Beowulf

of her mother’s friends. She saw men green with hunger; other horrors she kept for Beowulf, such as the hands of a man “broken by rifle butts” whom the Nazis had left for dead.
Touching down at Poole in England during an air raid, Bryher dwelled on the ludicrous nature of her trip to London: “got here from Switzerland. How? Oh, only by a German plane with an Italian pilot. […] Officially Spanish” to land in “the middle of the Blitz.” Forced to stop several times due to rail damage, Bryher finally arrived at Lowndes Square on September 28. H.D. had, in fact, just ducked out for lunch at the “Warming Pan.” Bryher sat on the steps, reeling, surveying the blacked-out windows and general ruin. With no illusion the war would be over by Christmas, she felt “forced back into the cage and misery of the first war.”34
When H.D. spotted Bryher sitting on her steps on her suitcase, she held her hand out, guided Bryher towards the sand piles, showing her how to put out incendiaries. Perdita was staying on what she called an officers’ camp-bed in Bryher’s room. Like one sleepwalker to another, H.D. initiated Bryher into war-ways. The sirens started up; they climbed down to the lower floor. Upon waking, Bryher confronted the “war made new,” exploiting earth’s skies and seas. Herring wrote: “So you made it,” followed with, “It certainly is a fabulous time at which to drop in. Congratulations.”35
Thinking nothing would faze her after her journey, Bryher’s first reaction was terrible shock, summed up in her anecdote about a woman who ran an eel shop who left only briefly, and returned to find it gone. Such immediate vanishings gave Bryher a sense of unreality, akin to what she felt among the ruins of the Parthenon with H.D. on their travels in 1920. Only now the ruins were in ongoing process. She used Pearson as safety valve, “[t]he blackout cuts out half one’s life. Travel about England is intensely uncomfortable and difficult,”36 further retailing for their growing bond: “ignorance of what is going on in Europe makes one howl with rage. The French for instance loathe Pétain […] and the officials here want to believe he is a noble elderly soldier.” Spain felt “merely a German province,” where she recounted hearing only German spoken. Bryher uniquely cultivated a bird’s eye-view. “Believe me,” she wrote, “there is nothing romantic about bombardments, gunfire, black out, food rations, and the awful claustrophobia of being stuck on an island. My slogan is that I am perfectly willing to die for England but absolutely hostile to being asked to live on the island.”37 Bryher described her and H.D. cooking supper by a single candle, training themselves not to swallow if the anti-aircraft guns were firing.
Keeping up American contacts, Bryher wrote H.D.’s friend, Mary Herr, that London was a “mouse-trap,” and that she had arrived in the middle of the Blitz, watching “the tiny houses go down like toys.”38 These details fed her writing in Beowulf, begun in October, written during the day on a “broad window ledge,” and she told how once a warden came by at night, thinking her typing on her bed was some kind of signaling.39 She recorded the hollowness in watching solid structures dematerialize: “The heaviest buildings had a fragile air as if children had cut them out of coloured paper and stuck them up in school with cardboard supports. If you poked a brick you were surprised that it did not crumple like a balloon.” Bryher found adjustment difficult: “Life here can only be called peculiar. It goes on perfect normally with gigantic gaps.”40 She vented: “I knew it was coming and nobody would listen to me when I told them about the German preparations and I watched helplessly while we gave the Germans every advantage possible and slid into this state of utter muddle ourselves.”
Beowulf allowed Bryher to dramatize the visceral, noting in her narrative descriptions, “a new smell for London,” not like “plague pits,” but “the smell of wet dust and burnt brick,” and she observed a road “ankle deep in glass,” with “broad jagged splinters and heaps of brittle crumbs.” Language strained to approximate visions of craters pocking the streets; the sizzling desertion, with those who joined the “great migration to the country,” as she calls it.
By the end of 1940 in London, many were forced to “live” in shelters. Bryher was shocked, writing Moore that it was “unbelievable what the people are enduring”; she described the scene in detail: “most of them sleeping on the ground in excessively damp shelters or sitting up on chairs under the staircase or parked in the tubes. It is really more than any book ever could describe.”41 Marianne Moore empathized with her friend: “the unnatural danger of the blackout; and the obstacles to getting a job. When one is panting with desire to help the country win, and what is more rare—equipped at every point as you are, to do it—I know the white hot intensity of some of your wartime reflections.” Moore provided salve for Bryher’s “hide,” knowing her desire to heal, to give and to act: “But there is a certain consolation, don’t you think, in the sense that each of us is scourged with the very same sense of frustration—an illusion after all, Bryher. What we feel is the sinews of war.” Within the temporal confusion, Bryher saw young girls, like Eve in the novel, tramping down the stairs of the tearoom’s lodging; one also sees a bit of Bryher in her Colonel Ferguson, seeking a government position, rebuffed because he had been in Switzerland after India, his age counting against him.
Bryher gunned for the Establishment, which she separated from Churchill, who she thought received paltry gratitude for rescuing London, the world even, when he was put out of office by Labor in 1946. Matter of fact about losing their Life & Letters Maiden Lane office, Bryher wrote Pearson: “[it] went, a time