All Men Are Enemies by Richard Aldington

First published: 1933

Type of work: Bildungsroman

Time of work: 1900-1914, 1919, and 1926-1927

Locale: England, Italy, Austria, and France

Principal Characters:

• Antony Clarendon, the hero, a public school student, army officer, and junior executive
• Henry Clarendon, his father
• Henry Scrope, a local squire
• Stephen Crang, an elementary school master and a highranking civil servant
• Robin Fletcher, a novelist and a Communist organizer
• Katharina (Katha), an Austrian, Antony’s true love
• Margaret, Antony’s sometime mistress, later his wife
• Walter Cartwright, Margaret’s friend, a civil servant
• Richard Waterton, a disabled pilot, Antony’s landlord and friend
• Julian, Margaret’s brother, a solicitor and journalist
• Mama, and
• Babbo, elderly owners of a hotel on Aeaea

The Novel

Antony Clarendon grows up in the comfortable, protected, pre-World War I environment of rural Great Britain, believing that Englishmen are generous and caring and love the land with an opulence not found elsewhere. Antony’s early memories of Vine House, the home in which he was born and grew up, a seventeenth century brick and stone dwelling with a coat of arms over the door, are memories of a “harmony so complete that he had breathed it as naturally and unconsciously as pure air.” The people he encounters, from his nanny, Annie, to the local squire, Henry Scrope, affirm the permanence and kindliness of this splendid world.

A very brief affair with his cousin Evelyn convinces him of the paramount importance of the world of the senses. Even a note of dissonance sounded by Stephen Crang, the local radical, who simplistically reduces all life to the problem of subsistence, hardly gets him to change his opinions, although it does encourage him to ponder the extent of society’s responsibility toward those less fortunate.

When Antony is graduated from secondary school, he has no clear idea of what he will do. He tells his father that he is considering becoming an architect, and his father gives him some money to go to Italy to luxuriate in the wonders of the past. On an island in the Tyrrhenian Sea (symbolically called Aeaea after the mythical dwelling place of Circe), Antony meets the love of his life, Katharina. They have an intense two-week affair (“he heard her whispering from far away: ‘Herz, Herz, mein Herz!’”) and make plans to meet again in London, where she will go to live with him, after first returning home to Vienna. Unfortunately, this is the summer of 1914. The Great War intervenes, and she cannot leave her country. The lovers’ meeting never takes place.

Five years later, Antony, having fought on the Western Front as an infantry officer, is haunted by memories of the killing and destruction. He now finds England insipid and views most of its establishment as misguided. Antony wants to be left alone. He continues to be traumatized by the loss of Katharina and asks Henry Scrope, the local squire in his childhood village, to help him obtain a passport to go to Austria and look for her. Scrope’s connections, however, do not pay off.

Antony feels his past slipping away from him. “There was something in having a firm path underfoot, gasless air and no shelling, but otherwise he found nothing [about his old haunts] to rejoice in.” His father pressures him to settle down with a steady job and to marry Margaret, with whom Antony had an affair in the last year of the war. Margaret wants to become Tony’s wife and even tries to entrap him into getting her pregnant. Antony sees through her. He is determined to make no decisions concerning matrimony until he has had a chance to go to Vienna for Katharina. “There was one certainty from which he could not escape, and that was that his relation with Margaret had never been wholly right, never the complete liberation and utter self-forgetting he had experienced with Katha.”

Antony finally manages to get a passport and an Austrian visa and sets off to find his love. He goes to her last known address but finds the house deserted and for sale. He tries to discover her whereabouts from the real estate office, but the agent refers him to the building’s present owner, who also cannot tell him anything. Antony next tries the police, equally without success. He leaves Vienna in despair, returning to Aeaea, where he has spent so many blissful hours. He takes a room in the same hotel, the very room where he and Katharina made love. The trip adds to his melancholy, and on the boat returning to the mainland, he watches the island fade into the distance “as if he were a dead soul ferried over the water of death and gazing back at the last glimpse of the warm land of the living.”

Seven years pass; it is now 1926. Antony is unhappily married to Margaret. He is an executive in a London firm but finds that, despite the material comfort his job provides, he is still miserable. He concludes that “business is bunk. Worse than that. It’s the gradual death of all vital instincts and feelings.” He wants out. At a Board of Directors meeting, he resigns, requesting to liquidate his initial investment in the business. The other directors think he is tired and suggest that he take a few months off to restore his spirits. His wife treats the whole thing as a childish aberration that will pass.

Yet Antony has made up his mind. He heads back to the Continent to rethink his life, going from Chartres to Blois and down toward the Spanish frontier, mostly on foot. He returns to England in time for the General Strike. He participates by doing volunteer work for a London daily, loading the newspapers in cars for distribution to the provinces. England’s greatest example of postwar labor unrest makes Antony realize how utterly helpless he is, how much he is “at the mercy of the social machine.”

The following year is his year of decision. He can no longer relate to his friends or to his wife, whose main concern is to maintain the upper-middle-class standard of living to which she has become accustomed. Following a depressing reunion with his first love, Evelyn, Antony realizes that “everybody he had known and loved in pre-war years was either dead, or estranged from him, or had somehow drifted out of his life.” He again seeks solace in travel, going this time to Tunis, then Sicily, and on to Rome, where by chance he meets Filomena, the daughter of the owners of the hotel on Aeaea at which he once stayed.

Filomena tells him that Katharina is now at her parents’ hotel, although she is due to leave the day after tomorrow. Antony immediately finds a cab, checks out of his hotel, and heads for the railway station to catch the next train for Naples. When it leaves without him, he hires a taxi to get him there. He takes the night boat to Aeaea and arrives at his final destination the following afternoon.

The elderly hotel owners treat him as a long-lost relative. They say that Signorina Katharina is out taking a walk. Antony finds her sitting in the hidden place under a rocky ledge where they first fell in love. Katharina seems delighted to see him, but Antony notices a mysterious fear in her eyes. On the morrow, he discovers the reason.

She tells him that during the war her father was falsely accused of helping Russia and was thrown in prison, where he died. She herself was in jail under surveillance. Her brother, who was in the army, found the disgrace unbearable and committed suicide. The family lost its money; she had to sell the house. After the war, she was unable to get permission to come to England and could not find work. To avoid starvation she turned to prostitution. She finally found a job as a cleaning lady in a shop.

Antony’s love for her, however, has not changed. He says that he was also dishonored by the war and begs her to forget past sorrows and regrets; they should now “sow love and happiness where they planted destruction and misery.” He plans their future. He will divorce Margaret; Katharina will leave Vienna and come to live with him for the rest of his life, possibly in some small house in the south of France. Once a year they will return to Aeaea. Katharine then makes another confession: During the three months she was a prostitute, she had herself sterilized. Antony is unconcerned. He claims that he would have been a rotten father anyway.

Antony then tells her that they should live for the moment and not look too far into the future. He says that they should guard their love from the rest of the world and hope that the world of men will “pardon us the happiness we have made for ourselves, as we pardon them the misery they have laid upon us.”

The Characters

Richard Aldington calls Antony “an example of the modern romantic idealistic temperament,” a man who is “struggling towards what he believes will be a finer and fuller life.” He divides Antony’s life into two periods: before and after the Great War. Before 1914, Antony was protected from the harshness of evil. “No one ever told [him] that there were vast areas of England where children had never seen things growing, where the sun was hidden behind perpetual smoke, where the rain was black with smuts, and life a sort of organized hell.” The trenches of France changed everything, destroying his sense of permanence and contentment. Antony is a very disturbed and self-centered young man, inclined toward sentimentality, seeking refuge behind a presumption of his own moral superiority. His search for a new foundation will include “life with the woman he really loves” and “the energy and beauty of existence which he wants to contribute to their joint possession.”

The book’s other characters are mostly weak and two-dimensional. They drop in and out of Antony’s life, heightening his frustration, providing him with an opportunity to denounce the shortcomings of contemporary society. In any exchange they consistently emerge second-best. Antony sees them as compassionless, unable to understand the higher things of life. They are all stodgy ignoramuses living artificial lives, his wife, Margaret, included. He characteristically dismisses her reaction to his decision to throw away his career as an example of “exemplary bitchiness.”

Antony at thirty-three, still a bit too young for the proverbial mid-life crisis, sums up his life: “For twenty years he had been a happy child, for four years a wretched soldier, for a year and a half a half-demented crock, and for the rest a business parasite.” Antony’s two-week affair has become a symbol of salvation.

Katharina will infuse his life with new meaning, but her personality is one-dimensional. She is sexually desirable, compassionate, and completely devoted to making Antony happy. She is a male fantasy, a woman who fulfills her lover’s need to protect her. She smiles with delight when he gives her a smile. Despite Richard Aldington’s attempt to give her profundity by making her a victim, she remains unconvincing.

Critical Context

Aldington entered the British army in 1916, the year of the Battle of the Somme, and was so traumatized by his experiences that he returned from the war with a case of shell shock from which it took eight years to recover. In his fiction, he tried to achieve a catharsis, pouring out his anger in such novels as Death of a Hero (1929), The Colonel’s Daughter (1931), and All Men Are Enemies. All the works are autobiographical.

All Men Are Enemies skips over the war itself, leaping from 1914 to 1919, but the conflict forms the spine of the narrative. In trying to make sense of the hideous slaughter, Aldington is often repetitive, and his plot lacks direction. The love story is compelling, but its sense of drama is frequently lost in the endless lectures on what is wrong with everything. He has Antony telling his father that “patriotism is bunk, and that we’re all exploited by catchwords to enrich a set of devils and gratify the power sense of sadistic old men and women.” Yet Mr. Clarendon, understandably, does not listen.

Though many critics were impressed by the fervor of Aldington’s prose, to say nothing of his message, All Men Are Enemies was not treated too kindly. Louis Kronenberger called it “an outpouring of miscellaneous information, ideas and sentiments in a pretentious desire to invent man’s salvation in a mixed up world.” Another reviewer, however, L. A. G. Strong, more generously called it the best thing that Aldington had done, saying that it possessed none of the “crossness and ineffectual anger that has spoiled some of Mr. Aldington’s work in the past.”

Aldington’s style is often florid, his tendency to modify his nouns with multiple adjectives betraying poetic antecedents. He said that he especially tried to depict physical love “to create new sensations in the mind of the reader by evoking the reactions and emotions experienced when one human being touches another.” Yet many of his descriptions, albeit mildly erotic, may seem, in the light of the sexual revolution, outdated and even ludicrous: “Her lithe limbs clasped him with passionate eagerness, and almost at once he felt her body shaken with ecstasy, and she moaned softly.” The resemblance to D. H. Lawrence is rather more than coincidental.

Bibliography

Hughes, Glenn. Imagism and the Imagists: A Study in Modern Poetry, 1931.

Kershaw, Alister, and Frederic-Jacques Temple. Richard Aldington: An Intimate Portrait, 1965.

Kronenberger, Louis. Review in The New York Times. LXXXII (July 30, 1933), p. 7.

McCarthy, Mary. Review in The New Republic. LXXVI (September 13, 1933), p. 136.

McGreevy, Thomas. Richard Aldington: An Englishman, 1931.

Smith, Richard Eugene. Richard Aldington, 1977.

The Times Literary Supplement. Review. March 2, 1933, p. 144.