No Modernism Without Lesbians, Diana Souhami [love books to read txt] 📗

say the least – to encounter one’s father as a boy of fifteen as seen through the eyes of a boy of fourteen who is in love with him.’ H.D. used the same title – Palimpsest – in 1926 for three connected short stories, published first by Contact, then by Houghton Mifflin in New York.

McAlmon called his stable of writers ‘the Bunch’. No more than five hundred copies of a book were printed. American reviewers spoke disparagingly of ‘expatriate’ writers and ‘Paris publications’, though most of Contact’s authors were later picked up by commercial publishers. In his memoir Being Geniuses Together, McAlmon was caustic about ‘The Bunch’: ‘They are as they are as they are and were as they were as they were and they wasn’t roses,’ he wrote.

Mary Butts was grateful for Bryher’s patronage. Bryher wrote of her: ‘Mary was one of the few who matter, a builder of English, and I have never doubted since I read her first short story that she belonged to the immortals…’ Marianne Moore also recommended her with high praise. Like Bryher, Mary Butts was inspired by Cornwall and she had a small house at Sennen Cove. She had studied Greek and said her classical education started as a small child when her father told her Greek myths and they acted them out together. ‘Only in Homer’, she wrote, ‘have I found impersonal consolation, a life where I am unsexed or bisexed, or completely myself.’ Of ‘ecstasies transcended’ with her lover, Eleanor Rogers, she wrote in her journal in September 1916: ‘there will have to be a secret manuscript seeing that no one can write openly about these things.’ Contact Editions published her short stories and her first novel, Ashe of Rings.

Bryher’s lasting impression was of Mary Butts’s hair, ‘flaming and red… the torque-gold of windy islands’.

Dorothy Richardson was another modernist whom Bryher funded. She was twenty-one years older than Bryher, who gave her books, clothes, flowers and encouragement and £100 a year. In 1933 she set up a trust fund for her.

Dorothy Richardson’s 2,000-page semi-autobiographical prose work Pilgrimage was published in chapter volumes between 1915 and her death in 1957. Her narrator, Miriam Henderson, was on an unending search for a room, a life and voice of her own. Through her, Dorothy Richardson conveyed thoughts on gender, feminism, socialism and animal rights.

In Paris, Bryher was accepted as both married to McAlmon and H.D.’s partner. There was no need to dissemble. With McAlmon she went to Gertrude’s salons, to Sylvia and Adrienne’s literary evenings and to Jean Cocteau’s cabarets at Le Bœuf sur le Toit. Man Ray photographed her. McAlmon introduced her to James Joyce, who was his drinking partner, and took her, Harriet Weaver, Thelma Wood, Djuna Barnes and Ezra Pound to Chez Bricktop in Montparnasse.3 After the cabaret, Bryher took them all to dinner at l’Avenue restaurant in avenue Montaigne.

Only occasionally, though, did Bryher accompany McAlmon to the clubs and cafés. She ‘found the places he visited intolerably dull’. She did not drink or want to pick up women, take drugs, or even go to bed late.

McAlmon, a tireless social networker and partygoer, spent much of his allowance from Bryher in the bars. Marianne Moore said of him that his work was ‘all riot and no construction’. H.D. agreed. His drinking got him into trouble: he pranced about naked at the Quat’z Arts costume ball in 1925.4

H.D. shunned the Paris lights. She preferred London, and found it easier to love Bryher when away from her. Often they were not just in separate living quarters but in separate countries. H.D. could not exist financially or emotionally without Bryher, but nor could she cope with Bryher’s control. Separated, she wrote often and anxiously: ‘Just to prove my darling’, she wrote in 1922, from the Hotel Washington in Curzon Street,

that I think of HE all the time. I bought some pink roses to put before the Man Ray portrait – my little altar…

This is just to say I love and love and love you. I missed not hearing this morning horribly, not a note came last night no doubt one will arrive ce soir. Dear Heart, 1001 kisses.

She used whimsical gender-laced nicknames: Bryher was Fido. ‘I am very eager for news of Fido-He’, ‘Dear He, do be good’, or ‘Fido, mon cher, as Adrienne says’. Bryher signed herself ‘love and barks’ and did little drawings of a terrier. ‘The little sketches of Fido-He are very comforting and lifelike. See that his bow is fresh and pretty every day.’

Such whimsy was a barrier. Bryher was the generous benefactor, the courageous publisher for new and compelling writing, but she could not capture H.D.’s creative heart. Fondness was perhaps as much as H.D. could feel for Bryher – as well as gratitude, dependence, respect and recoil.

Most of Bryher’s friends lived in Paris, and she visited often – usually she stayed with Sylvia and Adrienne. But she did not want to live there. Nor did she want to spend much time in London, where South Audley Street loomed. She preferred the neutrality of Switzerland and the habit of frequent travel.

parents for Perdita

The challenge for Bryher, with her alternative family, was how to make it work. H.D. said her ‘heart contracted’ when, on Valentine’s Day in 1923, D.H. Lawrence sent her red roses and a book of his poems, some of which had been written to her. She had no such residual feeling for Ezra Pound, whom she called ‘blustering and really stupid. He is adolescent. He seems almost “arrested” in development.’

As for H.D.’s husband, by 1925 Richard Aldington was living in Paris with Brigit Patmore. H.D. confided to Brigit her fear that Aldington might seek divorce on the grounds of desertion and that, because she had registered him as the father, she would lose custody of Perdita, who was six. She wondered, if Bryher and Robert McAlmon were to adopt Perdita, whether Aldington would oppose this.

Bryher was willing to go ahead with adoption but had provisos: her