{"id":148981,"date":"2020-11-10T10:54:55","date_gmt":"2020-11-10T15:54:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=148981"},"modified":"2020-11-10T13:51:52","modified_gmt":"2020-11-10T18:51:52","slug":"re-covered-living-through-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/11\/10\/re-covered-living-through-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Re-Covered: Living Through History"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

A woman sips a cup of tea after her street is struck by a German bombing raid, 1940<\/p><\/div>\n

Since the beginning of lockdown, I\u2019ve sought refuge in sagas set during the Second World War. There is something deeply comforting about reading stories in which people are trying to live their lives against the backdrop of an intense global crisis, not least because it\u2019s given me a much-needed sense of perspective. It\u2019s so easy to become caught up in the myriad horrors of the contemporary moment, one sometimes forgets that the darkest days of the Second World War would have been just as depressing and desperate as the period we\u2019re living through right now.<\/p>\n

Of the many books on the subject I read, Blitz Spirit: Voices of Britain Living Through Crisis, 1939\u20131945<\/em>\u2014a brilliant new compendium of extracts from wartime diaries compiled from the Mass Observation Archive by the anthologist, editor, and literary agent Becky Brown\u2014has stuck with me. Mass Observation (MO) was set up in 1937 by the anthropologist and polymath Tom Harrison, painter and filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, and poet and journalist Charles Madge. It\u2019s aim, Brown explains, was \u201cto tell a truer, fuller version of events than was available in the newspapers or recorded in the history books,\u201d or, as the founders themselves put it, to collate an \u201canthropology of ourselves.\u201d Central to the project was the five-hundred-strong National Panel of Diarists, volunteers from all walks of life living across the UK, who kept a daily personal journal that they then submitted each month. So many of the films and books from or about this period are, Brown explains, \u201cbathed in the golden glow of \u2018Blitz Spirit\u2019,\u201d yet this is nowhere near the full story. \u201cThis alleged wartime phenomenon has little space for twenty-first-century human frailties such as succumbing to unnecessary trips to the shops, or hugging your grandmother,\u201d she continues, invoking the deprivations of the current pandemic. \u201cWe are used to hearing about \u2018Blitz Spirit\u2019 as psychological bunting that festooned the national mind, a one-size-fits-all utility suit that the nation donned for The Duration, allowing every person to dig their way to victory with a song and a smile.\u201d Instead, she argues, what makes the MO Archive \u201cso valuable and so poignant,\u201d is that these are accounts written in real time and by real people, thus \u201criddled with fear and defeat.\u201d Take, for example, this entry written by a widowed housewife and voluntary worker from London on September 1, 1941:<\/p>\n

Life at present offers for my taste a damn sight too little active pleasure to set against the unaccustomed displeasure of work\u2014what with friends scattered & busy, & the lack of petrol, & the shortage & monotony of food & drink, & now the beastly long blackouts creeping in again. Everything seems reduced to a vast, drab boringness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Change a few minor details\u2014swap rationing for quarantine and isolation, for example\u2014and this could have been written only yesterday.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve read some masterpieces on the period, Olivia Manning\u2019s Balkan Trilogy and Elizabeth Jane Howard\u2019s five-volume Cazalet Chronicles among them, but the one that mirrored the real-time realism of Brown\u2019s Blitz Spirit <\/em>most clearly was Bryher\u2019s novel Beowulf<\/em>, which its author wrote during the height of the relentless Nazi bombing raids on the British capital. \u201cIt is not difficult to write during a Blitz, there is nothing else to do, but merely uncomfortable,\u201d she explained after the fact.<\/p>\n

Although it was first published in France in 1946, and then in America in 1956, Beowulf<\/em> is only now being made available in the UK, in a new edition recently published by Schaffner Press. In The Days of Mars: A Memoir, 1940\u20131946<\/em>, Bryher describes her earlier book as \u201ca documentary, not a novel, but an almost literal description of what I saw and heard during my first six months in London,\u201d (Schaffner has given it a subtitle, A Novel of the London Blitz<\/em>, perhaps to distinguish it from the significantly more famous Anglo-Saxon poem of the same title). She arrived in the city at the end of September 1940, having reluctantly left her home in Switzerland, to rejoin her lover, the imagist poet H.\u2009D. In its commitment to verisimilitude, rather than that \u201cgolden glow\u201d that Brown refers to, Beowulf <\/em>is steeped in fear, danger, and, above all, absolute exhaustion. It\u2019s the anti\u2013Mrs. Miniver<\/em>, if you will, which is precisely what made it unpublishable in postwar Britain. \u201cThe English refused to publish Beowulf<\/em>,\u201d Bryher explains in The Days of Mars<\/em>, \u201cthey had had enough of war.\u201d Yet reading the book today, it feels urgent and absorbing. Despite the glaring differences between a nation at war and one fighting a deadly virus, Beowulf<\/em> makes for especially timely reading right now, proof of a surprising number of similarities, parallels, and echoes between the past and the present.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The book takes its title from the name that one of its protagonists, Angelina, gives a plaster statuette of a British bulldog\u2014\u201calmost life size, with a piratical scowl painted on his black muzzle\u201d\u2014that she buys in a salvage sale. She displays the bulldog in pride of place in the Warming Pan, the London tea shop that she runs with her friend Selina. This small, rather inconspicuous establishment, with its now \u201cstinted and miserly\u201d supply of cakes, is the hub around which the action of the novel takes place. It \u201cfulfilled a need in the neighbourhood [\u2026] a cross between a village shop and the family doctor,\u201d somewhere for people to meet a friend for a cup of tea, stop by for lunch during a day of shopping in town, where a shop girl can get a hot meal, or, in the case of Horatio Rashleigh\u2014the elderly, impoverished painter who lives alone in a small, cold flat in the attic of the same building\u2014just while away the long, lonely hours. The Warming Pan was a real tea shop, situated just around the corner from H.\u2009D.\u2019s flat in Lowndes Square in London\u2019s Belgravia, as were its proprietors. Bryher and H.\u2009D. frequented the Warming Pan for their meals, and they became extremely fond of the real-life Angelina and Selina, too. \u201cMy dear, dear Selina,\u201d Bryher writes in The Days of Mars<\/em>. \u201cShe was a symbol to me of the essential soul of England.\u201d Beowulf, the ironically named bulldog statuette, takes on this role in the book: he stands in pride of place in the tearoom\u2019s empty fireplace, a symbol of \u201ccommon sense\u201d and of the British people\u2019s bulldog spirit, the tenacity and courage they display even during the country\u2019s darkest hour.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Bryher and HD, Still from Kenneth Mcpherson\u2019s film Borderline, 1930<\/p><\/div>\n

Despite having published prolifically\u2014Bryher\u2019s work includes memoir, poetry, nonfiction, and novels\u2014few of these volumes remain in print today. Instead, it is the author\u2019s relationships with others for which she remains best known; as H.\u2009D.\u2019s lover, but, more generally, for her association with other expat writers, artists, and intellectuals who made Paris their home in the twenties. She was friends with Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Sylvia Beach and her lover, Adrienne Monnier, who was also the proprietor of La Maison des Amis de Livres. (Beowulf <\/em>is dedicated to Beach and Monnier.) Bryher had deep pockets\u2014her father had made a fortune from his shipping business; on the occasion of his death in 1933, he was said to be the richest man in England\u2014thus she acted as a generous patron to many other writers as well as publishing her own work.<\/p>\n

Born Annie Winifred Ellerman in 1894, she later adopted the more androgynous-sounding Bryher, naming herself after her favorite of the Scilly Isles, that remote and beautiful archipelago off the Cornish coast. The wild isolation of these heath-covered islands spoke to her desire to reject convention, particularly its gendered norms. \u201cHer one regret was that she was a girl,\u201d explains Nancy, the protagonist of Development<\/em>, the first of Bryher\u2019s pioneering three-volume fictionalized autobiography\u2014which continues in Two Selves <\/em>and West<\/em>\u2014that details her gender dysphoria:<\/p>\n

Never having played with any boys, she imagined them wonderful creatures, welded of her favourite heroes and her own fancy, ever seeking adventures [\u2026] She tried to forget, to escape any reference to being a girl, her knowledge of them being confined to one book read by accident, an impression they liked clothes and were afraid of getting dirty. She was sure if she hoped enough she would turn into a boy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bryher met H.\u2009D. in July 1918. From the get-go, theirs was an unconventional coupling. H.\u2009D., who was at the time married to Richard Aldington, was pregnant from an affair with the composer Cecil Gray, at whose Cornish home she\u2019d fled to for comfort while Aldington pursued an adulterous affair of his own. As Susan McCabe explains in her introduction to the new edition of Beowulf<\/em>, H.\u2009D. and Bryher \u201cfinessed their relationship by burying it in plain sight.\u201d Bryher married Robert McAlmon in 1920, after which her father funded McAlmon\u2019s Paris-based Contact Press, which published, among others, Joyce, Stein, Djuna Barnes, H.\u2009D., and Bryher during the twenties. Bryher divorced McAlmon in 1927, and married the filmmaker, photographer, and critic Kenneth Macpherson instead. Shortly after, the two of them legally adopted H.\u2009D. and Gray\u2019s daughter, Perdita, whose care Bryher had been responsible for since her birth. Macpherson, meanwhile, was also H.\u2009D.\u2019s sometime lover, and thus the four of them\u2014Bryher, H.\u2009D., Macpherson and Perdita\u2014forged a happy if unconventional family unit. Macpherson and Bryher built a house together in Switzerland, where Bryher remained after H.\u2009D. and Perdita returned to London in November 1939, after the outbreak of war. Bryher had begun to use her money and contacts to help Jewish refugees flee Europe as early as 1933, and she continued this work until she herself left Switzerland in 1940, making the arduous journey to London via Barcelona and Lisbon. She arrived at her partner\u2019s flat at midday on September 28, while H.\u2009D. was out having lunch at the Warming Pan.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Beowulf <\/em>recounts the happenings of a single day and night, and Bryher moves with ease among her assorted cast of characters, linked by their connection to the Warming Pan. There\u2019s the rather pompous retired Colonel Ferguson, for example, who\u2019s recently returned from living on the Continent, keen to get back into the fray and do his bit. There\u2019s also the tea shop\u2019s waitress, Ruby, who makes the long journey in from the East End, and then back again, by bus each day. The West End certainly suffered during the bombing, but it was London\u2019s poorest neighborhoods\u2014where the factories, the docks, and the workers were concentrated\u2014that bore the brunt of the nightly assaults. As the bus that Ruby takes home draws closer to her destination, we\u2019re told that the \u201cair began to fill with the smell of wet dust and burnt brick that was peculiar to a badly bombed district.\u201d Beowulf<\/em> is full of similarly rich sensory detail, whether in Bryher\u2019s description of the specific sights\u2014\u201cThe sky was a soft velvet that flashes turned into a gala of exploding candles\u201d\u2014and sounds\u2014\u201cThe noise was tremendous. It was not like thunder, it was angrier. Planes seemed to be directly overhead as if the whir of a mosquito had been magnified many times\u201d\u2014of an air raid, or her detailing of the aftermath. With its strange, spare, surrealist precision, this evocative description of Hyde Park echoes the wartime photos of Lee Miller: \u201cA piece of parachute silk fluttered from a branch near the explosive circle of a new crater. Patches of grass were corroded as if by acid, a piece of broken railing stuck out of the earth.\u201d Observing this barren, fragmented scene, Ferguson notes that the landscape has the \u201cbare, haunted loneliness of the moors in Lear<\/em>; only a fretful succession of necessary acts, eating, sleeping, getting warm, differentiated life from nightmare.\u201d<\/p>\n

This\u2014the nightmarish reality of life during the Blitz\u2014is something the book comes back to again and again. McCabe comments that Bryher\u2019s characters are \u201ceveryday Londoners who were not always able to \u2018keep calm and carry on\u2019 (as the posters instructed) during horrific threats and massive changes.\u201d This supports Brown\u2019s reflections on what she discovered in the MO Archive: \u201clives experienced by the minute and the day, not the week or the year.\u201d It\u2019s surely no coincidence that Bryher chose to limit her portrait of the city to a single twenty-four-hour period: the nightly possibility of death forced people to live moment by moment.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn wartime it was impossible to be gay or brave for long,\u201d writes Bryher with an honesty that\u2019s rarely found quite so unvarnished in other fiction from this period. A thick seam of despair runs through Beowulf<\/em>. As with the pandemic-related hardships of today, those who are suffering the most are those who\u2019d already had it hardest before the crisis hit. Rashleigh, for example, is a \u201clonely old man,\u201d without a penny to his name, thus the war makes his already uncomfortable life one of even more misery and suffering:<\/p>\n

If one were seventy-six, every moment counted. There were no brave words about death except when one was young. Suppose he were too ailing, when it stopped, to go to the National Gallery again? [\u2026] It was dreary enough to be an old man and have no soul to comfort him without these fiendish noises and the Government cutting down his butter.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Selina, meanwhile, struggles with her own financial worries. Between rationing and the exodus of so many of their regulars, it isn\u2019t easy keeping the Warming Pan in business. \u201cThere are worse things than war, she caught herself thinking,\u201d in an effort not to dwell on life\u2019s hardships, \u201cthough this, of course, was the result of war,\u201d she realizes sagely.<\/p>\n

Perhaps most interestingly, just as many of us today here in the UK where I live question our government\u2019s apparently incompetent handling of the pandemic, Beowulf <\/em>is seeded with complaints about the failures and fiascos of those in charge. What scant plot there is revolves around Angelina\u2019s efforts to obtain eggs\u2014or dried egg powder\u2014for the Warming Pan\u2019s kitchen. Bryher emphasizes the privations of rationing, something that in the popular collective consciousness is more often synonymous with images of ruddy-cheeked Britons digging for victory, their back gardens devoted to luscious vegetable patches. The reality, as it turns out, was rather different. \u201cIt was said in England that we gave the children in England an adequate diet but that was propaganda,\u201d writes Bryher in The Days of Mars<\/em>:<\/p>\n

The ones I met were always hungry and their parents undernourished. Of course this is not the picture that was presented to the world but it comes from direct observation and was for me a depressing lesson; control the Press and other methods of influencing public opinion and a nation can be persuaded into believing whatever a government wishes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Londoners we meet in the pages of Beowulf<\/em> aren\u2019t all unquestioning patriots, they\u2019re ordinary people who are suffering, uneasy and distrustful of many of the decisions the government has made on their behalf. The war is described as both \u201ca manifestation of governmental incompetence,\u201d and a \u201ctriumph of bad organization,\u201d something that\u2019s rendered the citizens of London, who diligently troop into their uncomfortable and often rather perilous shelters each night, \u201cvictims of a vast, destructive bureaucracy.\u201d As Beowulf <\/em>draws to a close, in the early morning aftermath of yet another violent air raid, the sighs of relief breathed by those who\u2019ve survived the night (and not all have made it) aren\u2019t a match for the utter fatigue everyone feels. As Bryher puts it in The Days of Mars<\/em>, as the war crept on and everyone\u2019s patience was tested, the grim reality was that everyone was \u201ctoo exhausted to care whether or not we survived until the peace.\u201d This is one aspect of Blitz spirit that we don\u2019t often hear about. And to learn more about Bryher herself\u2014whom McCabe describes as \u201ca pioneer, a model of personal and cultural defiance\u201d\u2014is to realize that she really couldn\u2019t have written Beowulf <\/em>any other way than with such candid, unromantic truth-telling.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt may be that it is the artist rather than the historian who has the vision to give certain moments of the national chronicle their full and terrible value,\u201d writes Bryher in The Days of Mars<\/em>. Beowulf <\/em>is testament to this; its \u201csmall,\u201d but \u201cresounding,\u201d story\u2014as The<\/em> New Yorker <\/em>praised the book in September 1956\u2014is a strikingly authentic account of the conflict that Bryher summed up as \u201clong dreary days that are full of hardships rather than valor.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read earlier installments of Re-Covered here<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Lucy Scholes is a critic who lives in London. She writes for the\u00a0<\/em>NYR Daily,<\/em>\u00a0The Financial Times,<\/em>\u00a0The New York Times Book Review,\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Literary Hub, among other publications.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A novel by H. D.\u2019s lover, Bryher, captures the unromantic difficulty of living through war. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1670,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46439],"tags":[67827],"class_list":["post-148981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-re-covered","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRe-Covered: Living Through History by Lucy Scholes<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A novel by H. 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