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

free, and away from school and South Audley Street. Her attachment to Cornwall and her friendship and support of Doris became lifelong:

There was something about Cornwall that made us forget the difficulties of getting there. It was older, less tolerant of the human race, yet offering some sudden moments of illumination such as I have never felt in any other land. Once there, I never wanted to leave it, yet I also knew that I should do no work, moment would succeed moment of hibernation and dream.

When adult, and in command of her own affairs, Bryher bought Doris a daffodil farm in Trenoweth Valley in St Keverne in Cornwall. She took holidays at this farm and stayed there when London was being bombed in the Second World War.

complete frustration

On leaving school, Bryher asked her father to let her work in the family business. He refused. ‘Women will never be accepted at conferences,’ he said. In 1914 she applied to work as a land girl. She was twenty. Her father’s signed permission was needed and he would not give it. Sylvia Beach’s parents encouraged her freedom of choice; Bryher’s sought her conformity. Only by subterfuge could she be free. Her father allowed her request to study Arabic at the University of London but her sense of being blocked and thwarted was acute: ‘I waste in a raw world, dumb, unendurable and old,’ she wrote. She became suicidal:

Complete frustration leads to a preoccupation with death. I could think of nothing else. There was plenty of vitality in me but this only made the situation worse. I found a bottle of rat poison in a cupboard and the only thing that prevented me from swallowing it was that I did not want to hurt my parents. For myself death seemed infinitely preferable to the subexistence we had to endure. The rat poison became my talisman. I could struggle on as long as I knew that it was mine for the taking… Under such circumstances I am always amazed now that I survived.

She did not correlate her brother’s later absorption in the behaviour of rodents with her own preoccupation with rat poison in a cupboard. She said her one overmastering passion was to be free, to get out of South Audley Street, open herself to new experience, live her own life.

To express the humiliation of being trapped as a woman in a world claimed by men, she began writing Development, about her traumatic school days, ‘at the rate of about a phrase a day, written almost with blood’. In it, she advocated educational reform for women:

I have always been a feminist if that word means fighting for women’s rights and I glory in it… Equality means equality with no special privileges or advantages on either side, but why should men have all the interesting jobs?

She identified as a feminist even while feeling she was at heart a man.

Like Sylvia Beach and Natalie Barney, Bryher read the symbolist poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé – poems of dreams of an ideal world: ‘for the next twenty years my principles of conduct were founded upon his ideas’, she said. She called him ‘my master’. Mallarmé’s ideas were to purify speech, use contemporary language, avoid the hackneyed and ‘paint not the object but the effect it produces’. Poetry and art were about evocation and suggestion: ‘between the lines and above the glance communication is achieved’. Mallarmé, for Bryher, hinted at the buried life, identity unexpressed, the mind liberated from purely conscious thought. She resolved to be a writer. She published a poetry collection, Region of Lutany, in 1914 – poems of longing for distant places and of yearning for freedom. She learned by heart all the poems in H.D.’s collection Sea Garden. This, she said, was the one book above all others that made her self-aware: ‘The rhythms were new, it evoked for me both the Scillies and the South. It touched Mallarmé’s vision.’ Here were poems that reimagined the world:

to blot out this garden

to forget, to find a new beauty

in some terrible

wind-tortured place.

She did not know that H.D. was Hilda Doolittle, an American woman who had women lovers. Sea Garden, published in 1916, had been financed and edited by Amy Lowell, another American lesbian poet whom Bryher admired from an early age. Amy Lowell was a large woman with dark hair, a deep voice and a masterful manner. Margaret Anderson said she was so vast she had difficulty getting through the door.

Bryher meets H.D.

(Left) Bryher photographed by Gisèle Freund © Bryher Papers General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University © Photo Gisèle Freund / IMEC / Fonds MCC; (right) Poet Hilda Doolittle © Bettmann / Getty Images

Bryher wanted to meet H.D. In the summer of 1918, she asked the editor of The Sphere, a journal owned by her father, to find her address. She learned she was staying in Cornwall, near St Ives. Bryher wrote a fan letter, went to Zennor with Doris Banfield, and asked H.D. if she and a friend might visit. H.D. thought her letter was from an elderly schoolmistress. She invited Bryher to tea on 17 July. She told her to look below the ruins of Bosigran Castle for a square house, close to the road, with two tall red chimneys. Bryher was full of anticipation:

Was something going to happen to her at last? If she had a friend, something would burst and she would shoot ahead, be the thing she wanted and disgrace them by her knowledge. Because she would care for no laws, only for happiness. If she found a friend, an answer, the past years would vanish utterly from her mind.

Her words sounded as if written by a gauche schoolgirl rather than an elderly schoolmistress. She wrote them five years after first meeting H.D., by which time more than friendship had happened. The bursting thing she wanted, the shooting ahead, was intimacy and a woman lover. Friend was a catch-all word. There was nothing