Mecklenburgh Square – Named for Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the wife of King George III, and queen of Great Britain and Ireland from 1761 until her death in 1818; a pen pal of Marie Antoinette and an influential patron of the arts. Fanny Burney was one of her ladies-in-waiting.
Samuel Pepys Cockerell – For the building of Mecklenburgh Square – and various intrigues involving renegade builders – see Donald J. Olsen, Town Planning in London.
‘exposed to insult’ – Even in the twentieth century, the location proved off-putting to potential residents. On 7 January 1915, Virginia Woolf rejected a house in Mecklenburgh Square: ‘a vast place, with a great hall, a sweeping staircase; & we could have a flat at the top – the only objection being that Gray’s Inn Road is at the back’. She looked over another house in the square but was deterred by the landlady’s collections of photographs of royal families of the world; they stayed in Richmond instead.
‘indecent and improper’ – Donald J. Olsen, Town Planning in London, p. 118.
‘so very airy!’ – See also Jean Rhys’s 1939 novel Good Morning, Midnight, in which Sasha takes a ‘little health-stroll’ around Mecklenburgh Square.
prominent suffragettes – Among them were the militants Annie Kenney and Rachel Barrett, whose shared flat at 19 Mecklenburgh Square was raided several times by the police. Catherine Pine, nurse and suffragette, lived in the square and cared for four female ‘war babies’ whom Emmeline Pankhurst adopted in 1915.
‘ardent but educated’ – VW to Violet Dickinson, 27 February 1910. On 1 January she had written to her Greek tutor, Janet Case: ‘Would it be any use if I spent an afternoon or two weekly in addressing envelopes for the Adult Suffragists? … You impressed me so much the other night with the wrongness of the present state of affairs that I feel that action is necessary … How melancholy it is that conversation isn’t enough!’ She immortalised her experience in Night and Day, where Mary Datchet volunteers in a Bloomsbury building shared by numerous relief causes, busy ‘disseminating their views upon the protection of native races, or the value of cereals as foodstuffs’.
‘Reform House’ – The premises were shared by the Women’s Trade Union League, the National Anti-Sweating League, the Working Women’s Legal Advice Bureau, the National Federation of Women Workers (which organised strikes and demonstrations for women excluded from other unions), the Industrial Law Committee (which established an indemnity fund for the protection of women dismissed from jobs for giving evidence to government inspectors) and the People’s Suffrage Federation. The top flat – often the site of lectures and fundraising concerts – belonged to the Labour MP Will Anderson and his wife Mary Reid Macarthur, a passionate campaigner for trade unions and workers’ rights, who was involved in most of the building’s projects. She co-founded the National Federation of Women Workers with Gertrude Tuckwell, who shared another flat in Mecklenburgh Square with Constance Smith, a fellow labour activist and factory inspector.
‘colony of workers’ – Gertrude Tuckwell, Constance Smith: A Short Memoir, p. 29. Anderson’s obituary in The Times described their house in Mecklenburgh Square as ‘a homely centre for all reformers – not, let me explain, a salon but a home’.
‘genteel, commodious’ – The Times, 16 January 1822.
‘high-class service flatlets’ – The Times, 16 October 1939; 26 November 1925.
‘nests of’ – Thomas Burke, Living in Bloomsbury, p. 12.
‘sunk in public’ – ‘The Bohemian in Bloomsbury’, Saturday Review, 17 September 1904.
‘the beloved’ – Emily Hobhouse, ‘Women Workers: How They Live, How They Wish to Live’, Nineteenth Century: a monthly review (March 1900).
violent underworld – Mecklenburgh Square appeared several times in the crime pages of Victorian newspapers, though reportage usually set up a dichotomy between the square’s respectable inhabitants and sinister external interlopers, from the servant who pawned all the family’s property while they were abroad, to the bogus anchovy-seller, left to wait in the hallway while the maid fetched her master, who made away with two greatcoats.
‘people are always’ – DLS, ‘The Vindictive Story of the Footsteps that Ran’, in Lord Peter Views the Body.
‘in Paddington’ – Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie.
Bloomsbury signalled possibility – This sense of freedom is expressed in numerous novels and stories by writers of the period. Woolf’s very first short story, ‘Phyllis and Rosamond’ (1906), describes two sisters from a well-to-do South Kensington home who feel ‘indigenous to the drawing-room’, and are offered no education other than preparation for marriage. A visit to friends in ‘distant and unfashionable’ Bloomsbury awakens Phyllis to the potential of re-inventing herself in a different place, a different house: ‘The stucco fronts, the irreproachable rows of Belgravia and South Kensington seemed to Phyllis the type of her lot; of a life trained to grow in an ugly pattern to match the staid ugliness of its fellows. But if one lived here in Bloomsbury, she began to theorise, waving with her hand as her cab passed through the great tranquil squares, beneath the pale green of umbrageous trees, one might grow up as one liked.’ In Isabella Ford’s On the Threshold (1895), two student friends move together into cheap Bloomsbury digs, rejecting the comforts of their parental homes in favour of a gloomy boarding house, which to them is like ‘a house in Paradise’. A Writer of Books (1898) by ‘George Paston’ (Emily Morse Symonds) follows Cosima Chudleigh, an aspiring writer who moves to a Bloomsbury boarding house to be near the British Museum; in Violet Hunt’s A Workaday Woman (1906), the narrator Caroline feels a ‘sensation of unaccustomed liberty’ when she goes to Bloomsbury to visit Jehane Bruce, who ‘lives alone in a flat, and pays its rent and supports herself on regular journalism and occasional fiction’. In C. F. Keary’s 1905 novel Bloomsbury, May and Joyce share a room in Mecklenburgh Square itself, described as ‘the back of beyond’, from where they attend art classes, lectures and revolutionary meetings. In Radclyffe Hall’s 1924 novel The Unlit Lamp, two women dream of setting up home together in one of the new Working Women’s Flats in Bloomsbury (‘we’d have a little flat together, and be free and very happy … we might be purposeful and tired and happy because we mean something’). Similarly, in Winifred Holtby’s 1924 novel The Crowded Street, the heroine leaves her small village, where ‘the only thing that mattered was marriage’, to live in Bloomsbury with her friend Delia, who works for ‘one of the most provocative and militant societies in England’, and rails lucidly against ‘marriage as an end of life in itself, as the ultimate goal of the female soul’s development’.
‘at the centre’ – VW, ‘Old Bloomsbury’, Moments of Being, p. 46.
‘the Baedeker’ – Bryher, The Heart to Artemis: A Writer’s Memoirs, p. 174.
‘long armistice’ – Richard Aldington, Life for Life’s Sake, p. 5.
‘the war will’ – H. D., Bid Me to Live, p. 12.
H. D.
‘Hitler gives bread’ – H. D., Tribute to Freud, p. 58.
‘carefully avoided’ – ibid., p. 134.
‘violent purple-patch’ – H. D. to Bryher, 11 May 1933. Beinecke.
‘seems to believe’ – H. D. to Bryher, 18 May 1933. Beinecke.
‘Evidently’ – H. D. to Bryher, 13 May 1933. Beinecke.
‘are of course’ – H. D., ‘H. D. by Delia Alton’, p. 181.
‘But Dryad’ – H. D., End to Torment, p. 18. Aldington believed this event took place in the Fuller tea shop in Kensington and that he was present – cf. his letter to H. D., 21 November 1958. Beinecke.
‘It’s just that’ – Interview with Hilda Doolittle by Lionel Durand, Newsweek, 2 May 1960.
cocooned in layers – The novel compresses the events of several months into a single timeframe. The letter in which Aldington says ‘I love you & I desire – l’autre’ was not sent until well after the Lawrences left Mecklenburgh Square; they were only there for six weeks, but H. D. incorporates her correspond
ence with Lawrence dating back to 1916.
‘not intended’ – H. D. to John Cournos, 9 July (c. 1921). Houghton JC.
impetuous bonfire – H. D., Compassionate Friendship, p. 115. H. D. wrote that she left ‘a bundle’ of her letters from Lawrence in a suitcase in the basement of number 44, along with ‘great stacks’ of Aldington’s letters, and the letters she had written daily to Aldington at the front, which he had sent back to her periodically for safekeeping. In 1929, Aldington admitted that he had burned them, in 1920. Zilboorg writes that his charwoman’s daughter recalled Aldington asking her mother to burn the ‘piles and piles of papers’ (Caroline Zilboorg, Richard Aldington and H. D.: Their Lives in Letters, p. 1).
‘Why was it’ – H. D., The Gift, p. 4.
‘How could I’ – ibid., p. 21.
‘morbid’ – H. D., Tribute to Freud, p. 164.
‘imaginative faculties’ – ibid., p. 121.
‘to give her’ – William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, p. 69.
‘I don’t suppose’ – H. D. to Norman Holmes Pearson, 12 March 1950. Quoted in H. D., Tribute to Freud, p. xi.
‘You have no’ – Barbara Guest, Herself Defined, p. 4.
‘Ezra would have’ – H. D., End to Torment, p. 35.
‘initiators’ – The others (named in Compassionate Friendship) are Richard Aldington, John Cournos, Cecil Gray, Kenneth Macpherson, Walter Schmideberg and Erich Heydt.
‘a sort of alter ego’ – H. D., Autobiographical Notes. Beinecke.
‘like a blue flame’ – H. D., End to Torment, p. 8.
‘a dreadful little place’ – H. D., Autobiographical Notes. Beinecke.
the Mona Lisa – Eileen Power, who had recently returned from Paris, wrote to Margery Spring Rice on 8 September 1911: ‘Isn’t it ghastly about Monna Lisa? I feel so depressed about it, that I wished I had spent all my time padlocked in front of her. Shall we ever see her again? I am convinced that someone is in love with her & has stolen her for that reason.’
‘Arrive Sunday.’ – H. D. to Ezra Pound, 28 September 1911.
‘Our reception’ – H. D. to Isabel Pound, 4 December 1911.
a short story – H. D., ‘The Suffragette’. Beinecke.
‘freedom of mind’ – H. D. to Bryher, 31 December 1918. Beinecke.
‘I had to’ – H. D. to Bryher, 24 June 1931. Beinecke.
‘extreme vulnerability’ – Brigit Patmore, My Friends When Young, p. 65.
‘that infernal Bloomsbury’ – H. D., Asphodel, p. 62.
‘R. & H.’ – Ezra Pound to Dorothy Shakespear, 3 May 1913. D. D. Paige (ed.), The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound.
‘Kensingtonian squabbles’ – Richard Aldington to Amy Lowell, 1 February 1915. Houghton AL.
‘nothing that’ – Ezra Pound to Harriet Monroe, undated (January 1915). D. D. Paige (ed.), The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound.
‘Am sending you’ – Ezra Pound to Harriet Monroe, October 1912. Ibid.
‘simply advertising bull-dust’ – Quoted in A. E. Barlow, ‘Imagism and after: a study of the poetry’.
‘where friendly people’ – Richard Aldington, Life for Life’s Sake, p. 140.
‘We want war!’ – H. D. to Richard Aldington, 30 October 1959. Beinecke.
conscientious objector – The area swiftly acquired a reputation for unpatriotic subversiveness: the Sunday Times called, only half-jokingly, for Mecklenburgh Square to follow the royal family and Ford Madox Hueffer (now known as Ford Madox Ford) and expunge German origins from its name. David Jones, in his 1937 poem In Parenthesis, takes the square as representative of elitist aloofness: ‘this Conchy propaganda’s no bon for the troops – hope Jerry puts one on Mecklenburgh Square – instead of fussing patriotic Croydon.’
‘black hollow’ – H. D., Bid Me to Live, p. 12.
‘cold, nun-like’ – H. D., Tribute to Freud, p. 116.
‘the affinity between’ – Quoted in Francis West, Gilbert Murray: A Life, p. 104.
‘the child Amor’ – H. D., Magic Mirror, p. 55.
‘psycho-physical’ – H. D., Notes on Euripides, Beinecke.
‘Don’t tell me’ – Richard Aldington to F. S. Flint, 26 May 1916. HRC.
‘the blundering world’ – H. D. to John Gould Fletcher, undated (1917). Beinecke JGF.
‘a mad fanatic’ – H. D. to John Cournos, 5 September 1916. Houghton JC.
‘spiritual loneliness’ – H. D. to John Cournos, July 1916. Houghton JC.
‘My one struggle’ – H. D. to Amy Lowell, 31 October 1916. Houghton AL.
‘I am ready’ – H. D. to John Cournos, 5 September 1916. Houghton JC.
‘Hang Flo’ – Quoted in H. D. to John Cournos, 8 September 1916. Houghton JC.
‘H. D. has been’ – Richard Aldington to Amy Lowell, August 1916. Houghton AL.
‘I have all faith’ – H. D. to John Cournos, 13 September 1916. Houghton JC.
‘Korshoon!’ – John Cournos, Autobiography, p. 289.
‘the very core’ – H. D. to John Cournos, 3 October 1916. Houghton JC.
‘If love’ – H. D. to John Cournos, 8 September 1916. Houghton JC.
‘If it seems best’ – H. D. to John Cournos, 5 September 1916. Houghton JC.
‘If I die’ – Richard Aldington to John Cournos, 2 November 1916. Houghton JC. apricot-coloured walls – Brigit Patmore, My Friends When Young, p. 79.
Alida Klemantaski – See D. Hibberd, Harold Monro: Poet of the New Age. She wrote to Monro of her annoyance at Cournos continually knocking to see if she was in, and complained that she had had to lock her door to prevent H. D. wandering in unannounced and trying to talk about poetry.
‘I am waiting’ – H. D. to Amy Lowell, 21 December 1916. Houghton AL.
‘All I want’ – H. D. to F. S. Flint, 7 August 1916. Beinecke.
‘the Egoist’ – H. D. wrote several long essays for the magazine during her tenure, on Marianne Moore, Charlotte Mew, John Gould Fletcher and William Carlos Williams. She was also an assiduous editor of poetry: to Williams she wrote on 14 August 1916: ‘I trust you will not hate me for wanting to delete from your poem all the flippancies … I don’t know what you think but I consider this business of writing a very sacred thing!’
‘some most poignant lyrics’ – Richard Aldington to Amy Lowell, 2 January 1918. Houghton AL.
‘broken spiritually’ – H. D. to John Gould Fletcher, 1917. Beinecke JGF.
‘imminent possibility’ – H. D., ‘H. D. by Delia Alton’, p. 204.
‘any stone’ – H. D., Bid Me to Live, p. 16.
‘We came home’ – H. D. to Norman Holmes Pearson, 1937, published in Diana Collecott (ed.), Agenda, p. 72.
‘write her cheerful lies’ – Richard Aldington to Amy Lowell, 8 December 1916. Houghton AL.
‘For the Lord’s sake’ – Richard Aldington to F. S. Flint, 22 January 1917. HRC Flint.
‘You really can not’ – H. D. to Charles Bubb, June 1917. Kent State.
‘Everyone said’ – Richard Aldington to Charles Bubb, 29 June 1917. Dean H. Keller (ed.), Bubb Booklets.
‘delightfully lazy’ – Richard Aldington to Amy Lowell, 20 November 1917. Houghton AL.
‘A beautiful lady’ – H. D. to F. S. Flint, 30 August 1917. Beinecke.
‘as he was’ – H. D., Divorce Statement. Beinecke.
‘stage-set’ – H. D., Asphodel, p. 126.
‘four walls’ – H. D., Bid Me to Live, p. 111.
‘The truth is’ – Richard Aldington to H. D., 20 May 1918. Beinecke.
‘like a person’ – Quoted in Witter Bynner, Journey with Genius, p. 145.
‘worth anything’ – D. H. Lawrence to Arthur McLeod, 21 December 1916.
‘Don’t you think’ – D. H. Lawrence to Edward Marsh, 29 January 1917.
‘a blasphemy’ – D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, p. 246.
‘I myself’ – H. D. to John Gould Fletcher, 1917. Beinecke JGF.
‘very qu
ietly’ – D. H. Lawrence to John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, 5 March 1916.
Cecil Gray – This account comes from Gray’s own autobiography, Musical Chairs; his biography of Philip Heseltine, Peter Warlock; and his notebooks, edited by his daughter Pauline. Gray lives on in a variety of fictional avatars: as Cyril Scott in Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod (‘a fair, pale, flattish young fellow in pince-nez and dark clothes’), Mr Mercaptan in Aldous Huxley’s Antic Hay (‘a sleek, comfortable young man’ with ‘a rather gross, snouty look’) and Maclintick in Anthony Powell’s Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant, a ‘solidly built musical type’ with the air of ‘a bad-tempered doctor’.
‘greatest literary genius’ – Barry Smith, Peter Warlock, p. 76.
a publishing company – This was only one of several schemes conceived by Heseltine and Gray. A concert at the Wigmore Hall in February 1917 devoted to Bernard van Dieren, whose discordant work they considered the height of modernity, was resoundingly mocked in the press; a projected four-week season of opera in a West End theatre never got off the ground.
‘a paradisal existence’ – Cecil Gray, Musical Chairs, p. 115.
Bosigran Castle – The house, called the Count House, still stands; it is now a climbers’ hostel.
‘Remember the revolution’ – D. H. Lawrence to Cecil Gray, 14 June 1917.
‘hostile and unsympathetic’ – Cecil Gray, Musical Chairs, p. 126.
‘vindictive’ – ibid., p. 128.
‘thinks and breathes’ – D. H. Lawrence to Cecil Gray, 17 October 1917.
‘Beyond the tall’ – D. H. Lawrence, Aaron’s Rod, p. 70.
revocation – Lawrence did not return to Cornwall. In January 1918, he offered the lease of Higher Tregerthen to Leonard and Virginia Woolf, who had expressed interest in the cottage via their mutual friend Samuel Koteliansky. Virginia wrote in her diary on 23 January that ‘We’re in treaty with DH Lawrence for his house at Zennor. It’s very distant & improbable at present though sufficiently tempting to make me think of that sea & those cliffs several times a day.’ This didn’t come off, though the Woolfs knew the area well, often staying with their friends Will and Ka Arnold-Forster at Eagle’s Nest, on the cliff just above Lawrence’s cottage.
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