No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  Bergner and Czinner left Germany in late 1933. They went first to London, then to America. Bryher travelled to see her performances. At the Apollo Theatre in London, Bergner was praised for her stage performance as an unmarried mother in Escape Me Never, adapted from a novel by Margaret Kennedy. The play went to Broadway. Czinner directed the film version in 1935 and Bergner was nominated for a best actress Oscar. Other nominees included Katharine Hepburn for Alice Adams and Bette Davis for Dangerous (Bette Davis won). Bryher saw all three films in New York. ‘If you saw Hepburn you would never leave New York’, she wrote to H.D., ‘so I think it is just as well you are NOT here.’

  Bryher considered leaving Europe for America but had no attachment to American lifestyle. She went to the first night in February 1934 in Connecticut of Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts, a theatrical spectacle that was a valediction to the gaiety and freedom modernist lesbians had sought.

  death of Sir John Ellerman

  Bryher’s father had a stroke in the Hotel Royal in Dieppe on 16 July 1933. Bryher, in Kenwin, was contacted by her mother from the hotel. No train was scheduled before evening, so she telephoned Geneva airport and chartered a single-engine two-seater passenger plane, a Gipsy Moth; the pilot had been trained by the Swiss Air Force. The day was stormy, the flight turbulent. When she reached the hotel, her father was dead.

  One of his ships took his body back to England. His coffin was draped with a Union Jack. At South Audley Street, Bryher fought off reporters who tried to question her mother. ‘I had the great satisfaction myself of kicking one cameraman hard in the stomach,’ she said.

  Sir John was buried at Putney Vale Cemetery near Wimbledon Common on a grey, rainy July day. An officer from his ships, Lady Ellerman and Bryher’s brother, John, followed the hearse in the family’s Rolls-Royce. Bryher called it the Crystal Palace because it was designed with headroom for her mother’s elaborate hats. Macpherson called it ‘a Hilton on wheels, towering over everything on the roads except the tops of buses’. He and Bryher followed in ‘the Lanchester’. Press photographers shoved and pushed in their efforts to photograph the coffin as it was lowered into the ground. Lady Ellerman wrote to The Times about their hooliganism.

  Bryher’s father had died at the height of the Depression. His estate, valued for probate at £36,685,000,10 represented 30 per cent of the nation’s wealth passed by probate that year, a fortune accrued by a man who showed little interest in what money could buy. ‘I believe that my father could have become a religious leader as easily as a financier, he had such an extraordinary inner detachment,’ Bryher said.

  Her brother, aged twenty-three, heir to their father’s business, became the second Sir John. Bryher suspected that a ‘Letter of Directions’ about the inheritance had been taken from her father’s safe. She inferred her brother knew of this; he ‘said unpardonable things’, threw a chair at her head and they had no further contact. A month later, he married his girlfriend, Esther de Sola, who was from an orthodox Sephardic Jewish family – the elder Sir John had disapproved of her. They had no children. He was a private man who shunned all publicity, and he divided his time between a house in Buckinghamshire, a suite he permanently hired at the Dorchester Hotel in London and frequent trips to South Africa for his rodent work. He was made a fellow of the Royal Society there.

  By the terms of her father’s will, Bryher received £600,000 outright and a further £600,000 in trust.11 Her brother received £600,000 outright and £2,000,000 in trust. Extravagant though it was, the settlement insulted her. In Development, she had written of herself:

  To possess the intellect, the hopes, the ambitions of a man, unsoftened by any feminine attribute, to have these sheathed in convention, impossible to break, without hurt to those she had no wish to hurt, to feel so thoroughly unlike a girl—this was the tragedy.

  Hurt was all around Bryher when it came to family matters. Freud wrote to her from Vienna three days after her father’s death:

  I read the news in our newspapers with great sympathy for you, not without a certain envy towards him. I suspect you will have a turbulent time ahead of you, during which a lot will depend on your mother’s health and behaviour. My son Ernst’s address is: Mascot Hotel, York Street, Baker Street, W.1. I don’t know for how long he’ll be staying in London still. Fa and Tattoun are fine and ask to be remembered to you.

  Warmly yours

  Freud

  Fa and Tattoun were Freud’s chow puppies from Yofi, which Bryher had not felt able to house at Kenwin. Freud foresaw that Bryher would be tested by her father’s will. By the distribution of the wealth her father had accumulated, Bryher was made to feel of less value than her brother. Her inheritance was huge, she already benefited from substantial investments from her father, but her younger brother was to receive three times more. Money was a metaphor for worth. Whatever the size of the fortune, she was perceived as less deserving of it. The insult was compounded because she felt herself to have ‘the intellect, hopes and ambitions of a man, unsoftened by any feminine attribute’. Bryher was as clever and courageous as any man, so why an insistence on gender that she did not apply to herself?

  a fractured world

  H.D.’s intense delving with Freud helped her recover her poetic voice and accept her dependency on Bryher. But analysis inevitably made clear that the price for this dependency was her autonomy. H.D. tried to distance herself from Bryher. In November 1934, as the sessions were coming to an end, she wrote to her:

  PLEASE Fido, if you love me, and love my work, leave that to work its own will in its own way… Please for six months or a year do NOT probe me about my writing.

  It seemed H.D. related her writer’s block to the control Bryher exerted over her. It was hard for Bryher to be told to keep away. She did love H.D. and she did love her work and had done everything to serve H.D.’s poetic gift. Despite her authoritative temperament, she tried to keep this boundary too.

  Back at Kenwin after her father’s death, Bryher’s main preoccupation was the impact of fascism in Europe. With her additional wealth, she renegotiated trust funds for H.D. and Dorothy Richardson and for herself hired a new housekeeper, Elsie Volkart, whom she called ‘the dragon’.

  There were no more shared projects with Macpherson. Close Up folded. Fascism meant film-makers like Eisenstein and Fritz Lang left for America. Any film with Jewish backing or involvement was forbidden distribution in Germany. Janet Flanner wrote in her New Yorker ‘Letter from Paris’ in 1934:

  from now on there will apparently be no more of those excellent modern films coming out of Germany, except maybe some featuring Friedrich der Grosse with a little up-to-date swastika moustache.

  Switzerland opened its borders to Jewish refugees, though in Zurich they were not allowed to seek work because of existing unemployment.

  Macpherson was only intermittently at Kenwin. He began a relationship with David Wickham, a young man from Barbados, and he travelled with him and Norman Douglas. He had no wish to be with H.D. or Bryher, but nor did he want formally to separate or divorce. The marriage suited him financially and made no demands. Bryher suggested he have analysis to find out if he genuinely wanted any sort of life with her. He complained that she tried to control him and change him from what he really was. In August 1934 she wrote him a frosty letter:

  I don’t want to change you from what you really are but since I have known you you have been two completely different people. Between 1926 and 1930 you wrote two books, you made four films, you did a lot of work on Close Up, both from the photographic and the editorial side, and you spent practically the whole year with me, entirely happily to judge from your letters which I have. From 1930 to 1934 you dropped your film work entirely, you did less and less for Close Up, some issues not even the photographs and you have written, I think, one book. Almost all this time you have lived at least half the year with other people.

  Now the solution once I know which you are is absolutely easy. If
you are as you are now, why then we have not an interest in common, I do not like the way you live, and you dislike equally the way I live. Therefore the sooner we are separated or divorced the better. It would be stupid to continue like this.

  If you are as you were 1926–30, we had then a great deal in common and there would be a reasonable chance of continuing happily on that basis. I suggested analysis as the way to show which person you wanted to be. But I don’t want to stop you from being the person you want to be. If we are living together, not for a few separated weeks, but for at least two thirds of the year and if we have a community of interests, that is one thing. If you wish of yourself to try analysis, to discover what it is that you really want to be, I’ll wait certainly while you try it but I cannot continue with you if you wish to go on with the same conditions that you have lived with since last January.

  Macpherson did not try analysis, nor did he try to rekindle a community of interests with Bryher, or to live with her again.

  H.D. in London

  In London, H.D. continued analysis with an Austrian friend of Freud’s, Walter Schmideberg, who shared his consulting room with his mother-in-law, Melanie Klein. Schmideberg helped H.D. with the stress caused when Aldington finally divorced her in 1938 to marry Brigit Patmore’s former daughter-in-law, Netta, who was pregnant with his child. He wanted the child to be legitimate.

  H.D. visited Kenwin but did not view it as home. Though afraid of the prospect of war, she did not share Bryher’s efforts to help European Jews escape Nazi tyranny, nor did she travel with her. She took Perdita to Greece in March and April 1932, they visited Athens and Delphi, but her base was London and a flat at 49 Lowndes Square in Knightsbridge.

  In February 1935, Silvia Dobson, a primary school teacher and aspiring writer, wrote H.D. a fan letter. H.D. invited her to tea and she visited on Valentine’s Day. She was twenty-six, H.D. was forty-nine. They became lovers under H.D.’s rules of free love and not much proximity. They travelled to Venice together and indulged a great deal in what Freud called H.D.’s ‘star fish stuff’. They drew up astrological charts, H.D. experienced ‘intense states’ of perception, and when Silvia sent her flowers she said one of the lilies would protect her, for it had ‘five buds and flowers and five is the pentacle to keep off witches. Five is Mercury and Mercury is the Messenger or Gabriel of the Zodiac. Isn’t he too Virgo.’

  Silvia Dobson also began analysis, paid for and arranged by Bryher.

  the road to war

  From the early 1930s, Bryher felt she tried and failed to get people to face the eventuality of another war. Any brave publishing enterprise in Berlin became impossible. Determined to keep cultural innovation alive, in 1935 Bryher bought the London-based magazine Life and Letters, renamed it Life and Letters Today and installed Robert Herring as editor. She wanted an outlet for H.D.’s writing and for the work of friends and contemporaries, to keep an international scope and to ensure contributors got paid. The first issue featured work from H.D., Mary Butts, Havelock Ellis, Kenneth Macpherson, Lotte Reiniger and Gertrude Stein.

  The magazine ran from 1935 until 1950. With her usual foresight, Bryher stockpiled paper so publication continued throughout the war years when other magazines folded through paper shortages. Life and Letters Today published poetry, opinion pieces, articles, short stories and theatre, cinema and book reviews. Dorothy Richardson, the Sitwells, Marianne Moore, Sartre, André Gide, Paul Valéry, Elizabeth Bishop and T.S. Eliot all contributed, as did Perdita, who was now sixteen. H.D. published serially her impressions of Freud.

  Until the outbreak of war, Bryher maintained her habit of travel. She took Perdita to America in the spring of 1935, she stayed with Sylvia Beach in Paris, visited Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in their summer house at Bilignin near Aix-les-Bains, and there was a stream of guests at Kenwin. But her urgent task was to help Jewish doctors, lawyers, psychologists and intellectuals escape Nazi-controlled areas and ensure their safe havens in other countries. By 1940, when she herself had to flee Switzerland, she had helped, with money, contacts and sponsorship, 105 such people, 60 of them Jews, escape the Nazis. She established a fund in America for psychoanalytical training, financed the smuggling of documents, helped Walter Benjamin get to Paris and Freud, his wife Martha and daughter Anna, to London. Of Freud’s other children, she helped Oliver, an engineer, get to Paris and his daughter Mathilde to the south of France.

  Freud reached London on 6 June 1938. On 16 November, he wrote to the editor of Time and Tide:

  I came to Vienna as a small child of 4 years from a small town in Moravia. After 78 years of assiduous work I had to leave my home, saw the Scientific Society I had founded, dissolved, our institutions destroyed, our printing Press ‘Verlag’ taken over by the invaders, the books I had published, confiscated or reduced to pulp, my children expelled from their professions…

  Such was the work of dictators, censors and racists. Janet Flanner in her letter for The New Yorker wrote of how Brussels was packed with refugees and of how, at Verviers near the Belgian/German frontier, customs officers stayed up half the night to search out and detain refugees who, with packs on their backs and no visas on their passports, tried to sneak through the fields and over the border in darkness.

  In February 1940 Bryher wrote:

  I blame the English government intensely for not having stopped Hitler before German rearmament became serious. As it is there is nothing now but to fight it out for were the Germans to triumph there would be no more liberty, art or thought in Europe.

  more war

  Bryher’s mother died in September 1939 in a hospital in Truro, Cornwall. The South Audley Street house then passed to Bryher’s brother. ‘I had no idea where he was’, Bryher wrote. ‘The few necessary business arrangements were made through our lawyers.’ Sigmund Freud died in London the same month of throat cancer. He was eighty-three.

  In Switzerland, there was not enough fuel to heat Kenwin, and Elsie Volkart, Bryher’s housekeeper, moved to a little house near Lausanne. Bryher listened on the radio to the invasion of France on 10 May 1940. By September, with the threat of Germany invading England, she needed to get to London and H.D., though she hated the thought of leaving Kenwin and Switzerland. ‘Ask me to die for England but do not ask me to live in the British climate’ was her view.

  Because of her refugee work, she was on the German authorities’ blacklist. She learned, like Sylvia Beach and Gertrude Stein, that ‘when people are fighting for their own lives and for those whom they love, the words “law” and “justice” become empty words’. She burned all papers that might incriminate herself and others and looked for help, from whatever source, to get out of the country. She could not leave by a regular route or take funds with her. ‘I plundered the black market for passports,’ she said.

  A favour came from a Swiss man in a travel agency for whose son she had once found a textbook. He told Bryher of seats on a coach, with a collective visa for the business people on it, going from Geneva to Barcelona. Bryher wanted to take a young English student, Grace, the daughter of a friend, with her. She travelled with a suitcase and a rucksack containing enough food for three days. A gruelling journey followed. They journeyed via Grenoble, Sète, Perpignan. It took twenty-one hours to get to Barcelona, her suitcase was searched, she had no money, the British Institute was closed. She cabled relatives in America and ‘oiled the wheels’ with dollars. Not for the first or last time were Bryher’s wheels oiled with banknotes.

  After four days they flew to Madrid, then Lisbon, where they remained stuck for three weeks. Bryher took over the sorting of tickets and exit permits. They were put on a waiting list for spare places on ‘the Clipper’, a plane from America to Portugal then London. Each day they checked at the airport, and at dawn one morning they got seats. The flight was turbulent and there was a shortage of paper bags in which to be sick. They landed in rain and darkness in a south of England airport – ‘It may have been Poole’ – then were put on a bus, and finally
sent by train to London.

  the guns began

  H.D., returning from lunch on a day in late October, found Bryher sitting on her suitcase in the entrance to 49 Lowndes Square. Bryher wrote:

  Here I was, aged forty-six, forced back into the cage and misery of the first war and I had no illusions that the second one would soon be over. I felt a little better when Hilda came up the staircase a few minutes afterwards to look at me in astonishment. She took me immediately to show me the pile of sand kept ready to throw on incendiaries. Many of my friends, I found, were scattered about England but at least I was with the people I loved… as the sirens started, the guns began and we went with our blankets to the shelter downstairs.

  For Bryher and her circle, the élan, shared endeavours, flamboyant freedom, mischief and optimism of artistic experiment were over. War came down like a shutter on free expression. And for its duration, she and H.D. stayed almost continuously together – which tested their tempers.

  Bryher edited Life and Letters Today with Robert Herring, and worked on a memoir of the war years, The Days of Mars, and on a novel, Beowulf, based on the Blitz on London. She learned Persian and in the long evenings of the blackout felt she was going crazy. She yearned for pre-war Paris, ‘that blue, smoky atmosphere where everyone was sipping bitter coffee and arguing about metaphysics’, and missed the ‘snowy mountain crests above the placid lake’ of her home in Switzerland. She hoped the United States would enter the war with the Allies, given their military strength, and bring it to an end.