No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  McAlmon called his stable of writers ‘the Bunch’. No more than five hundred copies of a book were printed. American reviewers spoke disparagingly of ‘expatriate’ writers and ‘Paris publications’, though most of Contact’s authors were later picked up by commercial publishers. In his memoir Being Geniuses Together, McAlmon was caustic about ‘The Bunch’: ‘They are as they are as they are and were as they were as they were and they wasn’t roses,’ he wrote.

  Mary Butts was grateful for Bryher’s patronage. Bryher wrote of her: ‘Mary was one of the few who matter, a builder of English, and I have never doubted since I read her first short story that she belonged to the immortals…’ Marianne Moore also recommended her with high praise. Like Bryher, Mary Butts was inspired by Cornwall and she had a small house at Sennen Cove. She had studied Greek and said her classical education started as a small child when her father told her Greek myths and they acted them out together. ‘Only in Homer’, she wrote, ‘have I found impersonal consolation, a life where I am unsexed or bisexed, or completely myself.’ Of ‘ecstasies transcended’ with her lover, Eleanor Rogers, she wrote in her journal in September 1916: ‘there will have to be a secret manuscript seeing that no one can write openly about these things.’ Contact Editions published her short stories and her first novel, Ashe of Rings.

  Bryher’s lasting impression was of Mary Butts’s hair, ‘flaming and red… the torque-gold of windy islands’.

  Dorothy Richardson was another modernist whom Bryher funded. She was twenty-one years older than Bryher, who gave her books, clothes, flowers and encouragement and £100 a year. In 1933 she set up a trust fund for her.

  Dorothy Richardson’s 2,000-page semi-autobiographical prose work Pilgrimage was published in chapter volumes between 1915 and her death in 1957. Her narrator, Miriam Henderson, was on an unending search for a room, a life and voice of her own. Through her, Dorothy Richardson conveyed thoughts on gender, feminism, socialism and animal rights.

  In Paris, Bryher was accepted as both married to McAlmon and H.D.’s partner. There was no need to dissemble. With McAlmon she went to Gertrude’s salons, to Sylvia and Adrienne’s literary evenings and to Jean Cocteau’s cabarets at Le Bœuf sur le Toit. Man Ray photographed her. McAlmon introduced her to James Joyce, who was his drinking partner, and took her, Harriet Weaver, Thelma Wood, Djuna Barnes and Ezra Pound to Chez Bricktop in Montparnasse.3 After the cabaret, Bryher took them all to dinner at l’Avenue restaurant in avenue Montaigne.

  Only occasionally, though, did Bryher accompany McAlmon to the clubs and cafés. She ‘found the places he visited intolerably dull’. She did not drink or want to pick up women, take drugs, or even go to bed late.

  McAlmon, a tireless social networker and partygoer, spent much of his allowance from Bryher in the bars. Marianne Moore said of him that his work was ‘all riot and no construction’. H.D. agreed. His drinking got him into trouble: he pranced about naked at the Quat’z Arts costume ball in 1925.4

  H.D. shunned the Paris lights. She preferred London, and found it easier to love Bryher when away from her. Often they were not just in separate living quarters but in separate countries. H.D. could not exist financially or emotionally without Bryher, but nor could she cope with Bryher’s control. Separated, she wrote often and anxiously: ‘Just to prove my darling’, she wrote in 1922, from the Hotel Washington in Curzon Street,

  that I think of HE all the time. I bought some pink roses to put before the Man Ray portrait – my little altar…

  This is just to say I love and love and love you. I missed not hearing this morning horribly, not a note came last night no doubt one will arrive ce soir. Dear Heart, 1001 kisses.

  She used whimsical gender-laced nicknames: Bryher was Fido. ‘I am very eager for news of Fido-He’, ‘Dear He, do be good’, or ‘Fido, mon cher, as Adrienne says’. Bryher signed herself ‘love and barks’ and did little drawings of a terrier. ‘The little sketches of Fido-He are very comforting and lifelike. See that his bow is fresh and pretty every day.’

  Such whimsy was a barrier. Bryher was the generous benefactor, the courageous publisher for new and compelling writing, but she could not capture H.D.’s creative heart. Fondness was perhaps as much as H.D. could feel for Bryher – as well as gratitude, dependence, respect and recoil.

  Most of Bryher’s friends lived in Paris, and she visited often – usually she stayed with Sylvia and Adrienne. But she did not want to live there. Nor did she want to spend much time in London, where South Audley Street loomed. She preferred the neutrality of Switzerland and the habit of frequent travel.

  parents for Perdita

  The challenge for Bryher, with her alternative family, was how to make it work. H.D. said her ‘heart contracted’ when, on Valentine’s Day in 1923, D.H. Lawrence sent her red roses and a book of his poems, some of which had been written to her. She had no such residual feeling for Ezra Pound, whom she called ‘blustering and really stupid. He is adolescent. He seems almost “arrested” in development.’

  As for H.D.’s husband, by 1925 Richard Aldington was living in Paris with Brigit Patmore. H.D. confided to Brigit her fear that Aldington might seek divorce on the grounds of desertion and that, because she had registered him as the father, she would lose custody of Perdita, who was six. She wondered, if Bryher and Robert McAlmon were to adopt Perdita, whether Aldington would oppose this.

  Bryher was willing to go ahead with adoption but had provisos: her parents must not hear of it; Perdita should retain British nationality, which H.D. had through her marriage to Aldington but which Bryher forfeited through her marriage to McAlmon; and Aldington must cooperate. On 4 March, Bryher wrote to Brigit Patmore:

  I personally don’t trust R.A. a scrap. Now I suggest, and Robert is very kind and helpful and says that I may, that Robert and I adopt, legally and fully, Perdita. She will take our name, have an immediate settlement on her as regards money, and her education and everything provided for. I have no wish to take her from Hilda’s care, in fact that is the only stipulation that Robert makes, that it does not mean that I drag an infant round with me.

  My hands are tied unless she is mine, because there is no fun in providing an expensive education and either having a fight with R.A. in the middle of it, or else having some beastly struggle in the courts of justice.

  Please do not mention this matter to anybody as if the thing is carried through it must be done as secretly and quietly as possible. I should prefer that the whole thing was kept silent, that only the parties interested know about it, and that as she was born in England she still stayed on her mother’s passport. It is simply a question that I am not prepared to pay down money for an expensive education and have R.A. making a mess of things in the middle… If H. could get a legal separation with custody of child, things would be different. But I will not spend a lot of money on the infant’s education and have R.A. stick his nose in, in the middle.

  Thus the struggle and subterfuge when the law would not allow same-sex marriage. Had fairness ruled, Sylvia Beach might have married Adrienne Monnier, Gertrude Stein would have married Alice B. Toklas,5 Bryher could have married H.D. and Perdita would have had two bona fide mothers. The adoption by Bryher and McAlmon did not happen. Adoption was for a later date with a different husband. But there was a sense of Perdita as an encumbrance, a problem to be negotiated.

  Bryher’s stark letter revealed how much Perdita was at the mercy of complex adult relationships and marital law. Her strange unavailable mother could not concentrate on her work if she was in the same apartment with her. She met her biological father on one occasion only and he wanted nothing to do with her. Bryher would ‘throw money’ at her education and care, if conditions were acceptable, but did not want ‘to drag an infant around’ with her.

  Perdita could not be sure of her name or address. She bore the name of a man she never saw and who had not wanted her birth registered in his name. She might become Perdita McAlmon, the name of a man who once played with her on a sh
ip. She had been housed at Norland Nursery, shunted from London to Switzerland, sent to a girls’ boarding school. From time to time, her mother’s partner’s deaf mother took her out in a Daimler to view London. Her mother’s mother was a devout Moravian Christian, who lived in Pennsylvania and looked after her on holidays. There was not one special adult to make her feel safe.

  That year, 1925, Jonathan Cape published West by Bryher – her impressions of early twentieth-century America – and Heliodora and Other Poems by H.D. The contrast in style and vision was strong, Bryher’s solemn naivety, H.D.’s inspired complexity. In West, Bryher dismissed American landscape:

  One could be one’s self in Europe. Because the grass, the trees were familiar. Here not even the air was the same… One was a piece of a puzzle upset in the wrong box.

  H.D.’s connection was to an interior terrain:

  We strove for a name,

  while the light of the lamps burnt thin

  and the outer dawn came in,

  a ghost, the last at the feast

  or the first,

  to sit within

  with the two that remained

  to quibble in flowers and verse

  over a girl’s name.

  He said, ‘the rain loving’

  I said, ‘the narcissus, drunk,

  drunk with the rain.’

  Yet I had lost

  for he said,

  ‘the rose, the lover’s gift,

  is loved of love,’

  he said it,

  ‘loved of love,’

  I waited, even as he spoke,

  to see the room filled with a light,

  as when in winter

  the embers catch in a wind

  when a room is dank:

  so it would be filled, I thought,

  our room with a light

  when he said

  (and he said it first)

  ‘the rose, the lover’s delight,

  is loved of love,’

  but the light was the same.

  Then he caught,

  seeing the fire in my eyes,

  my fire, my fever, perhaps,

  for he leaned

  with the purple wine

  stained in his sleeve,

  and said this:

  ‘Did you ever think

  a girl’s mouth

  caught in a kiss

  is a lily that laughs?’

  In August, Bryher rented two Knightsbridge flats, one with a seven-year lease at 26 Sloane Street for H.D. and another for McAlmon at 45 Parkside. Bryher, when in London, stayed at South Audley Street or in one or other of the flats. This was a family that needed space.

  another lover, another husband

  In late 1926, H.D.’s first lesbian love, Frances Gregg, was operated on for cancer in St George’s Hospital, London. She recovered well. In December she introduced H.D. to a friend, Kenneth Macpherson, a film-maker and photographer. He was twenty-four, H.D. was forty. His father was an artist; his mother, like Kenneth, had affairs with young men.6

  Macpherson and H.D. began an affair. She said she loved him. He said he needed her but,

  Please if you can stay near me. I see now how exactly that is what I need. I would do anything for you… Some desperate hurt looks out of your eyes… As things are now, all that you were to me yesterday is all that I want or ask – all that anyone could want or ask – it came so swiftly after you had spoken of gods upon earth, and I knew that I had seen god or goddess in you then. God but you have in you that swift, impetuous, sudden divinity. Love me if you can. Hilda I need you. But be free!

  He wanted her, but not too much of her. Near, but not too near. Not nearer than yesterday.

  Like McAlmon, Macpherson lacked money of his own and had career ambitions but no prospects. He was apprenticed to a commercial artist but wanted to make films. Photography and film-making were expensive and needed financial backing. Bryher liked Macpherson’s roughness, embrace of new ideas, youth and energy, in much the same way as she had once liked McAlmon’s, and she was interested in the emerging art of cinema. Also, by 1926, she was tired of McAlmon: tired of his drinking, squandering of funds and diminished creative influence. She accused him of being alcoholic and a dope fiend. He was neither compliant nor reliable. But he did not want to divorce her.

  She accepted Macpherson’s sexual relationship with H.D. and his homosexuality. He could be a new member of her unconventional family, a recipient of her enabling patronage. She also wanted to help H.D. find a legal family context for Perdita so as to pay for her ‘expensive education’ without ‘beastly struggle in the courts of justice’. If Bryher married Macpherson, who was Scottish, and as husband and wife they adopted Perdita, British citizenship would be acquired all round. H.D. would still be Perdita’s legal British birth mother and Aldington would no longer be a threat.

  H.D. said of Macpherson that he was ‘very untravelled’. He had not been as far as Paris. Bryher proposed marriage to him and offered to finance his film-making. Her money would fuel all plans. All he need do was accept her as head of the household and at the centre of arrangements. Marriage to Bryher was as appealing to Macpherson as it had been to McAlmon. Such a marriage and free love with H.D. did not preclude his having sex with men. H.D. had no acquaintance with or insistence on monogamy.

  They all travelled to Territet via Paris, where Bryher bought Macpherson his first movie camera.

  In June 1927 Bryher divorced Robert McAlmon, who then became known in Paris as Robert McAlimony. His revenge was to write a scathing roman à clef, A Scarlet Pansy, under the pseudonym Robert Scully. McAlmon was the Pansy or Fay Étrange from Kuntsville, Pennsylvania, who worked as a nude model. Bryher was Marjorie Bull-Dike. Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas were among the lesbians cast as Fuchs, Pickup, Butsch, Godown and Kuntz. Like McAlmon’s memoir Being Geniuses Together, which he published in 1938, his Scarlet Pansy was too vitriolic and not funny enough and as a memoir did not compare in style with Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack or Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast or Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

  On 1 September, Bryher and Kenneth Macpherson married in Chelsea Registry Office in London with H.D. and Bryher’s brother, John, as witnesses. The following March, Mr and Mrs Macpherson formally adopted Perdita.

  And so, dressed in evening clothes from Savile Row and with cufflinks from Cartier, husband number two, Kenneth Macpherson, smoked after-dinner cigars with Sir John Ellerman in the deep leather armchairs of the library at 1 South Audley Street.

  Hoping to be a man of the world and with requisite subaltern respect, I would nod sagely and knit my brow. One was really trying to communicate with the Ice Cap… I decided he was a sort of Eternomatic precision instrument, a full-time solitary chess-game. … I accepted that John thought little of me and in his way he was right.

  Bryher, back in the parental home, regressed to a version of Winifred or Dolly, drawn into behaviour that intellectually she despised. The Ellermans belonged to the world of Empire and money, power and privilege, low pay for miners and formal landscape paintings. Bryher, though a rebel, was inextricably linked to this world.

  Macpherson could not sit in Sir John’s library and speak of his own revisionist views: of les Fauves, Dada, Cubism, Surrealism, experimental film; of his marriage of convenience from which no progeny would follow because he, the groom, felt not a whiff of desire for his wife, nor she for him. The truth could not be spoken. It could not be said that Sir John’s daughter saw herself as a biological mistake, a he trapped in the body of a she, and that her essentially homosexual husband was having an affair with her bisexual partner. Pretence was needed, because Ellerman’s money funded such modernist revision.

  Bryher and her husband went with Sir John and Lady Ellerman to the opening night of Show Boat at Drury Lane. Ivor Novello’s mother, a friend of Lady Ellerman, was in their party, smothered in diamonds and pale blue ostrich feathers. ‘It’s easy to see Dolly married h
im for his looks,’ she said of Macpherson in his white tie and tails. They were in the Royal Box, which was wreathed with carnations and roses. There was applause as they entered. Bryher wore floral chiffon. Macpherson said of her:

  She looked a fright… This evening dress had been acquired for her by her mother, to turn her back into Dolly. What was meant to be a draped cape behind, hung down in front as if to conceal pregnancy. You could see crisscross stitching down the seams.

  Bryher was wearing the dress inside out and back to front. ‘How is one to know?’ she asked. In the interval, in an anteroom, they were served caviare and champagne by peruked lackeys in white satin tails and red velvet breeches. Macpherson downed too many brandies.

  family affairs

  In Switzerland, the family lived at Riant Chateau. Perdita began her expensive education. H.D. found life in Switzerland ‘too self contained and insulated’, and though she loathed the air and fog in London, she needed escape to 26 Sloane Street. Kenneth Macpherson decorated the apartment with camp opulence: a gold Buddha beside a brocaded divan bed, damask curtains, Lalique glass wall brackets. H.D. had ‘a little Swiss maid named Sophie who does not speak English’. There was another flat at 169 Sloane Street for Macpherson or Bryher or guests.

  In 1927, H.D. wrote her roman à clef HERmione, based on her life from 1905 to 1911, and ‘Halcyon’, a poem about her relationship with Bryher, was published in Poetry. ‘I am full of work and trying to keep “young” – have friends near this winter, who insist on my dancing and dancing AND dancing’, she wrote to a friend.