No Modernism Without Lesbians by Diana Souhami (latest books to read txt) 📕

Bryher was Sylvia Beach’s trusted friend for forty years. They confided, corresponded and looked out for each other even when living in different countries. Bryher discreetly helped Sylvia and Adrienne Monnier keep their bookshops going. In her memoirs, she wrote:

There was only one street in Paris for me, the rue de l’Odéon. It is association I suppose, but I have always considered it one of the most beautiful streets in the world. It meant naturally Sylvia and Adrienne and the happy hours that I spent in their libraries. Has there ever been another bookshop like Shakespeare and Company? It was not just the crowded shelves, the little bust of Shakespeare nor the many informal photographs of her friends, it was Sylvia herself, standing like a passenger from the Mayflower with the wind still blowing through her hair and a thorough command of French slang, waiting to help us and be our guide. She found us printers, translators and rooms… she was the perfect Ambassador and I doubt if a citizen has ever done more to spread knowledge of America abroad.

name of the father

Bryher was born Annie Winifred Glover on 2 September 1894 in the English seaside town of Margate; on her birth certificate was a dash in the space headed Name of Father. Officially she was illegitimate, for though her parents lived together, they were not married. Her father, John Reeves Ellerman, did not marry Hannah Glover, her mother, until Bryher was fifteen. There was the impediment of an existing husband. Only when Hannah Glover belatedly gave birth to a son did Sir John, as he had then become, marry her to accord legitimacy to his son and heir and, as a secondary consideration, to his teenage daughter.

John Ellerman, a self-made man

Bryher’s father was a self-made man. When he died in 1933 aged seventy-one, he left an estate of more than £36 million, the largest recorded fortune in Britain.1 He was born in Hull in 1862, the only child of an English mother and German father. Bryher said she searched the family tree in vain, hoping for Jewish ancestry. His own father died when he was nine. He left home aged fourteen, was articled to a Birmingham chartered accountant, and when he was twenty-four he started his own accountancy firm, John Ellerman & Co., in Moorgate, London.

By scrutiny of their accounts, he identified ailing shipping companies that commanded South African, Atlantic and Indian routes, took them over as the sole stakeholder, and combined them all into what quickly became the giant Ellerman Lines. His first competitive purchase of a shipping line was for Leyland & Company. He bid for this after Frederick Leyland collapsed and died of a heart attack in 1892, aged sixty, at Blackfriars Station in London. Ellerman then bought up other lines, like Thomas Wilson’s of Hull, the largest privately owned shipping line in the world. In 1905 he was created a baronet for lending ships to the British government in the Boer War, and by 1917 he owned not only as many ships as were in the entire French merchant navy, but also swathes of prime London property and most of the shares in the Financial Times, The Times, The Illustrated London News, The Sphere, Tatler and The Sketch. He was also a major shareholder in twenty-two collieries and seventy breweries.

He had a mind like a latter-day computer, with a kind of Euclidean power of prediction. At any given time he knew which of his ships was where, what it carried, where it would unload, how many passengers would embark and disembark and what each journey was worth. Apparently he predicted, even to the months, the dates of both world wars.

As a parent, he was remote. The Mayfair house at 1 South Audley Street where Bryher was brought up was huge, the chauffeurs liveried, the servants numerous. Sir John worked long hours, amassing money by the lax rules of Victorian enterprise culture. He was portly, immaculate, his hands laced across his middle when he sat, ‘his beard so neat it could have been applied with spirit gum’, his eyes ice-blue, as were Bryher’s. He watched steadily, was soft-spoken and never discourteous. His eyes did not seem mirthful when he laughed.

He had no particular vision of what he wanted to do with his colossal wealth beyond creating more of it and bequeathing his empire to a son. Though as rich as Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller, little was known of him, for he shunned publicity and society. His personal habits were abstemious: an early supper, a single whisky and to bed at ten. Hannah Glover, Bryher’s mother, was deaf, selectively so, a side effect of scarlet fever. She did what he required of her. To the first of Bryher’s gay ersatz husbands, she said of Sir John: ‘He keeps me in a glass case but I keep human.’

Bryher’s childhood

Sir John was fond of his daughter, whom he called Winifred or Dolly, but he had fixed ideas of a woman’s place. An empty atmosphere pervaded 1 South Audley Street. Despite the size and opulence of the house, there was little or no conversation or emotional exchange between its three occupants. Bryher, the only child for fifteen years, never played with and seldom saw a child of her own age.

She suffered her restrictive clothes, the sense she could not be the appropriate daughter, a succession of nannies and governesses. She wished she were her father’s son so as to pass his test of approval. She learned horse riding and fencing: ‘I found the French fleuret too formal and switched to the duelling sword dreaming of challenges.’ She had a sense of imprisonment, of identity denied:

In the early nineteen hundreds so many harmless things were forbidden us. We might not feel water nor sand nor earth when two kinds of drawers and two kinds of petticoats, a pinafore and serge frock imposed, as I can still remember,