Beowulf Read online

  Bryher’s grief-laden mind (for her mother, for the past) was clouded. Although she came to Lowndes Square in December, she left again for Kenwin in January 1940, compelled to return to help her housekeeper and friend Elsie Volkart move to a small house in Pully (with Bryher’s beloved Claudi and pups). She also needed to burn evidence of her refugee work, having aided endangered Jewish students, analysts, and others persecuted by the Nazis. Perdita’s former governess, the Austrian Alice Modern and her husband Franz Alt, whom Bryher had urged to apply for exit visas early and supplied them with $5,000 to establish themselves, were now safe in New York.22 Alice’s sister, Klara Modern, in London with funds from Bryher for analysis, vowed to fight for her adopted country and pledged to be interned, if it would in any way help the British.

  Throughout February and March, H.D. reported “general war demoralization.”23 Braving it on her own, she felt an unexpected euphoria: “4:30 black-out and then get up in the morning to fog. But I have many chats with people in shops and everywhere. We in the city are very much at one.”24

  Almost with no opposition, Hitler’s blitzkrieg conquered Europe at an alarming rate in the first months of the year: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. Bryher told H.D. she didn’t know exactly when she could return to London, planning to arrive by April, but German military advances made this tricky.

  Not a second too soon, Churchill took over as Prime Minister on May 7, 1940. Fight, and fight on they must, he boomed on radio broadcasts, convincing the public through his impish yet stern rhetoric to toughing the disaster head-on, though they were grievously unprepared. A month after Norway’s capitulation, the Germans invaded Holland and Belgium. The British Expeditionary Force and French troops could not stand up to the “Blitzkrieg,” rupturing defense lines to seize airfields. The Luftwaffe made it impossible to resupply. French regiments crumbled; with the Germans moving into the low countries, the majority of Allied Troops corralled at Dunkirk.

  During the critical days from May 26, to June 4, 1940, Churchill offered the British public a stake in their own survival, commanding all boats, whether civilian or military, of any demonstrable size to evacuate Dunkirk. His B.B.C. plea received a thunderous response. H.D. exulted in what seemed “almost a religious spectacle”: The battle of the ports was something out of all time, wonderful. The merchant marine came in for a lot of glory. Tugs were all taken off the Thames, all fire-boats, trawlers, fishing smacks, lifeboats and so on, took that terrible trip over and over.”25 This coordinated effort cheered H.D.; this Bryher missed.

  Fretting about Perdita, H.D. knew it was a “hang-over” from the last war: “This is truly for all, a spiritual rebirth. If ones bodies [sic] stand it.”26 On their anniversary, H.D. told Bryher London might be “more to your vibration when you return.”27 Though stationed in the country, Edith Sitwell expressed: “The last fortnight has been on such a gigantic scale, that everything in history since the Crucifixion seems dwarfed—only Shakespeare could do justice to it.”28 H.D. had her heroes in the R.A.F., led by Air Marshall, Hugh Dowding. Still British propriety crashed; people wandered about with coats over pajamas; women stopped wearing stockings. H.D. noticed the new generation’s short skirts and cut several of Bryher’s dresses in half, so they’d fit her, but it felt like “castrating” Bryher!29

  On June 9, Sylvia Beach urged Bryher to come to France immediately, offering Adrienne’s cellar. The German tanks, however, outflanked the Maginot Line. While gunned down and bombed on June 14, civilians fled Paris en masse. By June 22, 1940, France signed an armistice with Germany, leaving a small unoccupied zone. After France surrendered, readiness was all. Magnetized by the living drama, at the tea-shop and Lowndes, H.D. felt it her duty was to be “in readiness, as for anyone of the crowd who may need psychic sustenance,” telling Bryher: “I consider that it is necessary to hold this place as for you, first and foremost, a little fortress. It is always ready. That is my chief raison-d’etre. Then Pup (Perdita).”30 With exuberance over Dunkirk fading, H.D. craved Bryher’s presence: “You said early June, then mid-June, then just June!”31

  From June through September 1940, the couple, who both compulsively corresponded, could not write full letters, only “keeping the wire open,” as H.D. put it. Marianne Moore forwarded letters between them, for fear of the censor. H.D. suffered “homesickness.” England felt temporarily “gone.” After all, she was psychically linked to South Audley Street, the late Lady Ellerman, and Bryher. H.D. sent Bryher birthday wishes on September 2, shopping between air-raid sirens. In honor of Bryher, she “now recognizes the big gun, our special Big Ben and feel very comforted when it booms off,” admitting “I never thought I would have a personal feeling about a gun, before.”32 Having endured “three weeks of constant hammering,” she acclimated to a “nine o’clock symphony.” “Every morning,” H.D. wrote Moore, “is a sort of special gift; a new day to be cherished and loved, a DAY that seems to love back in return.”33 Proximity to death incited H.D towards its apparent grand opponent: love. Glad Moore and her mother were “spared,” she bragged she was “sorry, too, as our fervour and intensity gives new life to the very bones.” Urged to return to the States, H.D. resisted.

  “Fido,” however felt trapped, while Swiss officials told her to make haste. A man, whose son she had given a book from Sylvia’s Beach bookshop in Paris, arranged her transport. It was a grueling, dangerous journey through Barcelona and Lisbon, partly on a cramped coach, another leg on a bus riddled with bullet holes Bryher suspected were from the Spanish Civil War, only to await plane transport. Anxiously moving through checkpoints, she travelled with a young Jewish woman, Grace Irwin, daughter of one of her mother’s friends. She saw men green with hunger; other horrors she kept for Beowulf, such as the hands of a man “broken by rifle butts” whom the Nazis had left for dead.

  Touching down at Poole in England during an air raid, Bryher dwelled on the ludicrous nature of her trip to London: “got here from Switzerland. How? Oh, only by a German plane with an Italian pilot. […] Officially Spanish” to land in “the middle of the Blitz.” Forced to stop several times due to rail damage, Bryher finally arrived at Lowndes Square on September 28. H.D. had, in fact, just ducked out for lunch at the “Warming Pan.” Bryher sat on the steps, reeling, surveying the blacked-out windows and general ruin. With no illusion the war would be over by Christmas, she felt “forced back into the cage and misery of the first war.”34

  When H.D. spotted Bryher sitting on her steps on her suitcase, she held her hand out, guided Bryher towards the sand piles, showing her how to put out incendiaries. Perdita was staying on what she called an officers’ camp-bed in Bryher’s room. Like one sleepwalker to another, H.D. initiated Bryher into war-ways. The sirens started up; they climbed down to the lower floor. Upon waking, Bryher confronted the “war made new,” exploiting earth’s skies and seas. Herring wrote: “So you made it,” followed with, “It certainly is a fabulous time at which to drop in. Congratulations.”35

  Thinking nothing would faze her after her journey, Bryher’s first reaction was terrible shock, summed up in her anecdote about a woman who ran an eel shop who left only briefly, and returned to find it gone. Such immediate vanishings gave Bryher a sense of unreality, akin to what she felt among the ruins of the Parthenon with H.D. on their travels in 1920. Only now the ruins were in ongoing process. She used Pearson as safety valve, “[t]he blackout cuts out half one’s life. Travel about England is intensely uncomfortable and difficult,”36 further retailing for their growing bond: “ignorance of what is going on in Europe makes one howl with rage. The French for instance loathe Pétain […] and the officials here want to believe he is a noble elderly soldier.” Spain felt “merely a German province,” where she recounted hearing only German spoken. Bryher uniquely cultivated a bird’s eye-view. “Believe me,” she wrote, “there is nothing romantic about bombardments, gunfire, black out, food rations, and the awful claustrophobia of being stuck on an island. My slogan is that I am p
erfectly willing to die for England but absolutely hostile to being asked to live on the island.”37 Bryher described her and H.D. cooking supper by a single candle, training themselves not to swallow if the anti-aircraft guns were firing.

  Keeping up American contacts, Bryher wrote H.D.’s friend, Mary Herr, that London was a “mouse-trap,” and that she had arrived in the middle of the Blitz, watching “the tiny houses go down like toys.”38 These details fed her writing in Beowulf, begun in October, written during the day on a “broad window ledge,” and she told how once a warden came by at night, thinking her typing on her bed was some kind of signaling.39 She recorded the hollowness in watching solid structures dematerialize: “The heaviest buildings had a fragile air as if children had cut them out of coloured paper and stuck them up in school with cardboard supports. If you poked a brick you were surprised that it did not crumple like a balloon.” Bryher found adjustment difficult: “Life here can only be called peculiar. It goes on perfect normally with gigantic gaps.”40 She vented: “I knew it was coming and nobody would listen to me when I told them about the German preparations and I watched helplessly while we gave the Germans every advantage possible and slid into this state of utter muddle ourselves.”

  Beowulf allowed Bryher to dramatize the visceral, noting in her narrative descriptions, “a new smell for London,” not like “plague pits,” but “the smell of wet dust and burnt brick,” and she observed a road “ankle deep in glass,” with “broad jagged splinters and heaps of brittle crumbs.” Language strained to approximate visions of craters pocking the streets; the sizzling desertion, with those who joined the “great migration to the country,” as she calls it.

  By the end of 1940 in London, many were forced to “live” in shelters. Bryher was shocked, writing Moore that it was “unbelievable what the people are enduring”; she described the scene in detail: “most of them sleeping on the ground in excessively damp shelters or sitting up on chairs under the staircase or parked in the tubes. It is really more than any book ever could describe.”41 Marianne Moore empathized with her friend: “the unnatural danger of the blackout; and the obstacles to getting a job. When one is panting with desire to help the country win, and what is more rare—equipped at every point as you are, to do it—I know the white hot intensity of some of your wartime reflections.” Moore provided salve for Bryher’s “hide,” knowing her desire to heal, to give and to act: “But there is a certain consolation, don’t you think, in the sense that each of us is scourged with the very same sense of frustration—an illusion after all, Bryher. What we feel is the sinews of war.” Within the temporal confusion, Bryher saw young girls, like Eve in the novel, tramping down the stairs of the tearoom’s lodging; one also sees a bit of Bryher in her Colonel Ferguson, seeking a government position, rebuffed because he had been in Switzerland after India, his age counting against him.

  Bryher gunned for the Establishment, which she separated from Churchill, who she thought received paltry gratitude for rescuing London, the world even, when he was put out of office by Labor in 1946. Matter of fact about losing their Life & Letters Maiden Lane office, Bryher wrote Pearson: “[it] went, a time bomb so no casualties and we saved everything but had to clear out as ceilings fell on desks.” Bryher hoarded a tonnage of paper before war started to be sure she could keep her journal afloat. Another of Beowulf’s cast, Adelaide Spenser, in London with a military husband, bought “sixty pounds of marmalade,” for barter for eggs after the Munich Conference in 1938. Bryher deliberately put herself near everyday Londoners, surveying the wreckage of glass, dirt, damp and even flesh. The Germans took up where they left off, with vicious attacks between December 27 and New Year’s Eve. Churchill posted extra fire watchers around St. Paul’s Cathedral to extinguish incendiaries, but as Bryher’s novel observes, there were limited resources for “the middle groups” who “suffer most in war and the Victorian doctrine that hard work is its own reward flops at once in a time of national disaster.”

  Still holding a visa for America, Bryher expressed to Pearson: “What is it like. The house rocks like the Normandie in a gale, all the things happen that you see on a movie, and hear […] Shells whistling, guns thundering, explosions, one thinks nothing can survive the night and crawls up from the basement to listen to the early news and dear B.B.C says ‘last night’s attacks were on a somewhat smaller scale than usual.’ Then one rushes out to listen to what the milkman, the taxi driver, the porter and the shopgirl have to say about the B.B.C.”42 This sentiment found its way into Beowulf as the heiress joined London citizens, and in fact her Angelina, the teashop proprietor most like Bryher, with her political meetings and what H.D. liked to call Bryher’s “enthusiasms,” who probably spent time, like Angelina, “mimick[ing] the announcer: ‘there was slight enemy activity over London in the early hours of last evening.’” When Bryher went to obtain her identity card and ration book she was stopped by the porter, once an acrobat in Switzerland, who knew her lake “upside-down.”43 Startled, she wrote Annie Reich, a psychoanalyst she helped emigrate to New York, about this phenomenon: “I chat incorrigibly to people in the street and am acquiring a mass of miscellaneous knowledge, one friend of mine is over sixty and suddenly decided that she had to make munitions.”44 Bryher was herself vitalized by war through such encounters, and her devotion to H.D.

  She mourned in her chronicle, “the absurdity of it all, dropping of balls upon the ninepin houses.” This felt vulnerability she expressed by “going out” and facing it; H.D. stayed close within her walls, incanting prayers for those in danger, and for her own psychic survival, culminating in The Walls Do Not Fall, dedicated to Bryher for their previous travel to Egypt in 1920 and now London; H.D. telescoped these geographies, seeing the fragile houses instead as roofless shrines, “ruin everywhere, yet as the fallen roof / leaves the sealed room,”45 she sought to conjure “protection for the scribe”46 through her very writing. H.D.’s recognition that their shelter was imperiled drove Bryher’s sense in Beowulf of “walls being alive.” She transported Horatio Rasleigh (she gave her real life contacts fictional names in the novel), born in approximately 1872, subsisting on an aunt’s monthly pittance, into her novel, as living above the “Warming Pan”; though never meeting this man, because of his quaint paintings of ships, she corresponded with him for years, sending him stipends.47 In Beowulf, he winces at the “wretched” noises on the radio, anxious about his loss of patrons of his handpainted greeting cards.

  Pledging no raid would scare her after what she endured in her harrowing trip back to London, Bryher put on her beaten leather jacket, market gloves, braved the queues, turned in registration forms, and prowled the ruins, grieving the loss of her father’s long-gone world. As chronicler and griever, she almost immediately came upon the genesis of her working title for Beowulf:

  The raids were heavy throughout October. I went out gloomily one morning with my basket to get our rations and saw a huge crater at the end of Basil Street. Somebody had fetched a large plaster bulldog, I assume from Harrods because they were then on sale there, and stuck it on guard beside the biggest pile of rubble.48

  “Comrade Bulldog” was “conceived” in a flash. Her Angelina was not “a symbol of gallantry but of common sense,” while Selina, perhaps speaking for H.D., questioned the sense of carrying a plaster bulldog and setting it in the hearth of a tearoom. Selina found it vulgar—as much as Angelina protests: “‘Beowulf is a symbol of us, colleague,” for “‘comrade simply didn’t suit’” the dignified Selina.

  H.D. was well aware that Bryher took to the “outer” world better than she did, describing Bryher’s humanist forays: “a wonder with her good deeds and constant care; she knows all the people in the neighborhood and when I go out with her, it is positively embarrassing as her progress is one triumphal procession. Someone’s teeth here, someone’s gout there, someone’s baby there, someone’s son in the near-east somewhere else—” and finally, speaking for them both, she looked “forward to [him] joining [the
ir] village life.”49 After Norman Pearson came to London in 1943 to supervise spycraft, he hired Perdita for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. Though Pearson arranged a job in Washington for her, Bryher desired proximity to H.D. and Perdita.

  The novel Beowulf opens on the last day of Horatio Rashleigh, born in the Victorian age. Modernist in its form of twelve chapters, it is “a day and night in the life” of the Blitz, it provides key-hole glimpses, set forth in plain if spunky language, knowing “there were no words” to describe the predicament of Londoners during the Blitz. The saving grace is the tea shop, “a cross between a village shop and family doctor”: “You walked up to the ‘Warming Pan’ if you wanted a recipe for quince marmalade or if Auntie had trapped a swarm of bees in her garden and had written for advice.”

  Bryher’s “Warming Pan” is a nexus, where a number of lives meet: along with Selina and Angelina, the retired Colonel roaring to get back into action; a woman waiting to see a friend coming in from the country; Horatio, the older rheumatic gentleman; the young working girl, Eva, who plays jazz, sports bobbed hair and rushes out, “like a fledgling man-at-arms,” encapsulating the new generation’s “freedoms.” Written in the style of free indirect discourse, the narrative flits from mind to mind. Bryher knit everyday Londoners who were not always able to “keep calm and carry on” (as the posters instructed) during horrific threats and massive changes.

  Angelina and Selina bear shadow resemblances to Bryher and H.D. themselves. The former semi-mocks herself through Angelina, who a quarter in, emerges in a slow cinematic unveiling: “At first only scarlet gloves and the tip of a beret were visible,” before she sets down a plaster dog, “almost life size, with a piratical scowl painted on his black muzzle.” The impractical plaster dog is the heart of the novel. With her imagist sensibility (learned from H.D.)—the practice of condensing in one image a number of related ideas or motifs—the artificial canine becomes provisional, a shadow of the emblematic British Empire, and thus more endearing. Angelina boldly carries the “vulgar” icon into the eighteenth-century tearoom.