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

By the terms of her father’s will, Bryher received £600,000 outright and a further £600,000 in trust.11 Her brother received £600,000 outright and £2,000,000 in trust. Extravagant though it was, the settlement insulted her. In Development, she had written of herself:

To possess the intellect, the hopes, the ambitions of a man, unsoftened by any feminine attribute, to have these sheathed in convention, impossible to break, without hurt to those she had no wish to hurt, to feel so thoroughly unlike a girl—this was the tragedy.

Hurt was all around Bryher when it came to family matters. Freud wrote to her from Vienna three days after her father’s death:

I read the news in our newspapers with great sympathy for you, not without a certain envy towards him. I suspect you will have a turbulent time ahead of you, during which a lot will depend on your mother’s health and behaviour. My son Ernst’s address is: Mascot Hotel, York Street, Baker Street, W.1. I don’t know for how long he’ll be staying in London still. Fa and Tattoun are fine and ask to be remembered to you.

Warmly yours

Freud

Fa and Tattoun were Freud’s chow puppies from Yofi, which Bryher had not felt able to house at Kenwin. Freud foresaw that Bryher would be tested by her father’s will. By the distribution of the wealth her father had accumulated, Bryher was made to feel of less value than her brother. Her inheritance was huge, she already benefited from substantial investments from her father, but her younger brother was to receive three times more. Money was a metaphor for worth. Whatever the size of the fortune, she was perceived as less deserving of it. The insult was compounded because she felt herself to have ‘the intellect, hopes and ambitions of a man, unsoftened by any feminine attribute’. Bryher was as clever and courageous as any man, so why an insistence on gender that she did not apply to herself?

a fractured world

H.D.’s intense delving with Freud helped her recover her poetic voice and accept her dependency on Bryher. But analysis inevitably made clear that the price for this dependency was her autonomy. H.D. tried to distance herself from Bryher. In November 1934, as the sessions were coming to an end, she wrote to her:

PLEASE Fido, if you love me, and love my work, leave that to work its own will in its own way… Please for six months or a year do NOT probe me about my writing.

It seemed H.D. related her writer’s block to the control Bryher exerted over her. It was hard for Bryher to be told to keep away. She did love H.D. and she did love her work and had done everything to serve H.D.’s poetic gift. Despite her authoritative temperament, she tried to keep this boundary too.

Back at Kenwin after her father’s death, Bryher’s main preoccupation was the impact of fascism in Europe. With her additional wealth, she renegotiated trust funds for H.D. and Dorothy Richardson and for herself hired a new housekeeper, Elsie Volkart, whom she called ‘the dragon’.

There were no more shared projects with Macpherson. Close Up folded. Fascism meant film-makers like Eisenstein and Fritz Lang left for America. Any film with Jewish backing or involvement was forbidden distribution in Germany. Janet Flanner wrote in her New Yorker ‘Letter from Paris’ in 1934:

from now on there will apparently be no more of those excellent modern films coming out of Germany, except maybe some featuring Friedrich der Grosse with a little up-to-date swastika moustache.

Switzerland opened its borders to Jewish refugees, though in Zurich they were not allowed to seek work because of existing unemployment.

Macpherson was only intermittently at Kenwin. He began a relationship with David Wickham, a young man from Barbados, and he travelled with him and Norman Douglas. He had no wish to be with H.D. or Bryher, but nor did he want formally to separate or divorce. The marriage suited him financially and made no demands. Bryher suggested he have analysis to find out if he genuinely wanted any sort of life with her. He complained that she tried to control him and change him from what he really was. In August 1934 she wrote him a frosty letter:

I don’t want to change you from what you really are but since I have known you you have been two completely different people. Between 1926 and 1930 you wrote two books, you made four films, you did a lot of work on Close Up, both from the photographic and the editorial side, and you spent practically the whole year with me, entirely happily to judge from your letters which I have. From 1930 to 1934 you dropped your film work entirely, you did less and less for Close Up, some issues not even the photographs and you have written, I think, one book. Almost all this time you have lived at least half the year with other people.

Now the solution once I know which you are is absolutely easy. If you are as you are now, why then we have not an interest in common, I do not like the way you live, and you dislike equally the way I live. Therefore the sooner we are separated or divorced the better. It would be stupid to continue like this.

If you are as you were 1926–30, we had then a great deal in common and there would be a reasonable chance of continuing happily on that basis. I suggested analysis as the way to show which person you wanted to be. But I don’t want to stop you from being the person you want to be. If we are living together, not for a few separated weeks, but for at least two thirds of the year and if we have a community of interests, that is one thing. If you wish of yourself to try analysis, to discover what it is that you really want to be, I’ll wait certainly while you try