Square Haunting

by Francesca Wade

  ‘very handsome’ – Cynthia Asquith, diary 28 October 1917. Asquith was sympathetic to Lawrence in his exile: ‘His health doesn’t allow of his living in London and all the money he has in the world is the prospect of eighteen pounds for the publication of some poems all about bellies and breasts which he gave me to read.’ She offered to help him, but doubted the authorities could be persuaded: ‘after all, the woman is a German and it doesn’t seem unreasonable.’

  Earl’s Court – This was not the end of Lawrence’s association with 44 Mecklenburgh Square. On 20 July 1928, he wrote to his friend Enid Hilton, who had just moved into number 44: ‘Did I tell you I believe that is the very house we lived in, in 1917 in the Aldingtons’ rooms on the first floor, on the front and Arabella had an attic at the top – it was very jolly, I liked it very much. I hope you can stay there in peace.’ Lawrence turned to Hilton that year when bookshops began to refuse to stock Lady Chatterley’s Lover; she enthusiastically collected the stock and distributed copies from Mecklenburgh Square directly to subscribers.

  ‘seem pretty happy’ – D. H. Lawrence to Amy Lowell, 13 December 1917.

  ‘it would be’ – H. D., Divorce Statement. Beinecke.

  ‘someone not in khaki’ – H. D., Asphodel, p. 139.

  ‘did not talk’ – H. D., Bid Me to Live, p. 116.

  ‘How I must’ – Cecil Gray to H. D., 13 March 1918. Beinecke.

  ‘Poor Dryad’ – Ezra Pound to H. D., March 1918. Quoted in Barbara Guest, Herself Defined, p.93.

  ‘I am not’ – Richard Aldington to John Cournos, 6 April 1918. Houghton JC.

  ‘O, it was’ – H. D. to John Cournos, April 1918. Houghton JC.

  ‘We will go mad’ – H. D. to John Cournos, 3 April 1918. Houghton JC.

  ‘a most unseemly book’ – H. D. to Ezra Pound, 1 July 1938. Beinecke.

  ‘one of the most’ – Spectator, 17 July 1926.

  ‘here were two poets’ – Cournos, Autobiography, p. 269.

  ‘cold healing mist’ – H. D., Bid Me to Live, p. 145.

  ‘Twice last week’ – Richard Aldington to H. D., 20 May 1918. Beinecke.

  ‘We are “parted”’ – Richard Aldington to F. S. Flint, 2 June 1918. HRC Flint.

  ‘I am so proud’ – Richard Aldington to H. D., 1 June 1918. Beinecke.

  ‘going about London’ – Richard Aldington to H. D., 7 July 1918. Beinecke.

  ‘To you I have’ – Richard Aldington to H. D., 25 August 1918. Beinecke.

  ‘Out of this’ – Richard Aldington to H. D., 2 June 1918. Beinecke.

  ‘cheer up’ – Richard Aldington to H. D., 3 August 1918. Beinecke.

  ‘Damn it, Dooley’ – Richard Aldington to H. D., 4 August 1918. Beinecke.

  ‘Gray becomes’ – Richard Aldington to H. D., 4 August 1918. Beinecke. In the same letter he claimed he had refused to have a child with Arabella for that very reason. Aldington retained a grudge against Cecil Gray; Leonard Woolf recalled that, in 1926, Aldington came to him looking ‘gloomy and threatening’ and complained that one of the reviewers Woolf had commissioned for The Nation had ‘run off with [Aldington’s] wife’, and that Woolf should not re-employ him. When Woolf replied that this wasn’t reasonable, Aldington never spoke to him again. Gray had reviewed Stravinsky’s ballet Les Noces, pronouncing it ‘pretty poor stuff’.

  ‘so elusive’ – Cecil Gray to H. D., undated (March 1918). Beinecke.

  ‘sick to death’ – Cecil Gray, Musical Chairs, p. 145. Gray didn’t meet his daughter for many years, and never publicly acknowledged her existence. In 1922, at H. D.’s request, Brigit Patmore attempted to persuade him to pay H. D. financial support for Perdita; she found him drunk and penniless, smoking hashish with Aleister Crowley, having spent his last money on a bust of Bernard van Dieren commissioned from Jacob Epstein. ‘He seems divided,’ she told H. D. and Bryher, ‘between a hatred and disgust with his own part in it and a consequent weak determination to shut it out completely, and a sort of equally weak desire to make it all right.’ In December 1936, H. D. wrote to him to request a meeting: ‘it would not only be laying old ghosts but it would be such fun now to talk about old Lorenzo – God rest his soul – and the others … Cornwall has always remained a dream, for which I deeply thank you!’ He never replied. Gray married three times and had two further daughters, Pauline and Fabia.

  In an afterword to the 1984 Virago edition of Bid Me to Live, Perdita tells her own story. As a child, she assumed her father was the ‘Mr Aldington’ occasionally mentioned by H. D. and Bryher; Bryher told her only that her father was ‘a very bad man’ who ‘ran away from you’ – but grudgingly showed Perdita a copy of Gray’s book Sibelius, with the instruction not to ask any more questions. When Perdita was a young adult, her mother told her that the affair was ‘a brief fling, a spunky retaliation for Richard Aldington’s infidelities. One of those things, of no lasting import except for my existence.’ In 1947, she met Gray for the only time. Along with Kenneth Macpherson, Bryher’s husband, who had legally adopted her in 1927, Perdita was spending the summer in Capri, at the house of Norman Douglas. The group was joined by Gray and his third wife, Marjorie, also friends of Douglas. Macpherson introduced the pair: ‘Cecil, my daughter Perdita.’ Perdita ‘felt as if I were looking into a mirror’. Nothing was said, and she never saw him again. Yet Gray did make a note in his diary: ‘My best works are probably my daughters, some without opus numbers – not officially acknowledged, but not the worse for that.’

  ‘fini, fini, fini’ – Richard Aldington to H. D., 27 September 1918. Beinecke.

  sublet her room – H. D. sublet 44 Mecklenburgh Square to a young woman named Margaret Postgate, who described the flat as ‘a lovely first-floor room in Mecklenburgh Square belonging to the poet H. D., with three tall windows, a balcony looking out on the plane-trees of the Square, very inadequate heating and a large population of mice’. Postgate subsequently married the economist G. D. H. Cole, with whom she wrote a series of detective novels; the pair were to be part of the detective-writing syndicate Dorothy L. Sayers attempted to form after university. The Coles also knew Eileen Power and R. H. Tawney through their work on the General Strike.

  ‘begun really seriously’ – H. D. to John Cournos, 17 July 1918. Houghton JC.

  ‘a Greek’ – Bryher to Amy Lowell, 28 November 1918. Houghton AL.

  ‘The worst thing’ – H. D. to John Cournos, November 1919. Bryn Mawr.

  ‘I feel it’ – H. D. to Clement Shorter, January 1919. Beinecke.

  ‘My only real’ – H. D., End to Torment, p. 8.

  ‘without her’ – H. D., Tribute to Freud, p. 49.

  ‘I hope’ – Bryher to H. D., 21 April 1919. Beinecke.

  ‘take, at times’ – H. D. to Bryher, 18 December 1918. Beinecke.

  Thinking back – Perdita Schaffner, ‘Running’, p. 7.

  ‘Every year’ – Barbara Guest, Herself Defined, p. 110.

  ‘repetitive thoughts’ – H. D., Tribute to Freud, p. 13.

  ‘women did not’ – ibid., p. 149.

  ‘found him some’ – ibid., p. 141.

  ‘a prophet’ – VW, ‘Notes on D. H. Lawrence’ (1931) in The Moment and Other Essays, p. 79.

  ‘a fiery, golden’ – H. D., Compassionate Friendship, p. 54.

  ‘But there is’ – H. D. to John Cournos, 31 October 1916. Houghton JC.

  ‘I think’ – H. D. to Richard Aldington, 23 February 1949. Morris.

  ‘Feeling sorry’ – D. H. Lawrence to Selina Yorke, 16 December 1918.

  ‘a cat’ – D. H. Lawrence to Emily King, 14 June 1926.

  ‘unrecognisable’ – Quoted in Susan Stanford Friedman, Penelope’s Web, p. 153.

  ‘which no one’ – Cecil Gray, Peter Warlock, p. 120.

  ‘weary and sceptical’ – Cecil Gray, Musical Chairs, p. 133.

  ‘a Jesus Christ’ – idem.

  ‘the threshold’ – D. H. Lawrence to Cecil Gray, 7 November 1917.

  ‘Lawrenc
e does not’ – H. D., Compassionate Friendship, p. 114.

  ‘Frieda was there’ – idem.

  ‘perfect bisexual’ – H. D. to Bryher, 24 November 1934. Beinecke.

  ‘I have tried’ – H. D. to Bryher, 27 November 1934. Beinecke.

  ‘the room grew colder’ – H. D., Thorn Thicket, p. 182.

  ‘realised that’ – H. D., ‘H. D. by Delia Alton’, p. 180.

  ‘You must not’ – H. D. to Richard Aldington, 14 January 1953. Morris.

  ‘kick over’ – H. D., Bid Me to Live, p. 61.

  ‘This is my’ – H. D., Thorn Thicket, p. 23.

  DOROTHY L. SAYERS

  ‘As the south doors’ – The scene is described in Vera Brittain, The Women at Oxford, p. 156.

  ‘but really’ – DLS to her mother, 18 August 1920. Barbara Reynolds (ed.), The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers.

  ‘I gnash my teeth’ – JEH to Gilbert Murray, October 1920. Newnham.

  ‘Of those’ – Vera Brittain, The Women at Oxford, pp. 122–3. In Testament of Youth, Brittain describes Sayers as follows: ‘a bouncing and exuberant young female who always seems to be preparing for tea parties, she could be seen at almost any hour of the day or night scuttling about the top floor of the new Maitland building with a kettle in her hand and a little checked apron fastened over her skirt.’

  ‘hedged about’ – DLS to Barbara Reynolds, 27 January 1949.

  ‘Dear me!’ – DLS, The Comediad. Wheaton.

  ‘brought up without’ – DLS to Maurice Reckitt, 19 November 1941.

  ‘a woman of’ – DLS, ‘My Edwardian Childhood’. Wheaton. Published in Barbara Reynolds (ed.), Dorothy L. Sayers: Child and Woman of Her Time, p. 8.

  ‘oblique and distorted’ – Walter M. Gallichan, ‘The Great Unmarried’ (1916). Quoted in Virginia Nicholson, Singled Out, p. 37.

  ‘sentimental’ – DLS to Ivy Shrimpton, 15 April 1930.

  ‘Gentlemen – and others’ – Rosamund Essex, Woman in a Man’s World, p. 11.

  ‘extravagant indoor headgear’ – Vera Brittain, The Women at Oxford, p. 123.

  ‘If the trousers’ – DLS, ‘Are Women Human?’, Unpopular Opinions, pp. 108–9.

  ‘the best medium’ – DLS to Anthony Berkeley, 24 January 1949. Wheaton.

  ‘I write prose’ – DLS to Catherine Godfrey, 29 July 1913.

  ‘quite a ghost craze’ – DLS to her parents, 26 January 1913.

  ‘immensely exciting’ – DLS to her parents, 2 August 1914.

  a military hospital – See also Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, and Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That for soldiers’ memories of Somerville.

  ‘Do you know’ – DLS to her parents, 26 May 1913.

  ‘something real’ – DLS to parents, 16 May 1915.

  ‘wouldn’t do any harm’ – DLS to Catherine Godfrey, 23 November 1915.

  ‘growing rusty’ – DLS to Muriel Jaeger, 6 February 1916.

  her debut collection – Her second book of poems, Catholic Tales and Christian Songs, was published by Blackwell in September 1918.

  ‘There is no future’ – DLS to her father, 25 January 1917.

  ‘a thorough change’ – DLS to her parents, 6 June 1919.

  he later claimed – Whelpton quotes are taken from an interview in the Sunday Times, 30 March 1975.

  ‘The whole thing’ – DLS to her mother, 27 February 1920.

  ‘I really want’ – DLS to her parents, 12 September 1920. Wheaton.

  ‘Certainly no more teaching’ – Paper dated 17 August 1920. Wheaton.

  ‘Our generation is’ – VW, diary 29 June 1920.

  ‘a great generation’ – J. B. Priestley, Margin Released, p. 136.

  came to shape – In particular her 1928 novel The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, in which a former soldier is driven by his demons to a false confession. ‘a frightfully paying business’ – DLS to her parents, 23 July 1920. Her proposal is now in a private collection.

  ‘There seem to be’ – DLS to her parents, 3 October 1920.

  ‘I think we could’ – DLS to her parents, 3 September 1920. Wheaton.

  ‘fixed up to take’ – DLS to her parents, 26 October 1920.

  ‘her rents are too high’ – DLS to her parents, 7 December 1920.

  ‘rather beautiful room’ – DLS to her parents, 3 December 1920.

  ‘valiant militant suffragette’ – H. D., Bid Me to Live, p. 9. ‘Early Fabian of the period, herself already period-piece in 1914, in 1917 already pre-war, valiant militant suffragette with brown velvet jacket. She was very tiny. Sometimes she wore her little George Sand jacket with trousers. Her hair was naturally curly, untidy but not dowdy. Mop of gold-brown hair went grey at the temples. Fine wrinkles etched blue eyes. She spoke precisely, with the indefinable je ne sais quoi of the aristocrat. “I don’t like ugly women,” she said, flicking ash from the end of amber.’

  Birth of Venus – In Miranda Masters, Cournos writes that the landlady loved Botticelli and every room in the house had a reproduction of one of his paintings.

  ‘full from attic to basement’ – DLS to her parents, 14 December 1920.

  ‘delightful underclothing’ – DLS to her parents, 27 July 1921.

  ‘I have discovered’ – DLS to her parents, 14 December 1920.

  ‘Don’t ever think’ – DLS to her parents, 9 December 1920. London restaurants recur in her books, from a memorable lunch at Simpson’s in the Strand in Murder Must Advertise – ‘the finest roast saddle of mutton in London’ – to moules at Gatti’s and turtle soup at the Savoy in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club.

  ‘felt that’ – DLS to Hilary F. Page, 10 August 1944.

  ‘It’s immoral’ – DLS to Muriel Jaeger, 8 March 1917.

  ‘looking rather ungainly’ – Quoted in Barbara Reynolds, Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul (Hodder & Stoughton, 1993), p. 100.

  ‘a little gold-mine’ – DLS to her parents, 31 October 1920.

  ‘of a sort’ – DLS to her parents, November 1920. Wheaton.

  ‘She really seems’ – DLS to her parents, 14 December 1920.

  ‘as a master’ – DLS, ‘Tristan’, Modern Languages 1.5 (June 1920) and 1.6 (August 1920).

  ‘a particularly swell’ – DLS to her parents, 14 December 1920.

  ‘She really isn’t’ – DLS to her parents, 15 March 1921.

  ‘I don’t seem’ – DLS to her parents, 19 December 1920. Wheaton.

  ‘a meeting’ – DLS to her parents, 20 November 1920. Wheaton.

  Virginia Woolf – Woolf records in her diary on 25 January 1921 that she had attended a show the previous night.

  Bonds of Egypt and ‘The Priest’s Chamber’ – Unpublished manuscripts in a private collection.

  ‘the works of’ – Eric Whelpton interview in the Sunday Times, 30 March 1975.

  ‘more a part’ – DLS to Mrs G. K. Chesterton, 15 June 1936.

  ‘the Holmes tradition’ – DLS (ed.), Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, Horror, p. 16.

  ‘the nearest modern’ – idem.

  exclusively highbrow – Detective fiction found several fans among the high modernists, including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein, who wrote an essay titled ‘Why I Like Detective Stories’. Vladimir Nabokov enjoyed Murder Must Advertise, and recommended it to his friend Edmund Wilson, a genre sceptic: ‘Of course, Agatha is unreadable – but Sayers, whom you do not mention, writes well.’

  ‘is no longer’ – DLS, ‘The Present Status of the Mystery Story’, London Mercury, November 1930.

  unpublished essay – DLS, ‘Why is the Detective a Popular Figure?’ – in a private collection.

  Sherlock Holmes – Sayers was a founder member of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, and later wrote a radio script in which the young Peter Wimsey consults the great detective on the question of the disappearance of a kitten.

  ‘all the Sexton Blakes’ – DLS to Muriel Jaeger, 8 March 1920. Wheaton.

>   ‘The Adventure of the Piccadilly Flat’ – The manuscript of this story was sold at Sotheby’s in 2002, and I have been unable to trace its present location, though its details can be reconstructed from Jill Paton Walsh’s report at the Wheaton Center, and descriptions in Barbara Reynolds’s biography. I am grateful to Anthony Cardew for showing me the manuscript of the original synopsis in his possession.

  bachelor flat – Wimsey’s flat is at 110a Piccadilly, a play on Sherlock Holmes’s famous rooms at 221b Baker Street. It is described as ‘one of the most delightful bachelor rooms in London’, with black and primrose walls, featuring a baby grand piano, bookshelves full of rare editions and Sèvres vases on the chimney piece, and a library looking over Piccadilly.

  a masculine adjective – An ingenious twist which Sayers would later recycle in her story ‘The Entertaining Episode of the Article in Question’.

  dashed-off fragments – A story, ‘Introducing Lord Peter’, and a play titled The Mousehole. The first is an incomplete story involving rival journalists jostling for a scoop on the murder of a famous novelist, and introduces Lord Peter as one who ‘had accomplished many things and identified himself with nothing. He collected old books and old wine, and solved detective problems.’ In The Mousehole: A Detective Fantasia in Three Flats, Sayers placed the bodies of a well-known financier and a mysterious woman not in Wimsey’s own flat but in the room above, with the gas on and the keyhole stopped. Enter Lord Peter (‘Hobby: other people’s business’): ‘sleek, fair, monocle, dressed in a grey suit, with the exception of his coat, whose place is taken by a luxurious dressing-gown’. To the disgruntlement of Inspector Sugg, he immediately recognises the female victim, and picks up a small object from the floor when the policemen’s backs are turned; the story leaves off here. Wheaton.