No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  This oddball family had its tensions. Macpherson disparaged his wife to H.D. He warned her not to:

  get caught up into the Bryher blunderbuss manner… I don’t want you to feel lost, harassed, browbeaten, separated from us, from yourself from Bryher…. Don’t be vulnerable… because she has a fort, has to have a fort, in some ways BE a fort, so must you be armed and able to fall back on simple strength reserved for protection.

  Whether or not Bryher’s manner was blunderbuss, her patronage and imagination allowed them all to take a new creative direction, another break from Victorian norms and certainties, a new way of communicating.

  POOL productions

  The year 1927 was a transforming one for Bryher. At Territet, with Macpherson, she changed direction. Both thought film the new medium of communication. With her money and his technological expertise they started POOL Productions, a film company. Bryher explained the name, which was based on the analogy of a stone being dropped into a pool:

  as the stone will cause a spread of ripples to the water’s edge, so ideas once started will go to their unknown boundary… these concentric expansions are exemplified in POOL which is the source simply – the stone – the idea… The expanding ripples from a stone dropped in a pool have become more a symbol for the growth of an idea than a simple matter of hydraulics.

  With POOL Productions, Bryher’s focus turned from literary innovation in Paris to Berlin and Russia, the psychoanalytical writings of Freud, and the new realism of films about social conditions. Berlin was the film capital of Europe. Bryher was the only member of the group to speak much German. She said she ‘saw a dozen of these films in small projection rooms without music at nine o’clock in the morning and they were art and they were truth’.

  In Berlin, she and Macpherson met in the Hotel Adlon with the Austrian film-maker G.W. Pabst, who was at the forefront of the German movement for ‘new realism’ in film. Macpherson wrote to H.D. about this meeting and of looking at photos ‘one of Pabst himself, young, very very very very Lesbian, and he is Deeeeellllllighted to mit you’.

  Bryher was affected by Pabst’s film Joyless Street, about inflation in Vienna and poverty in the middle class. She saw the film as an indictment of the treatment of women and of the soulless Weimar era. It starred Greta Garbo before Hollywood consumed her. H.D. called the film her ‘never to be forgotten premiere to the whole art of the screen’.

  Switzerland, set in the heart of Europe, was the perfect place for POOL’s headquarters. Bryher rented a studio near Lausanne, spent $4,000 on the best cameras, Klieg carbon-arc close lamps, a projector and other equipment. She was the producer, Macpherson the director and they, H.D. and friends scripted, acted in and improvised the films they made. The company became a vehicle to explore afresh in another medium the modernist ideas and lifestyle that guided them all.

  In February they made the first of their films, Wing Beat, inspired, Bryher said, by the play of light on Lake Geneva. The wild dancing figure of H.D. elided with shifting light, the flight of a bird and the movement of water. Their advertisement for it read:

  Free verse poem. Telepathy and attraction, the reaching out, the very edge of dimensions, the chemistry of actual attraction, of will, shivering and quavering on a frail, too high, too inaccessible brink.

  They aspired to change the direction of British film, to make film magical. Macpherson was ‘scornful of the obvious lighting in most American films’. Bryher said he achieved wonderful effects with shadow and half-lights. Pabst, impressed with Wing Beat, said H.D.’s performance ‘showed up the utter futility of the Hollywood tradition and that beauty was something quite different’.

  Bryher delighted in ‘the glory of escape through another medium’. She loved the innovations of technology. She acquired a car, a Buick ‘with special hill-climbing devices’. Flying exhilarated her and in May 1927, when in Venice with Macpherson, she saw a return flight to Vienna advertised. She booked them on it and took with her a letter of introduction to Freud from Havelock Ellis. There were six other passengers on the plane and they flew into a storm. They had two days in Vienna and she sent her letter round by messenger to Freud’s house at Berggasse 19:

  We were invited to call the next afternoon… We were taken into the famous room with the statuettes and the chow. The dog approved of Kenneth, another element in our favour. Freud sat behind his desk, I recognised him from the photographs but what they and reports about him had lacked was his gaiety. He asked us 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.

  Close Up

  Bryher also rented an office space near the film studio in Lausanne. There, she, Macpherson and H.D. started a subscription magazine, Close Up, ‘to meet the need of those interested in the artistic and educational development of the cinema’. It ran from July 1927 to December 1933, at first monthly, then quarterly, with 500 copies for each printing. It was the first journal in English devoted exclusively to film and that treated film as an art form. Subscriptions were through booksellers or direct from a London office in the Charing Cross Road.

  Its international focus gave Sergei Eisenstein and other Soviet and eastern film-makers a voice in the west and it became a forum for discussion of film technique. Its originality was on a par with the innovative literary magazines. There were articles on the educational use of film and on technical innovation, there were reviews of films and of books dealing with cinema. Forty or fifty photographs were included in each issue. ‘We do not issue “gossip articles”’, subscribers were told.

  The first issue sold out in a month and was enthusiastically reviewed. Close Up reflected the excitement of new ways of seeing, and of how film as a medium could be used. Bryher and Macpherson encouraged experimental cinema. The intention was for each issue to deal with a different theme: ‘the Negro attitude and problem’, ‘the Far East and its relation to cinema’.

  Topics ranged wide: the hazards of film-making, social injustice, gender, problems of light and sound, the insularity of England, repressive methods of education, the nascent art or science of psychoanalysis. Macpherson hoped for public showings of experimental films in Paris and London and that ‘people making films and experimenting in all sorts of ways shall be able to see what others are doing in the same way’.

  Friends contributed. H.D., in the first issue, had an article on ‘Cinema and the Classics’ and a poem, ‘Projector’, in which she praised the art of cinema as a ‘redemptive light’ and criticized the overuse of spectacle. Over the magazine’s six-year life span, she wrote eleven reviews.

  Bryher wrote about Joyless Street, and how Pabst, through the interlocking lives of the inhabitants of a single street, reflected the economic depression and brutality of Vienna after the First World War. She told of how he made the film in thirty-four days, how on one occasion the crew worked for thirty-six hours without anyone leaving the set, how in Germany censors tried to ban it, and Pabst could not get Greta Garbo work in Europe after it, so she went reluctantly to Hollywood.

  Sergei Eisenstein, in a piece called ‘A Statement on Sound’, warned of ‘the silent thing that has learned to talk’ and how sound, as a new montage element working with visual images, might destroy the purity of those images.

  Upton Sinclair wrote of the film Thunder Over Mexico, based on Eisenstein’s ¡Que Viva México!. Eisenstein had shot 285,000 feet of film in Mexico and this was shipped to Hollywood, but he was then banished from the United States so could not edit the film himself and no film studio would take it on. Sinclair was said to have massacred Eisenstein’s work by using only 2 per cent of his footage.

  Nancy Cunard, who was in a relationship with H
enry Crowder, the African-American jazz musician, wrote about the Scottsboro Trial of nine black boys, the youngest thirteen, falsely accused in Alabama of gang-raping two white American women on a train in 1931. Through her Hours Press, which she set up in her Normandy farmhouse, she presented a petition to the Governor, demanding their ‘unconditional and immediate release’.

  Hanns Sachs wrote of how witch hunts had evolved to demonize women who failed to be docile and subservient housewives.

  Marianne Moore wrote enthusiastically about a twenty-seven-minute film, Lot in Sodom, which premiered at the Little Carnegie Theatre in New York on Christmas Day 1933:

  a chill passed over me as the blood wandered down the torso of the prostrate body, and I thought the use of slow motion and distortion, the Blake designs in the fire, and the Pascin, Giotto and El Greco effects, wonderful.

  Though familiar names contributed, Bryher was emphatic that her new venture should not be linked in any way with Contact Editions or Robert McAlmon. She turned down a contribution from William Carlos Williams because he remained a friend of McAlmon’s and had worked with him.

  Graham Greene, as a cinema reviewer in the 1920s, read Close Up with much enthusiasm. He saw in film a new art, with images as formal in design as in painting, but where this design moved. He too initially thought the introduction of sound a reduction, a dilution. Film, when he came to write novels, influenced his imagination and perception.

  Bryher invited Dorothy Richardson to contribute. She thought her name, as an experimental writer, would indicate to Close Up’s readership the kind of artistic endeavour the magazine wanted to promote. Dorothy Richardson, at first reluctant, suggested other writers who might know more about film but then capitulated and wrote a piece on how sound spoiled movies.

  Gertrude Stein wrote a ‘phylo-scenic aria’ rather akin to the poem she wrote to promote interest in Sylvia Beach’s bookshop.

  Foothills and Berlin

  In 1928, POOL Productions made their second film, Foothills. Bryher, H.D. and Kenneth acted in it. H.D. described, or half-described, the plot as:

  a dame from the city [Jess played by H.D.] comes to the country village for rest… There are all the complications of village life and gossip and a sort of idealistic encounter with the young intelligent lout [Jean played by Kenneth] in Vaudois farm clothes.

  More formally, Kenneth Macpherson said of the film and himself:

  This is a four-reel film experimentally made in a small studio arranged and equipped by the author of the scenario, who also directed, part-photographed and part-played in the production. Unlike most of the One-Man films made to date, it does not attempt abstractions, freak effects or incoherency, but is a simple story simply told of life in a small Swiss village.

  The locations are genuine beauty spots of Switzerland, none of the artistes are professionals, one of the roles is actually played by a Swiss peasant. The season is Spring when the hills are covered knee-high with wild flowers and the trees are all in blossom against snow capped mountains.

  They all had fun. Making an experimental film seemed as free and spontaneous as children at play.

  There were problems over taxes and distribution in English-speaking countries so Bryher and Macpherson showed Foothills in Berlin. Pabst liked it. Through her friendship with Pabst, Bryher met Jewish artists and intellectuals imperilled by anti-Semitism and the rise of fascism. Pabst introduced her to Lotte Reiniger, the pioneer in animated film. Bryher wrote to H.D. that Reiniger made her films herself, in a room the size of their dining room at Territet, with a piece of glass, a movie camera ‘and an electric apparatus’. Bryher gave her money to finance her work and together they explored Berlin.

  Hanns Sachs and analysis

  Also through Pabst, Bryher met the psychoanalyst Hanns Sachs. He was adviser for Pabst’s 1926 silent film Secrets of a Soul, subtitled ‘A psychoanalytic film’. It explored the cause of neurosis and the psychopathology of jealousy and guilt. Its explanatory legend ran:

  Inside every person there are desires and passions which remain unknown to ‘consciousness’. In the dark hours of psychological conflict, these ‘unconscious’ drives attempt to assert themselves. Mysterious illnesses arise from such struggles, the resolution and cure of which form the field of psychoanalysis.

  Freud was asked to contribute but would not:

  I do not believe in the possibility of anything good and useful coming of the project and therefore for the time being cannot give my authorization… I do not deny that I should prefer my name not to come into it at all.

  Bryher began analysis with Hanns Sachs. Mainly she saw him in Berlin but during the summer they met in Switzerland. Her daily hour-long sessions with him first thing in the morning took place from 1928 to 1932. He lived in a small apartment at 7 Mommsenstrasse near the Kurfürstendamm – the most famous avenue in Berlin. His English was fluent. He charged his foreign analysands twenty marks, his German ones ten. ‘Analysis must have no morals only mirrors’, he told Bryher. She saw her analysis as liberation, a discovery of self, the uncovering of the repressions of her formative years:

  The object of my search since I had been a child was absolute truth. Not to be believed was what I found hardest to bear. I could not have burst through the barriers that were holding me up without help. We tried to dig down to the bones of the past and to excavate memories in the process.

  private ripples

  A spread of ripples from stones in pools happened not just with POOL Productions but in the private lives of Bryher’s family too. Macpherson and H.D. had begun their affair in 1926, Bryher divorced McAlmon in 1927 and married Macpherson and adopted Perdita in the same year. They worked together on films and the magazine, but family connections were tenuous. Perdita had no choice about Bryher and Kenneth Macpherson becoming her adoptive parents; she stayed at different apartments, was sent to various schools, taken on trips to different countries. Bryher was conscientious and generous with money, but no one seemed to bother to find out who Perdita was.

  Monkeys’ Moon and an abortion

  In 1929, POOL Productions made the third of their short experimental films, Monkeys’ Moon. It lasted six minutes. Macpherson shot it in the grounds of Territet. H.D. and Bryher acted in it and it featured two of their pet monkeys, Lady and Tsme, a beetle, a watering can, the moon, a trombone, Bryher’s feet, stones and flower pots. The idea was to use dramatic lighting, montage and double or triple exposure to evoke psychological states, impressions, inner experience and tension. The moon cut through the sky, the monkeys were agitated, the beetle was on its back, water dripped from the can, there were shadows, feet walking… The intention was for film to interact with poetry and painting.7

  Also in 1929, POOL published Film Problems of Soviet Russia by Bryher. Macpherson chose the illustrations. In it, Bryher condemned censorship, political intervention in the arts, and militarism. Of Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin, she wrote: ‘Personally, as long as there is an army I should use Potemkin as an educational and propaganda film at Sandhurst and at Woolwich.’8

  With Kenneth Macpherson and the writer and poet Robert Herring, she went to Iceland to shoot film for a new project, Borderline, but her consuming interest was psychoanalysis. Berlin was the city where, through extensive psychoanalysis, she delved into the wellspring of her personality. Homosexuality was visible in the cabarets and culture, in Pabst’s film Pandora’s Box and William Dieterle’s Sex in Chains. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexology defended homosexual rights. Bryher became a patron of the International Psychoanalytical Press, gave money to the cause and trained to become an analyst. She might have been one of the first lesbian psychoanalysts had the war not brought such plans to an end.

  H.D. had no particular enthusiasm for film or Berlin. In London that year she published new poems in Imagist Anthology but she felt blocked in her work. She became absorbed in astrology and tarot card readings, which did not help her mental health. From Territet she wrote to tell Macph
erson she had cut her hair even shorter – ‘I think it is so much more comfortable and nice’ – and that she was pregnant with his child. He panicked, told her she must come to Berlin, and that Hanns Sachs would arrange an abortion:

  Brave, handsome, beautiful, sad, noble, furry dignified kitten, hurry up and come and have that star or starfish or star maiden or whatever it is removed. Just get on that train and tell itself its troubles are almost over and tell itself it myst bye a NAICE woman from now on.

  Macpherson’s alarm was total. ‘No more “Normal” for Rover’, he said of himself. He needed little prompting to give up normal with H.D. or any woman. His preferred company and sex life was with homosexual men. He referred to H.D. ‘throwing three schizophrenic phits per day when asked to go anywhere but always going’. Nor was he convinced the child was his. H.D. had been ‘seeing’ other men when in London. Abortion was illegal in Germany, as in England and America. H.D. went to Berlin; Sachs found a doctor, who ended the pregnancy.

  Borderline

  In 1930, POOL Productions made Borderline, their only full-length feature film. Pabst called it ‘the only real avant-garde film’. Macpherson was director. Paul Robeson starred in it. It focused on race, class, sexuality and gender and was set in an unspecified border town in some mid-European mountain area. The characters were people ‘not out of life, not in life’, H.D. said. Her borderline was between creativity and madness. The symbolism of her poetry was given parallel expression in filmed images: a stuffed bird, a witch-like doll, a rose.

  Front cover of Borderline magazine © TCD / Prod. DB / Alamy

  Paul Robeson was an activist for black civil rights as well as an actor and singer. In the late 1920s and early 30s, black, Jewish and homosexual identities were all targeted by fascist power. In mainstream entertainment, white actors ‘blacked up’ to avoid giving acting roles to people of colour. If black actors were included, they reinforced the idea of white superiority. They were servants, slaves, doormen, villains. In Showboat, Paul Robeson was the simple-minded ‘darky’. Skin pigmentation was used to reflect gradations of moral worth. The blacker the skin, the worse the character; the whiter and blonder, the purer. This prejudice snaked through society, language and popular culture.