Beowulf

a basket on Beowulf, set him on wheels, and serve their wares. They’d need a hawker’s license. Its mutely horrific end was appropriate—for after all, such events happened every day and night in London and elsewhere. The last line bandies a mock stiff-upper-lip response: “It is embarrassing to be caught in a raid.”
Bryher expected the British would suppress the publication of Beowulf because it too closely recorded actual Blitz conditions, believing the public wanted to forget the war—and would dismiss her so-called “little people”—the shopkeepers and their customers—trying to make life a bit gayer. Adrienne Monnier called it a “petit classique;” the book’s brevity at 201 pages calls attention to Bryher’s goal: she wanted to give the everyday citizen]a reflection of their struggle. It was first published in French, through Monnier’s own press, Mercure de France, on April 18, 1946, but the translator, Helene Malvant, was unsure of the title. Sylvia Beach said “[i]f the French have never heard of Beowulf they are going to do so now.”54 Both Sylvia and Adrienne were sworn “Beowulfians.” They recognized themselves as the two teashop owners, Selina and Angelina (the couples even had identical initials). In a sense, Bryher wrote the book in homage to female couples, as herself and H.D., whose relationships were obscured by still governing Victorian rules, and blindness to variations in sexual identity and desire.
After finishing the work in 1944, Bryher put it aside to write her first historical novel, The Fourteenth of October, portraying the Norman Conquest. She told Pearson she viewed those invaders as the “Nazis of their day.” He introduced Bryher to Kurt Wolff, who, along with his wife Helen, had an imprint at Pantheon Books in New York. Wolff published Bryher’s novels, including the Fourteenth of October (1952), The Player’s Boy (1953) The Roman Wall (1954), and finally, Beowulf (1956). Its publication was advertised in a quarter-page of The New York Times, alongside H.D.’s Tribute to Freud, published the same year but like Beowulf, finished more than a decade earlier, in 1944. “Together, at last,” wrote H.D., happy to see Beowulf and her own memoir of Freud out at the same time. H.D.’s lyricism joined Bryher’s documentarian point of view, both fueled by great humor, and humility.
The American edition of Beowulf bears the dedication, both an epistle and an epitaph:
TO
Sylvia Beach
AND THE MEMORY OF
Adrienne Monnier
The dedication is significant. After all, the “Warming Pan” offered sustenance when there was none. In some ways, it operated similarly to Beach’s Shakespeare & Co. or Adrienne’s shop as not just sites for commerce, but also for cultivating creativity in a dark time. Bryher held faith with her early Beowulf supporter, Adrienne, diagnosed in 1954 with “la maladie Ménière,” with spells of terrible vertigo, dizziness, vomiting, and whistling in the ears, making her life unlivable.55 With no cure, Adrienne’s sister and Sylvia assisted her suicide by giving her a lethal dose of pills on June 19, 1955. Bryher memorialized this act: “When the time came she showed us how to die and hardly a day passes now when I do not miss her.”56 H.D. heard this news from Bryher by phone, and wrote immediately to Sylvia to “accept my heart’s devotion-a double devotion”: she couldn’t imagine them apart.57 Bryher posed with Sylvia Beach, with the photo of H.D. by Man Ray between them: the date of the photo is uncertain but was post-WWII, reflecting as biographer Virginia Smyers puts it, “she never lost faith in H.D.’s art.”58
A handful of favorable reviews came out when Pantheon published the English version of Beowulf, and in the “Briefly Noted” section of The New Yorker the reviewer exclaimed that Bryher, “that very gifted, very human writer, tells a small, resounding story.”59 “Small” again, but a dynamo. Marianne Moore commended Bryher’s deft combination of prosaic and heroic.60 She spoke with choral helplessness through her characters. As she put it in her book, there would always exist a chasm between those bombed upon and those not, yet it seemed New York was ready to start looking at what films had not showed. Robert Parris’s appreciative review of it as “emotional,” compared Beowulf favorably to The Fair Game by Constantine Fitzgibbons’, both “about people living among live bombs and dying friends,” but more notably aligned hers with the macabre realism of Henry Green. By 1956, when these reviews were written, Bryher had come into her own, described by Parris in his review as “a lady who had the courage to return to England from Switzerland at the outbreak of war, and who obviously knows what bad tea, margarine, cakes made with egg powder and sleeping in public shelters mean to an Englishman.” Recognizing in Bryher’s steady absurd portrait of the “idea of morale is to carry on as if nothing at all unusual were happening,” John Hutchens praised her “quiet, affecting, formal understated report.”61
Beowulf’s stark humor makes it a faithful companion when times are uncertain. The fact that it appeared in French first highlights its circuitous route to publication: a novel of London, only publishable in Paris or New York. In republishing the work, the hope is that those in the twenty-first century will find their own “plaster” reflection in Beowulf, learning history’s jolting repetitions—as well as finding in Bryher an insightful chronicler, observing the quotidian details of life in their most unreal and extreme circumstances. She had learned from the philosopher Walter Benjamin that any triumphal conquest depended on devastation and plunder, with the victors recording history. In Beowulf, she mourned lost devotions, fantasizing being among “anonymous craftsmen who spent a lifetime on some obscure corner of a cathedral wall.”
Both Bryher and H.D. wrote some of their best work during the Second World War with an eye to writing as survival and resistance. Bryher took on the external world, complemented by H.D.’s more inner one. They sought to find through historical time-travel precedents for war—and peace, and if in fact, they were heading as H.D. believed, into a supposed “Aquarian