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obliged to pay for all relationships. Like McAlmon and Macpherson, Schmideberg drank; he was also treated for drug addiction.

She resumed her passion for travel. She flew to the Caribbean with Robert Herring and Walter Schmideberg, to India with Macpherson and Islay Lyons, to New York via the Azores and Canada with Perdita. ‘It was almost my ideal of life, flipping up and down all over continents.’ She loved the sunsets and mountains, the markets and street life, the excitement of unknown places and of moving on.

Perdita marries

Perdita went to New York when the war ended; she needed to distance herself from her mother and Bryher. She married in Maine in June 1950. Her husband, John Valentine Schaffner, was the New York literary agent for whom she had been working. The writer and academic Norman Holmes Pearson wrote to H.D. of the day. Perdita looked lovely, he said, in a soft blue dress with a wide blue hat to match and a bouquet of white and yellow flowers. The following February, her eldest son, Valentine Schaffner, was born. With her subsequent children, Perdita told her mother they were due a month later than in reality to spare them both anxiety. She visited Bryher and her mother with her husband and new baby in 1951 and stayed two weeks at Kenwin.

Perdita opted for a more conventional model of family than the variety she had experienced in her formative years. She took her husband’s name, reclaimed her American citizenship, wrote for literary magazines, had four children, cats called Petunia, Magnolia and Dr Hugh de P. Van Brugh PhD. The homey, easy things Perdita was denied as a child, she created for herself and those whom she found to love. She lived to be eighty.

One of her sons, Nicholas, a rock star and biographer of The Beatles, died of AIDS when he was thirty-eight. John Schaffner, her husband, died aged seventy, also of AIDS.

Kenwin alone

When H.D. was well enough to leave the clinic, she did not return to Kenwin. She went first to the Alexandra Hotel, half an hour’s walk away from Bryher. They saw each other almost every day – met in a bakery ‘for chocolate and an inch of whipped cream and ambrosia croissants’. H.D.’s hotel room had a balcony looking out over a church. The peacefulness of the mountains, no responsibility, and medical care made her creative life possible. She had what she called her ‘simple luxuries – cold water, coffee and cigarettes’. She could work again. Bryher gave her notebooks, reference books, anything she wanted. H.D. was fulsome in her thanks: ‘I can never begin to thank you, dear Fido, for showing me the “path” here & for all the Greek and Italian journeys this recalls.’

Bryher and Hilda Doolittle, from the H.D. Papers, American Literature Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Photographer unknown.

In the summer of 1948, she moved to the Minerva Hotel in Lugano; she said Lugano was more beautiful than the Nile Valley or the Gulf of Corinth. Her schedule was work, gentle outings and no demands. On 17 July, at the hotel, she and Bryher celebrated the anniversary of their meeting, thirty years earlier.

For Bryher, the problem became who would care for the carer. She had spent her life thinking of others, but no one seemed to look out for her. She found the upkeep of Kenwin hard to sustain. The boiler needed repairs, the gardener left, maids were hard to find. Designed as a modernist centre for the arts, not much went on there once Macpherson and H.D. were gone. Bryher welcomed Schmideberg’s company but his drinking got out of hand.

After an abdominal operation in 1953, H.D. moved back to Dr Brunner’s Nervenklinik. Bryher called the clinic a ‘microcosm of the world’. It was an asylum in the best sense of the word, five houses in beautiful grounds with lakeside views. The inhabitants were drug addicts, alcoholics, the mentally ill. H.D. liked the strange people gathered there; she was perhaps happier than at any point in her life. Her book-filled balcony room looked out over a lake with white swans. There was a little room where Bryher could stay and all around were pine and cedar trees. The food was good, she would breakfast at eight then go back to bed for an hour, she ran a reading group, went out to the cinema and to concerts. She once said that had she been Catholic, she would have become a nun. This was close to the sequestered life.

In December that year, Walter Schmideberg was admitted to the clinic too, ill with alcoholism and a gastric infection. He died there the following year.

From her safe haven, H.D. published a book of poems a year. In her poetry she channelled creative disorders of thinking, her crisis of identity, the myths of ancient Greece, her fascination with things occult, her unconscious mind. She thought there was a fourth dimension to past, present and future. ‘The room has four walls, there are four seasons.’ She allied her creativity to the universal experience of the dream. She worked on her Tribute to Freud. In it, she wrote:

He had dared to say that the dream came from an unexplored depth in man’s consciousness and that this unexplored depth ran like a great stream or ocean underground… He had dared to say that it was the same ocean of universal consciousness… he had dared to imply that this consciousness proclaimed all men one; all nations and races met in the universal world of the dream…

In 1956, she slipped on a rug on the polished floor and broke her hip, but was unperturbed when confined to bed and alone with her imagination. The clinic was a mix of hotel, rest home and hospital. Never good at making decisions, or even capable of making them, H.D. felt safeguarded and liberated by institutional life. She corresponded with Pound and with Aldington, whose second wife left him. Bryher visited, brought