Bryher Patch

THE HEART TO ARTEMIS (316 pp.) --Bryher--Harcourt, Brace & World ($5.75).

The doughty little Englishwoman known as Bryher--in 1920 she changed her name from Winifred Ellerman--lives in Switzerland, where she has written a series of brisk, gnomic historical novels (Roman Wall, Ruari). Bryher seems to have had a full life of missed opportunities. She is the daughter and sister of millionaires.

Her father, Sir John Reeves Ellerman, rose from stock clerk to owner of a vast shipping fortune. By shrewd investment, her brother John--a skittery recluse whose sole passion is the study of rodent anatomy--has become Britain's richest man.

Winifred and John quarreled bitterly after their father died, have not spoken to each other in 30 years.

After publication of her first novel, Bryher was quickly accepted in the best literary circles. She was a friend and traveling companion of Poetess Hilda Doolittle; Ezra Pound tried vaguely to seduce her; in Paris she dined with Gide and Joyce and Gertrude Stein.

Judging by this petulant, priggish and reticent autobiography, Bryher seems to have been daydreaming through most of her encounters with the personalities who made modern literature. She recalls almost nothing of her talks with James Joyce or William Butler Yeats. She was invited often to the salon of Gertrude Stein, but spent most of the time in the corner, gossiping--about what, she does not say--with Alice B. Toklas. When that masterful raconteur Norman (South Wind} Douglas asked her to hike with him across Italy, Bryher thought of the disgrace of failure--and said no. Introduced to Andre Gide, Bryher had so little to say that the Great Man cut short the interview by autographing a copy of his latest novel and, in obvious relief, rushed away.

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