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H.D. & Bryher
H.D. & Bryher
An Untold Love Story of Modernism
Susan McCabe
1
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

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© Oxford University Press 2021
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You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McCabe, Susan, 1960– author.
Title: H.D. and Bryher : an untold love story of modernism / Susan McCabe.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2021. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021022647 | ISBN 9780190621223 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780190621247 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), 1886–1961. | Bryher, 1894–1983. |
H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), 1886–1961—Relations with women. |
Bryher, 1894–1983—Relations with women. | Poets, American—20th century—Biography. |
Novelists, English—20th century—Biography. | Lesbian authors—Biography. |
LCGFT: Biographies.
Classification: LCC PS 3507.O 726 Z776 2021 | DDC 811/.52 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021022647
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190621223.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
For Kate
Contents
List of Figures ix
Acknowledgments xi
Abbreviations and a Note on the Archives xiii
Dramatis Personae xvii
THE VOYAGE OUT 1886–1 915

1. The Meeting: “We Two” and Modernism 3
2. H.D.’s Ancestors Circle 16
3. Bryher’s Family Closet 29
LINE 1 FLORIDE 1909–1 919

4. Sentimental Educations 43
5. Love & Art: Being Phantoms Together 56
6. Romance of Rescue & “the Jellyfish Experience” 71
LINE 2 BORODINO 1920–1 928

7. Parting of the Veil: Greece, 1920 . . . 89
8. Questing America & Marianne Moore 101
9. Inconvenient Marriages & Wanderlust 114
10. Cinematics: We Three 130
LINE 3 PSYCHOANALYSIS 1929–1 939

11. Film Morphing into Borderline 145
12. Enter Freud: Dreaming through the Houses 160
13. Death Drive & “the Perfect-Bi” 173
14. “Group Consciousness” & Ion 184
15. Abdication, Aggression, Anschluss 196
viii Contents
LINE 4 BLITZ 1939–1 945

16. Twilight Zone & “the Combined UNK” 211
17. Walls Falling & the Drive Inward 223
18. Séance Nights 232
19. The Writing on the Wall 246
LINE 5 VIKING 1946–1 961

20. Losing One’s Mind to Find It 259
21. Tidying Up Modernism 270
22. Cold War Romances 281
23. Recovery & Illuminations (1953–) 296
Notes 313
Bibliography 363
Index 375
Figures
2.1 Helen Wolle Doolittle and her father, 188? 21

2.2 Gilbert, Harold, and Hilda Doolittle, c. 1890 22
2.3 Charles Leander Doolittle at his telescope, undated 24
3.1 Sir John Ellerman and Bryher, undated 30
3.2 Bryher and her father, c. 1897 34
3.3 Bryher in Paris for the World Exhibition, 1900 36
3.4 Bryher in Egypt, 1903. 37
3.5 Bryher and her mother on a ship, c. 1905 39
4.1 H.D.’s high school graduation photo, 1904 44
4.2 H.D. in 1909 or 1910 47
4.3 Bryher on a ship, with notebook, 1912 54
5.1 Scrapbook with clippings of D. H. Lawrence and Richard Aldington 64
5.2 Bryher and John Jr., undated 65
6.1 H. D. and Perdita, c. 1919 76
6.2 Scrapbook images of Bryher and H.D., 1919 or 1920? 81
6.3 H. D. at Mullion, Cornwall, c. 1919 84
6.4 Bryher seated on rocks, c. 1919 85
7.1 Passport photograph of Bryher, c. 1920 90
7.2 H.D., 1920(?) 95
8.1 Bryher in Cornwall, c. 1921 104
8.2 Marianne Moore, 1932? 105
8.3 Bryher, H.D., and Perdita, 1920 106
8.4 H.D. on wooded path, 1920 108
9.1 Helen Wolle and Perdita, 1921 or 1922 115
10.1 Kenneth Macpherson and Bryher, 1927 131
10.2 Scrapbook photomontage of H.D. and Bryher, undated 141
10.3 Photomontage of Bryher with Athena haircut, undated 141
11.1 Bryher, Kenneth MacPherson, and Robert Herring in Norway, 1929 146
11.2 Borderline still of Bryher, 1930 147
11.3 Borderline still of Paul Robeson, 1930 149
x List of Figures
11.4 Borderline still of Paul and Eslanda Robeson, 1930 150

11.5 Borderline still of H.D., 1930 151
11.6 Borderline still of Eslanda Robeson, 1930 151
11.7 Program for Borderline, 1930 156
15.1 Photograph of Bryher by Gisele Freund, 1938 206
22.1 Swiss stamps, 1951 288
23.1 H.D., Norman H. Pearson, and Bryher, 1956 305
23.2 Sylvia Beach and Bryher with a photo of H.D., undated 311
Acknowledgments
There were many angels along the way.

Much gratitude goes to the Schaffner Family. Val Schaffner generously hosted
me for lunch in 2009 for an interview in early days to discuss his grandmother
and Bryher, and very recently, provided several family photos. I thank Timothy
Schaffner for permission to quote from Bryher’s unpublished and published works,
granted courtesy of the Schaffner family. Further thanks goes to Declan Spring, agent
of H.D.’s estate for permission to quote from the published and unpublished works of
H.D. granted by New Directions Publishing Corporation, and The Schaffner Family
Foundation to quote from previously unpublished letters by Hilda Doolittle: © (Untold
Love Story, 2021). Permission to quote excerpts from Notes on Thought & the Wise
Sappho © 1982 by the Estate of Hilda Doolittle. Reprinted with the permission of
The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of City Lights Books, citylight.com.
Richard Deveson’s brother, James Alt, alerted me of Klara’s letters to her sister,
Alice Modern, who escaped Vienna with her husband to New York, with Bryher’s aid
before World War II began. I thank Richard for permission to quote from My Dearest
Family: An Austrian Refugee’s Letters from London © (Richard Deveson, 2017). I am
more than grateful to Susan Stanford Friedman’s Analyzing Freud @ (Friedman,
2002), and for her permission to quote from private correspondence she provided:
first, Perdita Schaffner who spoke of her “two mothers,” and next, H.D.’s close friend,
Silvia Dobson, along with interviews with Norman Holmes Pearson, the professor
who befriended H.D. and Bryher.
I thank my editor, Norman Hirschy, for his incredible patience. I am grateful to
the University of Southern California, Dornsife College, for its belief in this project:
it awarded me an Advancing Humanities Fellowship, and other travel and research
funds necessary for this decade long project. In the ancient days of 2009, I met
Virginia Smyers, librarian at Harvard, who handed on an interview she had with
Bryher.
Making annual trips to the mecca of modernist papers, the Beinecke Library at
Yale University, holding the bulk of H.D. and Bryher’s writing, receiving two fel-
lowships, I thank Nancy Kuhl, Curator of Poetry in the Yale Collection of American
Literature, for her warm assistance, and thanks as well to emeritus curator, Patricia
Willis, whose wisdom radiated through early H.D. scholars. Gisèle Freund’s photo
of Bryher in 1938, used by permission from the Institute of Contemporary Publishing
Archives in Paris. I thank Valentine Schaffner for providing family shots from the
Schaffner album. The remaining shots are all Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Room.
This book would not have been possible without the Modernist Studies Society and
the H.D. Society, with support at various stages from Julie Vandivere, Cynthia Hogue,
xii Acknowledgments
Annette Debo, Jane Augustine, and Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos. Sawnie Morris

published a much earlier version of Chapter 6 in Taos Journal of Poetry © (McCabe
2014). I owe special thanks to Marjorie Perloff, for her translation of letters from
Dr. Theodore Brunner. Gratitude also goes to Linda Leavell, Langdon Hammer, and
in the final stages, Judith Sensibar, key biographers who lit my way.
I thank the American Academy in Berlin, where I researched fascist Europe,
reading Bryher’s letters to Walter Benjamin at Akademie der Kunst, “Archiv 33.”
Pamela Rosenberg directed me to the music scholar, Ivan Nagel, the lover of H.D.’s
last analyst, Erich Heydt. He knew both women. The Center for the Humanities at
Stanford granted me the Marta Suttons Weeks fellowship in 2016. While there, Elaine
Pagels delivered an influential lecture on Gnosticism. Writing this dual biography felt
like déjà vu, with all its echoes with the present—the desire for tenderness and the
desperate need for social justice. Gratitude as well goes to the poets, Brenda Hillman
and Bob Hass, who invited me and my wife to Inverness to tune in to Code Pink. An
inspiring friend, the poet ‘Annah Sobelman, dead from breast cancer in July 2017,
had buoyed my stamina when I hiked the Santa Clara mountains.
I owe much to friends, Brian Lizotte, Maja Liliqviust, Marianne Thormählen,
and students, among others, Amaranth Borsuk, Brandon Som, Doug Manuel, Elise
Martin, Marcie Vogel, Diana Arterian, Catherine Pond, Austen Leah Rosenfield,
and Christopher Adamson. Steven Aaron Minas stepped in as miracle during my
drafting of the manuscript draft in 2018. Catherine Theis, poet and H.D. scholar,
has been an inspiring interlocuter. I thank Janalynn Bliss for her fortitude and
kindness. I thank the Chair of English at USC, poet David St. John, for his gen-
erous faith. I thank Dolly at Patton’s Pharmacy, and Ray-man at Votre Sante, born
in Bethlehem, P.A.
I thank my sister, Marilyn McCabe Seeman, for her belief in me, and for finding
The Conquest of Illusion at a used bookstore when we were teenagers; this esoteric
work was written by a major figure in H.D.’s world, J.J. van der Leuww, another patient
in the waiting room on her way to see Freud. My gratitude extends infinitely to my
beloved wife, Kate M. Chandler, who endured reiterations of this tale, essentially its
midwife.
Be bold, dear reader, as this curious story unfolds—in writing it, I entered and
exited tunnels, feeling like H.D.’s grandmother, who always carried matches and a
candle. May this story of an untold love under the surface allow other such stories
to arise.
Deo Volente.
Abbreviations and a Note on the Archives
H.D
“Advent” In Tribute to Freud (New York: New Directions, 1974)
“AN” “Autobiographical Notes”
Angels “Tribute to the Angels” in Trilogy with Walls. Trilogy. New York: New
Directions, 1973.
BID H.D, Bid Me To Live, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011.
CP H.D., Collected Poems, 1912–1944, edited by Louis Martz
(New York: New Directions, 1982)
Compassionate in H.D. Magic Mirror, Compassionate Friendship, Thorn
Ticket: A Tribute to Erich Heydt. Edited by Nephie J. Christodoulides.
Victoria: ELS Editions, 2012
“Euripides” “Notes on Euripides, Pausanias, and Greek Lyric Poets” (1920), H.D.
Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University
Flowering “Flowering of the Rod,” in Trilogy with Walls. Trilogy. New York: New
Directions, 1973.
Gift &“Notes to Gift.” The Gift. Edited by Jane Augustine. Gainesville: University Press of
Florida, 1998.
“H.D.” “ ‘H.D.,’ by Delia Alton,” Iowa Review 16:3 (1986): 180–221
Helen Helen in Egypt (New York: New Directions, 1961)
Her HERmione (New York: New Directions, 1981)
Kora and Ka (New York: New Directions, 1996)
Majic Majic Ring, edited by Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009)
Compassionate in H.D. Magic Mirror, Compassionate Friendship, Thorn
Ticket: A Tribute to Erich Heydt. Edited by Nephie J. Christodoulides.
“Meleager” In “Notes on Euripides, Pausanius and Greek Lyric Poets” (1920), H.D.
Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University
Notes Notes on Thought and Vision (San Francisco: City Lights, 1982)
Paint It Paint It To-Day, edited by Cassandra Laity (New York: New York
University Press, 1992)
“Pausanius” In “Notes on Euripides, Pausanius and Greek Lyric Poets” (1920),
H.D. Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University: University Press of
Florida, 2009)
Sappho “The Wise Sappho,” collected with Notes on Thought and Vision (San
Francisco: City lights, 1982)
Sword The Sword Went Out to Sea (Synthesis of a Dream). Edited by
Cynthia Hogue and Julie Vandivere. Gainesville: University Press of
Florida, 2007.
xiv Abbreviations and a Note on the Archives
Thorn in H.D. Magic Mirror, Compassionate Friendship, Thorn Ticket:

A Tribute to Erich Heydt. Edited by Nephie J. Christodoulides.
Tribute Tribute to Freud (New York: New Directions, 1974)
Walls The Walls Do Not Fall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944)
Within Within the Walls, edited by Annette Debo (Gainesville: University
Press of Florida, 2014)
Bryher
Days The Days of Mars: A Memoir, 1940–1946 (New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1971)
Development In Two Novels, introduction by Joanne Winning (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2000)
Fourteenth The Fourteenth of October (New York: Pantheon, 1952)
HA The Heart to Artemis: A Writer’s Memoirs (New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1962)
Two Two Selves, in Two Novels
Collaborations
Cinema and Modernism A selection from Close Up, edited by James Donald, Anne
Friedberg, and Laura Marcus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1998)
CU Close Up, a monthly literary magazine devoted to film published
between 1927 and 1933, edited by Kenneth Macpherson with
Bryher as assistant editor
L&L Life and Literature To-Day: An International Monthly of Living
Literature, a journal dedicated to literature and the arts that ran
from 1935 to 1950, with Robert Herring as editor in chief
Additional Abbreviations and Abbreviations Used in References

to Secondary Works
AF Susan Stanford Friedman, Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher
and Their Circle (New York: New Directions, 2002)
BGT Robert McAlmon, Being Geniuses Together, 1920–1930 (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968)
BHP Donna Krolik Hollenberg, Between History and Poetry: The Letters
of H.D. and Norman Pearson Holmes (Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press, 1997)
Dearest Family Klara Modern, My Dearest Family: An Austrian Refugee’s Letters
from London to America, 1938–1945, ed. Richard Deveson
(privately printed, 2017)
“Friendship” Carol Tinker, ed., “A Friendship Traced: H.D. Letters to Silvia
Dobson,” Conjunctions, no. 2 (Spring 1982): 112–157
“Mirror” Silvia Dobson, “Mirror to a Star,” unpublished autobiography,
Dobson Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale
University
Abbreviations and a Note on the Archives xv
ML Frances Gregg, The Mystic Leeway, ed. Oliver Marlow Wilkinson

(Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1995)
MMSL Marianne Moore, The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore, ed. Bonnie
Costello, Celeste Goodridge, and Cristanne Miller (New York: Penguin
Books, 1997)
RAHDEY Caroline Zilboorg, Richard Aldington and H.D.: The Early Years in
Letters (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992)
RAHDLY Caroline Zilboorg, Richard Aldington and H.D.: The Later Years in
Letters (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995)
Silverstein Louis Silverstein’s H.D. Chronology, Introduction and Parts 1–6 (1905–
1986), http://www.imagists.org/hd/hdchron.html
SSF Susan Stanford Friedman Correspondence
“UA” Perdita Schaffner, “Unpublished Autobiography,” Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Library, Yale University
Archives
Although this book draws from individual works by H.D., Bryher, and others, it significantly
depends on archives. The Beinecke Library at Yale University houses most of the papers I rely
upon: unpublished works, letters, photographs, and other material. All references to letters
not indicated by a source are from the unpublished works at Beinecke. Other archives (e.g.,
Houghton at Harvard) are noted after citation.
Amy Lowell Papers Amy Lowell Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University
Bryher Papers Bryher Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale
University
Dobson Papers Silvia Dobson Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale
University
H.D. Papers H.D. Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale
University
HDPBM H.D. Papers, Bryn Mawr Library Special Collections, Bryn Mawr
College
Jordan Papers Jordan Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale
University
Moore Papers Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Pearson Papers Pearson Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale
University
Pound Papers Pound Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale
University
RLM Rosenbach Library and Museum, Philadelphia
WBA 33 Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Walter Benjamin, Archiv
Dramatis Personae
(in order of appearance)
Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman; aka Amy Lowell (“Armory”), 1874–1925

“Dolly,” “Fido,” “Sir F,” “Gareth,” “Bay,” “Small
D. H. Lawrence, 1885–1930
Dog,” “Fitho,” “Fiend,” “exo”), 1894–1983
Cecil Gray (biological father of Perdita;
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle; aka “Dooley,”
“Hare,” “Vanio,” “Cissie”), 1895–1951
“Astarte,” “Horse,” “Unicorn,” “Cat,” “Kat,”
“Dryad,” “Hyacinth,” “Lynnix,” “Mog,” “Helga Havelock Ellis (“Chiron,” “Centaur”),
Doorn,” “Moggles,” “Delia Alton,” “eso”), 1859–1939
1886–1961
Marianne Moore (“Rat,” “Dactyl”),
Sir John Ellerman (Bryher’s father), 1887–1972
1862–1933
Mary Warner Moore (Marianne Moore’s
Lady Ellerman (Hannah Glover; Bryher’s mother; “Mole”), 1862–1947
mother; “Lady E,” “Goat”), 1867–1939
Peter Rodeck (“Piotor”), 1876–?
Charles Leander Doolittle (H.D.’s father),
George Plank (illustrator), 1883–1965
1843–1919
Dorothy Richardson (“Rat”), 1873–1957
Eugenia Doolittle (Helen Eugenia Wolle;
H.D.’s mother; “Beaver”), 1853–1927 Robert McAlmon (Bryher’s first husband of
convenience; “Piggy”), 1896–1956
Elizabeth Weiss Seidel Wolle
(H.D.’s maternal grandmother; Norman Douglas (“Oncle”), 1868–1952
“Mamalie”),1824–1906
Blanch Lewin (“Mouse”)
Francis Wolle (H.D.’s maternal grandfather;
Kenneth Macpherson (Bryher’s second
“Papalie”), 1817–1893
husband of convenience; “Dog,” “Dawg,”
Frances Josepha Gregg, 1884–1941 “Rover,” “Kex,” “K,” “Kay,” “Big Dog”),
1902–1971
Ezra Pound, 1885–1972
Paul Robeson, 1898–1976
Brigit Patmore (“Mimosa”), 1882–1965
Eslanda Robeson, 1895–1965
May Sinclair, 1863–1946
(anthropologist, civil rights activist)
Violet Hunt, 1862–1942
Robert Herring (“Bud,” “Buddy”),
Richard Aldington (H.D.’s husband, father 1903–1975
of stillborn; “Cuthbert,” “R.A.,” “Faun”),
Hanns Sachs (“Turtle”), 1881–1947
1892–1962
Elizabeth Bergner (“Die B”), 1900–1986
Frances Perdita Macpherson Schaffner
(“Pup,” “Puss,” “Lizard”), 1919–2001
xviii Dramatis Personae
Sigmund Freud (“Papa,” “Professor,” Norman Holmes Pearson (“Chevalier,”

“Maestro”), 1856–1939 “Puritan”), 1909–1975
J. J. van der Leeuw (“Flying Dutchman”), Walter Benjamin 1892–1940

1893–1934
Elizabeth Bowen 1899–1973
Alice Modern, 1908–1968
Osbert Sitwell, 1892–1969
Klara Modern Deveson, 1913–1998
Edith Sitwell 1887–1964
Walter Schmideberg (“Bear”), 1890–1953
Hermann Hesse (“Maestro”), 1877–1962
Melitta Schmideberg (“Bearess”), 1904–1983
Elizabeth Siddal (“Sid,” “Lizzy”), 1829–1862
Silvia Dobson (“Sylvio,” “Dragon”),
Elizabeth Ashby (“Herrison”)
1909–1993
Erich Heydt (“Chevalier”), 1920–1977
Mary Chadwick (British psychoanalyst,
“Chaddie”), ?–1943 Ivan Nagel (theater and music critic),
1934–2012.
Dorothy Cole Henderson ?–1961
Gerald Henderson (St. Paul’s Cathedral’s

librarian)
THE VOYAGE OUT 1886–1 915
1
The Meeting
“We Two” and Modernism
We two remain: /yet by what miracle

—H.D., Heliodora and Other Poems (1924)
Cryptic enough to be a man’s initials, H.D., born Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961) in

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, while Bryher, born Winifred Ellerman (1894–1983), in
London, felt like a young man, enduring a yet unnamed condition. Their “union” dis-
appears from most appraisals. They hid in plain sight. The illegitimate daughter of Sir
John Ellerman when he died in 1933,1 Bryher’s greatest pleasure during adolescence
was venturing to Cornwall with her school chum, Doris Banfield, to satisfy her invis-
ible inner “boy.” Spurning her father’s surname, she took the moniker Bryher after
the wildest island in the Scilly archipelago. At twenty-three, she learned she could
not come out as a man and take the reins of her beloved father’s empire, nor could
she come out as a debutante or be forced into “womanhood,” its customs and binding
limits.
With Doris hosting Bryher in Zennor, she arranged to meet the poet H.D., then
staying at Bosigran Castle at St. Ives, only five miles away. H.D.’s Sea Garden, pub-
lished in 1916, transported Bryher, who memorized its stark, broken lines. Struggling
to make literary ties, Bryher succeeded in befriending the lesbian poet Amy Lowell,
her first transatlantic pen pal. Lowell also corresponded regularly with H.D. and her
husband Richard Aldington. Receiving Bryher’s recent pamphlet An Appreciation of
Amy Lowell as a calling card, H.D. invited her to “chat over tea,” directing her to “a
square house standing by itself just below the ruins (with two tall red chimneys) that
stand close to the road.”2
Bryher wound her long brown plaits up into two chignons. Her heart racing, she
pulled on a flared skirt under a middy blouse hanging from her shoulder to below the
waist, tied with a loose belt, a style adapted by Coco Chanel from the kit of French
seamen. If she could not be a sailor, at least she could dress like one. As she set off for
H.D.’s cottage, a storm approached.
Cornwall, at its widest, forty-five miles, narrowed to five miles at Land’s End. It
hypnotized Bryher with its rugged trails, an intoxicating braid of smells: heather,
chamomile, gorse, comfrey, repeating H.D.’s lines, guided by their instruction
H.D. & Bryher. Susan McCabe, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190621223.003.0001
4 The Voyage Out 1886–1915
“to find a new beauty /in some terrible /wind-tortured place,” escape from “dead
grass,”3 savoring the “stunted” sea rose, with “marred” and “meager petals,”4 feeling
personally addressed by “The Shrine”: “Are your rocks shelter for ships?”5 When the
breeze turned to strong gusts, Bryher regretted not donning doublet and hose like the
Elizabethan “girl-pages” she was then writing about.
H.D. paced in her cottage on a promontory about two hundred feet above the sea.
Torn whether to write to her husband in the trenches, the difficulties she faced felt
overwhelming. During a leave, he started an affair with another woman. The com-
poser Cecil Gray asked H.D. to his cottage in 1918, and she too had an affair. It was the
modern way. Their succinct intimacy left her with child. H.D.’s pregnancy aggravated
flashbacks to the traumatic stillbirth of her baby conceived with Aldington, coin-
ciding with the sinking of the Lusitania, a Cunard liner, on May 7, 1915, by a German
U-boat. Paired with the loss of 1,198 lives and the consequent entry of America into
World War I, their lost baby doubled with global loss. H.D.’s brother, Gilbert, her elder
by two years, was fighting in France, the rest of her family in America, her intimates
missing in action, among them, her former fiancé, Ezra Pound, and her first real love,
with whom she shared clairvoyant adventures, Frances Josepha Gregg, now married.
Self-identified “witches,” H.D. knew their love was considered “unnatural,” and both
“she and Josepha should be cast out of the mass of the living . . . as useless as natural
wastage, excrementitious.”6
H.D. asked the gods to have mercy upon her in birthing this second baby. She
tucked her terror away under a blanket of absurdity—she would write Aldington. He
might be amused at an island coming to tea. Bryher easily found the solitary stone
shelter, spying a shadow bent over pages, and then memorialized “[a]‌tall figure
opened the door. Young. A spear flower if a spear could bloom.” Then she heard “[a]
voice all wind and gull notes” saying, “ ‘I was waiting for you to come.’ ”7 Towering
over Bryher, only five foot two, H.D., this “spear flower,” at six foot, with angular de-
termination and magnetic eyes, at home in this landscape, bordering the wild Celtic
sea. If H.D.’s poems awed Bryher, meeting her thrilled like an illumination.
Scattered sunlight passing through storm clouds presented an opening. Bryher’s
glazed eyes took in the half-furnished rooms, a shelf with a painted Osiris, an egg-
shaped mummy owl, and a bronze Isis at the end. With the pouring of tea, Bryher
numbered her enthusiasms for Egyptology, Shakespeare, and Ruskin. H.D. spoke of
translating, falling in love with Euripides’ Ion. Self-startled, Bryher spoke of escaping
clinging fog to America to meet writers. H.D. noted her guest’s slight slouch, ener-
getic timidity, a characteristic clenching of fists, and wide stare. “Are you the island,
or the person?” H.D. might have teased. Bryher tried explaining her self-renaming
at fifteen in favor of an island, with its delicate flowers, like the dwarf pansy, found
nowhere else in England. Producing a map to locate “Bryher,” H.D. took the visitor’s
small hand to put a finger to place her, as if intuiting Bryher’s sense of predominantly
“ ‘geographical emotions.’ ”8
Bryher resisted “Ellerman” as her passport into the world. Her mother, she
explained, expected her to behave as “Dolly,” her childhood nickname. Why was
The Meeting 5
her brother allowed to be the boy, she fumed, despising the ambience of the “strait-
laced . . . footmen on the stairs, stately expeditions in a Rolls Royce; hats and white
gloves.”9 Sensing H.D.’s approval, Bryher spoke of her childhood fantasy of stowing
away as a cabin boy.10 With her dizzying ability to absorb and respond, an ability that
could overwhelm her, H.D. took in Bryher, who, on this first encounter, nearly asked
the poet to rescue her, claiming herself prisoner at 1 South Audley, the family’s Mayfair
mansion. That summer, Bryher and Doris slept on a roof open to the stars. For herself,
H.D. enjoyed the secrecy and freedom of her two initials, manifested when Ezra Pound
crowned her an imagiste six years earlier in the British Museum’s tearoom.
Stepping outside, they spotted a blue swallow. Bryher wooed H.D. through her own
poems, reciting bits from memory. Bryher’s awkward boyishness and stated longing
to wear men’s clothes intrigued and frightened. Armed with promises to reconnect,
H.D. assigned Bryher the task of translating the names of Greek flowers. The meeting
produced an electric charge, a set of recognitions. H.D. saw the possibility—they
might be “crystallized out, orient pearls,” wondering how this compact tense person,
little more than one hundred pounds, might alter her confused straits.11 Erotically
drawn to both sexes, H.D. relished reading Swinburne with Frances Gregg in the
days before Aldington. Akin to Frances, Bryher more thoroughly rejected gender
conformity—and H.D. was fascinated.
Before combining their fates, each had to remedy their situations: Bryher, walled up
by her family, and H.D., confronting her shell-shocked husband and the tangible fact
of impending motherhood. Thirty-one years later, H.D. wrote Bryher, “Remember
that it all began with the bluuue swallllow and in Bosigran.”12 Over the next forty-two
odd years, the couple annually celebrated their meeting—July 17, 1918.
* * *
A love story of modernism began with the anguish of the so-called Great War (1914–
1918). H.D. nearly died in childbirth. With desecrated lands and obliterated lives,
what was true before now rang false. At the same time, the zeitgeist opened for those
sexually unsure, offering provisional hope. After meeting Bryher, H.D. rearranged
pieces of a Latin tag throughout Paint It Today: “Let those love now, who have never
loved before /let those who always loved, now love the more.”13 As moderns, H.D. and
Bryher desired more than aesthetic innovation—but also to tap into newly embodied
identities, awaiting expression. Forerunners, they helped transform invisible, even
persecuted lives into more livable ones. Contemporary global right-wing homo-and
transphobia have risen, thwarting queer lives. This untold story reclaims the pair as
unseen activists.14
They lived as lovers during a period that condemned and punished sexual outsid-
ers. Oscar Wilde, born before our pair, set minds trembling over deviance. Heather
Love describes “the pervasiveness of non-normative desires in the making of the
modern” and “queer” more “permissive” than gay or lesbian. Quite literally in this
case, Bryher’s meeting H.D., “[q]‌ueer” itself is “the uninvited guest, unexpected but
not totally unwelcome, that shows up without visible relations or ties.”15 Bryher’s
extrasensory intelligence, her liminal gender status, and awakening to a world that
“den[ied] sex and work for women,” leaving unsatisfying “innumerable tiny subli-
mations.”16 This dissatisfaction compelled H.D., while Bryher saw in H.D.’s flint-like
determination and porous sensitivity a path toward freedom.
Bicenturians, they straddled several epochs, the Victorian and the Edwardian,
their adult lives spanning the modern through the inception of the postmodern. As
Victorians, they were laced up, restricted in the Edwardian era, and then the modern
woman stepped forth, but not without limits. Homophobia, peaking during 1930s
Fascism, the Cold War of the 1950s obscured same-sex ties. Without a frame to hold
them, the couple’s atypical identities led them to forgo full “welcome.” Then in the
atomic age, rampant suspicion muted free expression, though words akin to let them
love now slowly re-emerged with the likes of John Lennon.17 Bryher collected sex-
change articles, one in 1936 of the athlete, the Czech Zdeněk Koubokva (1913–1986),
who as a woman in the 1934 Women’s World Games won two jumping champion-
ships; Koubokva underwent surgery for gender reassignment, only to leave sports
altogether.18 Sex-change surgery in the thirties was dangerous, with unknown out-
comes. Prescient with today’s framing of “genderqueer,” which the Oxford Dictionary
denotes as “a person who does not subscribe to conventional gender distinctions but
identifies with neither, both, or a combination of male and female genders,” Bryher
gathered homosexual men as part of the couple’s circle, supporting her enactment of
a masculinity without labels. Both sought a nonbinary view of their bodies, history,
and the cosmos, and in fact, “genderqueer” accurately applies to H.D., who identified
as male and female and had male and female lovers.
In our period, even with updated vocabulary, “to understand and accept that they
were neither a man nor a woman, that they were nonbinary, gender fluid, gender
expansive” is challenging. H.D. would probably be happily startled that nonbinary
gender, one of her critical discoveries about herself, is finally being fleshed out; Bryher
might grumble over the time taken to find more liberating nomenclature. The pro-
noun “they” denotes the intermediate state they navigated. Nonbinary types “yearn
not to go from one category to the other but to escape altogether.”19
Connected on an almost neuronal level, the pair’s new postwar freedoms did not
mean they could flaunt their intimacies. Both were frightened of the social stigma still
attached to any queer identity. They developed a nautilus perspective of history that
“repeats itself or life advances in a spiral.”20 Their time had not quite come. They lived
a half-century before Stonewall, before Gay Pride parades, and before two women
could legally marry; “their devotion to each other was a revolutionary act,” their
union without legal footing.21 And now, a full century later, with gay marriage and
trans and nonbinary identities emerging, the spiral reveals new repressions, new lib-
erties. Nonbinary types continue to experience gargantuan doses of shame, and when
they view their bodies, some still find the mirror foggy.
* * *
The Meeting 7
In 1972, writing Norman Holmes Pearson at Yale, Susan Stanford Friedman feared
“[H.D.] will undeservedly slip into the oblivion of imagist magazines.”22 Although
Pearson ensured transmission, compiling their papers on his “H.D.-Bryher re-
doubtable shelf,”23 he feared the neglect of H.D.’s post-Imagist work, pursued after
meeting Bryher, stemmed from a “general dislike of anything bordering on her-
metic.”24 By “hermetic,” he meant the unpublished works, the pair’s “wisdom search,”
and H.D.’s bisexual quest with Bryher as co-visionary. The couple embodied the basic
gnostic tenet of “yearning for experiential knowledge” of unseen truths.25
By 1977, Friedman’s early digging and groundbreaking article, “Who Buried
H.D.?” catapulted H.D. out of her crypt and into the literary canon. Louis Martz’s
hefty 1986 Collected Poems (1912–1944), her World War II Trilogy, Tribute to Freud,
and Helen in Egypt, each republished by New Directions, constitutes a substantial
opus itself, though much remains unappreciated. “H.D. studies” now abound. The
International H.D. Society boasts The H.D. Biography Wiki, tracing her life and
works.26 The release of H.D.’s previously unpublished manuscripts, the republishing
of several of Bryher’s lost works, along with the availability of their collaborative film,
Borderline, now on a film disc of its star, Paul Robeson, all herald documentation of
the pair’s shared lives and works.27
H.D.’s life story was more enmeshed with Bryher’s than the only extant viable bi-
ography, Barbara Guest’s Herself Defined (1984), lets on.28 Freidman wrote H.D.’s
daughter that she believed “Barbara’s biography” was “really the story of two women,
almost entitled We Two.”29 Yet while Guest reinforced H.D.’s reputation as a feminist
poet, she simplified Bryher as “a permanent child,” split between “the good fairy’s
gift of common sense” and “the bad fairy.”30 H.D. and Bryher’s love story could not
yet be told. The current gratifying resurgence of H.D. in modernist studies with
Bryher’s near absence in narratives of H.D. invite the need to study the pair together.
Never attempted before, guided by over a decade-long hunch, substantiated by their
archives, a picture emerges of an unusually creative couple.
This dual biography answers Friedman’s initiating question by recognizing Bryher’s
“resurrections” of H.D. as well as H.D.’s bids for Bryher to expand her own gifts. Each
can be read alone, but without exposing their entangled lives, their stories remain
incomplete. From 1918 forward, they were the central figures in each other’s lives. “A
word opens a door,” H.D. repeated, as they sought language both to hide and to ex-
press their love.31 Their lives, precursor-like, braved the elements. Both recognized
that they could not exist “alone,” as their male counterparts had and did, and who,
when married, usually segregated their wives from their art. They pursued an un-
charted voyage to seal their togetherness. Thriving on not being pegged, they formed
an odd couple: one already married and pregnant, the other, a virgin. Born eight years
and eight days apart, H.D. had a compatibility chart cast with Bryher, also a Virgo,
verifying deep kinship, not a small matter to H.D., who regarded astrology as a re-
spectable science, dating from Ptolemy.32
Almost Bryher’s entire adolescence was trance practice, directing her gaze be-
yond the improbability of her material existence, suiting H.D., who wrestled with the
invisible. Both suffered war neurosis, the result of surviving two global conflagrations,
and their frustration with pathologizing nomenclature to describe themselves indi-
vidually, let alone as a couple. Like H.D., Bryher, no stranger to preternatural expe-
riences, thought the Elizabethan period more tangible and “saw” and heard bodies
dropping contemporary dress and speech during World War I. Cultivating visions to
express their queerness as well as the reverse, both thinned divisions between tem-
poral and eternal, visible and invisible, and, by extension, masculine and feminine,
black and white. The “combining of two worlds” made “another world,” H.D. thought,
finding unseen geologic signs of how they might fit into a war-damaged world.33
When they set sail for the Scillies in 1919 and Greece in 1920, there were still undeto-
nated explosives under the sea’s surface, yet submerged mythical islands, sunk matri-
archies, unseen spaces beckoned—experiences they could have only with each other.
In the literary world, the exceptional male poet could establish visionary lineage
through Dante to Blake to Yeats, while two women together had little precedent be-
sides Sappho and her girls. In spite of their joint quest, H.D. studies has focused on
the poet’s so-called male initiators. Rachel Blau DuPlessis traced the poet’s chronic
attachment to overpowering men as “erotic thralldom.”34 Bryher’s support enabled
H.D. to grapple with these flawed “heroes,” who temporarily derailed her—such as
H.D. refuting Pound’s freeze-framing her as an Imagist. “I have the flowers of my-
self, and my thoughts, no god /can take that,” articulates a Eurydice who outwits
Orpheus.35 Michael Schmidt asserts in Lives of the Poets that Freud “helped [H.D.]
make connections” that stood “apart from the anchored and anchoring love between
herself and Bryher”; though uniquely recognizing their love’s “anchoring,” he over-
looks H.D.’s challenging Freud: “The Professor was not always right.”36 The list of
taunting men include Lord Dowding, who during World War II acted the heroic air
marshal; learning he believed in psychic matters, H.D. tried sharing “their” find-
ings, but he refused welcome to his séance circle. H.D. weathered rejections by top-
pling expectations, bolstered through intellectual, sensory, sensual exchange with
Bryher through what amounted to telepathic connection, refined over years. Bryher
brought H.D. into 1920s Paris “circles,” the new worlds of cinema and psychoanal-
ysis, and in the 1930s her refugee work paralleled H.D.’s search, as she put it, “to feed
the light.”37
Unlike her chief poetic peers, Eliot, Pound, and Yeats, H.D. took on authorial an-
onymity, for good reason. Interviewed by Friedman in 1979, the Beat poet Robert
Duncan believed London literary circles rejected H.D. after she went to Greece
with Bryher.38 H.D.’s writing, after Sea Garden, was occluded. Seizing H.D.’s own
oft-used metaphor of a “cocoon” hatching into a butterfly, Lawrence Rainey writes
in Institutions of Modernism that “[h]‌er world was a cocoon, and she neither needed
nor pursued the give-and-take of exchange with others.”39 Unmoved by the creative
aspect of a larval process or H.D.’s persistent exchange with Bryher and their circle of
friends, he dismisses her as “one whose writings circulated, like bonbons at a dinner
party, among a cénacle of friends and hangers-on in wealthy bohemia.”40 The fiercely
interior workhorse H.D. would have guffawed at such an estimation.
The Meeting 9
Neither yet fully recognizable, a second uprising in H.D. studies shows a critical
community ready to “catch up” with the couple. H.D.’s initials approximated her de-
sire, with Bryher’s, “to wear the cloak of invisibility.” The initials marched until they
didn’t, and then after a hiatus from poetry, H.D. re-embodied them in her translation
of Ion (1936). Quoting from her own quintessential Imagist poem of 1912, “Oread,”
H.D. quipped that “you can keep writing ‘whirl up pine trees, whirl up tulips’ but
you can’t go on.”41 Hatching from cocoons, key to her creative process, her last long
poem, Hermetic Definition, pulled no punches: “I am delirious now and mean to be,
/the whole earth shudders with my ecstasy.”42 With a kindred sense, Hugh Kenner
calls Eliot the ultimate “invisible poet,” quoting Moore, who dubbed him “master of
the anonymous,” “never sure whether his gift was not on the point of exhaustion.”43
This would have reassured H.D., who followed “the lure of the invisible.”44 Likewise,
Bryher inhabited necessary invisibility, fantasizing herself as “among anonymous
craftsmen who spent a lifetime” devoted to a patch on some cathedral wall.45 Both
turned to autobiographic prose to discover who they were through writing, and both
felt split, finding consolation in their mediumistic practice. Voices spoke through
them. H.D. persisted in a neoplatonic understanding “every concrete object //has
abstract value, is timeless /in the dream parallel.”46 Sheltering and transmitting their
experiences, they embraced what T. E. Hulme cast as “spilt religion,”47 impelled by
unseen vibrations, to abide in two planes.
* * *
At a time when this step was unthinkable, the unconventional pair coparented H.D.’s
daughter, Perdita (1919–2001). Nine months after meeting H.D., Bryher committed
to raising her as their child. Perdita celebrated her two mothers, writing Friedman
of their “legend”: “A great admirer of her work appeared on the scene and took over.
Winifred Ellerman, daughter of Sir John Ellerman—she writes under the name of
Bryher. She adopted us both; still alive, she is my ‘other mother.’ ”48
“They were always together, those two; the one tall and dreamy, the other short and
purposeful, austere with close-cropped hair and tailored suits,” Perdita elaborated,
confirming H.D.’s “closest, most lasting relationship was undoubtedly Bryher,” en-
tirely implicated in H.D.’s work and peace of heart and mind.49 One now needs ask,
“Who buried H.D. & Bryher?”
Writing from Vienna, H.D. capsulized Bryher as representing “food, help, sup-
port, mother, though of course, it mixes over into father too. It is really reversible.”50
This reversibility allowed them to live on and off with each other, to travel in Greece,
America, Egypt, Italy, France, Austria; when apart, they kept in almost constant epis-
tolary contact: volumes of letters exist between them about daily life, creative proj-
ects, mutual friends, and reiterated assertions of love, and sometimes aggravation.
Replete with nicknames for themselves and their circle, they created an alternate
universe, where H.D.’s mother was “Beaver,” Bryher’s “Lady Goat” after her astrolog-
ical sign; Bryher was “Fido,” H.D. “Cat,” and Perdita, “Pup.” H.D. addressed Bryher as
“him” whenever possible. They constructed a private language where “Fish” denoted
the psychical, “ps-a” psychoanalysis, and “Unk,” the unconscious. Innovating with ce-
rebral eroticism, H.D. referred to a “combined Unk,” and asked “your Unk or mine?”
More evocative, after a phone call with Bryher, she felt her “unk licked.”51
Nurturing an extended family of exiles, psychoanalysts, pensioners, writers,
and troubled souls, Bryher provided for, among others, Marianne Moore, Dorothy
Richardson, Edith Sitwell, Adrienne Monnier, and Sylvia Beach. Bryher surrounded
herself with templates for a desired bodily identity, queer men whom she called “boy-
friends,” key among them Kenneth Macpherson, Robert Herring, Osbert Sitwell, and
the analyst Walter Schmideberg, nicknamed “Bear.”
Before World War II, guided by an ideal they might together save the world from
ruin, both made epic attempts. Bryher faced the diaspora head on, taking great pains
to aid European refugees. Obtaining passports and visas, settling exiled psychoana-
lysts in London, where in a circular “give-and-take” she subsidized analysis for many
friends. Moore diagnosed Bryher as suffering from “suicidal generosity”;52 Bryher’s
own “feeding the light” paralleled H.D.’s poetics in a manner akin to Marcel Mauss’s
exploration of the gift in archaic cultures, binding receiver to giver, and in this case,
widening their duo to a circle of essentially strangers, spreading bounty.53 Luckily,
some refugees Bryher helped kept in contact. Among them were the Austrian Jew
Alice Modern, a tutor for Perdita, and her sister Klara, who stayed in London during
the Blitz. In July 2017, during a phone conversation, James Alt, Harvard professor
emeritus and son of Alice Modern and Franz Alt, simply said, “Bryher saved my
family’s life.” His parents emigrated to New York in 1938 and could not have escaped
without Bryher’s aid of $5,000.
Inspired by Einstein, H.D. intuited that wisdom lay within the new physics, which
was progressing rapidly during the poet’s formative years.54 When World War II broke
out, she sensed a new formula was in process and that “only Einstein could make the
proper numerical diagram for this ‘dimensional state.’ ”55 Moreover, H.D. believed
that “lost” voices often arose in “aftertimes,” that her work might well be for another
generation, more like ours, with more nuanced vocabulary for gender struggles.
Against the current backdrop of proliferating gender designations, it behooves us to
understand the distress and erasure facing those living before any words, much less legal
sanction, for visible expression existed. When H.D. and Bryher feared walking arm in
arm, names had bubbled up in their youth that almost fit: “invert,” “mannish lesbian,”
“Uranian,” “the third sex.” H.D.’s “We Two” courts the present: they were both a him
and a her and a “we” and a “they,” with a lived sense of nonbinary gender as well as of
multiple dimensions, past lives, parallel universes.
This study forgoes ultra-close readings of their texts. Instead, it links their
writing to the duo’s gender insecurities, tying visionary experience to its messy
genesis in real life: thwarted desires, inconvenient marriages, divorces, abortion,
breakdowns, and wars. As a countervailing force, H.D. imagined hermetic “boxes”
of wisdom “hidden, buried under the rubble of prescribed thinking, of inevitable
social pruning and taming of emotion and imagination,” but noted that “you just
The Meeting 11
stumble” on treasures.56 Together, they germinated and safeguarded acute visceral

experiences through writing, meditation upon a “great wide stillness.”57 Yet far from
living in an airtight cocoon, they met multiple obstacles during modernity’s intru-
sive brutality, united by their sense of persecution, real and imagined, and their faith
in overcoming it. Their joined quest for a time and space safe for their love and ideals
tallied with H.D.’s prescription “There are no great artists without great lovers.”58
“Bryher was my special heritage as I had been hers,” H.D. described their ancestral
relationship.59
* * *
Not a conventional love story, Bryher dynamized H.D.’s already intuited sense of her-
self as “psychic,” here broadly indicating an ability to communicate or to sense the
thoughts or feelings of another with or without words as well as an ability to intuit
events. In 1918–1919, after H.D.’s rough brushes with male modernists, she began
a search for the divine maternal, to reveal with Bryher that patriarchal rationalism,
dominant in their immediate cultural backdrop, needed powerful revisions to avert
wars and destructive upheavals. H.D. urgently directed, “Try to understand the gods
for really they are to be understood; love, love, love beauty and mysterious things.”60
Was H.D. instructing Bryher, or echoing her? With Bryher, “she saw what [H.D.] did
not see,” keeping them both in dialogue with the hidden.61 In H.D.’s view, “Ghosts to
speak must have sacrifice.”62
Freud intuited H.D. wanted to create a “new religion,” which required thinking
about time in a nonlinear fashion, while he cast Bryher as a “northern explorer,” a
travel mania compelling her to locate and relocate. H.D. gave her entire being to the
ineffable; Bryher acted as “shield,” providing sanctuary for “visions” or trances, but
also seeing.63 In 1943, H.D. metaphorically retraced their steps to Greece in 1920, re-
flecting that taking “off a mere 20 years and you get a revenant, a girl who has found
God.”64 After World War II, H.D. suffered a severe breakdown, and Bryher stimulated
H.D. to fabricate out of “madness” new poetry and prose, while she launched her own
novels.
H.D. very specifically called Bryher an “alter ego,” someone so closely resembling
her she could be a secondary self. Bryher assisted in “concentrations,” while H.D. lib-
erated Bryher from what felt like madness—a paralysis induced by alienation from
her birth gender. In short, both suffered from the sense they could easily be erased.
With stark disharmony between her body and her psyche, Bryher suffered a near-
crippling bodily dysphoria, with Victorian garb a “nightmare.”65 During World War I,
she kept rat poison on hand if suicide became necessary. Similar to the experience of a
contemporary trans person, Bryher’s inner boy felt hallucinated. Transsexuality is still
pathologized, cast “as a mental disturbance” of “a person fantasiz[ing] herself to have
the genitals of the sex to which she does not belong,” “understood to signal a break
from reality,” “characterized as a psychosis rather than a neurosis.”66 Not psychotic
but rather an exceptional modernist companion, Bryher’s bond with H.D. suitably
pivoted upon the ability to “envision” an unprecedented identity, navigate the mist,
retracing frayed history.
Both suffered high degrees of shame and self-doubt.67 Both might be called patho-
logical, but for what they faced, they managed exceptionally. Feeling she “never, never
met so tragic a personality,”68 seven months into their relationship, H.D. urged Bryher
to visit Dr. Havelock Ellis, who confirmed Bryher was “a girl only by accident.”69 Still
Bryher remained illegible as one who “fought for a place in life, in a social scheme”
that didn’t yet exist, causing dissociations, selective mutism, and suicidal ideation.
Neither woman was able to conform, and that looked and often felt like pathology.
With this in mind, H.D. herself advocated expanding the border between “hys-
teria” and psychosis. Suffering “slight” or “minor” breakdowns at various turnstiles,
H.D. regularly described herself as “shot to bits,” “in pieces,” “shattered”—applied
when inner demands met repressive outer constraints, leading to depressions, often
premonitory of creative exhilaration. “Traumatophiles” like Baudelaire, who, at least
in Walter Benjamin’s estimation, made it his “business to parry the shocks, no matter
what their source, with his spiritual and physical self.”70 This couple’s very embodi-
ment shocked others. Like Bryher’s, H.D.’s body did not conform to stereotypes: taller
than most men, her ungainly height and elongated torso made her self-conscious.
Similar to widening the distance between the neurotic and the psychotic, H.D. par-
ried with two genders as “an unexplored waste-land, a no-man’s land between them.”71
As her posthumously published Pilate’s Wife put it, “woman is not enough” and “man
is not sufficient.”72 She “tried to be a man or woman but [she had] to be both.”73 Bryher
was trained as a fencer in childhood and learned to cut her way through inertia to em-
body a highly active persona.
* * *
The modernity of their love stemmed from their queer longings and their high ideals,
but also from their spiritual inquiries. The occult, from the Latin occulere, meaning
“to cover over,” doubled with their uncategorized love. Spiritualism of many sorts
permeated post–World War I life, providing H.D. with vocabulary to bridge science,
art, and religion, an imperative to this astronomer’s daughter, capable of naming the
most distant stars. By ancestry Moravian, a sect driven underground, she arrived in
London with an unusual faith tucked in her back pocket.
In the late nineteenth century, London was a center for seekers, populated by “a
swirling mix of freethinkers, Masons, Gnostics, mystics and other experimenters in
religion and the divine, blended with writers, travelers and Orientalists fascinated
with the so-called Near East.”74 Religious syncretism won followers, propelled by the
idea that some new belief system might provide global unity. Other modernists, such
as Yeats, Eliot, and Conan Doyle, discovered entries into invisible worlds. Still H.D.’s
specific mystical exploration led back to “De-meter” and to chanting, “Mary, Maia,
Miriam, Mut, Madre, Mere, Mother pray for us. Pray for us, dark Mary, Mary, mere,
mut; this is the nightmare, this the dark horse, this Mary, Maia, Mut, Mutter. This is
The Meeting 13
Gaia, this is the beginning.” “God-the-father” blocked her view, finding “beneath the
carved super-structure of every temple to God-the-Father, the dark cave or grotto.”75
Though aspirational, both wearied of absolutes, H.D. reminding, “[W]‌e must not step
right over into the transcendental, we must crouch near the grass and near to the
earth that made us.”76 Ultimately, H.D. and Bryher shared gnosis, supplemented by
“mystery religions” and belief in an “underground” spiritualism preserving “the orig-
inal great-mother.”77
Eminent scientists, among them Pierre and Marie Curie, Cesare Lombroso,
Camille Flammarion, and Henri Bergson, explored whether spiritualism might ex-
plain the occult aspects of nature.78 H.D. and Bryher were attracted to antiration-
alists, harkening back to natural forces discovered in the late eighteenth century,
with Franz Anton Mesmer among the first to understand what our pair intuited—
that thought transfers were not only possible but extremely probable. Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein (1818) also loomed in its vision of an electrically charged resurrection
of a shunned body.
Growing up with Thomas A. Edison (1847–1931), inventor of the telephone, elec-
tric light bulb, portable recording device, motion picture, and power grid, the couple
found electricity an opportunity to investigate connective tissue and vibrations. At
eighty, Edison seized upon his last great invention: a “spirit phone” or Ghost Machine
to open up electronic communication with the dead. Relying upon Einstein’s special
theory of relativity, Edison’s universe consisted of eternal matter, incapable of being
created or destroyed. He designed a machine to communicate with this reservoir of
shared “eternity,” transmitting signals—a flow of electrons—to and from the other
side. Edison hypothesized a memory storage area in the brain, with “clusters” inde-
pendent of physical reality, functioning “like a phonograph, tape recorder or film
reel,” capable of reviving those in the past.79 Edison’s spirit phone failed, though he set
currents flowing.
Like an innovative scientist, H.D. thought deep memory, akin to Edison’s “life clus-
ters,” could be tapped. She had a palpable sense of having lived elsewhere in time and
space, believing she could contact as “an actual psychic entity, that continent, for the
most part buried, of the self, which contains cells or seeds which can be affiliated to
the selves of people, living or long dead.” Boldly she wrote, “[A]‌little cell of my brain
responds to a cell of someone’s brain, who died thousands of years ago.”80 This was not
Eliot’s “mythic method,” “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and signif-
icance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary his-
tory,”81 but an embodied psychic mythopoetic method, one to contact, for instance, the
Egyptian goddess of wisdom, Isis, or the Greek Artemis, the chaste huntress.
H.D. didn’t build a spirit phone, but she schematized her relationship to Bryher
as a “whole machine,” generating creative sparks. They had séances at “a sort of re-
ceiving station,” modifying that she was “not the whole machine. Gareth’s intense
psychic quality is concealed, she is like the inner springs and wheels, or the careful
wrapping around live-wire. I have been the live-wire, I receive the live-messages. But
not now.” When H.D. needed a “conductor,” she called Bryher “Gareth” or “Garry,”
referring to Gawain’s brother knight. Malory’s Gareth was the “fair unknown,” arriv-
ing armored, on horseback, yet mistaken for a “lowborn.” Tasked with cooking, fem-
inized for his beautiful hands, Gareth, despite gender bullying, was sent on a quest by
Arthur. Possessing her own “inner springs,” Bryher, as Garry, provided “wrapping”
for H.D. as “live wire.”
If my being had flowed and quivered and responded to that wind of inspiration,
like the branches of a paper-birch or like the strings of a harp, Gareth’s [Bryher’s]
had remained the static lode-stone, the north-star, the steel of the magnetic horse-
shoe, around which the iron-filings collect in different patterns.82
Literally pulling H.D. together, Bryher acted the provocative enigma, steadying
H.D., who needed psychic collaboration, admitting “what [Bryher] said was orac-
ular and always had been.”83 It was as if they followed W. H. Auden, who asserted that
“[q]‌ueers, to whom normal marriage and parenthood are forbidden” seek out “tasks
which require collaboration and the right person with whom to collaborate.”84
Called many things, when called anything, Bryher is dubbed H.D.’s partner, friend,
companion, or “cousin”; there is reluctance to accept her as H.D.’s lover, her nearest
intimate, but she was. To erase Bryher, the crucial person in the poet’s life, is to blot
H.D., a point evading those who would like, for whatever reason, to keep her in het-
erosexual brackets; no one has appropriately gauged Bryher’s intellectual and psychic
imprint, with her Cassandra-like predictions of war and economic fallout, along with
her near total care of H.D., one of the most perfectionist poets of all time, who could
dissolve or blend with the wind, who had the guts to cross a Nazi barbed-wire fence
in Vienna to hear a bit of opera. Whatever either said, both were willfully child-like;
both suffered lifelong instabilities. H.D. was emotionally intense, both a strength and
a weakness, while Bryher, as Gertrude Stein observed, enacted another Napoleon and
had a devilish side as “Fiend,” another of H.D.’s nicknames for Fido. If the former
was demanding, the latter was commanding. Quite simply, H.D. identified as double-
sexed, yet Bryher almost embodied an entirely new species.
* * *
This is a story of “we two” on a quest, seeking alternative realities. H.D. provided an
implicit charting:
The first decade of my adventure opened with the Argo, Floride, a small French-line
steamer, sailing for Havre. The second of my adventures with the Argo, Borodino, a
boat belonging to “one of the lines,” Bryher’s phrase for her father’s shipping. The
third decade of my cruise or quest may be said to have begun in London with my
decision to undertake a serious course of psychoanalysis.85
The Meeting 15
H.D. correlated psychic experiences as ocean voyages, as “lines,” poetic and nau-
tical, a nod to Bryher’s father, the shipper. Each voyage in the pilgrimage spawned
texts and trials. The first section, “The Voyage Out,” explores ancestral inheritance
to chart H.D.’s and Bryher’s shared obsessions. Line 1, the Floride, fills in H.D.’s prior
loves, with H.D. inducting Bryher as co-voyager; Line 2 follows the Borodino, staging
the pair’s early romance and shared visions; Line 3 follows psychoanalysis, which
H.D. deemed “high explosives,” and Bryher “second sight.” They lived in London
through what I call the “Blitz line,” Line 4, for after all, H.D. left ellipses, knowing
she might catch another ocean liner or two. Finally, Bryher joined H.D.’s “Viking
line” after the ship they conjured during their séances between 1943 and 1945. Line
5 tracks H.D.’s retreat to a dissociative paranoia, her recovery, followed by Bryher’s
escalating fears of another war. In the fifties, Bryher joined queers leaving the United
States for jaunts to Capri, and even Pakistan.
In stark contrast to the presumed openness of the twenty-first century, H.D. and
Bryher were bound in a clinging web of silence. Yet today’s explosion of gender and
sexual possibilities as well as an oppressive backlash offers a chance to look anew at
this couple seeking an alternative idea of “family” and creative collaboration. This
dual biography rescues their lives together as an improbable miracle. The grain of
their daily life, responsive to major historical shifts, figures forth their mediumistic
poetics. In its broadest sense, the twentieth century marked them, as they marked it.
We must catch their measure.
2
H.D.’s Ancestors Circle
We are all haunted houses.

—H.D., “Advent” (1948)
H.D.’s first nine years, 1886 to 1895, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, were magical but
also haunted by ritual and loss. By 1890, the city’s population was just shy of twenty
thousand, mainly newly arrived European immigrants clustered around Bethlehem
Steel, its blast furnaces forging modern inventions: I-beams for girder skyscrapers
and bridges, armor plate to bolster tanks, airplanes, ships, railroad tracks, and muni-
tions. Approximately one-third of its inhabitants, including H.D.’s family, lived across
the Lehigh River in “Old Town,” whose spirit of connectedness stemmed from the
town’s founders, congregants of the Moravian Church. This unusual faith set itself
apart by claiming no human mind could comprehend God.
H.D.’s closest link to Bethlehem’s distant past came through her maternal grand-
mother, Elizabeth Caroline Weiss Seidel Wolle (1824–1906), “Mamalie,” who in 1842
married Henry Augustus Seidel, called “Christian.” He practiced as a minister in a
small Moravian church a hundred miles from Bethlehem and died two years later of
typhus.1 Elizabeth returned with their five-year-old daughter and only child, Agnes,
born in 1843, and taught in the Young Ladies’ Seminary, founded in 1749, dedicated
to women’s education. She married again, on July 6, 1848; Francis Wolle (1817–1893),
“Papalie,” also a Moravian minister, was principal of the seminary. In 1853, Elizabeth
gave birth to H.D.’s mother, Helen Eugenia.
During Hilda’s childhood, handmade beeswax candles lit this quaint late
nineteenth-century town. Advancing secularism tempered expansive rituals, such
as the Moravian belief that Christ’s side wounds were holy openings and that every
soul was considered female and equal, with Jesus conceived as vaguely bigendered.
Moravians celebrated “love feasts” where Holy Communion “developed through so-
cial gathering of friends,” “singing praises”; in H.D.’s day, these feasts were celebrated
with “coffee with cream and rolls,” combined with breathing exercises and music,
creating euphoria.2 Hilda belonged. “Everyone knows our mother so we are never
sure who is related and who is not,” she wrote, especially joined through their “candle
service on Christmas Eve,” Freud applauding this ceremony as “the true heart of all
religion.”3
H.D. & Bryher. Susan McCabe, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190621223.003.0002
H.D.’s Ancestors Circle 17
H.D.’s grandfather Papalie was the pastor; her mother’s brother, Uncle Fred, led the
choir, initiating an annual Bach festival. For Christmas, Papalie crafted with Hilda a
small universe of animals to adorn the crèche. Though her household pivoted around
her father, Charles Leander Doolittle (1843–1919), he was a misfit in Moravian cir-
cles, unhappy on Sundays and at Christmas, never having had a tree as a child.
The Doolittle family occupied 10 East Church Street, a block away from Hilda’s
kindergarten. At home, everything doubled: “2 fathers and 2 mothers, for we thought
Papalie and Mamalie (our mother’s parents) were our own ‘other’ father and mother”
with “2 of everybody (except myself) in that first house,” including “2 brothers who
shared the same room.”4 From home, walking past vestigial dormitories segregated
by sex, the “Single Men’s House,” the “Single Women’s House,” and the “Widows’
House,” the child easily reached the seminary, where her mother taught German, art,
and singing. In Bethlehem’s early years, Moravians divided congregants into same-
sex living arrangements, placing them into “choirs,” based on divisions of age, mar-
ital status, and gender, to advance each group’s spiritual development. In her youth,
Helen Eugenia, “child of a long line of musicians,” could tell by the hymn played if
“someone was born or someone had died.”5
Governed by the “General Economy” for a golden pocket of time roughly between
1722 and 1788, there was no great chasm between wealthy and poor. The Church
owned everything and collectively cared for its members.6 Sunday school taught
H.D. that “Moravians never acted as isolated individuals but always worked with the
concept of group endeavor.”7 Dying was “going home.” No one wore black at funerals.
A short climb to Nisky Hill Cemetery, children played, lovers met, and Hilda saw
where many of her forbearers lay under unadorned stones, spotting unusual names,
Native Americans, who had once lived side by side with Moravian settlers.8 Sensing
ghost traces of “old Indian tracks,” Hilda feared slipping on a jagged stone through
a “trap-door.”9 With fascinated ear, the child heard Mamalie’s tales from nearly two
centuries earlier, when Moravians fled persecution across the sea from Germany.
During World War II, while bombs rained down, Bryher coached H.D. through
childhood memories, tunneling backward in time, and space, from London to
Bethlehem. Their research for her autobiographical The Gift went into its “Notes,” it-
self “an interesting little pocket of religious persecution and survival.”10 H.D. discov-
ered an earlier Christian Seidel, an important Moravian voyager on the Catherine in
1742, part of the “first Sea Congregation.” In German, the surname Seidel translates
to “chalice” (der Kelch) or “calix,” derived from Greek, formed by the petals protecting
the bud, a motif throughout H.D.’s work, signifying the communion chalice, for her
an invitation to creativity and, ultimately, the unknowable.
H.D.’s modernism unexpectedly depended upon her ancestry’s radical break from
dominant Abrahamic dogmas, which preached that the male gender wielded a mo-
nopoly on divinity. Like twentieth-century refugees from Fascism, her Moravian
ancestors were hounded out of Europe. Often feeling loosely tethered to the world,
H.D. happily rediscovered the initiating John Hus (1370–1415), called the “burning
reformer,” who fought for liturgical celebration in the vernacular, leading “Papal
authorities” to burn Hus at the stake on July 6, 1415, “to intimidate the uprising hosts.”
This was major, sharing the Communion cup with an entire congregation instead
of limiting it to the clergy. It gave his followers a “new lease on life,” leading to the
founding of the Moravian Church in 1457. After a Bohemian civil war, they flour-
ished, until the Jesuits forced them back underground in 1622, creating a Moravian
diaspora. This “almost annihilated” brotherhood H.D. likened to earlier persecuted
believers: Gnostics, Templars, Troubadours, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Teresa of Avila,
a diverse group in an “Invisible Church,” forced into anonymity by the Inquisition
and Counter-Reformation, yet H.D. railed that an “underground river, you can never
destroy.”11 Scholar Elaine Pagels similarly tracks this river, observing that Eastern
and Western religions were not “separate streams” two thousand years ago; in fact,
“Oriental religion” and “Hellenistic culture” mingled, making gnosis “an intuitive
process of knowing oneself.” By “a.d. 200,” Christianity was a “three-rank hierarchy of
bishops, priests, and deacons,” driving spiritual dissidents underground.12
The Moravians’ eighteenth-century leader, the mystically oriented and charismatic
Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–1760), a religious exile from Austria,
feminized Jesus and the soul itself.13 In Lower Saxony, he offered sanctuary to ten
brethren to establish on his estate a community called Herrnhut (the Lord’s Watch)
in 1722. Until Zinzendorf ’s death, Moravians experienced an “expansive period.”14
He reignited belief in God as a melding of “male and female elements together consti-
tuting the finest production of the Mother.”15
Some of H.D.’s “brethren” believed that Christ’s “side hole” wounds, received
at his Crucifixion, unified male and female. Rather baroque for an anti-Papist reli-
gion, Moravian iconography portrayed healing fluids gushing from the savior’s side,
assigning it both erotic and maternal qualities. Eighteenth-century Moravians even
created dioramas on colorful little cards, bidding the supplicant drop into the wound
to be taken care of by the maternal “great comforter,” too fantastical for most other
sects to tolerate.16
In 1741, persecution motivated a group of Moravians to sail with Zinzendorf
and two young leaders, David Zeisberger with David Nitschmann, leaving Europe
for another Herrnhut, seeking asylum in Pennsylvania with other nonconformist
Protestants, among them the reclusive Quakers and the Amish. They bought land
from John Penn on the forks of the Delaware and Lecha (now Lehigh) rivers. These
three officially founded Bethlehem on December 24, 1741. On that day, the early set-
tlers, with John Christopher Pyrlaeus, a musician and a scholar of Indian dialects,
proficient in Mohican, shared a meal of corncake, washed down with roasted rye.
Matching musical notes and tones, he steadily compiled Iroquois and Algonquian
dictionaries.17
A year after arriving in 1742, Zinzendorf negotiated a peace treaty with the Six
Nations of Iroquois. Contemporaneously, the Moravians dispatched missionaries,
led by Christian Henry Rauch, to the Mohicans in eastern New York along the
Hudson River. Chief Tschoop accepted Rauch, allowing Moravians to live with his
tribe. Enraged white settlers, bitter because this “peace” impeded their exploitation
of Native Americans through land grabs and alcohol trafficking, spread false rumors
about the Moravians, whom authorities arrested and fined in Milford, Connecticut.
Retreating to Bethlehem, Native Americans and Moravians built Friedenshuetten,
“Habitations of Peace,” in 1744, with a “summer house” for religious gatherings be-
hind the seminary, leading across a “rustic foot bridge” to Wunden Eiland, the Island
of Wounds, named after Christ’s lacerations.18 This same year, the sheer number of
Christianized Native Americans in Bethlehem exceeded whites. Non-Moravian col-
onists threatened eviction so vociferously that the Indians stopped gathering, which
for Mamalie’s Henry Christian spelled the loss of what had held their church to-
gether. Moravian elders then established Gnadenhuetten (Habitations of Grace) for
the persecuted tribes, a day’s journey up the Lehigh by canoe.19 German words like
Gnadenhuetten opened for H.D. “like a bee-hive” buzzing with “Count Z.”20
Zinzendorf ’s son, Christian Renatus (1722–1752), known as Christel, assumed
stewardship in 1748 of Herrnhaag, one of the Count’s German estates. Even more
explicitly than his father, he preached that Jesus was both male and female, all souls
female, and all single brethren were sisters and brides of Christ. “Charged with en-
ergy, piety and hormones,” Christel led the 1748 Single Brothers’ Festival, where he
presided as Christ, re-creating the Last Supper, featuring an exchange of kisses with
his male apostles that ascended into ecstasy. One brother described the “astonishing
feeling [that] we were all accepted and declared as single sisters.”21 These gender-
bending “performances” provoked the elder count to recall Christel to London to es-
tablish a British headquarters on Sir Thomas More’s Chelsea estate; in 1749 the British
Parliament recognized it as belonging to the Protestant Episcopal church.22
Fleeing Europe for Bethlehem, John Christopher Fredrick Cammerhof (1721–
1751) and his wife, Anna von Pahlen (1717?–1786), enacted an explicit ceremony to
make peace with Paxnous, the Shawnee chief, at Gnadenhuetten. Bishop Levering,
H.D. remarked, suggested the couple’s arrival was partly responsible for “the craze
that broke out,” with “a rage for the spectacular,” the very aspect of her ancestry that
excited her. Cammerhof and von Pahlen performed a peace ritual that Mamalie
described to the not yet adolescent Hilda in 1895, who had lived nine years in
Bethlehem before learning “the secret,” as she called it.
* * *
While H.D.’s Moravian heritage contains much that remains intangible, her ancestry
also had a far more concrete existence, which she absorbed subliminally and at school.
For instance, during the Revolutionary War, after General George Washington’s 1777
defeat at Brandywine, Bethlehem served as an army hospital. Applying native herbal
remedies, Moravian women nursed the wounded.
Mamalie’s father, Jedediah Weiss (1796–1873), built the grandfather clock that
kept time in H.D.’s home. For over four decades he ran a cottage industry crafting
such timepieces.23 Mary Stables Weiss (1796–1872), Mamalie’s mother and H.D.’s
nearest biological link to Europe, born in Virginia to Scottish immigrants, reputedly
possessed “second sight” and was gifted in music, cultivating Mamalie, an “expert
musician,” who played the spinet.24 Within the hour of the death of her son, George
Augustus Weiss (1821–1853), while he was on a mission in the West Indies, Mary
stopped in her garden, hearing a distinct voice; when she turned to greet her son, no
one was there. She taught Mamalie the Scottish ballad “The Four Marys”:
Last night there were four Marys;

Tonight there’ll be but three.
’Twas Mary Beaton and Mary Seaton
And Mary Carmichael and me.
One of the Marys, a lady-in-waiting, was hanged for seduction and infanticide.25
As Mamalie’s favorite, the song, grim in its original meaning, was “more precious to
[H.D.] than the St. Matthew’s Passion and the Mass in B Minor,” so that it made “a
furrow or runnel in [her] emotional or spiritual being.” It summoned seasons, the
compass, the quatrain, the fourth dimension.26
Mamalie’s second husband, Francis Wolle, “Papalie,” started as a clerk in his father’s
grocery store. Noticing that customers were unable to carry all the goods they’d
purchased, by 1852 he had perfected a machine to fabricate paper bags. His patent
approved in 1869, he founded the Union Paper Bag Machine Company; he soon
ceded its management to his brothers. Papalie became a bishop and principal at the
seminary. After the bloody Gettysburg battle, he opened it as a hospital for Union and
Rebel soldiers, a particularly humane gesture. H.D. worshiped her grandfather as “the
naked eye,” “the apple of [her] eye,” “the apple of God’s eye,” and Bethlehem’s last cu-
rator of a European tradition, soon overshadowed by American industrialism.27
This Moravian innovator combed the wooded shores and mountains around
Bethlehem, searching out mosses and algae. Carrying home “invisible finds,” the
fund of arduous labor and curiosity, Papalie allowed Hilda and her siblings to gather
around his workbench to observe through his microscope that pressing a specimen
“between two glass-slides” shows “we know so little about even a drop of water, how
can we know the inner secrets of God?”28 A respected “pioneer in micro-botany,”
Papalie published Desmids of the United States and Freshwater Algae of the United
States, two volumes, with colored plates, and Diatomoceae of North America.29
After the Civil War, H.D.’s mother witnessed “progress,” shrinking the bucolic land-
scapes portrayed in her paintings. “Pitilessly ravaged,” Bethlehem mutated from a re-
treat of “lovely Arcadian simplicity,” nestled among hills, into a noisy mill town. H.D.’s
elders feared that billowing smoke might kill the trees grown from cuttings their
ancestors had brought from Germany. Helen taught music and painting at the semi-
nary she had attended and met her soon-to-be husband, Charles Leander Doolittle,
while teaching German in a night class. In 1882, Helen broke with Moravian tra-
dition and married this outsider from Indiana. A photograph shows Francis Wolle
overseeing Helen, instructing art pupils at an easel and, beside it, a tripod table
(Figure 2.1).
Figure 2.1 Helen Wolle Doolittle standing in front of her father in the seminary, 188?
Unsourced family photograph, H.D. Papers.
Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Charles Doolittle had two sons from his first marriage, Alfred (1868–1920) and
Eric (1870–1920), with Alice, who died in 1876. In this second union, the couple
lost their first child, Edith, born in July 1883, alive for only four months, followed
by Gilbert (1884–1918), Hilda (the odd girl out), and Harold (1887–1968). When
H.D. was born, Charles consulted a name book; closing his eyes, his finger settled
first upon the old Testament prophet Hulda, reputed to have heard God directly, then
traced his finger back to Hilda.30 A photo of the siblings catches Hilda’s intense gaze
(Figure 2.2).
Born in Ontario, Indiana, on November 12, 1843, H.D.’s father was the son of
Charles, a lawyer, and his wife, Celia. The Doolittles spent “[s]‌ix generations weath-
ered and shaped by the rock and flint of New England.”31 She traced the “Doolittle”
line to northern England during Elizabeth I’s reign. “Their most important kinsman,”
Thomas (1632–1707), a Cambridge-educated nonconformist, served as pastor of St.
Alphege, London Wall, and authored several religious tomes.32 During the 1660s,
Parliament barred dissenting ministers from their pulpits, prohibiting nonconform-
ists from civil or military office or matriculating at Cambridge or Oxford. After the
Great London Fire in 1666, Thomas defied the law, preaching on sites where churches
lay in rubble. Evading arrest, he founded a dissenters’ church.
Part of the great Puritan exodus, Thomas’ relative, Abraham, migrated to New
Haven, Connecticut, in 1640. H.D. half-joked that her father’s line stuck to their
English pedigree: stubborn New Englanders refrained from striking first, but once
attacked, struck to kill. After controlling state legislatures, these Puritan ancestors,
Figure 2.2 (Right to left) Gilbert, Harold, and Hilda Doolittle, c. 1890. Unsourced family
photograph, H.D. Papers.
targets of the English Crown’s campaigns of state violence, themselves launched sim-
ilar attacks, suffering neither witches nor Native Americans.
H.D.’s paternal grandparents headed toward California in a covered wagon, fol-
lowing a “Viking call” to the ocean; Charles’ father, disappointed, stayed in Indiana,
where bounty hunters tracked down runaway slaves, and his father dug up a buried
Indian skull. H.D.’s father’s “far-sighted grey eyes” picked out “the ten stars of the
Dipper or the eight of Orion’s sword-belt”; “this satisfied him.” In 1860, at seven-
teen, Charles abandoned his studies at the University of Michigan, lied about his age,
and along with his nineteen-year-old brother, Alvin, enlisted in the Union Army.33
Without killing a single Rebel, Charles fought, only to see Alvin die not in combat
but of typhoid. He never told his grieving mother the real cause of his brother’s
death. Charles’ “domed forehead” and irresolute mouth and chin betrayed a mel-
ancholy at his mother’s evident disappointment that he, rather than Alvin, had sur-
vived.34 Charles married Martha Cloyes Farrand in 1866. After graduating from
the University of Michigan with a Civil Engineering degree. In 1874, he worked a
summer for the U.S. Boundary Commission, sleeping in a tent during rough weather.
The following year, he arrived with Martha and two sons in Bethlehem as professor of
mathematics and chair of astronomy at Lehigh University, where students affection-
ally called him “Poppy Doo.”35 Martha died two years later.
Other scientists did not initially perceive Doolittle’s research as entirely empirical,
but over time his work gained credence. In his alumni address at Lehigh, delivered
on June 17, 1885, a year before H.D.’s birth, he observed the “transits of Venus, only
two of which occur in a century,” with the sun “surrounded with a gaseous envelope
or atmosphere of considerable extent,” while “the planet Venus has an atmosphere
probably much like our own,” producing “a blending or haziness of outline when
the two discs are near the point of tangency.” (Much like H.D.’s embodied mind, tan-
gent with Bryher’s.) The field was “inexhaustible,” he admitted, while “our capacities”
were “finite.”36 Doolittle authored a textbook, A Treatise on Practical Astronomy as
Applied to Geodesy and Navigation (1885), reprinted in multiple editions over three
decades, with practical applications for shippers, like Bryher’s father. A former stu-
dent stated that there was no rival “contribution to the problem of the latitudinal
variation.”37
By H.D.’s estimate, her father studied “cold and absolute beauty” for thirty years
and minimized that the only thing she knew “about this variation is that the earth
itself floats like a ship in the ocean. The earth does not go around in perfect circles.
It sways slightly or ‘wobbles.’ ” The child was frightened by earth’s “precarious voy-
aging,”38 and by her father, who traced the movement of “the earth round the sun,
the variation of latitude,” adjusting “a graph on a map started by Ptolemy in Egypt.”39
Doolittle’s stealthy tracking of parallel lines circling the earth, locating stars through
symbols, numbers, code, this very abstract method of thinking planted itself in H.D.,
unable to make parallel lines meet, addicted to widening circles.
Like H.D.’s maternal grandfather, who sought invisible specimens, Charles too
slipped out at night, but to study galactic entities, privy to what no one else could see.
Thomas Hardy’s Two on a Tower (1882) observes of astronomy that of “all the sciences
it alone deserves the character of the terrible,” the lonely star-gazer making his “way
through a heaven of total darkness, occasionally striking against the black, invisible
cinders of those stars.”40 Doolittle slept most days to make up for his nightly vigils. He
gave H.D. a gigantic snowy owl, encased in a bell jar perched on his bookshelf; flank-
ing the other end was the Indian skull his father had given him, displaying results of
excavation. Charles singled out “his one girl” to inherit his scientific prowess instead
of his sons, leading to “a terrible responsibility.”41 A photo catches Charles at his tele-
scope, catapulting him towards distant constellations [Figure 2.3].
Figure 2.3 Charles Leander Doolittle at his telescope, undated. Unsourced family
photograph, H.D. Papers.
Before learning her alphabet or how to read the clock face, tantalized by its
roundness, in the nursery, under her half-brother Eric’s tutelage, she was “a thing of
hunched shoulders and sparrow claws, who with unabated intensity, scratched 7, 7, 7,
7, 7 across the entire length of great sheets of brown wrapping paper . . . more portent,
more cabalistic than the two marks of equal length joined, tent-wise, and fastened
in the middle.” Numbers signified with special meaning, Eric providing “over-time,”
a means of sensing timelessness. Defying the proprieties of her starched cornflower
pinafore, H.D. recalled her “colt knees crawling into the rabbit hutch,” “[c]‌rawling,
crawling with elbows scraping the rough lathes and end of wire netting,” confronted
“at last with a vision of eight pink bodies, eight unexpectedly furless and rigid bodies,”
struck by the rigid newborns, and “the weary old bunny” who “thumps, disconsolate
in the corner.” Defiantly, she “scaled the tree” and “shook the branches in a frenzy till
the multiplying Edwardses were drenched in the soft, too-ripe, purple blackberries.”
While fantasizing over a “foundling sister of Princess Minnehaha,” H.D. saw her child
self as boyish, distinctly separate—“an uncanny monster,” fated to join other “curious,
misshapen things.”42
* * *
H.D.’s mother was at origin a myth. The poet surmised that “if one could stay near her
always, there would be no break in consciousness” and savored her “laughing, not so
much at us as with or over us and around us.”43 The child inherited her mother’s pas-
sion for choral music and elaborate needlework, stitching “petit point canvases—an
occupation which both rested her mind and stimulated it.”44 Helen told her children
that a fortune teller predicted she would have a gifted child, then claimed her chil-
dren were not especially so, possibly due to her own mother’s obsessional ramblings
over the distant past. Herself tempted by a singing or artist’s career, Helen stuck to
her fate as the proper principal’s daughter and likely discouraged her daughter’s rich
imagination, out of worry, to help her conform, while Mamalie led the child to intan-
gibles such as telling her that a black rose was really “a shadow of a rose,” or Hilda’s
own overactive mind, wanting to lie down, for instance in the snow, “dangerous” be-
cause it would make her “too happy.”45 Helen generally discouraged Hilda’s visions,
for instance when “that thing that happened, that Mama said didn’t happen, when
the Young Man who at first I thought was the Gardener, cut off a lily with a short stem
that I held in my hand like a cup.”46 Nonetheless, H.D. attributed her poetic “second
sight” to her “musician-artist mother, through her part-Celtic mother.” When visiting
Nisky Hill Cemetery, she longed for a twin sister. With Papalie’s death in 1893, he was
the first “ ‘dead’ person” the seven-year-old had “ever known.”47 Grieving, Mamalie
succumbed to encephalitis.
* * *
Shortly before the family moved to Upper Darby outside Philadelphia in 1895 with
Doolittle’s appointment at the University of Pennsylvania, H.D. ministered to her in-
firm, delirious grandmother, then seventy-two; with her prim lace cap, pinched face,
and piercing eyes, she ailed beneath her quilt, “patches of everybody’s best dresses.”48
Burning with brain fever, she spoke of Indian retributions and epigenetic trauma.
Spellbound, the child brought chipped ice to Mamalie’s lips. With difficulty speaking,
she guided Hilda back in time to her first husband, Henry, who, while cataloguing
Church records, came across a weathered birch-bark case, a deer-skin parchment so
thin that he feared it might dissolve; it dated back to Zinzendorf ’s time, so he copied
the original. Its motto, written in French, translated to “the friendship that passes the
grave.”49 The parchment was signed by Cammerhof, Pyrlaeus, and the first Christian
Seidel, whom H.D. considered “the shadow or under-study” of Mamalie’s husband
“Christian” Henry, proficient in Greek, who believed it documented tribal chiefs,
medicine men, and priests in “picture writing,” combining characters in “Greek,
Hebrew, and Indian dialects,” alongside “tones and notes of the Indian voices, like
annotations.”50 His proprietary interest in the document was from fear that church
elders might destroy it. Devoting himself, he was assured that if he could reconstruct
its scrambled fragments, he might fulfill “a Promise”: a world without war, and spir-
itual rebirth.
Untrained in music, he enlisted Mamalie, who had “not only a delicate tone-
perception” but also a “working knowledge of musical composition.” Deciphering
“native rhythms” grafted with Moravian music, Pyrlaeus’ Shawnee dictionary helped
them link Anna von Pahlen’s collage of devotionals to musical rhythms. The docu-
ment reached back before Bethlehem’s havens were betrayed by marauders, the non-
Moravian white colonists. Mamalie hinted to the child that the collaboration between
her and her husband was like walking blind, tucking candles and matches in her
handbag for train travel, should they be trapped in a tunnel.51
After intensive labor, Mamalie and her husband uncovered a special ceremony that
in the eighteenth century symbolically joined Native American and Moravian spir-
itual practices through mutual understanding that the Holy Ghost and the Indian’s
Great Spirit were indivisible. They forged a precarious peace. Indian names signaled
a person’s invisible soul. The Shawnee chief Paxnous pledged his wife through one of
her “inner names,” Morning Star. In exchange, Cammerhof pledged his wife, Anna
von Pahlen, with one of her names, Angelica.
From her bed, Mamalie enacted what transpired after the name exchange, not
simply with words but through reverberations, “an inner greeting,” “strange pledges,”
and “rhythms.”52 The Indians gave Cammerhof an ancient belt, woven from silver
and gold with alternating patterns of a rose or daisy and a star, a simple cross, in-
side a circle. Unlike the T-shaped wood indicating Christ’s crucifixion, the simple
cross, +, with no elongated horizontal line, signified in the second and third centuries
among persecuted Gnostics that it was safe to speak of the feminine Holy Ghost. By
matching or mixing church music with Indian rhythms, Mamalie teleported Hilda
back to the ceremony on Wunden Eiland. “Songs bring things back.” Traveling back
to the eighteenth-century ritual,53 Mamalie imagined “herself speaking in tongues,
hymns of the spirit in the air, of spirit at sun-rise and sun-setting, of the deer and the
wild squirrel, the beaver, the otter, the king-fisher and the hawk and eagle.” Bit by
bit, she conjured up the talking, laughing, and singing, “with no words or words of
leaves rustling and rivers flowing and snow swirling in the wind, which is the breath
of the Spirit, it seems.” Anna’s “high pure silver” voice “breathed the hymn” until
the “laughter ran over us,” “pouring from the sky or from the inner realm of spirit.”
Speaking of just such a ritual, H.D. wrote in the 1944 Flowering, “[A]‌ll we know is that
it was all so very soon over, /the feasting, the laughter.”54
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
[Inhoud]
VERRADERLIJKE ROOK!
De blijde dag is daar.—Wim Bolk komt terug.
Zijn zes makkers staan op het perron en wachten op den trein.
„Hij is te laat,” zegt Chris ongeduldig.
„Weet ie, dat we er allemaal zijn?” vraagt Paul.
„Neen, daar weet ie niks van,” is Ambro’s antwoord.
„Ik heb hem wel geschreven, dat ik hem zou afhalen.”
„’t Duurt lang,” bromt Puckie.
„Kwam ie nou maar.” [183]
„Zou ie z’n puist nog op z’n neus hebben?” vraagt Piet.
„Ik zie hem,” roept Ambro verheugd.
„Z’n puist?” vraagt Piet nog, maar de trein is in aantocht en rolt met
donderend geweld de stationskap binnen.
Een hevig gekrijsch en gepiep van de assen en de trein staat

snuivend en dampend stil.
„Jonge, jonge, wat een menschen! Goed uitkijken, knullen,” zegt

Ambro.
„Laten we ons verdeelen ieder bij een uitgang,” stelt Karel voor. En
juist wil het troepje zich splitsen, als Puckie hard schreeuwt:
„Ik zie ’m, daar heb je ’m, daar heb je ’m!”
Wim heeft de jongens nog niet in de gaten. Hij nadert langzaam,

schuifelend achter de dichte menschen-massa aan.
Ambro begint luidkeels signalen te geven, seinen, die alleen bekend

zijn bij de rooverbende. Hij wordt berispt door een hoofd-conducteur,
die hem verbiedt zoo’n lawaai te maken.
Maar Wim heeft de krijgskreten gehoord en rekt zijn hals uit, om te

zien waar het bekende en geliefde signaal vandaan komt.
Ja, daar zijn ze, hij ziet ze staan z’n oude makkers, alle zes, wat een
verrassing! Hij had wel over de hoofden van de menschen heen
willen springen om maar vlug bij hen te zijn en hij geeft een mijnheer
voor hem hevige duwen in den rug om hem aan te sporen wat
vlugger op te schieten. [184]
Zijn ouders komen een heel eind achteraan, ze vinden echter best,
dat Wim vooruit holt, want ze hebben de bende herkend, die hun
zoon komt verwelkomen en kunnen zich nu zijn ongeduld best
voorstellen.
Eindelijk is hij bij hen en komt aan ’t handen schudden schier geen
einde.
Dan zoeken de jongens naar woorden om hem toch maar te laten

zien hoe blij ze wel zijn, dat de oude makker terug is.
„Adi Wim,” gilt er een. „Hallo jong!” en dit gepaard met een stevigen
slag op z’n schouder.
En Ambro, die oorspronkelijk van plan was geweest, uit naam van
de bende een korte welkomstrede uit te spreken, is deze geheel
vergeten en doet nu niets dan om Wim heen dansen als een hond
die na langen tijd zijn baas terugziet.
Wim is bijna verlegen met al die blijdschap van het wederzien.
„Hè, wat fijn, om weer bij jullie te zijn,” zegt hij. „Wat heb ik naar
Rotterdam verlangd! Allemaal nog dezelfde snuiten …” en lachend
inspecteert hij de bende.
„Wat gaan we doen, jongens?” vraagt Chris. „We zijn vanmiddag

allemaal vrij, jij toch ook, Wim?”
„Natuurlijk,” luidt Wim’s antwoord. „We gaan weer ouderwetsch

keetschoppen, maar dat is waar … ik kan niet in den Dierentuin … ik
ben geen lid … Vader moet het weer worden.”
„Da’s niks,” stelt Ambro hem gerust. „We peesen [185]zoo hard we
kunnen allemaal het hek door, zóó hard, dat die kerel in z’n hok ons
niet eens kan onderscheiden.”
„Ja, ja, da’s goed,” vindt de heele bende.
„Eerst m’n ouwetjes vertellen, dat ik met jullie meega,” en Wim holt
met de jongens naar z’n ouders om hun te zeggen, dat ze hem
vooreerst niet zullen zien, want dat hij eerst met de jongens gaat
spelen.
En nu kuieren ze allen de Kruisstraat in en zijn het hek van den

Dierentuin genaderd.
„Op een draffie, jongens,” schreeuwt Ambro. „Vlug, hij zit binnen.”
Die „hij” is de dikke roodharige portier die als een Cerberus den tuin
bewaakte en er voor zorgde, dat geen vreemdeling dit heiligdom kon
binnentreden.
In vollen ren draafde de bende het hek binnen, Wim tusschen hen in
en de portier, die wel eenige bekende gezichten zag bleef rustig in
zijn kantoortje, terwijl de jongens, uit vrees terug geroepen te
worden, niet rustten voor zij buiten het bereik van den portier waren.
„Het is hier nog niks veranderd,” zei Wim toen het troepje hijgend stil
stond.
„Ik ben erg benieuwd naar het Hol.”
„Nou, dat zal je zien,” zegt Ambro. „De kamer is net aan kant.”
Bij dit gezegde kijken de jongens elkaar met een blik van
verstandhouding aan.
Nu gaat het in gestrekten draf naar het Hol.
Als ze er aangekomen zijn, zegt Ambro met [186]een fraaie buiging

tegen Wim: „Aan n de eer, mijnheer.”
En alsof hij niet weg is geweest, kruipt Wim op handen en voeten

langs het van ouds bekende paadje het geliefde Hol binnen.
Dan slaakt hij een kreet van verrukking.
„Da’s verduiveld aardig van jullie,” roept hij.
Het heele Hol is versierd met vlaggetjes, serpentine en papieren

rozen. In het midden hangt aan een tak een groote lampion te
bengelen waaronder een stoel staat, rijkelijk versierd met
sparregroen ter eere van het feestvarken.
Vlak over den stoel hangt aan een boom een blauw schild, waarop
met vergulde letters de woorden prijken:
„Welkom in het Hol van Kaan.”

Uit angst ontdekt te worden, durfden de jongens geen „lang zal ie
leven’s” te laten schallen en moest de plechtigheid in alle stilte plaats
hebben.
Toch bleef er nog een verrassing. Toen Wim met vereende krachten
op z’n versierde zetel was geheschen, zóó hardhandig, dat de
sparrenaalden hem om de ooren vlogen, haalde Ambro met
gewichtig gebaar een rol papier uit z’n zak en verzocht stilte.
Hij begon:
„Beste Wim, daar zit je weer,

Net zoo als den laatsten keer.
Jôh! we vinden ’t zoo fijn!
Lang mag j’ in ons midden zijn. [187]
Waren wij niet al te bang,
Schreeuwden wij „hij leve lang”.
En dan was ’t met de lol
Gauw geëindigd in ons Hol.
Daarom spreek ik niet te luid
Deze welkomstrede uit.
Fluister het me allen na,
Héél zacht hiep, hiep, hiep hoera!”
(Dit bevel werd stipt opgevolgd en nog nooit was een jubilaris op
zulk een zonderlinge wijze verwelkomd. En Ambro vervolgde:)
Wim, je lijkt wel aangedaan,

Laat je tranen vrij uit gaan.
Veeg die druppel van je neus,
Want hij hangt er, maar niet heusch.
Nog een woordje tot besluit,
En dan is dit pracht-vers uit.
(na deze woorden haalt Ambro een klein pakje uit zijn zak en terwijl
hij het Wim aanbiedt, vervolgt hij:)
Dit geschenk is voor Wim Bolk

Namens heel het roovervolk,
Dat je het gebruiken mag
Ter herinnering aan deez’ dag.”
Na dit schoone vers, dat ook een verrassing voor de andere jongens
was, wilde Puckie, alles vergetend, een luid hoera aanheffen, dat
direct [188]door de jongens gesmoord werd met uitroepen als: hou je
kop, enz.
Intusschen maakt het feestvarken, nog geheel onder den indruk van
de opeenvolgende verrassingen het pakje open en ziet tot z’n groote
vreugde een prachtig zakmes, wel zoo mooi als het veel-benijde van
Ambro.
„Potver …!” roept hij blij.
„En ’n fijn hoor!” zegt Puckie.
„Zweedsch staal, uit Solingen,” pocht Chris.
„En niet goedkoop ook,” zegt Karel.
„’n Reuze-messie!” vindt Paul. Maar al deze loftuigingen op het mes

waren onnoodig, want er was niemand, die het zoo prachtig vond als
Wim; hij wist alleen maar niet hoe ie ze zou bedanken en verlegen
drukte hij, zonder iets te zeggen, de zes vriendenhanden.
„Nou een pijp rooken,” stelt Ambro voor.
„Da’s een idee,” zegt Wim, blij, dat ze weer in hun gewone doen
komen. „Maar ik heb me pijp niet bij me,” zegt hij.
„Da’s niks,” zegt Paul. „Neem de mijne maar, die heb ik toch maar
voor ’t mooi.”
„Durf jij niet te rooken?” vraagt Wim.
„Hij durft wel, maar hij wordt er zeeziek van en hij is ook een jaar
jonger dan wij,” zegt Ambro.
Uit een gat in den grond wordt nu een groote blikken trommel te
voorschijn gehaald. Dit is de provisiekast van de bende; daar
bewaren ze hun detective-romans, hun rookgerei en zelfs kwam het
voor, dat bij feestelijke gelegenheden er versche [189]kadetjes en
chocoladereepen in opgeborgen zijn.
De pijpen werden uit de trommel gehaald en in een doosje vonden

zij nog juist genoeg tabak om zes pijpen te stoppen.
Ambro haalde een lucifersdoosje uit zijn zak, waarin nog slechts één
lucifer zat.
„Oppassen, jongens, als die uitgaat, zijn we zuur,” waarschuwde hij.
En allen bogen zich over hem heen om het aanstaande vlammetje

tegen tocht te beschermen. En terwijl ze den adem inhielden, stak
Ambro moedig z’n pijp aan en trok als een stoomzuiger.
„Hou bij, hij brandt nog,” riep hij.
En bliksemsnel werden de vijf andere pijpen aangestoken. Nu

dampen ze er op los als mooren.
Wim had z’n stekelige feestzetel verlaten en was als de andere

jongens languit op den grond gaan liggen.
Er werd niet veel gesproken, hun volle aandacht was bij de pijp en al
beweerden ze tot elkaar dat rooken toch een genot was, in
werkelijkheid was het rooken van een pijp steeds een heele karwei,
waarvan de eenige bekoring was, dat ’t niet mocht en dat het
mannelijk stond.
—————————————
Twee tuinlui met een kruiwagen komen langs de rots aangeloopen

en naderen het rhododendronbosch.
„Kijk es,” zegt de eene. „’t Lijkt wel of daar wat smeult in dat
bosschie.”
„Waarachtig,” zegt de andere. [190]
„Wat zalle me nou hebbe?”
„Es effetjes kijke.”
Voor een volwassen mensch was het bereiken van het Hol een
heele toer, vooral, zonder bekend te zijn met het door de jongens
gemaakte paadje, dat steeds zorgvuldig bij den ingang werd
afgesloten door enkele takken.
„Daar kom je soo niet in.”
„Stil,” zegt plotseling de ander. „’t Is of ik stemme hoor.”
Nu luisteren ze allebei aandachtig bij het boschje, en ja, ze hooren

duidelijk jongensstemmen.
„Wat motte me doen,” vraagt de eene.
„Weet je wat,” zegt de ander. „We zalle ’t zaakie omsingelen.” In het

groote bloemperk bij de sociëteit zijn drie tuinlui aan het werk en
deze worden te hulp geroepen voor de aanstaande jacht.
Maar de jongens, zijn op hun hoede. Ze hebben het gesprek van de

tuinlui wel terdege gehoord.
„We zijn verraaje, jongens,” zegt Ambro.
„Hoe komen we d’r uit, ze willen ons omsingelen. Maar stil, ik weet
wat! Puckie, Chris en ik zijn de vlugsten, wij kunnen ’t hardst
loopen.”
De jongens hebben de hoofden bijeen gestoken om te vernemen

wat Ambro van plan is te doen om zich uit deze hachelijke positie te
redden.
„Wij drieën kruipen in verschillende richting naar den rand van het
boschje en houden ons zoo goed als het gaat, verscholen. Dan
kijken we uit naar een gaatje om ’m door te piepen, liefst alle drie
tegelijk en dan hollen we uit alle macht den [191]tuin uit, laten we
afspreken dat we elkaar dan weer zien bij den telefoonpaal op de
Diergaardelaan.”
„Alles best,” zegt Piet. „Maar wij dan?”
„Dat zal ik je zeggen. Jullie gaan plat op je buik liggen, dáár, een
eindje verder en houdt je doodstil. Wij verbergen jullie onder de
afgevallen bladeren; als je je maar koest houdt als wij drieën ’m
smeren, dan zullen ze vast denken dat er geen meer in het boschje
zit. Als alles dan veilig is, kunnen jullie ’m ook piepen. Maar gauw
wat, want we hebben weinig tijd.”
De vier jongens volgen stipt het bevel van Ambro op en in minder

dan geen tijd is er niets meer van hen te bespeuren.
Ambro, Puckie en Chris sluipen vlug voort naar den rand van het
boschje. Gelukkig voor hen, heeft het den vorigen dag flink geregend
en hebben ze geen last van krakende takken.
Intusschen houden de tuinlui de wacht om het boschje en twee van

hen turen door de dichte blader-massa om te zien of ze ook iets van
de bengels kunnen ontdekken.
Bliksemsnel springt er iets tusschen de beenen van een ouden

tuinman door en rent in volle vaart weg.
Het is Ambro.
De andere tuinlieden kijken hem verbaasd na, terwijl er een uitroept:

„Heere nog an toe, kan dat jong loope.”
Ambro is al bijna uit het gezicht. Puckie en Chris maken nu van de

gelegenheid gebruik, [192]schieten ook uit het boschje en verdwijnen
eveneens als vluchtende gemzen.
„Wel heb ik me nou!” raast een der tuinlieden. „We worden effetjes
genomen, Piet.”
En zich richtende tot den ouden tuinbaas: „Sijmen, kâ-jij ze inhalen?

Ik niet.”
„Neen,” zegt Sijmen. „Die snuiters ben-me te vlug af.”
„Nou oppasse,” zegt een ander. „D’r kenne d’r nog best meer zijn.”
En met beide handen dringt hij de takken weg en baant zich een
weg door het dichtbegroeide boschje.
Hij heeft heel wat moeite om vooruit te komen, want de geheime

paadjes van de jongens zijn hem onbekend. Maar eindelijk is hij dan
toch het Hol genaderd en slaakt, gelijk Wim Bolk die verrast was
door de versiering ter zijner eere, een kreet van verbazing.
„Neen maar, kom nou d’r es kijke! Je mot ’t zien! ’t Laikent wel
kerremis. De heeren hebben een best plekkie uitgezocht.”
De vier jongens, liggen in doodsangst onder den bladerenhoop. Ze

hebben het benauwd en durven zich toch niet te verroeren.
De tuinman staat nu vlak bij Karel en de volgende stap die hij doet,
is bovenop Karel’s hand; maar de jongen weet zich goed te houden
en de tuinman merkt niets.
Nu de overige tuinlieden geen belang blijken te stellen in de

inrichting van het Hol van Kaan [193]blijft ook hij niet langer talmen en
begint zich weer het boschje uit te werken.
Na verloop van eenigen tijd hooren de jongens niets meer en ze

achten nu het oogenblik gekomen om ook hun biezen te pakken.
Piet is de eerste die beweegt, hij schudt de bladeren van zich af en

roept zacht: „Jongens, de baan is vrij! Kom mee, we smeren ’m!
Gauw wat!”
De heele troep komt nu van onder het bladerendek te voorschijn en

Karel kan niet nalaten den jongens van zijn heldendaad te vertellen.
„Je lijkt wel die soldaat uit ’t turfschip van Breda,” lachte Piet.
„Nou, kijk me poot es,” zegt Karel. „De striemen staan er op!”
„We zullen ’t in de Geschiedenisboeken vermelden,” zegt Wim Bolk.

„Zelfverloochening van Karel Boekers, bij de belegering van ’t Hol
van Kaan op den 17den April van het jaar 1904.”
De jongens zijn nu veilig buiten het Hol gekomen en kijken
behoedzaam rond of er geen onraad meer in de buurt is. Piet
constateert, dat de baan vrij is.
„Vooruit,” zegt Wim. „Den tuin uit en naar den telefoonpaal.”
Daar komt het viertal hijgend aan en wordt er juichend begroet door
de rest van de bende.
„Nou, dat is goed afgeloopen,” zegt Wim opgelucht. „Ik heb ’m

geknepen, hoor! Ik dacht, dat we er bij zouden zijn.” [194]
„Noem jij dat maar goed afloopen,” antwoordt Ambro met een
bedrukt gezicht.
„Nou,” zegt Piet. „Ze hebben ons toch maar niet te grazen gehad.”
„Ons niet,” zegt Ambro. „Maar ’t Hol, dàt hebben ze te grazen, dat
zijn we voor goed kwijt.”
„Ja, da’s waar,” zegt Paul. „Ze hebben ’t Hol ontdekt. We kunnen er
vast niet meer in.”
„Nou,” stelt Chris ze gerust, „’t Is te probeeren. Morgen zijn die

kerels ’t weer vergeten.”
„Ik geloof er niks van,” zegt Karel. „Je zult zien, ’t Hol is voor goed
naar de haaien,” en hij voegt er spijtig aan toe: „Hadden we maar
niet zoo zitten dampen.”
„’t Is wel sneu,” zegt Wim. „Net den eersten dag dat ik er ben
ontnemen ze ons onze vergaderzaal.”
„Waar moeten we nou voortaan zitten om onze geheime

besprekingen te houden?” vraagt Puckie.
„Onder de Hooge Brug,” zegt Piet.
„Een reuzen-plekkie! Ambro, zeg es wat, je staat zoo te suffen.”
„Ja, ik zal me daar ’t Hol laten afkapen,” zegt deze en z’n oogen
schieten vuur.
„An me nooit niet! Ik zàl ’t terug hebben.”
„Als je ons dan maar es verteld hoe!” zegt Wim.
„We moeten beginnen,” zegt Ambro, „met een week buiten het Hol te
blijven, want ik beloof je, dat ze op zullen letten. Als ze dan niets
meer van ons merken, zullen ze misschien denken, dat het maar
een tijdelijke schuilplaats was en geen [195]haan zal er meer naar
kraaien. Die week, zullen we samen komen onder de Hooge Brug,
maar dat is erg gevaarlijk en we mogen ons dan wel heel stil
houden, want daar kunnen ze ons al gauw ontdekken.”
„Ik ga er morgenochtend heen om eens poolshoogte te nemen,” zegt

Wim. „Dan zal ik zoo goed als ’t gaat, den boel in orde maken en
dan komen jullie tusschen 12–1 maar kijken.”
„Moet je dan niet naar school?” vraagt Paul.
„Neen, antwoordt Wim. „Ik word twee maanden thuis bijgewerkt voor
de H.B.S.”
„Nou,” zegt Ambro. „’t Kon wel es gebeuren, dat ik morgen puzzerde
en dan vind ik je wel onder de brug.”
„Hè, willen we allemaal wegblijven?” stelt Chris voor.
„Mij best,” zegt Piet. „Maar als er zes mankeeren en juist wij met z’n
zessen, dan begrijp je wel, dat we voor ’n paar vrije middagen zuur
zijn.”
Dit vonden de anderen ook en ze besloten, geduld te hebben tot na

schooltijd. Ambro moest dan maar zelf weten wat hij deed.
De bende ging uit elkaar en sprak af den volgenden dag op het

bepaalde uur present te zijn op de nieuwe vergaderplaats. [196]
[Inhoud]
VAN EEN DIEFSTAL OP SCHOOL EN EEN
VUILNISBLIK ALS KOEKEPAN.
Ambro volvoerde dien volgenden morgen zijn plan en puzzerde. Had

hij geweten, hoe ’n belangwekkende dag het op school was, dan zou
hij zeker niet ontbroken hebben.
Toen n.l. de jongens dien morgen in het eerste les-uur waren, ging
plotseling de deur open en trad het Hoofd der school binnen,
gevolgd door een Inspecteur van politie en een agent.
Het ongewone van dit verschijnen bracht even groote stilte als
verbazing.
„Wat hebben we nou aan de hand!” fluisterde Chris, Karel in ’t oor.
„Ze komen Ambro toch niet halen?” Intusschen komt het Hoofd der
school voor de klasse staan, geflankeerd door den Inspecteur en
den ridder van den Heiligen Hermandad.
Hij verzoekt den onderwijzer even de les te staken en richt zich tot
de jongens.
„Jongens, leg je pen eens neer en luistert.
„We hebben een dief op school. Ik zeg een, misschien zijn ’t er meer.
We weten niet, in welke klas de dief zit. Wie dus iets van de zaak
afweet, moet ons nu helpen. De diefstal moet aan ’t licht komen. Ik
schaam me, dat op mijn school zooiets gebeurd is.”
De Inspecteur fluistert het Hoofd der school iets in het oor, waarop
deze den jongens gebiedt één voor één voor de klasse te komen.
[197]
„De Inspecteur vindt het wenschelijk, dat jullie de zakken leeg

maken. Het is zeer onaangenaam voor degenen die geen schuld
hebben, doch als de dader zoo laf is zich schuil te houden, moeten
we hier wel toe over gaan.”
Plotseling weerklinkt een hevig gesnik, dat uit de achterste bank der
klasse komt en een angstig-bevende stem roept:
„Ik heb ’t gedaan, mijnheer, maar ik heb nog maar de helft.”
„Jij Koos,” zegt streng het Hoofd. „Van jou had ik zooiets het
allerminst verwacht. Kom hier, en breng alles mee.”
Schoorvoetend, met beschaamde kaken, schuifelt bolwangige Koos

de bank uit en begeeft zich naar het Gerecht.
Drie paar oogen kijken vol gestrengheid op den knaap voor hen
neer, en die van den agent maken den meesten indruk op hem.
Dan diept de schuldige uit zijn zakken een klein appeltje op, waarin
reeds een hap is gegeven.
Hij legt het met bevende vingers op tafel voor hem neer en snikt:
„M’n moeder koopt … altijd bij ’m … en gisteren … wou ie … er me

nog … een geven … en … dat heef ie niet … gedaan … en nou … heb
ik … ’m … genomen …”
Voor een scherp opmerker is op het gezicht van den Inspecteur een
glimlach te bespeuren.
„Ga maar weer zitten, Koos,” zegt het Hoofd der school. „Het is hier
blijkbaar niet om jou te [198]doen. Wat je deed, is heel verkeerd, maar
daar spreken we elkaar nog nader over.”
Koos stapt, zichtbaar opgelucht, doch nog nasnikkend naar zijn bank
terug.
Puckie kan niet nalaten hem toe te roepen: „Je vergeet je appel!”
Hij wordt door de drie paar voornoemde oogen tot stilte gedwongen.
„Het gaat hier om een ernstiger feit, jongens,” zegt nu weer de

hoofd-onderwijzer. „We zullen van het rijtje afgaan.
„Karel Boekers, kom hier.”
Karel komt geheel onbevangen naar voren en keert z’n zakken om

die een geheel museum van jongens-rariteiten bevatten. Hij kan
weer naar z’n plaats gaan. Plotseling begeeft de Inspecteur, die
totnogtoe niet anders deed, dan rustig rondspeuren, zich naar een
der banken en terwijl hij den daarin zittenden jongen streng aankijkt
zegt hij:
„Wat haalde jij uit je blouse en berg je daar in je kastje?”
Vuurrood, maar ongeroerd kijkt de jongen hem aan en zwijgt.
„Als jij ’t niet zegt, zal ik ’t je zeggen,” en terwijl hij zich voorover
buigt, haalt hij vlug het kastje leeg.
„Net zooals ik dacht,” zegt hij.
Hij legt den inhoud van het kastje op de bank, bestaande uit 15
pijpen kaneel en 12 dropveters.
„Waar is de rest?” vraagt hij streng.
De jongen volhardt in zijn zwijgen. [199]

„Spreek op! Waar heb je de rest gelaten? Ik raad je in je bestwil aan
te bekennen.”
„Weggegeven,” zegt de jongen norsch.
„Aan wie?”
„Zeg ik niet.”
„Weet je wel, dat dit je straf verzwaart?” zegt de Inspecteur om hem

schrik aan te jagen.
„Hier is ’t andere,” klinkt plotseling een stem, niet ver van den dader
af en de rest, bestaande uit dezelfde artikelen, wordt op het kastje
voor hem neergelegd.
„Heb jij die van hem gekregen of ook weggenomen?” vraagt de

Inspecteur.
„Gekregen, mijnheer, maar ik wist, dat ie ze gegapt had.”
Dan richt de Inspecteur zich weer tot het Hoofd en verzoekt hem, nu
alles terecht is, met de twee jongens het lokaal te verlaten.
’t Is een nare stoet, zooals ze zich daar verwijderen. Voorop de

dader en de heler, met gebogen hoofden, gevolgd door de drie
gestrenge rechters. Als de deur zich achter hen sluit, ontspant zich
de stilte, die al dien tijd in de klas geheerscht had.
„Waar hebben ze dat gegapt?” vraagt Chris.
„Nog al wiedes, bij de Hazelip natuurlijk.”
„Zou die ze d’r bij gelapt hebben? Wat een serpent.”

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H. D.

& Bryher: An Untold Love Story of

Helltown Casey Sherman

Modernism and Mimesis 1st Edition Stephen D. Dowden

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The Day I Die: The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

THE VOYAGE OUT 1886–​1 915

LINE 1 FLORIDE 1909–​1 919

LINE 2 BORODINO 1920–​1 928

LINE 3 PSYCHOANALYSIS 1929–​1 939

LINE 4 BLITZ 1939–​1 945

LINE 5 VIKING 1946–​1 961

2.1 Helen Wolle Doolittle and her father, 188? 21

11.4 Borderline still of Paul and Eslanda Robeson, 1930 150

There were many angels along the way.

Annette Debo, Jane Augustine, and Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos. Sawnie Morris

Thorn in H.D. Magic Mirror, Compassionate Friendship, Thorn Ticket:

Additional Abbreviations and Abbreviations Used in References

ML Frances Gregg, The Mystic Leeway, ed. Oliver Marlow Wilkinson

Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman; aka Amy Lowell (“Armory”), 1874–​1925

Sigmund Freud (“Papa,” “Professor,” Norman Holmes Pearson (“Chevalier,”

J. J. van der Leeuw (“Flying Dutchman”), Walter Benjamin 1892–​1940

Gerald Henderson (St. Paul’s Cathedral’s

We two remain: /​yet by what miracle

Cryptic enough to be a man’s initials, H.D., born Hilda Doolittle (1886–​1961) in

stumble” on treasures.56 Together, they germinated and safeguarded acute visceral

We are all haunted houses.

Last night there were four Marys;

De blijde dag is daar.—Wim Bolk komt terug.

Zijn zes makkers staan op het perron en wachten op den trein.

„Hij is te laat,” zegt Chris ongeduldig.

„Weet ie, dat we er allemaal zijn?” vraagt Paul.

„Neen, daar weet ie niks van,” is Ambro’s antwoord.

„Ik heb hem wel geschreven, dat ik hem zou afhalen.”

„’t Duurt lang,” bromt Puckie.

„Kwam ie nou maar.” [183]

„Zou ie z’n puist nog op z’n neus hebben?” vraagt Piet.

„Ik zie hem,” roept Ambro verheugd.

Een hevig gekrijsch en gepiep van de assen en de trein staat

„Jonge, jonge, wat een menschen! Goed uitkijken, knullen,” zegt

Wim heeft de jongens nog niet in de gaten. Hij nadert langzaam,

Ambro begint luidkeels signalen te geven, seinen, die alleen bekend

Maar Wim heeft de krijgskreten gehoord en rekt zijn hals uit, om te

Dan zoeken de jongens naar woorden om hem toch maar te laten

Wim is bijna verlegen met al die blijdschap van het wederzien.

„Wat gaan we doen, jongens?” vraagt Chris. „We zijn vanmiddag

„Natuurlijk,” luidt Wim’s antwoord. „We gaan weer ouderwetsch

„Ja, ja, da’s goed,” vindt de heele bende.

En nu kuieren ze allen de Kruisstraat in en zijn het hek van den

„Ik ben erg benieuwd naar het Hol.”

Nu gaat het in gestrekten draf naar het Hol.

Als ze er aangekomen zijn, zegt Ambro met [186]een fraaie buiging

En alsof hij niet weg is geweest, kruipt Wim op handen en voeten

Dan slaakt hij een kreet van verrukking.

THE VOYAGE OUT 1886–1 915

LINE 1 FLORIDE 1909–1 919

LINE 2 BORODINO 1920–1 928

LINE 3 PSYCHOANALYSIS 1929–1 939

LINE 4 BLITZ 1939–1 945

LINE 5 VIKING 1946–1 961

Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman; aka Amy Lowell (“Armory”), 1874–1925

J. J. van der Leeuw (“Flying Dutchman”), Walter Benjamin 1892–1940

We two remain: /yet by what miracle

Cryptic enough to be a man’s initials, H.D., born Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961) in