'Let's Be Alone Together': Bryher's and Marianne Moore's Aesthetic-Erotic Collaboration

Abstract

'Let's Be Alone Together':Bryher's and Marianne Moore's Aesthetic-Erotic Collaboration Susan McCabe (bio) This essay begins to untangle the complex and ignored erotic friendship and collaboration between Bryher and Marianne Moore, during the years 1920-1923. Until recently, as Wayne Koestenbaum explains in Double Talk, critics have often disparaged and misread collaboration. He contrasts the Goncourt brothers' exceptional declaration that their work represented one self, one confession, one "I" with the conventional notion of the male genius working alone. Given that "male collaboration had already earned a reputation for perversity," the dual authorship of The Waste Land, for instance, was initially concealed.1 Even so, Koestenbaum explains, the poem unveils "an epoch we might call The Age of Inversion, when heterosexuality was in the process of being undermined and traduced by its eerie opposite."2 The startling discovery that J.A. Symonds (spokesman for Decadent modernism), shortly before his death, had collaborated with Havelock Ellis on Sexual Inversion (1897) is emblematic of how collaborative relationships, like the works they produced, were in themselves modernist experiments. What of female collaborations in the "Age of Inversion"? While all collaborations are not based on friendships, the two are usually linked. Much work has been done to illuminate the networking and collaboration within female modernism.3 Same-sex friendship, like collaboration, has remained a somewhat sacrosanct zone, set apart from romantic or erotic entanglements. In her fascinating study of negative or "backward" feelings in modernist queer writers, Heather Love writes: "The history of friendship is a particularly attractive archive for the exploration [End Page 607] of same-sex relations, partly because of the relative absence of stigma, and partly because of the relatively unstructured nature of friendship as a mode of intimacy."4 More pertinently here, friendship apparently "holds out the promise of an autonomous space away from the tremors of eroticism, and also from eros's relentless narrative logic of pursuit, consummation, and exhaustion. Being with the friend is an end in itself. There is no orgasm of friendship; wedding bells do not ring for friends."5 It is against this "promise" of friendship that I propose a more muddied conflux of attraction and collaboration—one inspired by Love's emphasis upon "negative structures of feeling" and the call for an expanded queer literary historiography. My argument relies to a large extent upon a psychoanalytic model of transference, developed during modernism, which provides a necessary vocabulary for reframing collaboration. Transference, as a complex term of art, will be further defined and teased out later in this essay, but suffice it to say at the outset, that transference is part of all relationships, and can be differentiated from the conventional analytic situation, and newly enacted when unstated emotional currents and projective fantasies between individuals are routed through material, in this case literary, production. As an illuminating case study, I examine Moore's erotic friendship, collaboration and transference with Bryher, born Annie Winifred Ellerman, illegitimate daughter of Sir John Ellerman, a shipping magnate, and the richest man in England upon his death in 1933. Bryher is an exemplary figure through which to explore the question of "inverted collaboration" and transference, given her numerous material and psychic interactions with cohorts, friends, lovers, and analysts. However, Bryher is, to a much greater extent than Moore, recognized more for her absence in modernist history than otherwise. For instance, Jayne Marek writes Bryher's "multifaceted support of publishing activities has been largely overlooked"6; I would go further and say that virtually all Bryher's "activities" have been "largely overlooked." Bryher was decidedly not T.S. Eliot with his vague inklings toward inversion, as Koestenbaum portrays him in his "perverse" collaboration; rather, she repeatedly and unabashedly claimed she should have been a boy, and resisted her mother's attempt throughout her adolescence to mould her into a perfect miss. In February 1919, Bryher met sexologist Havelock Ellis, who confirmed "she was only a girl by accident."7 Armed with the terminology of inversion and her new romance with the poet H.D. (born Hilda Doolittle, dubbed H.D., Imagiste by Pound), Bryher still could not embrace an openly lesbian or transgender life. Instead, she married...