Beowulf

war.
H.D. and Bryher’s relationship was complex, involving them in numerous “psychic” triangles, including one with Freud, with whom Bryher arranged for H.D. to consult in 1933 and 1934, during the poet’s writer’s block. While H.D. was in analysis, Bryher widely distributed J’Accuse!, the pamphlet by S.M. Salomon, published by the World Alliance for Combating Anti-Semitism, that contained numerous evidentiary photographs and testimonials, gathered from reputable news agencies and eye-witnesses, exposing the barbarity against Jews: torture, beatings, interrogation, normalized through hate articles and armed militia.10 H.D. asked Bryher for some for Freud and others. H.D. told her that Freud “broke his great analytical rule of not noticing mags” in picking up J’ACCUSE; he “almost wept” that the English had done this.11 Still H.D. resisted what she saw as Bryher’s “warpath” mentality, wanting to savor her hours with the aged Freud. Impressed with Bryher, Freud called her a “northern explorer,” though asking if she was Jewish, he answered the naive question that there “was no trace.” A skeptical Bryher: “So I said rubbish I wanted to be a Jew because David was tiny but slew Goliath.”12 Freud saw her savior complex writ large. At this point, Bryher embarked on a six-year crusade of rescuing refugees from the Nazis, obtaining visas, and even buying passports on the black market.
In 1936, Bryher warned in her new publication, Life & Letters: “Every time that you laugh about not having the time nor the brains to bother about foreign affairs, you will just go and water the lupins, you are making it a little more certain that you will lose eventually, your garden, your home, and your life.”13 Bryher echoes this in the words of one of her characters in Beowulf: “How does being an ostrich save one from disaster?”
When Hitler invaded Poland, our couple was at Kenwin in Switzerland with the psychoanalysts, Melitta and Walter Schmideberg (Melitta was the daughter of the eminent child psychologist, Melanie Klein), huddling around the wireless. Two days later, Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand declared war. Bryher imagined herself during the Great War “struggling up the lane in the Isle of Wight towards the post office as if the intervening years had been wiped out with some dark sponge.”14 A soldier in World War I, Walter spoke of its first dead. H.D. wrote George Plank that “the last 20 [years] have simply dropped out, simply gone and one is just there back in ones [sic] early middle age.”15 She coaxed herself: “I must pull myself together and live or die. I don’t think I’ll do the latter.”16
With war announced, another abyss opened: Bryher’s mother, Lady Hannah Ellerman, died on September 17, 1939 in Cornwall. Bryher could not make it back in time to be by her mother’s bed-side. That same month Freud died. Relieved Lady Ellerman and Freud would be spared this new war, the couple nonetheless felt a terrible sense of loss and time disjunction. Both bi-centurians—with Bryher born in Queen Victoria’s reign, like the teashop owners in the novel, held a panoramic sense of seismic change. H.D. and Bryher were middle-aged—53 and 45, respectively, when WWII began. While H.D. strove to survive through “ancient rubrics” and “spiritual realism” in the first section of Trilogy, Walls Do Not Fall, published by Oxford in 1944 (though written almost simultaneously to Beowulf ), Bryher could only live moment to moment, feeling “war was Time in all its ponderous duration. […] People must live, but sometimes waiting in line, she wondered why.”
The so-called “phony war” lasted from approximately September 1939 until July 1940, with the Germans embroiled elsewhere on the continent. Many in the populace, such as Robert Herring, editor of Life & Letters, felt “in the dark” on many points. Advising that “[g]asmasks are practically second-nature,” along with hat and gloves, Herring prepared the returnees, not knowing Bryher would stay behind.17 The sidewalk edges were chalked white to prevent falls during a raid. Air-wardens commandeered the streets. In Beowulf, Bryher describes how people sometimes had to crawl to shelters.
H.D. took the last Orient Express back to London in November 1939. At 48 Lowndes Square, the flat H.D. inhabited after her Freud sessions in 1934, H.D. saw London brace for attack with the mandatory blackouts, fire watchers, stretcher vans, shelters, and mobile canteens. She perceived how gender standards had altered, conveying to Bryher that “the streets are full of attractive girls in long blue trousers, ambulance, and other oddments in short skirts and short hair […] the ambulance drivers use their blue pants, like yours and Pup’s. All very familiar and sea-shorish.”18 Both H.D. and Perdita noted the subtle but eerie switch from white bulbs to blue. London was pulling itself together.
H.D. lunched with Perdita regularly at “The Warming Pan” where she went for “escapes” to find a shadow of the familiar “old world” of London. Adversity initially fed H.D.’s magic. Seeing herself as “analyst poet,” with a small fund Bryher had set up, she reached out to help others in extremes whom she met at the tearoom, or those who, like herself, had survived World War I. H.D. wrote her friend Silvia Dobson, “I am expecting Br., end Nov or early Dec. But I am here, hale and hearty, moving about like a fire-fly. I find the black-out very beautiful and exciting, too,” remarking upon an air-warden who “found a chink of light.”19 Perdita recognized “Kat,” (H.D.’s nickname) as a species distinct from her other mother, “Fido” (Bryher’s nickname), diagnosing: “She has one of those poetic, detached natures which see the best in all, even the black-out; she finds it so beautiful, the emergency lamps are like fairy candles, girls in tin helmets like at a fancy dress party.”20 Perdita admitted she herself couldn’t stop swearing. She knew the blackout wasn’t likely to revitalize Bryher, though H.D. compared her to “a little Atlas.” Bryher confirmed to Norman Holmes Pearson (1909–1975), a professor of English poetry at Yale, who would remain close friends of both women into