Word: bryher
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...cream for lunch. It was 1960 and H.D., as she signed herself, had come home briefly from Europe to receive the Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She died the following year, at age 75, in Zurich, within a circle of admirers and close to Bryher, nee Annie Winifred Ellerman, the energetic heiress and novelist (The Fourteenth of October) who had been her lover and benefactor for more than 40 years...
Herself Defined is a book of such famous names, legendary times and places, and unconventional relationships. H.D. married British Writer Richard Aldington, had a daughter, Perdita, with Composer Cecil Gray, and possibly an affair with D.H. Lawrence. Her most enduring relationship was with Bryher, whose father was Sir John Ellerman, a self-made shipping tycoon from Hull...
...Bryher's checkbook makes fascinating reading. She kept H.D. in style and paid for much of her daughter's upbringing and education. James Joyce, the Sitwells and Dylan Thomas were recipients of Bryher's beneficence. Ellerman money also enabled her husband, American Writer Robert McAlmon, to publish the early works of Gertrude Stein, Pound, Hemingway and their fellow expatriates...
Fortunately there is Bryher, whose wealth, practical intelligence and activities run away with the book. "Fido," as H.D. called her cigar-smoking companion, is constantly on the move: in one day she visits Brancusi, Stein, Pound, Joyce's wife Nora, and has dinner with Jean Cocteau and Man Ray. Bryher proves to be a great traveler who mingles comfortably and is resourceful under pressure. In London, during World War II, she had cloth woven from camel hair collected at the city zoo. She also tried to raise chickens during the blitz, but the birds ate their own eggs. Just...
...There was the story of H.D.'s fleeing to the roof of Lowndes Square and flinging her clothes over the edge, preparing to leap after them, yet fortunately prevented. Or of Bryher's taking a near overdose of a drug and being saved by H.D. Yet these were the productive days. Bryher commenced her historical novels. And H.D.'s triumph over circumstance is celebrated in her Trilogy. It is no wonder that H.D. wrote during an air raid: '... now that I saw that Bryher was accepting the fury, we could accept the thing together...