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

but there was a kind of unreality in their journeying – as if at heart they could never be a family or find a destination. There was little sense of parenting Perdita, of enjoying her personality or little ways. The plan was to meet with editors and publishers in New York, then visit H.D.’s mother in Orange city in California and leave Perdita with her until they found somewhere peaceful to settle in the Californian countryside, a house where they could live and work.

They arrived in New York on 10 September 1920, H.D.’s thirty-fourth birthday. Amy Lowell and her partner, the actress Ada Dwyer Russell, met them, took them to the Belmont hotel and drove them around the city. H.D. met with friends and peers: Marianne Moore, the editors of the literary magazines – Harriet Monroe from Poetry, Margaret Anderson from The Little Review.

Bryher’s book Development had been published earlier that year in New York. In it, she declared her gender disorientation:

Her one regret was that she was a girl. Never having played with any boys she imagined them wonderful creatures, welded of her favourite heroes and her own fancy, ever seeking adventures, and of course, wiser than any grown-up people. She tried to forget, to escape any reference to being a girl, her knowledge of them being confined to one book read by accident, an impression they liked clothes and were afraid of getting dirty. She was sure if she hoped enough she would turn into a boy.

Amy Lowell wrote a preface. The book received good reviews and sold well. Bryher’s father warned her not to draw attention to the Ellerman name and forbade her to make any revelations about him, his family life or business empire. He insisted that on return to England she should live again at South Audley Street.

In New York, H.D. and Bryher assembled and published a collection of Marianne Moore’s poetry. They called the volume Poems and Bryher financed it. She also made Marianne Moore the first beneficiary from the Bryher Foundation Fund, which she later set up to help hard-up artists. Marianne Moore’s parents had separated before she was born and she lived with her mother, who called her ‘he’ and ‘Uncle Fangs’. They were devoted to each other and slept in the same bed.

William Carlos Williams was a friend of H.D.’s from her college days in Philadelphia. She invited him to the hotel and he brought with him Robert McAlmon, a young impoverished writer. McAlmon was the eighth child of a Presbyterian minister in a small provincial mid-western town. His childhood was miserable; his father beat him and despised his homosexuality. He left home, enrolled at the University of Southern California, dropped out, made his way to Greenwich Village, mixed with writers and artists and lived hand to mouth. When Bryher met him, he was earning a dollar an hour as a life model at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

Bryher thought him authentic. He told her he had ‘the energy of a yearling stallion… we can’t be too careful livers’, he said, ‘or we just won’t live at all.’ He admired her mind and spirit, had read a review of Development in The New Republic and said he too hated school, conformity and ‘timid stepping’. He was disappointed in the New York literary scene. He had written a novel, but knew it would not get past the censors. He longed to join the exodus of American writers, go to Paris, write freely, meet James Joyce, be open about his homosexuality. That was his dream, but he did not have the money for his fare.

McAlmon thought H.D. the best of the Imagists, although he did not rate Imagism and thought it escapist. Bryher, he said, was better than any imagist. She told him of her yearning to be a boy. He said a boy’s life was difficult: beatings, no money, not enough to eat. As for himself, he aspired ‘to sing with my own voice and dance on my own legs and blaspheme and fight – express impulses rather than trying to squeeze them into writing’.

He advised her to ‘see the lightness of wit and clarity of perception of your Greeks’. He intended to get on a freighter, head for Europe and test his luck. Such expressions of freedom resonated with Bryher. She told him not to leave until she got back to New York.

disaffection

Bryher corresponded with McAlmon while she travelled with H.D., H.D.’s widowed mother, Helen Wolle Doolittle, Perdita and the nurse to Los Angeles, Monrovia, Santa Barbara, Carmel. It quickly became clear to Bryher that America was not going to be the answer to the question of where to live and how, with her unorthodox identity and new-found family. She and they were rootless, and she was disaffected with all she saw. H.D., disappointed by Bryher’s aversion to America, felt discouraged and could not work. Her daughter had no home. But Bryher was also fearful of returning to London. ‘I did not want to live in England because I knew I shocked my family with my advanced ideas.’

Bryher published ‘An Impression of America’ in The Sphere. She wrote that she had imagined Santa Barbara to be a quiet sunlit Californian town straggling down from the mountains to the sea, but what she found was a resort:

it is everything I am trying to escape from – a civilisation without life, when I want America, the America that had the energy to lay the miles of railroad we came across, the America that planted the corn, the America that built New York.

She worked on a roman à clef, West, about her disappointment:

I thought America was going to be new, different. And it’s like Victorian England grafted on to the cheap end of Nice. Dust, formality and no end to spending money… Greece was cheap and you had Hymettus. New York was New York, arrogant and barbaric. But here you weighed out gold and silver for suburbia gone