2 2                               Miriam ]. Benkovitz

If Aldington's distaste for America had changed in any way by
that March 1953, when Sims first visited him and recovered the
Columbia lectures, it had intensified. In a letter dated shortly after
Sims' departure. Aldington wrote with contempt of Sims' "rev¬
erence and belligerence for Pound," who was then in St. Eliza¬
beth's, the mental hospital to which he had been consigned as unfit
to stand trial for his wartime, pro-fascist activities. In the same
letter Aldington went on to call F'liot "the biggest fraud and clev¬
erest literary strategist and self-advertiser of this century," and
ended by speculating on the reasons English intellectuals submit¬
ted to a series of American dictators from James Russell Lowell
to T. S. Eliot. Subsequently Aldington remarked on American
indifference to world affairs, he imitated American speech as it
sounded to him ("chegging" for checking is an example), and he
condemned all Americans but especially the women for "ill-bred
offensiveness."

Out of that attitude came the postscript Aldington wrote for
the publication of his lecture on Pound and Eliot, as well as its
deletion. Tlic postscript reads, "I take a more lenient view now. I
realize what Samuel Butler meant when he said that though Amer¬
ica, like other countries, would produce men of genius, he thought
that America would not be a pleasant place for genius to live in."
From that postscript and its fate could be deduced much about
Richard Aldington: arrogance, inconsistency, reluctance to admit
mistakes, and ultimate kindness. Perhaps that gives too much im¬
portance to so slight a statement as the postscript, but obviously
Aldington regretted the severe appraisal, made in 1940, of the two
men who had once been friends. And so, in 1954, he put the blame
on America.

Sims would not have it that way. Samuel Butler's "silly slur" still
seems gratuitous to Sims. He was and is an admirer of America,
and so he asked Aldington to remove the postscript. Aldington
"kindly acceded to the request," and the postscript was deleted.