Beowulf

to
SYLVIA BEACH
and the memory of
ADRIENNE MONNIER


Copyright © 1956, 1984 by W. Bryher
First Reprinted Edition, © 2020 by Estate of W. Bryher
c/o Schaffner Press, Inc.
Introduction: “Comrade Bulldog Among the Ruins”
Copyright © 2019 by Susan McCabe, Ph.D., all rights reserved
No part of this book may be excerpted or reprinted without the express written consent of the Publisher.
Contact: Permissions Dept., Schaffner Press, POB 41567
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Cover, Interior Design, and Illustrations by Evan Johnston
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Printed in the United States
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-943156-90-0
E-Book ISBN: 978-1-943-156-91-7


INTRODUCTION
“COMRADE BULLDOG AMONG THE RUINS”
“Two wars in a single generation asked too much of any race.”
–Beowulf
WHO OR WHAT IS “Beowulf,” the title of a book chronicling the Blitz? Moreover, who is this writer? Primarily an historical novelist, Bryher (1894–1983), little known today, her writings largely out of print,1 was a pioneer, a model of personal and cultural defiance. Before World War II, she published among other works, two volumes of poetry, two early coming-of-age memoirs, Development (1920) and Two Selves (1923)—both early accounts of gender dysphoria in modern literary history. Bryher was a woman, but felt like a boy, as she claimed, from infancy.
“Comrade Bulldog” was Bryher’s working title for her first novel that she later renamed Beowulf, taking the same title of the Anglo-Saxon foundational poem from the early 10th century, recorded by an anonymous scribe, long before England existed and half a millennium before the Empire was born. Beowulf, the armored hero of the ancient epic, travels from Geatland—what is now Sweden—to assist the Danes in combating the monster Grendel, and Grendel’s mother. While successful in fending them off, his old age (fifty!) presents another challenge, a dragon, terrorizing his subjects; he slays it, though mortally wounded as a result.
In this hybrid docu-novel, Bryher has morphed Beowulf into a bulldog, a miniaturized plaster statuette, a popular mascot to decorate a teashop. Known as “The Warming Pan,” this establishment became the pivotal locale of her novel, based on an actual tearoom run by a pair of women. As Bryher describes: “Selina and Angelina supplied their clients with soup, meat, two veg and dessert for two shillings and ninepence. They were country people, they bought all the ingredients they could from farms and the cooking was plain but excellent. Such places are now extinct. I liked it because, as I said, I could go there without fear. There was a large notice, Dogs Welcome, hanging on the door and as I am to those, but only those, who know me intimately, Fido, I felt at ease and knew that I should not be hustled out.”2
Using the fusty classic’s title was her joke with legend; her bulldog is humanity’s finest. By the end of the novel, it seems we are all plaster—when those staying near the City faced total annihilation (one rumor had it that London could be demolished in three years). Bryher probably foresaw that, although Britain was wholly unprepared for World War II, its bulldog spirit would triumph in the end. However, as in legend, the first battle waged and won, like the Great War, the second amounted to a muted victory, in which the victor prevails, though mortally wounded. We are not supermen or superwomen, Bryher seems to be telling us, nor could she idealize England’s own eroding Empire that had sustained the Victorian-era sense of solid well-being.
Beowulf was actually the first of Bryher’s eight novels, that received critical acclaim in the 1950s and 1960’s. Instead of attending to the heroic, she focused upon the lives of ordinary citizens as shaped or disfigured by their rulers. She put it starkly: “there would be a gulf between the bombed and the unraided.”
Bryher was allergic to nationalism of any stripe—an obsession ignited when she was five, when, visiting the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris, she recognized that the Boer war made the French disdain the English; at first she wanted to put up fisticuffs, but was disarmed when she learned the French shared her values of égalité, fraternité, liberté.3 These words entranced Bryher—ultimately leading to Beowulf. But to understand her engagement with history, and her first book that confronts the daily reality of London during World War II, the reader needs some familiarity with Bryher’s own history—and her most significant and enduring love relationship with the imagist poet H.D.
Bryher was born Annie Winifred Ellerman, on September 2, 1894 to the then-unwed couple, John Ellerman and Hannah Glover. Her father had made a fortune in shipping and other enterprises, and upon his death in 1933 was said to have been the richest man in England. The constraints of the Victorian age made her wonder “if adventure had died just before I was born,” which propelled her to conclude that “if I wanted to be happy when I grew up I had to become a cabin boy and run away from the inexplicable taboos of Victorian life.”4 At an early age, she secretly sensed what Havelock Ellis, the sexologist, later confirmed in 1919 that she was “a girl only by accident.”5
During her early years, Bryher travelled extensively with her parents, spending winters in Italy, Egypt, Greece, and the south of France, and summers in Switzerland. The family spent little time in Britain. Travel advanced Ellerman’s shipping business, and fulfilled his desire to escape snobbery and restraint. During these early treks, Bryher learned Arabic, tried to decipher hieroglyphics, rode her first camel, learned to barter, and traded thoughts with Sufis. At twelve, she had a vision near the wall of Euryelus, the ancient fortress at Syracuse, where, according to mythic lore, one’s fate is sealed: “seized by the throat, barely able to breathe,” she was hit with “a terrifying sense of ecstasy,” and understood with undeniable certainty that Clio, muse of history, was destined to be her life’s mistress: to “write of things was to become part of them. It was to see before the beginning and after the end. I almost screamed against the pain of