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  Bryher channeled through Angelina’s point of view, explaining that she found it opposite the “Food Office”: “‘I can’t keep a dog, I know, in the raids, but it’s so cheerless without one. I was afraid at first you might be tempted to call him Winnie, but then I thought, no, here is an emblem of the whole of us, so gentle, so determined …” Of course we hear Winifred in Winnie (Bryher’s original middle birth name). The nickname “Fido” represented Bryher’s fidelity to H.D., her fiduciary know-how, and her tenacity when taking up the cudgels for underdogs.

  The actual teashop Bryher and H.D. regularly patronized was put out of business by a raid in 1941, making the book elegiac.50 Bryher’s novel maintains an essentially Enlightenment vision that coffeehouses and tearooms are public spaces that exist for exchange of thought. Her Selina reasons that the times wanted “a new and quite other vocabulary” to comprehend what was beyond human comprehension. Her tea shop, Selina believed, helped “morale”: “For if clients came into lunch and went off cheerfully afterwards, they, in turn, would affect their relatives and their maids.” Bryher found Selina inspiring, “especially on such a cold, dreary morning, to think how much one solitary woman could do in defence of her native land.” “Tearooms had a special meaning for Selina.” They were “the perfect meeting place.” Bryher later memorialized, “Selina was a symbol to me of the essential soul of England,” in her desire to maintain quality, noting the couple’s difficulty during the war because “most of their customers had gone into the country or joined the Women’s Services.”51

  Bryher held that the British government, in failing to listen to Churchill, had cheated the public of a proper wartime diet. Never one to indulge herself, she wondered where her country’s sirloins, cheddars and beer had gone. She knew H.D., already lacking in protein, had trouble eating when harassed. England could have imported better food, but it “had flung away much of the nation’s foreign reserves in panic selling after the Fall of France.”52 There was too much “austerity and restraint.”53 An obsession with food supply revealed her provider-complex.

  Part of the minimal plot, the drama of her tea shop proprietors was that they only used farm eggs, but now only rationed egg powder was allotted for such shops as theirs; but since they hadn’t signed on initially, they fretted about necessary forms, or not being able to bake at all. As unimportant as a tearoom might seem, Bryher unveiled Selina’s invisible life-and-death struggle to survive, while helping make wartime life a bit more nutritious and solacing.

  While the teashop is a locus of community, it bears the marks of the war. The posted notice, ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives,’ part of a propaganda campaign, reminded her “of a morning in the last war when she had stood in line for hours to get new ration books.” Selina herself didn’t like the sign, feeling “[l]ife ought to be generous, she felt, wildly generous.” The link between rationing and espionage posters reminded that liberty is sometimes as hard to obtain as butter in wartime.

  Bryher, as Angelina, compared the raids “to a film, but the screen was at least concrete” compared to “this concentrated bombing.” It simply narrowed life to survival, without cohesion. “‘So this is the twentieth century,’” her Selina “snorted.” This declaration occurs before Bryher delivers a final quiet slow-motion chapter with herself as witness, with the painful sense of shared precarity. We sense her “procession” with H.D. among Londoners, but here she takes us to the visceral core of war response.

  After many descents to the shelter, Selina never knew climbing the short set of stairs could be so exhausting. The siren goes off, and dutifully, Selina climbs up to rouse the elderly Horatio, who resists her efforts. Her neck, “permanently stiff,” she lugged blankets and necessities down the dark stairs and through the hall to the dark street, where she almost drops her burden, hearing explosions beginning: “Half the sky seemed to explode over their heads and crash.” When they arrive at the shelter, knitting needles resume between crashes and explosions: it was “as if they were lying on the bottom of the well with nothing overhead.” (H.D.’s “shrine open to the sky” of Walls echoes.) Suddenly, “the walls lifted with a roar at that moment and split, and rushed towards each other in a cascade of noise, plaster, and crumbling bricks.” Selina discovers, looking through thick smoke, the staircase Eve traversed was no more. Angelina reassures—“remember, partner, here we are alive,” excited that Beowulf survived the raid as well. “Humor is protection,” she declared, plotting to strap a basket on Beowulf, set him on wheels, and serve their wares. They’d need a hawker’s license. Its mutely horrific end was appropriate—for after all, such events happened every day and night in London and elsewhere. The last line bandies a mock stiff-upper-lip response: “It is embarrassing to be caught in a raid.”

  Bryher expected the British would suppress the publication of Beowulf because it too closely recorded actual Blitz conditions, believing the public wanted to forget the war—and would dismiss her so-called “little people”—the shopkeepers and their customers—trying to make life a bit gayer. Adrienne Monnier called it a “petit classique;” the book’s brevity at 201 pages calls attention to Bryher’s goal: she wanted to give the everyday citizen]a reflection of their struggle. It was first published in French, through Monnier’s own press, Mercure de France, on April 18, 1946, but the translator, Helene Malvant, was unsure of the title. Sylvia Beach said “[i]f the French have never heard of Beowulf they are going to do so now.”54 Both Sylvia and Adrienne were sworn “Beowulfians.” They recognized themselves as the two teashop owners, Selina and Angelina (the couples even had identical initials). In a sense, Bryher wrote the book in homage to female couples, as herself and H.D., whose relationships were obscured by still governing Victorian rules, and blindness to variations in sexual identity and desire.

  After finishing the work in 1944, Bryher put it aside to write her first historical novel, The Fourteenth of October, portraying the Norman Conquest. She told Pearson she viewed those invaders as the “Nazis of their day.” He introduced Bryher to Kurt Wolff, who, along with his wife Helen, had an imprint at Pantheon Books in New York. Wolff published Bryher’s novels, including the Fourteenth of October (1952), The Player’s Boy (1953) The Roman Wall (1954), and finally, Beowulf (1956). Its publication was advertised in a quarter-page of The New York Times, alongside H.D.’s Tribute to Freud, published the same year but like Beowulf, finished more than a decade earlier, in 1944. “Together, at last,” wrote H.D., happy to see Beowulf and her own memoir of Freud out at the same time. H.D.’s lyricism joined Bryher’s documentarian point of view, both fueled by great humor, and humility.

  The American edition of Beowulf bears the dedication, both an epistle and an epitaph:

  TO

  Sylvia Beach

  AND THE MEMORY OF

  Adrienne Monnier

  The dedication is significant. After all, the “Warming Pan” offered sustenance when there was none. In some ways, it operated similarly to Beach’s Shakespeare & Co. or Adrienne’s shop as not just sites for commerce, but also for cultivating creativity in a dark time. Bryher held faith with her early Beowulf supporter, Adrienne, diagnosed in 1954 with “la maladie Ménière,” with spells of terrible vertigo, dizziness, vomiting, and whistling in the ears, making her life unlivable.55 With no cure, Adrienne’s sister and Sylvia assisted her suicide by giving her a lethal dose of pills on June 19, 1955. Bryher memorialized this act: “When the time came she showed us how to die and hardly a day passes now when I do not miss her.”56 H.D. heard this news from Bryher by phone, and wrote immediately to Sylvia to “accept my heart’s devotion-a double devotion”: she couldn’t imagine them apart.57 Bryher posed with Sylvia Beach, with the photo of H.D. by Man Ray between them: the date of the photo is uncertain but was post-WWII, reflecting as biographer Virginia Smyers puts it, “she never lost faith in H.D.’s art.”58

  A handful of favorable reviews came out when Pantheon published the English version of Beowulf, and in the “Briefly Noted” sec
tion of The New Yorker the reviewer exclaimed that Bryher, “that very gifted, very human writer, tells a small, resounding story.”59 “Small” again, but a dynamo. Marianne Moore commended Bryher’s deft combination of prosaic and heroic.60 She spoke with choral helplessness through her characters. As she put it in her book, there would always exist a chasm between those bombed upon and those not, yet it seemed New York was ready to start looking at what films had not showed. Robert Parris’s appreciative review of it as “emotional,” compared Beowulf favorably to The Fair Game by Constantine Fitzgibbons’, both “about people living among live bombs and dying friends,” but more notably aligned hers with the macabre realism of Henry Green. By 1956, when these reviews were written, Bryher had come into her own, described by Parris in his review as “a lady who had the courage to return to England from Switzerland at the outbreak of war, and who obviously knows what bad tea, margarine, cakes made with egg powder and sleeping in public shelters mean to an Englishman.” Recognizing in Bryher’s steady absurd portrait of the “idea of morale is to carry on as if nothing at all unusual were happening,” John Hutchens praised her “quiet, affecting, formal understated report.”61

  Beowulf’s stark humor makes it a faithful companion when times are uncertain. The fact that it appeared in French first highlights its circuitous route to publication: a novel of London, only publishable in Paris or New York. In republishing the work, the hope is that those in the twenty-first century will find their own “plaster” reflection in Beowulf, learning history’s jolting repetitions—as well as finding in Bryher an insightful chronicler, observing the quotidian details of life in their most unreal and extreme circumstances. She had learned from the philosopher Walter Benjamin that any triumphal conquest depended on devastation and plunder, with the victors recording history. In Beowulf, she mourned lost devotions, fantasizing being among “anonymous craftsmen who spent a lifetime on some obscure corner of a cathedral wall.”

  Both Bryher and H.D. wrote some of their best work during the Second World War with an eye to writing as survival and resistance. Bryher took on the external world, complemented by H.D.’s more inner one. They sought to find through historical time-travel precedents for war—and peace, and if in fact, they were heading as H.D. believed, into a supposed “Aquarian age.” They were the generation that saw the quick erosion of Victorian life, though its repressiveness lingered. The constant disruption made it possible, according to H.D., for Bryher to write in episodes. By the 1950s, H.D. looked back nostalgically on Bryher reading parts aloud as they emerged while she and Perdita stitched.

  Bryher perceived herself among exiles “scattered across Europe as deputy ambassadors, carrying ideas or even goods to people who would never come in contact,” a premise with the “emissaries” of “secret wisdom,” and “living remnant” that Walls conveyed in a more literary register.62 Trilogy believed in talismans, charms, amulets; Bryher’s mascot bulldog was a bitter-sweet charm. On a brighter note, Bryher recorded in her journal that she finished Beowulf on January 18, 1944, but she knew the English would have none of it. H.D. had good news for Pearson: Oxford wanted to publish an American copy of “W A L L S.”63 With this in mind, the more raw world of Beowulf would make a clarifying teaching companion to Trilogy, especially The Walls Do Not Fall, that witnesses “dust and powder fill our lungs / our bodies blunder” as well as its faith without faith, a search: “we are voyagers, discoverers / of the not-known, / / the unrecorded: we have no map.” A productive dialogue between these texts, both written at Lowndes Square, widens the lens so we see each woman’s struggle as “shock knit with terror,” recording the precursors to our own contemporary sense of omnipresent war, a digital blitz of sorts, and a geopolitical communal helplessness—and, yet, hope.

  ENDNOTES

  1The University of Wisconsin collected Development and Two Selves in a single volume in 2000; Paris Press has published several of her novels (Visa for Avalon: A Novel [2004] and The Player’s Boy [2006]) along with her influential memoir, The Heart to Artemis: A Writer’s Memoirs (2006).

  2The Days of Mars: A Memoir, 1940–1946 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971), 12.

  3Paris 1900, translated into French like Beowulf, was first published by Adrienne Monnier in 1936.

  4Heart to Artemis, 16–17.

  5Bryher to H.D., March 20, 1919. All letters unless otherwise noted are from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  6HA, 110–111.

  7Ibid, 115–116.

  8H.D. to Bryher, November 29, 1934.

  9Close Up 10.2 (June 1933): 188.

  10J’Accuse, Salomon House, 33 St. Jame’s Street, London, S.W. 1: 6.

  11H.D. to Bryher, May 16, 1933.

  12Bryher to Macpherson, March 31, 1933.

  13“The Crisis: September’, Life and Letters To-Day, 19/25 (Nov. 1938): 1.

  14Bryher, Heart to Artemis, 288.

  15H.D to George Plank, September 25, 1939.

  16Ibid.

  17Herring to Bryher September 21, 1939.

  18H.D. to Bryher, November 11, 1939.

  19H.D. to Silvia Dobson, November 16, 1939.

  20Perdita to Bryher, November 14, 1939.

  21Bryher to Pearson, December 2, 1939.

  22Conversation with James Alt, July 2018; as a son of Alice Modern, he learned of Bryher’s generosity, and claimed she saved his whole family.

  23H.D. to Bryher, March 5, 1940.

  24Ibid., November 11, 1939.

  25Ibid, June 5, 1940.

  26Ibid. June 7, 1940.

  27Ibid. July 17, 1940.

  28Edith Sitwell to Pavel Tchelitchew; June 6, 1940. Quoted in Greene’s Edith Sitwell: Avant Garde Poet, English Genius (New York: Virago Press, 2011), 284.

  29H.D. to Bryher, May 1, 1940.

  30Ibid, May 31, 1940.

  31Ibid., May 30, 1940.

  32Ibid, September 2, 1940.

  33H.D. to Moore, September 24, 1940.

  34Heart to Artemis, 307.

  35Herring to Bryher, September 30, 1940.

  36Bryher to Pearson, December 5, 1940.

  37Ibid, January 1941.

  38Bryher to Mary Herr, October 17, 1940. Bryn Mawr Bryher Papers.

  39Days of Mars, 14.

  40Bryher to Pearson, January 19, 1941.

  41Moore to Bryher, October 14, 1940; Rosenbach Museum and Library.

  42Bryher to Pearson, December 5, 1940.

  43Bryher, Days of Mars, 8.

  44Bryher to Annie Reich, January 5, 1941.

  45Walls Do Not Fall in Trilogy New York: New Directions 1973: 3.

  46H.D. to Pearson, [nd] 1943; cited in Between Poetry and History: The Letters of H.D. and Norman Holmes Pearson, edited by Donna Krolik Hollenberg (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 997), 30–33.

  47Days of Mars, 15.

  48Ibid., 12-13.

  49H.D. to Pearson, May 2, 1943; Between History and Poetry, 22.

  50Annette Debo in Within the Walls notes that H.D. requested bequests from Bryher for the two women, Miss Docker and Miss Venables, after they lost their business. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014: 49. Debo’s collection of H.D.’s uncollected stories and poems from the Blitz is accompanied by her deft research into the period. This book could fruitfully join for a class on H.D. and Bryher during World War II.

  51Days of Mars, 12.

  52Ibid, 5.

  53Ibid., 5.

  54Beach to Bryher, January 28, 1948.

  55Sylvia to Bryher, October 25, 1954.

  56HA, 209.

  57H.D. to Sylvia Beach, June 22, 1955.

  58Gillian Hanscombe & Virgina L. Smyers, Writing for their Lives: The Modernist Women 1910–1940. (London: The Women’s Press, 1987), 46.

  59New Yorker, September 1, 1956.

  60New York Post, August 26, 1956.

  61Chicago Tribute, August 27, 1956.

  62Bryher, Days of Mars, 76.

  63H.D. to Pearson, February 24, 1944. Hollenberg, Betwee
n History and Poetry, 34. WDNF was published in 1944, Tribute to the Angels in 1945, and Flowering of the Rod in 1946, published successively by Oxford University Press: it became Trilogy.

  BEOWULF

  1

  THOSE WRETCHED people had turned on the radio again. Horatio shifted the bedclothes with great caution and felt for the switch. Formerly he had flung his curtains wide last thing in the evening, but in this miserable blackout he could see nothing without a light. Seven o’clock. There was no need, absolutely no need, to consider rising for at least two hours. First of all his doctor, his very kind doctor, had bidden him stay in bed, “just as long as you are able, Mr. Rashleigh,” and secondly, it was an economy in fuel. It was distasteful, as he often repeated to Miss Tippett downstairs, to worry about the pence. “My fault, if I may say so, is extravagance.” Still, now that people had dropped sending handpainted Christmas cards to each other, it was important not to start the gasfire until the last possible moment. Naturally, he never expected a woman to be punctual, but Agatha, his cousin, was really exasperating; it was often the seventh of the month before she remembered to mail him his little cheque; it made life so difficult.

  How hard it was, after an active life, to lie still in the mornings! Up to the previous September there had been sparrows outside, the bobbing tassels of a plane tree, and what he liked to call not cirrus but the nainsook puffets of a cloud. He looked angrily at the black square of paper that kept out the sky. He could have slept for hours after the barrage all night had it not been for the wireless.