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-Autor


Valender, James

-Título


'Stanley Richardson and Spain'

-Categoría


artículo (revista)

-Publicación


Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses (Tenerife), 7, pp. 61-72.

-Año


1983

-Colaboradores




-Idioma


inglés

-Reedición




-Notas


biografía

-Texto1


STANLEY RICHARDSON AND SPAIN




James Valender
Universidad Autónoma de México


Among the several English writers who established links with their contemporaries in Spain during the 1930s (Stephen Spender, John Lehmann and Nancy Cunard are names that spring to mind at once in this connection), a special place must be set aside for the poet Stanley Richardson. To most students of modern English poetry his name will be anything but familar; indeed, since his death in 1941, virtually no mention, either of his work or of his life, has been made in books or journals dealing with this period. Such neglect is perhaps understandable; at a time when, following the lead given by T. S. Eliot, the idiom of English poetry was being dramatically transformed by such poets as Auden, Spender, Day-Lewis and MacNeice, Richardson's rather traditional Georgian verse could hardly expect to arouse much critical interest, still less acclaim. From the vantage point of the 1980s, however, and now that the dust is beginning to settle on the inter-war period, it is possible to see that the Georgian style of poetry against which the Thirties Poets rebelled was not without its virtues (1); and although it would be ludicrous to suggest that Richardson was in any way a great poet (he died before his career had scarcely begun), it is certainly possible to detect in his verse the working of a genuine poetic talent. Consider, for example, one of his better poems, the sonnet "Letter to England", from his final collection The Heart's Renewal:


Tonight, then, just tonight, I'll think for you
All my uncensored love. I will make clear
Down the glass walls of dreams for men to view
This treasure of my fierce and desperate fear:
Casting the false cloak from the very true,
Behaving as if you alone were near:
Heart, there is never a madness I'll not do
For you who neither speak nor think nor care.


So out of tune! but when dead centuries
Have rimmed their margin to this tale of ours,
Younger eyes will peep and fill and flow
To comprehend a passion such as this,
Dazzling across the unrecorded hours
Of all the waste that only lovers know. (2)


The romantic posture which Richardson unashamedly adopts here will almost certainly grate on the sensibilities of the modern reader; indeed, so pervasive has been the influence on contemporary English poetry of T. S. Eliot's code of impersonality that it would seem extremely difficult (if not impossible) for an English poet coming after him to write in an overtly personal vein- as Richardson does here- and still engage his reader's whole-hearted sympathy. Yet if the reader manages to swallow his immediate embarrassment and looks again at the text he will see that the sonnet has undeniable qualities: a strong rhythm, a tight ordering of thought and feeling and, above all, clarity of texture (this last the result of a meticulous attention to syntax); and it is possible that, had his talents been allowed to develop and mature, Richardson could have outgrown this attachment to the Romantic School and pursued a less personalised, and therefore (by modern standards) more acceptable, style of poetry.


A writer, however, must be judged by what he achieves rather than by what he promises and, despite the evident qualities of much of his verse, it would be very difficult to argue the case for the inclusion of any of the poems Richardson did write in any serious critical anthology of twentieth-century English poetry. The reasons for presenting him to the public now have to do, therefore, with his life rather than with his work. As I indicated at the beginning of this essay, what makes Richardson's life particularly interesting to the literary historian is his active involvement in the Spanish literary circles of the 1930s; other English writers may have visited Spain at this time (a good many, of course, as a direct result of the Civil War), but Richardson appears to have been the only one who could claim to have known something of the Madrid literary scene from within, having developed a very close friendship with such leading figures as Federico García Lorca, Luis Cernuda and Manuel Altolaguirre. So that what follows is an attempt to chart out, as far as available evidence allows, the course and nature of this involvement with Spain. The story which emerges is, I believe, a striking one, and one which deserves to be recorded if only for the light it sheds on the more renowned figures Richardson got to know during the course of his tragically brief, but astonishingly full, career.


John Stanley Richardson was born on March 25th, 1911, the son of a Lincolnshire farmer (3). Educated at the local Grammar School in Horncastle, in October 1929 he went up to St John's College, Cambridge with a scholarship to read modern languages (French and Spanish). There he distinguished himself as a scholar, as a dancer and actor (4), and- most notably- as a poet. In addition to publishing a collection of his own verse, Road to Emmaus (Cambridge: S.G. Marshall & Son, 1934), he founded his own Merry Meeting Poetry Club, and also had a hand in editing the student magazine Contemporaries and Makers (5). In June 1932 he graduated with first class honours and seemed set for a brilliant academic career. Yet, despite the award the following year of a Jebb Studentship in European History and Literature, research work- on the Poema de mío Cid- seems to have been neglected in favour of this interest in poetry (6).


Richardson's involvement with contemporary Spanish poetry began when he met the Spanish poet and printer Manuel Altolaguirre, possibly in the spring of 1934 (7). With his wife Concha Méndez, Altolaguirre had come to London in October of the previous year and, after settling down in his new home in Earl's Court, had begun to prepare a bilingual poetry review entitled 1616- one of the most beautiful of the many remarkable magazines that Altolaguirre was to edit. The review ran to ten numbers. Alongside the great classics of both languages- Gil Vicente, Garcilaso, Lope de Vega, St John of the Cross, Jorge de Montemayor, Shelley, Byron (either in translation or in the original)- there were contributions from many of the leading contemporary poets then writing in Spain and England- Pérez de Ayala, Moreno Villa, Lorca, Neruda, Alberti, Aleixandre, Guillén, Cernuda, Altolaguirre, Valbuena Prat, T. S. Eliot, A. E. Housman, Humbert Wolfe (again, either in translation or in the original). Following Altolaguirre's usual editorial policy, a place was also reserved for the young or as yet unestablished: Serrano Plaja, Muñoz Rojas, María F. de Laguna (8) among those writing in Spanish; and among those writing in English: Edward Sarmiento, William F. Stirling (9) and Stanley Richardson.


Of the English contributors to the magazine Richardson was certainly the most frequent, his poems ("The End of Adventure, or The Happy Commercial Traveller", "Murderer", "Spinsters", "Swan Lake") and translations (of work by Altolaguirre, Alberti, Lorca and Concha Méndez (10)) appearing in seven of the ten issues. Way into Life, his second collection of poems, was also published, in 1935, as the second supplement of the review. Whether, as he was to claim some years later, he was actually responsible for editing the English side of 1616 is a debatable point. Sr Martínez Nadal, who knew the various members of the group at this time, recalls that ultimate editorial policy rested with the Altolaguirres alone: "Manolo podría consultar individualmente con uno u otro [miembro del grupo] pero las decisiones las tomaba él con Concha; y siempre forzados por el material disponible" (11). In all events it seems likely that Richardson helped to bring English contributors to the magazine (one thinks, in particular, of A. E. Housman, a poet whom Richardson had known at Cambridge and whose work he greatly admired).


For Altolaguirre Richardson appears to have been "además de un excelente amigo el poeta que más destaca de la nueva generación" (12), a point not without interest given Richardson's rather unfashionable stand against the "modern" trends being set by the poets of the thirties. "Nowadays", he declared in an interview in 1933 (13), "everyone considers his jottings as poetry, and is proud of them, as he is proud of his Freudian dreams. They mean something to him, or they ought to, although probably only about as much as a dream does on the next afternoon..." Asked whether by this he meant that poets ought to practise, Richardson replied: "And to do translations and to read the classics. How simple it sounds. But it's never done, you know. (To study Edith Sitwell for technicalities rather than imitate T. S. Eliot. To read Dante before Auden). And not to be afraid of "beauty." I am often reproached for my "overt pursuit of beauty" (14). I don't see why. Beauty... and I am not going to enumerate my dead leaves and sunsets and ships and roses... is a very real thing. You all look for it in cinemas and theatres and in travel and in books. But you are shy of it in poetry. Yet it means all the things you most appreciate... it means cross-country running as much as the Russian Ballet [...] If you concentrate on tram lines you may be modern, but if you lift your eyes to the hills you may see something." Altolaguirre may well not have read Spender and Auden, but his praise for Richardson nonetheless reveals something of his taste in poetry at this time, and something, too, of the tenor of the magazine he was editing.


In February 1935, at the height of his involvement in 1616, Richardson set off for Madrid in the hope of getting to know personally some of the Spanish poets who had been sending contributions to Altolaguirre in London. One of his first visits was to the home of the Chilean consul, Sr Carlos Morla Lynch, a close friend of many of these writers. In his diary Morla recorded how he was at home entertaining Federico García Lorca when conversation was halted by the arrival at the door of "un jovenzuelo inglés, muy rubio, muy risueño- veintitrés años-, con una cara dispareja de clown. Viene de Londres provisto de una carta para mí de Manolito Altolaguirre. Sin darme tiempo para imponerme del contenido de la epístola el muchacho se presenta él mismo "como el mejor poeta actual de Inglaterra" (así como suena): Stanley Richardson. Inmediatamente se me hace simpático por su franqueza y su espíritu comunicativo, lleno de viveza y no exento de picardía" (15). During the few weeks that Richardson remained in Madrid he appears to have become very much a part of the literary life there. From Morla's diary we learn that "se ha hecho, desde el comienzo, amigo de Federico y de Luis Cernuda": that on March 12th he attended the tribute given to Lorca at the Teatro Español; and that shortly afterwards he was seen accompanying Cernuda at a poetry recital given by Pablo Neruda (16). Cernuda's appreciation of Richardson was reflected in the dedication to him of his latest poem "Por unos tulipanes amarillos" (17), a rare gesture on Cernuda's part and one which was later reciprocated, Richardson dedicating the poem "Swan Lake" to his friend in Madrid (18). "Uno se pregunta," mused Morla, "a qué misterio obedece la facilidad con que algunos seres pasan- en el espacio de breves días- a formar parte de nuestro ambiente, en tanto que otros nunca logran penetrar en él." (19)


One of the first things Richardson did on his return to England at the end of March was to publish the essay "Spanish Poetry, 1935"- a most enthusiastic and perceptive review of the work of his Spanish friends, incorporating translations which, with their help, he had completed in Madrid. Lorca, Alberti, Aleixandre, Cernuda, Altolaguirre and Concha Méndez were all presented in the most glowing terms, but none more so than Cernuda whose great talent he was one of the first, if not to recognize, certainly to acknowledge. "Luis Cernuda stands high by his achievement," he concludes in the section devoted to his work, "but he also stands high in promise. When his poetry embraces wider issues, as it must, his deep and proven seriousness, the grief of his youth, will give richness to his voice, emotion to his words, and value to his judgements. He is his poetry. Already he has reached the stage of Yeats in the famous anthology lyrics: continuing, he will inevitably reach greatness as Yeats reached it." (20)


In the summer of 1935 the Altolaguirres returned to Spain and 1616 came to an end. From poetry Richardson's attention turned to politics when in July of the following year the Spanish Civil War broke out. From the very beginning of hostilities his sympathies lay with the Republican cause. But, like many writers and intellectuals both inside and outside Spain, he was extremely perturbed by the influence of communism within the Republican ranks, believing communism to be as great a threat to western democracy as the fascism which it claimed to be combating. Yet despite these very real misgivings, he felt it quite wrong to try to remain au-dessus de la mêlée. "Those pallid neutrals who fled the country from the start," he wrote in 1938 (21), "must be grateful if their names are in time dissociated from such a shameful, and to their countrymen, incomprehensible act, and allowed to pass into their minor place of history as what they are, timid scholars, talkative but characterless theorists, citizens of Utopias but not sons of Spain." A devout Christian, Richardson's own approach was to give his full support to the Republic, but at the same time to campaign for greater religious tolerance on the Republican side. "In this matter," he added in the same article, "the role of such Catholic Republicans as Angel Ossorio, J. M. de Semprín and José Bergamín should be of paramount importance. [...] The twin serpents of Fascism and Communism once strangled, Spain may take her place in a confederation of nations and back with her powerful arm the reforms which her heart must ever support." (22)


Typical of this attitude was his decision, at the outbreak of the war, not to enlist in the International Brigades- which had close links with communism- but instead to assist Lord Churchill's Spanish Aid Committee whose aims were much closer to his own. "Owing to the blindness of the governments of the West," Lord Churchill records, "Stalin had been allowed to step in as the noble saviour of democracy in Spain, and he had instructed his followers in various countries to back the Spanish cause. So, in England, it was only the "reds" who were favourable to the legally elected Government of Spain. Still, I wanted to do something, and there were plenty of the others like me. Finally, a group of us [...] formed a committee for the purpose of collecting money for medical supplies to be sent to the Spanish Government forces. We called it the Spanish Medical Aid Committee." The first medical aid unit arrived in Spain in August 1936. "In Barcelona our arrival was greeted with a terrific ovation. Thousands of people cheered us in the Ramblas as our ambulances went by and they read the words MISIÓN SANITARIA INGLESA on each one. There was a reason for this popular exuberance. At the time we were almost the only visible sign to the hard-pressed Spaniards that any sympathy for them existed or that any help could come from the outside world." (23) Richardson volunteered to serve as interpreter to this first expedition, the job involving visits to the war fronts and broadcasts from Barcelona.


A different, though no less important, job awaited him on his return to England the following month: that of press attaché to the newly appointed Spanish Ambassador in London, Sr Pablo de Azcárate, a post which Richardson held until the fall of the Republic in February 1939 (24). During these two-and-a-half years he appears to have been actively engaged in trying to win support in England for the Republican cause, assisting those sympathisers whose views carried some political weight- most notaby Dr Temple, Archbishop of York, and Katherine Murray, Duchess of Atholl (25)-, whilst at the same time keeping himself informed of developments in Spain through meetings with many of the Republican ministers- Bosch Gimpera, Negrín, Alvarez del Vayo, Ossorio y Gallardo- who visited the Embassy.


His work at the Embassy was not his only responsibility at this time. In 1937, and with the help of Prince Hubertus zu Löwenstein, a Czechoslovak exile to whom he had been introduced by the Duchess of Atholl, Richardson founded the Arden Society for Artists and Writers Exiled in England. "The Archbishops of Canterbury and York were the chief sponsors," Prince Hubertus recalls. "The Duchess of Atholl, the Dean of Chichester, Walter de la Mare, Augustus John, the Earl of Antrim, the Master of Balliol, Professor Ernst Barker, Lady Violet Bonham-Carter, Dame Marie Tempest, the Provost of King's College, Cambridge, Nevil Coghill, Evan John, Helen Simpson and many others served either on the board or among the sponsors." (26) Some idea of the scope of the work achieved by this society can be gauged from the fact that during its first two years "eight hundred writers, scientists and artists had been assisted in one way or another." (27)


Meanwhile Richardson had not forgotten the friends he had made in Madrid before the war. In February 1938 he arranged for Luis Cernuda to visit England to give a series of lectures on behalf of the Republican cause (28). When Cernuda arrived in London, an official reception was given him at the home of the Conservative politician Sir Paul Latham, with those in attendance including the Spanish and Chinese Ambassadors and their wives, the Duchess of Atholl, the Dowager Marchioness of Reading, Lord Faringdon, Rebecca West, Rose Macaulay, Humbert Wolfe, Sir Hugh Allen and Conservative and Liberal members of Parliament. Little is known about the lectures Cernuda gave during this his first brief stay in England. One source reported him to be lecturing in Oxford and Cambridge and since, by his own admission, his command of English at this time was very poor (29), he may well have limited himself to these two places. The precise subject of the lectures likewise remains unknown, although the essay "Federico García Lorca", published in England in the Left Review (London) in May 1938, may well have been the text of one of them. When not lecturing, Cernuda spent some of his time working with Richardson on an anthology of Spanish poetry in English translation. The anthology was never published but the translation of poems by Lorca and Moreno Villa which appeared later that year in Lehmann's New Writing series may well have been from this projected work (30). At the same time the two of them translated English poems into Spanish, their version of two Wordsworth sonnets appearing in Barcelona in Hora de España (31).


In July 1938 Cernuda left England in the hope of returning to the war in Spain, but news that greeted him in Paris made him realize just how forlorn a hope this now was. Once again Richardson intervened to help his friend, finding him a post as a Spanish Assistant at a school in Surrey. In this way Cernuda began his nine-year exile in England "la experiencia más considerable de mis años maduros." (32) Had it not been for Richardson's timely intervention, Cernuda's life (and therefore his work) would doubtless have been very different. Certainly, as Cernuda himself was to acknowledge, had Richardson not arranged for him to visit England in the spring of 1938, he might not have survived the war: "A ese amigo, Stanley Richardson [...], debo haberme salvado de los riesgos eventuales después de terminada la guerra civil, si su final me alcanza en España." (33)


In 1938 Richardson published his third collection of verse, Dark Blue Sunlight (London, Simpkin Marshall Ltd.). I have been unable to consult a copy of this work but the title suggests that its subject was far removed from the political problems which daily concerned him. So-called "committed art" evidently did not meet with his approval. "For inspiration in the themes of war", he was to observe (34), "has its own drawbacks; witness perhaps the most spectacular production of all, the "Guernica" of Pablo Picasso, a powerful, haunting, greatly exciting and subtly disappointing work of art plus passion. The distortion of poetry in the service of propaganda has proceeded apace, although nothing in Spain itself can ever equal the bathos of works produced from the outside. The contrasting merits of Paul Claudel's hymn to Nationalist Spain and W. H. Auden's cantos on the Republic, for instance, are forgotten in their equal badness as poetry and even as understanding of the subject of which they purport to sing." Despite this, he himself was drawn to write two propaganda poems, "The Calpe Hunt" and "A Christmas Poem for Spain", neither of which count among his best compositions (35).


By the end of 1938 the civil war was rapidly drawing to a close. Richardson himself made a fleeting visit to Barcelona that Christmas, only to return appalled by the situation that he found there (36). With the fall of the Republic in February 1939 he lost his post at the Spanish Embassy. Work for the Arden Society, however, became ever more pressing, with thousands of refugees fleeing from Nationalist Spain. In April 1939 he went to New York to address the American Guild for Cultural Freedom- the sister organization to the Arden Society and founded by Prince Hubertus in April 1935. At a dinner presided over by Thomas Mann and attended by many important dignitaries and politicians including the American Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, Richardson spoke on this problem, describing the plight of the Spaniards then living destitute in concentration camps in France (37).


This marks virtually the end of Richardson's involvement with Spain. With the threat of war with Germany already looming large on the horizon, his attention now turned to other things. During the summer of 1939, and once again back in England, he worked with Prince Hubertus on a book on "Christianity and the world crisis" (38). At the same time he also began his autobiography, a novel Sword Between Lovers (39), and the opening poems of his last collection The Heart's Renewal. It was almost as though, behind this sudden rush of literary activity, there was the premonition that death was now not far off. His reaction to the war, when it finally came, is contained in the poem "September The Third," a moving statement of his political faith and idealism:


Sun on the garden the last time today.
Come store it for the winter of the heart;
In half-an-hour or so the cannons start,
And we shall have no thought for the sun's way.
It is a brave or else a foolish thing
To do what we are doing for a land
Of men we never knew, and all we planned
Cast overboard to aid their suffering.
But brave or foolish we have made our choice
And crashed our futures to War's beaten drum,
That children in the many years to come
May listen in these gardens, summer-thrilled,
To the cool magic of a cuckoo's voice
Calling across the silences we killed. (40)


After completing a lecture tour in the United States during the winter months of 1939-1940 (41), Richardson returned to England and enlisted in the Royal Naval Voluntary Reserve. On March 8th, 1941, while on leave in London, he was killed during an air-raid. He was just twenty-nine (42).




NOTES


1. For a rousing defense of Georgian poetry, see James Reeves' introduction to his anthology Georgian Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd., 1962), xi-xxiii.
2. Stanley Richardson, "Letter to England," The Heart's Renewal (New York: Henry Harrison, 1940), 11.
3. Unless otherwise stated, all information concerning Stanley Richardson comes from academic records kept at Cambridge University and from the private archives of Richardson's two cousins, Mrs W. Taylor and Mrs. L. Whittaker.
4. His interest in ballet led him to found the University ballet club "Salome"; whilst his talents as an actor were demonstrated in student productions of Cervantes' La cueva de Salamanca and Lope de Rueda's El convidado. Anon., "C.U. Spanish Society," The Cambridge Review (Cambridge), nº. 1.331 (21-IV-33), 341.
5. The review, whose title was shortened to Contemporaries after the first issue, ran to five numbers during its two-year existence (1933-35). Work by Richardson appeared in all five numbers. This included both poetry ("Andalucia", "Very quietly I watched...", "Francisco", "To F. L. Dead, August 1932", "Et Ego in Arcadia", "There was a thick wet mist...", "Sea Burial", "Ophelia by the Dark Water", "Way into Life", "Extracts from «Songs of my Home»", "From «Sonnets to a Victorian Godmother»", "Triptych for Youth", "Careless the winds blow...", "Spinsters") and prose ("Afternoon Performance", "Flight of a Don", "Sick Harvest"). Other means of publication at this time included The Cambridge Review, which published the poem "Day of the Dead", nº. 1.367 (9-Xl-34), 90.
6. Professor E. M. Wilson recalls having been told by his predecessor at Cambridge, Professor J. B. Trend, that "Richardson was going to work on the anthropological background of the Poema de mío Cid- to try to illuminate it by the ideas of kingship to be found in Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough." Letter to Derek Harris, dated 15-1-77. Although work on this subject seems to have continued for several years (the minutes of the Cambridge University Spanish Society record a lecture given by him on 28th January 1939 entitled "The Cid in the Imagination of the Spanish People" [Cambridge Univ. Library Mss. Add. 7978]), there is no record at Cambridge that Richardson submitted any thesis or any thesis title.
7. In the minutes of the CUSS for February 1934 mention is made of the attendance of Altolaguirre and his wife at a lecture given by Enrique Moreno on the work of Juan Ramón Jiménez (C.U. Library Mss. Add. 7978); it is possible that this may have been the occasion when the two first met.
8. The author of A Small Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Poetry Specially Selected for Broadcasting 1935-1936 (London: B.B.C., 1935). Luis Cernuda gratefully acknowledged this publication in his essay "Líneas sobre los poetas y para los poetas en los días actuales" (1937); reproduced in his Prosa Completa (Barcelona: Barral Editores, 1975), 1319.
9. The author of Orange Groves (London: E. Mathews and Marrot, 1934), a work which carried an introductory poem by Ramón Pérez de Ayala, then Spanish Ambassador in London.
10. The poems were: by Altolaguirre "The Song of the Soul" and "I bear my solitude within..." ("Crepúsculo" from Poesía 1930-31 and "Separación" from Ejemplo); by Alberti "The Hunt" and "Myth" ("Día de caza" and "Mito" from El alba del alhelí): by Lorca "Chinese Song in Europe" ("Canción china en Europa" from Canciones); and by Concha Méndez "Anchor of Dream" and "What atmosphere of mist" (source unknown, possibly uncollected).
11. Letter to the present writer, dated 23-Xl-76.
12. Letter to Carlos Morla Lynch, cited in Morla Lynch, Con Federico García Lorca en España (Madrid: Aguilar, 1957), 443.
13. "The Undergraduate in the Witness Box. 2. Mr Stanley Richardson", The Granta (Cambridge), nº. 966 (25-X-33), 42.
14. Reviewing the first issue of Contemporaries, one critic wrote: "Amongst the poetry there is far too much of Mr Richardson's overt pursuit of beauty, too much tired sophistication of feeling, too little brain work". J. M. R., "Mannerisms Makyth", The Granta, no 953 (24-II-33), 307. Later critics were evidently more appreciative. On the back cover of Richardson's last collection, The Heart's Renewal, the publishers announced that "His poetry has been praised by A.E. Housman, G. K. Chesterton, Virginia Woolf, Humbert Wolfe, Rose Macaulay, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Cecil Day Lewis, Walter de la Mare, etc..."
15. Morla Lynch, op. cit., 442-443.
16. Ibid., 445.
17. Cernuda, "Páginas de un diario (1934-1935)", op. cit., 1421.
18. Further evidence of Richardson's admiration for Cernuda is contained in the inscription at the front of copies of Road to Emmaus and Way into Life which he presented to Cernuda. In the first he wrote: "Luis Cernuda con el cariño de su amigo Stanley. Spring 1935. En el camino largo me alegro de haberte encontrado y conocido". The second bears the dedication: "For Luis Cernuda to whom from now on I shall write poetry. Stanley R. March 1935". Both books are now in the archives of Cernuda's family in Seville.
19. Morla Lynch, op. cit., 446.
20. Stanley Richardson, "Spanish Poetry, 1935", Contemporaries (Cambridge), vol. 2, nº. 1 (1935), 237. Not surprisingly, Cernuda was delighted by this review of his work. Shortly before his death he wrote to Derek Harris asking him if he could find and send a copy of this article, adding: "Le advierto que el trabajo de Richardson aunque lo leí cuando apenas leía inglés, me saca [sic] los colores a la cara. ¡Cómo será el tono!". Letter dated 21-V-62. Cf. Cernuda, Epistolario inédito, ed. F. Ortiz (Sevilla, 1981), 89.
21. Anon. [Stanley Richardson], "Peace in Spain", The Diplomatic-Political Correspondent (London), nº. 1 (November 1938), 19.
22. Ibid., 20, 21.
23. Viscount Churchill, All My Sins Remembered (London: Heinemann, 1964), 161, 164.
24. Curiously, Señor Azcárate makes no mention of Richardson in his memoirs Mi embajada en Londres durante la guerra civil (Barcelona: Editorial Ariel, 1976). Having listed the principal Embassy officials (Daniel Fernández-Shaw, Commander Navarro, José Da Casa, Antonio de la Cruz Marín, Miss Eileen Brooke, José Luis Plaza, Antonio Ramos Oliveira), he simply records that: "A este personal de plantilla se fueron agregando tres o cuatro auxiliares reclutados en el mismo Londres para trabajos especiales en relación, sobre todo, con los servicios de información y prensa" (op. cit., 30). One assumes that Richardson was one of those "tres o cuatro auxiliares".
25. The author of Searchlight on Spain (London, 1938). In April 1938 she was deprived of her post as Conservative Party Whip because of her criticism of the policy of "non-intervention" in Spain. On the evening of her sacking she had dinner at the Spanish Embassy with the Ambassador and with Stanley Richardson, "a devoted friend of Republican Spain and a very promising poet." Duchess of Atholl, Working Partnership (London: Arthur Barker Ltd., 1958), 220.
26. Prince Hubertus zu Löwestein, Towards the Further Shore (London: Victor Gollancz, 1968), 180. In a letter to the present writer dated 10-Xl-76, Mr Martin Forrest (a close friend of Richardson) states that the committee was composed of: Stanley Richardson (Secretary), C. Holland Martin (Treasurer), Nevil Coghill, Evan John, Herbert Read, Helen Simpson and J.B. Trend. One of the ways of raising money was to hold poetry recitals. One such recital was arranged to be held at the home of Lady Astor with T.S. Eliot reading some of his own poems. Löwenstein, On Borrowed Peace (London: Faber and Faber, 1943), 234.
27. Löwenstein, Towards the Further Shore, ed. cit, 215.
28. All information in this paragraph concerning Cernuda's stay in England derives from an undated, unidentified news-clipping kindly forwarded to me by Mrs W. Taylor.
29. Luis Cernuda, "Historial de un libro", op. cit, 920.
30. José Moreno Villa, "Madrid Front", and Federico García Lorca, "Song", New Writing (New Series) (London), nº. 1 (Autumn 1938), 34-35, 109, respectively.
31. "Dos sonetos de William Wordsworth" ["El roble de Guernica", "Cólera de un español altanero"], Hora de España (Barcelona), nº. XVI (April 1938), 11-12.
32. Cernuda, "Historial...", 921.
33. Ibid., 919. In his article "Cernuda en Inglaterra" (Insula, julio-agosto 1977, p.6) Rafael Martínez Nadal suggests that the relationship between the two poets was not altogether satisfactory from Cernuda's point of view, that Richardson tried unsuccessfully to monopolize Cernuda from the moment he set foot in England. Hopefully, Nadal will go further into the matter in his forthcoming book on Cernuda en Inglaterra.
34. Richardson, "Peace in Spain", 20-21.
35. Both poems were originally published in The New Times and Ethiopia News (London), 13-Xl-37, 6, and 1-I-38, 8, respectively. They were both subsequently translated by Manuel Altolaguirre and published by him in Hora de España (Barcelona), nº. XIII (January 1938), 84-85. "The Calpe Hunt" also appeared in the anthology Poems for Spain edited by Stephen Spender and John Lehmann (London: The Hogarth Press, 1939), 88. Richardson's religious stand-point comes across clearly in "To a certain priest"; originally published in Spain at War, nº. 3, June 1938, the poem was recently translated by Bernd Dietz in his anthology of English poetry of the Spanish Civil War (Un país donde lucía el sol, Madrid: Hiperión, 1981). 1 have been unable to trace the poem "Air raid over Barcelona", attributed to Richardson by E. M., editor of the Kraus Reprint of Hora de España (Nendeln: Verlag Detlev Anvermann KG, 1972).
36. Löwenstein, On Borrowed Peace, 210.
37. Löwenstein, Towards the Further Shore, 176, 215.
38. The book was probably "Enemies of the Cross", whose fate Prince Hubertus describes in Towards the Further Shore (p. 219): "The book was printed but never published. The publisher, a rich playboy with left-wing tendencies, objected to the chapter written after the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was concluded and wanted me to leave it out. I never submitted to rightist censorship, I told him, neither would I submit to the leftist variety. Thereupon he burnt the manuscript and proofs and broke up the type. What he did not know, fortunately, was that I still had a set of proofs in my possession."
39. Neither the novel nor the autobiography was ever published, and the texts of both must now be presumed lost.
40. The Heart's Renewal, 4.
41. The lecture tour took him from New England to Seattle, and then back again to New York via Washington. The leaflet which advertised the tour gave as the subject of his lectures: English Youth and Its International Outlook; What English Youth Will Fight For; English Poetry and the Democratic Tradition; Politics and Poetry; The Future of Spain; The Origins and Outcome of the Spanish War.
42. Those who have helped in the preparation of this article are too numerous for me to be able here to thank them all individually. I must, however, acknowledge my very real debt of gratitude to Miss Angela Dimsdale, Professors Derek Harris, Edward Sarmiento and Howard T. Young for their invaluable comments on early drafts of this work; to Mr Martin Forrest and Sr Rafael Martínez Nadal for much valuable information; and, finally, to Mrs W. Taylor and Mrs L. Whittaker for their constant help and forbearance throughout.






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