Word: bryher
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...COIN OF CARTHAGE by Bryher. 240 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World...
...lowly characters to eyewitness the past customarily keep them close to the great captains-as, say, a cabin boy on the Santa Maria or a drummer dragged along in the wake of Napoleon's march to Moscow. But the wispy, aging English heiress who calls herself Bryher and now lives permanently in Switzerland writes historical fiction in her own strange way. Her latest book covers some 40 years of the Punic wars. Characteristically, her two major characters never take part in, or talk about, any of the major battles. They are not attached to either army. For that matter...
...Subtitles. Bryher's seemingly patchy method is likely to prove a relief to readers tired of overstuffed historical pageantry. But her assumption that anyone reading the book will know in large outline at least who won the Punic Wars and how is often disconcerting. As Trader Zonas leaves from his home in a seaport town and trudges into the hills with the hope of selling leather bridles to the Carthaginians, his small adventures at first seem fragmentary and meaningless-like a provocative foreign film seen without subtitles...
After publication of her first novel, Bryher was quickly accepted in the best literary circles. She was a friend and traveling companion of Poetess Hilda Doolittle; Ezra Pound tried vaguely to seduce her; in Paris she dined with Gide and Joyce and Gertrude Stein...
Judging by this petulant, priggish and reticent autobiography, Bryher seems to have been daydreaming through most of her encounters with the personalities who made modern literature. She recalls almost nothing of her talks with James Joyce or William Butler Yeats. She was invited often to the salon of Gertrude Stein, but spent most of the time in the corner, gossiping-about what, she does not say-with Alice B. Toklas. When that masterful raconteur Norman (South Wind} Douglas asked her to hike with him across Italy, Bryher thought of the disgrace of failure-and said no. Introduced to Andre...