Beowulf

the future: “H.D. seems to find black outs poetical, I am sure I shall find it depressing.”21
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