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

her whatever she wanted, answered her every request and kept the flame of her literary distinction alive.

Honours for H.D. accrued: the Harriet Monroe prize, a citation for distinguished service from Bryn Mawr, the Gold Medal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The International Communication Association in Washington wanted her to lecture, the Poetry Center in New York wanted her to read. There was a flurry of reissue of her books. ‘For beauty of phrase and psychological insight there is no poet more interesting than HD’, Bryher wrote. ‘Flower leaf and salt water and a mind like a diving bird.’

In March 1959, Bryher went to the Paris exposition ‘Les Années Vingt – American writers and their friends in Paris, 1920–30’ curated by Sylvia Beach, with memorabilia from Shakespeare and Company. ‘It’s most beautifully done with everyone we knew and many we did not,’ Bryher wrote to H.D. Contact Editions featured large, and all the little magazines Bryher’s patronage had kept alive. Twenty thousand people visited, and the same number when the exposition moved to London the following year. When Bryher walked in Paris with Sylvia, passers-by said, ‘C’est Mademoiselle Beach.’ That winter, Sylvia stayed for a week at Kenwin and Bryher showed her part of her memoirs, which she was writing. Romaine Brooks and Natalie Barney visited too. ‘Nothing seems to daunt these old ladies,’ Bryher said.

death of H.D.

In May 1961, the freeholder of the Nervenklinik sold the estate. Everyone had to move at short notice.

Most occupants had a very difficult time with relocating: Most of them were old ladies of eighty and over and we had one attempted suicide because they were so distressed at having to move from their rooms where they had been, some of them almost twenty years.

H.D. was wrenched from what had become her home. Bryher moved her to the Hotel Sonnenberg, Zurich, with a view of the mountains, but it did not compare. H.D. only had a single room with a bath and a bit of flat balcony. The following month she suffered a stroke, which paralysed her right side and affected her speech. She died in the Klinik Hirslanden in Zurich on Wednesday 27 September 1961. Bryher felt it was merciful. ‘She minded the frustrations so dreadfully,’ she wrote to Silvia Dobson.

‘It is impossible to believe in Bryher without HD,’ Alice B. Toklas wrote to Perdita’s husband, John Schaffner. She had heard of H.D.’s death from Sylvia Beach.

the cabin boy in the sailor suit

Bryher lived from then on more or less alone at Kenwin, travelled as she would, stayed in the shadows and kept from the limelight. She had always been solitary, her relationships defined by what she gave, with no vain wish for adoration or affirmation from another person. She had always expected others to take centre stage and win the accolades, for her to be the producer whose name was not remembered, the enabler not the star.

Without another cause to fight, or poet to sponsor, and with the world now a different place, year on year she wrote historical novels, set in Ancient Carthage at the time of Hannibal, or in sixth-century Cornwall, or third-century Switzerland, in Rome 400 BC, post-Arthurian Britain, or at the time of the Norman Conquest. In these stories, the hero was variously a nine- or twelve-year-old boy, the elder brother watchful of his little sister, the putative soldier, the defiant Prince:

he was thankful that he had run away from Exeter and home. He had taken nothing with him but a bag of dried meat and a sharp knife.12

I will run away I had promised myself every morning, but then my mother had looked at me sorrowfully and begged me to be patient and so I had lost my courage. ‘One day you will be second to the King’ she had said…13

He wondered how much he dared tell his sister. Brave as she was all women were afraid of raiders.14

It was as if Bryher, in her stories, careful in their research, ponderous in a prose style that broke no new ground and stirred no literary interest, found the inner liberation she sought. She was matter-of-fact about her writing, apt to repeat the bad reviews: ‘her language is jerky and unmelodious; her characterisation too thin’. But in these stories, written with no particular reader in mind, she found the key to freeing the small boy trapped in the wrong body, a salve to the gender quandary that so dismayed her when every expectation was for her to be a girl with curls.

Free at last from responsibility for others, and safe in her Bauhaus eyrie, Bryher could march over the Alps in the dead of winter accompanied by a troop of elephants, be the cabin boy in the sailor suit, side with the Saxons against the Normans, travel with Columbus to America to find a brave new world. As a child, ‘I loved antiquity. It was more real, it is more real to me than this present world…’, Bryher said. ‘I was nine when my parents gave me The Young Carthaginian by G.A. Henty:

It fired my imagination because I was just the same age as Hannibal when he had sworn his famous oath to fight Rome… I wanted to be a cabin boy and found that I could reply to tiresome arguments ‘if Hannibal was old enough to go on a campaign when he was nine, I am old enough to go to sea.’

Bryher, photograph by Islay Lyons, 1966, Bryher Papers General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Permission to reproduce granted courtesy of the Schaffner family and Manop Cheroensuk

In her first autobiographical novel, Development, written in her early twenties, she voiced her own desire to be a writer:

Work was difficult in an unbroken isolation which fettered thought and plundered her of dream, yet, sharp as it was to wait for life, there were days she was glad of her solitude, the solitude which had taught her the loneliness, the