The Heart to Artemis

by Bryher;

  FIFTEEN

  I should like this book to be read as neither mere autobiography nor period piece but as an attempt to show how external events and unconscious drives help or hinder development. History itself is a philosophy. It dies and is continuous. The skeleton survives; the particular circumstances of time and place perish with each generation. The ages move however frantically the nations may resist all changes and although we can trace an outline from our diaries or from records, no memory can give us back the intensity of that first moment of the early twenties when the artist, it seemed, was more influential than the politician.

  We were all exiles. We remain so today. It is our destiny. We were the last group to grow up under the formidable discipline of the nineteenth century whose effect, however much we resent it, cannot be entirely eradicated from our systems. All of us had been taught as soon as we could speak that abnegation and hard work would give us security and peace. The battle of the trenches cracked this myth from one end of Europe to the other. The Armistice offered us influenza, inflation and loss. In such a seething epoch of personal tragedy, the only thing left in which we could believe was art. It was to us what religion was to the Middle Ages, discovery to the Renaissance and what science is becoming to the present day. Only art, if it were to fill the hollow left by chaos, must be revolutionary and new. It must find words that were not tainted by nineteenth-century associations, rhythms that fitted the purr of machines rather than the thudding of hooves, different colors and, above all, a sternly truthful approach.

  We believed that if we stated facts without comment, moral or otherwise, mankind must see its follies and revise its laws. It was a vain and idle dream and yet, looking back at it after forty years, how much that we created in the way of thought is accepted now as valid and desirable.

  We were very young, in part because we tended to go back to what we had wanted to be in 1914. Many of the men had just come out of the army and were still surprised to be alive. A number of the women were young widows; others had emancipated themselves from their families through their war work. There was too much drinking, less promiscuous love-making than is supposed, and plenty of revolutionary talk, but it was always basically a moral revolt. There was a seriousness beneath the wildest escapade that differentiated it from what often seems mere shallowness today.

  It is hard to realize now how new everything was. A few of us had begun to read Freud, others talked about the Russian Revolution, but we were not “engaged” by either psychology or politics. War that had been attrition made the momentary our concern. We laughed at everybody and no idea was sacred. We really believed that if we could discover why we preferred a particular café or disliked some otherwise acceptable person’s face, we should eventually understand the baffling roots of human behavior. It was a form of crude, spontaneous analysis although such a term would have puzzled us in 1920. The mistake that we made was that though we owed our survival to rebellion, we did not realize that it was not the concepts themselves but the way that mankind had used them that was false. Our incessant mockery of loyalty, duty and honor deprived the next generation of its proper roots and they did not have our apprenticeship of danger to steady them. Yet remember that nothing was left to us of the codes to which our youth had been sacrificed and that we gave our century a sense of honesty (England went into the second war without illusions) and an inquisitiveness of mind. We swept away some good together with much evil but always with such exuberance that compared with us the thirties seem a dull and spiritless age.

  Our geography was Montparnasse; our capital, the length of pavement outside a café. The group or, in the slang of that day, “the bunch” went first to one place and then, for a reason divined rather than uttered, they moved to another across the street. At the time that I was there, it was usually the Dôme or the Rotonde. It was the moment of glory for the little reviews. Printing was cheap, whoever had fifty dollars or its equivalent started a magazine for himself and one or two carefully selected friends. Funds failed or there was the inevitable quarrel and the paper died. I pulled a pile of them out of a cupboard a few weeks ago. They were full of misprints, the covers were faded, but the contents blazed with vitality. There were the now famous names besides those of whom nothing more was heard. Some of the unsuccessful died, some wrote a single book, others have vanished. I suppose if they remember their one golden summer now they think of it with surprise, even a little shame. At least we never turned out factual reports or tidy little novels. The sublime epitaph, the trick ending, were pulled mercilessly to pieces as the crowds rushed up from the Métro and the buses thundered along the streets. The scornful, however, were in the game as well and when their stories were printed the following week, we took our revenge with no holds barred. If a manuscript was sold to an established publisher, its author was regarded as a black sheep and for his own safety moved to the Right Bank. We boasted, we knew that we were good and to hell with the bourgeoisie including all reviewers, but we did not write with an eye on fame, security or television appearances. We were permitted to appear without loss of prestige in Contact, Broom, Transition, the Transatlantic and This Quarter.

  It was a marvelous apprenticeship and I am thankful to have shared in a historic moment that seems so much richer today than when I was in the middle of it but although I realized the exhilaration around me, I was a Puritan in Montparnasse and Paris could not give me the same sense of enchantment that it offered my companions. The very familiarity of the streets made me uneasy and reminded me of the restrictions of childhood. I had to see McAlmon, however, from time to time; he lived there and it was a convenient meeting place. Sometimes I think of the middle part of my life as the wasted years. It is an unfair judgment because some of the experiences were necessary but I had temporarily lost my way. We advance in zigzags while I wanted to rush straight to my goal, and the book that was nearest to me at that time because it seemed to express so many of my exasperations was André Gide’s Paludes. Were we not always preparing ourselves for the great moment that would light our creative fire, and didn’t something always go wrong? It never occurred to me that I was getting some of the impressions that I needed, sitting in the cafés that half of me despised.

  I was introduced to the “Quarter” at the end of May, 1921. It was at the beginning of an eventful journey that ended in my settling in Switzerland for most of my life. I had read an account of a new service from London to Paris and had persuaded H. D. to cross over with me by air.

  Flying then was an experience. The youngest girl was chosen at Croydon, thrust into a borrowed suit and pushed into the nose. The rest of us were strapped into our seats, handed paper bags, and the door was slammed. There were no hostesses in those days and no frills. The return fare, I am told, was twelve pounds.

  I knew nothing about aeroplanes, it was the “being modern” that appealed to me. I remembered the headlines when Bleriot crossed the Channel but that had seemed a feat, like riding out a hurricane, far removed from ordinary life. Later on, I must have been about fourteen, I had watched some oxen drag a strange-looking object to the top of the Downs near Alfriston and had laughed as heartily as the rest when it flattened itself on the ground after about a minute in the air. My immediate reaction as we started towards France was surprise. In a flash, I understood modern painting. We could not have been very high and the geometric patterns of the fields, the curves of the rivers and the thick lines of sudden, oblong pools explained the canvases that till then had meant so little to me. I have never really lost the excitement of that initial moment. I prefer to see landscapes from the air and I cannot understand people who find such travel boring. I hate the holdups at airports, the customs and the long drives towards the terminal as much as anybody but once we take off I am a different person, it stirs my imagination, I have lived through whole stories in one flight. The clouds form themselves into strange polar patterns, the sun changes, I saw it once bouncing like a scarlet football from peak to peak on an autumn journey
from Geneva; besides we look down at a globe instead of across a segment of earth. On land I am a frightened mouse if I have to cross a road, on the sea or in the air I come into my own.

  The first trip took about three hours and I was hauled out at Le Bourget, horribly airsick and almost deaf. In spite of this, I was ready to go up again the moment an opportunity occurred.

  H. D. had not been airsick but she did not seem to share my enthusiasm. Later in the afternoon we sat down with McAlmon and Dorothy Pound to wait for Ezra and nobody showed the slightest interest in our then unusual exploit.

  “Watch the life on the boulevards,” my father had said to me once, “it takes an artist to get even a suggestion of it on paper.” I thought at that moment that it all seemed rather ordinary, the men were pale as they came out of the offices, the girls who were eating wild strawberries beside us were not so different from the ones that I had seen in 1913. Their skirts were a little shorter, their faces were half covered by their hats and their summer dresses had brighter flowers than would formerly have been considered correct. The real change was in the number of cars, the many taxis with dusty wheel spokes that looked as if they were made out of wire and the heavy lorries that had replaced the horse-drawn carts. Ezra came but I hardly listened to the conversation, I was looking up at the sky. I have been there, I thought, I am sharing in a great discovery, it is new and free. I did not realize how soon the controls would come to force us small adventurers out of the air.

  There was only one street in Paris for me, the rue de l’Odéon. It is association, I suppose, but I have always considered it one of the most beautiful streets in the world. It meant naturally Sylvia and Adrienne and the happy hours that I spent in their libraries. Has there ever been another bookshop like Shakespeare and Company? It was not just the crowded shelves, the little bust of Shakespeare nor the many informal photographs of her friends, it was Sylvia herself, standing like a passenger from the Mayflower with the wind still blowing through her hair and a thorough command of French slang, waiting to help us and be our guide. She found us printers, translators and rooms, she was busy all those years with the problem of publishing Ulysses, yet she never lost her detachment nor identified herself with any particular group. If there could be such a thing, she was the perfect Ambassador and I doubt if a citizen has ever done more to spread knowledge of America abroad. She loved France, she made us feel that it was a privilege to be in Paris, but the common modern mistake never occurred to her, she never tried to identify herself too closely with a foreign land whose childhood myths she had not shared. Great and humble, she mixed us all together instead, the bond between us being that we were artists and discoverers. We changed, the city altered, but after an absence we always found Sylvia waiting for us, her arms full of new books, and often a writer whom we wanted to meet, standing beside her in the corner.

  Sylvia had both kindness and understanding. I was living a placid existence among the Swiss mountains but my family expected me to be in Paris with McAlmon. I did not want to worry my mother and so Sylvia posted letters to her from me and forwarded my mail. It may have been wrong but it saved my parents from a lot of anxiety and I cannot think that it did any harm.

  Number seven, on the opposite side of the rue de l’Odéon, was also a cave full of treasures. I was shy with Adrienne Monnier at first, my British accent got in my way and I also knew directly I looked at her round forehead and deceptively placid blue eyes that she was a thought reader. It was an instinctive gift and while others of the Quarter spoke of her native Savoyard qualities, I felt rather that she was part of that timeless nucleus that has, as its purpose, the transmission of a wisdom that cannot be written down, even in poetry. At first she merely suggested a few books that I might have missed and then, gradually, and only as she felt that I was ready, she began to talk, saying little, always waiting for me to take the lead but suddenly revealing in a flash another angle or the deeper appreciation of some author whom I might have neglected. Thanks principally to Flint’s articles, I had read many of her favorite books but she introduced me to the work of Valéry and Fargue. It is because of her that I have kept consistently in touch with modern French literature for forty years. She sent me regularly parcels of what she considered to be the best books published every season. It was an invaluable service to render to a foreigner, living outside France.

  In those early years our meetings blur into two memories, one of her at her shop and the other of her at home. I see Adrienne coming towards me as I open the door of number seven, with her arms full of yellow, paper-covered books. Some people change according to what they wear but Adrienne and her clothes were one. I could never make up my mind whether I preferred her in blue or gray but the fine woolen skirt never seemed either a clerk’s robe nor a Savoyard petticoat as some have written, to me she was a French officer in a military cape, trying in 1812 to bring his soldiers back from Moscow. Adrienne hated war in any form and yet I think that this was what she was, a captain with a wholehearted devotion to her company, the young or would-be writers united to her by their devotion to art. She taught us with a humility born from great pride, not in her own gifts though this would have been perfectly legitimate, but because we were all privileged to put vision above ignorance.

  In her own home it is the delicious smells that I remember, herbs, a chicken roasting, the polish on the wood, these and the murmur of talk. I met Romains there and Michaux and later, but this belongs to the thirties, Schlumberger, Prévost and Chamson. It was a unique experience, first to eat the dinner because she cooked better than anyone whom I have ever known, and then to listen to the conversation of some of the finest minds in France. I never spoke unless I was spoken to and so they forgot sometimes that I was a foreigner. Sylvia, of course, had been adopted by them all.

  We pray for opportunities and when they are given us often fail to use them. I took Adrienne’s kindness too much for granted and lost the chance to learn much of what she would willingly have taught me. She knew me inside out. She said once to my intense surprise, I forget the exact French words but this is the substance, “Ah, Bryher, nine tenths of you is all that is practical and balanced, but the other tenth,” she shrugged her shoulders and looked at me as if she were curious rather than puzzled, “est follement Romanesque.” I disputed the matter but once when I was sleeping in a tent up in the Arctic, I suspected that she might have been right. She also added on that same occasion, “You will write but late and in the classic style.”

  When the time came she showed us how to die and hardly a day passes now when I do not miss her.

  One sunny afternoon we were walking down one of those obscure streets that were so familiar to me through many French stories. The chimneys hid much of the sky, the gray façades concealed a dozen disenchanted heroes full of scruples, and the road itself was like the connective word in a sentence, necessary but colorless, with nothing in it to disrupt the attention. Suddenly a high, old-fashioned car drew up beside us. Two penetrating eyes in a square, impassive face seemed to be absorbing every detail of my appearance. “Why, McAlmon,” a puzzled voice remarked, “you did not tell me that you had married an ethical Jewess. It’s rather a rare type.”

  All my ancestors had been English Protestants or German Lutherans but you did not argue with Gertrude Stein. You acquiesced. The Jewish suggestion linked up to the East but I did not care for the ethical, anything that smacked of morals was suspect. Still I was searching (how had she guessed this?) for a form of absolute truth. I took it therefore as a compliment and nodded. She talked a few minutes to McAlmon, invited us both to tea and drove off in her famous Ford, a jolly little dinosaur riding down the sands of time.

  Apart from Shakespeare and Company it is the long room in the rue de Fleurus that I remember most from my Paris visits. It was full of paintings but what I noticed, it must have been some trick of the lighting, was that the atmosphere seemed full of gold. There was a table piled with books and beyond this a high chair where Gertrude sat,
surrounded by a group of young men. At first there was little general conversation, then she would pick up a phrase and develop it, ranging through a process of continuous association until we seemed to have ascended through the seven Persian heavens and in the process to have turned our personalities inside out. Make no mistake, however, it was not an ego selfishly seizing the stage, it was rhetoric, spare and uncolored by emotion. She offered us the world, took it away again in the following sentence, only to demonstrate in a third that it was something that we could not want because it had never existed. How bitterly I regret that there were no tape recorders then available to preserve her disputations.

  Gertrude had no use for me but she did not dislike me. I had nothing to offer her in the way of intellectual stimulus and, unlike her young men, brought her no personal problems. I knew this and so, whenever I could, I slipped away to join Miss Toklas in her corner.

  It was never Miss Stein but Gertrude from the first meeting but only very intimate friends called Miss Toklas “Alice.” Her dignity subdued the rawest, most boisterous youth. I wondered why she had not been more often painted, under an apparent repose there was such a glowing quality of life. She had subordinated her own gifts to looking after her friend yet they never grew to resemble each other as often happens in such cases. Her own personality was intact. I left the others busy with their speculations while I listened to stories of her childhood in a remote Californian valley that she transformed as she spoke into some Jules Verne island mysteriously drifting among mountains instead of seas. I wish Gertrude had written more about these beginnings in the Autobiography but I suppose they did not touch her essentially modern mind.