Lesbian Lives

Psychoanalytic Narratives Old and New

Maggie Magee, Diana C. Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134898732
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Human Sexuality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this groundbreaking re-visioning of lesbianism, Magee and Miller transcend a literature that, for decades, has focused on the timeworn and misconceived task of formulating a lesbian-specific psychology. Rather, they focus on a set of interrelated issues of far greater salience in our time: the developmental and psychological consequences of identifying as homosexual and of having lesbian relationships. Their consideration of these issues leads to a rigorous review of major psychoanalytic and biological theories about female homosexuality and a probing examination of current notions of gender identity. These tasks set the stage for Magee and Miller's own model of psychologically mature sexuality between members of the same sex.

The developmental and clinical issues taken up in specific chapters of Lesbian Lives include the challenges facing lesbian adolescents; the psychological and social significance of "coming out"; the various meanings and contexts of coming out as a gay or lesbian analyst; the interaction of individual psyche and social context in clinical work with lesbian patients; and the history of homosexual therapists and psychoanalytic training. The chapter on "Bryher, " the lesbian-identified life partner of the poet Hilda Doolittle (Freud's patient "H.D."), relying on unpublished documents, is not only a wonderful exemplification of themes developed throughout the work, but an invaluable contribution to psychoanalytic history.

Lesbian Lives is a heartening sign of the generous scholarship and humane impulse that are transforming psychoanalysis in our time. In writing infused with an experiential immediacy born of personal participation in the stories they tell, Magee and Miller weave a multiplicity of narratives into a fabric of explanation far richer, far more colorful --far truer to lived experience--than anything psychoanalysis has heretofore offered on the subject.

1

SUPERIOR GUINEA-PIG

BRYHER AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

I did think once of getting an analysts collar…. [I]t was just the time when Turtle left for the States…. So I think it is much better to have become a sort of superior guinea-pig, able to sympathise with analyst and guinea pig alike!

[Bryher to Walter Schmideberg, October 8, 1936]

The imagist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) had a short analysis with Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysts and literary scholars have examined H.D.’s poetry and her Tribute to Freud (Doolittle, 1956), an account of her analysis, for what they reveal about the effect of the analytic treatment on H.D.’s writing, as well as the effect on Freud of his relationship with the modernist poet. H.D.’s analysis with Freud was encouraged and financially supported by her lifelong lesbian partner, Annie Winifred Ellerman. Ellerman, who called herself Bryher, is all but unknown to psychoanalysts today, although she played an interesting role in the early psychoanalytic movement, to whose support and survival she contributed in significant ways. She was a prolific letter writer whose correspondents included Sigmund and Anna Freud, Havelock Ellis, Hanns Sachs, and Annie Reich. Her unpublished correspondence is housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. It offers perspectives on early analytic practice in London and Berlin, the conflict over lay analysts, and the 1930s forced emigration of many European analysts. This chapter uses Bryher’s memoirs and correspondence to make her life and work belter known to the psychoanalytic community she helped sustain. Had circumstances been different in Europe of 1933, Bryher might have become the first lesbian psychoanalyst.¹

Annie Winifred Ellerman was born in 1894, the first child of Sir John Reeves Ellerman, one of the wealthiest men in England. Ellerman was a shipping tycoon, as well as the major stockholder in The Times of London and the owner of numerous London magazines. As a young child, Bryher traveled with her parents to Italy, Greece, Sicily, Spain, and Algeria. Bryher wanted to be a boy, and she longed for a life of adventure. She admired her father, who called her Dolly, and she wanted to run his shipping company when she grew up. But Sir John believed that a woman would always be at a disadvantage in the financial world. John Ellerman did not legally marry Hannah Glover, Bryher’s mother, until a son, John II, was born when Bryher was 15 years old. Bryher’s autobiographical writings and letters do not reveal her feelings about these family dynamics, but they must have contributed to an idea that it would have been better to have been the son of John Ellerman than to be his daughter.

When Ellerman died in 1933, he left a fortune of £30,000,000, the bulk of which English law prevented Bryher from inheriting. Nevertheless, her share of her family’s wealth did enable Bryher to live independently and to have considerable adventures. She traveled frequently and widely, including trips to Egypt, Greece, America, and Iceland. She founded the first magazine devoted to film as an art form. She made an experimental psychoanalytic film. She wrote poetry and film criticism, three novels, several travel books, a children’s geography book, two memoirs, and ten historical novels. She owned and edited the journal Life and Times Today for 15 years (1934–1950). She supported artists and writers and was especially supportive of independent women with interests similar to hers but with less income—Paris bookstore owners and publishers, Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Company.²

Fido, Kat, Dog, and Pup: Marriages and Menageries

Perdita Schaffner believed that her mother and Bryher were platonic lesbians (Friedman, 1986, p. 220), and Barbara Guest (1984), H.D.’s biographer, believed, “It is certain that she [H.D.] never felt [for Bryher] the physical passion she had experienced toward Frances Gregg” (p. 120). Bryher and H.D.’s 43-year relationship began as a mutual rescue operation. Its terms and form were to be continually reinvented by the two women, who shared longings for independence and recognition.

Bryher was a frustrated 24-year-old when she met H.D. She wanted to write; she devoured poetry magazines and literary reviews. She wanted to go to New York, to visit Marianne Moore and Amy Lowell, whose poetry she loved. She was suicidally depressed by the social restrictions she felt from her family.³

Complete frustration leads to a preoccupation with death. I could think of nothing else. There was plenty of vitality in me but this only made the situation worse. I found a bottle of rat poison in a cupboard and the only thing that prevented me from swallowing it was that I did not want to hurt my parents. For myself, death seemed infinitely preferable to the subexistence that we had to endure. The rat poison became my talisman. I could struggle on as long as I knew that it was mine for the taking…. Under such circumstances, I am al ways amazed now that I survived.

Sometimes the gods toss us a laurel berry to keep us still afloat [Bryher, 1962, p. 182].

Bryhers laurel berry was the opportunity to review books for the Saturday Review. She also began writing Development (1920), an account of her much-hated school days at Queenwood, “at the rate of about a phrase a day written almost with blood…. Yet I could hardly read or think; my one overmastering passion was to be free. There will always be one book among all others that makes us aware of ourselves; for me, it is Sea Garden by H.D. (Bryher, 1962). I learned it by heart from cover to cover” (p. 182). When Bryher discovered that the author of Sea Garden was a woman poet and that the poet was living near her, she wrote and asked if she might visit. H.D. invited Bryher to tea. In Bryher’s (1923) novel Two Selves, Nancy expresses her hopes before that meeting. “Was something going to happen to her at last? … If she had a friend something would burst and she would shoot ahead, be the thing she wanted and disgrace them by her knowledge. Because she would care for no laws, only for happiness. If she found a friend, an answer, the past years would vanish utterly from her mind” (quoted in Hanscombe and Smyers, 1987, p. 36).

Bryher (1962) was terrified that her knowledge of poetry would be inadequate for conversation with H.D.

I was waiting for a question to prove my integrity…. “I wonder if you could tell me something,” H.D. began, “have you ever seen a puffin and what is it like?”

“They call them sea parrots and there are dozens of them in the Scillies. I go there almost every summer, you must join me next year…. Say that you will come with me,” I pleaded. It was the moment that I had longed for during seven interminable years [p. 183].

Bryher felt she had found that friend she had longed for and had found a reason for living. She wanted to lake H.D. to her favorite place, the Scilly Islands off Cornwall. She wanted to take her to Delphi and Athens and Egypt.

H.D. was 32 years old when she met Bryher. She had been engaged to Ezra Pound, had had an affair with Frances Gregg, married Richard Aldington, lost her first child, who had been stillborn, and published her first book of poems. She was separated from her husband, living with Cecil Gray, and pregnant. Her affair with Gray came to an end, and very late in her pregnancy she became ill during the deadly influenza epidemic of 1919. Bryher helped H.D. obtain nursing care. H.D. recovered and gave birth to Perdita on March 31, 1919. In “Asphodel,” H. D. gives her account of the pact she made at that time with Brhyer. When the Bryher-based character threatens suicide, H.D. makes “her promise … to grow up and take care of the little girl.” She describes Bryher as she gives her answer. “The eyes were wide eyes, bluer than blue, bluer than gentian, than convolvulus, than forget-me-not, than the blue of blue pansies. They were child’s eyes, gone wild and fair with gladness.” (Quoted in Hanscombe and Smyers, 1987, p. 39).

H.D. and Bryher often lived apart and sometimes lived with others. H.D. would have other brief sexual affairs with men. Nevertheless, in the words of H.D. scholar Rachel Blau Duplessis (1986), Bryher and H.D. were “bonded for life” (p. xx). When separated, they wrote frequently, sometimes several times a day. Bryher’s letters to H.D. (variously addressed as “Lynx,” “Cat,” “Kat”) were signed “Fido,” a signature of her steadfast faithfulness. Each year they celebrated July 17, the anniversary of their meeting, with special gifts and grateful acknowledgments. H.D. wrote: “Every year I thank you for saving me and Pup [Perdita]” (Guest, 1984, p. 110). And Bryher was always equally grateful for having been rescued. “I shall be thinking of you with much gratitude for all the years, especially the blitz years, London would have been quite unendurable without the Kat and I doubt if I would ever have found my way to our work sans Kat” (p. 277). Bryher’s wealth supported various homes and enterprises, assuring both women ample cottage and support for their competencies. Bryher (and Kenneth Macpherson) legally adopted Perdita in 1929, and Bryher financially and emotionally supported H.D., until H.D.’s death in 1961.

Bryher gives no indication in her letters or autobiographical writing that she was ever surprised, conflicted, or apologetic about the nature or strength of her emotional attachment to H.D. Bryher found Havelock Ellis’s ideas about inversion helpful in understanding her attraction to H.D. as well as her childhood desire to be a boy. Ellis believed that inversion was an incurable congenital condition and was distinguishable from female homosexuality, which he believed to be acquired and contagious.⁴ Bryher visited Havelock Ellis for the first time in 1919. They talked of America (which he advised her against visiting), of her phobias, of sailing and other adventures:

Then we got on to the question of whether I was a boy sort of escaped into the wrong body and he says it is a disputed subject but quite possible and showed me a book about it…. We agreed it was most unfair for it to happen but apparently I am quite justified in pleading I ought to be a boy,—I am just a girl by accident. (To H.D., March 20, 1919)

Given Bryher’s family dynamics, it is not hard to understand her plea that she ought to have been a boy and that only an “accident” of biology had made her female. Her self-chosen androgynous name, taken from one of her favorite Scilly Islands, led readers who did not know her to assume that she was a man. She was delighted that in Russia she was considered “an earnest young man” because of her book on Soviet films. Ellis’s ideas about sexual inversion made sense to Bryher. Although physically Bryher was smaller and shorter than H.D., psychically she saw herself as Fido, the masculine protector and provider for H.D.’s feminine “Cat.” Her friend Adrienne Monnier (1940) described Bryher 20 years later:

She is small, slender—slender is not the word: you do not come to think about her body. You grasp only certain aspects of it: her hands, which habitually close into little energetic fists from which her thumbs thrust out like thick buds; the movement of her head, always a bit bent as if for study, and above all her eyes, which are sky blue—it is there you see all the mischief, all the insight, all the goodness of “the happy few” to whom she belongs [pp. 204–205].

Bryher and H.D. became friends with Ellis, whom they nicknamed Chiron, after the teacher of Achilles. Ellis accompanied them to Greece in 1920, and Ellis and Bryher corresponded until his death in 1939.

Freud made the discoveries but it was Ellis who was a friend. He had replied to my letters within twenty-four hours of receiving them, told me about books and advised me about writing for twenty years. A myth has grown up that he was a fussy old man who compiled lists but had no original ideas. It is a false picture of a very great Englishman…. Ellis opened new ways and relieved the anxieties of hundreds of uneasy minds [Bryher, 1962, pp. 285–86].

In 1920, against the advice of Ellis⁵ and her family, Bryher sailed to America, accompanied by H.D. and Perdita. There she finally met Marianne Moore and Amy Lowell⁶ and Robert McAlmon, a young American writer who wanted to go to Europe. Bryher proposed marriage to McAlmon, and they married on Valentines Day in 1921. As “Mrs. McAlmon” Bryher had greater social legitimacy and increased independence from her family as well as the necessary camouflage for her relationship with H.D. Bryher’s father generously financed a publishing company for his new son-in-law, through which McAlmon met and published and, in the case of James Joyce, financially supported, many of the avante garde writers of 1920s Paris, including Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Barnes. McAlmon thought Bryher’s family insufferably repressed and neurotic, and Bryher disliked Paris and McAlmon’s friends. They lived apart for almost all their marriage.⁷

In 1927 Bryher divorced McAlmon to marry Scottish filmmaker Kenneth Macpherson. Macpherson was at the time H.D.’s lover, and the Bryher-Macpherson marriage helped H.D. hide her affair from her long-estranged husband. It also provided Bryher with a more compatible male companion than McAlmon. This marriage was an evolving menagerie of animals, intimate relationships, and work colleagues.⁸ Macpherson became known as Dog or, more appropriately, Rover, for his wandering ways in love relationships. Bryher and Macpherson raised monkeys in their London home. (Macpherson’s film Monkey’s Moon starred his pet douocoulis monkey). They built Kenwin (named for Kenneth and Winifred), a wonderful Bauhaus house overlooking Lake Geneva, much against the opposition of their architecturally conservative Swiss neighbors. Bryher, Macpherson, H.D., and their friend psychoanalyst Mary Chadwick were members of The POOL Group, a small film production company in London and Territet, Switzerland. POOL published Bryher’s (1929) Film Problems of Soviet Russia, an extended discussion of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and other Russian directors, complete with film stills selected by Macpherson and ample infusions of Bryher’s ideas about everything from airplanes to education. Bryher and Macpherson started Close-up, the first serious film journal.⁹ POOL Productions also made several experimental films, including Borderline (1930) directed by Macpherson and starring Paul Robeson, his wife, Essie, H.D., and Bryher. Borderline used psychoanalytic concepts to explore racism and what today would be called homophobia.¹⁰ Bryher once compared the creative pleasures of film production to childhood play.

I think it is because studios are nurseries on a large scale, with full size blocks, trains, people, etc., to play with. (Turtle [Sachs] once suggested I ought to write on this, perhaps for Imago, but that would be too perturbing. Bad enough to write in the ordinary way and to cope with one’s analyst, one doesn’t want an audience of fifty analysts all barking at...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Prologue
• Introduction
• 1. Superior Guinea-Pig: Bryher and Psychoanalysis
• 2. The Story of Our Lives Becomes Our Lives
• 3. “She Foreswore Her Womanhood”: Psychoanalytic and Biological Theories of the Etiology of Female Homosexuality”
• 4. Assaults and Harrassments: The Violent Acts of Theorizing Lesbian Sexuality
• 5. Coming Out: The Necessity of Becoming a Bee-Charmer
• 6. Moratoriums and Secrets: Searching for the Love of One’s Life
• 7. What Sex Is an Amaryllis? What Gender Is Lesbian?
• 8. When the Psychoanalyst Is a Lesbian: “A Certain Idealization of Heterosexuality”
• 9. Homosexuality and Psychoanalytic Training
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index