Fall 2011 | Issue 21

Fall 2011 | Number Twenty-One | The Berlin Journal | 9
my life I have suffered from
‘geographical emotions.’ Cities
“All
are so much easier to understand
than people,” Bryher wrote in Paris
1900, her account of the city’s Exposition
Universelle. World-traveler, historical
chronicler, poet, novelist, and patron,
Bryher (born Annie Winifred Ellerman
in 1894) was the illegitimate child of
shipping magnate Sir John Ellerman, the
richest man in England when he died in
1933. Bryher’s diaries of Berlin, recorded
between 1925 and 1938, reveal a struggle
to define her geo- emotional perspective.
During this period she witnessed “the
flowering and almost annihilation of the
new art of film,” poverty on a massive
scale, and a culture that fostered the twin
dynamos of cinema and psychoanalysis.
Berlin was a site of entrancing complexity
and eventually grave anxiety – and it
provoked an emotional investment Bryher
could not have anticipated.
Geographical emotions emerge from
intense, repeated engagements with architecture,
thoroughfares, waterways, parks,
museums, hotels, ports, and railways;
they attach to pieces of a larger structure
CITIES WERE REPOSITORIES OF
PROJECTED MEMORIES, DESIRES,
AND PHOBIAS.
of human culture rather than to a single
individual. Memory catches upon the
traveler’s affective loom, whether he or she
is buoyed up into exhilaration or plunged
into despondency. Potentially a person
can more easily gauge cities than human
beings, as a metropolis ideally presents a
more diffuse emotional exposure. From
Bryher’s psychoanalytic perspective, which
tended to map the psyche as geography, cities
were repositories of projected memories,
desires, and phobias.
After World War II, with a baby boom
underway and nuclear war a tangible possibility,
cities began to embrace increasing
dispersal and sprawl to ward off concentrated
annihilation. From the 1950s to the
present, homogenization and the strip mall
has given way to a Starbuckian globalism,
where chains can crop up almost anywhere,
and perhaps regulate, pacify or even nullify
a person’s individual emotional relationship
to place. Bryher’s Berlin, on the other
hand, was starkly variegated, multiple, fastpaced,
old-world, rich in history, yet on the
edge.
BIOGRAPHICAL BACKDROP
The allure and adrenaline of travel
were ever present to Bryher, whose
first ambition had been to “run
away to sea as a cabin boy.” No wonder
she astutely observed on her first crossing
to Paris: “A historian without other
chronicle to guide him might reconstruct
the age from the pictures of its luggage.” Of
another childhood sojourn she mused, in
“Egypt 1903”: “Nobody ever gets over their
first camel.” She claimed that when she was
seven, a Cairo trader taught her to “think
across” consciousness, read the “other’s”
thoughts through a focused concentration.
As a teenager she christened herself Bryher
after one of the wildest of the Scilly islands,
permanently linking her identity to geography.
She later wanted to pilot planes, but
her training was interrupted by her urgent
need to leave “neutral” Switzerland in 1940.
The poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) was
Bryher’s closest intimate for over forty
years, yet they lived together for continuous
periods only sporadically, mostly in
hotels at the outset of their relationship in
1919, and, for the longest sustained period,
in a London flat during the Blitz. Their
tumultuous romance began with Bryher’s
love of modernist poetry, with H.D. as its
star. H.D. gave her the courage to flee the
confines of her father’s London mansion
at 1 Audley Street, where she had viewed
the Queen’s Jubilee as well as the lighting
of the gas lamps on Armistice Day. With
H.D.’s introduction in the year they met,
Bryher saw the famous sexologist Havelock
Ellis, who had advocated social acceptance
of a variety of so-called perversions. He
reassured Bryher she was only a girl by
accident, an insight that liberated her
from stifling gender conventions. Bryher’s
passport shows her after her first inroad
into cutting her Victorian locks. Passport
photos, introduced during World War I,
were often an individual’s first publicly
reproduced image – they marked a distinct
geo-emotional moment.
In 1919 Bryher simultaneously nurtured
and wooed a convalescing and war-shocked
H.D., coupled to an estranged, adulterous
husband, and pregnant with another man’s
child. Within this melodramatic swirl,
Bryher adopted H.D.’s daughter, Perdita
(the lost one), who, like herself, was illegitimate.
After Perdita’s birth, she “arranged”
a trip to Greece, the home of H.D.’s most
intense literary fantasies. Ellis acted as
an odd chaperone for the couple during
the voyage to Greece on the Borodino, one
of the Ellerman ships. They stayed, as he
complained on February 27, 1920, “at the
most luxurious hotel” in Athens, the Hotel
Bretagne, while he lodged at a somewhat
shabby pension. When in Corfu, they resided
at the costly Hotel Venise. Bryher spared
no expense in providing for her beloved
(though she herself wasn’t obsessed with
luxury, preferring the fantasies of roughing
it as a cabin boy). The hotels, no matter
how fashionable, reinforced Bryher’s
sense of disorienting transience rather
than Edwardian stability, her father’s more
familiar monetary mobility, or her fantasies
of rugged adventure.
In Corfu, a place productive for their
mutual creativity, the pair experienced
hotel visions (“writing on the wall’) or hallucinations,
as Freud later dubbed them.
These hallucinations became the fodder
of H.D.’s analysis between 1931 and 1934,
which Bryher also funded and “arranged.”
By then, Bryher believed that psychoanalysis
was the only viable means of cultural
and political recovery from the Great War
as well as a template for creating and altering
a corresponding inner geography
When Bryher began living in Lausanne
in the 1920s, she supplied H.D. with a flat,
housekeeper, and allowance in London,
thus establishing the dislocated tenor of
their relationship. She took care of Perdita’s
education, legally adopting her in 1927, and
giving her Kenneth Macpherson’s last name
(he was Bryher’s second bisexual husband
of convenience). “Kenwin” (companioning
Kenneth and Winifred) was Bryher’s base
in Vevey from 1929 until her death, and
her “holding station,” as she called it, for
refugees fleeing the Nazis. Bryher aided
over a hundred refugees, including Walter
Benjamin. (They exchanged books in 1937:
her Paris 1900 for his Berlin Childhood
around 1900.) Tragically, Benjamin committed
suicide (he had a ready supply of
morphine pills since the burning of the
Reichstag), at the border between France
and Spain, where he discovered, too late, he
needed a French exit visa.
Bryher’s close proximity to the German
border made her first forays into Berlin
a great boon; increasingly, the frontiers
became horrific signals of nationalist
power gone wrong. The affective experience
of this group (Bryher, H.D., Perdita,
and Macpherson) reflects how emotions
become geographically dependent, shaped
by passports, frontiers, long-distance travel,
and correspondence.