No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  Friends dispersed. Sylvia Beach was forced to close Shakespeare and Company then was interned by the Nazis. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas were in Vichy-occupied France. Robert McAlmon and Kenneth Macpherson were in America. Perdita, who was twenty, was driving an ambulance for the Red Cross. Ezra Pound became overtly anti-Semitic and regularly and publicly said ‘something vile against Jews’. On 21 April 1941, Plymouth was bombed. Frances Gregg was killed in her house, along with her daughter and mother. She was fifty-six.

  Bryher felt trapped in London. She and H.D. were visited by a government official because of all the black-market packets of cigarettes and the amount of chocolate they acquired above their ration coupons. The only journeys she made were to Barra in the Outer Hebrides to stay with Compton Mackenzie and his wife, Faith, and to Cornwall to stay with Doris Banfield.

  As ever, Bryher saw it as imperative to help with acts of generosity. She gave money to Osbert and Edith Sitwell – she bought Edith Sitwell a house. When a woman in a bread queue told her she had broken her dentures on wartime bread and to replace them would cost more than her Christmas bonus, Bryher paid her dentist’s bills: ‘we were firm friends until she died shortly after the war’, she wrote. A firefighter complained to her about his ill-fitting Wellington boots, so she bought him better ones. She helped clean up when the London Library was bombed and flooded. She paid for clippings of camel hair from the zoo to be made into coats for distribution as needed.

  H.D., though destabilized by the war, during those years wrote three novels, three volumes of poetry, a memoir, short stories and a collection of poetry and prose. But the death of Freud, the killing of Frances Gregg, air raids, danger, unalleviated proximity to Bryher and constant news of destruction caused her to break down.

  ‘I could visualise the very worst terrors,’ she said. Preoccupations with spiritualism and the occult, with Bryher, psychoanalysis, her Moravian heritage, and terror of bombardment filled her writing. She wrote in The Gift:

  I could see myself caught in the fall of bricks and I would be pinned down under a great beam, helpless. Many had been. I would be burned to death.

  The Gift, she said, ‘was a Gift of Vision, it was the Gift of Wisdom, the Gift of the Holy Spirit, the Sanctus Spiritus’.

  In the summer of 1944, with Paris and Belgium liberated and the blackout reduced to a ‘dim out’, Bryher and H.D. went to Cornwall for two months. Bryher received her first letter in five years from Sylvia Beach and immediately sent money to her. In February 1945, she reported buying ice cream at Harrods and on VE day – Victory in Europe – on 8 May, she and H.D. hung Allied flags in the windows of Lowndes Square. That Christmas, they had turkey and a decorated tree.

  H.D.’s breakdown

  Neither Bryher nor H.D. wanted to remain in post-war Britain. They talked of going to America. But H.D. was not well. She was paranoid. She delved into spiritualism, held seances and thought she heard urgent messages warning of an imminent third world war. In the spring of 1946 she tore the bookplates out of her books, moved furniture into the hall and climbed on to the roof of 49 Lowndes Square, intending to throw herself to the street. Instead, she threw down a fur coat Bryher had recently given her.

  Bryher wrote: ‘I am not frightened of mental illness and because of this I am able to understand and handle certain cases during the difficult hours between their treatments.’ Twenty-eight years of partnership with H.D. had taught her about psychosis. She chartered a plane and flew her to a clinic in Switzerland: Dr Brunner’s Nervenklinik in Küsnacht, by Lake Zurich.

  She was advised by H.D.’s doctors not to visit or write to her. The medical opinion was that because H.D. had seemed distressed by Bryher in London, separation would help her restore. But not seeing Bryher or hearing from her terrified H.D. even more. She feared she was dead like Frances Gregg, or in mortal danger. For herself, she wrote to friends that she had meningitis and was staying in a romantic eighteenth-century manor house with roses brought from Versailles. To Bryher, she wrote that she was frightened of being charged with insanity. She asked her to come with armed men to rescue her but feared that then they would both be entrapped. She lost forty pounds in weight.

  Bryher was criticized for being controlling, but at the root of all her intervention was the desire to do what was best. Without her, H.D. would probably be dead. She employed Walter Schmideberg as a psychiatrist for her and as a companion for herself.

  H.D.’s letters from the clinic showed her need for Bryher. ‘My frenzy was due entirely to the separation and anxiety’, she told her. She thought her room at the clinic had been wired and her telephone line cut. She imagined all the apparatus of war directed at her: gun shots, police dogs and whistles and gas fumes. Never once did her paranoia direct itself towards Bryher. She wrote to her:

  I had a sort of ‘shock-treatment.’ They locked me in the bed-room, with window & shutters barred. There were 5 of us, 3 hefty men and a nurse. One of the men left with the nurse, when I refused an injection. I thought they were trying to kill me. I suppose this is ‘dementia praecox.’ I begged for a few minutes. An enormous prize-fighter, weighing a ton, ordered me to lie down on the bed. I refused & tried to dodge them. I have been severely shocked: if that is what they wanted to do, they succeeded. It was worse or ‘better’ than the most lurid film. They spotted my sheets with some sort of real or chemical ‘urine’. I did not find this until long after mid-night, when I opened the bed. The stench was frightful—’bed-wetting’ child memories, I presume! I must leave here. They did not kill me. I refused food, as I was heart-broken about you & pup, so then, I suppose they wrote me up as ‘paranoia’ or ‘schiz.’ and for a time I lived on your coffee and cigarettes. I do not know why I am here. There is T.B. on the towels. I am also apparently mad. However, we will laugh soon & I feel, dear Fido, I can now discuss with you intelligently, the Tibetan Book of the dead.

  By October, H.D. was calm enough for Bryher to explain to her why she had kept away:

  When you were so very ill in London you seemed to worry whenever I was there, so Dr Carroll said I must not be with you then or write, but all the time I was in touch with Dr Brunner to see how you were. I wrote the moment it was felt you were well enough for letters.

  Bryher visited with Walter Schmideberg, whom H.D. called The Bear. It was a relief to Bryher that H.D. was in a safe and peaceful place and that she did not have to take on the impossible burden of caring for her alone. She visited her most days for lunch or tea or to do a bit of shopping. She gave her an additional settlement of £70,000 and an annual allowance of £2,500, though H.D. spent little or nothing beyond the fees for the clinic.

  Bryher was unsettled too and, apart from Schmideberg, no one looked out for her. She could not return immediately to Kenwin. Refurbishment was needed and the heating pipes had rusted. Her parents were dead, she was not on speaking terms with her brother, H.D. was gripped by psychosis and Bryher saw very little of Kenneth Macpherson who did not visit H.D.

  Bryher flew to America in January 1947 to discuss divorce details with him. He was sharing a house with Peggy Guggenheim and Bryher found him ‘very sad, disillusioned and more mature’. He seemed to have given up all artistic ambition. When the divorce was finalized in February, he moved with the photographer Islay Lyons, who became his long-term partner, and ‘that old roué’ Norman Douglas to the Villa Tuoro in Capri. Bryher financed their ménage. She also gave him an apartment in Rome, near the Coliseum.

  She moved back to the Villa Kenwin in the spring of 1947. Elsie Volkart resumed as her housekeeper. For ten years, Schmideberg was Bryher’s paid companion there. It was as if Bryher felt obliged to pay for all relationships. Like McAlmon and Macpherson, Schmideberg drank; he was also treated for drug addiction.

  She resumed her passion for travel. She flew to the Caribbean with Robert Herring and Walter Schmideberg, to India with Macpherson and Islay Lyons, to New York via the Azores and Canada with Perdita. ‘It was almost my ideal of life, flipping up and
down all over continents.’ She loved the sunsets and mountains, the markets and street life, the excitement of unknown places and of moving on.

  Perdita marries

  Perdita went to New York when the war ended; she needed to distance herself from her mother and Bryher. She married in Maine in June 1950. Her husband, John Valentine Schaffner, was the New York literary agent for whom she had been working. The writer and academic Norman Holmes Pearson wrote to H.D. of the day. Perdita looked lovely, he said, in a soft blue dress with a wide blue hat to match and a bouquet of white and yellow flowers. The following February, her eldest son, Valentine Schaffner, was born. With her subsequent children, Perdita told her mother they were due a month later than in reality to spare them both anxiety. She visited Bryher and her mother with her husband and new baby in 1951 and stayed two weeks at Kenwin.

  Perdita opted for a more conventional model of family than the variety she had experienced in her formative years. She took her husband’s name, reclaimed her American citizenship, wrote for literary magazines, had four children, cats called Petunia, Magnolia and Dr Hugh de P. Van Brugh PhD. The homey, easy things Perdita was denied as a child, she created for herself and those whom she found to love. She lived to be eighty.

  One of her sons, Nicholas, a rock star and biographer of The Beatles, died of AIDS when he was thirty-eight. John Schaffner, her husband, died aged seventy, also of AIDS.

  Kenwin alone

  When H.D. was well enough to leave the clinic, she did not return to Kenwin. She went first to the Alexandra Hotel, half an hour’s walk away from Bryher. They saw each other almost every day – met in a bakery ‘for chocolate and an inch of whipped cream and ambrosia croissants’. H.D.’s hotel room had a balcony looking out over a church. The peacefulness of the mountains, no responsibility, and medical care made her creative life possible. She had what she called her ‘simple luxuries – cold water, coffee and cigarettes’. She could work again. Bryher gave her notebooks, reference books, anything she wanted. H.D. was fulsome in her thanks: ‘I can never begin to thank you, dear Fido, for showing me the “path” here & for all the Greek and Italian journeys this recalls.’

  Bryher and Hilda Doolittle, from the H.D. Papers, American Literature Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Photographer unknown.

  In the summer of 1948, she moved to the Minerva Hotel in Lugano; she said Lugano was more beautiful than the Nile Valley or the Gulf of Corinth. Her schedule was work, gentle outings and no demands. On 17 July, at the hotel, she and Bryher celebrated the anniversary of their meeting, thirty years earlier.

  For Bryher, the problem became who would care for the carer. She had spent her life thinking of others, but no one seemed to look out for her. She found the upkeep of Kenwin hard to sustain. The boiler needed repairs, the gardener left, maids were hard to find. Designed as a modernist centre for the arts, not much went on there once Macpherson and H.D. were gone. Bryher welcomed Schmideberg’s company but his drinking got out of hand.

  After an abdominal operation in 1953, H.D. moved back to Dr Brunner’s Nervenklinik. Bryher called the clinic a ‘microcosm of the world’. It was an asylum in the best sense of the word, five houses in beautiful grounds with lakeside views. The inhabitants were drug addicts, alcoholics, the mentally ill. H.D. liked the strange people gathered there; she was perhaps happier than at any point in her life. Her book-filled balcony room looked out over a lake with white swans. There was a little room where Bryher could stay and all around were pine and cedar trees. The food was good, she would breakfast at eight then go back to bed for an hour, she ran a reading group, went out to the cinema and to concerts. She once said that had she been Catholic, she would have become a nun. This was close to the sequestered life.

  In December that year, Walter Schmideberg was admitted to the clinic too, ill with alcoholism and a gastric infection. He died there the following year.

  From her safe haven, H.D. published a book of poems a year. In her poetry she channelled creative disorders of thinking, her crisis of identity, the myths of ancient Greece, her fascination with things occult, her unconscious mind. She thought there was a fourth dimension to past, present and future. ‘The room has four walls, there are four seasons.’ She allied her creativity to the universal experience of the dream. She worked on her Tribute to Freud. In it, she wrote:

  He had dared to say that the dream came from an unexplored depth in man’s consciousness and that this unexplored depth ran like a great stream or ocean underground… He had dared to say that it was the same ocean of universal consciousness… he had dared to imply that this consciousness proclaimed all men one; all nations and races met in the universal world of the dream…

  In 1956, she slipped on a rug on the polished floor and broke her hip, but was unperturbed when confined to bed and alone with her imagination. The clinic was a mix of hotel, rest home and hospital. Never good at making decisions, or even capable of making them, H.D. felt safeguarded and liberated by institutional life. She corresponded with Pound and with Aldington, whose second wife left him. Bryher visited, brought her whatever she wanted, answered her every request and kept the flame of her literary distinction alive.

  Honours for H.D. accrued: the Harriet Monroe prize, a citation for distinguished service from Bryn Mawr, the Gold Medal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The International Communication Association in Washington wanted her to lecture, the Poetry Center in New York wanted her to read. There was a flurry of reissue of her books. ‘For beauty of phrase and psychological insight there is no poet more interesting than HD’, Bryher wrote. ‘Flower leaf and salt water and a mind like a diving bird.’

  In March 1959, Bryher went to the Paris exposition ‘Les Années Vingt – American writers and their friends in Paris, 1920–30’ curated by Sylvia Beach, with memorabilia from Shakespeare and Company. ‘It’s most beautifully done with everyone we knew and many we did not,’ Bryher wrote to H.D. Contact Editions featured large, and all the little magazines Bryher’s patronage had kept alive. Twenty thousand people visited, and the same number when the exposition moved to London the following year. When Bryher walked in Paris with Sylvia, passers-by said, ‘C’est Mademoiselle Beach.’ That winter, Sylvia stayed for a week at Kenwin and Bryher showed her part of her memoirs, which she was writing. Romaine Brooks and Natalie Barney visited too. ‘Nothing seems to daunt these old ladies,’ Bryher said.

  death of H.D.

  In May 1961, the freeholder of the Nervenklinik sold the estate. Everyone had to move at short notice.

  Most occupants had a very difficult time with relocating: Most of them were old ladies of eighty and over and we had one attempted suicide because they were so distressed at having to move from their rooms where they had been, some of them almost twenty years.

  H.D. was wrenched from what had become her home. Bryher moved her to the Hotel Sonnenberg, Zurich, with a view of the mountains, but it did not compare. H.D. only had a single room with a bath and a bit of flat balcony. The following month she suffered a stroke, which paralysed her right side and affected her speech. She died in the Klinik Hirslanden in Zurich on Wednesday 27 September 1961. Bryher felt it was merciful. ‘She minded the frustrations so dreadfully,’ she wrote to Silvia Dobson.

  ‘It is impossible to believe in Bryher without HD,’ Alice B. Toklas wrote to Perdita’s husband, John Schaffner. She had heard of H.D.’s death from Sylvia Beach.

  the cabin boy in the sailor suit

  Bryher lived from then on more or less alone at Kenwin, travelled as she would, stayed in the shadows and kept from the limelight. She had always been solitary, her relationships defined by what she gave, with no vain wish for adoration or affirmation from another person. She had always expected others to take centre stage and win the accolades, for her to be the producer whose name was not remembered, the enabler not the star.

  Without another cause to fight, or poet to sponsor, and with the world now a different p
lace, year on year she wrote historical novels, set in Ancient Carthage at the time of Hannibal, or in sixth-century Cornwall, or third-century Switzerland, in Rome 400 BC, post-Arthurian Britain, or at the time of the Norman Conquest. In these stories, the hero was variously a nine- or twelve-year-old boy, the elder brother watchful of his little sister, the putative soldier, the defiant Prince:

  he was thankful that he had run away from Exeter and home. He had taken nothing with him but a bag of dried meat and a sharp knife.12

  I will run away I had promised myself every morning, but then my mother had looked at me sorrowfully and begged me to be patient and so I had lost my courage. ‘One day you will be second to the King’ she had said…13

  He wondered how much he dared tell his sister. Brave as she was all women were afraid of raiders.14

  It was as if Bryher, in her stories, careful in their research, ponderous in a prose style that broke no new ground and stirred no literary interest, found the inner liberation she sought. She was matter-of-fact about her writing, apt to repeat the bad reviews: ‘her language is jerky and unmelodious; her characterisation too thin’. But in these stories, written with no particular reader in mind, she found the key to freeing the small boy trapped in the wrong body, a salve to the gender quandary that so dismayed her when every expectation was for her to be a girl with curls.

  Free at last from responsibility for others, and safe in her Bauhaus eyrie, Bryher could march over the Alps in the dead of winter accompanied by a troop of elephants, be the cabin boy in the sailor suit, side with the Saxons against the Normans, travel with Columbus to America to find a brave new world. As a child, ‘I loved antiquity. It was more real, it is more real to me than this present world…’, Bryher said. ‘I was nine when my parents gave me The Young Carthaginian by G.A. Henty: