No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  1 Taken from the Sikhs by the British in 1849 and now in Pakistan.

  2 ‘They are not men, they are not women, they are Americans.’

  3 A women’s college in Pennsylvania.

  4 Using these manuscripts as a base, Sylvia arranged a Walt Whitman exhibition in the late 1920s.

  5 A variation on bollocks.

  6 Equivalent to about £500,000 in 2020.

  7 Sonia Delaunay, a pioneer of the Orphism movement in art, did a painting of the Bal Bullier in 1913.

  BRYHER

  ‘When is a woman not a woman?

  When obviously she is sleet and

  hail and a stuffed sea-gull.’

  H.D.

  Passport photograph of Annie Winifred Ellerman, aka Bryher, Bryher Papers General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

  Bryher felt trapped in the wrong body. Even as a child she viewed her birth gender as a trick, a mistake. She saw herself as a boy who needed to escape from the physical cage of a girl. She was tormented by pressure to have curls, wear frocks, be called by her birth names, Annie Winifred, or her nickname, Dolly.

  Adrienne Monnier said it was impossible to speak about Bryher’s style of dress: ‘it is distinguished by absolutely nothing; everything about it is neutral to an extreme. When I see her I simply want to brush her beret…’

  Bryher did not want the patronymic of her father, the matronymic of her mother, or the name of any husband of convenience. Bryher is one of the Isles of Scilly off the Cornish coast, a part of the world she came particularly to love. She chose to be defined by the sea, the cliffs and by a landscape beyond gender. Nothing pleased her more, she said, than getting her hair cut short. Short hair and her chosen name distanced Bryher from the daughter she could not and would not be.

  Barbered hair and a changed name declared resistance. Radclyffe Hall was Dear John to her partner Una Troubridge, and she had the curls painted out from a portrait of her made when she was a child named Marguerite. The society painter Gluck, whose birth name was Hannah Gluckstein, insisted on ‘Gluck, no prefix, no suffix, no quotes’ in the art world, and had her hair cut at Truefitt gentlemen’s hairdresser in Bond Street; Alice B. Toklas cropped Gertrude Stein’s hair with the kitchen scissors.

  Money shaped Bryher’s life and work – she was born into a vault of it. Access to great wealth meant the power to do good as she saw it. ‘I have rushed to the penniless young, not with bowls of soup but with typewriters,’ she wrote. She became a patron of modernism. She was the rock and saviour of her partner, the poet H.D. – Hilda Doolittle. She funded the Contact Publishing Company in Paris, supported James Joyce and his family with a monthly allowance, gave money to Sylvia Beach and subsidized Margaret Anderson’s Little Review in New York. She started the film company POOL Productions in Switzerland, financed its experimental films, and founded Close Up, the first film magazine in English. She built a Bauhaus-style home in Switzerland. She supported the emerging psychoanalytical movement in Vienna, and funded Freud and other Jewish intellectuals hounded by the Nazis to help them get out of Germany and Austria.

  Bryher’s allegiance was to new ways of saying and seeing, civil liberties, gender equality. ‘I was completely a child of my age,’ she said, by which she meant the age of modernism, of new ways of seeing and saying.

  Bryher’s life was long, her interests wide. Subversive in the causes she supported and in her revisionist ideas of gender and relationship, she made two lavender marriages with gay men, one to secure her inheritance and pacify her parents, the other to secure adoption rights for H.D.’s child. She accepted the open sexual relationships of those with whom she was involved and was vocal and dedicated in her opposition to fascism. And yet there was something neutral ‘to the extreme’ about Bryher’s demeanour. She did not drink, smoke or party. She liked unfussy food (toast and Yorkshire pudding), seemed humourless, stayed quiet when others were talking and was overlooked in a group. No one fell in love with her, though numerous people were hugely grateful for her help and the way she realized their dreams. Among her writings were a number of novels in which the hero was a twelve-year-old boy and it was as if this boy were an identity trapped within herself.

  Bryher was Sylvia Beach’s trusted friend for forty years. They confided, corresponded and looked out for each other even when living in different countries. Bryher discreetly helped Sylvia and Adrienne Monnier keep their bookshops going. In her memoirs, she wrote:

  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 the perfect Ambassador and I doubt if a citizen has ever done more to spread knowledge of America abroad.

  name of the father

  Bryher was born Annie Winifred Glover on 2 September 1894 in the English seaside town of Margate; on her birth certificate was a dash in the space headed Name of Father. Officially she was illegitimate, for though her parents lived together, they were not married. Her father, John Reeves Ellerman, did not marry Hannah Glover, her mother, until Bryher was fifteen. There was the impediment of an existing husband. Only when Hannah Glover belatedly gave birth to a son did Sir John, as he had then become, marry her to accord legitimacy to his son and heir and, as a secondary consideration, to his teenage daughter.

  John Ellerman, a self-made man

  Bryher’s father was a self-made man. When he died in 1933 aged seventy-one, he left an estate of more than £36 million, the largest recorded fortune in Britain.1 He was born in Hull in 1862, the only child of an English mother and German father. Bryher said she searched the family tree in vain, hoping for Jewish ancestry. His own father died when he was nine. He left home aged fourteen, was articled to a Birmingham chartered accountant, and when he was twenty-four he started his own accountancy firm, John Ellerman & Co., in Moorgate, London.

  By scrutiny of their accounts, he identified ailing shipping companies that commanded South African, Atlantic and Indian routes, took them over as the sole stakeholder, and combined them all into what quickly became the giant Ellerman Lines. His first competitive purchase of a shipping line was for Leyland & Company. He bid for this after Frederick Leyland collapsed and died of a heart attack in 1892, aged sixty, at Blackfriars Station in London. Ellerman then bought up other lines, like Thomas Wilson’s of Hull, the largest privately owned shipping line in the world. In 1905 he was created a baronet for lending ships to the British government in the Boer War, and by 1917 he owned not only as many ships as were in the entire French merchant navy, but also swathes of prime London property and most of the shares in the Financial Times, The Times, The Illustrated London News, The Sphere, Tatler and The Sketch. He was also a major shareholder in twenty-two collieries and seventy breweries.

  He had a mind like a latter-day computer, with a kind of Euclidean power of prediction. At any given time he knew which of his ships was where, what it carried, where it would unload, how many passengers would embark and disembark and what each journey was worth. Apparently he predicted, even to the months, the dates of both world wars.

  As a parent, he was remote. The Mayfair house at 1 South Audley Street where Bryher was brought up was huge, the chauffeurs liveried, the servants numerous. Sir John worked long hours, amassing money by the lax rules of Victorian enterprise culture. He was portly, immaculate, his hands laced across his middle when he sat, ‘his beard so neat it could have been applied with spirit gum’, his eyes ice-blue, as were Bryher’s. He watched steadil
y, was soft-spoken and never discourteous. His eyes did not seem mirthful when he laughed.

  He had no particular vision of what he wanted to do with his colossal wealth beyond creating more of it and bequeathing his empire to a son. Though as rich as Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller, little was known of him, for he shunned publicity and society. His personal habits were abstemious: an early supper, a single whisky and to bed at ten. Hannah Glover, Bryher’s mother, was deaf, selectively so, a side effect of scarlet fever. She did what he required of her. To the first of Bryher’s gay ersatz husbands, she said of Sir John: ‘He keeps me in a glass case but I keep human.’

  Bryher’s childhood

  Sir John was fond of his daughter, whom he called Winifred or Dolly, but he had fixed ideas of a woman’s place. An empty atmosphere pervaded 1 South Audley Street. Despite the size and opulence of the house, there was little or no conversation or emotional exchange between its three occupants. Bryher, the only child for fifteen years, never played with and seldom saw a child of her own age.

  She suffered her restrictive clothes, the sense she could not be the appropriate daughter, a succession of nannies and governesses. She wished she were her father’s son so as to pass his test of approval. She learned horse riding and fencing: ‘I found the French fleuret too formal and switched to the duelling sword dreaming of challenges.’ She had a sense of imprisonment, of identity denied:

  In the early nineteen hundreds so many harmless things were forbidden us. We might not feel water nor sand nor earth when two kinds of drawers and two kinds of petticoats, a pinafore and serge frock imposed, as I can still remember, a very real strain on one’s vitality. Prohibitions were imposed for whose reason we might not ask. We were pruned of every form of self-expression, like the single flower on an exhibition stem, until everything in us went into a single desire, freedom, which we saw only in wind or in the breaking waves and as we could not hold these, into what was nearest to them, poetry.

  She ran away several times but got no further than the end of the street. As with Sylvia Beach, books were her childhood refuge and she identified with heroic fictional figures. Sir John’s library, with its leather armchairs and stoked fires, was shelved with leather-bound editions of the classics. The titles of the complete works of Charles Dickens were tooled in gold on red bindings. On the walls were landscapes in oil – a precipice on Capri with fig trees in the foreground, a mid-period Corot of the Loire on a grey day.

  For Bryher, from the age of five, escape from the oppression of South Audley Street was to sail with her parents on her father’s ships: ‘I watched the seamen enviously because the thing I wanted most was a boy’s sailor suit.’ In a memoir, The Heart to Artemis, she wrote of journeys in the decade before the First World War, to Egypt, Turkey, Italy, Spain, North Africa. She described the streets of Cairo, learning Arabic, taking a steamship down the Nile, trekking through the desert on donkey back, walking in Capri, climbing the Alps, nights in tents and palaces. She loved these travels. They created in her a restless international view, a disregard for the notion of home as a fixed place. Travel became natural to her as a lifestyle. When adult, she crossed the globe with the same nonchalance as others might go to the shops. ‘“What do you expect me to do for you?” my analyst asked many years later. “As a child you have been in paradise.”’

  a brother

  When Bryher was fifteen, in 1909, her brother, John, was born. A son was the apotheosis of family for Sir John Ellerman. To legitimize his son’s birth and inheritance rights, he married Hannah Glover under a little-known Scottish law, per verba de praesenti, by which a couple could be legally married without witness if they lived together in Scotland for twenty-one successive days. Sir John’s son might not easily have succeeded to his baronetcy or business were he identified as illegitimate.

  All that Bryher, as Winifred or Dolly, had been denied was heaped on her brother. He was his father’s heir and would inherit the Ellerman empire. His path was not easy and his childhood was lonely. His father forbade him ordinary pleasures – like going to see a Charlie Chaplin film. He was not allowed outside without a hat, and almost predictably had little interest in finance or business as an adult. His life’s work and passion became the study of rodents. He lectured and published scholarly articles and a three-volume, 1,500-page monograph, The Families and Genera of Living Rodents, with a list of named forms (1758–1936).2

  Bryher hated him from the off. It was bad enough, after fifteen years of being the only child, to be usurped by a sibling, but the unfairness of the blatant privilege bestowed on this boy compounded the insult of her illegitimacy and sense of gender incongruence. It also honed her feminism and guided her subversion and rebellion. A core element of her embrace of new writing and thinking was the sense that the values of the past were patriarchal, stifling, and inordinately unfair.

  To her conservative father, she was his daughter, his Dolly. He was bewildered by her. Her path was to be a wife and mother, ergo she must wear frocks, be debarred from working in his or in any business, and by laws of primogeniture, enforced by men of power like himself, after the birth of his son, be excluded from inheriting his estate.

  boarding school

  In what to Bryher was a literal act of rejection, immediately after her brother’s birth she was packed off to Queenswood Ladies’ College in Eastbourne. There were eighty boarders aged nine to seventeen and a few day girls:

  I was flung into a crowded boarding school to sink or swim alone… Nobody gave any explanations; it was a perfect preparation for Freud. The experience could have driven me to insanity or suicide and it was as crippling for a time as a paralytic stroke. I did not recover from it until long after psychoanalysis and I survived only because I was tough.

  School highlighted her sense of dislocation. ‘I had the emotional development of a boy of nine,’ she said of herself. She did not know who or where she was or how to communicate in this bewildering, unfamiliar environment. She said she did not understand the vernacular of ‘bags I this seat’ or ‘funny old fish’. She hated the discipline but liked the food. Her marks were average.

  ‘Nobody gave any explanations’ was Bryher’s protest about her strange childhood. Her mother described the home environment as like being in a glass case. For Bryher, cut off from herself and others by wealth, emotional inarticulacy and assumptions about gender, it was like being marooned. If she could not be Winifred Glover or Winifred Ellerman, then who was she?

  a friend

  At school she made her first friend. Doris Banfield was half Scillonian, half Cornish, and her father too was a shipowner. In 1911 Bryher was allowed to go for a summer holiday with the Banfield family to their house in the Scillies: ‘It was an instantaneous falling in love… the sea, islands and boats.’ With Doris, she swam in the sea, collected shells (‘cowries were the great prize’), went out in small fishing boats, landed on uninhabited islets – ‘even to see a puffin on the rocks near where we were sitting seemed an intrusion’. Doris had a fox terrier called Sampie with a black spot above his tail. Bryher was happy, free, and away from school and South Audley Street. Her attachment to Cornwall and her friendship and support of Doris became lifelong:

  There was something about Cornwall that made us forget the difficulties of getting there. It was older, less tolerant of the human race, yet offering some sudden moments of illumination such as I have never felt in any other land. Once there, I never wanted to leave it, yet I also knew that I should do no work, moment would succeed moment of hibernation and dream.

  When adult, and in command of her own affairs, Bryher bought Doris a daffodil farm in Trenoweth Valley in St Keverne in Cornwall. She took holidays at this farm and stayed there when London was being bombed in the Second World War.

  complete frustration

  On leaving school, Bryher asked her father to let her work in the family business. He refused. ‘Women will never be accepted at conferences,’ he said. In 1914 she applied to work as a land girl
. She was twenty. Her father’s signed permission was needed and he would not give it. Sylvia Beach’s parents encouraged her freedom of choice; Bryher’s sought her conformity. Only by subterfuge could she be free. Her father allowed her request to study Arabic at the University of London but her sense of being blocked and thwarted was acute: ‘I waste in a raw world, dumb, unendurable and old,’ she wrote. She became suicidal:

  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 subexistence 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… Under such circumstances I am always amazed now that I survived.

  She did not correlate her brother’s later absorption in the behaviour of rodents with her own preoccupation with rat poison in a cupboard. She said her one overmastering passion was to be free, to get out of South Audley Street, open herself to new experience, live her own life.