by Bryher;
I developed what my mother called, in tones of resignation, “a new craze.” I tried to teach myself bookkeeping. I imagine that I was too proud to ask for explanations but double entry was baffling; my exercises never seemed to come out as they should. Still, as my mother said, they kept me quiet. I had decided that my best chance of getting to sea was to become a merchant. If I could sail round the Mediterranean selling oranges and fish at every port, I could combine being a mariner and historian. Henty and my father had both contributed, however, to a conviction that I had to prepare for the day when my wishes might be granted. I knew that a trader had to keep accounts and so I sacrificed some of my few free hours struggling with the arithmetic that I hated.
It grew a little warmer and we went to Girgenti where I wandered among the temples with Freeman’s History under my arm and the memory of Africa in my head. Otherwise we were still in the eighteenth century. There were armed guards on the train when we crossed the island by way of the sulphur mines to Catania and people discussed bandits, flowing lava and the orange harvest with equal indifference in front of us. All of these were everyday facts. Once we had octopus for dinner, my mother refused it but I was always experimental and decided that it was like a rather tough chicken.
It is a great advantage to have been an Iberian slinger in one’s pinafore and I came to my own at Syracuse. We stayed at a hotel above the quarries where the Athenians had been confined and nothing could keep me away from the spot. I stood there for hours, looking down at a tangle of grass and half-wild geraniums, wondering if it were true that some prisoners had been saved because they could repeat the words of a new play and if they had ever got home? At such moments I felt that I had only to make some sign or turn my head a certain way, to enter the actual past. Curiously enough, I do not think I wanted to become a Sicilian, what I passionately desired, as in my Swiss Robinson days, was to share in the adventure as myself, or else to stand detached from it to observe what had actually happened. It was certainly a wild and melancholy place. The sixteen-year-old son of an English doctor and his wife, fellow guests at the hotel, used to go out with a penknife and return with a handful of human bones.
It was near Euryelus and the ancient walls that I knew Clio for my life’s mistress and that ecstasy, in the Greek and terrifying sense of that word, seized me by the throat. I saw a vision and could hardly breathe. History from Tyre and Carthage to the Pillars of Hercules spun in front of me, waiting for an interpreter, not in separate, narrow lengths but in a single, flowing-together wave. To translate the old into the new, I had to feel as a rower had felt bending over his oar, the heat at the point of a sculptor’s tool, the range of a ruler’s mind and the helplessness of the slave. To write of things was to become part of them. It was to see before the beginning and after the end. I almost screamed against the pain of the moment that from its very intensity could not last.
It was youthful, yes, but in that hour I ceased to be a child. Perhaps, like the South, I flowered early but I have never felt so utter a dedication to wisdom again and I still believe that on that day my mind reached the height of its powers. Freedom, especially of thought, is always disliked and the conventions of the time retarded my development for another twelve years. Destiny may have played some part in the matter, it is true; in my efforts to liberate myself I turned to psychology that is also the study of the living past, instead of drifting into purely historical research. All the same, I can forgive the world for many of its blows but not for its attempt to keep me back from my rightful maturity.
EIGHT
The next two years are blank. Even a dedicated scholar needs a fraction of encouragement but people laughed at me as a rule or accused me of “showing off’ (sometimes I did) and I had no idea where I could find the books that I needed. Libraries were forbidden, “You are not to go into those dusty places, full of germs.” It was not entirely a wasted period, however, the motoring age had begun and we traveled a lot in France.
We still never expected to complete a journey without breaking down at least once. Our first car was a Panhard, almost as high as a dog cart; our second, I think, was a Daimler. Horses reared, boys threw stones at us, policemen stopped us continually and the veils and goggles that we wore were really necessary on account of the dust. Some people considered us heroic, others immoral. “The body cannot stand a speed of thirty miles an hour,” my aunt warned me solemnly, “beg your father to leave you behind or your heart will give out and you will spend your life on a sofa.” Such warnings did not discourage me in the least. More and more people joined us on the roads and at last the reign of Queen Victoria was truly over.
I had no French friends as yet but the sounds, sights and smells as we drove across the countryside rapidly became as familiar as the Sussex villages. Every town had its story, they were like a row of gaily jacketed books. Children in sabots and black aprons chased hens out of the way and once on a clear stretch of road, to our awe and amazement, the speedometer touched forty miles an hour.
I began to think in French but found little to read until I was given L’Histoire d’un paysan by Erckmann-Chatrian. This was a book about the French Revolution from the French point of view. It was full of facts about smallpox, famine, the first planting of potatoes and the effects of the blockade upon poor craftsmen. The young respond to the primitive meaning of words. All my life I have been interested in Robespierre because his nickname of the “Incorruptible” so impressed me in childhood.
We did not go to Switzerland either of those summers but we drove once as far as Cornwall. I felt my spirits lift as soon as we crossed the Devon border; the raspberries and cream may have had something to do with it but the West seemed to welcome me and I longed to live in one of its sheltered lanes. Perhaps unconsciously I recognized that its sea was a Mediterranean blue. Otherwise those years were a time of hibernation while I rode, fenced and grew into a tough and cheeky boy, clamoring to enter the apprenticeship of life.
How did I discover poetry? I don’t know, it came. At the beginning I supposed that it rhymed. I also decided that it had to have the same numbers of letters in each line but this, as sound, limped unpleasantly. I found the clue (somehow I would!) at the back of my French grammar. There was a chapter on various meters. “How do I know what a great poem is?” I inquired, thinking of some carefully hidden sheets of foolscap.
“Poems? You give them away with a packet of tea,” was the amused Edwardian reply. Again how thankful I am that nobody encouraged me. I should have been insufferable.
Except for Shakespeare or an anthology or two, little poetry came my way until I was fifteen. I was growing out of Henty, however, and one day, after many entreaties, my father gave me Freeman’s five-volume history of the Norman Conquest. I flung myself into it as only the young can read with an intensity that was near to the battle rage of the warriors. Freeman, we know, was wrong about the palisades and a few other details but none of the soberer authorities that I studied later in life had his sweep and fire nor much that was new to say about the conflict. I knew the countryside well because we often drove over to Battle for tea. I suppose that it was imagination but I was always uneasy on the legendary site, it was usually damp and I felt sorrow rising into the air with the mist although I never spoke of this, fearing that people would laugh at me.
The only part that I liked was the road that led down to the Pevensey marshes. That landscape has always remained vividly in my mind, the yellow flags, the grass that oozed water if we trod on it, and even the disagreeable old woman who, in sheer fright, pulled her perfectly calm pony and trap into a ditch as our motorcar advanced (we might have been going fifteen miles an hour) and then cursed us as we dragged her out of it.
I often wondered since if we ever passed a walker in her tweed together with “the coat and mushroom straw” on the Hurstmonceux side of the lanes? The Quaker farm that was the setting of Dorothy Richardson’s Dimple Hill was in that neighborhood, she was there at about the same date and we often s
peculated afterwards what would have happened had we met at the time instead of in 1923.
It was in 1909 when the shadow of my century first fell across my own horizon. We were out one Sunday morning looking for mushrooms in a field below the Downs. “I don’t like the news,” my father said uneasily, “I’m afraid there may be a war.” I listened, of course, but it seemed as vague as any national disaster, the earthquake at Messina for example or a fire that nobody knew anything about until after it had happened. We had passed through Messina before it had been destroyed and it was equally hard to think of its solid buildings in ruins as to imagine “the Continent” that we had visited so frequently being the scene of battles.
It was a particularly cold winter that year. We went to Folkestone for a couple of months and I sometimes wondered if I should ever feel warm again. One day my father came into the schoolroom with a newspaper in his hand. “Read this article, Miggy; Blatchford is a socialist but he has grasped the situation. You must try to understand, it is very serious.”
Stamford Bridge, the Saxons and the Normans were easy but even the Boer War had been a continent away and although I understood the surface of the warning its meaning did not really penetrate my consciousness. How could I have imagined the young men whom I saw hurrying to work with black umbrellas and what seemed to me a total lack of any adventurous spirit, taking to uniforms and rifles? I listened to my father but then, with the thoughtlessness that was, after all, natural to my age, I forgot his anxiety. Besides I soon had enough to do without bothering my head about a possible conflict between the Great Powers.
Most of us have only one April, mine came early. Fifteen can be a turning point in youth and several factors combined to make 1909 a different year from any that preceded it. My father and mother were married in that year although I did not know this until I was twenty-four. They were hardly separated for a day during the nearly fifty years that they were together. They were always passionately in love and it was a truer marriage from the first than most of those that I have seen, before or since. I prefer to state the facts rather than to have an aura of mystery. Long afterwards, I was offered the chance to ask for my birth to be regarded as legitimate. I refused with indignation, preferring the affection and the glory.
My brother was born after the marriage in December, 1909. My mother was ill for a considerable time afterwards, we did not go abroad that winter but my father bought a house in London. I was told that I had been allowed to run wild too long; it was time that I conformed to contemporary customs. The shift from the formerly freer French atmosphere at home to a rigidly conventional English one was revolutionary and startling. I was scolded incessantly for unreasonable or trivial reasons. Life changed in fact and not in imagination.
I can see now that I presented a problem. I was not so much an ugly duckling as a voracious cuckoo with an open beak, clamoring for lessons in Arabic and drawing. Since I had said good-by to Sylvia, aged six, I had scarcely spoken to a child of my own age. My mother would have liked me to be interested in clothes, I hated what I called “dressing up.” I had always had the energy and the frankness of a boy and the high-necked Edwardian blouses and my now longer navy blue skirts made me look ridiculous although they were the uniform of the period. I tried to be unobtrusive, it saved many scoldings, but I had only to enter a room to upset my mother’s visitors. “She knows what I think,” one of them complained bitterly afterwards, “she stares right through me.” It was perfectly true. I had felt her deciding that I was an awkward, clumsy girl who needed to be sent to school and beaten into shape. My relatives blamed me for my lack of education while at the same time every sign of intelligence was immediately repressed. Apart from my parents and my governess, I cannot remember a kind or an encouraging word. It was harsh treatment because I was still very young but it forged my spirit; I shall be a rebel, I think, until the end of my days. The sands were running out but one last moment was granted to me. I think that it determined my life.
I saw a sign, THE SCHOOL OF ANIMAL PAINTING, written up above a studio in Baker Street. I persuaded my governess to let me make inquiries and my father, with more difficulty, to let me enter one of the classes. Six weeks of pure happiness followed. You cannot talk to me about heaven, I have been there, but just as in the myths so profound an experience has to be paid for with sorrow.
Most of my fellow students were elderly gentlemen except for a rosy-cheeked country girl a little older than myself. According to the custom of the time, we did not speak to one another. We had not been introduced. There was a muttered “thank you” if somebody picked up a pencil or an “excuse me” if an easel were bumped in passing, otherwise we worked in silence or spoke to the dog, a beautiful basset hound who slept on the model’s stand during the whole morning except when he rose from time to time, stretched himself and had to be enticed to lie down again by an attendant with biscuits.
I was quite the worst student in the class because I had never learned the rudiments of drawing. I had merely scribbled incessantly and looked at pictures. Now they give colored chalks to children as soon as they can crawl but I belonged to the sterner age when we only had slates. Paints were “messy” and it was “less selfish” to go for a walk on the Downs than to pore over a sheet of paper. These lessons were the first time that I had been allowed to draw for two hours together without reproof.
Mr. Cameron, our teacher, used to walk up Baker Street with a cloak flying from his shoulders. I was accustomed to seeing men wear capes in Italy but it shocked my governess when she came to fetch me. She reported him as dangerously eccentric. I liked him because he would tolerate no covering up of mistakes. Everything had to be stripped down to essentials. The rest of the class found him arid. He taught, in fact, anatomy rather than art. He looked in horror at my board when my turn came, demonstrated faults with a flick of his pencil and tore the paper in two. I was enchanted. This was learning as I had imagined it to be and I wanted to cut my teeth on the hardest criticism possible. I understood the rules but my hands were clumsy and my lines appalling. “All she does is to draw little black lumps,” Mr. Cameron complained to my governess, “and yet somehow she has the root of the matter in her.”
I sometimes wonder what would have happened to me if I had been allowed to continue drawing. I should have become quite a different person from myself as writer. The written word is colored by the conscious mind, by reason and by all that we learn through observation and experience. In painting with me, the unconscious would have been dominant. I know who my master would have been, Toulouse-Lautrec. Say what you will, no woman yet has had the same opportunities as a man to use her mind. I have always been handicapped in writing because, although due to some psychological training I know what a lumberman thinks, it is impossible for me to stay beside him while he works or drinks and listen to his conversation. It is not important to reproduce his swear words, these are monotonous and stupid, but I must be able to hear the rhythm of his speech if I am to reproduce it afterwards. Social taboos have cut me off from much of the material that I should have liked to use. They are also the reason for the greater concentration of women writers upon landscape and mood. Drawing is different, it is a silent art. If I permit myself to scribble on Sundays I am indifferent to beauty, it is the greed beneath some placid face that holds me, the envy under a smile. I long to catch the “is” and not the “should be” and I suspect that I should have gone deeper and deeper into the underworld to record such impressions. It is possible that I should have been a much greater painter than I can hope to be a writer but how would it have ended? How much would it have mattered?
In 1910 I knew how I wanted to see—in an instantaneous flash of lines in the Japanese manner—and that I needed for this long years of hard, technical training. This was not the whim of a child, it was mature and in spite of my awkwardness every hour of work was pure happiness. Changes in development have always happened to me with the speed of lightning although the approach to them may have been slow
and unperceived. Now to my intense surprise, I grew up in a day.
The beginning of life is brief. It is only the moment when the spirit is neither male nor female but a unity and my April lasted barely its thirty days. I think my mind might subsequently have died had not destiny sent me scuffing along the shelves of my father’s library towards an old, leather-bound book. It was Hazlitt’s Dramatic Literature of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth and in it, waiting for me, was Bellario.
The mature reader of Elizabethan drama comes back to Shakespeare with an added appreciation of his power but that does not mean that at a certain phase of our existence, other writers of that time may not have a closer message for us. I was drawn to Bellario as I never was to Viola or Rosalind because from my point of view she had all the virtues, she was loyal, she was not afraid of a sword and she had some of the loveliest lines to speak in all English poetry. Philaster was tiresome but youth can alter material as it pleases; I transformed love into fidelity to the muses. It is strange that in the darkness that followed, it was a figure from a now almost forgotten play who kept me anchored to the world of reality. It must be remembered, however, that both people and circumstances during the next nine years tried to force me to conform to a conventional pattern whereas I, almost with ferocity, felt myself to be dedicated to art and freedom.
I inhaled the studio turpentine as if it were Arabian jasmine while I tried to strip everything that I saw or read to its skeleton, to the reflection behind the bone that Egypt had taught me to call the Ka. Alas, I became so absorbed by this process that I forgot to say “yes” and “no” at the right moment so that people complained to my parents that I was not “quite normal.” Send her to school, they advised, it will knock the edges off her.
Mr. Cameron’s classes closed for Easter and I wondered how I should exist until the summer term began. I had been promised that I might go back to his lessons. On Friday we returned to Eastbourne, on Saturday they told me that my drawing days were over, Saturday and Sunday I prayed that I might die...,
