No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  To express the humiliation of being trapped as a woman in a world claimed by men, she began writing Development, about her traumatic school days, ‘at the rate of about a phrase a day, written almost with blood’. In it, she advocated educational reform for women:

  I have always been a feminist if that word means fighting for women’s rights and I glory in it… Equality means equality with no special privileges or advantages on either side, but why should men have all the interesting jobs?

  She identified as a feminist even while feeling she was at heart a man.

  Like Sylvia Beach and Natalie Barney, Bryher read the symbolist poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé – poems of dreams of an ideal world: ‘for the next twenty years my principles of conduct were founded upon his ideas’, she said. She called him ‘my master’. Mallarmé’s ideas were to purify speech, use contemporary language, avoid the hackneyed and ‘paint not the object but the effect it produces’. Poetry and art were about evocation and suggestion: ‘between the lines and above the glance communication is achieved’. Mallarmé, for Bryher, hinted at the buried life, identity unexpressed, the mind liberated from purely conscious thought. She resolved to be a writer. She published a poetry collection, Region of Lutany, in 1914 – poems of longing for distant places and of yearning for freedom. She learned by heart all the poems in H.D.’s collection Sea Garden. This, she said, was the one book above all others that made her self-aware: ‘The rhythms were new, it evoked for me both the Scillies and the South. It touched Mallarmé’s vision.’ Here were poems that reimagined the world:

  to blot out this garden

  to forget, to find a new beauty

  in some terrible

  wind-tortured place.

  She did not know that H.D. was Hilda Doolittle, an American woman who had women lovers. Sea Garden, published in 1916, had been financed and edited by Amy Lowell, another American lesbian poet whom Bryher admired from an early age. Amy Lowell was a large woman with dark hair, a deep voice and a masterful manner. Margaret Anderson said she was so vast she had difficulty getting through the door.

  Bryher meets H.D.

  (Left) Bryher photographed by Gisèle Freund © Bryher Papers General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University © Photo Gisèle Freund / IMEC / Fonds MCC; (right) Poet Hilda Doolittle © Bettmann / Getty Images

  Bryher wanted to meet H.D. In the summer of 1918, she asked the editor of The Sphere, a journal owned by her father, to find her address. She learned she was staying in Cornwall, near St Ives. Bryher wrote a fan letter, went to Zennor with Doris Banfield, and asked H.D. if she and a friend might visit. H.D. thought her letter was from an elderly schoolmistress. She invited Bryher to tea on 17 July. She told her to look below the ruins of Bosigran Castle for a square house, close to the road, with two tall red chimneys. Bryher was full of anticipation:

  Was something going to happen to her at last? If she had a friend, something would burst and she would shoot ahead, be the thing she wanted and disgrace them by her knowledge. Because she would care for no laws, only for happiness. If she found a friend, an answer, the past years would vanish utterly from her mind.

  Her words sounded as if written by a gauche schoolgirl rather than an elderly schoolmistress. She wrote them five years after first meeting H.D., by which time more than friendship had happened. The bursting thing she wanted, the shooting ahead, was intimacy and a woman lover. Friend was a catch-all word. There was nothing explosive about her friendship with Doris Banfield. The disgrace, the flouting of laws, the knowledge, the answer, was to live out her desire for sexual and emotional relationship with a woman. H.D. was her quest. Of that she was sure.

  The door opened and I started in surprise. I had seen the face before, on a Greek statue or in some indefinable territory of the mind. We were meeting again after a long absence but not for the first time. ‘Won’t you come in?’ the voice had a birdlike quality that was nearer to song than speech. There was a bowl of wild flowers on the table, a pile of books on the chair. We sat down and looked at each other or, more correctly, I stared. I was waiting for a question to prove my integrity and the extent of my knowledge. ‘I wonder if you could tell me something’ H.D. began, ‘have you ever seen a puffin and what is it like?’

  ‘They call them sea parrots and there are dozens of them in the Scillies. I go there almost every summer. You must join me next year.’

  So Love began. Bryher’s equivalent of Sylvia Beach’s hat bowling in the wind down rue de l’Odéon with Adrienne Monnier in pursuit. H.D. said Bryher loved her ‘so madly it is terrible. No man has ever cared for me like that.’

  Bryher was twenty-four and H.D. thirty-two at the time of this first meeting. Bryher, naive and cut off by the strangeness of her childhood, had had no sexual relationships. Her romantic expectations were lofty, her commitment certain. She was in love with H.D. before she met her. H.D.’s emotional life was more than muddled, her mental health fragile. D.H. Lawrence said of her: ‘She is like a person walking a tightrope. You wonder if she’ll get across.’ There was a thin line between the imagery of her poetry and her bouts of psychosis.

  The Bosigran Castle address sounded grand but was in fact a tin miner’s stone cottage at the foot of the castle ruins. H.D. had lived there since March with Cecil Gray, a Scottish musicologist. Richard Aldington, her husband, was conscripted and fighting at the Western Front. Gray, who was in London on the day of Bryher’s visit, was twenty-three and had rented the Cornish cottage as a love nest for their affair. H.D. was not in love with him. She was missing Aldington. She was also enamoured of D.H. Lawrence and believed him to be in love with her. She had joined Gray to escape the Zeppelin bombing raids on London and her emotional confusion. She found the Cornish landscape inspirational. She was translating the choruses from Euripides’ Hippolytus – Harriet Weaver published this in her Egoist Press. Gray kept being cautioned for contravening blackout regulations; visible lights were a guide to hostile submarines, he was told.

  Frances, Ezra, Richard, Cecil

  H.D.’s relationships overlapped, merged, were never exclusive and seemed incidental to the true experience of her life, which was her writing. She slipped into affairs and was vague about shaping her life. She seemed to say ‘yes’ to all overtures. In her early twenties she had expressed deep love for a poet, Frances Gregg. ‘No one will ever love you as I love you,’ she wrote to her in 1911. She described this love in an autobiographical novel, HERmione, not published until 1981, twenty years after her death. ‘I don’t want to be (as they say crudely) a boy’, H.D. told Frances, ‘nor do I want to be a girl. What is all this trash of Sappho? None of that seems real. I feel you. My pulse runs swiftly.’

  For H.D., love was transcendent, the currency of poetry, and same-sex love as valid as any other: ‘We are legitimate children’, she wrote.

  We are children of the Rossettis, of Burne Jones, of Swinburne… We were in the thoughts of Wilde when he spoke late at night of carts rumbling past the window, fresh with farm produce on the way to Covent Garden. He was talking to a young man called Gilbert.

  Before Frances Gregg – and while with her – she had been ‘engaged’ to Ezra Pound, whom she first met at a Halloween party in Pennsylvania when she was fifteen and he was sixteen. She vowed to dedicate her life to him; he gave her a pearl ring, wrote poems to and about her and called her Saint Hilda. But he too was dating Frances Gregg, who wrote in her journal: ‘Two girls in love with each other and each in love with the same man.’

  H.D. was five foot eleven – taller than most men. She stooped to compensate. Like Bryher, Natalie Barney, Gertrude Stein and most creative lesbians of the time, she felt she was not the daughter her parents wanted. In Pennsylvania her father was a distinguished astronomer and her three brothers and two half-brothers were academically successful. There was expectation of achievement in the Doolittle household but H.D. dropped out of Bryn Mawr without qualifications. ‘She was a disappointment to her father, an odd duckl
ing to her mother, an importunate overgrown unincarnated entity that had no place here’ was how she described herself in HERmione. When Ezra Pound asked Professor Doolittle’s permission to marry Hilda, he was dismissed as ‘nothing but a nomad’.

  In July 1911 H.D. travelled to London with Frances Gregg and Frances’s mother. They all met up with Pound. The Greggs returned home in the autumn but H.D. stayed on. She asked Pound if they were engaged. ‘Gawd forbid’ was his reply, but he helped her find a place in London’s literary world. Her poems were published in Harriet Weaver’s The Egoist along with work by Pound, T.S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, Richard Aldington and James Joyce. Harriet described H.D. as ‘tall, thin, pale, rather handsome, dreamy-eyed, pleasant mannered’. With the publication of Sea Garden, which so inspired Bryher, the novelist May Sinclair called H.D. ‘the best of the Imagists’. H.D. wove images from the coasts of Cornwall, and Maine in New England, into emotional moments in time.

  She met Richard Aldington at a party in London in 1911 when she was twenty and he was twenty-six. He thought her the finest of poets and had no problem with her love for Frances Gregg. They rented rooms together in a house in Kensington – 6 Church Walk. Ezra Pound was a neighbour. They all wanted to free poetry from past constraints, use only essential words, discard rules about rhyme. They wanted too to discard rules in their personal lives. H.D. said that ‘to deny love entrance is to crush and break beauty. Let love crush & break you but never break love by denial and conscience.’

  She believed the hurt she suffered ‘freed my song – this is most precious to me’.

  She and Aldington travelled together to Paris, Italy, Capri. Ezra Pound, jealous, wrote a poem, ‘The Faun’. It began:

  Ha! sir, I have seen you sniffing and snoozling

  about my flowers.

  And what, pray, do you know about

  horticulture, you capriped?

  In Venice, Aldington met H.D.’s parents, who did not approve of him any more than of Ezra Pound. Nonetheless, on 18 October 1913 Aldington and H.D. married at Kensington Registry Office in London with Professor Doolittle and Ezra Pound as witnesses. They rented a house in Hampstead, next door to D.H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda. The following August, war was declared. H.D. was pregnant. She became seriously ill in the last months of pregnancy and the baby was stillborn. ‘Why is it always the girl who dies’ was her lament – for her own mother had given birth to two stillborn baby girls. After the trauma, she no longer wanted sex with Aldington, although she wanted his love and support. She was unfazed or even encouraging of his affairs with other women, in particular his affair with Dorothy ‘Arabella’ Yorke.

  Aldington was conscripted in 1916. After he left, H.D. had auditory hallucinations and from outside of her head heard his voice calling her. D.H. and Frieda Lawrence were sympathetic to her mental fragility. ‘Hilda gets very low at times,’ Frieda wrote to Amy Lowell. ‘It isn’t good for her to be alone and Richard away, she feels it very much…’

  By 1918 H.D. was alone in temporary lodgings in Mecklenburgh Square in London’s King’s Cross. Through the Lawrences she met Cecil Gray, who had until then avoided conscription because of ‘a heart tic’. He told her he loved her. In his Cornwall cottage, he was working on a musical interpretation of Flaubert’s The Temptation of St Anthony. In March he pleaded with H.D. to join him. Lawrence was unhappy at her going. H.D. seemed unclear about what she was doing or with whom. Aldington wrote to her almost every day; he admitted they had grown apart, but was jealous of her being with Gray. Then in May he was sent with the British Expeditionary Force to the Western Front and the hell of front-line battle. He wrote to H.D. of ‘them bloody, bleedin’ fuckin’ trenches… I wish I wasn’t a soldier.’ He told her in a way he cared most terribly for her and in a way he cared for Arabella, ‘but there are too many dead men, too much misery… But you are silly to think that our love would ever be broken.’

  a devilish mess

  The First World War threw H.D.’s life into turmoil. She called it ‘the stillborn generation’. Her crises of identity and bouts of insanity were recurring and painful. She wrote: ‘I feel my work is beautiful. I have a deep faith in it, an absolute faith. But sometimes I have no faith in myself.’

  For Bryher, meeting H.D., whom she felt she knew through her work, was love before first sight. For herself, she was insulated from the war and from life. She described H.D. as ‘the most beautiful figure that I had ever seen with a face that came directly from a Greek statue, and the body of an athlete’. She did not know, when she went to tea on 17 July, that H.D. was pregnant with Cecil Gray’s child.

  Initially, the two women corresponded but did not often meet. Bryher returned to the confines of South Audley Street. She self-published a eulogistic essay, Amy Lowell: A Critical Appreciation. In gratitude, Amy Lowell arranged for Harriet Monroe, editor of the magazine Poetry, to publish three of Bryher’s poems, ‘Waste’, ‘Rejection’ and ‘Wakefulness’.

  Time magazine front cover featuring poet Amy Lowell © Archive PL / Alamy

  Two weeks after meeting Bryher, H.D. wrote to tell Aldington she was pregnant, that the father was Cecil Gray and conception had been in early July. The following month, Gray was conscripted. He did not know H.D. was pregnant with his child.

  ‘You seem to be in rather a devilish mess,’ Aldington wrote to H.D. on 3 August.

  I will accept this child as mine if you wish, or follow any other course which seems desirable to you. I enclose five pounds, I will send you as much of my pay as I can. Try & keep it by for doctors &c. You will need it.

  He added he hoped she was mistaken about this pregnancy and that he loved her but desired Arabella.

  The next day he felt differently:

  Damn it Dooley, I am fed up to have lost you. I was an idiot to let you go away with Grey… I never really thought you would have a child with him. And Dooley, I can’t ever really love this little one – there’s our own sweet dead baby I’ll never forget. I should always hate this one for being alive…I love you & I want you to be happy & have lovers & girl lovers if you want, but I don’t want to lose you as I should if this happened…

  H.D. was in a devilish mess. Neither or none of the men in her life was willing to be father to this child. When she finally told Gray of her pregnancy, he was silent. On leave, he did not visit her. Aldington shifted between anger and rejection. H.D. did not want an illegal abortion. She had no money and wondered about having the baby adopted.

  In September, her brother Gilbert, fighting with the American Expeditionary Force in north-eastern France, was killed by machine-gun fire in the Battle of Saint-Mihiel near the town of Thiaucourt. He was thirty-two. Their father, in Pennsylvania, had a massive heart attack when he heard the news.

  The backdrop for them all was the carnage of war, described by Virginia Woolf as ‘this preposterous masculine fiction’. Except it was preposterous fact.

  H.D. did not tell Bryher of her pregnancy until December 1918, five months after their first meeting and a month after the war’s end. Aldington, jubilant at having survived, picked up with Dorothy Yorke, and hardened himself against responsibility for his wife: ‘No more than Cain am I my brother’s keeper’, he wrote to H.D. ‘Get from Gray what you can; and call on me in any emergency. I shall not fail you.’

  Aldington met Bryher in London and thought her of a fine temperament but crushed by her parents and their immense wealth. ‘I don’t see how she can do anything until she gets away from her people,’ he said. Gray vanished from the scene. He was well off with inherited money from wealthy parents but after hearing of H.D.’s pregnancy he wanted nothing to do with her or the child he had fathered.

  H.D. was isolated and vulnerable. Her baby was due in March 1919. ‘Her nerves are very shaken, perhaps the child will soothe and settle her,’ D.H. Lawrence wrote to Amy Lowell. In the final weeks of her pregnancy H.D.’s father died, devastated by the death of his son Gilbert in France the previous September. H.D. became ill, mentally
and physically. She had visual and auditory hallucinations of a gigantic river god and a doctor with wings on his sleeves. She caught influenza, which led to pneumonia.

  Bryher to the rescue

  Bryher found her close to death in rented rooms in Ealing. She became her saviour, arranged medical and nursing care, booked her in to St Faith’s Nursing Home, financed everything needed for the birth, visited daily, brought ‘wonderful bunches of anemones’, promised support and spoke of taking her to Cornwall and the Scillies, to Greece, to America as soon as she was strong. Her commitment and management were unwavering. It was hard for H.D. to distrust her or to resist her.

  Frances Perdita Aldington was born at noon on 31 March 1919. She was given her first name after Frances Gregg but was known as Perdita. Bryher visited that day and most days thereafter, always bringing flowers, assurances of help and anything that was needed. H.D. wanted Richard Aldington named as the father on Perdita’s birth certificate. She wanted to avoid the stigma of illegitimacy and to conceal the ‘devilish mess’. Aldington threatened legal action if she did this. She named him as father anyway, without telling him.

  Aldington was conflicted about H.D. He asked her to return to him, but when she did, in London, he ordered her to leave. ‘Hilda must get out of here at once,’ he wrote to Bryher. The yo-yo of his devotion and hostility destabilized H.D., who talked of her psychic death.

  As for Gray, three years after Perdita’s birth the writer Brigit Patmore, who had introduced H.D. to Aldington, confronted him about his behaviour towards H.D. and his daughter. He said he had much on his conscience, that inaction was almost a madness with him and ‘You must think me the greatest cad on earth, but everything was so awful…’ Brigit Patmore told him H.D. would have died had it not been for Bryher. He ‘went green’ and claimed he would always look after Perdita, but his family had suffered financial loss and money was now scarce. Brigit Patmore did not believe him: ‘He seems divided between hatred & disgust with his own part in it & a consequent weak determination to shut it out completely, & a sort of equally weak desire to make it all right,’ she wrote to Bryher.