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

not visit her. Aldington shifted between anger and rejection. H.D. did not want an illegal abortion. She had no money and wondered about having the baby adopted.

In September, her brother Gilbert, fighting with the American Expeditionary Force in north-eastern France, was killed by machine-gun fire in the Battle of Saint-Mihiel near the town of Thiaucourt. He was thirty-two. Their father, in Pennsylvania, had a massive heart attack when he heard the news.

The backdrop for them all was the carnage of war, described by Virginia Woolf as ‘this preposterous masculine fiction’. Except it was preposterous fact.

H.D. did not tell Bryher of her pregnancy until December 1918, five months after their first meeting and a month after the war’s end. Aldington, jubilant at having survived, picked up with Dorothy Yorke, and hardened himself against responsibility for his wife: ‘No more than Cain am I my brother’s keeper’, he wrote to H.D. ‘Get from Gray what you can; and call on me in any emergency. I shall not fail you.’

Aldington met Bryher in London and thought her of a fine temperament but crushed by her parents and their immense wealth. ‘I don’t see how she can do anything until she gets away from her people,’ he said. Gray vanished from the scene. He was well off with inherited money from wealthy parents but after hearing of H.D.’s pregnancy he wanted nothing to do with her or the child he had fathered.

H.D. was isolated and vulnerable. Her baby was due in March 1919. ‘Her nerves are very shaken, perhaps the child will soothe and settle her,’ D.H. Lawrence wrote to Amy Lowell. In the final weeks of her pregnancy H.D.’s father died, devastated by the death of his son Gilbert in France the previous September. H.D. became ill, mentally and physically. She had visual and auditory hallucinations of a gigantic river god and a doctor with wings on his sleeves. She caught influenza, which led to pneumonia.

Bryher to the rescue

Bryher found her close to death in rented rooms in Ealing. She became her saviour, arranged medical and nursing care, booked her in to St Faith’s Nursing Home, financed everything needed for the birth, visited daily, brought ‘wonderful bunches of anemones’, promised support and spoke of taking her to Cornwall and the Scillies, to Greece, to America as soon as she was strong. Her commitment and management were unwavering. It was hard for H.D. to distrust her or to resist her.

Frances Perdita Aldington was born at noon on 31 March 1919. She was given her first name after Frances Gregg but was known as Perdita. Bryher visited that day and most days thereafter, always bringing flowers, assurances of help and anything that was needed. H.D. wanted Richard Aldington named as the father on Perdita’s birth certificate. She wanted to avoid the stigma of illegitimacy and to conceal the ‘devilish mess’. Aldington threatened legal action if she did this. She named him as father anyway, without telling him.

Aldington was conflicted about H.D. He asked her to return to him, but when she did, in London, he ordered her to leave. ‘Hilda must get out of here at once,’ he wrote to Bryher. The yo-yo of his devotion and hostility destabilized H.D., who talked of her psychic death.

As for Gray, three years after Perdita’s birth the writer Brigit Patmore, who had introduced H.D. to Aldington, confronted him about his behaviour towards H.D. and his daughter. He said he had much on his conscience, that inaction was almost a madness with him and ‘You must think me the greatest cad on earth, but everything was so awful…’ Brigit Patmore told him H.D. would have died had it not been for Bryher. He ‘went green’ and claimed he would always look after Perdita, but his family had suffered financial loss and money was now scarce. Brigit Patmore did not believe him: ‘He seems divided between hatred & disgust with his own part in it & a consequent weak determination to shut it out completely, & a sort of equally weak desire to make it all right,’ she wrote to Bryher.

Perdita, who looked like her father, only met him once – by chance on Capri in 1947. A few years after her birth, Gray apparently fathered another girl by an unspecified young married woman. He wrote in one of his notebooks: ‘The world is full of my daughters. It pullulates with them. You can’t escape them. They are all over the place.’

He married three times. His addiction to alcohol and cocaine got out of hand and he died aged fifty-six of cirrhosis of the liver.

Saint Bryher

Bryher saved H.D.’s life and H.D. became her life. Both were outsiders. Bryher never doubted H.D.’s creative talent was greater than her own. The core of their relationship was H.D.’s need and Bryher’s unfaltering wish to protect her and to champion her work. Three weeks after Perdita’s birth, Bryher took H.D. to Eastbourne to recuperate. Perdita was left in the Norland Nursery in Holland Park, which became her main home throughout her infancy. Bryher paid all fees.

A pattern of dependency and provision formed. In June and July 1919, Bryher took H.D. to Mullion Cove in south Cornwall and to the Scilly Isle from which she had taken her name. H.D. had a psychotic episode, which years later she described to Freud as the ‘sense of being in a bell jar’ immersed in a watery globe. Bryher encouraged such episodes and called them the most wonderful thing. But they alarmed H.D. and caused her mental and physical torment, even while she cherished them as a creative source.

Bryher did not shrink from the demands H.D.’s mental breakdowns brought. She gave H.D. wealth, love, admiration, loyalty and psychiatric help. In a poem dedicating her 1926 novel Palimpsest to Bryher, H.D. wrote;

stars turn in purple, glorious to the sight;

yours is not gracious as the Pleiads are

nor as Orion’s sapphires, luminous

yet disenchanted, cold imperious face,

when all the others, blighted, reel and fall,

your star, steel-set, keeps lone and frigid