by Bryher;
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Text originally published in 1962 under the same title.
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Publisher’s Note
Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.
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THE HEART TO ARTEMIS:
A WRITER’S MEMOIRS
BY
BRYHER
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS 3
DEDICATION 4
ONE 5
TWO 31
THREE 45
FOUR 62
FIVE 68
SIX 72
SEVEN 79
EIGHT 82
NINE 87
TEN 106
ELEVEN 118
TWELVE 126
THIRTEEN 134
FOURTEEN 143
FIFTEEN 148
SIXTEEN 163
SEVENTEEN 171
EIGHTEEN 177
NINETEEN 194
TWENTY 198
TWENTY-ONE 206
REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 221
DEDICATION
To the memory of my master, Stéphane Mallarmé
ONE
When I was born in September, 1894, Dorothy Richardson’s Miriam was a secretary. Mallarmé had just retired and was no longer teaching English to French schoolboys. The death duties that were to obliterate most of our feudal estates had been introduced in that year’s budget while the Fram was drifting through the polar ice and would-be explorers dreamed about Bokhara, a fabulous city that was then more difficult of access than Tibet. I opened my eyes upon the end of not only the nineteenth century but of a second Puritan age. An epoch passed away while I was learning to speak and walk. Its influence remains as the start of memory and as a measuring rod for progress that even Edwardian survivors lack.
There were no motorcars, no taxis and no aeroplanes. The garden flowers were different; speech followed a more complex and leisurely pattern, the houses were usually cold. The real background to these formative years, however, was the sound of hooves; the metallic thunder of the big animals drawing the carriages called landaus, the lighter trip-trop of the hansom cabs. On land, apart from a few trains, horses comprised the whole of transportation. I only realized how largely they formed a part of my earliest consciousness when I woke up in Lahore over fifty years later to listen to the passing tongas and wonder why the clatter seemed so familiar and comforting in that otherwise strange land? It took me some minutes to discover that it was because I was back in the world of the horse.
I was born at Margate, in Kent, but we returned to London when I was three months old and I have never been back to that town. On my father’s side, I was of mixed Yorkshire and German descent. The earliest ancestor that I have been able to trace was a Johann Jürgen Ellermann, an ex-dragoon who married a Maria Dorothea Kelzen in 1726 and settled down at Hitzacker in Lower Saxony. They were Lutherans. According to a family tradition, they possessed a mill on an island in the Elbe and after it was swept away in a flood, a generation later, they went first to Hamburg and afterwards to Hull. Why they chose the lesser adventure of England instead of the greater one of America has always been a puzzle to me. My grandfather grew up in the north and became a corn merchant. He was appointed German consul at Hull and married a Yorkshire girl, Anne Elizabeth Reeves. There were three children, first two daughters, Ida Annie, born in 1856, and Emily Mary, born in 1858, and then a son, my father John Reeves, who was born at Brough, near Hull, on May 15, 1862.
I have often wondered if my father was teased about his parents at school because he would never speak of Germany and I only heard about these ancestors after I had grown up. Being a historian, I then wanted to trace them but the political events in Germany in the early nineteen thirties stopped my research. It was not until this autobiography was begun that I reached Hitzacker the summer of 1960 and my discovery of the ruins of the old mill that my ancestors had left more than a century before belongs to a later chapter of these memoirs. I knew nothing about the Elbe when I was young. Perhaps my love of water and flat landscapes is some proof, however, of the influence of heredity? I often heard my mother say in a puzzled voice, “Why does the child always want to go to the marshes and never to the Downs?” I know that I thought rushes growing in a slowly moving stream were the most beautiful sight in the world and sometimes, to please me, my father would draw such landscapes on a piece of paper with a bird, perhaps, rising from the reeds.
On my mother’s side I was Middle English, not actually from Warwickshire but not so far, I like to think, from Shakespeare’s Stratford. She had the most beautiful skin that I have ever seen, the forget-me-not blue eyes of the Angles, their same feeling for plants and mistrust of everything that did not come out of the earth. She did not like the sea but she loved the wind. I suspect that she must have had a Celt among her ancestors but cannot confirm this as a fact. She was full of temperament together with a sense of art that, in her case, was translated into love. So my inheritance was the north with the strands of plowing and the sea inextricably mingled. It never occurred to me until I was fifteen that I could be anything but a sailor and I have always been glad to feel the merchant tradition rooted in me and the slow, stubborn blood of the Lowland nations.
It is fitting that my first memory should be a historical one. On the evening of June 22, 1897, my parents took me out to the steps in front of our house and lifted me up to see the illuminations. I had never known night except from a window. The sky surprised me, it seemed so large. Lights flashed, I was not sure if they were candles or stars. It was the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria and I was two years and nine months old. The lamps were gold, the night was black and it was so long past my usual bedtime that I was convinced that I had suddenly grown up.
I have only confused memories otherwise of the London of the period. Horse-drawn omnibuses rattled down wide, gray streets. Occasionally the jingling stopped suddenly because straw had been spread across the road and then we knew that somebody in an adjacent house was ill. The gas was lighted solemnly every evening and there were no bathrooms. Water was heated in the kitchen and carried upstairs in mahogany-colored cans. I remember the smell of soapy flannel when Ruth, the nursemaid, washed my face while I sat in a brown enamel tub in front of a big fire. It was very wicked to splash. Everything was large and solid, the chairs, like houses, were never to be moved and there was seldom enough crawling space between the heavy table legs and an immense chest of drawers.
I was told that in babyhood a fox terrier shared my pram and that I learned to walk when left alone on a rug in the garden near a bed of ripe strawberries. These incidents remain legends. I cannot remember them although a faint picture remains of pride in tottering round a room on short, fat legs without holding on to the chairs. I do remember my favorite toy, a clockwork elephant that my father had brought back from some journey and that walked with a buzz and stiff, tiny steps right across the carpet.
Clothes w
ere a nightmare. I wore a thick vest, a bodice, woolen knickers, one flannel and one white petticoat, long black stockings, high black button boots and a serge dress. Over this, I had a white pinafore indoors and when I went out a triangular piece of cloth round my neck to keep the air from my throat, I had a large hat, sometimes with a feather on it, it either blew off or the elastic cut into my chin, a heavy coat, gloves, and sometimes a muff. It was the customary attire of all little girls of that period, many even wore a third petticoat, and except that the materials were thinner, the same in summer as in winter. Is it surprising that after wearing such polar equipment continuously I shudder when I think of that time? I never went bareheaded or barefooted and could not run without heavy garments whipping about my knees. No wonder that the Victorians worshiped Nature! How mysterious the elements must have seemed to them when they had never felt sun or rain except through heavy layers of tweed. As for my hair! It was strained back into a pigtail that caught in bushes or fell forward into the ink; worse still, it was done up in rags called “bobs” every evening and brushed round a hoop stick in the morning to make it curl which it never did. Somehow at least one tight hair always got caught in those bobs; besides they stuck into one’s neck or tickled one’s ears. To this day I feel intense pity for any child I see with long hair, and no single act in my life ever gave me greater pleasure than having my hair cut short in 1920.
My first recollection of summer is of watching my mother walk across the balcony with a shiny, green watering can in her hands, sprinkling the then so fashionable red geraniums in our window boxes. The wet leaves and the black loam had an acrid scent that was slightly tinged with dust but quite free from petrol fumes. Perhaps this watering was a rare event or I recall it so vividly because I have always responded to warmth but shrivel into a hibernating dormouse in the cold.
There were trips to the Zoo with its frightening revolving gate. “Keep your hands still or you will get your fingers pinched.” Sometimes the ticket collector nodded; then I entered proudly on my father’s shoulder. None of the animals frightened me but the afternoons were short and how could I choose between waiting in front of the gay, noisy monkeys whom I was said to resemble or trotting to the pond where a hippo rolled and snorted in the water without its keeper ever saying “don’t splash”?
There was also drama. I was often lifted over the railing in the elephant house to stand in the narrow passage opposite the cages. It was almost my teatime one visit when the keeper arrived with a round of crisp, brown biscuits. My father took the first one and handed it to the biggest elephant there. How wonderful it was to see the trunk find, then grasp and lift the morsel to an almost invisible mouth! Its feet alone were halfway to my shoulders; a tassel tip of tail swung to and fro. The second, mother elephant got her portion, we came to the baby at the end of the line. There was a single biscuit left in my father’s hand. I watched, hoping that he would give it to me. I could have borne being asked to share but to lose all was unendurable. I could not have been more than three because I did not know how to protest. I had no words. All I could do was to yell loudly and violently, to my parents’ surprise. They called it overexcitement, I know now that it was jealousy. I supposed that my father preferred the baby elephant to myself.
I am certain that children experience human passions with uninhibited force. The only difference is that, unlike adults, they bend to the storm and do not reason with it. A residue remains to influence their subsequent development but the tempest dies down rapidly and it is this quality of apparent forgetfulness that has led generations to deny that their charges could be subject to mature emotions. They are; only like myself on that occasion, they cannot explain, they lack the vocabulary.
The Zoo, of course, was an exceptional treat but every morning I was taken for a walk in Kensington Gardens. (We lived somewhere in Bayswater but I have been unable to trace the road.) Why did Ruth have to bustle in, ordering me to put my toys away just as I had upset the button bag, a favorite plaything, or arranged my animals in rows? “Try to be good like the little prince,” she would say, buttoning up my coat, “he never fidgets.” Still, as we crossed the big road into the park she would tell me stories about the Queen’s cream ponies or about her own (was it Hampshire?) village. How old was she? Eighteen perhaps and still a little homesick. “When the hay was cut,” she would begin if I were particularly restless, “all of us children climbed on top of the last wagon, you have no idea how slippery it was.”
“And you had how many horses?” I would ask faithfully because this was my favorite tale.
“Two and they pulled us right up to the big barn.”
“And there was a table inside...”
“With pies on it and cakes and loaves of bread and tea and we ate until there wasn’t a crumb left on the board.”
I had seen such barns when we were in the country and I could imagine the pies; unlike most children I liked meat better than candy, and loaves with a broad, brown base and a softer bit on top that reminded me of a farmer’s wife with a flapping apron. It was near and natural, part of a village life that could have changed but little since Elizabethan times, with the years divided by seasons and ruled by crops. I have wondered since how much my wish to feel the reality of the past was originally wakened by these simple but ancient stories.
I remember surprisingly little about the park itself. I had already decided that it was not amusing to be virtuous, one must not shout, one must not play with fire or water, above all, one must never “answer back.” The trees and green chairs were not to be fingered as I passed them but there was one place where I could dig, half secretly, and make mud pies. I was shaping a lump of earth one morning and wishing that it was good to eat when Ruth snatched me by the hand and rushed me to the edge of the road. An old lady in black was driving past us in a carriage. Was she coming from Kensington or had she been to look at the Memorial? “Wave to the Queen,” Ruth said excitedly, “wave, look, she is smiling at you.” I did not wave, I did not smile, according to Ruth I sulked. How much more important a mud pie seemed at that moment than a royal coach that was not even drawn by the cream ponies! All the same it was an incident that I never forgot.
A short time afterwards my father bought a small house in Worthing, so of that early London no impressions remain other than the geranium-scented afternoons, an elephant’s cake, the first view of night, the last glimpse of a Queen.
Worthing in 1898 was a sleepy little town where many of the roads still ended in meadows. I imagine that my family chose the place because it was near enough to London for my father to join us every weekend. He came down on Friday from a mysterious place where he must never be disturbed called “the office” and took the first train back on the Monday morning. We were a small household by Victorian standards so that mercifully I was often left alone to play by myself. Ruth helped in the house, my mother made most of my clothes. The garden was tiny but there was much to explore in it, I could run my fingers along the “frizzly moss” at the top of a low wall, we had a fox terrier called Vick. These were the years that turned me into a thinker before the pressures of an ignorant society planted in me this or the other fear. It has seemed to me since that I have never again been so completely a whole. I knew what I wanted, I judged people clearly. I was not afraid.
We used to pick primroses in Goring Woods and blackberries along the neighboring hedges. “Long stalks, remember,” and “Don’t squash” were among the first orders to echo in my ears. The word “common” as applied to grazing has always fascinated me yet I fear that this may be due to its association with the long oval of Broadwater Green that was then famous for a sweetshop where they sold black and white peppermint humbugs, the only candy that I liked.
We drove on hot summer days to the foot of the Downs and then climbed on foot up a narrow path to Chanctonbury Ring. My father looked for mushrooms and my mother once found a round, polished stone that we thought was a bullet but I suspect now was a sling stone. The way back led thro
ugh a village where each garden was a plot of fragrance. The quality of the plants may be better today but our mid-summers are no longer scented; June then was clove pinks, July mignonette. Erect we miss them less but at crawling time what substitute is there for their graces? The nearer that we are to the earth the more its odors mean to us, it is not only the spring sap of the primroses that comes back to me but leather reins and seaweed as well as the hotter smell of cut grass.
A child’s first books, if they stir the imagination, may alter its life. Perhaps the sea air stimulated development but on the day that I was three years and nine months old I was given a copy of The Swiss Family Robinson because “in three months you will be four, darling,” and from that moment I became conscious of the world.
I could not yet read the book myself but Ruth had no peace, she had to go over it again and again, it was the essence of truth to me. Yes, this was the quality that set it apart, mine had been a puzzling landscape until Pastor Robinson arrived. The mental capacity of children is always underrated, I wanted facts, not fables; how were bridges built, what was a raft, why did a porcupine have quills? There was no television in 1898 and very slight difference between my nursery and the one where Madame de Montolieu retold Wyss’s story to an invalid grandson in that Elba summer of 1814. The narrative of the shipwrecked family became part of the common experience of childhood. I imagined that I saw flamingoes when Ruth took me along the marshes for a treat, trefoil that I gathered in the meadows turned into “potato flowers,” one day I might have a dog like Turk. There were many scoldings because I was always turning the big Victorian workbasket upside down to serve as Mrs. Robinson’s bag. What could the red, withered scales of sorrel be other than coffee or the empty chestnut husks than coconuts? Perhaps I was born with a longing for adventure instead of a heart? I have never wanted to remain anywhere permanently, no matter how beautiful the landscape. My roots go deep but their ground is the English tradition and not a particular earth. It may also be the influence of that Kentish sea whose sound I heard before I knew its name.
