No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  Perdita, who looked like her father, only met him once – by chance on Capri in 1947. A few years after her birth, Gray apparently fathered another girl by an unspecified young married woman. He wrote in one of his notebooks: ‘The world is full of my daughters. It pullulates with them. You can’t escape them. They are all over the place.’

  He married three times. His addiction to alcohol and cocaine got out of hand and he died aged fifty-six of cirrhosis of the liver.

  Saint Bryher

  Bryher saved H.D.’s life and H.D. became her life. Both were outsiders. Bryher never doubted H.D.’s creative talent was greater than her own. The core of their relationship was H.D.’s need and Bryher’s unfaltering wish to protect her and to champion her work. Three weeks after Perdita’s birth, Bryher took H.D. to Eastbourne to recuperate. Perdita was left in the Norland Nursery in Holland Park, which became her main home throughout her infancy. Bryher paid all fees.

  A pattern of dependency and provision formed. In June and July 1919, Bryher took H.D. to Mullion Cove in south Cornwall and to the Scilly Isle from which she had taken her name. H.D. had a psychotic episode, which years later she described to Freud as the ‘sense of being in a bell jar’ immersed in a watery globe. Bryher encouraged such episodes and called them the most wonderful thing. But they alarmed H.D. and caused her mental and physical torment, even while she cherished them as a creative source.

  Bryher did not shrink from the demands H.D.’s mental breakdowns brought. She gave H.D. wealth, love, admiration, loyalty and psychiatric help. In a poem dedicating her 1926 novel Palimpsest to Bryher, H.D. wrote;

  stars turn in purple, glorious to the sight;

  yours is not gracious as the Pleiads are

  nor as Orion’s sapphires, luminous

  yet disenchanted, cold imperious face,

  when all the others, blighted, reel and fall,

  your star, steel-set, keeps lone and frigid tryst

  to freighted ships baffled in wind and blast.

  H.D. was, throughout her life, ‘baffled in wind and blast’. Bryher was her North Star. Other stars, more bright and alluring, reeled and fell from sight when the going got stormy. As a provider, Bryher was more of a man than Aldington or Gray. Aldington proffered a fiver but said he would always hate his wife’s baby for being alive. Gray ran from the scene and would not face responsibility for having fathered a child.

  Bryher offered herself as more than a partner to H.D., more than a ‘girl lover’ or friend. She was the resolution to this devilish mess. H.D. would have the best accommodation, travel anywhere in the world, buy what she wanted and have provision for her child. She could be free to write. Bryher’s devotion would be steel-set. She would be her steadfast partner, her wise guardian. That year she financed the publishing of H.D.’s volume of verse Hymen with Harriet Weaver’s Egoist Press and subsidized the Poets’ Translation Series where H.D.’s Greek translations appeared.

  that odd commanding look

  So H.D. chose to make her life’s voyage under Bryher’s lone and frigid tryst. But there was a barrier to her affection. She found Bryher controlling; ‘cold and imperious’. She described her eyes as ‘bluer than blue, bluer than gentian, than convolvulus, than forget-me-not, than the blue of pansies. They were a child’s eyes, gone wild and fair with gladness.’

  But she was not drawn to the personality behind this blueness:

  that odd commanding look and that certainty and that lack of understanding and that utter understanding that goes with certain types of people… people who were simple and domineering never having known anything of scraping, of terror at the wrong thing, of the wrong people. Hard face, child face, how can you be so hard? The smile froze across the white large teeth and the white perfect teeth showed the lips as hard, coral red, clear, beautifully cut and yet the child was not beautiful.

  There was something out of reach in Bryher: a kinship with her father’s computing mind and her brother’s remorseless interest in rodents. She wanted to be part of H.D.’s creative world with her own gender identity understood. But H.D. was not particularly sympathetic to Bryher’s problems, the strange obstinacy of the solitary child, the girl who was privileged but undermined and with a sense of encasement in the wrong body. H.D. declared love and affection for Bryher, but never passion. She said she had a brain where her heart ought to be, though she came to trust this brain and not once did Bryher fail her. ‘When I met Bryher first’, H.D. wrote,

  a little thing – all tense, dressed like a princess, buns over her ears – she said to me ‘you’re the first person who treats me like a human being. Everyone else looks at me as though they saw just over my head a funnel out of which pours gold coins.’

  But H.D. quickly became dependent on the gold coins that poured from the Ellerman funnel. Bryher’s father was not just the richest man in Britain, he was the richest by a factor of four, the largest taxpayer in the country. Bryher neither wanted nor expected acknowledgement or thanks. H.D. was neither calculating nor mercenary, but she knew the measure of the gift: rescue from a devilish mess and absolute creative freedom of the sort most writers dare not dream.

  In return, H.D. gave Bryher the avenue of escape from South Audley Street, a path for creative endeavour and a revisionist lifestyle. They talked of living together. Bryher said she would be glad to be with her ‘almost entirely’ and promised to provide for Perdita.

  They needed each other, though the road was not easy. H.D. needed Bryher’s wealth and strength, her generosity and care. She was not in love with her and often said she would leave her. She described herself as at times very lonely with Bryher. But, she confided to Ezra Pound, Bryher looked after Perdita and ‘that seemed to be the only thing I was hanging on for’:

  I put down a lot of myself after Perdita’s birth. I loved Richard very much and you know he threatened to use Perdita to divorce me and to have me locked up if I registered her as legitimate.

  Hilda’s circle did not like me at all

  Bryher, when she returned with H.D. from Cornwall in the summer of 1919, rented a London flat for them both in Kensington Church Street, 16 Bullingham Mansions, an Edwardian block near the nursery where Perdita was almost permanently ensconced. ‘Hilda’s circle did not like me at all’, Bryher said of her cool reception into H.D.’s world. Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington called at the flat. Both felt redundant. Ezra Pound thought Bryher impossible. She seemed guarded, self-assured, dominating even through her silence. In August, when Aldington was hard up, H.D. gave him £10. It was Bryher’s money.

  Bryher seemed an unlikely proponent of modernism. She did not look or behave like a poet or an artist. She was emphatic, and businesslike. She wrote unflowery prose and wooed with precision:

  ‘It meant everything to talk that day of Mallarmé.’

  ‘It meant so much to see you yesterday.’

  ‘I’ll send the car over to fetch you.’

  Many cars were sent.

  H.D. and South Audley Street

  H.D., when introduced to Sir John and Lady Ellerman, could not communicate with them nor they with her. She was presented as a quasi chaperone for Bryher, a role she struggled to perform. After the first encounter she always took a tranquillizer before visiting. The Ellermans were disconcerted. Why was their daughter spending so much time with this woman, this poet who was separated from her husband and who had a newborn daughter whom the father did not acknowledge? This was not an arrangement they wished to understand. They suspected Winifred’s private life was irregular and they feared for her reputation and the Ellerman name. They wanted her married. Sir John did not threaten to withdraw the investments, shares and assured income in place for her, but he did not wish to bankroll unorthodoxy. Bryher cared about incurring his disapproval. Also, her allowance as a married woman would be far greater, though it would not compare to the inheritance reserved for her brother.

  For Bryher, taking on H.D., her emotional fragility, baby daughter and devilish mess, was a cha
llenge. She was herself young, naive, battling with her own gender incongruity and her parents’ expectations of Victorian conformity. She had courage and determination, but was also in thrall to her parents and their status. And so she was divided; she must be both man and woman, both modernist and Victorian. She went ‘back and forth from Audley Street, strange and uneven but always staunch and loyal’.

  Havelock Ellis

  H.D. introduced Bryher to Havelock Ellis. ‘Nobody could have been kinder to me,’ Bryher said of him. She and H.D. began analysis with him. She read his Studies in the Psychology of Sex, they talked about women’s rights, he gave her a paper on Freud, and she became one of the first subscribers to the Journal of Psychoanalysis. The boundaries between the roles of therapist, analysand and friend were blurred. He called to see them at their Kensington flat and joined them there on Christmas Day 1919. There was a tree and presents. Perdita was brought over from the Norland Nursery.

  Havelock Ellis was at home with sexual diversity. His wife, Edith, was lesbian; he was a virgin when he married her in 1891 and was impotent until he was sixty. His 1897 medical textbook on same-sex relationship, Sexual Inversion, had been censored as obscene. Bryher told him of her conviction that she was a boy trapped in a female body. He assured her this was a not uncommon phenomenon and gave her Psychopathia Sexualis by Richard von Krafft-Ebing to read.

  H.D.’s relationship with him was colourful. In Fountain of Life, a collection of impressions and comments, he wrote of his interest in urolagnia and described in embellished prose how H.D. urinated on him:

  her tall form languidly rose and stood erect, taut and massive it seemed now with the length of those straight adolescent legs still more ravishing in their unyielding pride, and the form before me seemed to be some adorable Olympian vase, and a large stream gushed afar in the glistering liquid arch, endlessly, it seemed to my wondering eyes, as I contemplated with enthralled gaze this prototypal statue of the Fountain of Life.

  The therapeutic value of this to H.D. was unclear, but when, years later, she recounted the incident to Freud, she said he ‘bust his cat-whiskers with joy’.

  Ellis’s overmind

  Havelock Ellis’s theories and writings about sex were banned by the censors. His attempts to classify and understand gender and sexual behaviour were disallowed. His ideas seemed of questionable help to H.D. He talked of her mind taking on a physical character in the creation of her work:

  When a creative scientist, artist or philosopher has been for some hours or days intent on his work, his mind often takes on an almost physical character. That is, the mind becomes his real body. His overmind becomes his brain… In place of the ‘real’ material body, the creative artist has a fantasmatic body, a body of the mind. It is this insubstantial body and ethereal overmind which produce man’s highest cultural achievements.

  In 1919, in Notes on Thought and Vision, H.D. described how her ‘overmind’ went beyond her body and normal thinking to a state of visionary awareness. In thirty-two pages she wrote of the ‘super feelers of the super mind’ and how ‘Christ was the grapes that hung against the sunlit walls of Nazareth’.

  H.D.’s hold on reality was uncertain and such flights were scary. She had much to cope with and talk of fantasmatic bodies and super feelers did not make her well. She slipped into depression. Bryher hoped a journey to Greece would help and held this out as a prize. They would visit the temples and sites of the gods who inspired H.D. Such a journey would take her away from the confusion of Gray, Aldington and the baby daughter whose needs she could not answer. As soon as H.D. was strong enough, they would leave:

  We had made a pact; if I got well she would take me to Greece. I got well. But something was lacking. Something had gone. I was convalescent you might say psychically, I had taken up my bed and walked. But where had I walked?

  Havelock Ellis was both analyst and friend. Bryher made plans for him to accompany them on the Greek visit.

  to Greece with H.D. and Havelock Ellis

  Early in February 1920, the three of them sailed on the SS Borodino, one of Ellerman’s passenger ships. Perdita, eleven months old, was left in the Norland Nursery. H.D. found the journey difficult. Terrified of the sea, she anticipated shipwreck and the engulfing ocean. The trio arrived at Piraeus at the end of the month. In Athens, she and Bryher stayed at the Hotel Grande Bretagne. ‘They were comfortably ensconced in the most luxurious hotel in the city,’ Ellis wrote. He was uncomfortably ensconced in a modest pension.

  They explored the streets of Athens, heard Greek spoken, visited the Acropolis and the Archaeological Museum and sensed, like Oscar Wilde before them, ‘the spirit of the gods that dwelt within the marble’. Bryher’s hope was to transport H.D. to the classical past. They climbed the slopes of Mount Hymettus, ‘found early hyacinths and great rose-coloured anemones among the rocks’ and reached the eleventh-century monastery of Kaisariani where there was once a shrine to Aphrodite. They had tea with Evalina Palmer, who had been Natalie Barney’s lover and who extolled Sappho and her community of women on Lesbos. They climbed Mount Lykabettos, visited Eleusis, the birthplace of Aeschylus…

  Here were the columns and statues of Greece bathed in authentic light. But H.D. was ill. She felt trapped. The war, the death of her brother and father, her broken marriage, separation from America, failed relationships with men, severance from her year-old baby, anxiety over motherhood, and pressure from the weight of Bryher’s full-on love and indulgent wealth all affected her. ‘They are both very peculiar,’ Havelock Ellis wrote in a letter home. As if he wasn’t.

  He left them and made his own way home alone. At the end of March, Bryher and H.D. then cruised to Corfu on the SS Hélène, stopping at little islands on the way. In Corfu town, they stayed five weeks in a suite at the Belle Venise Hotel, the ‘jewel in the crown’ of nineteenth-century Corfu. They walked among olive groves, drove to the town of Potamós, visited the Byzantine monastery at Paleokastritsa, went to the hilltop village of Pelekas, saw the Temple of Artemis at Kanoni. At times H.D. felt elated and liberated, as if, for many years, she had been ‘crawling about existing under mist and fog’. The whirlwind of impressions, she said, ‘will flood over me when I leave’. But before she left she suffered hallucinations and saw helmeted faces and tiny black people climbing up a wall of their rooms in the Belle Venise:

  They are not important but it would be a calamity if one of them got stuck on one’s eye. There was that sort of feeling people, people, why did they annoy me so? Would they eventually cloud my vision, or worse still would one of them get stuck in my eye?

  Bryher interpreted these hallucinations not as symptoms of illness but as imaginative inspiration. Here was the mind of the creative genius. She encouraged H.D. to probe into the meaning of these images. Which sent H.D. crazier. Years later, in Tribute to Freud, H.D. wrote about this breakdown:

  this writing on the wall before me, could not be shared with anyone except the girl who stood so bravely beside me. This girl said without hesitation, ‘Go on.’ It was she really who had the detachment and the integrity of the Pythoness of Delphi. But it was I, battered and disassociated from my American family and my English friends, who was seeing the pictures, who was reading the writing or who was granted the inner vision.

  That was thirty-six years later, in 1956. At the time, for Bryher, twenty-five years old and cocooned from experience of other people, the situation took some managing. Their resident psychoanalyst had fled. Havelock Ellis wrote: ‘Hilda went right out of her mind and Bryher had to bring her back overland.’

  H.D. would not face travelling back by sea. She feared collision with icebergs, as with the Titanic. Bryher made other arrangements to get her lover home. At the end of April they made the short boat trip on the SS Arcadia through the Gulf of Corinth to the Italian port of Brindisi, rested up at the Hotel Europe, took the train to Rome, stayed at the Grand Hotel, and within weeks were back at the Mullion Cove Hotel in the reassuring landscape of Cornwall. From t
here they returned to their flat at Bullingham Mansions in Kensington.

  where to live

  Once back from Greece, Bryher spent little time at South Audley Street. To her parents’ concern, she was mostly at the Kensington flat with H.D. Bryher felt unsettled by their disapproval and unable to navigate her double life.

  H.D. was homesick for America. She missed friends and family, and wanted to find a home for her child, and leave behind her failed marriage and the depressed aftermath of European war. She hinted to Amy Lowell at her close relationship with Bryher; she praised Bryher’s work and said they would all meet when they came to America in the autumn. She also wrote to Marianne Moore of plans to winter in California with Bryher, Perdita and her nurse, so as to escape the fog and rain of England and with thoughts and plans of settling there.

  America

  Both H.D. and Bryher hoped relocating to America would answer their problems. Bryher wanted to please H.D. and be her partner. America was H.D.’s country and Bryher wanted to see her acclaimed there. For herself, she needed to escape South Audley Street and her parents’ wishes. In her autobiographical novel Two Selves, which she published in 1923, she wrote:

  If people got between one and one’s vision one had to cut them out…

  ‘I want to be free….It’s not that I’m not grateful for all you’ve done for me but I can’t help wanting to use my brain. If I don’t go away I can’t develop. I don’t want to hurt your feelings. Surely you must see that I don’t want to hurt your feelings. But I want to live by myself.’