The Heart to Artemis

by Bryher;

  In the middle thirties Negro literature was beginning to emerge and we read the first novels and poems with sympathy and interest. Some of us were invited to a party to celebrate the founding of a new magazine. I have never been able to feel any color distinction. People are people to me, it is character and not appearance that matters. I hate parties but a sense of solidarity with fellow writers pricked my conscience and I agreed to go. “You can be as highbrow as you like,” my friends assured me, “they may not have caught up with the latest André Breton but otherwise they will have read as much as yourself.”

  I do not remember now where the house was, but it was not in Harlem. The proportion of light and dark was evenly mixed and everybody seemed serious. I found myself sitting next to a man with a golden-brown skin who seemed to have arrived recently from Paris. I supposed him to be one of the assistant editors and remembering my instructions began to talk to him about Proust. I decided that this was a middle choice between the classics—he might then have thought me condescending as many of the people present were teachers—and the extreme avant-garde. He stared, he said yes and no, I perceived him finally to be making frantic signs. Somebody rescued him and shortly afterwards my friends rescued me. They were silent until we reached the street, then they turned on me furiously. “If you did not want to go, you should have refused but you ought not to have behaved in that outrageous manner. You frightened the poor fellow badly.”

  “But what did I do?” I asked in genuine surprise, “I thought Proust was such a safe choice.”

  “Proust!” they snorted, “That was Mistinguett’s dancing partner. Didn’t you look at his legs?”

  It is always the tradition rather than geographical environment that counts and, although a common language is a convenience, if Americans and English had to approach each other with clicks and snorts we should not misunderstand each other nearly so much. Why is American history not taught more often and more thoroughly in English schools and why are American children given so often a picture of King George the Third’s England without the corrective of the evolution of Britain during the last hundred years? I shall always remember a well-educated English lady saying to me in about 1935, “Oh, my dear, I believe you have been to New York. Do tell me, what do they do with all their buffalo carcasses? They can’t eat them all, and every time I go for a picnic I am terribly afraid I am eating canned hump.”

  I had the good fortune to find an interpreter. H. D. came with us on one of our trips and returned from a visit to her publisher full of enthusiasm for a new friend whom she had made there who had helped her to wriggle out of some literary interview. It was Norman Pearson and she brought him to see Kenneth and myself a few days afterwards. I am slow as a rule to friendship and at first we regarded each other warily from our separate corners like two suspicious dogs. Yet I should never have gone to Greenland nor written my historical novels if it had not been for Norman. I happened to have begun a short novel at that time, of which a portion had appeared in Life and Letters Today. He astounded me by having noticed a difference in the color of the phrases and discussing less what I had written than what I had wanted to make. Such a creative understanding is rare. Nobody had spoken to me in such a manner in either London, Berlin, or Paris. I suppose it is my function to write, my wish was to see the Arctic; but both of these things are unimportant beside what Norman gave me, some knowledge of the America about which I had dreamed so much that it had really become my youth. It is seldom that a desire of such intensity is ever realized in later life but it was in my case, thanks to him. He was not able to do this before the war, three years of which he spent in London, but from 1947 onwards he has helped me to become what I have most wanted to be, a unit in the bridge between two great civilizations. It has been salted with quarrels naturally, otherwise it would not have been alive.

  I was walking down a New York street just before Christmas in 1938. The sky was the curious copper that comes from neon lighting, the pavements were full of shoppers, there was a feeling of snow in the air. By this time my visits had become so regular that they were almost routine. I was about to return to London to see my mother but I had told my friends that I should be out to see them the next fall. Suddenly I looked up and for a piercing and unexpected moment I knew that I should not see the city again for a very long time. I told myself that I was stupid, I tried to shake off the feeling, I laughed but it proved true. It was nine years before I returned, but to the airport and not the harbor. A war, for the second time, completely changed my life.

  It is to the post-war days that I date a real knowledge of America and they belong to another volume of this autobiography. I can only repeat here what I used to say, looking at the Atlantic from the rocks in Scilly, “In England you say don’t to me always, in America you say try.”

  TWENTY

  1934-1940, that block of years was Swiss. Part of it was grim because devoted to the refugees but I also studied with some thoroughness the eighteenth-century history of Vaud. My first fugitive from the Nazis arrived actually in 1933 but the flood began during the following year. Do not think that I had a simple task. Try to feel it instead as if it had happened to yourself. Suppose that you were a citizen of good standing with a wife, children and a respected position. Then overnight you were declared an enemy, beaten up, your possessions seized and if you were very, very lucky, allowed to leave with your family and a suitcase apiece for an alien land where your professional qualifications were useless. I had to meet the people to whom such things had happened, some still scarred from the beatings that they had received. Yet it was the intangible things that they mourned rather than their former security; comradeship, childhood memories and above all, their language.

  I should not have felt compelled to intervene in some political struggle in a country different from my own but this was another matter. It was the attempt to exterminate a whole section of the population no matter whether their characters were good or bad. Nor was it only the Jews who suffered, many Germans who objected to the regime on moral or religious grounds were equally persecuted. Roughly two thirds of my cases were Jewish but the other third were Christians of purely German descent. I cannot understand how any person anywhere who professed the slightest belief in ethics could stand aside at such a moment.

  I warned the English privately and also in print. They called me a warmonger and jeered at me for my pains. It did not help me when I stood among the ruins of blitzed London to know that my forebodings had come true. I remain ashamed of the majority of my fellow citizens and convinced that apathy is the greatest sin in life. If Europe had reacted with horror to the murder of both the Jews and many other honest German citizens in 1933, the regime would have collapsed. An economic boycott and the threat to take up arms unless such persecution ceased would have settled the matter swiftly if it had been done at once. “You could have bribed most of the leaders for a couple of million pounds,” a Swiss in a position to know said to me at the time of Dunkirk, “it would have been cheaper for you than a war.” Most of us, wherever we live, must share the guilt of having done nothing at all.

  The English newspapers, with the honorable exception of the Manchester Guardian and an occasional weekly, refused to print the news. I know. I took attested documents and photographs to London but they were rejected as being “not in accord with the Government policy at the moment” or simply as “too hot.” A larger number of English than people want to remember were pro-Nazi and the general feeling was “It’s not happening to us, why should we care?”

  Many of the refugee committees were poorly organized, cumbersome, afraid of “the government” and too slow. Some were extremely dangerous. It was difficult to impose security checks upon large and usually voluntary staffs and there was reason to fear Nazi infiltration in order to get names so that they could round up and torture the relatives of those who had escaped. The Quakers were a magnificent exception. They were efficient and prompt. The very lucky ones got on their lists.


  A few of us who had been interested in psychology organized a private group. The leading psychoanalysts had been rescued by their colleagues, we started with students but our lists soon widened to include people from a wide variety of occupations. We pooled our funds. The Americans among us arranged for affidavits and looked for jobs so that the exiles could get back to work. The English concentrated upon educational courses, these gave their students the chance to wait in England till their visa numbers were reached. I was the receiving station in Switzerland.

  It was considered too dangerous for me to enter Germany but I went several times to Vienna and Prague to interview applicants and bring out documents that they needed for their visas. It was a favorite Nazi trick to withhold such papers. I used to smuggle them out in copies of the Times. This newspaper was considered so pro-Nazi at that time that its readers were usually unmolested at the frontier.

  We were tough. We made loans for travel expenses and retraining on condition that as soon as the borrowers found work, they paid us back even if it were only a small sum each week. In this way our funds were continually employed and as the loans came back we could rescue another person from our long waiting list. We helped a total of a hundred and five. About sixty were Jews and the rest went into exile because of their moral beliefs. I do not now remember all the names because I burnt my notebook in 1940 when we expected the Nazis to invade Switzerland but I am still in touch with about forty of them. Of the hundred and five, ninety-eight became fully integrated into their new countries; two died, one was an elderly and gifted lawyer, the other the writer, Walter Benjamin. Three were troublesome although they eventually settled and we suspected two of being German agents because they returned to Germany just before war broke out. I think that five failures out of a hundred and five was a magnificent record.

  The authorities would not allow refugees to remain in Switzerland. This was reasonable because of the policy of neutrality and the geographical position. They were liberal about transit visas so that many of my visitors could rest for a couple of days before going on to take their steamers at the various ports and they allowed a number of students to finish their training at the Swiss universities provided that they left as soon as they had gained their diplomas. I met these exiles at the station, saw that they had some funds and a room, gave them any new information that I had about visas and collected their news in return. Besides this, I looked after a group of medical students studying at Lausanne and had them come to see me whenever they wanted to talk over a problem. I thought one or two would go crazy before their final examination because we all knew that they had no second chance.

  Even sympathy had to be rationed. It was impossible to listen continually to their stories without growing a tough hide but it was then that a personal experience of my own came to my help. I had had my individual world taken away from me (and how abruptly) by school and I knew all about the difficulties of adjustment afterwards. At fifteen, however, I had been young and pliable whereas some of my refugees were fifty and one was seventy. I do not think helpers should have to work longer than three years at such a task. It is so distressing that in self-defense names have to turn into ciphers. I had to work six years because we were so few. If I asked my fellow Englishmen for assistance they only said, “Oh, don’t be so emotional, there must be something wrong with the people or their fellow citizens wouldn’t have turned them out” and if I showed them photographs of the brutalities they answered, “Can’t you see, they must be faked.” I found that there was nothing to choose between the political parties. The Right said, “Wait and see” and the Left asked, “What about our jobs?”

  If I was able to help, it was due to the Protestant training of my childhood. Like the Quakers, I dared not sit idly by while such things happened. Yet if destiny offers us a chance at such a time, Fortune heaps us with riches. I was amply rewarded for any assistance that I could give by some of the best friendships of my life. It sharpened my political sense and there was also adventure because I was occasionally in some danger, it trained me to sift the essential from the less valuable and never to relax my guard. It is one thing to take a holiday abroad and another to be an exile, the bitterest fate according to the Greeks and our Saxon forefathers that could befall a man. I met my people at the station, I saw their faces and I knew. “If a man say he has another country in his heart, it is not true,” Ben Jonson once wrote and how should I feel, I wondered, if because of a mark in my passport I could never see the Scillies again nor watch the Falmouth lights?

  Dr. Donald Galbreath, the historian, surprised me once by saying, “Remember, whenever general education rises above a certain level, revolutions follow. However much we may regret it, the masses are unable to bear too much knowledge.” I hardly believed him at the time but I know now that what he said was largely correct. Jobs were so scarce in post-war Germany that it was commonly said that a boy had to have a university diploma merely to sell potatoes and I am sure that an overbalance of academic learning contributed to the irrational outburst of violence although it was not the only cause. If my refugee experiences have taught me anything it is that survival depends upon fluidity and I believe that the old English doctrine that sport is next to godliness is often true. Any deep division between body and brain is weakening to a nation. Thought and action should balance in the same person as they did in Elizabethan times. Both are needed to create a healthy civilization.

  Ironically enough, my refugees were the cream of Germany’s citizens. If there were a weakness in them, it was overcivilization. They could not imagine brutality and kept repeating over and over in bewildered voices, “How could we even know that this persecution was possible?”

  There had to be relief from such appalling sadness and I found it in research. Dr. Sachs had once said to me, “I think you settled at Burier because of The Swiss Family Robinson.” I felt that it was equally due to my Alpine excursions with my father but it was a fact that the version of the story that we usually read was written by Madame de Montolieu at Bussigny about thirty miles from my home. My interest was reawakened by an article on her by Henri Perrochon in the Revue historique vaudois for 1937 and as a result, I plunged deeply into the history of eighteenth-century Lausanne when the city was spoken of as “the new Athens.”

  The Swiss Family Robinson is a folk tale of migration and could not have been written anywhere except in Switzerland. Actually the word “family” is a later English interpolation, it is more correct to speak of the book as the Swiss Robinsons. The original tale was written by Johann Wyss, a pastor and native of Bern, to instruct his children. It contained more sermons than adventures and was first published by one of his sons. Most of the subsequent editions, however, have been based upon an adaptation made by Isabelle de Montolieu to amuse a sick grandchild. She herself was the daughter of Antoine de Polier. He was a friend of Voltaire, a contributor to Diderot’s Encyclopédie and the author of a fragment of autobiography that brings the age vividly to life and has been printed in the Revue historique vaudois for 1913. Isabelle omitted many of the sermons and stressed the adventures. There were many interpolations during the nineteenth century. All the early versions end with the return of the whole family to Europe. The present conclusion with the parents remaining at Rock House and two of the sons leaving for the Old World seems to date to about 1841. The English introduced a girl, dressed as a midshipman! They naturally claimed the island. There were always two dogs but the names were seldom the same. The original popularity of the book probably owed much to the fact that as Vaud was governed by Bern and there were no opportunities for its youth to serve in any official capacity, hundreds left every year to seek their fortunes as soldiers or merchants often as far afield as Canada or China, or they became tutors at the Russian or German courts. The emphasis on plants was due to a desperate need to improve agricultural methods at that time to provide food for a rising population.

  One October day in 1938 I went with a friend to Bussigny. We found the hous
e where Isabelle had lived and that, to her bitter sorrow, she had been compelled to sell because of poverty in her old age. The owner of the place in 1938 was a white-haired lady who might have come out of one of Isabelle’s books. She met us at the door in a stiff black dress and the black buttoned boots that seem a heraldic emblem of the Victorian age. The house had been turned into a school, the salon was a bedroom for some of the girls and the dining room had been altered but the kitchen and the garden had not been touched. A picture of Madame de Montolieu was hanging on the wall together with a cutting from a newspaper of the time advertising the sale of the house. “My pupils never read her anymore,” the owner said sorrowfully in French, “but I was brought up on her Châteaux Suisses.” She took us out to the wooden gallery along the first floor where Isabelle had worked. There was still the view towards Mont Blanc that could sometimes be seen on a clear day and the huge tree that towered above the railing might have been a sapling that she had planted. Her flowers were below her as she wrote about Falcon’s Nest. The best description of the house is in a letter by Maria Edgeworth after she had visited her at Bussigny. It was strange to stand in the exact place where Isabelle had worked and know that she had died after a stroke brought on by poverty and overwork while her tale must have earned riches for many strangers during the century after her death. We can only hope that her vision of the island was a Little compensation.