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

it but I cannot continue with you if you wish to go on with the same conditions that you have lived with since last January.

Macpherson did not try analysis, nor did he try to rekindle a community of interests with Bryher, or to live with her again.

H.D. in London

In London, H.D. continued analysis with an Austrian friend of Freud’s, Walter Schmideberg, who shared his consulting room with his mother-in-law, Melanie Klein. Schmideberg helped H.D. with the stress caused when Aldington finally divorced her in 1938 to marry Brigit Patmore’s former daughter-in-law, Netta, who was pregnant with his child. He wanted the child to be legitimate.

H.D. visited Kenwin but did not view it as home. Though afraid of the prospect of war, she did not share Bryher’s efforts to help European Jews escape Nazi tyranny, nor did she travel with her. She took Perdita to Greece in March and April 1932, they visited Athens and Delphi, but her base was London and a flat at 49 Lowndes Square in Knightsbridge.

In February 1935, Silvia Dobson, a primary school teacher and aspiring writer, wrote H.D. a fan letter. H.D. invited her to tea and she visited on Valentine’s Day. She was twenty-six, H.D. was forty-nine. They became lovers under H.D.’s rules of free love and not much proximity. They travelled to Venice together and indulged a great deal in what Freud called H.D.’s ‘star fish stuff’. They drew up astrological charts, H.D. experienced ‘intense states’ of perception, and when Silvia sent her flowers she said one of the lilies would protect her, for it had ‘five buds and flowers and five is the pentacle to keep off witches. Five is Mercury and Mercury is the Messenger or Gabriel of the Zodiac. Isn’t he too Virgo.’

Silvia Dobson also began analysis, paid for and arranged by Bryher.

the road to war

From the early 1930s, Bryher felt she tried and failed to get people to face the eventuality of another war. Any brave publishing enterprise in Berlin became impossible. Determined to keep cultural innovation alive, in 1935 Bryher bought the London-based magazine Life and Letters, renamed it Life and Letters Today and installed Robert Herring as editor. She wanted an outlet for H.D.’s writing and for the work of friends and contemporaries, to keep an international scope and to ensure contributors got paid. The first issue featured work from H.D., Mary Butts, Havelock Ellis, Kenneth Macpherson, Lotte Reiniger and Gertrude Stein.

The magazine ran from 1935 until 1950. With her usual foresight, Bryher stockpiled paper so publication continued throughout the war years when other magazines folded through paper shortages. Life and Letters Today published poetry, opinion pieces, articles, short stories and theatre, cinema and book reviews. Dorothy Richardson, the Sitwells, Marianne Moore, Sartre, André Gide, Paul Valéry, Elizabeth Bishop and T.S. Eliot all contributed, as did Perdita, who was now sixteen. H.D. published serially her impressions of Freud.

Until the outbreak of war, Bryher maintained her habit of travel. She took Perdita to America in the spring of 1935, she stayed with Sylvia Beach in Paris, visited Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in their summer house at Bilignin near Aix-les-Bains, and there was a stream of guests at Kenwin. But her urgent task was to help Jewish doctors, lawyers, psychologists and intellectuals escape Nazi-controlled areas and ensure their safe havens in other countries. By 1940, when she herself had to flee Switzerland, she had helped, with money, contacts and sponsorship, 105 such people, 60 of them Jews, escape the Nazis. She established a fund in America for psychoanalytical training, financed the smuggling of documents, helped Walter Benjamin get to Paris and Freud, his wife Martha and daughter Anna, to London. Of Freud’s other children, she helped Oliver, an engineer, get to Paris and his daughter Mathilde to the south of France.

Freud reached London on 6 June 1938. On 16 November, he wrote to the editor of Time and Tide:

I came to Vienna as a small child of 4 years from a small town in Moravia. After 78 years of assiduous work I had to leave my home, saw the Scientific Society I had founded, dissolved, our institutions destroyed, our printing Press ‘Verlag’ taken over by the invaders, the books I had published, confiscated or reduced to pulp, my children expelled from their professions…

Such was the work of dictators, censors and racists. Janet Flanner in her letter for The New Yorker wrote of how Brussels was packed with refugees and of how, at Verviers near the Belgian/German frontier, customs officers stayed up half the night to search out and detain refugees who, with packs on their backs and no visas on their passports, tried to sneak through the fields and over the border in darkness.

In February 1940 Bryher wrote:

I blame the English government intensely for not having stopped Hitler before German rearmament became serious. As it is there is nothing now but to fight it out for were the Germans to triumph there would be no more liberty, art or thought in Europe.

more war

Bryher’s mother died in September 1939 in a hospital in Truro, Cornwall. The South Audley Street house then passed to Bryher’s brother. ‘I had no idea where he was’, Bryher wrote. ‘The few necessary business arrangements were made through our lawyers.’ Sigmund Freud died in London the same month of throat cancer. He was eighty-three.

In Switzerland, there was not enough fuel to heat Kenwin, and Elsie Volkart, Bryher’s housekeeper, moved to a little house near Lausanne. Bryher listened on the radio to the invasion of France on 10 May 1940. By September, with the threat of Germany invading England, she needed to get to London and H.D., though she hated the thought of leaving Kenwin and Switzerland. ‘Ask me to die for England but do not ask me to live in the British climate’ was her view.

Because of her refugee work, she was on the German authorities’ blacklist. She learned, like Sylvia Beach and Gertrude Stein, that ‘when people are fighting for their