. They are not well linked, except that both contribute to the catastrophe, and the second is far stronger. The Victorians are satirized with a savagery that defeats itself, for the reader begins to protest that it must be overdone. The tone of these chapters is like one of George's own remarks, thus reported: " 'Now, look at these simian bipeds,' George pursued, pointing to an inoffensive pair of lovers . . . 'more foul, more deadly, more incestuously blood-lustful . . .!' " Throughout the early chapters Author Aldington seems to be pointing at inoffensive people and gratuitously calling them incestuous. There may be reason for dissecting a diseased corpse; there can be none for clubbing it.

When he comes to the War, surprisingly, the author is much more restrained, more willing to let the facts indict themselves. He gives a plain, horrible account of the existence that unfitted George first for the conversation of his frippery London set and then for life itself. The climax has real inevitability.

The Author. This is Richard Aldington's first novel. He is known for criticism, translations and poems. His wife, Hilda Doolittle Aldington, is the Imagist poet H. D.