Beowulf

bomb so no casualties and we saved everything but had to clear out as ceilings fell on desks.” Bryher hoarded a tonnage of paper before war started to be sure she could keep her journal afloat. Another of Beowulf’s cast, Adelaide Spenser, in London with a military husband, bought “sixty pounds of marmalade,” for barter for eggs after the Munich Conference in 1938. Bryher deliberately put herself near everyday Londoners, surveying the wreckage of glass, dirt, damp and even flesh. The Germans took up where they left off, with vicious attacks between December 27 and New Year’s Eve. Churchill posted extra fire watchers around St. Paul’s Cathedral to extinguish incendiaries, but as Bryher’s novel observes, there were limited resources for “the middle groups” who “suffer most in war and the Victorian doctrine that hard work is its own reward flops at once in a time of national disaster.”
Still holding a visa for America, Bryher expressed to Pearson: “What is it like. The house rocks like the Normandie in a gale, all the things happen that you see on a movie, and hear […] Shells whistling, guns thundering, explosions, one thinks nothing can survive the night and crawls up from the basement to listen to the early news and dear B.B.C says ‘last night’s attacks were on a somewhat smaller scale than usual.’ Then one rushes out to listen to what the milkman, the taxi driver, the porter and the shopgirl have to say about the B.B.C.”42 This sentiment found its way into Beowulf as the heiress joined London citizens, and in fact her Angelina, the teashop proprietor most like Bryher, with her political meetings and what H.D. liked to call Bryher’s “enthusiasms,” who probably spent time, like Angelina, “mimick[ing] the announcer: ‘there was slight enemy activity over London in the early hours of last evening.’” When Bryher went to obtain her identity card and ration book she was stopped by the porter, once an acrobat in Switzerland, who knew her lake “upside-down.”43 Startled, she wrote Annie Reich, a psychoanalyst she helped emigrate to New York, about this phenomenon: “I chat incorrigibly to people in the street and am acquiring a mass of miscellaneous knowledge, one friend of mine is over sixty and suddenly decided that she had to make munitions.”44 Bryher was herself vitalized by war through such encounters, and her devotion to H.D.
She mourned in her chronicle, “the absurdity of it all, dropping of balls upon the ninepin houses.” This felt vulnerability she expressed by “going out” and facing it; H.D. stayed close within her walls, incanting prayers for those in danger, and for her own psychic survival, culminating in The Walls Do Not Fall, dedicated to Bryher for their previous travel to Egypt in 1920 and now London; H.D. telescoped these geographies, seeing the fragile houses instead as roofless shrines, “ruin everywhere, yet as the fallen roof / leaves the sealed room,”45 she sought to conjure “protection for the scribe”46 through her very writing. H.D.’s recognition that their shelter was imperiled drove Bryher’s sense in Beowulf of “walls being alive.” She transported Horatio Rasleigh (she gave her real life contacts fictional names in the novel), born in approximately 1872, subsisting on an aunt’s monthly pittance, into her novel, as living above the “Warming Pan”; though never meeting this man, because of his quaint paintings of ships, she corresponded with him for years, sending him stipends.47 In Beowulf, he winces at the “wretched” noises on the radio, anxious about his loss of patrons of his handpainted greeting cards.
Pledging no raid would scare her after what she endured in her harrowing trip back to London, Bryher put on her beaten leather jacket, market gloves, braved the queues, turned in registration forms, and prowled the ruins, grieving the loss of her father’s long-gone world. As chronicler and griever, she almost immediately came upon the genesis of her working title for Beowulf:
The raids were heavy throughout October. I went out gloomily one morning with my basket to get our rations and saw a huge crater at the end of Basil Street. Somebody had fetched a large plaster bulldog, I assume from Harrods because they were then on sale there, and stuck it on guard beside the biggest pile of rubble.48
“Comrade Bulldog” was “conceived” in a flash. Her Angelina was not “a symbol of gallantry but of common sense,” while Selina, perhaps speaking for H.D., questioned the sense of carrying a plaster bulldog and setting it in the hearth of a tearoom. Selina found it vulgar—as much as Angelina protests: “‘Beowulf is a symbol of us, colleague,” for “‘comrade simply didn’t suit’” the dignified Selina.
H.D. was well aware that Bryher took to the “outer” world better than she did, describing Bryher’s humanist forays: “a wonder with her good deeds and constant care; she knows all the people in the neighborhood and when I go out with her, it is positively embarrassing as her progress is one triumphal procession. Someone’s teeth here, someone’s gout there, someone’s baby there, someone’s son in the near-east somewhere else—” and finally, speaking for them both, she looked “forward to [him] joining [their] village life.”49 After Norman Pearson came to London in 1943 to supervise spycraft, he hired Perdita for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. Though Pearson arranged a job in Washington for her, Bryher desired proximity to H.D. and Perdita.
The novel Beowulf opens on the last day of Horatio Rashleigh, born in the Victorian age. Modernist in its form of twelve chapters, it is “a day and night in the life” of the Blitz, it provides key-hole glimpses, set forth in plain if spunky language, knowing “there were no words” to describe the predicament of Londoners during the Blitz. The saving grace is the tea shop, “a cross between a village shop and family doctor”: “You walked up to the ‘Warming Pan’ if you wanted a recipe for quince marmalade or if Auntie had trapped a swarm