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

parents must not hear of it; Perdita should retain British nationality, which H.D. had through her marriage to Aldington but which Bryher forfeited through her marriage to McAlmon; and Aldington must cooperate. On 4 March, Bryher wrote to Brigit Patmore:

I personally don’t trust R.A. a scrap. Now I suggest, and Robert is very kind and helpful and says that I may, that Robert and I adopt, legally and fully, Perdita. She will take our name, have an immediate settlement on her as regards money, and her education and everything provided for. I have no wish to take her from Hilda’s care, in fact that is the only stipulation that Robert makes, that it does not mean that I drag an infant round with me.

My hands are tied unless she is mine, because there is no fun in providing an expensive education and either having a fight with R.A. in the middle of it, or else having some beastly struggle in the courts of justice.

Please do not mention this matter to anybody as if the thing is carried through it must be done as secretly and quietly as possible. I should prefer that the whole thing was kept silent, that only the parties interested know about it, and that as she was born in England she still stayed on her mother’s passport. It is simply a question that I am not prepared to pay down money for an expensive education and have R.A. making a mess of things in the middle… If H. could get a legal separation with custody of child, things would be different. But I will not spend a lot of money on the infant’s education and have R.A. stick his nose in, in the middle.

Thus the struggle and subterfuge when the law would not allow same-sex marriage. Had fairness ruled, Sylvia Beach might have married Adrienne Monnier, Gertrude Stein would have married Alice B. Toklas,5 Bryher could have married H.D. and Perdita would have had two bona fide mothers. The adoption by Bryher and McAlmon did not happen. Adoption was for a later date with a different husband. But there was a sense of Perdita as an encumbrance, a problem to be negotiated.

Bryher’s stark letter revealed how much Perdita was at the mercy of complex adult relationships and marital law. Her strange unavailable mother could not concentrate on her work if she was in the same apartment with her. She met her biological father on one occasion only and he wanted nothing to do with her. Bryher would ‘throw money’ at her education and care, if conditions were acceptable, but did not want ‘to drag an infant around’ with her.

Perdita could not be sure of her name or address. She bore the name of a man she never saw and who had not wanted her birth registered in his name. She might become Perdita McAlmon, the name of a man who once played with her on a ship. She had been housed at Norland Nursery, shunted from London to Switzerland, sent to a girls’ boarding school. From time to time, her mother’s partner’s deaf mother took her out in a Daimler to view London. Her mother’s mother was a devout Moravian Christian, who lived in Pennsylvania and looked after her on holidays. There was not one special adult to make her feel safe.

That year, 1925, Jonathan Cape published West by Bryher – her impressions of early twentieth-century America – and Heliodora and Other Poems by H.D. The contrast in style and vision was strong, Bryher’s solemn naivety, H.D.’s inspired complexity. In West, Bryher dismissed American landscape:

One could be one’s self in Europe. Because the grass, the trees were familiar. Here not even the air was the same… One was a piece of a puzzle upset in the wrong box.

H.D.’s connection was to an interior terrain:

We strove for a name,

while the light of the lamps burnt thin

and the outer dawn came in,

a ghost, the last at the feast

or the first,

to sit within

with the two that remained

to quibble in flowers and verse

over a girl’s name.

He said, ‘the rain loving’

I said, ‘the narcissus, drunk,

drunk with the rain.’

Yet I had lost

for he said,

‘the rose, the lover’s gift,

is loved of love,’

he said it,

‘loved of love,’

I waited, even as he spoke,

to see the room filled with a light,

as when in winter

the embers catch in a wind

when a room is dank:

so it would be filled, I thought,

our room with a light

when he said

(and he said it first)

‘the rose, the lover’s delight,

is loved of love,’

but the light was the same.

Then he caught,

seeing the fire in my eyes,

my fire, my fever, perhaps,

for he leaned

with the purple wine

stained in his sleeve,

and said this:

‘Did you ever think

a girl’s mouth

caught in a kiss

is a lily that laughs?’

In August, Bryher rented two Knightsbridge flats, one with a seven-year lease at 26 Sloane Street for H.D. and another for McAlmon at 45 Parkside. Bryher, when in London, stayed at South Audley Street or in one or other of the flats. This was a family that needed space.

another lover, another husband

In late 1926, H.D.’s first lesbian love, Frances Gregg, was operated on for cancer in St George’s Hospital, London. She recovered well. In December she introduced H.D. to a friend, Kenneth Macpherson, a film-maker and photographer. He was twenty-four, H.D. was forty. His father was an artist; his mother, like Kenneth, had affairs with young men.6

Macpherson and H.D. began an affair. She said she loved him. He said he needed her but,

Please if you can stay near me. I see now how exactly that is what I need. I would do anything for you… Some desperate hurt looks out of your eyes… As things are now, all that you were to me yesterday is all that I want or ask – all that anyone could want or ask – it came so swiftly after you had spoken of gods upon earth, and I knew that I had seen god or goddess in you then. God but you have in you that