Editing Richard Aldington (section)

===Exile===
Aldington went into self-imposed exile in 1928.<ref>[[Jonathan Bate]], Chris Baldick, ''The Oxford English Literary History: Volume 10: The Modern Movement (1910–1940)'' (2002), p. 43.</ref> He lived in Paris for years, living with Brigit Patmore and fascinated by [[Nancy Cunard]], whom he met in 1928. Following his divorce in 1938 he married Netta, née McCullough, previously Brigit's daughter-in-law.

''[[Death of a Hero]]'' (1929), which Aldington called a "jazz novel," was his semi-autobiographical response to the war. He started writing it almost immediately after the [[Armistice of 11 November 1918|armistice]] was declared. The novel condemned Victorian materialism as a cause of the tragedy and waste of the war.<ref name=Doyle/> Rejectionist, an "Expressionist scream",<ref name=Hero/> it was commended by [[Lawrence Durrell]] as "the best war novel of the epoch". It was developed mostly while Aldington was living on the island of [[Port-Cros]] in Provence, building on the manuscript from a decade before. Opening with a letter to the playwright Halcott Glover, the book takes a satirical, cynical, and critical stance on Victorian and Edwardian [[Hypocrisy|cant]].<ref>Michael Copp (editor), ''An Imagist at War: The Complete War Poems of Richard Aldington'' (2002), p. 18.</ref> Published in September 1929, by Christmas it had sold more than 10,000 copies in England alone, part of a wave of war remembrances from writers such as [[Erich Maria Remarque|Remarque]], [[Siegfried Sassoon|Sassoon]], and [[Hemingway]]. The book was quickly translated into German and other European languages. In Russia the book was taken to be a wholesale attack on bourgeois politics, "the inevitable result of the life which had preceded it", as Aldington wrote. "The next one will be much worse". It was praised by [[Maxim Gorky|Gorky]] as revolutionary, and the book, along with Aldington's later fiction, received huge Russian distribution. Aldington was, however, fiercely non-partisan in his politics, despite his passion for iconoclasm and feminism.<ref name=Hero>Richard Aldington (1998). ''Death of a Hero'', Dundurn Press, p. xi.</ref>

The character of George Winterbourne is loosely based on Aldington as an artist (Winterbourne a painter rather than writer), having a mistress before and through the war, and the novel portrays locations strongly resembling those he had travelled to. One of these locations, fictionally named "The Chateau de Fressin," strongly resembled a castle he wrote about in a letter to H.D.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Zilboorg |first=Caroline |date=Winter 1988 |title=Richard Aldington in Transition: His Pieces for The Sphere in 1919 |journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=34 |issue=4 |pages=489–506 |doi=10.2307/441889 |jstor=441889}}</ref>

''Death of a Hero'', like many other novels published around this time about the war, suffered greatly from censorship. Instead of changing or cutting parts of his novel, he replaced objectionable words with asterisks. Although they looked awkward on the page, Aldington, among others, wanted to call attention to censoring by publishers.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Willis Jr. |first=J. H. |date=Winter 1999 |title=The Censored Language of War: Richard Aldington's ''Death of a Hero'' and Three Other Novels of 1929 |journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=45 |issue=4 |pages=467–487 |doi=10.2307/441948|jstor=441948}}</ref>

In 1930 Aldington published a translation of ''[[The Decameron]]'' and then the romance ''All Men are Enemies'' (1933). In 1942, having relocated to the United States with his new wife Netta, he began to write biographies, starting with [[Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington|Wellington]]: ''The Duke: Being an Account of the Life & Achievements of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington'' (1943). It was followed by works on D. H. Lawrence: ''Portrait of a Genius, But ...'' (1950), [[Robert Louis Stevenson]]: ''Portrait of a Rebel'' (1957), and [[T. E. Lawrence]]: ''Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Inquiry'' (1955). Under financial pressure, he also worked as a Hollywood screenwriter.

Aldington's excoriating biography of T. E. Lawrence caused a scandal on its publication in 1955.<ref>[https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/te-lawrence-action-man-317983.html ''Independent'' Sunday 9 October 2005]</ref><ref>Crawford, Fred D., ''Richard Aldington and Lawrence of Arabia: A Cautionary Tale'' (1998).</ref> In the spirit of iconoclasm, he was the first to bring public notice to Lawrence's illegitimacy and asserted that he was a homosexual, a liar, a charlatan, an "impudent mythomaniac", a "self-important egotist", a poor writer and even a bad motorcyclist.<ref>''The Oxford Companion to English Literature'', 6th Edition. Edited by [[Margaret Drabble]], Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 16.</ref><ref>''T. E. Lawrence: Biography of a Broken Hero'' (2002) Harold Orlans, McFarland, p. 4.</ref> The biography dramatically coloured popular opinion of Lawrence.<ref Name=NDB>[https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-34440 ''Oxford Dictionary of Biography''], profile, 2011.</ref> Foreign and War Office files concerning Lawrence's career were released during the 1960s and further biographies continued to analyse the 'British hero'.<ref Name=NDB/> [[Robert Graves]], a friend of Lawrence, wrote that "instead of a carefully considered portrait of Lawrence, I find the self-portrait of a bitter, bedridden, leering, asthmatic, elderly hangman-of-letters."<ref Name=PF/> [[Robert Irwin (writer)|Robert Irwin]], in the London Review of Books, speculated that Aldington's spite was driven by jealousy and a sense of exclusion by the British establishment. Lawrence had attended Oxford and his father was a baronet; Aldington had suffered in the bloodbath of Europe during the First World War while Lawrence had gained a heroic reputation in the Middle Eastern theatre and became an international celebrity and homosexual icon. Irwin observes that he "was industrious and his portrait of Lawrence was fuelled by careful research".<ref>[https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n04/robert-irwin/top-grumpy-s-top-hate "Top Grumpy’s Top Hate"], ''London Review of Books'', Vol. 21, no. 4, 18 February 1999, Robert Irwin.</ref> [[Christopher Sykes (writer)|Christopher Sykes]], in his 1969 introduction to the Collins edition (reprinted in Pelican Biographies in 1971), stated that "for the first time, the awkward questions were faced squarely"; Sykes's final assessment of Aldington's book is that it "cleared the ground of rubbish, efficiently and thoroughly".<ref>''Lawrence of Arabia'' (1971), Richard Aldington, Pelican Biographies, Pelican Books, pp.13–23</ref>

Aldington lived in [[Sury-en-Vaux]], [[Cher (department)|Cher, France]], from 1958.<ref>N. T. Gates, ed. (1992). ''Richard Aldington: An Autobiography in Letters.'' The University of Pennsylvania Press.</ref> His last significant book was a biography of the Provençal poet and winner of the [[Nobel Prize in Literature]], [[Frédéric Mistral]] (1956).<ref name=Doyle/>