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

swift, impetuous, sudden divinity. Love me if you can. Hilda I need you. But be free!

He wanted her, but not too much of her. Near, but not too near. Not nearer than yesterday.

Like McAlmon, Macpherson lacked money of his own and had career ambitions but no prospects. He was apprenticed to a commercial artist but wanted to make films. Photography and film-making were expensive and needed financial backing. Bryher liked Macpherson’s roughness, embrace of new ideas, youth and energy, in much the same way as she had once liked McAlmon’s, and she was interested in the emerging art of cinema. Also, by 1926, she was tired of McAlmon: tired of his drinking, squandering of funds and diminished creative influence. She accused him of being alcoholic and a dope fiend. He was neither compliant nor reliable. But he did not want to divorce her.

She accepted Macpherson’s sexual relationship with H.D. and his homosexuality. He could be a new member of her unconventional family, a recipient of her enabling patronage. She also wanted to help H.D. find a legal family context for Perdita so as to pay for her ‘expensive education’ without ‘beastly struggle in the courts of justice’. If Bryher married Macpherson, who was Scottish, and as husband and wife they adopted Perdita, British citizenship would be acquired all round. H.D. would still be Perdita’s legal British birth mother and Aldington would no longer be a threat.

H.D. said of Macpherson that he was ‘very untravelled’. He had not been as far as Paris. Bryher proposed marriage to him and offered to finance his film-making. Her money would fuel all plans. All he need do was accept her as head of the household and at the centre of arrangements. Marriage to Bryher was as appealing to Macpherson as it had been to McAlmon. Such a marriage and free love with H.D. did not preclude his having sex with men. H.D. had no acquaintance with or insistence on monogamy.

They all travelled to Territet via Paris, where Bryher bought Macpherson his first movie camera.

In June 1927 Bryher divorced Robert McAlmon, who then became known in Paris as Robert McAlimony. His revenge was to write a scathing roman à clef, A Scarlet Pansy, under the pseudonym Robert Scully. McAlmon was the Pansy or Fay Étrange from Kuntsville, Pennsylvania, who worked as a nude model. Bryher was Marjorie Bull-Dike. Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas were among the lesbians cast as Fuchs, Pickup, Butsch, Godown and Kuntz. Like McAlmon’s memoir Being Geniuses Together, which he published in 1938, his Scarlet Pansy was too vitriolic and not funny enough and as a memoir did not compare in style with Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack or Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast or Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

On 1 September, Bryher and Kenneth Macpherson married in Chelsea Registry Office in London with H.D. and Bryher’s brother, John, as witnesses. The following March, Mr and Mrs Macpherson formally adopted Perdita.

And so, dressed in evening clothes from Savile Row and with cufflinks from Cartier, husband number two, Kenneth Macpherson, smoked after-dinner cigars with Sir John Ellerman in the deep leather armchairs of the library at 1 South Audley Street.

Hoping to be a man of the world and with requisite subaltern respect, I would nod sagely and knit my brow. One was really trying to communicate with the Ice Cap… I decided he was a sort of Eternomatic precision instrument, a full-time solitary chess-game. … I accepted that John thought little of me and in his way he was right.

Bryher, back in the parental home, regressed to a version of Winifred or Dolly, drawn into behaviour that intellectually she despised. The Ellermans belonged to the world of Empire and money, power and privilege, low pay for miners and formal landscape paintings. Bryher, though a rebel, was inextricably linked to this world.

Macpherson could not sit in Sir John’s library and speak of his own revisionist views: of les Fauves, Dada, Cubism, Surrealism, experimental film; of his marriage of convenience from which no progeny would follow because he, the groom, felt not a whiff of desire for his wife, nor she for him. The truth could not be spoken. It could not be said that Sir John’s daughter saw herself as a biological mistake, a he trapped in the body of a she, and that her essentially homosexual husband was having an affair with her bisexual partner. Pretence was needed, because Ellerman’s money funded such modernist revision.

Bryher and her husband went with Sir John and Lady Ellerman to the opening night of Show Boat at Drury Lane. Ivor Novello’s mother, a friend of Lady Ellerman, was in their party, smothered in diamonds and pale blue ostrich feathers. ‘It’s easy to see Dolly married him for his looks,’ she said of Macpherson in his white tie and tails. They were in the Royal Box, which was wreathed with carnations and roses. There was applause as they entered. Bryher wore floral chiffon. Macpherson said of her:

She looked a fright… This evening dress had been acquired for her by her mother, to turn her back into Dolly. What was meant to be a draped cape behind, hung down in front as if to conceal pregnancy. You could see crisscross stitching down the seams.

Bryher was wearing the dress inside out and back to front. ‘How is one to know?’ she asked. In the interval, in an anteroom, they were served caviare and champagne by peruked lackeys in white satin tails and red velvet breeches. Macpherson downed too many brandies.

family affairs

In Switzerland, the family lived at Riant Chateau. Perdita began her expensive education. H.D. found life in Switzerland ‘too self contained and insulated’, and though she loathed the air and fog in London, she needed escape to 26 Sloane Street. Kenneth Macpherson decorated the apartment with camp opulence: a gold Buddha beside a brocaded divan bed, damask curtains, Lalique glass wall brackets. H.D. had ‘a little Swiss maid named Sophie who does not speak English’.