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

She met Richard Aldington at a party in London in 1911 when she was twenty and he was twenty-six. He thought her the finest of poets and had no problem with her love for Frances Gregg. They rented rooms together in a house in Kensington – 6 Church Walk. Ezra Pound was a neighbour. They all wanted to free poetry from past constraints, use only essential words, discard rules about rhyme. They wanted too to discard rules in their personal lives. H.D. said that ‘to deny love entrance is to crush and break beauty. Let love crush & break you but never break love by denial and conscience.’

She believed the hurt she suffered ‘freed my song – this is most precious to me’.

She and Aldington travelled together to Paris, Italy, Capri. Ezra Pound, jealous, wrote a poem, ‘The Faun’. It began:

Ha! sir, I have seen you sniffing and snoozling

                                   about my flowers.

And what, pray, do you know about

horticulture, you capriped?

In Venice, Aldington met H.D.’s parents, who did not approve of him any more than of Ezra Pound. Nonetheless, on 18 October 1913 Aldington and H.D. married at Kensington Registry Office in London with Professor Doolittle and Ezra Pound as witnesses. They rented a house in Hampstead, next door to D.H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda. The following August, war was declared. H.D. was pregnant. She became seriously ill in the last months of pregnancy and the baby was stillborn. ‘Why is it always the girl who dies’ was her lament – for her own mother had given birth to two stillborn baby girls. After the trauma, she no longer wanted sex with Aldington, although she wanted his love and support. She was unfazed or even encouraging of his affairs with other women, in particular his affair with Dorothy ‘Arabella’ Yorke.

Aldington was conscripted in 1916. After he left, H.D. had auditory hallucinations and from outside of her head heard his voice calling her. D.H. and Frieda Lawrence were sympathetic to her mental fragility. ‘Hilda gets very low at times,’ Frieda wrote to Amy Lowell. ‘It isn’t good for her to be alone and Richard away, she feels it very much…’

By 1918 H.D. was alone in temporary lodgings in Mecklenburgh Square in London’s King’s Cross. Through the Lawrences she met Cecil Gray, who had until then avoided conscription because of ‘a heart tic’. He told her he loved her. In his Cornwall cottage, he was working on a musical interpretation of Flaubert’s The Temptation of St Anthony. In March he pleaded with H.D. to join him. Lawrence was unhappy at her going. H.D. seemed unclear about what she was doing or with whom. Aldington wrote to her almost every day; he admitted they had grown apart, but was jealous of her being with Gray. Then in May he was sent with the British Expeditionary Force to the Western Front and the hell of front-line battle. He wrote to H.D. of ‘them bloody, bleedin’ fuckin’ trenches… I wish I wasn’t a soldier.’ He told her in a way he cared most terribly for her and in a way he cared for Arabella, ‘but there are too many dead men, too much misery… But you are silly to think that our love would ever be broken.’

a devilish mess

The First World War threw H.D.’s life into turmoil. She called it ‘the stillborn generation’. Her crises of identity and bouts of insanity were recurring and painful. She wrote: ‘I feel my work is beautiful. I have a deep faith in it, an absolute faith. But sometimes I have no faith in myself.’

For Bryher, meeting H.D., whom she felt she knew through her work, was love before first sight. For herself, she was insulated from the war and from life. She described H.D. as ‘the most beautiful figure that I had ever seen with a face that came directly from a Greek statue, and the body of an athlete’. She did not know, when she went to tea on 17 July, that H.D. was pregnant with Cecil Gray’s child.

Initially, the two women corresponded but did not often meet. Bryher returned to the confines of South Audley Street. She self-published a eulogistic essay, Amy Lowell: A Critical Appreciation. In gratitude, Amy Lowell arranged for Harriet Monroe, editor of the magazine Poetry, to publish three of Bryher’s poems, ‘Waste’, ‘Rejection’ and ‘Wakefulness’.

Time magazine front cover featuring poet Amy Lowell © Archive PL / Alamy

Two weeks after meeting Bryher, H.D. wrote to tell Aldington she was pregnant, that the father was Cecil Gray and conception had been in early July. The following month, Gray was conscripted. He did not know H.D. was pregnant with his child.

‘You seem to be in rather a devilish mess,’ Aldington wrote to H.D. on 3 August.

I will accept this child as mine if you wish, or follow any other course which seems desirable to you. I enclose five pounds, I will send you as much of my pay as I can. Try & keep it by for doctors &c. You will need it.

He added he hoped she was mistaken about this pregnancy and that he loved her but desired Arabella.

The next day he felt differently:

Damn it Dooley, I am fed up to have lost you. I was an idiot to let you go away with Grey… I never really thought you would have a child with him. And Dooley, I can’t ever really love this little one – there’s our own sweet dead baby I’ll never forget. I should always hate this one for being alive…I love you & I want you to be happy & have lovers & girl lovers if you want, but I don’t want to lose you as I should if this happened…

H.D. was in a devilish mess. Neither or none of the men in her life was willing to be father to this child. When she finally told Gray of her pregnancy, he was silent. On leave, he did