The Heart to Artemis by Bryher

Author:Bryher [Bryher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Valmy Publishing
Published: 2017-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

What a disappointment I was to my parents! All their friends had liked me as a child but here I was with the raw aggressiveness of a boy, clamoring to be loosed upon a world that had no use for me. My father might have coped with the situation if I had had a mathematical mind but what was he to do with a young savage who was only interested in tearing society apart to see how it worked? It must have been disconcerting when a guest, meaning to be kind, asked me what my hobbies were and got the answer, “I want to find out how people think.” Once in an unguarded moment I said something about writing. There was a roar of laughter and a visitor answered, “Oh, no, Miss Winifred, I’m afraid that is a little out of your range but I’m sure you’ll run the garden splendidly in a year or two.” Usually I was careful and silent. I prayed to be forty, knowing that as long as I was young nobody would listen to me. I seldom had more than half an hour a day to myself. It taught me concentration because such moments were so precious no noises could disturb them and I usually spent the time memorizing pages of poetry to repeat during our interminable walks. It was a training in the ancient oral tradition but also a dangerous practice because it absorbed the energy that should have gone into creative work. Yet what else could I have done? It was morbid to read so much, they said, and selfish to want to write.

I do not know how I should have lived if it had not been for one of those little magazines that, as Gertrude Stein was fond of quoting, “have died to make verse free.” It was Poetry and Drama, edited by Harold Monro. The English contributions were too conventional to touch me but F. S. Flint had written articles on modern French poetry and I found in them for the first time the magic word “Mallarmé.”

Mallarmé’s ideas exploded in my head. We desire perfection when we are young, not knowing that inspiration is the skin boat of the seal woman, here momentarily, as suddenly vanished. I had been groping towards the idea of a poésie pure and I was willing to give up everything else to find it. I was utterly alone and for that reason, le verbe, as the French would say, had become of supreme importance. I thought of it as Pegasus and saw it as a way to freedom. In my innocence, I took the words literally and supposed that l’azur meant that Mallarmé had wanted to be a cabin boy and run away to sea. Unconsciously, I imagine, I caught some echo of his own unhappy schooldays although I knew nothing then about his life. Perhaps I was not so wrong after all, remember the famous yole? I had so great a thirst for life that when it came to me through certain of the lines, I could hardly bear to listen to them.

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