Beowulf

age.” They were the generation that saw the quick erosion of Victorian life, though its repressiveness lingered. The constant disruption made it possible, according to H.D., for Bryher to write in episodes. By the 1950s, H.D. looked back nostalgically on Bryher reading parts aloud as they emerged while she and Perdita stitched.
Bryher perceived herself among exiles “scattered across Europe as deputy ambassadors, carrying ideas or even goods to people who would never come in contact,” a premise with the “emissaries” of “secret wisdom,” and “living remnant” that Walls conveyed in a more literary register.62 Trilogy believed in talismans, charms, amulets; Bryher’s mascot bulldog was a bitter-sweet charm. On a brighter note, Bryher recorded in her journal that she finished Beowulf on January 18, 1944, but she knew the English would have none of it. H.D. had good news for Pearson: Oxford wanted to publish an American copy of “W A L L S.”63 With this in mind, the more raw world of Beowulf would make a clarifying teaching companion to Trilogy, especially The Walls Do Not Fall, that witnesses “dust and powder fill our lungs / our bodies blunder” as well as its faith without faith, a search: “we are voyagers, discoverers / of the not-known, / / the unrecorded: we have no map.” A productive dialogue between these texts, both written at Lowndes Square, widens the lens so we see each woman’s struggle as “shock knit with terror,” recording the precursors to our own contemporary sense of omnipresent war, a digital blitz of sorts, and a geopolitical communal helplessness—and, yet, hope.
ENDNOTES
1The University of Wisconsin collected Development and Two Selves in a single volume in 2000; Paris Press has published several of her novels (Visa for Avalon: A Novel [2004] and The Player’s Boy [2006]) along with her influential memoir, The Heart to Artemis: A Writer’s Memoirs (2006).
2The Days of Mars: A Memoir, 1940–1946 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971), 12.
3Paris 1900, translated into French like Beowulf, was first published by Adrienne Monnier in 1936.
4Heart to Artemis, 16–17.
5Bryher to H.D., March 20, 1919. All letters unless otherwise noted are from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
6HA, 110–111.
7Ibid, 115–116.
8H.D. to Bryher, November 29, 1934.
9Close Up 10.2 (June 1933): 188.
10J’Accuse, Salomon House, 33 St. Jame’s Street, London, S.W. 1: 6.
11H.D. to Bryher, May 16, 1933.
12Bryher to Macpherson, March 31, 1933.
13“The Crisis: September’, Life and Letters To-Day, 19/25 (Nov. 1938): 1.
14Bryher, Heart to Artemis, 288.
15H.D to George Plank, September 25, 1939.
16Ibid.
17Herring to Bryher September 21, 1939.
18H.D. to Bryher, November 11, 1939.
19H.D. to Silvia Dobson, November 16, 1939.
20Perdita to Bryher, November 14, 1939.
21Bryher to Pearson, December 2, 1939.
22Conversation with James Alt, July 2018; as a son of Alice Modern, he learned of Bryher’s generosity, and claimed she saved his whole family.
23H.D. to Bryher, March 5, 1940.
24Ibid., November 11, 1939.
25Ibid, June 5, 1940.
26Ibid. June 7, 1940.
27Ibid. July 17, 1940.
28Edith Sitwell to Pavel Tchelitchew; June 6, 1940. Quoted in Greene’s Edith Sitwell: Avant Garde Poet, English Genius (New York: Virago Press, 2011), 284.
29H.D. to Bryher, May 1, 1940.
30Ibid, May 31, 1940.
31Ibid., May 30, 1940.
32Ibid, September 2, 1940.
33H.D. to Moore, September 24, 1940.
34Heart to Artemis, 307.
35Herring to Bryher, September 30, 1940.
36Bryher to Pearson, December 5, 1940.
37Ibid, January 1941.
38Bryher to Mary Herr, October 17, 1940. Bryn Mawr Bryher Papers.
39Days of Mars, 14.
40Bryher to Pearson, January 19, 1941.
41Moore to Bryher, October 14, 1940; Rosenbach Museum and Library.
42Bryher to Pearson, December 5, 1940.
43Bryher, Days of Mars, 8.
44Bryher to Annie Reich, January 5, 1941.
45Walls Do Not Fall in Trilogy New York: New Directions 1973: 3.
46H.D. to Pearson, [nd] 1943; cited in Between Poetry and History: The Letters of H.D. and Norman Holmes Pearson, edited by Donna Krolik Hollenberg (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 997), 30–33.
47Days of Mars, 15.
48Ibid., 12-13.
49H.D. to Pearson, May 2, 1943; Between History and Poetry, 22.
50Annette Debo in Within the Walls notes that H.D. requested bequests from Bryher for the two women, Miss Docker and Miss Venables, after they lost their business. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014: 49. Debo’s collection of H.D.’s uncollected stories and poems from the Blitz is accompanied by her deft research into the period. This book could fruitfully join for a class on H.D. and Bryher during World War II.
51Days of Mars, 12.
52Ibid, 5.
53Ibid., 5.
54Beach to Bryher, January 28, 1948.
55Sylvia to Bryher, October 25, 1954.
56HA, 209.
57H.D. to Sylvia Beach, June 22, 1955.
58Gillian Hanscombe & Virgina L. Smyers, Writing for their Lives: The Modernist Women 1910–1940. (London: The Women’s Press, 1987), 46.
59New Yorker, September 1, 1956.
60New York Post, August 26, 1956.
61Chicago Tribute, August 27, 1956.
62Bryher, Days of Mars, 76.
63H.D. to Pearson, February 24, 1944. Hollenberg, Between History and Poetry, 34. WDNF was published in 1944, Tribute to the Angels in 1945, and Flowering of the Rod in 1946, published successively by Oxford University Press: it became Trilogy.

BEOWULF


1
THOSE WRETCHED people had turned on the radio again. Horatio shifted the bedclothes with great caution and felt for the switch. Formerly he had flung his curtains wide last thing in the evening, but in this miserable blackout he could see nothing without a light. Seven o’clock. There was no need, absolutely no need, to consider rising for at least two hours. First of all his doctor, his very kind doctor, had bidden him stay in bed, “just as long as you are able, Mr. Rashleigh,” and secondly, it was an economy in fuel. It was distasteful, as he often repeated to Miss Tippett downstairs, to worry about the pence. “My fault, if I may say so, is extravagance.” Still, now that people had dropped sending handpainted Christmas cards to each other, it was important not to start the gasfire until the last possible moment. Naturally, he never expected a woman to be punctual, but Agatha, his cousin, was really exasperating; it was often the seventh of the month before she remembered to mail him his little cheque; it made life so difficult.
How hard it was, after an active life, to lie still in the mornings! Up to the previous