by Bryher;
It seemed to me that this ruled out imagination but it offered possibilities for use in a novel. “Would this explain why some people belong to a particular historical epoch and not to others?” I inquired.
“Perhaps,” he was very cautious, “but we need to know a great deal more about it.”
It was part of the time. The war had brought such a complete reversal of values that it was a good climate for the psychological research that was just beginning to be generally known. Ellis and I were interested in color hearing. He did not laugh at me when I explained my sensations but gave me all the scientific papers on the subject. I wrote down my own observations in detail and I think that they were sent to a Canadian doctor who had done the most work on the subject and from whose paper I found that there were also people who “tasted” words. It was long before Michaux and Huxley but I was also invited to “guinea pig” on mescaline. One of the hospitals had planned a test and I accepted with alacrity but the project fell through, I think because they could not get a sufficient quantity of the drug. They had wanted at least twenty people for the experiment.
I felt very much at home in this early atmosphere of the investigation of human states. Ellis gave me the first paper by Freud that I ever read. It would be pleasant to record that I fell on it with enthusiasm. I try to be truthful and actually I read it with interest but some suspicion. It was a saner way to approach psychoanalysis than by a wild uncritical jump. I started to read whatever was available of Freud in translation and became one of the first subscribers to the British Journal of Psychoanalysis and it was Ellis who gave me the introduction that enabled me to meet Freud himself in 1927.
In 1920, however, we talked about Remy de Gourmont, the position of women throughout history and whether I heard colors plain or mixed. My answer, consonants modified the vowels. I accepted his help and kindness without question although I can have given him very little in return. He knew me through and through. Asked to help a scheme to aid some German professors who had been reduced to utter poverty through the inflation, he begged me to give a few pounds to a Dr. Deissmann, who was a professor of Tibetan. It recalled the frontier tales that Dr. Boyce had told me as a child. Ellis also sent me to his own typist, Miss Woolford, who put up with recopying my patched and ragged typescripts for forty years. Whenever I reread his letters I am surprised at my arrogance and his patience.
His scientific work seems old-fashioned today but the different world we live in now was partly made possible through his campaign against ignorance. Freud could have told him that a fellow human being can seldom forgive being helped; few of us are able to feel gratitude without an unconscious resentment. The pioneers always get the knocks and never the crowns. I had a sharp lesson in human snobbery and neglect when in some studies that appeared about him some years ago, his lifework was dismissed as of no importance and details of his private life were discussed that he had kept private, out of concern for others. Not one of the many thousands whom he had helped had the courage to say a word in his defense.
Dear Havelock, I disliked your rein upon my impatience at the time but among the many people whom I have met during my life, few have been more honest or more noble.
The London of those post-war years was cold and gray. People seemed stunned and I think that it is due to this and not to lack of observation that the people I saw seem now so shadowy to me. I liked Dorothy Pound. I felt that she belonged to the English countryside and the depths of its traditions. It must have been hard and difficult for her to find that her destiny was exile. I sometimes met May Sinclair, I admired her integrity and love of scholarship but again I was a rebel who longed for, admired and swallowed whole the new age that she found wanting in profundity.
The visitor whom I remember the most clearly was W. B. Yeats. The form of his poetry was too traditional for me at the time but his personality filled the room, it seemed to glow. He was enthusiastic, as the others were not, about America. He had just returned from Salt Lake City and spoke to us about the Mormons for an hour. He had the gift of storytelling because I saw the landscape as he described it, it was just what I had imagined it to be, fresh with great skies and clear, pure colors. How often subsequently I have wished that I could remember his actual words. As he was leaving, he turned with great courtesy and asked me if I had written Development. I was almost too surprised to reply. He said that he had also felt the educational system to be wrong and hoped that I was working on another book. Very few writers would have been as kind to a mere beginner.
In general, however, it was a world of tired people, trying simply to exist. I knew that I should never be content until I had trodden American soil and eventually and against everyone’s advice, I left for New York.
FOURTEEN
The rebellion of youth is necessary to the survival of mankind. Otherwise the world would stagnate and die because adaptability is essential to life. If the word “progress” is suspect at the present time, remember that without it, fact or illusion though it may be, we should be still helpless in the face of ignorance and starvation. The ambitious young have to leave their neighborhoods and the love-hate conflicts with an older generation to try their luck in some unfamiliar place. For the past two centuries America has been the European dream. It is also the reverse or peaceful side of war. The same qualities that are needed under fire are wanted to construct a home in a foreign land. The dream has created another civilization and in spite of many failures, thousands of people have seen their children, if not themselves, sharing opportunities that they could never have had in Europe. I think that this is part of the hostility that I find in many Europeans towards the United States. Have not the rebels succeeded where the stay-at-homes failed?
My arrival in New York with H. D. and Perdita in September, 1921, was inauspicious. A passenger was found to have some infectious disease just as we were starting to go ashore and so we were held on board for another ten hours, the prey of wild rumors and endless false alarms. Nothing is more exhausting than waiting and when Amy Lowell and Ada Russell met me as we landed late in the evening I had expected too much and I could not think of a word to say to them.
It was almost as bad the next afternoon when Amy took me for a drive and kept saying to me, “Look at the light under that bridge, what would you call it?” All I could mumble was I didn’t know and she was disappointed. I had dinner with her that evening, and Jean Untermeyer who was also there and realized that I was in a state of shock teases me to this day about the frozen silence with which I regarded the party.
American culture was new and exciting but it was totally different from Europe and I needed a guide to explain its differences to me. Most civilians in England had been shut up within a narrow round of duties for five years, my case was normal, not exceptional, but I could not break through its carapace in a moment. I also had to adapt my fantasy of America to its reality. I failed on my first trip and I am sorry but I do not think that it was surprising.
The thing that astonished me most was that the conventions were stronger than in Europe and, apart from ephemeral slang, the language more old-fashioned. Perhaps it is the counterweight to American audacity in invention but manners and words still seem to me to lag twenty years behind Britain. No nations are able to shed their pre-conceived opinions and I suppose that generations more will go on talking about English formality and American ease.
Due to the drier Mediterranean winters of my childhood, I had always suffered terribly from the English cold. It had been agreed before we left England that we should go to California for part of the winter and after a brief stay in New York I went out to Los Angeles, where I had cousins, with H. D., her mother, whom she had not seen for eight years, and Perdita.
I took one look at California and wanted to return to the East. I had expected a large-scale Cornwall where we could ramble on the cliffs. We moved to Carmel Highlands, it was then an isolated place full of elderly ladies who were seeking the sun, but it was dangerous to leave the trai
ls because we heard rattlesnakes several times. I did not like the oily roll and the kelp beds of the Pacific and the main conversation was about Prohibition that seemed to me to have brought the people dangerously near to civil war.
The hotel was in the center of a group of bungalows where we slept. I was walking over alone to breakfast one morning when a voice yelled, “Stop, we are shooting.” Various tales about lawlessness that I had been told but considered childish to believe flashed through my mind. I was a survivor from a war and I was not going to let any brigand frighten me into standing still. I stamped forward, I admit a little uneasily, and a second voice yelled, “We’re shooting, stay where you are.” I hesitated and a man rushed up to me in a white coat, “Haven’t you heard that Mary Pickford is here?”
I thought that I had seen the name on a poster but I had been inside perhaps two cinemas in my life and films barely existed to me. I was directed to another path that led to the hotel and to my amazement, on arrival, the manageress rushed me up to a small, rather plump boy in a flaxen wig and introduced me to him as “our visitor from England.” I was almost as puzzled when she explained that he was doubling for Mary Pickford in the danger scenes on a wreck. I was not sure that film people were respectable. Destiny soon punished me for this thought. A few years later I became an interpreter for film stars in Berlin who did not speak German.
We joined a crowd and sat on the edge of a cliff to watch one of the main scenes being filmed. It was in the informal days when much was improvised and all they asked of spectators was to keep out of camera range. It almost ended that morning in disaster as the hero got caught in the kelp on a dive. I saw people standing about with reflectors for the first time, we watched Mary Pickford repeat a sequence, but it seemed remote, rather like a village fair, it never occurred to me that I should ever take movies seriously and I refused a chance as “a visitor from England” to meet the star. H. D. was much more interested, she often went to the cinema.
The winter passed. I found it impossible to write and even difficult to read, Hilda worked at Greek and I found a companion in her mother whom we nicknamed the Beaver. I was glad when the time came, however, to return to New York. It was a moment when I needed people more than landscapes.
We went to see Jack Yeats. He was so like a retired mariner that I expected to see a telescope in the corner. There were several visitors present, they talked of incidents and people whom I did not know and I stared at the bare branches of the trees in Washington Square and marveled that I was with people who wrote or painted or merely talked about art. I do not think that my silence was the shyness of which I was often accused. It was a form of honesty. I knew that I had nothing to contribute as yet and it was natural to feel unsettled and bewildered. The roots of all England had been destroyed in 1914 and it was going to take me several more years to get over the shock.
I have fleeting impressions of many other people, among them Eunice Tietjens and Alfred Kreymborg. Amy Lowell was disappointed in me, but I was gradually moving away from a restricted world and instinctively withdrew from too strong a personality. My most vivid memory is of meeting Marsden Hartley one evening. We hardly spoke to each other but I must have felt unconsciously his devotion to the sea. The guests were talking that night about Dada, the new movement that was then sweeping Europe, and wondering whether it was a serious advance or a momentary whim. Years later, I came face to face with Hartley’s painting of an immense but not quite breaking wave in the Museum of Modern Art and relived the evening with its arguments, its “has it a meaning for us” as if all the phrases had been brush strokes in the picture; I think that a sense of search and something of the vast country that I so wanted to discover must have come to me across the chatter of that New York party.
The reward of my first visit was meeting Marianne Moore. H. D. had known her at Bryn Mawr and had helped to get some of her first poems published. She had also told me frequently that if I were interested in modern writing, I must study Marianne’s work. I think that “The Fish” was the first poem that I read. It brought the beaches in Scilly vividly into my mind.
Marianne was living with her mother in Greenwich Village at the time and they asked us to tea. “Why, it’s a pterodactyl,” I thought or rather a resemblance to the heraldic creatures that I imagined them to be, as I watched her come to welcome us with the massive gold that seemed more like a headdress than mortal hair, swaying slightly sidewards above a dark green dress. “How could you bear to leave London?” she and her mother said together, “How we wish that we could revisit England.”
“Is it long since you were there?”
“Ten years. We have the memory of it in our hearts, the mists, the green English leaves.”
“I wanted to get away from the fogs,” I said, remembering the winter days in unheated houses and the blackout.
“Even the war could not spoil London and its traditions. Do they still have muffins?”
“Not since rationing,” and they both sighed.
If I had been forty, I could have talked to them for hours about the nineteenth century but as the proverb says, “You can’t put an old head on young shoulders” and it was not even development, it was survival that led me to America. It was not my London of shackles and disappointments that Marianne loved but an image built up from books that had been written, in general, a whole century earlier. She could not understand that I had constructed a vision of clarity and freedom in precisely the same way from the poems that she and H. D. had written. Both of us were playing with dreams, both of us were right, but we were too young to explain this to each other at that moment. “Discipline,” Mrs. Moore remarked as she filled up the teacups, “is good for the spirit.” How could I explain that this word had acquired a totally different meaning for us since 1914?
We liked each other from the beginning but we understood our objectives better a few years later on. The repetition of early patterns in later life has always fascinated me and there is an element in both Marianne and her poetry, a sense of living in an uncrowded land that links her to the mornings when I found ammonites in the chalk pits of the Downs. Her eyes are different from ours, instead of a flashing whole, her mind sees first and they obey its orders in microscopic detail while she seems to lie perched on a rock above a warm and shallow lake, surveying an earlier globe.
The winter was one of the most negative moments of my life and I am ashamed of West, a book I tried to write about it, America was all I had dreamed of it and more but I needed a guide. I found one in Norman Pearson a few years afterwards. I had always loved the country from the first day, the sweep of the skies, the coloring that is less misty than my Northern islands and more austere than the South, but I had to be shown my place in it and that was impossible without help. My only excuse is that I should probably have floundered in any new country at that moment, shock is a process of slow obliteration, it cannot be wiped out with a word.
It was time to return to England but my family insisted that I go back to live with them again. I could have coped with the situation if I had been analyzed but in 1922 I had to face it alone and I was desperately afraid of hurting their feelings. I knew equally well that after a period of comparative freedom, I could not adjust to a conventional routine. I admit that I was foolish but I took the course I did in good faith.
I had happened to meet a young American writer, Robert McAlmon, who was full of enthusiasm for modern writing. He wanted to go to Paris to meet Joyce but lacked the passage money. I put my problem before him and suggested that if we married, my family would leave me alone. I would give him part of my allowance, he would join me for occasional visits to my parents, but otherwise we would live strictly separate lives. It must be remembered that I had been brought up on French rather than English lines and that arranged marriages were perfectly familiar to me. It never occurred to me at the time that there was anything irregular in my suggestion.
Later on, I felt some guilt in having exposed Bob to a post-war Europe
of which, it must be remembered, I knew nothing. Years afterwards again, I realized that he was a child of the Prohibition age and that the end would have been the same, whether he had remained in New York or gone to France. We neither of us felt the slightest attraction towards each other but remained perfectly friendly. We were divorced in 1927 but could have got an annulment just as easily except that this was a longer and more expensive procedure.
I think now that there were advantages on both sides. Bob had a gift for meeting people and bringing the most incongruous groups together. He introduced me to my lifelong friend, Sylvia Beach, to Joyce, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Berenice Abbott, Man Ray, and many others. He brought me the books of E. E. Cummings and Wallace Stevens. He received, in his turn, the freedom of the Paris of the twenties. It should not be forgotten that he used some of his allowance to print avant-garde books, among them one by Gertrude Stein and some of the first of Hemingway’s stories. I think that his own writing has been unduly neglected by the historians of the period. It is crude and uneven but not more so than other work of the time that has survived. Yet his real contribution was in introducing people to each other, from “that kid” to “old man so and so” who was probably barely middle-aged, and thus helping many to find themselves through talking out their problems.
If it had not been for these circumstances I should have gone to live in Cornwall. As it was, I remembered the Switzerland of my childhood and returned to Territet, at the far end of Lake Geneva. I expected to stay a couple of years but apart from the second war, I have lived in Vaud since May, 1922.