GLR November-December 2023

ton (who had his own extramarital affairs) was serving in the military during World War I, H.D. became pregnant by a Scot tish composer, Cecil Gray. She named her baby girl Frances Perdita, combining her lesbian lover’s first name with that of a character in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale , and stayed mar ried to Aldington, though they finally divorced in 1938. In time, she fell in love with another woman, Winifred “Bry her” Ellerman, a wealthy arts patron whom Vetter suggests would have identified as trans had she lived in a later era. Al though Bryher married twice (the second time to a gay man), her heart was always with H.D. The two traveled together in Europe and cohabited much of the time, though H.D. required periods of solitary living so she could write at her leisure. Her daughter, who went by “Perdita,” grew up with two mothers, and her frank and humorous comments about H.D. and Bryher add interest to this biography. Bryher also wrote and published books and had an active life of her own, but H.D., with her silent-movie-star looks and her fame as a poet, was the center

of attention and wanted it that way. Given the space restrictions of a concise biography, Vetter does not go into great detail about H.D.’s writings, but we do get a sense of H.D. as a searching, intensely intellectual poet. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Vetter notes that H.D.’s poetry “is marked by truncated staccato lines, as she strives to achieve some semblance of ancient Greek rhythm in modern-day Eng lish. Sound is dominated by repetition and resonance, stressed syllables crowd into brief lines, and the effect is incantatory, as if she is summoning the gods.” Her lifelong devotion to the an cient Greeks, especially the plays of Euripides, revealed that H.D., like Pound and T.S. Eliot, became a modernist through her transfixed study of the distant past. H.D. was everything all at once, and a trouper to boot. Of a bomb exploding terrifyingly close to her London home during the war, she said: “ Must they make so much noise?” I enjoyed this book and recommend it to anyone interested in learning about a fascinating writer who really should be the subject of a film.

Get to Know Charles Causley

M OTHER’S BOY is the seven teenth book by Patrick Gale, but you may not have heard of him. Although he’s a best selling author in Great Britain, he has been without an American publisher since his first three books came out. The novels are so quiet that you can miss how skillfully

Meanwhile, we learn a great deal about his mother’s sacrifices while nursing an ail ing husband who was devastated by serv ing in the Great War, and, after his death, while supporting a child on what she can make as a washerwoman. “Laundress” seems too fancy a term for her labors. She is almost always in hot water, scrubbing the

D AVID B ERGMAN

MOTHER’S BOY by Patrick Gale Tinder Press. 416 pages, $26.99

written they are. Mother’s Boy is both hushed and breathtakingly powerful, a biographical novel in the tradition of novels like Colm Tóibín’s The Master and The Magician that follow the known facts of a subject’s life and imaginatively fill in the gaps. In this case, the subject is the poet Charles Causley, a name that may not resonate very strongly in the U.S. but who’s a beloved figure in Britain for his war poetry and his children’s verse. Causley grew up in Launceston, a small Cornish town. There he stayed all his life, teaching in the local school and living with his mother until her death. The longest he stayed away was during World War II, when he may have had the only sexual relations in his life, and they were with other men. Gale wants to understand how Causley became so fixed in his life, geographically and sexually: in short, how he became a “mother’s boy.” Gale’s way of understanding Causley is not by going through the boy but by going through the mother. The novel gives us very little of Charles’ inner life. His naval service dur ing the war produces only the realization that he suffers from extreme seasickness. Gale gives a very detailed picture of life aboard a small cruiser, but little in the life of Charles’ cruising. Even the suspicious death of his first lover in a car crash a week after they split up provokes far less reflection than one might expect. David Bergman is a professor of English at Towson University, MD, and poetry editor for this magazine. November–December 2023

sheets of the local bawdy house with their distinctive stains or the less sordid clothes of the local gentry. The book provides handy tips for erasing a number of discolorations. But poor as she is, Mrs. Causley does the church clothes for free and attends services regularly. She is a saint, heroic in her efforts to care for her son. When one of the ladies offers to give Charles piano les sons, she makes the colossal investment of purchasing an up right, which barely fits into their parlor. The piano is equal to a month’s earnings. But her thrift as well as her generosity are local legends. And her efforts are not wasted. Her son is a ge nius—there she’s right. He becomes the pianist for not one, but two local dance bands. There is a limit to her bounty, however. The most painful one has to do with Charles’ education. He’s an extraordinary student, and everyone, including his teachers and friends, think he’s destined to go to the university. But Mama is growing weary and would like the extra pay that her son could bring in. And so, despite her misgivings, she takes him out of school. She finds him suitable work—a desk job—in a local business. When the business goes under, she finds another job for him. How many mothers procure jobs for their sons? But no one can refuse the sainted Mrs. Causley in her efforts to watch over her de voted, if peculiar, child. What Gale quietly suggests is that uni versity would mean separating the two, not just physically, but also in terms of class—Charles would be taking a step away from her socially. The archness of my summary distorts Patrick Gale’s control

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