No Modernism Without Lesbians by Diana Souhami (inspirational books for women TXT) 📗

explosive about her friendship with Doris Banfield. The disgrace, the flouting of laws, the knowledge, the answer, was to live out her desire for sexual and emotional relationship with a woman. H.D. was her quest. Of that she was sure.

The door opened and I started in surprise. I had seen the face before, on a Greek statue or in some indefinable territory of the mind. We were meeting again after a long absence but not for the first time. ‘Won’t you come in?’ the voice had a birdlike quality that was nearer to song than speech. There was a bowl of wild flowers on the table, a pile of books on the chair. We sat down and looked at each other or, more correctly, I stared. I was waiting for a question to prove my integrity and the extent of my knowledge. ‘I wonder if you could tell me something’ H.D. began, ‘have you ever seen a puffin and what is it like?’

‘They call them sea parrots and there are dozens of them in the Scillies. I go there almost every summer. You must join me next year.’

So Love began. Bryher’s equivalent of Sylvia Beach’s hat bowling in the wind down rue de l’Odéon with Adrienne Monnier in pursuit. H.D. said Bryher loved her ‘so madly it is terrible. No man has ever cared for me like that.’

Bryher was twenty-four and H.D. thirty-two at the time of this first meeting. Bryher, naive and cut off by the strangeness of her childhood, had had no sexual relationships. Her romantic expectations were lofty, her commitment certain. She was in love with H.D. before she met her. H.D.’s emotional life was more than muddled, her mental health fragile. D.H. Lawrence said of her: ‘She is like a person walking a tightrope. You wonder if she’ll get across.’ There was a thin line between the imagery of her poetry and her bouts of psychosis.

The Bosigran Castle address sounded grand but was in fact a tin miner’s stone cottage at the foot of the castle ruins. H.D. had lived there since March with Cecil Gray, a Scottish musicologist. Richard Aldington, her husband, was conscripted and fighting at the Western Front. Gray, who was in London on the day of Bryher’s visit, was twenty-three and had rented the Cornish cottage as a love nest for their affair. H.D. was not in love with him. She was missing Aldington. She was also enamoured of D.H. Lawrence and believed him to be in love with her. She had joined Gray to escape the Zeppelin bombing raids on London and her emotional confusion. She found the Cornish landscape inspirational. She was translating the choruses from Euripides’ Hippolytus – Harriet Weaver published this in her Egoist Press. Gray kept being cautioned for contravening blackout regulations; visible lights were a guide to hostile submarines, he was told.

Frances, Ezra, Richard, Cecil

H.D.’s relationships overlapped, merged, were never exclusive and seemed incidental to the true experience of her life, which was her writing. She slipped into affairs and was vague about shaping her life. She seemed to say ‘yes’ to all overtures. In her early twenties she had expressed deep love for a poet, Frances Gregg. ‘No one will ever love you as I love you,’ she wrote to her in 1911. She described this love in an autobiographical novel, HERmione, not published until 1981, twenty years after her death. ‘I don’t want to be (as they say crudely) a boy’, H.D. told Frances, ‘nor do I want to be a girl. What is all this trash of Sappho? None of that seems real. I feel you. My pulse runs swiftly.’

For H.D., love was transcendent, the currency of poetry, and same-sex love as valid as any other: ‘We are legitimate children’, she wrote.

We are children of the Rossettis, of Burne Jones, of Swinburne… We were in the thoughts of Wilde when he spoke late at night of carts rumbling past the window, fresh with farm produce on the way to Covent Garden. He was talking to a young man called Gilbert.

Before Frances Gregg – and while with her – she had been ‘engaged’ to Ezra Pound, whom she first met at a Halloween party in Pennsylvania when she was fifteen and he was sixteen. She vowed to dedicate her life to him; he gave her a pearl ring, wrote poems to and about her and called her Saint Hilda. But he too was dating Frances Gregg, who wrote in her journal: ‘Two girls in love with each other and each in love with the same man.’

H.D. was five foot eleven – taller than most men. She stooped to compensate. Like Bryher, Natalie Barney, Gertrude Stein and most creative lesbians of the time, she felt she was not the daughter her parents wanted. In Pennsylvania her father was a distinguished astronomer and her three brothers and two half-brothers were academically successful. There was expectation of achievement in the Doolittle household but H.D. dropped out of Bryn Mawr without qualifications. ‘She was a disappointment to her father, an odd duckling to her mother, an importunate overgrown unincarnated entity that had no place here’ was how she described herself in HERmione. When Ezra Pound asked Professor Doolittle’s permission to marry Hilda, he was dismissed as ‘nothing but a nomad’.

In July 1911 H.D. travelled to London with Frances Gregg and Frances’s mother. They all met up with Pound. The Greggs returned home in the autumn but H.D. stayed on. She asked Pound if they were engaged. ‘Gawd forbid’ was his reply, but he helped her find a place in London’s literary world. Her poems were published in Harriet Weaver’s The Egoist along with work by Pound, T.S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, Richard Aldington and James Joyce. Harriet described H.D. as ‘tall, thin, pale, rather handsome, dreamy-eyed, pleasant mannered’. With the publication of Sea Garden, which so inspired Bryher, the novelist May Sinclair called H.D. ‘the best of the Imagists’. H.D. wove images from the coasts of Cornwall,