Untitled Document

Portrait in 1940 by Vanessa Bell - National Portrait Gallery, London

Leonard Woolf writes of Richard Aldington, who wrote regular reviews for his magazine The Nation, as follows:

"I do not remember how I came across this disgruntled man ... he became a regular reviewer for me... He said that in the last issue of The Nation I had had a review by a Mr X - did I know that Mr X had run off with his (Aldington's) wife? ... Unless I gave an undertaking never to employ Mr X again, Aldington would never again write a review for me."

The wife Aldington was talking about will have been his first wife, H.D., who was also a Dial contributor though not in the issues discussed on these pages. This is possibly a reference to Cecil Gray, the artist, who fathered a child to Hilda Doolittle in 1919. She only later admitted that he was the father2.

What is also interesting is his comment (made in 1965 in his autobiography, page 75):

"It must be remembered that, if you published 42 years ago poetry by T. S. Eliot, Robert Graves, and 7Herbert Read and a novel by Virginia Woolf, you were publishing four books which the vast majority of people, including booksellers and the literary establishment, condemned as unintelligible and absurd."

Virginia Woolf's work was published several times in The Dial between 1922 and 1929, and Leonard's Russian translations. 460 copies of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land were printed by Hogarth Press in September 19233, one year after its original publication in Criterion, eleven months after The Dial, and 9 months after its publication by Liveright in January 1923.

	1880-1969 Leonard Woolf married Virginia (née Stephen), and together they founded The Hogarth Press, which was to publish some of the most influential works of the century. Between 1917 and 1946 they published 525 titles.`1` Virginia Woolf was also a contributor to the Dial, though not in the issues considered here. In relation to The Dial, 1922, the only interesting thing about his biography is that in amongst the mass of detail, he fails to mention it even once. He is named in this volume as translator of Ivan Bunin's story, Kasimir Stanislavovitch.


Spartacus School Net Controversial Book Delaware Library - special collections - Hogarth Press Quotation at Bartleby.com	Portrait in 1940 by Vanessa Bell - National Portrait Gallery, London Leonard Woolf writes of Richard Aldington, who wrote regular reviews for his magazine The Nation, as follows: "I do not remember how I came across this disgruntled man ... he became a regular reviewer for me... He said that in the last issue of The Nation I had had a review by a Mr X - did I know that Mr X had run off with his (Aldington's) wife? ... Unless I gave an undertaking never to employ Mr X again, Aldington would never again write a review for me." The wife Aldington was talking about will have been his first wife, H.D., who was also a Dial contributor though not in the issues discussed on these pages. This is possibly a reference to Cecil Gray, the artist, who fathered a child to Hilda Doolittle in 1919. She only later admitted that he was the father`2`. What is also interesting is his comment (made in 1965 in his autobiography, page 75): "It must be remembered that, if you published 42 years ago poetry by T. S. Eliot, Robert Graves, and 7Herbert Read and a novel by Virginia Woolf, you were publishing four books which the vast majority of people, including booksellers and the literary establishment, condemned as unintelligible and absurd." Virginia Woolf's work was published several times in The Dial between 1922 and 1929, and Leonard's Russian translations. 460 copies of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land were printed by Hogarth Press in September 1923`3`, one year after its original publication in Criterion, eleven months after The Dial, and 9 months after its publication by Liveright in January 1923.
	W. H. Smith Literary Award (for Beginning Again), 1965
2 It is not clear to me at the moment whether this is the same Cecil Gray, however. I'd need to look into The Nation archives. 3 See Woolmer, J. Howard, A Checklist of the Hogarth Press, 1917-1938, (London: Hogarth Press, 1976), page 40.