Poor Dryad
Buon Viaggio
Ezra
*
John Cournos’s work in St Petersburg was halted by the outbreak of the October Revolution; once the Brest-Litovsk peace was concluded on 3 March 1918, it seemed futile to stay in a volatile country where a civil war was brewing. On his journey home he spent three weeks in the Arctic port of Murmansk, stuck aboard a broken-down train, then sailed back to Dover on a perilously overcrowded vessel captured from the Germans. He arrived in London exhausted, expecting Arabella to greet him – though concerned that his regular letters and requests for chocolate had gone unanswered – only to discover that H. D. was in Cornwall, Aldington at a new training camp in Tunbridge Wells, and that Aldington and Arabella were apparently in love, their affair consummated in his own top-floor bedroom. He was furious, and blamed H. D. for failing to look after Arabella as she had promised. Remembering how she had condoned Aldington’s fling with Flo, he immediately assumed that she had been complicit in this second affair: in his mind, not only had H. D. rejected him herself, but she had now allowed his fiancée to betray him too.
Aldington insisted that it was at Arabella’s request that he had not disclosed their relationship to Cournos. ‘I am not ashamed of anything I have done; I regret nothing,’ he wrote, his letter veering between placatory and defiant. ‘What chiefly hurts you, I know, is that you feel I took advantage of your absence – but would your presence have altered things? I don’t know; there are events which are stronger than we are; there seems a kind of fatality about it, a bitter irony … we fell in love with each other, that is all.’ H. D.’s letters were more contrite, begging for Cournos’s continued friendship. ‘O, it was so terrible – you can’t imagine,’ she wrote in April 1918. ‘I am not able to think of myself as a person now. I must move, act, & do as it is moved upon me to do & act … I am cut off from everyone in the old world.’ She told him that, as she had done in Devon, she was retreating into her work in the face of ‘curious mental and spiritual tangles’, and suggested he do the same. ‘We will go mad with the general madness unless we “build our house upon a rock.” Your rock (as mine) is creating & imaginative work … don’t let the outside world hurt you.’
Taking her advice, Cournos poured his anger into a vitriolic novel, incorporating many of H. D.’s letters verbatim. Miranda Masters shocked H. D. when she read it on publication in 1926 (‘a most unseemly book about ME I think … a fool and an incompetent and suppressed nymphomaniac’). Cournos’s novel offers a very different perspective on the Mecklenburgh Square episode: it is a sobering reminder that H. D.’s accounts, many and varied as they are, offer only her views of events which affected several other lives. The novel’s acidity is directed entirely at Miranda, whom the Spectator reviewer denounced as ‘one of the most unpleasant, abnormal of women, even in current fiction’; while her husband’s affairs are portrayed as the reasonable and inevitable result of his body’s yearning for comfort, Miranda’s crude flirtation with the central character, John Gombarov (a very lightly veiled version of Cournos himself), is represented as a sordid craving for male attention. The novel overflows with bitterness at the betrayal Cournos felt, abandoned as collateral damage in the Aldingtons’ experimental marriage. He had looked to his friends’ apparent happiness – ‘here were two poets,’ he wrote later, ‘man and woman, who were happy together and worked together’ – as a model for the sort of marriage he had hoped to enjoy with Arabella; the revelations left him disillusioned and mistrustful, especially of women. Just as the period would remain with H. D. for ever, so did these rejections sting Cournos in a way that would affect future relationships – particularly one forged two years later in the very same Mecklenburgh Square flat, with a young graduate named Dorothy L. Sayers.
*
In Cornwall, away from the ruins and misery of London, H. D. felt regenerated. Gray’s house was beautiful and spacious, the walls lined with books, the housekeeper dignified and discreet. He gave H. D. her own room, where she wrote her celebrated poems ‘Leda’, ‘Lethe’ and ‘Song’ gazing out through the window at the ocean and ancient rock formations, the timbers shaken not by air raids but by gales. She felt the Cornish landscape was bathed in a ‘cold healing mist, as if someone had breathed a cold, healing breath’; as it had to Lawrence, Cornwall felt to her like a fine substitute for Rananim, holding in it the promise of a new and vitalising way of life. She continued to receive letters from her husband, pointedly addressed to Mrs Richard Aldington, which she hid from Gray. No longer did Aldington try to shield H. D. from the reality of life at the front, to which he returned in April 1918. ‘Twice last week I tried to get killed,’ he wrote pitifully, ‘and was unlucky or lucky, whichever you like.’ In June, Aldington wrote frostily to Flint, who had heard rumours that he and H. D. had separated: ‘We are “parted” to the extent that I am in France and she in Cornwall. But we are not “parted” in any other sense … You – et le monde – are very blind if you think anything could ever part us two.’ He pleaded with her to accept money from him, and to keep her identity entwined with his: ‘I am so proud that you have my name – please, please won’t you keep it, whatever happens, in memoriam as it were?’ He wrote that John Cournos was ‘going about London … implying that I have committed some deed of revolting treachery’, and that Arabella was trying to ‘enslave’ him by pressuring him to divorce H. D. and marry her: ‘To you I have under-estimated my passion for A, to A I have under-estimated my tenacious devotion to you.’ His letters were insistent in their plea for forgiveness. ‘Out of this present utter darkness of mine, this confusion & complete lack of direction & interest, there is one thing that seems to matter – you.’
At the end of July 1918, H. D. discovered she was pregnant. When she broke the news to her husband, Aldington was at first supportive, telling her to ‘cheer up and eat lots’, and promising to accept the child as his if she wanted him to. But his feelings quickly changed: the attitude of casual acceptance he had cultivated towards her affair (‘Damn it, Dooley,’ he had written, ‘I believe in women having all the lovers they want if they’re in love with them’) now vanished, and he reproached H. D. mournfully for her lack of caution. His letters were careful to imply that it was she who had broken the moral code of their permissive relationship, displaying an obtuse unawareness of the distress he had himself caused: ‘Gray becomes your husband & I merely your lover; because the emotions that bind lovers together are exquisite & sterile like poetry, but a child is a more ponderous link than any beauty … Oh, it is sad, bitter, biting sad, when our love was so deep, so untroubled really by our other love-affairs. But a child!’ Yet the bond between H. D. and Cecil Gray was quickly to prove brittle. That same month, Gray – who had been rejected from military duty on four occasions owing to a childhood illness – was finally called up to the lowest category of service, which involved cleaning lavatories. He immediately vanished into hiding, judging that the war was too close to its end for the authorities to bother prosecuting him as a deserter. Sweeping H. D. to Cornwall had been a dramatic gesture, but he had no desire to take on the responsibility of fatherhood; he still aspired to a reckless life devoted to art, and convinced himself that the situation was a test of his resolve. While H. D. was wavering over whether or not to leave London, he had written to remonstrate with her for being ‘so elusive, so unapproachable’: ‘You do not pretend to love me any more than you do,’ he wrote in wonder. But now it was he who drew their affair back to reality. His crumbling in the face of responsibility was certainly influenced by Philip Heseltine, who had recently become a father and wrote disdainfully to Gray about the financial drain and the incompatibility of domestic ties with making art. (He had refused to marry his child’s mother, a model named Puma Channing whom Heseltine dismissed as a ‘vampire’.) Gray’s 1948 autobiography Musical Chairs (which does not mention H. D.) describes how he spent six months travelling Italy, ‘sick to death of the world and everything and everybody in it’. She
never saw him again.
H. D. was alone once more, abandoned unceremoniously by the man who had seemed to promise her escape. It was her second wartime pregnancy, and the memory of the stillbirth still traumatised her; furthermore, she was devastated at the news that her beloved brother Gilbert had been killed in France. Aldington was now adamant that their marriage was over – ‘fini, fini, fini’ – but that they should remain friends and continue to correspond ‘on matters of art & literature & life’. At the end of the summer, H. D. left Cornwall and stayed with her friend Amy Randall in Hampstead; she couldn’t bear to return to Mecklenburgh Square, so she sublet her room for the rest of the lease. On 1 November, Aldington informed H. D. that he was going ‘over the top’, and sent her a blank cheque for use if he was killed. Ten days later, the war was over.
But just as she saw her new-found freedom beginning to dissipate, H. D. met someone who would offer her a new chance at the rebirth she had initially experienced in Cornwall. On 17 July 1918, H. D. had told Cournos – to whom she continued to write, despite his fury with her – that she had ‘begun really seriously on a novel’. That same day, she met Bryher for the first time. Born Annie Winifred Ellerman, Bryher had changed her name to express the deep affiliation she felt with the Scilly Isles, and to escape ready identification with a single gender. She was the daughter of a shipping magnate said to be the richest man in England, but was determined never to write under her own name, to avoid any accusations that she was exploiting her father’s influence. (Later in life, she would bestow her fortune liberally on struggling writers she met in Paris, and act as patron to numerous experimental presses, magazines and film productions.) Bryher was eight years younger than H. D., whose collection Sea Garden she had learned by heart; she herself was desperate to write and learn ancient languages, and considered H. D. ‘a Greek come to life again’. Bryher was staying in Cornwall, and when she heard that H. D. was nearby she resolved to visit her, walking to Bosigran through a storm. This meeting would mark the beginning of an open relationship which spanned forty years; in the various periods when they did not live together, they wrote to each other daily until H. D.’s death.
At first, stung by the betrayals and indignities of the last few years, H. D. was ambivalent about the prospect of taking on responsibility for another person’s well-being. Bryher was volatile, and her devotion oppressive: ‘The worst thing is,’ H. D. wrote to Cournos, ‘the girl is in love with me, so madly that it is terrible. No man has ever cared for me like that. She seems possessed at times with a daemon or spirit outside herself … I must have my freedom first and if the strain becomes too great, I shall just chuck her.’ But Bryher’s sensitivity and interventions proved indispensable over the first year of their acquaintance. Remembering the stillbirth, H. D. was listless throughout her pregnancy, almost in denial about the upheaval to come: she told a friend that ‘I feel it very wicked to worry yet about this one’s life and future … I cannot talk about it, as I was so sad and ill the last time.’ Frances Perdita was born on 31 March 1919, in a nursing home in Ealing. ‘My only real criticism is that this is not my child,’ said Pound, who came to visit. Aldington – now released from the army, and experiencing deferred shell shock – brought bunches of daffodils. The birth and its aftermath were extremely traumatic for H. D., who was suffering from pneumonia resulting from the deadly influenza epidemic which spread across post-war Europe; her illness was so severe that her landlady, somewhat unsympathetically, suggested Bryher put up the money for H. D.’s burial in advance. Yet Bryher nursed H. D. loyally through this period and subsequent crises, and H. D. later acknowledged that ‘without her … I could not have gone on’.
Bryher understood H. D.’s ambivalence about motherhood – her fear that caring duties would threaten her freedom and identity as an artist and confine her to the traditional role of ‘angel in the house’. She was insistent that H. D.’s writing should not be interrupted. ‘I hope you will be sensible over Perdita,’ Bryher wrote to H. D. in April 1919, ‘and remember you were not given poetry to sit and worry over an infant in a solitary cottage. I am very jealous for your poetry and I will even fight Perdita about it.’ Early on in her pregnancy, when it seemed likely that she would be embarking on motherhood alone, H. D. had written to Bryher that she hoped to employ a nurse, recommended by Brigit Patmore, to ‘take, at times, entire charge, so that I may continue my work’ – though she also wrote longingly of the ‘great adventures’ she anticipated having with her daughter, when she was old enough. Bryher’s support enabled an even more drastic solution: her money allowed Perdita to spend much of her first two years as a full-time resident at the renowned Norland Nursery in Kensington, where H. D. – still recovering from her illness – visited her daily. From 1921, Perdita lived with the two women and a revolving cast of nannies, friends and devoted grandparents (Bryher’s parents, and H. D.’s mother Helen, who came to Europe after her husband’s death and often travelled with the group), an integral part of a loving ménage structured around H. D.’s work. Thinking back on the routines and rhythms of her childhood, Perdita remembered watching H. D. sharpen her yellow pencils and stack up her notebooks, before being whisked away by Bryher as the study door closed. Bryher’s writing could be done while Perdita played under the table, but the child knew that her mother was not to be disturbed. For H. D., Bryher enabled a way of life where motherhood and creative work could be combined, if precariously: a life she had not felt possible. On 17 July, H. D. would write to Bryher if they were not together: the message would read, ‘Every year I thank you for saving me and Pup.’
H. D. and Perdita
*
During the 1920s, H. D. published several successful volumes of poetry, living at the centre of a bohemian network of writers and artists that extended across Europe. But the creative crisis associated with her time in Mecklenburgh Square refused to abate. On her shelves lay the unfinished manuscripts she had drafted and abandoned over the years; she described the process as akin to weaving Penelope’s web, constantly undoing work in a sterile cycle of destruction. By the early 1930s, her production had ground to a halt, and she felt trapped in a spiral of ‘repetitive thoughts and experiences’, unable to move on. It was at this point that, with Bryher’s encouragement, H. D. approached Sigmund Freud, whose radical theories on sexuality, the self and the unconscious had shocked the medical establishment. Their relationship – in part one of teacher and pupil, as well as analyst and analysand – was mutually stimulating. Freud, whom she called ‘Papa’ or ‘the Professor’, was an unlikely mentor for H. D.: she was especially indignant when he told her that ‘women did not creatively amount to anything or amount to much, unless they had a male counterpart or a male companion from whom they drew their inspiration’. Riled, she determined to prove to him that her artistic powers manifested through, not despite, her femininity. But Freud’s provocative attitude and general demeanour reminded her disconcertingly of D. H. Lawrence. As their analysis progressed, she was surprised to find that memories of Lawrence kept swimming to the surface: a brief episode in Mecklenburgh Square, long suppressed, now took on greater significance than it had before.
After she left Mecklenburgh Square, H. D. never saw Lawrence again. But during her analysis – her memory pricked by the resemblance she saw in Freud – she asked Bryher to send to Vienna a copy of Lawrence’s selected letters, edited by Aldous Huxley and published in 1932, two years after Lawrence’s death from tuberculosis at the age of forty-four. Her interest piqued, she began to read various recent memoirs of Lawrence written by ‘fanatical’ women – among them Catherine Carswell and Mabel Dodge Luhan – who seemed to have ‘found him some sort of guide or master’. H. D. was irritated by this ‘cult’, and the easy way Lawrence, in death, had begun to be idolised (in Virginia Woolf’s words, he had acquired a posthumous reputation as ‘a prophet, the exponent of some mystical theory of sex’). But she found him more and more on her mind, even infiltrating her subconscious. In a dream wh
ere Lawrence appeared without a beard, he merged with an image of her father she remembered from a photograph: the connection seemed to symbolise a power he held over her, but also a vertiginous blurring of his identity with her own. Later, during a ‘dark, bomb-shattered night’ of the Second World War, she dreamed again of ‘a fiery, golden Lawrence, it was nothing but a fleeting presence and the words “Hilda, you are the only one of the whole crowd, who can really write.”’
But as well as his praise for her writing, which had meant so much, these visions reminded her of a certain discomfort she had always felt around Lawrence. H. D. had written to John Cournos in October 1916 that she was beginning to see people in relation to colours: Cournos the peaceful blue of lapis lazuli, Aldington a fiery wine red. ‘But there is another now,’ she confided. ‘There is a yellow flame, bright, hard, clear, terrible, cruel! There is the yellow that sees in me its exact complement. There is a power in this person to kill me … I do not mean physically – (though I do not expect to see him physically) – I mean in a more subtle way. I do not want to deny fate – but it is fate that I die or that I live!’ She doesn’t offer this person’s name, and he isn’t mentioned elsewhere in their correspondence, but in Miranda Masters Cournos gives his reaction to this letter, which is quoted almost verbatim, and reveals that he took her to be speaking of a poet ‘whose beautiful, passionate verses were shocking England by their frank pagan sensuality’ – evidently a portrait of Lawrence. She didn’t mention him to Cournos again, and this character doesn’t recur in the novel, this episode left as an unexplained aside. But H. D.’s letter expresses a deep and complex emotion towards Lawrence. Even tenuous connections seemed, to her, imbued with portentous meaning: she had been struck by the fact that their birthdays were a year less a day apart, so that she and Lawrence were the same age for one day a year; their reversed initials also implied a twinship which felt to her significant. But her idea that Lawrence possessed a power to ‘kill me’, though not ‘physically’, suggests an anxiety that this sameness – the ‘exact complement’ – bore within it a threat: a fear that he might wipe out her own creative powers, deprive her, somehow, of her voice.
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