by Bryher;
Oh, why do the great winds
come whispering to me,
my heart’s aboard a drifter
that sails the swinging sea.
“What’s that?” Doris looked gaily over my shoulder. “You on a drifter! You know you’d be so seasick that you’d fall overboard. Besides, you idiot, they don’t sail, they steam. Try to make sense.” It was only too true. I was always the first one to rush for the side, I had already run the punt ashore and was extremely clumsy over knots.
We were out all day from early Monday until Saturday night. Sunday was different; we wore our best clothes and were recalled to civilization. In the morning we went to church. This was more bearable for me in Scilly than elsewhere because the psalms were read and not sung, I always preferred the sound of words to music. The vicar, very properly as we thought, sometimes left us in the middle of the service to attend to a new litter of puppies. After lunch we had to read until four o’clock; then we were loosed in a wild scramble of energy among the rocks at Peninnis until sunset.
My holiday reading was Henri de Régnier, Walter Pater and Browning. The few contemporary English historical novelists slid too easily into mere sentiment. I did not like the eighteenth century but at least de Régnier took the period seriously and created some atmosphere. I have always remembered the twins bending over their fishing nets in the marshes in Le Bon plaisir in spite of the love stories being rather tiresome. His novels seem now curiously old-fashioned but he was more experimental in some of his poetry. The long flowing lines of his invocation to the sea were running through my head when we sat beneath the earn at Porthellick and heard the door bang open and shut in a wreck as the tides came through it, surely the most desolate sound in the world.
Browning I knew well, he was describing the sights and sounds of my childhood and I remember getting a full mouthful of salt water trying to repeat “Cleon,” my favorite among his poems, and have a swimming lesson from Doris at the same time. The colors of a summer day in Scilly are the colors of the South and the words seemed so natural, I could imagine sailors bringing the gifts ashore in so many small havens along the Sound.
I regarded Pater as superior Henty. There was not much difference between A March on London and Gaston de Latour. I knew nothing about his life at the time but we recognize instinctively those people who are in a similar situation to our own and the first three chapters of Marius, but only the first three because I had few scruples and was fighting hard, might have been taken as a blueprint of my then mind. Certain writers can only be read subsequently within the compass of their period and I cannot repeat too often that any deviation from Victorian manners was repressed so strongly that we were driven back onto the points of our own intellects instead of being able to go forward. We reacted against the sadistic denials of the age by a heightened consciousness of nature and of art, places where our enemies could not reach us. I could not share Gaston’s love of medieval architecture, cathedrals to me were usually gloomy places, but I wanted to meet others of my own age who could write and I read of his ride to meet Ronsard with approval. His “poetry need no longer mask itself in the habit of a bygone day” was precisely what I had been saying to myself, thumping the heather, to an audience of sea gulls. I liked the way that history was allowed to touch the stories without obscuring the individual and his needs. As for the style, I had just emerged from Euphues and it seemed plain and sober by comparison. After all, we should be allowed a year’s love of adjectives even if we forswear them immediately afterwards.
It was only the name that I read in Pater. I had always been Epicurean. To seek for happiness is the bravest of the philosophies and one, though not all, of the Mysteries. It happens infrequently, once or twice for an instant during the most favored life, and is, if experienced, painful as well as winged but it is the dynamic twin of detachment and looks from the past towards a future that it may yet take us centuries to imagine. We cannot alter tragedy but we could sweep away an immense amount of frustrating and preventible unhappiness. Are the laws just that we impose upon our fellow men or do they come out of vanity or even laziness? It is the question that the wise have been asking ever since their sayings have been preserved.
I was also drawn to Epicurus by his insistence upon friendship. After I left Queenwood I prayed that my destiny might be service to artists and poets. I saw myself as a Gozzoli page, a cupbearer at the feast of minds, following the flight of speculation and dream as eagerly as children chase their colored balls. Alas, for my innocence! Fate granted me my wish in part and turned me into a mixture of nurse and business adviser, without pay, official recognition or an afternoon off to myself. I have sat for hours with people for whom life would be hard in any age, trying to persuade them to try psychoanalysis instead of suicide, I have put alcoholics to bed or struggled with income tax returns for people who seemed even worse at mathematics than myself. I have rushed to the penniless young not with bowls of soup but with typewriters. I have cursed it all, enjoyed it sometimes and my experiences have helped me to believe more deeply in the doctrine that I have chosen but it has not been in the least like the fabulous state that I imagined, aged seventeen. It is impossible to be too careful when bargaining with the gods.
I wish only that people would think for themselves instead of repeating slogans. I was brought up as an only child in extreme isolation yet I have led a practical and extroverted life. My brother who had playmates from his infancy and a conventional training turned into a recluse whom I have not seen for thirty years.
Yet the moments that I remember most of those early Scillonian days were the hours, usually on a Sunday evening, when we sat on the rocks and watched the foam tower, break and fall in swirling, white crescents far below us. Occasionally we saw a distant steamer, even a convoy, but there was nothing otherwise between us and the distant American continent except league after league of sea. The Elizabethan ships and the first colonists had often sighted our islands at the beginning of their voyages and there were still close links between Cornwall and the West. I did not try to imagine a coast line, to me as to many other thousands the “New World” meant precisely what the words said, a place to discard stupid, everyday conventions, the opportunity for development. It was partly an illusion but not entirely so. I found New York when I eventually got there more formal than London but whatever success I may have had came from there rather than from my own country. As I said then to Doris, as I have to write now, “In England you say ‘don’t’ to me always. In America you say ‘try.’”
Letters were censored but not to the extent that they were during the second war. A Boston friend of my mother asked if there were anything that she could send me for Christmas and I replied, “America is the hope of the world, please send me the following books.” I wanted the Imagist anthologies and some volumes by authors included in them. In this way I read Amy Lowell’s poems. I have already written that we respond emotionally in situations resembling our own. I did not know that Amy Lowell was largely confined to her home through illness and that her work reflected the frustrations from which she suffered. I was unable to expand because of the war. It was natural to fee! the similarity in the two situations. I wrote her, she answered and was extremely kind to me but by the time that we met the circumstances were different and I could not bear to think of lines that recalled to me the lonely miseries of the first war. This is one of the dangers of contemporary work. The classics are removed in time but the modern book to which we respond at a certain stage in youth may disappear with that phase of our development. I was a disappointment to her eventually but it was inevitable under the circumstances.
“If you must write,” my father used to say, “try to be a journalist. They do useful work.” He knew a number of newspapermen and, among them, Clement Shorter, the editor of the Sphere. Shorter was very kind to me although there again the gap operated, I was a modern unable to read his favorite Victorian books. He did me a great service, however, because he persuaded my fath
er to buy me a set of Dyce’s edition of the Elizabethan dramatists. I immersed myself in them to such an extent that I seemed to hear, not voices but lines from the plays, spoken as an Elizabethan would have said them, tapping at the extreme range of sound in my ears. I rejected the tragedies. It was Middleton’s comedies that I particularly liked. His London scenes were exactly like photographs. I did not always understand the jokes but I knew his flat-capped apprentices, the watermen and the old women with their herbs and steaming pies, as well as if I passed them every morning in Hyde Park. Destiny is strange, I forgot them for a time after 1918 only to find them looping themselves around me in 1940, as if I had been faithful to their company throughout the intervening years.
I agreed with Clausewitz. I do not think that we have ceased being at war since August, 1914. A population notices its losses more during the shooting phases but, I am speaking of the world and not of a particular nation, we are capable of as much cruelty in peace as in any battle and all trained observers are aware that we are now caught up in some global upheaval that has been going on for more than fifty years. It would be tempting to write of it as a struggle between the barbarians and civilization but this is only a fraction of the truth. One of the causes is overpopulation, there may be some natural balance that we do not yet understand and we are also in an epoch of change but unless we move and alter, we die. A wise historian once said to me, “Whenever you have to estimate a new situation, look at Asia first.” It has proved excellent advice. These conclusions, however, belong to a later part of this story, I had not had enough experience to be aware of them in 1917 and I mention them here only as a warning that the fog that enveloped us cleared only partially at the Armistice. All that I felt at the time was that I was trapped in an ever deeper layer of hopelessness from which there was no possibility of escape. Old ladies asked me to join a “save your paper bags” campaign and to pray for the King. In desperation Dorothy Pilley and I tried to join up as land workers but our parents refused to sign the necessary papers. There was no guarantee about accommodation and though they were not worried about our comfort, they were about the “respectability” of the quarters to which we might be assigned. It was a harsh winter and we shivered in the cold. There may have been gaiety for a small section of the population when soldiers came on leave but most of us were frowned at if we dared to smile.
They are cruel,
these faces,
as I pass under the plane trees,
is it wrong to watch the tufted buds
bend the black twigs
even in war?
It may have been a very bad poem but it was an accurate statement of fact. We felt that the populace hated us merely for being alive and what youth was we did not know.
Complete frustration leads to a preoccupation with death. I could think of nothing else. There was plenty of vitality in me but this only made the situation worse. I found a bottle of rat poison in a cupboard and the only thing that prevented me from swallowing it was that I did not want to hurt my parents. For myself, death seemed infinitely preferable to the sub-existence that we had to endure. The rat poison became my talisman. I could struggle on as long as I knew that it was mine for the taking. It was not the year that seemed so long, it was the hour, but then time for me had always passed with an almost unendurable slowness. Under such circumstances, I am always amazed now that I survived.
Sometimes the gods toss us a laurel berry to keep us still afloat. Clement Shorter introduced me to A. A. Baumann who was the editor of the then highly respected Saturday Review. Most of his staff was in the army so he sent me occasionally a book to notice. The first appropriately was in French and a study of the work of Verhaeren.
I only saw Mr. Baumann a couple of times and he had no time to waste on would-be aspirants to literature but he drilled me hard and I hope that I have remembered his lessons. “Check your facts” was a message frequently written against a rejected review. Yet he once let me write a “middle” on Tendencies in Modern American Poetry. It was incoherent with enthusiasm, a note stated stiffly that it represented my views and not those of the paper but I am still inordinately proud that I stated my belief in American literature in the days when few people had heard of it and during the middle of the war.
It was at about this time that I began to write Development, at the rate of about a phrase a day, written almost with blood. I had no leisure; everybody told me it was selfish in war to do creative work. Another parcel of books reached me from America. I unknotted the string and wore it round my neck, it had touched American soil. “Wait till the fighting is over and I will send you abroad again,” my father said, trying to console me for the difficulties of the time, “I think you would like India.” “India,” I snorted, seeing not only another country of the past but also a chaperone, “I want to go alone to New York.”
It may be a personal reaction although I doubt this but at the height of the blitz I never felt the same undercurrent of horror and fear that was around us in 1918. “Fifteen hundred men are being killed every minute,” people said while we stood helplessly watching the ruin of most of Europe. “It takes more than men to stop machines,” my father said, “once they are geared to war.” I still believe that if the leaders of my generation had not perished, there would have been an orderly progression in England towards a greater freedom and a more universal prosperity than the country knows today.
The weariness was such that people gave up blaming me for being self-absorbed and silent. Yet I could hardly read or think; my one overmastering passion was to be free. There will always be one book among all others that makes us aware of ourselves; for me, it is Sea Garden by H. D. I learned it by heart from cover to cover. The rhythms were new, it evoked for me both the Scillies and the South, it touched Mallarmé’s vision. I began the morning and ended the day repeating the poems. It was not until some months later that I discovered from Amy Lowell’s Tendencies in Modern American Poetry that H. D. was a woman and American.
We did not spend that summer in Scilly because Mrs. Banfield was kept at home through illness in the family but as a special favor Doris and I were allowed to go by ourselves to Zennor for a week or two, to run wild on the cliffs. It was then a lonely village with few visitors. Just as I had left London, Mr. Shorter had got H. D.’s address from May Sinclair who was a mutual friend and I discovered to my amazement that she was staying in the neighborhood. I asked permission to call. It must have been a very Victorian note because she told me afterwards that when she was reading it she had supposed me to be an elderly schoolmistress. I was terrified that my knowledge of poetry might not prove sufficient to meet a writer’s standards but I hung about waiting for the postman until, in due course, I was invited to tea.
It was July 17, 1918. I had had to abstract myself from my surroundings in order to survive at all. To wish to create was a sin against the consciousness of the time. Yet I wanted things to be real, I did not want to dream. The gorse was out, I was walking across some of the most ancient ground in Cornwall, I could hear the roar of the sea. I reached a cottage with the familiar, yellow covers of a dozen French books piled up against the window sill. I knew then that it must be the right place and knocked.
The door opened and I started in surprise. I had seen the face before, on a Greek statue or in some indefinable territory of the mind. We were meeting again after a long absence but not for the first time. “Won’t you come in?” The voice had a bird-like quality that was nearer to song than speech. There was a bowl of wild flowers on the table, another pile of books on a chair. We sat down and looked at each other or, more correctly, I stared. I was waiting for a question to prove my integrity and the extent of my knowledge. All the moments of a long apprenticeship, no more to be counted than the ears of corn, flashed across my brain. “I wonder if you could tell me something,” H. D. began, “have you ever seen a puffin and what is it like?”
“They call them sea parrots and there are dozens of them in the Scillies. I go the
re almost every summer, you must join me next year.”
I did not stop to think about the difficulties inherent in the invitation but only that my test had come through the islands and not through books. “The fishing is better in August and we drive everywhere in donkey carts. Say that you will come with me,” I pleaded. It was the moment that I had longed for during seven interminable years.
THIRTEEN
“It’s peace,” my father said at breakfast, “the Armistice will be announced at eleven o’clock. Go out and watch the people but be careful.”
Doris was staying with us and we rushed together across the park where a few rusty leaves were still hanging on the bushes, and started walking along the Brompton Road. The streets were half empty. The years had been so long that it did not seem to me as yet to be real. We wondered if there had been some hitch, everything seemed so quiet. Then the clocks struck eleven, there was a yell, people flooded into the road and complete strangers flung their arms round each other’s necks, women cried, boys shouted “Peace...peace...” and men jumped onto the running boards of any passing vehicle. We watched but to me at least it was strange and like a play, I could feel little emotion.