Beowulf

the moment that from its very intensity could not last.”6 Close study of the past helped her to view history as non-linear and see beyond it and the present, as captured in this assertion in Beowulf: “the distant thuddings of the mobile guns were the footsteps of mammoths.”
In 1909, when Bryher was 15, her mother gave birth to a boy, John Jr. Her father, knighted for his help in the Boer War, purchased a mansion in Mayfair, 1 South Audley Street, close to Hyde Park and adjacent to the Dorchester Hotel. Under English law, their newborn was also destined to be illegitimate; thus Bryher’s parents snuck off to obtain a “Scotch Marriage.” Bryher’s childhood utopia came to an abrupt close with her brother’s birth. Her parents shifted their fantasies to John Jr.’s future, throwing the teenage Bryher into paroxysms, not only of anger, but despair. Increasingly, Bryher disappointed her mother’s expectations that she would develop into a “lady.” (She puts it for one of her Beowulf characters: “everything should have been so different if she had been a man.”) As a child, it was easier to maintain the fantasy of boyhood. One of the family’s guests criticized Bryher as not “quite normal,” advising they put her in school “to knock the edges off.”7 Much to her horror, they followed this suggestion, enrolling her at Queenswood Boarding School, twenty miles outside London, as a day-student.
During this period, she began calling herself Bryher after the wildest island in The Scillies, off the coast of Cornwall. Fiercely independent, she wanted to make her way without the assistance of her father’s surname. After Queenswood, Bryher returned to Audley Street, and spent the First World War studying in her father’s library, attempting to write, and meet poets. She corresponded with the American poet, Amy Lowell, who was friends with a number of Imagist poets, including H.D., born Hilda Doolitttle in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania on September 10, 1886. Hilda had followed her one-time suitor, Ezra Pound, to Europe. Through Pound, H.D. met and married Richard Aldington. Through Lowell, Bryher discovered H.D., deeply moved by her debut collection, Sea Garden (1916).
The couple’s forty-two-year, intimate, tumultuous yet productive relationship began as World War I ended, and would continue on to H.D.’s death in 1961. At the time of their meeting, Aldington, H.D.’s soldier husband, was embroiled in a blatant adulterous affair, leading her to escape to Cornwall at the invitation of the Scottish music critic and composer Cecil Gray. With her photographic memory, Bryher memorized all of H.D.’s poems, and descended upon her there on July 17, 1918. H.D. was fascinated with this amorphously-gendered being. The H.D. and Bryher saga felt destined by both women. While sometimes maintaining separate households, they remained discretely together, corresponding when apart nearly daily. H.D. wrote “Remember that it all began with a bluuue swalllllow and you—”8 As a result of her tryst with Cecil Gray, H.D. was now pregnant with Perdita (“Pup”), and meeting Bryher felt like rebirth. Now separated from Richard Aldington, H.D. committed perjury and registered Perdita as his, only to fear he would unveil her and Bryher’s unusual state of affairs—two mothers and a baby.
An unusual couple, Bryher was five feet, next to the very tall H.D.; Bryher’s smallness, H.D. observed, made her like a literary Brueghel, who is said to have put his diminutive size to advantage by doing sketches under a table, invisible to those unobserved.
H.D. and Bryher explored the physical realms of Cornwall, Greece, Egypt, and aesthetic and intellectual worlds, too, in their mutual fascination with cinema and psychoanalysis. They shared visions in Corfu, cultivating a telepathic form of communication. Their birthdates separated by eight days and eight years, they celebrated the “octave” together. But they moved cautiously into the unknown realm of their relationship: one a bisexual, the other proto-transgender. Bryher’s parents, particularly her mother, kept her pinned to her shawl. The couple finessed their relationship by burying it in plain sight. Bryher asserted her freedom by marrying Robert McAlmon in 1920 on her trip to United States with H.D., H.D.’s mother, and baby Perdita.
Sir John gave McAlmon funding for Contact Press, that published some of the bright lights of modernism—among them, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, H.D., Bryher, and Mina Loy. As Bryher’s husband, McAlmon provided a cloak of marital respectability for her and H.D. One of his favorite haunts was Paris, where Bryher and H.D. were to meet Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Bryher also met and became fast friends with Adrienne Monnier, the proprietor of the bookshop, La Maison des Amis des Livres, and her lover, Sylvia Beach, who with her help, established Shakespeare and Co., the iconic English language bookstore that was to become the nexus for poets, artists, and playwrights in Paris during that time and for decades after. Bryher’s mother sent a plaster bust of Shakespeare as mascot for the store—the “post-office” used by Bryher and McAlmon to correlate their stories of togetherness, while living distinct lives.
But McAlmon’s decadence proved too much for Bryher. She divorced him, marrying filmmaker and photographer, Kenneth Mcpherson, and adopted Perdita (aka “Pup’) in 1927. Kenneth was not only a lover of H.D., but a creative force in his own right and a good friend to both women; theirs was an unconventional family. He and Bryher built Kenwin in the Bauhaus style, in Switzerland, its name deriving from the first syllables of their names—Kenneth and Winifred. Kenneth also directed three experimental films, the most complete, Borderline (1930), featuring Paul Robeson, his wife, Eslanda, H.D. and Bryher. With an avant-garde montage, it exposed undercurrents of white supremacy.
In 1933, Bryher witnessed brown shirts and military operations in Berlin, and wrote a piece openly criticizing Britain in the shutdown of Close Up, the trio’s experimental film magazine, “What Will You Do In the War?”9 She warned of heightened militarism, displaced persons with meagre luggage. At age fourteen, Perdita marched in Hyde Park to protest Nazism, and she felt her whole youth a build-up to