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

America, failed relationships with men, severance from her year-old baby, anxiety over motherhood, and pressure from the weight of Bryher’s full-on love and indulgent wealth all affected her. ‘They are both very peculiar,’ Havelock Ellis wrote in a letter home. As if he wasn’t.

He left them and made his own way home alone. At the end of March, Bryher and H.D. then cruised to Corfu on the SS Hélène, stopping at little islands on the way. In Corfu town, they stayed five weeks in a suite at the Belle Venise Hotel, the ‘jewel in the crown’ of nineteenth-century Corfu. They walked among olive groves, drove to the town of Potamós, visited the Byzantine monastery at Paleokastritsa, went to the hilltop village of Pelekas, saw the Temple of Artemis at Kanoni. At times H.D. felt elated and liberated, as if, for many years, she had been ‘crawling about existing under mist and fog’. The whirlwind of impressions, she said, ‘will flood over me when I leave’. But before she left she suffered hallucinations and saw helmeted faces and tiny black people climbing up a wall of their rooms in the Belle Venise:

They are not important but it would be a calamity if one of them got stuck on one’s eye. There was that sort of feeling people, people, why did they annoy me so? Would they eventually cloud my vision, or worse still would one of them get stuck in my eye?

Bryher interpreted these hallucinations not as symptoms of illness but as imaginative inspiration. Here was the mind of the creative genius. She encouraged H.D. to probe into the meaning of these images. Which sent H.D. crazier. Years later, in Tribute to Freud, H.D. wrote about this breakdown:

this writing on the wall before me, could not be shared with anyone except the girl who stood so bravely beside me. This girl said without hesitation, ‘Go on.’ It was she really who had the detachment and the integrity of the Pythoness of Delphi. But it was I, battered and disassociated from my American family and my English friends, who was seeing the pictures, who was reading the writing or who was granted the inner vision.

That was thirty-six years later, in 1956. At the time, for Bryher, twenty-five years old and cocooned from experience of other people, the situation took some managing. Their resident psychoanalyst had fled. Havelock Ellis wrote: ‘Hilda went right out of her mind and Bryher had to bring her back overland.’

H.D. would not face travelling back by sea. She feared collision with icebergs, as with the Titanic. Bryher made other arrangements to get her lover home. At the end of April they made the short boat trip on the SS Arcadia through the Gulf of Corinth to the Italian port of Brindisi, rested up at the Hotel Europe, took the train to Rome, stayed at the Grand Hotel, and within weeks were back at the Mullion Cove Hotel in the reassuring landscape of Cornwall. From there they returned to their flat at Bullingham Mansions in Kensington.

where to live

Once back from Greece, Bryher spent little time at South Audley Street. To her parents’ concern, she was mostly at the Kensington flat with H.D. Bryher felt unsettled by their disapproval and unable to navigate her double life.

H.D. was homesick for America. She missed friends and family, and wanted to find a home for her child, and leave behind her failed marriage and the depressed aftermath of European war. She hinted to Amy Lowell at her close relationship with Bryher; she praised Bryher’s work and said they would all meet when they came to America in the autumn. She also wrote to Marianne Moore of plans to winter in California with Bryher, Perdita and her nurse, so as to escape the fog and rain of England and with thoughts and plans of settling there.

America

Both H.D. and Bryher hoped relocating to America would answer their problems. Bryher wanted to please H.D. and be her partner. America was H.D.’s country and Bryher wanted to see her acclaimed there. For herself, she needed to escape South Audley Street and her parents’ wishes. In her autobiographical novel Two Selves, which she published in 1923, she wrote:

If people got between one and one’s vision one had to cut them out…

‘I want to be free….It’s not that I’m not grateful for all you’ve done for me but I can’t help wanting to use my brain. If I don’t go away I can’t develop. I don’t want to hurt your feelings. Surely you must see that I don’t want to hurt your feelings. But I want to live by myself.’

‘But how are you not free?’ She knew that would be the astonished answer. ‘What have you ever been forbidden to do?’

‘It’s the thousand things too unimportant to mention. But that make a barrier… Not cutting my hair short… I want to write. I have never been my real self to you. I have been silent about the things I care about. Because I knew you hated me to be rough and independent.

She could not say this. Could not hurt people’s feelings. Things had gone on too long.

But how to partner H.D. was also a problem for Bryher. Her commitment was total, she thought H.D. a genius, but finding a context was not going to be easy. To H.D., on some level other people were like trees blowing in the wind. And Bryher had her own bouts of confusion and temper loss. H.D. observed her distress but was not a person to protect or console. In later life, Bryher reflected that she did not understand her own motivation until she had undergone years of psychoanalysis with Hanns Sachs, a colleague of Freud’s.

Bryher, H.D., Perdita and a nurse set off for America in late August 1920 on the SS Adriatic, the fastest ocean liner and the first to have an indoor swimming pool. Bryher was in search of a brave new world where she could be who she was,