Square Haunting

by Francesca Wade

  She always found public interest in her personality ‘intolerable’, and was wary of her work being reduced to ‘personal and psychological terms’: she hoped there would be no biography for fifty years after her death, and charged her son with destroying any juvenilia or old letters that might allow journalists and biographers to ‘forget the work in vulgar gossip about the worker’. She died suddenly in 1957, at her home in Witham. Only eighteen years passed before the first biography made public the existence of John Anthony, who had remained a secret even from her closest friends. In 1991, Bill White’s daughter Valerie – whose mother, Beatrice, had told her about her half-brother a few months after Dorothy’s death – wrote to Anthony after reading James Brabazon’s biography of Sayers, thinking he might like to know more about his father (‘both my mother and yours agreed he was a “charming rotter”!’). But Anthony never received her letter; he had died in 1984, at the age of sixty.

  Sayers did return to Peter and Harriet. When, after a couple of short stories introduced a new generation of young Wimseys, readers wrote in to offer Peter and Harriet heartfelt advice on child-rearing, she realised that characters who commanded so much goodwill could not be entirely forsaken. And the theme she had introduced in Gaudy Night – whether it was possible for women to avoid a choice between emotional and intellectual fulfilment – remained at the forefront of her mind. In Busman’s Honeymoon, Sayers had made the newlywed Peter and Harriet negotiate a delicate marital power dynamic, carefully ensuring that neither allows their affection to corrupt their integrity. Subsequently, she began to plan another detective novel, revolving around the theme of power and the way it damages relationships. Thrones, Dominations was abandoned, and survives only in several fragments of typescript stored at Sayers’s archive at Wheaton College in Illinois, alongside a detailed diagram showing plot lines in green for Wimseys, red for murderer and purple for victim. (In 1998, the novelist Jill Paton Walsh completed it, remaining faithful to Sayers’s preliminary work.) The novel would contrast the Wimsey marriage with that of another couple, whose relationship is founded on the very inequality Harriet and Peter’s sought to avoid: Laurence, a rich and distinguished man, rescued Rosamund after her father’s fraud reduced her to poverty, leaving his wife in an unbearable position where ‘every act of love was an act of compliance’. The document breaks off before we learn who resorts to murder, but it is evident that Rosamund’s residual gratitude to Laurence places a death sentence on her self-respect and on their marriage. In the existing typescript, several amusing scenes see Harriet negotiating her new role as Lady Wimsey, frustrated when people assume she is going to change her name and give up writing, and furious at a visitor who expresses surprise that a whole room in their new home is given over as her study. Sayers might have moved on from detective fiction, but her feminist convictions and her belief in the importance of intellectual freedom continued undimmed to her death.

  *

  H. D. was in Switzerland when the Second World War was declared, but returned to London with Bryher, to a flat on Lowndes Square in Belgravia. Although she was appalled by fascism, and dreaded the recurrence of war, she felt a distance from this conflict that she had not experienced during the First World War. She had spent the last two decades roaming Europe, experimenting with psychoanalysis, film-making and the occult, living in various complicated ménages; now that she was comfortably settled in a single place, she felt ‘more alive and physically stronger than for years’. Walking amid the ruins of London, past bombed-out buildings filled with smoke from explosions, H. D. saw in the ‘orgy of destruction’ an intoxicating potential for regeneration. As the bombs fell outside, H. D. sat in her room, composing at speed.

  Like Virginia Woolf, H. D. looked back to her childhood as the world combusted beyond her walls. ‘The past is literally blasted into consciousness with the Blitz in London,’ she wrote, feeling herself driven inward by ‘that outer threat and constant reminder of death’: to her home in Philadelphia, the memory of her parents and siblings, and the family’s Moravian rituals. Her memoir The Gift, written between 1941 and 1943, is a celebration of survival and creativity, and of the artistic inheritance passed down by her grandmother, whom H. D. believed to possess second sight. At the same time, she was transforming the figure of her grandmother into an enigmatic prophet (much like one of Jane Harrison’s mother-goddesses) who appears in Trilogy, a dreamlike modern epic and a poetic manifesto for ‘new-world reconstruction’ which she worked on throughout the Second World War. In the poem, H. D. posits language as a healing force, bearing within it the possibility for survival and rebirth, and the female poet-speaker as a potential saviour of civilisation. Her vision recalls Woolf’s argument from Three Guineas, and the prevailing message of Harrison’s and Power’s life works: that we need different values, different voices, different forms of knowledge and, ultimately, different stories, which women must write in order to bring into being a peaceful future.

  After a meeting in the spring of 1919 at the Hotel du Littoral in Soho, at which he refused to put his name on Perdita’s birth certificate, coldly reminding her that registering the baby as his would be perjury punishable by five years’ imprisonment, H. D. did not contact Richard Aldington for nearly ten years. But in February 1929, she heard rumours that Aldington and Arabella had parted after a ‘violent and final quarrel’, that Aldington had sold all his books and begun an affair with their old friend Brigit Patmore. The news came as a shock, reigniting the trauma of their parting, but when she heard that Aldington was asking after her, she began to think of meeting him again, compelled by a strange sympathy. ‘It may seem odd to you,’ she wrote to Cournos, with whom she remained occasionally in touch, ‘but I would like very much to help one or the other of them … I know A behaved as only she could, as only R did, but they are both part of our “youth” for what it is worth and I do want to do what I can … It sounds horribly Salvation Army but it is only after one has completely suffered that one can afford to feel that peculiar tenderness.’ That July, she and Aldington met in Paris. Instantly H. D. felt their old rapport returning; now that their marriage was unequivocally over, they were able to be close ‘intellectually and spiritually’ as they had not been since Mecklenburgh Square days. Resuming contact with Aldington meant that the memories and loyalties of the past were ‘strangely embalmed’ for H. D.: the friendship, she wrote to her friend the illustrator George Plank, ‘has done much for my “subconscious” and left me free in other ways, to be more resilient and happy in my own way’.

  Over the years, H. D. had thought about requesting a divorce from Aldington, but had always been afraid that any publicity would compromise Perdita, and had been reluctant to engage with a potentially volatile Arabella. But in January 1937, she received a ‘thunderbolt by way of letter’, in which Aldington announced that he had fallen ‘madly in love’ with Netta, the wife of Brigit Patmore’s son Michael, and wanted to be released in order to marry her. H. D. was sceptical of the relationship, sorry for Brigit and irritated that the case made Richard look like ‘a sort of Byron de nos jours’ and herself ‘a noble woman’. But she agreed to the divorce, and set to recalling the final days at Mecklenburgh Square as she prepared her witness statement. ‘I look on it as a damn torturing form of analysis,’ she wrote to a friend. ‘It is a strange fatality that I should get my inner life clear with such excruciating pain (the analytical work), only just as I am recovering from that, to have another sort of search light turned on me … I suppose that is what the war did to us, took away our youth and gave us eternal youth.’

  The divorce case offered H. D. a chance to put down another narrative: an opportunity, as she saw it, for ‘a clear-up of my own inhibitions’. H. D. insisted that she would not be ‘cross-examined and bullied’ in the court proceedings, but would offer a single written statement which the judge would have to accept. Her Statement of Facts, dated 21 June 1937, is a curious document, an appendix as ripe with inconsistency, artifice and intrigue as
her novels. Anxious to prevent any charge of collusion, H. D. presents herself as a victim of Aldington’s brutality, alone and stunned, buffeted between men who used her for sex. The hearing took place on 13 May 1938, among nine other ‘discretions’ in a court which reminded H. D. of an old schoolroom, with huge clocks and desks with inkwells. Afterwards, H. D. was exuberant, and described it as a ‘charming occasion’: she had, she told a friend, had to ‘concentrate and say “yes” nonchalantly when the KC said, “Is it true that you found your husband and Miss Dorothy Yorke, known as Arabella, in bed together, in an air-raid?” That alone was worth more than the price of admission! … It did look like the best-seller run riot into film captions … but oddly it was all true.’ On Wednesday, 22 June, the divorce was granted – ‘“divorce” from so many pasts, not just 1913–1919!’ Richard and Netta married days later, and within a month Netta had given birth to Aldington’s only child, Catherine.

  Aldington and H. D. remained in sporadic but warm contact for the rest of their lives; in an act of supreme generosity, since she had always been furious at Aldington’s treatment of H. D., Bryher supported Catherine’s education, and Aldington read H. D.’s work in progress, apparently putting aside any sensitivity towards his own portrayal in it. ‘It’s awfully good, Dooley,’ he wrote in 1953, having read a draft of Bid Me to Live, ‘really good, authentic and concentrated, better than the equivalent chapters in Aaron’s Rod where Lorenzo was in one of his fits and guying us all … It seems to me just as well written as Virginia Woolf, much more interesting and “human” and truly poetical.’ The publication of Bid Me to Live in 1960 brought H. D. a flurry of welcome publicity: her early works had fallen out of print, and her new releases were seldom given the attention they had commanded in the 1920s. But Aldington’s magnanimity was not shared by all players in the drama. John Cournos was seventy-nine when Bid Me to Live was published, living alone in New York; his wife, Helen, had committed suicide the previous year, his health and career had declined, and he had resorted to selling off letters from his famous friends in order to survive. In fury at the perceived injustice of the book, he struck up a raging correspondence with Arabella, then living in a residential home in Pennsylvania. Alfred Satterthwaite, Cournos’s stepson, recalled that their shared anger was ‘Olympian, gigantic, inflated with a sure sense of righteousness, of being in possession of the real truth which had been perverted and contorted by H. D.’ Arabella was resentful at her depiction as an ‘illiterate bunny-brained whore’, while Cournos (who annotated a copy of the novel with sarcastic marginal notes) dismissed it all as ‘pure bitchiness’. For both Cournos and Yorke, on the verge of being forgotten, the book threatened to erase their memories of an illustrious past, which had provided them with a bittersweet sense of status; their correspondence, which soon softened into friendly reminiscence, provided some small succour amid their anger at H. D.

  *

  ‘When I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own,’ wrote Woolf, ‘I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life.’ It takes some courage and imagination to aspire to an invigorating life, rather than a happy or a successful one; as H. D. wrote in Bid Me to Live, ‘flying in the face of convention’ really means performing a tightrope act on ‘a very, very frail wire’. All these women’s lives contain periods of ambivalence, sometimes of deep unhappiness; nonetheless, in learning about each of them I have been moved by their determination to carve out new moulds for living – varied, multiple, complex, sometimes dangerous, yet always founded on a commitment to personal integrity and a deep desire for knowledge. ‘There still remains in the minds of many thinking persons,’ wrote Jane Harrison in 1913, ‘a prejudice to the effect that only certain kinds of knowledge are appropriate to women … the province of women was to feel: therefore they had better not know.’ The women in this book were hungry for knowledge in all its forms: knowledge of history and literature, knowledge of the wider world, and self-knowledge, no less difficult to obtain. A drive to expand ‘the province of women’ into new realms characterised all these lives, manifesting in their search for education, in their travels, their friendships, their work and in the way they made their homes. Their pursuit of a fulfilling way to live has resounded through the twentieth century. Today, we speak about ‘having it all’, perpetuating an unattainable ideal of achievement and fulfilment: still, women talk anxiously of how to reconcile their personal lives and careers, of the toll taken by refusing to conform to persistent narratives of how to live, echoing concerns little changed from a century ago.

  In a sense, all these chapters tell the same story, that of A Room of One’s Own, that which Woolf portrayed in her memoirs: of a struggle to be taken seriously, a move to a new place, a quest to find a way of life outside the traditional script. In many ways, the story I’ve told in this book has been one of community: not only between Bloomsbury women, but also between past and present, and across the wider world. None of these women is a straightforward role model by any means, yet in researching their lives I’ve been reminded how knowledge of the past can fortify us in the present: how finding unexpected resonances of feeling and experience, across time and place, can extend a validating sense of solidarity. In placing these lives together, I’ve been particularly struck by small moments which have shown how these figures, too, were quietly bolstered by the examples of other women – including, in some cases, each other. In 1920, when Woolf wrote indignantly to the New Statesman to refute Arnold Bennett and Desmond MacCarthy’s suggestion that women were intellectually inferior to men, she invoked Jane Harrison’s name as proof. Of all these connections and moments of camaraderie, one of the most satisfying is a fleeting encounter I discovered in the course of research. At Cambridge University Library, I saw that Eileen Power had Dorothy L. Sayers noted in her address book, but I couldn’t imagine how their paths might have crossed. Across the Atlantic, in Sayers’s archive at Wheaton College, Illinois, I found their correspondence. It seems that they were introduced at a party in Oxford, in May 1938, and struck up a conversation about the dearth of literature on Palestine under Roman rule, a subject which Sayers was researching for her play He That Should Come, a socially realistic depiction of the birth of Christ. Two days later, Power sent Sayers a notice of a forthcoming book which ‘seems to me to be exactly what you want’, along with recommendations of several other histories, and enclosing her own copy of Vladimir G. Simkhovitch’s Toward the Understanding of Jesus for Sayers to borrow. Her letter ends with a subtle recognition of like-mindedness between two women scholars: ‘It was such a pleasure to meet you.’

  *

  On 10 July 1938, a ball was held in Mecklenburgh Square, transforming its central garden into a wonderland of ‘baroque fantasy’. The grand facade of the east side was illuminated with floodlights and the gardens were decked with coloured lanterns; an elegant marquee – built by celebrity stage designer Oliver Messel – hosted two thousand guests resplendent in black tie. Pearly Kings and Queens distributed beer and sandwiches from an antique gazebo, while guests milled around the coconut shies and dartboards, admired jugglers from the queue for the fortune-teller and careened around the square in a fleet of hansom cabs. The party, organised by the newly established Georgian Group, was a fundraiser designed, as The Sketch put it, ‘to save one of London’s most perfect squares from “vandalism of modern business”’. Over the interwar years, London’s green spaces had become increasingly endangered by a ‘mania for destruction’; the Duke of Bedford’s vision of a luxurious and quiet residential estate had swiftly been overruled by wealthy speculators, who saw the open squares and Georgian mansions as ripe for replacement by luxury flats and business premises. In 1926, residents and well-wishers had narrowly shot down a proposal to transfer Covent Garden Market to the fields owned by the Foundling Hospital – which had moved that year to Berkhamsted – and to absorb the gardens of Mecklenburgh and Brunswick Squares into a bustling commercial centre. In the wake of this controversy, the
Royal Commission on London Squares had been created ‘to secure these gardens and squares as permanent sources of sunlight and fresh air for the population’. Yet Mecklenburgh Square remained in danger.

  In 1930, three houses on the south side of the square were converted to form London House, a hall of residence for visitors from the Commonwealth studying at London universities. Founded by F. C. Goodenough, chairman of Barclays Bank, on a wave of imperial idealism inspired by Cecil Rhodes’s scholarships, London House was designed to approximate an Oxford college in the heart of London. It aimed to train future leaders of the Empire and to send them back to the colonies as missionaries for British culture. Its hospitality was limited to those ‘of European origin’ (a restriction not lifted until 1945) and to men: ironically, given Bloomsbury’s historical tolerance, London House was then as closed to women and students of colour as the locked college of A Room of One’s Own.

  During the 1930s, the hall extended its buildings across the square’s entire south side, creating room for a library, a great hall, a spacious quadrangle and hundreds of student rooms. Residents of Mecklenburgh Square – including Eileen Power – protested against the encroachment of this new institution on a residential area, and lamented the detrimental effect of its modern architecture on the unity of Samuel Pepys Cockerell’s design. (The architect, Herbert Baker, grumpily retorted that the red bricks and flint tiles ‘will very soon be as dark and dingy as the houses are at present’.) But after the bombs of 1940 left the square in tatters (though London House itself remained intact), the opposition began to resign themselves to its expansion. In March 1950, the Lord Mayor’s National Thanksgiving Fund was launched to record the nation’s gratitude to the Commonwealth for the food parcels and voluntary aid it had sent to Britain during the war, which had totalled more than £80 million: as a mark of appreciation, donations were sought towards the completion of the London House buildings, and to establish a new hall for women and married students on the north side of Mecklenburgh Square. The fund was advertised on the radio and on billboards, through concerts and exhibitions, with a golf tournament and special sales on Bond Street and Regent Street; it was inaugurated at a banquet at Guildhall, where speakers included Princess Elizabeth, Winston Churchill and the Archbishop of Canterbury.