Ironically, the ‘White Death’ saved her creative life. She escaped her stifling family by spending months on end taking cures in Alpine air. She forged fulfilling friendships with fellow-sufferers — her gift for friendship was limitless. The journalist Dorothy Thompson, the sexually predatory poet Edna St Vincent Millay, Max Beerbohm, Ezra Pound (she challenged his abhorrent politics but remained a loyal friend), Daphne du Maurier, Lady Violet Bonham Carter, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, the writers Storm Jameson, Pamela Hansford Johnson and Colin Wilson, the dancer Albertina Rasch, the violinist Robert Pollak, were all intimates. Ivor Novello, who had a crush on the handsome Ernan and resented losing him to marriage, at first shunned Phyllis, but was won round by her charm. In the 1920s, isolated in the mountain village of Kitzbühel by Phyllis’s health, she and Ernan established a reform school for difficult British public schoolboys; one of their most challenging cases was Ian Fleming. He became a friend; it seems likely that Phyllis was the only woman he ever respected.
The most significant friendship was with Alfred Adler. Meeting him, said Phyllis, was ‘the greatest event of my life.’ Her interest in Adler’s theory of ‘Individual Psychology’ was used to powerful effect in her fiction.
Phyllis spent significant periods in England, America, Switzerland, Austria, France, Germany, Italy and Jamaica. Wherever she lived she was, says Pam Hirsch, ‘an engaged inhabitant’, empathetic and politically acute. Ever the chronicler of her times, she regarded fiction as ‘the soul of history’. Old Wine, her novel of 1924, concerns the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In London Pride (1941) an East End family endure the Blitz. Under the Skin (1950) describes racial tension in Jamaica. Eldorado Jane (1956) has for its heroine a delinquent sexually abused teenage girl. Why has such a bold and varied body of work dropped from the public consciousness?
The financial pressure that made Phyllis so prolific a writer diluted the quality of her prose. Artistically, less might have been more. But, says Hirsch, she is also a victim of the academic process that has established modernism as the official literary culture of the first half of the 20th century. Phyllis was a realist, not a modernist. Hirsch regards her lively and well-researched biography as an ‘important salvage work’, and I agree; Phyllis Bottome deserves immense respect.
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