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

to freighted ships baffled in wind and blast.

H.D. was, throughout her life, ‘baffled in wind and blast’. Bryher was her North Star. Other stars, more bright and alluring, reeled and fell from sight when the going got stormy. As a provider, Bryher was more of a man than Aldington or Gray. Aldington proffered a fiver but said he would always hate his wife’s baby for being alive. Gray ran from the scene and would not face responsibility for having fathered a child.

Bryher offered herself as more than a partner to H.D., more than a ‘girl lover’ or friend. She was the resolution to this devilish mess. H.D. would have the best accommodation, travel anywhere in the world, buy what she wanted and have provision for her child. She could be free to write. Bryher’s devotion would be steel-set. She would be her steadfast partner, her wise guardian. That year she financed the publishing of H.D.’s volume of verse Hymen with Harriet Weaver’s Egoist Press and subsidized the Poets’ Translation Series where H.D.’s Greek translations appeared.

that odd commanding look

So H.D. chose to make her life’s voyage under Bryher’s lone and frigid tryst. But there was a barrier to her affection. She found Bryher controlling; ‘cold and imperious’. She described her eyes as ‘bluer than blue, bluer than gentian, than convolvulus, than forget-me-not, than the blue of pansies. They were a child’s eyes, gone wild and fair with gladness.’

But she was not drawn to the personality behind this blueness:

that odd commanding look and that certainty and that lack of understanding and that utter understanding that goes with certain types of people… people who were simple and domineering never having known anything of scraping, of terror at the wrong thing, of the wrong people. Hard face, child face, how can you be so hard? The smile froze across the white large teeth and the white perfect teeth showed the lips as hard, coral red, clear, beautifully cut and yet the child was not beautiful.

There was something out of reach in Bryher: a kinship with her father’s computing mind and her brother’s remorseless interest in rodents. She wanted to be part of H.D.’s creative world with her own gender identity understood. But H.D. was not particularly sympathetic to Bryher’s problems, the strange obstinacy of the solitary child, the girl who was privileged but undermined and with a sense of encasement in the wrong body. H.D. declared love and affection for Bryher, but never passion. She said she had a brain where her heart ought to be, though she came to trust this brain and not once did Bryher fail her. ‘When I met Bryher first’, H.D. wrote,

a little thing – all tense, dressed like a princess, buns over her ears – she said to me ‘you’re the first person who treats me like a human being. Everyone else looks at me as though they saw just over my head a funnel out of which pours gold coins.’

But H.D. quickly became dependent on the gold coins that poured from the Ellerman funnel. Bryher’s father was not just the richest man in Britain, he was the richest by a factor of four, the largest taxpayer in the country. Bryher neither wanted nor expected acknowledgement or thanks. H.D. was neither calculating nor mercenary, but she knew the measure of the gift: rescue from a devilish mess and absolute creative freedom of the sort most writers dare not dream.

In return, H.D. gave Bryher the avenue of escape from South Audley Street, a path for creative endeavour and a revisionist lifestyle. They talked of living together. Bryher said she would be glad to be with her ‘almost entirely’ and promised to provide for Perdita.

They needed each other, though the road was not easy. H.D. needed Bryher’s wealth and strength, her generosity and care. She was not in love with her and often said she would leave her. She described herself as at times very lonely with Bryher. But, she confided to Ezra Pound, Bryher looked after Perdita and ‘that seemed to be the only thing I was hanging on for’:

I put down a lot of myself after Perdita’s birth. I loved Richard very much and you know he threatened to use Perdita to divorce me and to have me locked up if I registered her as legitimate.

Hilda’s circle did not like me at all

Bryher, when she returned with H.D. from Cornwall in the summer of 1919, rented a London flat for them both in Kensington Church Street, 16 Bullingham Mansions, an Edwardian block near the nursery where Perdita was almost permanently ensconced. ‘Hilda’s circle did not like me at all’, Bryher said of her cool reception into H.D.’s world. Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington called at the flat. Both felt redundant. Ezra Pound thought Bryher impossible. She seemed guarded, self-assured, dominating even through her silence. In August, when Aldington was hard up, H.D. gave him £10. It was Bryher’s money.

Bryher seemed an unlikely proponent of modernism. She did not look or behave like a poet or an artist. She was emphatic, and businesslike. She wrote unflowery prose and wooed with precision:

‘It meant everything to talk that day of Mallarmé.’

‘It meant so much to see you yesterday.’

‘I’ll send the car over to fetch you.’

Many cars were sent.

H.D. and South Audley Street

H.D., when introduced to Sir John and Lady Ellerman, could not communicate with them nor they with her. She was presented as a quasi chaperone for Bryher, a role she struggled to perform. After the first encounter she always took a tranquillizer before visiting. The Ellermans were disconcerted. Why was their daughter spending so much time with this woman, this poet who was separated from her husband and who had a newborn daughter whom the father did not acknowledge? This was not an arrangement they wished to understand. They suspected Winifred’s private life was irregular and they feared for her reputation and the Ellerman name. They wanted her married. Sir John did not threaten to withdraw the