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

own lives and for those whom they love, the words “law” and “justice” become empty words’. She burned all papers that might incriminate herself and others and looked for help, from whatever source, to get out of the country. She could not leave by a regular route or take funds with her. ‘I plundered the black market for passports,’ she said.

A favour came from a Swiss man in a travel agency for whose son she had once found a textbook. He told Bryher of seats on a coach, with a collective visa for the business people on it, going from Geneva to Barcelona. Bryher wanted to take a young English student, Grace, the daughter of a friend, with her. She travelled with a suitcase and a rucksack containing enough food for three days. A gruelling journey followed. They journeyed via Grenoble, Sète, Perpignan. It took twenty-one hours to get to Barcelona, her suitcase was searched, she had no money, the British Institute was closed. She cabled relatives in America and ‘oiled the wheels’ with dollars. Not for the first or last time were Bryher’s wheels oiled with banknotes.

After four days they flew to Madrid, then Lisbon, where they remained stuck for three weeks. Bryher took over the sorting of tickets and exit permits. They were put on a waiting list for spare places on ‘the Clipper’, a plane from America to Portugal then London. Each day they checked at the airport, and at dawn one morning they got seats. The flight was turbulent and there was a shortage of paper bags in which to be sick. They landed in rain and darkness in a south of England airport – ‘It may have been Poole’ – then were put on a bus, and finally sent by train to London.

the guns began

H.D., returning from lunch on a day in late October, found Bryher sitting on her suitcase in the entrance to 49 Lowndes Square. Bryher wrote:

Here I was, aged forty-six, forced back into the cage and misery of the first war and I had no illusions that the second one would soon be over. I felt a little better when Hilda came up the staircase a few minutes afterwards to look at me in astonishment. She took me immediately to show me the pile of sand kept ready to throw on incendiaries. Many of my friends, I found, were scattered about England but at least I was with the people I loved… as the sirens started, the guns began and we went with our blankets to the shelter downstairs.

For Bryher and her circle, the élan, shared endeavours, flamboyant freedom, mischief and optimism of artistic experiment were over. War came down like a shutter on free expression. And for its duration, she and H.D. stayed almost continuously together – which tested their tempers.

Bryher edited Life and Letters Today with Robert Herring, and worked on a memoir of the war years, The Days of Mars, and on a novel, Beowulf, based on the Blitz on London. She learned Persian and in the long evenings of the blackout felt she was going crazy. She yearned for pre-war Paris, ‘that blue, smoky atmosphere where everyone was sipping bitter coffee and arguing about metaphysics’, and missed the ‘snowy mountain crests above the placid lake’ of her home in Switzerland. She hoped the United States would enter the war with the Allies, given their military strength, and bring it to an end.

Friends dispersed. Sylvia Beach was forced to close Shakespeare and Company then was interned by the Nazis. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas were in Vichy-occupied France. Robert McAlmon and Kenneth Macpherson were in America. Perdita, who was twenty, was driving an ambulance for the Red Cross. Ezra Pound became overtly anti-Semitic and regularly and publicly said ‘something vile against Jews’. On 21 April 1941, Plymouth was bombed. Frances Gregg was killed in her house, along with her daughter and mother. She was fifty-six.

Bryher felt trapped in London. She and H.D. were visited by a government official because of all the black-market packets of cigarettes and the amount of chocolate they acquired above their ration coupons. The only journeys she made were to Barra in the Outer Hebrides to stay with Compton Mackenzie and his wife, Faith, and to Cornwall to stay with Doris Banfield.

As ever, Bryher saw it as imperative to help with acts of generosity. She gave money to Osbert and Edith Sitwell – she bought Edith Sitwell a house. When a woman in a bread queue told her she had broken her dentures on wartime bread and to replace them would cost more than her Christmas bonus, Bryher paid her dentist’s bills: ‘we were firm friends until she died shortly after the war’, she wrote. A firefighter complained to her about his ill-fitting Wellington boots, so she bought him better ones. She helped clean up when the London Library was bombed and flooded. She paid for clippings of camel hair from the zoo to be made into coats for distribution as needed.

H.D., though destabilized by the war, during those years wrote three novels, three volumes of poetry, a memoir, short stories and a collection of poetry and prose. But the death of Freud, the killing of Frances Gregg, air raids, danger, unalleviated proximity to Bryher and constant news of destruction caused her to break down.

‘I could visualise the very worst terrors,’ she said. Preoccupations with spiritualism and the occult, with Bryher, psychoanalysis, her Moravian heritage, and terror of bombardment filled her writing. She wrote in The Gift:

I could see myself caught in the fall of bricks and I would be pinned down under a great beam, helpless. Many had been. I would be burned to death.

The Gift, she said, ‘was a Gift of Vision, it was the Gift of Wisdom, the Gift of the Holy Spirit, the Sanctus Spiritus’.

In the summer of 1944, with Paris and Belgium liberated and the blackout reduced to a ‘dim out’, Bryher and H.D. went to Cornwall for