lyrics in her chastest imagist vein, from memory.)
Outerbridge in London, like Pound in Rapallo, had pulled the strings of his younger puppets in Oxford, New York, and San Francisco, and Sterling was among his willing captives. A.O., as Sterling needlessly reminded Paul, had been born in Nome in 1905, the son of a trapper and an Inuit woman. Somehow he got himself to Harvard, its first Alaskan student, but left after two semesters, in the spring of 1923, arguing, perhaps correctly, that the old Bostonian professorate had nothing to teach him. Instead he lit out, not for New York but London, earning his way across the Atlantic on a freighter, finding odd jobs in the metropolitan printing business, and, unbelievably, workinghis way deep into the beehive of English literary culture over the next decade. Ottoline Morrell took a shine to him, though Virginia Woolf found him “dull, bumptious” and T. S. Eliot studiously ignored him—until the brute force of Outerbridge’s talent compelled Old Possum to acknowledge that another American was making waves in London. Pound and Eliot, older by a generation, quailed when Arnold started haranguing no one in particular about the poetic “booboisie”—a term of opprobrium stolen from his antagonist and model H. L. Mencken. Brother Arnold, as he had the temerity to call himself, lifted more than a little from Uncle Ez, though Pound affected not to notice. But on top of A.O.’s literary prowess was political commitment as well, for, like Pound, Arnold became a True Believer, though in a very different church.
When the crash came, Arnold stayed put in London, where he fell under the spell of English Communism. He went to the Spanish Civil War with John Cornford, whom he had taught during a brief stint as a master at Stowe, and was by his side when Cornford died near Córdoba the day after his twenty-first birthday, at the end of 1936.
Hesperus
(1938), A.O.’s heroic elegy for his young comrade, won him fame across the political spectrum. Suddenly, the Left had an unimpeachable literary voice, less sniffily narcissistic than Auden, more expressive and more reliably doctrinaire than Dos Passos.
The brash, contentious American had become a force to contend with in London, widely viewed as the Shelley of his age. His brief affair with Decca Mitford before her marriage to Esmond Romilly was followed by a string of conquests, most of them among the Red Debutantes of Berkeley Square. In September 1940, he married Lady Annabel Grosvenor, estranged youngest daughter of the second Duke of Westminster. Their daughter, Svetlana, was born six months later.
Outerbridge had served with courage and distinction under Montgomery in North Africa during World War II, receiving the Victoria Cross, awarded for “most conspicuous bravery or extreme devotion to duty” for his ferocity at El Alamein. His poem about Stalingrad,
Elegy for Evgenia
(Heinemann, 1946)—he and Lady Annabel had divorced quietly in 1944—became the poetic rallying cry for worldwide Communism after the war, quoted approvingly by Stalin, translated into thirty-two languages (including into Russian by the up-and-coming Yurii Khodakovsky). Sterling nonchalantly pulled the 1948 American edition off a shelf and handed it to Paul.
Awarded an honorary Red Star in 1947, A.O. was at the peak of his powers. Even the archconservative Eliot wrote (privately) that he’d been moved to tears by A.O.’s epic
The Fight
(1948; Impetus, 1949), known as the
Aeneid
of international Communism, a twenty-thousand-line narrative of Russia’s devastating war the likes of which had not been seen since the days of Victor Hugo. Arnold’s autobiography,
South from Nome
(1950), was likewise an international succès fou (and for decades Sterling’s best-selling book. The Book-of-the-Month Club alone sold 88,000 copies the year it was published).
The Cold War, though, had been hard on A.O. From the left, the crowd around
The Protagonist
attacked his
Outerbridge in London, like Pound in Rapallo, had pulled the strings of his younger puppets in Oxford, New York, and San Francisco, and Sterling was among his willing captives. A.O., as Sterling needlessly reminded Paul, had been born in Nome in 1905, the son of a trapper and an Inuit woman. Somehow he got himself to Harvard, its first Alaskan student, but left after two semesters, in the spring of 1923, arguing, perhaps correctly, that the old Bostonian professorate had nothing to teach him. Instead he lit out, not for New York but London, earning his way across the Atlantic on a freighter, finding odd jobs in the metropolitan printing business, and, unbelievably, workinghis way deep into the beehive of English literary culture over the next decade. Ottoline Morrell took a shine to him, though Virginia Woolf found him “dull, bumptious” and T. S. Eliot studiously ignored him—until the brute force of Outerbridge’s talent compelled Old Possum to acknowledge that another American was making waves in London. Pound and Eliot, older by a generation, quailed when Arnold started haranguing no one in particular about the poetic “booboisie”—a term of opprobrium stolen from his antagonist and model H. L. Mencken. Brother Arnold, as he had the temerity to call himself, lifted more than a little from Uncle Ez, though Pound affected not to notice. But on top of A.O.’s literary prowess was political commitment as well, for, like Pound, Arnold became a True Believer, though in a very different church.
When the crash came, Arnold stayed put in London, where he fell under the spell of English Communism. He went to the Spanish Civil War with John Cornford, whom he had taught during a brief stint as a master at Stowe, and was by his side when Cornford died near Córdoba the day after his twenty-first birthday, at the end of 1936.
Hesperus
(1938), A.O.’s heroic elegy for his young comrade, won him fame across the political spectrum. Suddenly, the Left had an unimpeachable literary voice, less sniffily narcissistic than Auden, more expressive and more reliably doctrinaire than Dos Passos.
The brash, contentious American had become a force to contend with in London, widely viewed as the Shelley of his age. His brief affair with Decca Mitford before her marriage to Esmond Romilly was followed by a string of conquests, most of them among the Red Debutantes of Berkeley Square. In September 1940, he married Lady Annabel Grosvenor, estranged youngest daughter of the second Duke of Westminster. Their daughter, Svetlana, was born six months later.
Outerbridge had served with courage and distinction under Montgomery in North Africa during World War II, receiving the Victoria Cross, awarded for “most conspicuous bravery or extreme devotion to duty” for his ferocity at El Alamein. His poem about Stalingrad,
Elegy for Evgenia
(Heinemann, 1946)—he and Lady Annabel had divorced quietly in 1944—became the poetic rallying cry for worldwide Communism after the war, quoted approvingly by Stalin, translated into thirty-two languages (including into Russian by the up-and-coming Yurii Khodakovsky). Sterling nonchalantly pulled the 1948 American edition off a shelf and handed it to Paul.
Awarded an honorary Red Star in 1947, A.O. was at the peak of his powers. Even the archconservative Eliot wrote (privately) that he’d been moved to tears by A.O.’s epic
The Fight
(1948; Impetus, 1949), known as the
Aeneid
of international Communism, a twenty-thousand-line narrative of Russia’s devastating war the likes of which had not been seen since the days of Victor Hugo. Arnold’s autobiography,
South from Nome
(1950), was likewise an international succès fou (and for decades Sterling’s best-selling book. The Book-of-the-Month Club alone sold 88,000 copies the year it was published).
The Cold War, though, had been hard on A.O. From the left, the crowd around
The Protagonist
attacked his
Similar Books
