Beowulf

of bees in her garden and had written for advice.”
Bryher’s “Warming Pan” is a nexus, where a number of lives meet: along with Selina and Angelina, the retired Colonel roaring to get back into action; a woman waiting to see a friend coming in from the country; Horatio, the older rheumatic gentleman; the young working girl, Eva, who plays jazz, sports bobbed hair and rushes out, “like a fledgling man-at-arms,” encapsulating the new generation’s “freedoms.” Written in the style of free indirect discourse, the narrative flits from mind to mind. Bryher knit everyday Londoners who were not always able to “keep calm and carry on” (as the posters instructed) during horrific threats and massive changes.
Angelina and Selina bear shadow resemblances to Bryher and H.D. themselves. The former semi-mocks herself through Angelina, who a quarter in, emerges in a slow cinematic unveiling: “At first only scarlet gloves and the tip of a beret were visible,” before she sets down a plaster dog, “almost life size, with a piratical scowl painted on his black muzzle.” The impractical plaster dog is the heart of the novel. With her imagist sensibility (learned from H.D.)—the practice of condensing in one image a number of related ideas or motifs—the artificial canine becomes provisional, a shadow of the emblematic British Empire, and thus more endearing. Angelina boldly carries the “vulgar” icon into the eighteenth-century tearoom.
Bryher channeled through Angelina’s point of view, explaining that she found it opposite the “Food Office”: “‘I can’t keep a dog, I know, in the raids, but it’s so cheerless without one. I was afraid at first you might be tempted to call him Winnie, but then I thought, no, here is an emblem of the whole of us, so gentle, so determined …” Of course we hear Winifred in Winnie (Bryher’s original middle birth name). The nickname “Fido” represented Bryher’s fidelity to H.D., her fiduciary know-how, and her tenacity when taking up the cudgels for underdogs.
The actual teashop Bryher and H.D. regularly patronized was put out of business by a raid in 1941, making the book elegiac.50 Bryher’s novel maintains an essentially Enlightenment vision that coffeehouses and tearooms are public spaces that exist for exchange of thought. Her Selina reasons that the times wanted “a new and quite other vocabulary” to comprehend what was beyond human comprehension. Her tea shop, Selina believed, helped “morale”: “For if clients came into lunch and went off cheerfully afterwards, they, in turn, would affect their relatives and their maids.” Bryher found Selina inspiring, “especially on such a cold, dreary morning, to think how much one solitary woman could do in defence of her native land.” “Tearooms had a special meaning for Selina.” They were “the perfect meeting place.” Bryher later memorialized, “Selina was a symbol to me of the essential soul of England,” in her desire to maintain quality, noting the couple’s difficulty during the war because “most of their customers had gone into the country or joined the Women’s Services.”51
Bryher held that the British government, in failing to listen to Churchill, had cheated the public of a proper wartime diet. Never one to indulge herself, she wondered where her country’s sirloins, cheddars and beer had gone. She knew H.D., already lacking in protein, had trouble eating when harassed. England could have imported better food, but it “had flung away much of the nation’s foreign reserves in panic selling after the Fall of France.”52 There was too much “austerity and restraint.”53 An obsession with food supply revealed her provider-complex.
Part of the minimal plot, the drama of her tea shop proprietors was that they only used farm eggs, but now only rationed egg powder was allotted for such shops as theirs; but since they hadn’t signed on initially, they fretted about necessary forms, or not being able to bake at all. As unimportant as a tearoom might seem, Bryher unveiled Selina’s invisible life-and-death struggle to survive, while helping make wartime life a bit more nutritious and solacing.
While the teashop is a locus of community, it bears the marks of the war. The posted notice, ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives,’ part of a propaganda campaign, reminded her “of a morning in the last war when she had stood in line for hours to get new ration books.” Selina herself didn’t like the sign, feeling “[l]ife ought to be generous, she felt, wildly generous.” The link between rationing and espionage posters reminded that liberty is sometimes as hard to obtain as butter in wartime.
Bryher, as Angelina, compared the raids “to a film, but the screen was at least concrete” compared to “this concentrated bombing.” It simply narrowed life to survival, without cohesion. “‘So this is the twentieth century,’” her Selina “snorted.” This declaration occurs before Bryher delivers a final quiet slow-motion chapter with herself as witness, with the painful sense of shared precarity. We sense her “procession” with H.D. among Londoners, but here she takes us to the visceral core of war response.
After many descents to the shelter, Selina never knew climbing the short set of stairs could be so exhausting. The siren goes off, and dutifully, Selina climbs up to rouse the elderly Horatio, who resists her efforts. Her neck, “permanently stiff,” she lugged blankets and necessities down the dark stairs and through the hall to the dark street, where she almost drops her burden, hearing explosions beginning: “Half the sky seemed to explode over their heads and crash.” When they arrive at the shelter, knitting needles resume between crashes and explosions: it was “as if they were lying on the bottom of the well with nothing overhead.” (H.D.’s “shrine open to the sky” of Walls echoes.) Suddenly, “the walls lifted with a roar at that moment and split, and rushed towards each other in a cascade of noise, plaster, and crumbling bricks.” Selina discovers, looking through thick smoke, the staircase Eve traversed was no more. Angelina reassures—“remember, partner, here we are alive,” excited that Beowulf survived the raid as well. “Humor is protection,” she declared, plotting to strap