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

My friends were all Americans. I wanted to know the country that they came from… I doubt if the books which brought me over could have been written if their authors had not escaped to Europe from the environment of their adolescence. There’s a passion of beauty in them. A whole new world created. I thought that they were writing of what was about them. They were getting away from it. It’s a great joke.

America bewildered Bryher. She was shaped by Victorian England, its class structures and entitlements. Her acquired tastes, sensibilities and sense of history were English and European. She was at ease in Europe. Her disaffection with America equalled McAlmon’s. Like him, she wanted to get on a freighter, head for Europe and test her luck – albeit a freighter with first-class accommodation.

if we married

After six months, in February 1921, Bryher and her dependants were back in New York. They stayed at the Hotel Brevoort on Fifth Avenue. She met again with McAlmon and over tea there proposed to him:

I put my problem before him and suggested that if we married, my family would leave me alone. I would give him part of my allowance, he would join me for occasional visits to my parents, but otherwise we would live strictly separate lives… we neither of us felt the slightest attraction towards each other but remained perfectly friendly. We were divorced in 1927…

This was a way out from her parents’ insistence that when she returned to England, she should live with them and not with H.D.

I was desperately afraid of hurting their feelings. I knew equally well that after a period of comparative freedom, I could not adjust to a conventional routine. I admit that I was foolish but I took the course I did in good faith.

McAlmon readily agreed. They married next day, Valentine’s Day, a Monday, at New York City Hall. H.D.’s view was that Bryher ‘knows what she wants and how much & how little she wants’. Bryher, under the terms of her father’s trust fund, would receive more money if married, but her prime motivation was to have an acceptable reason for leaving her parents’ home.

On the afternoon of her marriage, Bryher went with H.D., but not McAlmon, to tea with Marianne Moore and her mother at 14 St Luke’s Place, Greenwich Village. The ostensible reason was to meet with Scofield Thayer, who owned The Dial, to talk about publishing H.D.’s latest poetry. Marianne Moore was shocked by the marriage. Her view was ‘marriage is a Crusade, there is always tragedy in it. There is no such thing as a prudent marriage.’ But she was appalled by this version; she felt McAlmon was taking advantage of Bryher. He later explained to her ‘it’s an unromantic arrangement between us’, but she wrote a satirical poem, ‘Marriage’, which was seen as a reproach to him. It might also have been a reproach to Scofield Thayer, who asked her to marry him even though he was already married to someone else. Marianne Moore viewed herself as both a confirmed bachelor and wedded to her mother. In Mrs Moore’s view, McAlmon had dishonoured Bryher and insulted the Ellermans and England. She referred to him as the ‘scoundrel bridegroom’.

The press was equally confused. Winifred Ellerman did not show up in Burke’s Peerage. Sir John had not married until 1908, Bryher was born in 1894 and there was no advertised record of her birth, only that of her brother John, now eleven. The New York Times suggested the whole thing was a scam: ‘“Heiress” Writer Weds Village Poet’, it reported. ‘Greenwich Circles Stirred by the Romance of Robert Menzies McAlmon.’ ‘The girl’ was thought to have proposed to and ‘exploited’ him by claiming to be the daughter of Sir John Ellerman, to whom Burke’s Peerage credited only a son.

The truth about what was going on was not surmised.

the Ellermans’ son-in-law

Bryher cabled her news to her parents. For a time her cables went unanswered. Eventually, Sir John asked them both to come over. They booked to sail on the Ellerman White Star liner SS Celtic from Pier 43 on Sunday 20 February. ‘We are in a terrible confusion of packing & unpacking and repacking,’ H.D. wrote.

On the Thursday before the newlyweds left, a celebratory dinner was held in a private room at the Brevoort. Among the guests were Robert McAlmon’s sister Grace, Marianne Moore and her mother, Scofield Thayer, and Florence and William Carlos Williams, who gave Bryher and McAlmon a box of orchids. On the voyage back to England everyone had the sulks, H.D. said. McAlmon was ‘very good’ with Perdita. He had no clear idea of the extent of the Ellerman fortune or what his role as a husband would be.

In London, the married couple moved in to South Audley Street, H.D. was installed in an apartment nearby in a regal part of town, St James’ Court, Buckingham Gate, and Perdita was delivered back to the Norland Nursery but brought out to join her revisionist family on her second birthday. H.D. wrote to Amy Lowell that when the Ellermans recovered from the shock, they

were very, very pleased with ‘Dolly’s’ choice and rather overdid things. They forced upon the couple a whirl of parties and a cascade of gifts and other unimaginable bridal atrocities.

No need for them to know that McAlmon was homosexual, penniless, posed nude as an artists’ model, was overfond of drink and had not a hint of desire for their daughter, who had set up the whole charade. He was a man. She was a woman. He was her husband and their son-in-law. Their daughter was married. She was Mrs McAlmon. She had a good friend who was a poet. The whole set-up could be explained away in more or less socially acceptable terms. No need to have conversations about same-sex love, the role of women, gender dysphoria or primogeniture. No need to upset