When Pantheon published Bryher’s Beowulf in 1956, one of its reviewers, R. T. Horchler, wrote, “Those who know Bryher’s historical romances will be surprised that Beowulf is a contemporary war novel, about the bombing of London in World War II.”
I have to confess that over the decades I’ve known about Bryher and her work, I always assumed that Beowulf was a historical novel — something from English history along the lines of The Player’s Boy (Shakespeare) or This January Tale (the Norman Conquest). It was only when I was browsing through a bibliography of World War Two fiction recently that I discovered my mistake — and quickly located a copy.
What’s more surprising, however, is that Beowulf has never been published in England. Bryher had, in fact, written the book in late 1943 and early 1944 while living in London as a refugee with her partner, the American poet H. D.. As Bryher later wrote in her war memoir, The Days of Mars, “The English refused to publish Beowulf. They do not want to remember. It was a documentary, not a novel, but an almost literal description of what I saw and heard during my first six months in London.”
Instead, after she returned to France following Liberation, Bryher was encouraged by her friends Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier to translate the book into French. Tt was published by Mercure de France as Beowulf: roman d’une maison de thé dans Londres bombardé in 1948. Bryher later repaid the favor by dedicating the American edition of the book to Beach and the memory of Monnier.
Monnier in particular loved the book, declaring in a French review, “As for myself, I should like better to have written it than most of the books that are spoken about.” Beach, who met Bryher in the 1920 when her then-husband Robert McAlmon brought the writer into Shakespeare & Co., saw a connection between Bryher’s behavior on that first visit and her approach to her subject in Beowulf:
Bryher, as far as I can remember, never said a word. She was practically soundless, a not uncommon thing in England; no small talk whatsoever — the French call it ‘letting the others pay the expenses of the conversation.’ …. She was quietly observing everything in her Bryhery way, just as she observed everything when she visited ‘The Warming Pan’ teashop in the London blitz days — and, as Beowulf proves, nothing escaped her.
Beowulf takes place over a few weeks in the course of the Blitz. It centers on a modest tea shop, the Warming Pan, run by Misses Selina Tippett and Angelina Hawkins. Bought with a legacy left Selina from her years in service, the tea shop runs on a mixture of hospitality and the altruism of its owners, who are willing to look past rationing restrictions to slip an extra cake to a hungry young soldier or to allow a lonely old man to spend hours nursing a cup in the corner.
There is no plot per se. Bryher simply introduces us to the Warming Pan, its owners, help, and a selection of its customers. She begins with Horatio Rashleigh. Old, lonely after the death of his wife, and no longer producing paintings that anyone wants, he survives on a tiny allowance given begrudgingly by a cousin. As if old age and widowerhood weren’t bad enough for him, war has left him thoroughly bewildered: “Why, this war was raging because people wanted to make haste, were shoddy, indifferent to detail, selfishly avid of some temporary laurel, unlike the anonymous craftsmen who had spent a lifetime on some obscure corner of a cathedral wall.” Horatio would have been happier living before the Industrial Age. “The artist abhors engines,” he observes to one of the few people who will still listen to him.
To the Warming Pan come an array of noncombatants. Colonel Ferguson, an expat returned after years in Switzerland, in hope of offering some service to some part of the government — with no clear notion of what, where, or how. Adelaide Spenser, a suburban wife in for a day of shopping, to whom the war is inevitable if undesirable: “If people make guns, it is human nature to want to use them.” Ruby, the waitress, worried each night that her family’s East End tenement will be destroyed by one of the German’s “century” (incendiary) bombs. The only soldier to appear in the whole book is Joe, a childhood friend of Eve, one of Selina and Angelina’s lodgers. Joe is also the only person who appears to thrive on the war — leading Eve to think, “It was a comment on civilization that it had taken a war to settle him into his right place.”
The Warming Pan is the culmination of a dream Selina has fostered through the decades she spent caring for an invalid, Mrs. Humphries. “Tearooms had had a special meaning for Selina. She associated them with freedom.” Freedom might seem an odd thing to associated with a tearoom, but in Selina’s mind, “Only those people who lived obedience for six and a half days of the week knew what liberty was.” The Warming Pan fulfils a need — serving as something like “a cross between a village shop and the family doctor.”
Selina has cultivated the art of the standard. “With the shortage of eggs and currants, all experiments had gone.” “Nowhere in all the district,” she reflects with pride, “had good standard things”: good farmhouse tea, nice crumpets and gingerbread, rock cakes and buns” — “the sort of food people wanted after a hard day or some hours of freedom too precious to waste on lunch.” Adrienne Monnier understood the value of these staples in wartime: “It is surely as a distributor of manna that Selina Tippett considers herself and fulfills her task. Complete manna, since tea with her is accompanied by perfect toast and excellent pastry,” Monnier wrote in an essay collected in Les Dernières Gazettes.
In offering these bedrocks of the English diet and a warm, hospitality place in which to enjoy them, she is not just running a business but improving morale. “For if clients came in to lunch and went off cheerfully afterwards, they, in turn, would affect their relatives and their maids.” “It was inspiring really,’ she thinks, “how much one solitary woman could do in defence of her native land.”
Her partner, Angelina Hawkins, is one of those tweed-cloaked Englishwomen whose energy could power a thousand homes. While Selina minds the shop and caters to its customers — never chatting too long or allowing too much familiarity, mind — Angelina is off doing battle with the war’s many attempts to interfere with and disrupt normality. “It added such richness to life, making so many contacts,” she thinks “hearing and learning so many things even if occasionally something went wrong.” It’s no surprise to learn, for example, that Angelina had roped Selina into taking classes in Esperanto before the war, or that Bryher characterizes her as “what the French called ‘an amateur of meetings.'”
War’s inevitable disruption of norms and the earnest attempts by the English to defend them is the overarching theme of Beowulf. To Adelaide Spenser, war is “a queue and a yellow form with blank lines that had to be filled up with the stub of a broken pencil.” To Selina, it’s “an endless succession of rainy days in a small country place on a brief summer holiday.” There is something satisfying in how many characters find solace in the thought that they can always write a sharply worded letter to the Times.
And no one is as ardent a defender as Mr. Burlap, the veteran civil servant Colonel Ferguson visits in the vain hope of finding a position. Arriving at his office one morning to find his secretary’s desk has been requisitioned, Burlap’s reaction is a gem of stiff-upper-lip-ness: “I am worried, I have been worried, but am I to understand that … unauthorized persons have entered this room where I am engaged, oh, in a very humble and insignificant manner, in guiding the destinies of a war-racked country and have removed the tool with which you aid me in such labours?”
The Beowulf of the book’s title refers not to the monster of the Old English saga but a plaster bulldog that Angelina Hawkins brings in one day to serve as the Warming Pan’s mascot:
“In a salvage sale, opposite the Food Office. I can’t keep a dog, I know, in the raids, but it’s so cheerless without one. I was afraid at first that you might be tempted to call him Winnie, but then I thought, no, here is an emblem of the whole of us, so gentle, so determined….”
“And so stubborn,” Adelaide Spenser interjects. And despite the fact that Selina, Horatio, and almost everyone else in the shop finds Beowulf the bulldog ugly and in bad taste, he does, in the end, serve his symbolic purpose, perched atop a bomb crater outside the shop, a Union Jack tied around his neck.
If Beowulf has a documentary quality, it’s no coincidence. As Bryher wrote in The Days of Mars, it had a real-life equivalent:
Hilda had discovered the Warming Pan some years earlier and usually went there for lunch. Up to 1941, its owners, Selina and Angelina, supplied their clients with soup, meat, two veg and dessert for two shillings and ninepence. They were country people, they bought all the ingredients they could directly from farms and the cooking was plain but excellent. Such places are now extinct. I liked it because, as I said, I could go there without fear.
And it was the sight of a plaster bulldog that inspired Bryher to write the novel:
I saw a huge crater at the end of Basil Street. Somebody had fetched a large plaster bulldog, I assume from Harrods because they were then on sale there, and stuck it on guard beside the biggest pile of rubble. At that moment Beowulf, my war novel, was conceived.
Even the sad old painter Rashleigh came from her experience: “We had corresponded for years,” she wrote, “and as he earned his living painting miniatures on ivory of the Victory, what else could I call him but Horatio?”
At just 201 pages in the American edition with generous margins, widely-spaced lines and each chapter set out by separately-numbered pages, Beowulf is more novella than novel, but Bryher packs a lot into her carefully chosen words. Monnier considered it a “little classic” and one American reviewer called it a novel “in which all the excess baggage has been thrown out.” Reviewing the book for the New York Times, Orville Prescott wrote that Bryher “has succeeded so well in her modest project that Beowulf could serve as a loving memorial to the millions of Londoners who carried on, as one of Bryher’s characters said, ‘after all the nervous people must have left.'”
Marianne Moore, writing in the Saturday Review of Literature, compared Bryher’s tribute to the spirit of “Keep Calm and Carry On” to Colonel Ferguson’s small but honest attempt to come to the aid of his country:
Like the Colonel’s return, Bryher’s work is always an offer of services. Beowulf is not only a close-up of war but a documentary of insights, of national temperament, of primness and patriotism, sarcasm and compassion, of hospitality and heroism, a miniaturama of all the folk who stood firm.
It’s wonderful, therefore, that British readers will finally have a chance to enjoy Beowulf for themselves. In October 2020, Schaffner Press, a small U.S. independent publisher based in Arizona, will be releasing it for the first time to in the U.K.. It can be pre-ordered now from Hive, Blackwell’s, Foyle’s, and Waterstones, among other outlets, and U.S. readers can find links to a variety of sources on the Beowulf page on Schaffner’s website.