In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [70]
The Paris Press is “a not-for-profit press publishing work by women that has been neglected or misrepresented by the literary world.” For this exemplary aim, Bryher is a strong candidate: few twentieth-century women’s lives were more interconnected with their own era, and few others displayed her edgy bravery and intellectual curiosity, but she is little-known today.
Bryher was born in England in 1894, thus living through the First World War as a woman in her twenties, through the intellectually exciting 1920s in her thirties, and through the Second World War in her fifties. Her birth name was Annie Ellerman; she renamed herself after one of the Scilly Isles, a place that—in her inner geography—stood for remoteness, adventure, and freedom: as a child, she longed to run away to sea and become a cabin boy. Her family was well-to-do, which gave her the opportunity to develop her many interests.
At the age of twenty she encountered Ezra Pound and Imagism, and through them, the poet H.D. Bryher and H.D. formed a lifelong friendship and sometime partnership, although they did not always live together. The two of them took up psychoanalysis in the 1920s, and Freud and his teachings remained important to Bryher throughout her life. She was a poet, a supporter of the modernists, and a foster mother of the experimental writers and filmmakers of the 1920s and 1930s. With the rise of fascism she foresaw the coming horror, and when it came she devoted herself to rescuing Jews and intellectuals, using her home base in Switzerland as a transfer point. When Switzerland expelled most foreigners in 1940 she went to England, where she lived through the blitz. After the war she published a series of historical novels that were widely read at the time; but from these, Visa for Avalon is a departure.
Bryher was seventy-one when Visa for Avalon was published. She had eighteen years yet to live—she died in 1983—and several books left to write; still, anything produced by an author of this age cannot help but be retrospective in mood, and Visa for Avalon has something of an autumnal feel to it. As the hand of Death readies itself for the definitive knock on the door, the writer toils even harder: Wait! Wait! I have just this one very important message I need to get across! A writer’s age at the time of a work’s composition is never irrelevant: The Tempest is not a young man’s play, and Visa for Avalon is not a young woman’s work.
In her introduction, Susan McCabe links Visa for Avalon to the twentieth-century dystopian tradition that includes Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Huxley’s Brave New World, and such a link is not entirely inappropriate. Yet Visa for Avalon is very different from either in tone, and—insofar as one can say anything about a writer’s intent—in intent as well. It’s an odd duck of a book, and placing it within the Orwell-Huxley frame does it a slight disservice: the reader enters the book expecting the kind of specific and quasi-satirical detail that abounds in these works—the religion of Our Ford, the Ministry of Love, the babies grown in bottles, the use of Newspeak, and so forth—but such sardonic, bat-winged flights of invention are not to be found in its pages.
What then is to be found in them? The word allegory has been used about Visa for Avalon, but it is not an allegory, since its characters and events cannot be interpreted one-for-one. In Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Una stands for the True Faith, Duessa for the false one, the Faerie Queene herself for Queen Elizabeth I, and so forth; but there are no such connect-the-dots certainties in Visa for Avalon. Part of this book