No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  Artists who wanted a better world tried to address issues of race. H.D., in February 1927, said she had been ‘reading a good deal on the “darky” problem lately’. In August 1929, Close Up ran an issue on black cinema. Robert Herring argued for a pure Afro-American cinema: ‘Not black films passing for white and not please white passing for black.’

  Janet Flanner, Genêt of The New Yorker, in her ‘Letter from Paris’ in 1925, wrote of Afro-American jazz in Paris and Josephine Baker’s star performance, aged nineteen, in La Revue Nègre at the Théâtre des Champs Élysées. Sidney Bechet played the clarinet. Josephine Baker:

  made her entry entirely nude except for a pink flamingo feather between her limbs; she was being carried upside down and doing the split on the shoulder of a black giant. Mid stage he paused, and with his long fingers holding her basket-wise around the waist, swung her in a slow cartwheel to the stage floor, where she stood, like his magnificent discarded burden, in an instant of complete silence… A scream of salutation spread through the theatre. Whatever happened next was unimportant. The two specific elements had been established and were unforgettable: her magnificent dark body, a new model that to the French proved for the first time that black was beautiful, and the acute response of the white masculine public in the capital of hedonism of all Europe – Paris.

  This was a breakthrough. Black was beautiful, naked and free. Paris was at the vanguard of liberation. Josephine Baker, born in the slums of St Louis, Missouri, to a single mother, worked her way from dresser to chorus girl in an all-black show, The Chocolate Dandies. In Broadway auditions, she was rejected for being ‘too black’. In Paris, by 1935 she was singing Offenbach’s La Créole at the Marigny, a role created in 1875 for Anna Judic, who ‘blacked up’ with liquorice for the part.

  Gender and colour were at the heart of modernist revision. Barbette starred with a trapeze act at the Cirque Médrano in Paris; his given name was Vander Clyde but ‘he was only himself when dressed as a woman’. He performed to the music of Scheherazade wearing diaphanous white skirts and white ostrich plumes. The audience gasped when he removed his wig and revealed himself to be a man.

  In Borderline, Bryher wanted Macpherson to explore conscious and unconscious mental processes in relation to colour. She wanted visual expression of Freud’s ideas. Macpherson used light and shadow to focus in close-up on tense expression, the veins in hands, the sweat on a brow.

  Paul Robeson was on his way to Berlin to perform in a stage version of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones. He was travelling with his wife, Eslanda, who was also his manager and herself an actor and activist. She acted in Borderline too. Robert Herring, who was homosexual both in and out of Borderline, brought the Robesons into the film. He played the part of the pianist. A friend of his, Gavin Arthur, also homosexual and a grandson of the twenty-first American president, Chester A. Arthur, was the violent husband. Kenneth Macpherson’s father was the film’s lighting manager.

  For the Robesons, the whole thing was a lark and a diversion ‘time out from the hectic pace of touring’. Filming took nine days, they stayed for ten. Macpherson’s fascination with Robeson’s body was plain in the shooting. H.D. wrote of her sexual feelings towards Robeson in various poems like ‘Red Roses for Bronze’, where Robeson was the bronze god.

  The film’s plot was secondary to its social purpose and experimental themes: Pete (Robeson) works in a cheap café in this border town. The café’s gay pianist (Herring) lusts after him. The café manager (Bryher) lusts after the barmaid. Pete’s estranged wife, Adah (Eslanda), is in the same town, though neither is aware of the presence of the other. Adah is staying in rooms with a married couple, Thorne (Gavin Arthur) and Astrid (H.D.). Thorne and Adah become lovers. In a quarrel, Thorne stabs Astrid, his wife. Adah is blamed and Thorne acquitted. The mayor, acting for the townsfolk, orders Pete out of town – he goes, a scapegoat for the crimes and neuroses of the whites.

  Robeson was depicted as the hero, not the victim. Racist words rebounded on who spoke them: ‘Nigger lover.’ ‘You brought him here.’ ‘If I had my way not one negro would be allowed in the country.’ Robeson was accorded the beauty of the femme fatale. Blackness was co-opted. Pete had no character beyond his beauty. Eslanda Robeson wrote in her diary that she and Paul ‘ruined our make up with tears of laughter’ over Macpherson and H.D.’s ‘naive ideas of negroes’. ‘We never once felt we were colored with them.’

  No one was paid and the total cost to Bryher of making the film was $2,000. In location shots in the village of Lutry, crowds followed the crew. H.D. said of the finished film: ‘It is without question a work of art.’ She thought it posed existential questions and was dramatically thrilling:

  When is an African not an African? When obviously he is an earth-god. When is a woman not a woman? When obviously she is sleet and hail and a stuffed sea-gull. When is white not white and when is black white and when is white black? You may or may not like this sort of cinematography.

  Pabst declared himself ‘very enthusiastic’ about it. Eslanda said, ‘It’s a dreadful highbrow but beautifully done.’ In October 1930 it was screened at the Academy cinema in London; the previous year, the Robesons had been refused service at the Savoy Grill. Interest in it came from many countries, including Japan. Borderline called for the right to be other, be that lesbian, queer, black, white.

  The encroaching Nazi presence haunted the film. Close Up and POOL Productions came to an end with Hitler’s rise to power.

  Kenwin

  Bryher’s next modernist project was the building in 1930 of a Bauhaus villa in the foothills above Lake Geneva at Burier-La-Tour near Montreux.

  It was the time of the Bauhaus… I loved the new functional furniture, the horizontal windows and the abolition of what I thought of as messy decoration.

  The aesthetic of the Bauhaus School, founded by Walter Gropius, was space, light and holistic living, a unity of life and art. Berlin was the birthplace of the Bauhaus movement. Kenneth Macpherson worked on the project with Bryher. They named the building Kenwin, a naff merging of syllables of his first name and hers. It was the only modern house in the area. Bryher’s father encouraged the investment.

  Bryher intended Kenwin to be a place of work and creativity for all who lived there. The villa’s first architect was the Hungarian film set designer and architect Alexander Ferenczy, a pupil of Adolf Loos, whose minimalist views were reflected in the works of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and other modernists. Ferenczy had designed sets for the film producers Alexander Korda and Friedrich Zelnik. His design for Kenwin reflected his cinematographic interest and awareness of the uses of light. There was a film studio and a library on the ground floor, there were bedrooms above facing the mountains and lake, there were decks and balconies.

  Bryher moved in in September 1931. She gave the full address as Villa Kenwin, Chemin de Vallon, 1814 Burier-La-Tour, Vaud, Switzerland. There was creative space for them all. She added to her menagerie: more monkeys (Sister, Bill and Gibb), two tiger cubs, dogs and cats. But her dream of the place as a centre of creativity was never realized. Kenwin became her home, not Kenneth’s or H.D.’s. They visited, but no more films were made. Close Up came to an end. Macpherson and H.D. took separate paths.

  Villa Kenwin © Wikimedia Commons

  no more normal

  Macpherson kept easily to ‘No more Normal’. The writer Norman Douglas, who drank, became his permanent companion. They travelled to Tunisia and Capri, frequented the bars, picked up young men. Macpherson made no more films. H.D., after the abortion and Macpherson’s rebuttal, lost direction in her work and came close to breakdown.

  Freud

  In the summer of 1932, Bryher went to Berlin for the last of her sessions with Sachs. One afternoon they were threatened in the street by gangs of brown-shirted youths. Sachs told Bryher he was leaving for Boston. She had arranged funds, to be managed by Freud’s son Martin, to help analysts threatened by anti-Semitism and the collapse of the Viennese economy
. She urged Sachs, before he left, to write to Freud in Vienna to ask him to take on H.D. as an analysand. Havelock Ellis also recommended H.D. to Freud at Bryher’s request.

  So Freud wrote to Bryher about analysis for her ‘cousin’, the poet. He suggested a fee of $15 an hour for daily sessions for three months, the account to be settled at the end of each month.9 He wanted to read H.D.’s poetry so as to better understand her. He hoped she would not be living alone in Vienna, because the nature of his analysis precluded her from socializing with his family.

  Bryher and Kenneth Macpherson saw H.D. off for Vienna in February 1933. She stayed at the Hotel Regina, built as a palace in 1877 at the Ringstrasse, and walked to Freud’s home at 19 Berggasse for her daily five o’clock sessions. These began on 1 March 1933, a month after Hitler became Chancellor in Germany. She hoped Freud would help her start writing again. She had lost direction and only by writing did she feel she could cope with her dread of mental breakdown and fear of the impending war.

  H.D. was forty-six, Freud seventy-seven and frail after operations for throat cancer. Unmodernist in his tastes, he collected antiques and his practice room was filled, H.D. said, with the ‘stares’ of animal-shaped gods and idols. She thought it like an opium dive. She resisted lying on the couch, but ‘he said he would prefer me to recline’. All day, from breakfast until he went to sleep, he smoked. His usual quantity was twenty cigars a day – Trabucos, which were the tobacco monopoly of the Austrian government. Often on Sundays he went to art museums and archaeological collections.

  For H.D., familial transference to Freud worked fast. She referred to him as Papa, as the oracle of Vienna, a mother-bull ‘filled with potent love’ and as ‘Jesus Christ after the resurrection’. On his birthday, his study was filled with flowers from friends. H.D. had wanted to buy him a statue of a goddess to go with his collection of antiques, but could not find anything suitable.

  During their sessions, Yofi, his chow dog, whom he called his Protector, slept by H.D.’s couch and snored. When Yofi got into a fight with another of his dogs, Freud lay on the floor between them, coins falling out of his pockets. He gave Bryher two of Yofi’s puppies – to Bryher’s dismay.

  H.D. told Freud about Havelock Ellis’s urolagnia habits, about which he ‘bust his cat-whiskers with joy’. She also told him Ellis’s wife was lesbian, which he did not already know. Freud seemed smitten with H.D. According to Bryher, he said of H.D. ‘that seldom if ever had he come into contact with a mind so fine, a spirit so pure’ as hers. He hoped she would have analysis ‘of months of weeks of even years if she so desired and she would have preference over all others’.

  In one session Freud talked half the time, in another he beat his hand on the pillow of his famous analysands’ couch where H.D. lay and said: ‘I am an old man, you do not think it worth your while to love me.’ He asked her to stand beside him to see who was taller: she was, though she had hoped he would be, so that she could feel herself to be a child. H.D. felt special because of Freud’s interest in her. To Bryher she wrote that ‘anyone who gets within ten miles of Freud is a sort of minor god-in-the-machine’, and she told Havelock Ellis that Freud ‘cannot take on people who have nothing to offer in return any more’.

  After the sessions, H.D. wrote Tribute to Freud. She called him ‘a discoverer of new life’. According to him, H.D. was ‘the perfect example of the bisexual’. He explained her bisexuality, she told Bryher, in terms of parental loss:

  usually a child decides for or against one or another parent, or identifies himself with one. But to me, it was simply the loss of both parents, and a sort of perfect bisexual attitude arises, loss and independence. I have tried to be man, or woman, but I have to be both. But it will work out, papa says and I said, now in writing.

  At the root of H.D.’s lesbian loves, Freud surmised, was her search for union with her mother, or a mother. To Bryher, H.D. boasted of the size of her ‘mother-fix’:

  F says mine is absolutely FIRST layer, I got stuck at the earliest pre-OE stage and ‘back to the womb’ seems to be my only solution. Hence islands, sea, Greek primitives and so on. It’s all too wonder-making.

  Freud told her he did not like being the mother in transference: ‘I feel so very, very very MASCULINE.’ Nor did he have time for her horoscopy and what he called her ‘star fish stuff’. She characterized his dismissal of what he viewed as superstition and pseudoscience as a racial trait:

  These Jews, I think, hold that any dealings with ‘lore’ and that sort of craft is wrong. I think so too, when it IS WRONG!!!! But it isn’t always. And I want to write my vol. to prove it.

  To Bryher, H.D. voiced gratitude for making psychotherapy with Freud possible – and for much else too:

  You evidently in some way are food, help, support, mother, though of course it mixes over into father too.

  And it was true. Whenever Bryher could make life better for the people in her orbit, she did so – and for the wider world. She expected little in return and did not count the cost.

  J’accuse!

  Freud’s work was publicly burned by the National Socialists in Berlin in May 1933. Bryher offered to pay for the Freud family to move from Vienna. She sent him emergency funds, in case he needed to escape, and a copy of J’accuse!, published by the World Alliance for Combating Anti-Semitism. It exposed Nazi atrocities and included the letter written by Émile Zola in 1898 to the President of France about the unlawful jailing of Alfred Dreyfus.

  In Close Up in 1933, Bryher published a long article, ‘What Shall You Do In the War?’ She wanted to galvanize outrage and action against the pogroms of German Jews, the tide of refugees and exiles, censorship, book burnings, the aggressive militarism of the Nazi regime. ‘I cannot understand how any person anywhere who professed to the slightest belief in ethics could stand aside at such a moment.’

  She viewed the situation as too grave for ‘a pacifism of theories and pamphlets’ when an attempt was underway:

  to exterminate a whole section of the population no matter whether their characters were good or bad… It is useless for us to talk about disarmament when children are being trained in military drill and where every leader of intellectual thought in Germany is exiled or silenced.

  Freud got H.D. writing again. Bryher went often to Vienna to visit her, sometimes with Macpherson and Norman Douglas. After a break in London, H.D. resumed the sessions in autumn 1934. One evening she strayed into closed-off streets and was interrogated by the military police. Jews were regularly attacked by Nazi gangs. On a day of violence when swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans were chalked on pavements, she turned up for her session with Freud, though all his other patients had cancelled. Bryher sent her instructions on how to get out of Vienna. H.D. replied that as her heart was ‘here with this old saint’, she would stay and risk death.

  Freud was accepting of the relationship between the two women. He respected them both. Bryher said of him:

  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… nobody this last century has helped humanity so much.

  Pursuit of psychoanalysis was in defiance of the meaningless evil of the times. Freud was pessimistic about the present, the future and this cancer of brutality:

  He says ‘many many people will be murdered’ [he meant Jews] I said I didn’t think massacre was possible, there was still the open sympathy of the world… he gave a flea shake to his shoulders and said ‘well we better go on with your analysis. It is the only thing now.’

  ‘Die Bergner’

  In Berlin, through her friendships with Pabst and Hanns Sachs, Bryher met the actress Elisabeth Bergner. She declared herself in love with her. ‘Die Bergner’, as she was known, was Viennese, Jewish and a left-wing activist. She was married to the film-maker Paul Cz
inner, who was Jewish and homosexual. Both were hounded by the Nazi regime. The ‘Bergner Phenomenon’ came from her androgynous looks and complex performances. She was a femme fatale and, like Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn, the new gender-questioning ideal of a heroine. Her acting career had been meteoric. In Berlin in the early 1920s she gave 566 consecutive performances in the trouser role of Rosalind in As You Like It. After a screening in Berlin in 1934 of Paul Czinner’s film The Rise of Catherine the Great, in which she starred, she, Czinner and all their films were banned by the Nazis.

  While H.D. was in Vienna, Elisabeth Bergner was a frequent guest at Kenwin. Bryher compiled a scrapbook about her, took her to tea at South Audley Street in London, gave money for her film productions. She recounted all their encounters to H.D. and asked her to search second-hand shops in Vienna for photographs of Bergner and to post them to her.

  Bryher’s courtship consisted of her pursuit and Bergner’s retreat. On 25 July 1933 Bryher reported to H.D.:

  such a scene with Elizabeth. She called me a ‘crude taxi driver’ and kicked me out. She said any question of zoo [sex] was piggish and never to be spoken of in her presence and that she had never been with anyone, male or female, or inanimate except C [Paul Czinner her husband] for a week which she would always remember but never repeat… She said her one emotion was jealousy… That she spent half her time thinking of your great beauty as you moved across the Kenwin grass and the other half wondering how you could delicately be poisoned!!!!!!!! that she wanted someone who would never speak to someone else and that I was unbearably crude. That I was wicked.