No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  ‘But how are you not free?’ She knew that would be the astonished answer. ‘What have you ever been forbidden to do?’

  ‘It’s the thousand things too unimportant to mention. But that make a barrier… Not cutting my hair short… I want to write. I have never been my real self to you. I have been silent about the things I care about. Because I knew you hated me to be rough and independent.

  She could not say this. Could not hurt people’s feelings. Things had gone on too long.

  But how to partner H.D. was also a problem for Bryher. Her commitment was total, she thought H.D. a genius, but finding a context was not going to be easy. To H.D., on some level other people were like trees blowing in the wind. And Bryher had her own bouts of confusion and temper loss. H.D. observed her distress but was not a person to protect or console. In later life, Bryher reflected that she did not understand her own motivation until she had undergone years of psychoanalysis with Hanns Sachs, a colleague of Freud’s.

  Bryher, H.D., Perdita and a nurse set off for America in late August 1920 on the SS Adriatic, the fastest ocean liner and the first to have an indoor swimming pool. Bryher was in search of a brave new world where she could be who she was, but there was a kind of unreality in their journeying – as if at heart they could never be a family or find a destination. There was little sense of parenting Perdita, of enjoying her personality or little ways. The plan was to meet with editors and publishers in New York, then visit H.D.’s mother in Orange city in California and leave Perdita with her until they found somewhere peaceful to settle in the Californian countryside, a house where they could live and work.

  They arrived in New York on 10 September 1920, H.D.’s thirty-fourth birthday. Amy Lowell and her partner, the actress Ada Dwyer Russell, met them, took them to the Belmont hotel and drove them around the city. H.D. met with friends and peers: Marianne Moore, the editors of the literary magazines – Harriet Monroe from Poetry, Margaret Anderson from The Little Review.

  Bryher’s book Development had been published earlier that year in New York. In it, she declared her gender disorientation:

  Her one regret was that she was a girl. Never having played with any boys she imagined them wonderful creatures, welded of her favourite heroes and her own fancy, ever seeking adventures, and of course, wiser than any grown-up people. She tried to forget, to escape any reference to being a girl, her knowledge of them being confined to one book read by accident, an impression they liked clothes and were afraid of getting dirty. She was sure if she hoped enough she would turn into a boy.

  Amy Lowell wrote a preface. The book received good reviews and sold well. Bryher’s father warned her not to draw attention to the Ellerman name and forbade her to make any revelations about him, his family life or business empire. He insisted that on return to England she should live again at South Audley Street.

  In New York, H.D. and Bryher assembled and published a collection of Marianne Moore’s poetry. They called the volume Poems and Bryher financed it. She also made Marianne Moore the first beneficiary from the Bryher Foundation Fund, which she later set up to help hard-up artists. Marianne Moore’s parents had separated before she was born and she lived with her mother, who called her ‘he’ and ‘Uncle Fangs’. They were devoted to each other and slept in the same bed.

  William Carlos Williams was a friend of H.D.’s from her college days in Philadelphia. She invited him to the hotel and he brought with him Robert McAlmon, a young impoverished writer. McAlmon was the eighth child of a Presbyterian minister in a small provincial mid-western town. His childhood was miserable; his father beat him and despised his homosexuality. He left home, enrolled at the University of Southern California, dropped out, made his way to Greenwich Village, mixed with writers and artists and lived hand to mouth. When Bryher met him, he was earning a dollar an hour as a life model at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

  Bryher thought him authentic. He told her he had ‘the energy of a yearling stallion… we can’t be too careful livers’, he said, ‘or we just won’t live at all.’ He admired her mind and spirit, had read a review of Development in The New Republic and said he too hated school, conformity and ‘timid stepping’. He was disappointed in the New York literary scene. He had written a novel, but knew it would not get past the censors. He longed to join the exodus of American writers, go to Paris, write freely, meet James Joyce, be open about his homosexuality. That was his dream, but he did not have the money for his fare.

  McAlmon thought H.D. the best of the Imagists, although he did not rate Imagism and thought it escapist. Bryher, he said, was better than any imagist. She told him of her yearning to be a boy. He said a boy’s life was difficult: beatings, no money, not enough to eat. As for himself, he aspired ‘to sing with my own voice and dance on my own legs and blaspheme and fight – express impulses rather than trying to squeeze them into writing’.

  He advised her to ‘see the lightness of wit and clarity of perception of your Greeks’. He intended to get on a freighter, head for Europe and test his luck. Such expressions of freedom resonated with Bryher. She told him not to leave until she got back to New York.

  disaffection

  Bryher corresponded with McAlmon while she travelled with H.D., H.D.’s widowed mother, Helen Wolle Doolittle, Perdita and the nurse to Los Angeles, Monrovia, Santa Barbara, Carmel. It quickly became clear to Bryher that America was not going to be the answer to the question of where to live and how, with her unorthodox identity and new-found family. She and they were rootless, and she was disaffected with all she saw. H.D., disappointed by Bryher’s aversion to America, felt discouraged and could not work. Her daughter had no home. But Bryher was also fearful of returning to London. ‘I did not want to live in England because I knew I shocked my family with my advanced ideas.’

  Bryher published ‘An Impression of America’ in The Sphere. She wrote that she had imagined Santa Barbara to be a quiet sunlit Californian town straggling down from the mountains to the sea, but what she found was a resort:

  it is everything I am trying to escape from – a civilisation without life, when I want America, the America that had the energy to lay the miles of railroad we came across, the America that planted the corn, the America that built New York.

  She worked on a roman à clef, West, about her disappointment:

  I thought America was going to be new, different. And it’s like Victorian England grafted on to the cheap end of Nice. Dust, formality and no end to spending money… Greece was cheap and you had Hymettus. New York was New York, arrogant and barbaric. But here you weighed out gold and silver for suburbia gone reckless, for the grind of wheels and an indefinable sense of restraint.

  My friends were all Americans. I wanted to know the country that they came from… I doubt if the books which brought me over could have been written if their authors had not escaped to Europe from the environment of their adolescence. There’s a passion of beauty in them. A whole new world created. I thought that they were writing of what was about them. They were getting away from it. It’s a great joke.

  America bewildered Bryher. She was shaped by Victorian England, its class structures and entitlements. Her acquired tastes, sensibilities and sense of history were English and European. She was at ease in Europe. Her disaffection with America equalled McAlmon’s. Like him, she wanted to get on a freighter, head for Europe and test her luck – albeit a freighter with first-class accommodation.

  if we married

  After six months, in February 1921, Bryher and her dependants were back in New York. They stayed at the Hotel Brevoort on Fifth Avenue. She met again with McAlmon and over tea there proposed to him:

  I put my problem before him and suggested that if we married, my family would leave me alone. I would give him part of my allowance, he would join me for occasional visits to my parents, but otherwise we would live strictly separate lives… we neither of us felt the slightest attraction towards each other but remained perfectly friendly
. We were divorced in 1927…

  This was a way out from her parents’ insistence that when she returned to England, she should live with them and not with H.D.

  I was desperately afraid of hurting their feelings. I knew equally well that after a period of comparative freedom, I could not adjust to a conventional routine. I admit that I was foolish but I took the course I did in good faith.

  McAlmon readily agreed. They married next day, Valentine’s Day, a Monday, at New York City Hall. H.D.’s view was that Bryher ‘knows what she wants and how much & how little she wants’. Bryher, under the terms of her father’s trust fund, would receive more money if married, but her prime motivation was to have an acceptable reason for leaving her parents’ home.

  On the afternoon of her marriage, Bryher went with H.D., but not McAlmon, to tea with Marianne Moore and her mother at 14 St Luke’s Place, Greenwich Village. The ostensible reason was to meet with Scofield Thayer, who owned The Dial, to talk about publishing H.D.’s latest poetry. Marianne Moore was shocked by the marriage. Her view was ‘marriage is a Crusade, there is always tragedy in it. There is no such thing as a prudent marriage.’ But she was appalled by this version; she felt McAlmon was taking advantage of Bryher. He later explained to her ‘it’s an unromantic arrangement between us’, but she wrote a satirical poem, ‘Marriage’, which was seen as a reproach to him. It might also have been a reproach to Scofield Thayer, who asked her to marry him even though he was already married to someone else. Marianne Moore viewed herself as both a confirmed bachelor and wedded to her mother. In Mrs Moore’s view, McAlmon had dishonoured Bryher and insulted the Ellermans and England. She referred to him as the ‘scoundrel bridegroom’.

  The press was equally confused. Winifred Ellerman did not show up in Burke’s Peerage. Sir John had not married until 1908, Bryher was born in 1894 and there was no advertised record of her birth, only that of her brother John, now eleven. The New York Times suggested the whole thing was a scam: ‘“Heiress” Writer Weds Village Poet’, it reported. ‘Greenwich Circles Stirred by the Romance of Robert Menzies McAlmon.’ ‘The girl’ was thought to have proposed to and ‘exploited’ him by claiming to be the daughter of Sir John Ellerman, to whom Burke’s Peerage credited only a son.

  The truth about what was going on was not surmised.

  the Ellermans’ son-in-law

  Bryher cabled her news to her parents. For a time her cables went unanswered. Eventually, Sir John asked them both to come over. They booked to sail on the Ellerman White Star liner SS Celtic from Pier 43 on Sunday 20 February. ‘We are in a terrible confusion of packing & unpacking and repacking,’ H.D. wrote.

  On the Thursday before the newlyweds left, a celebratory dinner was held in a private room at the Brevoort. Among the guests were Robert McAlmon’s sister Grace, Marianne Moore and her mother, Scofield Thayer, and Florence and William Carlos Williams, who gave Bryher and McAlmon a box of orchids. On the voyage back to England everyone had the sulks, H.D. said. McAlmon was ‘very good’ with Perdita. He had no clear idea of the extent of the Ellerman fortune or what his role as a husband would be.

  In London, the married couple moved in to South Audley Street, H.D. was installed in an apartment nearby in a regal part of town, St James’ Court, Buckingham Gate, and Perdita was delivered back to the Norland Nursery but brought out to join her revisionist family on her second birthday. H.D. wrote to Amy Lowell that when the Ellermans recovered from the shock, they

  were very, very pleased with ‘Dolly’s’ choice and rather overdid things. They forced upon the couple a whirl of parties and a cascade of gifts and other unimaginable bridal atrocities.

  No need for them to know that McAlmon was homosexual, penniless, posed nude as an artists’ model, was overfond of drink and had not a hint of desire for their daughter, who had set up the whole charade. He was a man. She was a woman. He was her husband and their son-in-law. Their daughter was married. She was Mrs McAlmon. She had a good friend who was a poet. The whole set-up could be explained away in more or less socially acceptable terms. No need to have conversations about same-sex love, the role of women, gender dysphoria or primogeniture. No need to upset the apple cart or to tell the truth.

  Bryher pretended, up to a point, to be the daughter her parents insisted she was. They would not, in their house, allow her to be anything else. In the front drawing room, on a gold easel, behind a stand of cut flowers, was a life-size portrait of ‘Dolly’ in a lady’s chair, wearing white tulle with a blue sash to match her blue eyes. It was by Sir Luke Fildes, who had painted King Edward VII in his coronation robes. Lady Ellerman claimed that the sash was sent back twice to Paris to be redyed before it matched exactly the true blue of her daughter’s blue blue eyes.

  McAlmon felt trapped. He would get through dinner, smoke an after-dinner cigar with Sir John in the library, then, in collusion with Payton the butler, sneak out to the clubs. He tried to make literary connections but found London culture respectable and prim. Sir John offered to find him an editorial post on one of his journals: Tatler, The Sketch, The Sphere. McAlmon had different publishing plans in mind. He had tea with T.S. Eliot and met Wyndham Lewis but failed to persuade Sir John to buy Lewis’s paintings. He was appalled at the repression of Bryher’s brother, who had to wear a bowler hat when he went out, had been sent away to Malvern College, which he hated, and who had no friends. Of Sir John Ellerman, McAlmon wrote in his memoir:

  moneymakers on the grand scale are monomaniacs and fanatics and self-willed. As regards finance Sir John had that thing which need not be looked upon with awe, genius, but in many other respects he was a perfect case of arrested development.

  Pretence of togetherness by the newlyweds at South Audley Street was a dinnertime affair. London was a stopgap. Bryher and McAlmon were both writing novels. H.D. worked on an autobiographical prose-poem, ‘Paint it Today’, and a book of poems, Heliodora. She wrote to Marianne Moore that Bryher was ‘wonderful, so good, intense & radiant, a baby Maecenas I call her’. Maecenas was an ancient Roman patron of poets, including of Horace and Virgil. McAlmon was impatient to head for Paris and to get away from them all. Bryher intended to make a base for herself and H.D. in Switzerland as soon as she could convincingly do so.

  writers on the move

  By the summer of 1921, McAlmon was in Paris and Bryher and H.D. were at the Riant Chateau in Territet in Montreux, Switzerland. This became their base until 1930. Switzerland was a tax haven for Bryher’s inheritance. Their apartment looked out over Lake Geneva, the Alps towered behind them, the climate was agreeable. Perdita was brought out for visits and holidays by a Mrs Dixie from the Norland Nursery. Towards the end of the year, H.D.’s mother joined them. She stayed as part of the family for four years and travelled with Bryher and H.D. to Italy, Greece and Constantinople. On Perdita’s visits, she looked after her. When in London without Bryher, H.D. stayed at the Hotel Washington in Curzon Street.

  Bryher and H.D. were writers on the move. While Bryher travelled with H.D., her parents thought she was with McAlmon in Paris. Sylvia Beach acted as go-between, posted on Bryher’s letters to Lady Ellerman so they would have the Paris postmark and forwarded mail to Bryher from her parents. ‘It may have been wrong but it saved my parents from a lot of anxiety and I cannot think it did any harm,’ Bryher said.

  She and H.D. travelled by train through Egypt. They survived sandstorms, visited the tomb of Tutankhamun, stayed at Luxor, cruised up the Nile, visited the Temple of Edfu, walked in the gardens of the Winter Palace Hotel, visited mosques and Coptic churches and bought fly whisks and turquoise cats and giant scarabs from bazaars, drove in a sand cart to the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, admired Karnak by moonlight… On Capri they stayed at the Hotel Quisisana with Nancy Cunard and Norman Douglas, who was ‘wildly, gloriously drunk’.

  Paris and Contact Editions

  In Paris, with Bryher’s money and editorial input, McAlmon set up Contact Editions. He ran the enterprise from his room at the Foyot hotel in
rue de Tournon; its restaurant was considered one of the best in the city. Contact’s publishing legend ran:

  Contact Editions are not concerned with what the ‘public’ wants. There are commercial publishers who know the public and its tastes. If books seem to us to have something of individuality, intelligence, talent, a live sense of literature, and a quality which has the odour and timbre of authenticity we publish them. We admit that eccentricities exist.

  We will bring out books by various writers who seem not likely to be published by other publishers for commercial or legislative reasons.

  That was an invitation to a host of expatriate writers at odds with the censors and mainstream thought. Between 1922 and 1930, Contact published, often for the first time, the work of Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, H.D., Gertrude Beasley, Mary Butts, Mina Loy, as well as Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Ford Madox Ford, Nathanael West, and of course McAlmon himself. All were paid with Bryher’s money. Bryher’s Two Selves, which included the account of her meeting with H.D., was published by Contact in 1923.

  With McAlmon as commissioning editor, Contact published Hemingway’s first work, Three Stories and Ten Poems, and took on the mammoth task of publishing Gertrude Stein’s 500,000-word The Making of Americans. He also published his own short stories, set in the American Midwest, his Grim Fairy Tales, about the homosexual subculture of Berlin, and his novel Village, a fictionalized account of the South Dakota town where he grew up and found his first love – Gene Vidal, the novelist Gore Vidal’s father, all of which mainstream publishers rejected as obscene. Seventy years later, in 1995, in a memoir, Palimpsest, Gore Vidal wrote of McAlmon’s book: ‘It is curious – to say the least – to encounter one’s father as a boy of fifteen as seen through the eyes of a boy of fourteen who is in love with him.’ H.D. used the same title – Palimpsest – in 1926 for three connected short stories, published first by Contact, then by Houghton Mifflin in New York.