Columbia Library columns (v.33(1983Nov-1984May))

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  v.33,no.1(1983:Nov): Page 12  



12                              Miriam. J. Benkovitz

appearances. In the first week of October 1939, he read some of
his poems "with comments" before "about 300 girls" at Wellesley
College, and on October 19 he repeated his performance at Har¬
vard. By the end of November he had appeared at Princeton and
at Queens College and was scheduled to present a talk at Yale.

On two occasions in 1940, Aldington came as close as he ever
would to a university appointment. The Weeks Visiting Profes¬
sorship Fund took him for a week to A\'esleyan University. There,
commencing March 11, he met with various classes, talked about
poetry and critics of poetry, and offered a plan to remedy the lack
of support for poets. In addition, he gave a lecture entitled "War
and the Poet," reading several of his own poems and discussing
those of others who wrote about war. That summer, Aldington
delivered five lectures, of which "Ezra Pound & T. S. Eliot" was
one, at Columbia University as part of "English S200—Lectures
on contemporary literature." Columbia's Bulletin of Information
described the course as a "series of lectures by distinguished au¬
thors on outstanding movements in the literature of the present
day." Among the authors were Joseph Wood Krutch, Richard
Lockridge, Padraic Coluni, Carl Van Doren, Irwin Ednian, and
Aldington. He was assigned the week beginning July 29 and end¬
ing August 2. It proved to be a very hot week with temperatures
rising to the mid-nineties every day and once to more than 98°, as
he recorded in letters and in his "Author's Note" to the published
lecture.

Very likely these lectures were the last Aldington delivered for
university students since, by mid-August, he no longer needed
the fees from them. For the rest of his life, and indeed after his
death, Brigit Patmore and her sons tried to get all they could from
him, and he was often pressed for money. But, in June 1940, Ald¬
ington had signed a contract with Viking for Life for Lifers Sake,
a book of reminiscences published the next year. Atlantic Monthly
had contracted for a somewhat abbreviated version of the book
with the title "Farewell to Europe" to appear in four installments,
starting in the issue of September 1940 (which came out in An-
  v.33,no.1(1983:Nov): Page 12