Square Haunting

by Francesca Wade

  When Aldington was sent back to France in September, Arabella moved upstairs to Cournos’s vacant room, and H. D. reclaimed the bigger flat. Aldington returned at regular intervals on leave, shuttling across the Channel on boats crowded with parties of nurses, reporters and fellow soldiers. The proximity of the front made separation all the more unsettling on both sides: the noise of distant guns could be heard at Dover, while soldiers could enjoy a leisurely breakfast in London and be back in the rat-infested, sodden trenches by sunset, stung with regret for all they were missing. Letters took between two and four days to arrive from the front, so until Aldington walked through the door H. D. feared he might at any moment already be dead: even when he was home on leave, she felt a strange sensation that she was in the company of a ghost. When they embraced, she flinched as his regulation buttons pressed against her cheek; with his khaki tunic flung over the back of an armchair, his service watch ticking away on the table, its face barricaded by woven wire, H. D. felt the war closing in on her, infiltrating her sanctuary.

  H. D.’s discomfort at Aldington’s new role was compounded by a second, longer-lasting infidelity, which marked a definitive rupture in the marriage. In the autumn of 1917, Aldington began sleeping with Arabella Yorke. H. D. knew about the relationship from its beginning, and acquiesced, if only because it relieved her of having to undergo the trauma of sex, and because Aldington insisted it was merely a passing passion: that he still loved H. D., but that – as H. D. later recalled – ‘as he was certain to get killed whenever he returned to the Front he must get every ounce of pleasure out of life while he had the chance’. From this point, when Aldington returned on leave it was not only to see his wife. Increasingly, he was spending nights upstairs in the tiny bedroom, while H. D. slept alone in the main flat, bitterly mourning the transformation she saw in her husband. In her novel Asphodel, Jerrold Darrington’s affairs are multiple, casual, reckless: he seduces women at parties and sleeps with them while Hermione lies awake on the other side of the thin screen, feeling as if her body is split between the woman with her husband and the woman lying silently alone. In Bid Me to Live, the denouement is more specific: after a perilous air raid, Rafe and Bella set off for the pub in Theobalds Road in search of restorative brandy. Rafe returns alone, and Julia (the H. D. character) immediately senses something is wrong. ‘She flung her arms round me in the Square,’ Rafe says dully, his eyes on the ground. He goes out, leaving Julia standing among scattered books and broken glass. As if in a trance, she tidies the room, knowing that nothing will be the same again.

  From everything she later wrote about this period, it’s clear that Aldington’s second affair affected H. D. far more deeply than the first with Flo. In all her novels, this episode is marked by a surreal detachment, and a sense that the war has imposed roles – soldier, wife, mistress – which everyone is playing out blindly, like characters in a Greek tragedy, puppeteered by heartless gods. In public, H. D. acted the accepted wartime part of the faithful wife, waiting at home like Odysseus’s loyal Penelope; in private, she felt like Iphigenia, deceived by a soldier-husband with an appetite for destruction. H. D. had stayed in London hoping to live the life she had envisaged when she first arrived in England, surrounded by other writers and artists and working with a fellow Hellenist in their shared home. Instead, 44 Mecklenburgh Square was overcrowded and divided, each movement within the house now signalling new allegiances. The whole arrangement of the flat – the merged bedroom and living room making H. D.’s most private spaces vulnerable to scrutiny by any visitor – left H. D. feeling exposed and invaded: her room felt like a ‘stage-set’: a fraught interchange of comings and goings, her own status unclear. This shared single room in a Bloomsbury boarding house was no longer a place of freedom from traditional domestic shackles, but a cruel distortion of the family home she might have shared with Aldington and their baby. She felt humiliated by the landlady’s clear disapproval when Aldington and Arabella appeared in the downstairs drawing room in pyjamas during a raid – and must have been aware that Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, living together unmarried, had recently been evicted from their boarding house on Gray’s Inn Road, just behind Mecklenburgh Square, by a landlady determined to maintain propriety on her premises. H. D. shrank from the other tenants, with their inquisitive sidelong glances when they passed her on the stairs; she could hardly bear her private affairs to be the stuff of idle gossip among the residents of a Bloomsbury boarding house. But she did not feel strong enough to fight it. Eventually, in a final gesture towards self-obliteration, she offered Aldington and Arabella use of the main bedroom, and retreated up to Cournos’s tiny garret, where she spent solitary evenings wrapped in the blanket she’d used when sitting out on deck during her first crossing to Europe. It seems another extraordinary concession, but by this point H. D. had thoroughly lost faith in herself. Number 44 Mecklenburgh Square now felt like ‘four walls about to crush her’.

  From the front, Aldington wrote plaintively to excuse his behaviour, protesting that he had little to live for and never intended anyone to suffer. ‘The truth is,’ he wrote in a weak attempt at honesty, ‘I love you & I desire – l’autre (that is, Arabella).’ His words reverberated with H. D. across the decades, and appear, exactly transcribed, in Bid Me to Live. There, Rafe claims to prefer his wife’s company and conversation, but confesses he cannot any longer find her physically attractive, as he does Bella, who is more conventionally ‘feminine’. ‘I would give her a mind, I would give you a body,’ he admits. Julia concludes that his stance reduces women to two types, neither of which allows any single woman to be whole. ‘I would be free,’ writes Julia, ‘if I could live in two dimensions.’ These unhappy circumstances produced the greatest insight of H. D.’s time in Mecklenburgh Square, and a thought echoed by every woman in this book: that real freedom entails the ability to live on one’s own terms, not to allow one’s identity to be proscribed or limited by anyone else. This was the realisation that would eventually drive H. D. to leave Mecklenburgh Square, to seek analysis with Freud, to form new and experimental relationships, and to write the books that gave voice to her suffering. But it was not only her husband who posed a serious challenge to H. D.’s sense of herself during her time in Mecklenburgh Square. At the end of October 1917, an unexpected turn of events introduced several new characters to number 44, whose stay there would have consequences none of them could have predicted.

  *

  H. D.’s relationship with D. H. Lawrence is difficult to reconstruct, its texture long ago dissolved into fragments and fictions. He had been a member of the Imagist circle, though on its margins, being ensconced in his work and his marriage to Frieda von Richthofen, who had left her husband and children to be with him. After meeting in 1914 at the Berkeley Hotel, H. D. and Aldington had visited Lawrence several times in Hampstead, and were sympathetic to the financial troubles he suffered after his 1915 novel The Rainbow was removed from sale because of its open discussion of sexual desire. Lawrence, in turn, was sensitive to H. D.’s vulnerability: early in their acquaintance, he described her as ‘like a person walking a tightrope. You wonder if she’ll get across.’ But he greatly admired her poetry, and considered H. D. the only one of the Imagists who was ‘worth anything’; to Edward Marsh he wrote, ‘Don’t you think H. D. – Mrs Aldington – writes some good poetry? I do – really very good.’ H. D. was thrilled at his attention, and stimulated by his support. Throughout the war years they sent each other works in progress for critique: early drafts of his novel Women in Love, and the new poem sequence she was writing, taking its voices from figures of Greek mythology.

  At this time – sickened by the war, which he considered ‘a blasphemy against life itself’ – Lawrence was evolving a project of escapist fantasy: to gather some like-minded souls, ‘sail away from this world of war and squalor’, and build a new, utopian order elsewhere. He called it Rananim, a Hebrew word translated as ‘let us rejoice’. H. D. wrote to John Gould Fletcher i
n excitement about the plans to find a ranch in the Andes, to ‘slough off Europe for some years, perhaps forever’ and, on horseback, to ‘make for new kingdoms’. Her letter expresses the same sense of sterility that Lawrence described, and her desire to leave the house where she now felt so constricted. ‘I myself can no longer breathe this dead air. It is really killing me – and driving my mind and spirit so far that I am becoming a sort of shadow,’ she told Gould Fletcher. The prospect of a life where creativity was prized over heroism, community over conflict, spoke deeply to her present anguish. But the proposal was little more than a fantasy: the Foreign Office had already confiscated Lawrence’s passport.

  Cornwall provided his alternative refuge. He and Frieda had found a cottage at Higher Tregerthen near the tiny village of Zennor, nestled beneath dramatic cliffs, where they lived ‘very quietly indeed, being far from the world’. It was there that Lawrence met and befriended Cecil Gray, a young man who would play a brief but critical role in H. D.’s life. A cynical aesthete with little respect for received opinion, Gray had arrived in London from Edinburgh in 1915, determined to have nothing to do with the war but to spend his days composing music ‘of a wildness and audacity hitherto undreamt of in art’. Aged twenty-one, Gray was wracked by compulsive self-doubt and fickle emotions: new-found passions would swiftly dissipate, leaving him dizzy at his own inconsistency. Living in Chelsea on a diet of baked beans and cheese, he was working on an orchestral score and a study of the relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner, spending long nights drinking with the circle of artists and bohemians that revolved around Fitzrovia’s pubs and cafes.

  Gray was introduced to Lawrence by his friend Philip Heseltine (the composer later known as Peter Warlock), who venerated Lawrence as ‘the greatest literary genius of his generation’, and who had recently – in an attempt to counter what he perceived as Britain’s unforgivable apathy towards genius and beauty – tried (and failed) to establish a publishing company specifically to distribute Lawrence’s censored work. In spring 1917, Gray and Heseltine visited Higher Tregerthen, and Gray immediately fell in love with Cornwall. Like Lawrence, he savoured the silence, the azure skies, the wild flowers carpeting the moors and the sound of beating waves mingled with the cries of seagulls and swallows. The openness of the land – forty miles of the Atlantic visible from the cliffs – seemed somehow to disallow deception; Gray felt he had escaped to ‘a paradisal existence in which the War and everything connected with it had no place’. On an impulse, he took a five-year lease on a seven-bedroom house three miles down the coast from Zennor, tucked behind the ruins of Bosigran Castle. Eager for a friendly neighbour, Lawrence attended furniture sales on Gray’s behalf, painted the woodwork and polished the floors, signing off detailed letters on the merits of different shapes of chairs and tables with the words ‘Remember the revolution’.

  Brought together as fellow exiles from ‘a hostile and unsympathetic world’, Gray and the Lawrences were soon meeting every day. Gradually, rumours began to circulate among the locals, whose suspicions had already been aroused by Frieda’s German accent: that the Lawrences’ chimney, covered in tar to keep out the damp, was a signal to the enemy; that they held secret reserves of petrol buried within the cliff; that they were on a mission to carry food to the alien submarines that circled the coast. One day, officers followed the Lawrences back from the local shop and asked to inspect their groceries, seizing on a loaf of bread they mistook for a hidden camera. Another evening, at Gray’s house, with the curtains drawn, Lawrence played the piano and Frieda led a resounding chorus of German folk songs. Suddenly there was a bang on the door and six men covered in mud (they had fallen into a ditch as they listened under the windows) marched in with loaded rifles, claiming they had seen lights flashing out to sea. Gray was fined a ‘vindictive’ £20 under the Defence of the Realm Act for his alleged indiscretion; he later learned that their neighbours were so riled that an expedition armed with scythes and pitchforks had at one point set out for his house, its members losing nerve on the way and eventually turning back.

  On 12 October, officers arrived at the Lawrence house with an order from the military authorities that the Lawrences must leave Cornwall within three days. Frieda wept as the detectives rifled through the bread tin and tea caddy; Lawrence’s remonstrations were met with impassivity. They were homeless, until a solution to their problem was found, which Lawrence outlines in his 1923 novel Kangaroo: ‘The American wife of an English friend, a poet serving in the army, offered her rooms in Mecklenburgh Square, and the third day after their arrival in London Somers and Harriet moved there: very grateful indeed to the American girl. They had no money. But the young woman tossed the rooms to them, and food and fuel, with a wild free hand. She was beautiful, reckless, one of the poetesses whose poetry Richard feared and wondered over.’

  *

  Lawrence’s return to London was fraught and painful. The city, he wrote to Gray, was a ghastly Inferno which ‘thinks and breathes and lives air raids, nothing else’. He wandered along the foggy King’s Cross Road, his shoes still caked with Cornish mud, longing to see the foxgloves around his cottage which would soon be in bloom; he asked Gray to send him a pound of Cornish butter, and wrote plaintive petitions to the War Office seeking a revocation of his exile. In his novel Aaron’s Rod, he recalled nocturnal ramblings in Mecklenburgh Square:

  Beyond the tall shrubs and the high, heavy railings the wet street gleamed silently. The houses of the Square rose like a cliff on this inner dark sea, dimly lighted at occasional windows. Boughs swayed and sang. A taxi-cab swirled round a corner like a cat, and purred to a standstill.

  There were happier moments: his friend Cynthia Asquith bicycled to Mecklenburgh Square for omelettes with sardines and pears, cooked by the fire in the ‘very handsome bed sitting-room’; they booked a box for Mozart’s Seraglio in Covent Garden, offering a spare ticket to Arabella, whom Asquith described in her diary as ‘a chic poor American, like a drawing in Vogue’. At the end of November, the Lawrences moved to stay with Gray’s mother in a ‘bourgeois little flat’ in Earl’s Court, but returned regularly to spend evenings in Mecklenburgh Square, sitting round the fire playing charades with H. D., Arabella and Aldington (who had a month’s leave over Christmas), all laughing uproariously at Lawrence’s talent for mimicry, while detectives skulked in the cold stairwell, hoping to catch Lawrence plotting further sedition. The Lawrences’ relationship remained tempestuous, and H. D. witnessed several violent shouting matches: from upstairs, Alida Klemantaski remembered seeing Frieda physically hurl her husband into the next-door flat, to the surprise of its occupant. But other evenings were merrier, despite the continual Zeppelin raids which on one occasion brought down the ceiling of Alida’s bedroom. In a raucous pageant which the group devised in the flat one night, Lawrence paired them off: Cecil Gray (who was visiting) played an angel, with an umbrella as his flaming sword, while H. D. was a dancing Tree of Life. Aldington and Arabella were Adam and Eve (with chrysanthemums for fig leaves); Frieda was the serpent, writhing on the carpet. Lawrence, narrator and puppeteer, blithely cast himself as God Almighty. He wrote to Lowell that H. D. and Aldington ‘seem pretty happy, as far as it is possible under the circumstances. We have had some good hours with them in Mecklenburgh Square – really jolly, notwithstanding everything: remembering that evening at the Berkeley with you, when we all met for the first time, and laughing at ourselves. Oh my dear Amy, I do wish to heaven we could all meet again in peace and freedom, to laugh together and be decent and happy with each other. This is a more wintry winter of discontent than I had ever conceived.’

  Letter from D. H. Lawrence to Lady Cynthia Asquith, 17 November 1917

  Yet it was not Lawrence who rescued H. D. from her present despair, but his friend Cecil Gray. Later in life, H. D. rarely mentioned Gray, but in everything she wrote about this period his intervention is portrayed as having saved her from desperation. Recalling these events in 1938, she described how Gray was introduced
to her by Lawrence, and took her out to dinner one evening while no one else was around. (In Bid Me to Live, Cyril Vane whisks Julia away in the middle of an air raid to a bustling restaurant, where they dine among officers on leave shouting across tables and ordering more wine in expensive obliteration.) Afterwards, they returned to Mecklenburgh Square for coffee, where she opened up to him about her misery. He was immediately sympathetic and refreshingly straightforward, insisting that, whatever happened, she had to leave Aldington; it was clear to him that the situation was taking a terrible toll on her health, and that ‘it would be suicide for me to stay for another leave of my husband’s under these circumstances’. Across her fictional accounts of the period, Gray is presented with a consistency rarely afforded to other characters in this story: he is ‘someone not in khaki’, someone who ‘did not talk of war’. His hatred of militarism and his passion for music reminded her of the creative partner she now feared she had lost for good. Discussing art and beauty with Gray stirred in H. D. the memory of her pre-war self; as they talked and laughed, she felt her identity as someone other than a soldier’s wife seeping back into her.

  Gray left London on 11 March 1918, and encouraged H. D. to follow him to Cornwall. At first, she was reluctant to leave Mecklenburgh Square and cement the break with her husband by abandoning their shared home. But as Aldington’s next leave approached, she saw that Gray’s invitation offered a chance to regain the solitude and privacy which the war had eroded – as well as a possible new romance. From Bosigran, Gray wrote to reiterate her welcome, offering a measured warning amid requests for her to bring sheets, towels, butter ration cards and Flaubert’s letters: ‘How I must have talked to you in London – about what I was going to do and how wonderful I was! I hope you did not take it too seriously.’ His words cannot have encouraged H. D., but they did not dissuade her. Before the end of March, she left Mecklenburgh Square and took the train to Cornwall. As she prepared to leave her home, H. D. received a letter from an old friend. It read: