by Bryher;
Seclusion was a point about which I did not agree with Miriam. I had been alone for seven years and I needed to be with people. “It’s a little more difficult than in London but it’s possible.”
“Perhaps that is why the young Americans whom I meet seem so anchorless. As if no country nor thought could claim them. Restless, without hold of earth.”
That is why I like them, I longed to say, they are not strangled with traditions; but I knew my place, it was not for an apprentice to argue with his master and I wanted to know more about Dorothy herself. “When is your next book coming out?” I asked.
“There are so many distractions,” Dorothy shrugged her shoulders, “the cooking, shopping, letters...”
The characteristic sentence plunged me at once into that attic in Tansley Street that she had described so often. The stranger whom she had invited, not from curiosity but kindness, her hope that a postcard or a note might announce the postponement of the visit and leave her to her solitude with Alan, the certainty that one side of her was watching me as a representative of the young while the other was far away with her own thoughts, made me feel that I was in the book myself however much I might disagree with some of its philosophy. “You must hurry your publishers,” I urged, “we are waiting so impatiently,” and she laughed, with indulgence but also, I think, some pleasure.
We were silent for a time. Only a rudimentary instinct that, if it were prolonged too far, departure would be necessary, impelled any of us to break it. I tried to tell her what Backwater had meant to me during the darkest days of the war, “I could grow again, I could grow...” and she told me the story of how her first book had been written. I often think of it now when writers complain to me about lack of security and time.
Dorothy had been loaned a cottage in Cornwall and had lived there on ten shillings a week while she wrote Pointed Roofs. The purchasing power of ten shillings then was equivalent perhaps to three pounds today but it had to cover fuel, light, food and, as she particularly insisted, paper. She went without meals for two days to save the half crown that was necessary to post the manuscript to a publisher. She had hoped that it might help the mass of underpaid women workers whose life she had shared, she had no idea that she had invented “continuous association” and she was afraid that by being labeled as experimental she had driven away the audience she wanted. It was the deep drive under a bleak youth that had created the modern novel. I do not think that even in her old age she realized her achievement. The philosophical discussions in Pilgrimage seem old-fashioned, but never Miriam nor her characters. We meet them in shops, trains and offices and they still use the same phrases. There is no better English social history of the years between 1890 and 1914 than in her books. Perhaps for this reason she has often a higher reputation on the Continent, and strong links with the new French school and writers like Robbe-Grillet and Butor, than in her native land. I think that she will be rediscovered once we dare to look again at our immediate past. Meantime she is “a writer’s writer” and I know of many artists who read through Pilgrimage, as I do, every few years.
Besides meeting Dorothy and Alan in London and later in Cornwall, I saw them, I think, on their last visit to Oberland. They spent a few days at Montreux one autumn on their journey to Château d’Oex and returned there on their way back in the spring. Dorothy delighted in being on the Continent so much that I was sad that she saw so little of it; a trip to Belgium as a child, her German schooldays, and half a dozen visits to Switzerland were all she ever had. Alan’s health kept her from possible holidays in America and Italy. Like so many English, she was a different being abroad. She became the girl that Miriam had been at seventeen, full of vitality and ready for any experiences.
All the same, enough of the later Miriam remained to make her welcome disputations in the evening. She talked in her amazingly resonant voice while Alan and I flung in just enough opposition to make her develop her ideas. I do not know why I copied the following conversation in my notebook soon after it had happened. Perhaps I realized that after a few hours even a good memory is a poor carrier of actual words.
I went one evening to their room and was amused to find that they had transformed the polished wood and neat linen of a Swiss pension into a replica of their London den. The air was full of smoke, there were postcards on the chest of drawers and a pile of papers on almost every chair. “Would you care to glance over this?” Dorothy inquired. “It is Coué’s latest book; by the way, what do you think of him?”
“He once lectured here,” I ventured cautiously, knowing her distrust of psychology.
“And that finished you?”
“Hasn’t that kind of thing been done before?” I did not question his sincerity but I was used to the deeper investigations of men like Havelock Ellis.
Dorothy’s eyebrows lifted, literally. “Not quite the same, surely?”
“Oh yes, it is a rehash of the pre-Nancy hypnotists.”
“Surely Coué has improved upon the old hypnotic method?”
“What I feel is” (I was fresh from the Psychoanalytic Journal) “autosuggestion is all right but it simply means a transference of symptoms and the trouble breaks out again afterwards.”
“That is what Barbara says,” Alan said solemnly in his corner; he was speaking of their friend, Barbara Low, who was one of the first of the English Freudians.
“Yes,” Dorothy brushed aside our interruptions, “but what I feel Coué accomplishes is a control. He does not claim his method can cure, he claims only to establish controls. Then he leaves it to you. Of course his dear kind personality is what counts. As it always does. Not the scientific method but the humanity in him, as you used to get the humanity of the old-fashioned general practitioner.”
“Do you know many of the London psychoanalysts?” I inquired.
“Only Barbara and one other doctor whose wife, a strong, forceful personality, dragged him into it.”
Alan, ever watchful that Dorothy did not get overexcited, stirred in his corner, “What I feel is that the flesh gets between us and art. It is only when the physical health is weak that the brain is strong.”
“Maybe now,” I protested, “but not in the great creative ages. Look at the Greeks or even at the Renaissance.”
“What was Socrates but a worn-out Paul Verlaine.” Alan’s surprising statement stunned even me to silence.
“And Aristotle.” Dorothy peered at us through the cigarette smoke. “Tell me, who in this room knows the personality of Aristotle?”
“Aristotle?” Alan snatched up the challenge, “That funny little man. I know at least he was different enough from the ordinary Greeks of his time to be thoroughly hated.”
“The Greeks were unaware,” Dorothy continued, “they were rounded, unself-conscious.”
“I grant you the sculptors,” Alan lit another cigarette, “but that proves what I say. It is the mind that makes for us the body we desire. And the sculptors had to have a good physique to ply their trade. They had to have it. It is a healthy occupation.”
“Yes, you repeat my words, we have the body we desire. We make it.”
It was useless talking to them about even my slight knowledge of the Greek islands, I was silent, listened and watched.
“All the same,” Alan continued, “most artists—look at the Renaissance!—have been tremendously healthy. I think the Greeks had a balance we have lost.”
“I should choose rather the Chinese for an illustration. Their marvelous impassivity.”
“Yes. A Chinaman would laugh if you cut off his hand. He would hold the stump up and look at it. Simply by the withdrawal of his vitality into other parts of his body. Not like a savage who laughs childishly, not being aware. He would be aware yet he would feel nothing.”
“Yes. But my bag, have you seen it? I must have left it downstairs.”
“Did you take it with you when you went to play the pe-ah-no?” Alan always pronounced the word with a strong stress on the ah, it must have been
some private joke.
“Perhaps, or did I leave it downstairs?”
It was pure later Miriam, a disputation in which she only half believed, mingling suddenly into the everyday. We found the handbag under a pile of papers and discarded envelopes but by that time I could see a desire for solitude growing in Dorothy’s eyes and knew that it was time to leave.
The great moment came later. They stopped in Paris for a week. I arrived there the day before they left and found them already adopted (as I never was) by Montparnasse. They told me eagerly about a classic “Quarter” fight that they had watched from behind their café table. They knew my friends and the phrases of the hour, and, to crown it all, Dorothy had bought a dress. I believe she kept the box in which it was packed for years. Paris to them was an Edwardian dream that my parents would have recognized. I have always been resentful that Dorothy’s lack of success with her later books distracted her from her work. We have no record of this Paris visit nor of her days in Cornwall and both would have been valuable as literature and social history.
We corresponded and I saw them whenever I could on my brief visits to England. My later recollections belong to another portion of this autobiography but we were friends for over thirty years and one of the things that I miss most are her gay, provocative letters and the way she spoke the English language.
I met Freud through flying and not through any serious consideration of the soul!
H. D., Kenneth Macpherson and I happened to be in Venice together for a few days during May, 1927. I saw a flight to Vienna and back, advertised at a moderate price, and smelt adventure. Hilda could not be torn from a city that she had always loved, but Kenneth and I started with six other passengers from an airport on the sandy shore of the Lido. It was the only way, we agreed as we rose into the air, to see the shape of the lagoons and the outlines of the boats. We skimmed so close to the tops of rounded hills that I felt I could see the prints of goat hooves upon the tiny, winding paths. I was still not used to the landscapes of the air, the way the mountain pools turned into emerald solids or the fields into strips of multicolored brocade. It was beautiful, it was exciting, until suddenly, almost as in a legend, we flew into a thunderstorm. I had been up perhaps three times and Kenneth twice, we did not fully realize the danger. The pilot turned. He made a detour that lengthened the journey by almost an hour but we left the storm on one side. We could see the thunderclouds and the lightning flashing miles away as if it were one of the tempests that the eighteenth-century artists were fond of painting in the corner of their landscapes, alarming and yet detached. It remains one of the strangest experiences that I have ever had while flying. Nobody was sorry when we landed to refuel at Klagenfurt and were able to wander for a time in a field full of extraordinarily fragrant meadow flowers.
The excursion allowed us two full days in Vienna. It was almost ten years since the war had ended but the city had not recovered, the window frames needed painting, the buildings were unrepaired. People looked hungry and the streets were desolate. I did not realize then that to cut a great city off from its seaports was one of the greatest mistakes that the peacemakers had made. It had destroyed the balance of south-eastern Europe, brought beggary to thousands and was an indirect but powerful cause of the rise of the Nazi state. I only felt embarrassed at the time at having to watch a stranger’s misery. I returned to Vienna several times during the nineteen thirties but never felt at my ease there. I had plenty of Austrian friends but, unpopular though I know my choice is, it was the energy and challenge of northern Germany (and perhaps my ancestors) that drew me more than the melancholy South.
I had happened to write to Havelock Ellis about our proposed trip and he had sent me a letter of introduction to Freud, with whom he had corresponded for years, although they had never met. I sent it round by messenger to the Berggasse and we were invited to call the next afternoon. I discovered afterwards that his family rationed Freud to one visitor a day on account of his health but he was interested in hearing about his contemporary, Ellis, and we had been chosen, therefore, from a number of applicants.
We were taken into the famous room with the ancient statuettes and the chow. The dog approved of Kenneth, another element in our favor. Freud sat behind his desk, I recognized him from the photographs but what they and reports about him had lacked was his gaiety. He asked us first several questions about Ellis whose courage as an investigator he admired, but then an amazing life came into his eyes as he questioned us about flying: why had we chosen to come by air, what did it feel like, how high had the pilot taken us, what did a landscape look like from above? We told him about the storm and the strange impression that we had had of seeing lightning sideways and I knew that he wished that he had been with us himself.
Kenneth was able to give the Professor details about the machinery that I did not know. The excitement to me in those days was the absolute newness of what we saw in the patterns on the ground and in the changing colors of the clouds just beyond the wings. I could feel that Freud had grasped our enthusiasm. The sky was as interesting to him at that moment as the mind.
That first visit and one later occasion were the only times that I saw Freud as he really was, gay, kind and curious about everything. Otherwise I met him only with his family. They warned me so often to remember that he was an invalid that our meetings became purely artificial. There is a wide difference between the attitudes of the English and the Europeans towards genius. We do not expect to be invited but, if we are, assume that it will be on a basis of reasonable human give-and-take. Europe stresses the intellectual achievement to the exclusion of everything else. It was not an accident that Freud chose to explore the influence of family life upon development. The older I grow the more profoundly I am aware that the broad lines of my character were established before I was seven. It was simply a matter of contact, of a national attitude if you will, that made it possible for Havelock Ellis and me to talk and joke together, whereas with Freud, apart from the two occasions that I have mentioned, the conversation was confined to general observations. I saw enough, however, to know that Freud in himself was not what his admirers wanted him to be, a silent sage or hermit sitting on a rock and staring at the horizon. He reminded me rather of a doctor of the nineties, full of advice and kindness, who would have gone out in all weathers to help his patients and turned no one away from his door. He had his wish, nobody this last century has helped humanity so much.
EIGHTEEN
In the autumn of 1927, I married Kenneth Macpherson. It was natural that he was passionately interested in films because his ancestors had been professional artists for six generations, his father was a painter and he had himself received a thorough training in art.
We lived at Territet and one day as we were walking beside the lake and Kenneth compared the ripples drifting across the water with an effect that should be tried on the screen, I remembered my Paris training of the early twenties and said, “If you are so interested, why don’t you start a magazine?”
So Close Up was born on a capital of sixty pounds. We expected it to last three issues and had five hundred copies printed. It was an immediate success and when we ended after the collapse of the silent film, six years later, we had five thousand readers.
I had been born before the cinema age and the only film that I had seen in childhood, and that when I was already about thirteen, was one of an Antarctic expedition. I kept to the business side of the magazine as much as possible and attended to much of the correspondence, but I was pressed into service occasionally to review educational films. I saw the possibilities of the movies but I found the screen restricted my own imagination as a writer and since Close Up ceased I have been perhaps to see one film a year. Yet it was a magnificent training because it taught me speed, not to hang about looking at my characters in a novel but to get them moving and to try to fix a landscape in a sentence as if it were a few feet of film.
It was the golden age of what I call “the art that died” becau
se sound ruined its development. I have written already that we had to get away from the nineteenth century if we were to survive. The film was new, it had no earlier associations and it offered occasionally, in an episode or single shot, some framework for our dreams. We felt we could state our convictions honorably in this twentieth-century form of art and it appealed to the popular internationalism of those so few years because “the silents” offered a single language across Europe. Switzerland was a perfect place for our headquarters. It was possible to see French, German, American and English films all in the same week.
To our utter amazement, the first issue of Close Up sold out within a month and it was enthusiastically reviewed. I wondered if we had done anything wrong because I was used to the “little magazines” with half the issues unsold and growing dusty in some corner. We made two new friends, Robert Herring, a professional film critic of the Manchester Guardian, and Oswell Blakeston, a cameraman, with hilarious stories of his adventures on British sets. Herring had just returned from Germany and urged us to go to Berlin.
We set off from London in November. It was before the days of flying and the easiest way was to take an Atlantic liner from Southampton to Hamburg. It cost then five pounds first class and was much cheaper and pleasanter than the train. I enjoyed my brief taste of salt air but was startled when I asked a sailor the name of a gray rock emerging from the mist. He snarled “Helgoland” and turned his back on me. At that time I felt that the leaders in Germany had been responsible for the war, but not the people. I was to learn in 1933 that all politicians represent some form of national feeling and that a citizen is responsible for their views and must share their guilt unless he either protests or goes to another country.
We spent two days in Hamburg. I knew that my ancestors had left the city for England about a century before but I had not then discovered that they had been millers at Hitzacker. My aunt had told me grim stories about a cholera epidemic and how one of the women of our family had died from it, “So you see, you must never drink unboiled water abroad.” Hamburg was unfamiliar after the places that I knew, my German showed no signs of coming back into my mind and when we went to the cinema and the screen filled suddenly with German soldiers, I felt like some agent charged to transmit a message that I did not understand to somebody I did not know. It was an odd, uneasy sensation that seemed to come out of the air because I do not remember having another such experience again.
