Pagan Light

by Jamie James

  The last of them, La Venus triste (translated as The Weeping Venus), was painted in the winter of 1916, during a dark period of the First World War. Brooks wrote in her memoir, “Who other than Ida Rubinstein, with her fragile and androgynous beauty, could suggest the passing away of familiar gods?” Venus’s pose in the painting is identical to that of the figure in The Masked Archer, rotated from a standing to a reclining position. The painting takes a star turn in The Forge. Radclyffe Hall describes it in precise detail as a work by Venetia Ford. When Susan Brent sees the painting in the artist’s studio, it has a transformative effect on her: “The Venus lay on a somber couch with a moonlit sky as background. One arm was flung above her head, the other dropped by her side. Susan got the impression of a body languid with too much pleasure, emaciated by too much suffering. Tears fell from under the closed eyelids, and the face seemed to hold the suffering of all the world.” The painting moves Susan to leave her husband and study with Venetia Ford.

  Brooks’s plan to paint Rubinstein in the studio was thwarted by the model’s habitual twitchiness, so she worked from photographs. In the finished work, the legs of the figure are remarkably long, to such an extent that the viewer might conclude that the artist exaggerated their length to enhance the visual impact, in the manner of El Greco. Yet after Brooks’s death, a series of photographs of Rubinstein in the pose of Venus were discovered among her effects, which revealed that the painting accurately reflected the model’s unusual proportions. Whitney Chadwick discerns a revolutionary intent in The Weeping Venus quite distinct from the modernist movements that ruled Paris at the time: “For the first time in depicting the body of a female lover, Brooks links death and eroticism under the sign of a new, female image of the androgyne. Fusing a pictorial style derived from decadent and symbolist representations with a body type stressing slenderness, small breasts, and sexual ambiguity, she appears to move toward a new, more fully realized representation of the lesbian body.”

  By this point in her life, despite the pleasure and intellectual stimulation she got from the company of sensitive, artistic men, Brooks firmly identified as lesbian. After the stressful relationship with Gabriele D’Annunzio ended, she confined her amours to her own sex. Her homosexual orientation was confirmed when she met the woman who would be her great love, the American poet and salonnière Natalie Barney. Brooks’s memoir is much vaguer in its terse account of this relationship than in the many pages devoted to D’Annunzio. She does not mention the date of their first meeting, but it must have taken place by late 1916, when Brooks painted The Weeping Venus, because Barney wrote a poem about the picture. It begins,

  THE WEEPING VENUS

  (by Romaine)

  Laid out as dead in moonlight shroud

  Beneath a derelict cloud:

  A double wreckage safe from flight

  High-cagèd as grief, in prisoned night.

  Brooks’s memoir is also elliptical about the nature of the relationship; throughout the text, Barney is referred to as “my friend.” It might seem logical to entertain the possibility that Brooks is more candid about her relationship with D’Annunzio than that with Barney because she wished to conceal her homosexuality, or to veil it in euphemism, but that would be a misreading. The authorial reticence is in part simply a function of Brooks’s old-fashioned ideas about good manners, and it might also have had a mild erotic motive. In her fine recent biography of the artist, Cassandra Langer writes that Brooks “believed that sensuality flourished best in secret, so she tells us very little about love and lovers.” Brooks might have made an exception in the case of D’Annunzio because his death, in 1938, had conferred upon him the retroactive exemption from blame often granted dead lovers and because he could no longer make mischief. Brooks’s recollection of her affair with D’Annunzio had mellowed with a nostalgic patina, but in her later life she became increasingly irascible, collecting quarrels with Barney and everyone else. In the memoir, she begins her account of her relationship with Barney on an acerbic note: “Friendship came to me again, bringing me its compensations but also demanding its toll.”

  Natalie Clifford Barney was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1876. Her father was the heir to a railway fortune, and her mother, Alice Pike Barney, was a painter who studied with Carolus-Duran and Whistler. Natalie met Oscar Wilde when she was a little girl, on a family holiday in Long Island, while he was on his triumphant American lecture tour. She was being chased down the boardwalk by little boys who pelted her with candy cherries that got stuck in her flaming-red hair when she ran into Wilde, who lifted her up and rescued her from her tormentors. She gratefully sat on his knee, and Wilde told her a fairy tale.

  In her early twenties, Barney made a permanent move to Paris, where she published collections of Sapphic verse, in French, which attracted little attention. In 1910, a slim volume of epigrams, Éparpillements (Scatterings), caught the eye of Remy de Gourmont, the influential critic and philosopher. He had become extremely reclusive after he contracted lupus, but he made an exception for Barney. They formed a bond of friendship that deepened on his part into a hopeless romantic infatuation. Gourmont published their conversations in Mercure de France, addressing her as l’Amazone, because she frequently came to him after horse riding in the Bois de Boulogne dressed in equestrian attire, the only socially acceptable costume that permitted women to wear trousers. Barney used the nickname to the end of her life. Brooks’s portrait of her is called L’Amazone; it is an unusually subdued, opaque likeness, with a bronze horse on a tabletop in front of the sitter.

  By the time she met Brooks, Barney had launched the salon at her mansion at 20 rue Jacob, in the Latin Quarter, which held an eminent position for more than sixty years, spanning the eras of Marcel Proust and Truman Capote. It would be easier to name the handful of major writers in Paris who did not attend her salon than to compile a list of those who did, which constitutes a nearly comprehensive census of modernist literature. An invitation to her Friday soirees was even more sought after than one to Saturdays chez Gertrude Stein, with whom, inevitably, Barney is often compared. She laid on a more lavish spread and had a Barnumesque flair for spectacle: Mata Hari once rode into the garden on rue Jacob as Lady Godiva, naked on a horse with a turquoise cloisonné harness.

  Natalie Barney resembled Gabriele D’Annunzio in one important respect: she was compulsively promiscuous in her pursuit of sex and love. By the time she met Brooks, around the age of forty, she had had many intense romantic relationships, all of them with women, which brought her a notoriety that eclipsed the attention given her literary works. Among her lovers were Liane de Pougy, one of the few women who rejected D’Annunzio, the “frightful gnome”; Olive Custance, the future wife of Lord Alfred Douglas; and Renée Vivien, born Pauline Tarn, a British poet whose mother was from Michigan. When she was courting Vivien, Barney enlisted the aid of Emma Calvé, the reigning mezzo-soprano at the Paris Opéra, to serenade her from the street. When Vivien opened her window, Barney tossed up a bouquet of flowers with a love poem attached. Barney, who had written a play early in her career about the life of Sappho, studied the poet’s fragments with Vivien. The two women traveled together to Mytilene, ancient Lesbos, with the intention of founding an art colony there for women.

  Near the end of Renée Vivien’s brief, unhappy life, when she was depressed and living in seclusion, she fell in love with Romaine Brooks and pursued her with pathetic perseverance. Here, Brooks recalls their first meeting, at Vivien’s flat, near the Place de l’Étoile:

  There comes before me the dark heavily curtained room, overreaching itself in lugubrious effects: grim life-sized Oriental figures sitting propped up on chairs, phosphorescent Buddhas glowing dimly in the folds of black draperies. The air is heavy with perfumed incense. A curtain draws aside and Renée Vivien stands before us dressed in Louis XVI male costume. Her straight blond hair falls to her shoulders, her flowerlike face is bent down … We lunch seated on the floor Oriental fashion, and scant food is served on ancient Dam
ascus ware, cracked and stained. During the meal Renée Vivien leaves us to bring in from the garden her pet frogs and a serpent, which she twines round her wrist.

  Brooks was impervious to the calculated drama of the scene and remained obdurate to Vivien’s desperate demands for love in the ensuing friendship. Vivien died a few months later of self-starvation, complicated by an addiction to chloral hydrate.

  Soon after they met, Barney became Brooks’s deepest emotional attachment, but it was a complicated relationship. Barney adored Brooks, but she was still in love with a woman she had met seven years before, Élisabeth de Gramont, the duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre, known as Lily. Gramont’s mother was a princess of the blood, and she was descended on her father’s side from a mistress of Henri IV’s. She was trapped in a wretched marriage with an abusive aristocrat, Philibert, duc de Clermont-Tonnerre, who demanded abject obedience from his wife and beat her often, for trivial reasons. She suffered two miscarriages as a result of his brutality. When she met Natalie Barney, Gramont was consumed by a passion that lasted to the end of her life. In Barney, she discovered affectionate love and sexual excitement and through them a salvation from her mariage noir. When the duke divined what his wife was getting up to, he confined her and their two daughters in a rural château, a scenario that might have been lifted from the Marquis de Sade. Gramont escaped and sought refuge with her new love at the mansion on rue Jacob. Impoverished by this declaration of independence, Gramont sold a few antiques she had inherited and bought a house in suburban Passy. A close friend and confidante of Proust’s, she made a tiny income as a writer and eked out a modest middle-class life with “loans” from Barney.

  By the time Barney and Brooks met, Lily de Gramont had embraced an open lesbian identity—or more properly, she was playing a major role in the creation of the emerging paradigm. She was said to be the first lesbian in Paris to crop her hair short, a style that Gertrude Stein imitated. When Gramont became aware that she had a serious rival in Brooks, she was just as defiant as she had been with her ducal husband and broke off the relationship with Barney, imperiling her new life as boldly as she had her old one. In a letter redolent of fine scorn, with a bitchy dig at her lover’s new coiffure, she wrote to Barney, “I am a cynic, and I find that pleasure is perhaps the only certainty apart from beauty. You look charming, of course, with your new haircut à la Brooks—the blonde and the brunette—an excellent pair—and I wonder if I am right to want to put asunder what the world has joined together?” Chastened, perhaps even panicked at the prospect of losing the woman she adored, Barney responded with a remarkable scheme: she proposed marriage.

  In 2004, in his biography of Élisabeth de Gramont, Francesco Rapazzini revealed the existence of a contract between Barney and Gramont that gave a semblance of legal form to their relationship. Drafted by Barney on the stationery of the Hôtel d’Europe, in Aix-les-Bains, the document is a curious blend of romance and lawyerly boilerplate. If it had had any legal force, it would have made Gramont a bigamist, for the duc de Clermont-Tonnerre did not divorce her until two years later. The contract declares that “one is indispensable to the other” and states, “No one union shall be so strong as this union, nor another joining so tender—nor relationship so lasting.” The document concedes that “adultery is inevitable in these relationships where there is no prejudice, no religion other than feelings, no laws other than desire, incapable of vain sacrifices that seem to be the negation of life.” The women consecrated their symbolic marriage in 1918, a few months before the end of the First World War, and celebrated it with a honeymoon in America, where they called on Barney’s mother and followed tradition with a trip to Niagara Falls.

  However Barney, Gramont, and Brooks worked out their relationships, the arrangement endured until Gramont’s death, in 1954. Cassandra Langer asserts that “Lily, Natalie, and Romaine were mapping new territory and building a model that simply did not have a name. This is not to imply that the relationship was always harmonious and without contradictions, but it was one of mutual respect and dependency within an open architecture of independence.” Barney, who was able to maintain and stabilize her relationships with both her lovers, was the most obvious beneficiary of the tripartite alliance, but it also suited Brooks, the most independent tenant of the open architecture. The record offers no evidence that Brooks and Gramont were ever lovers, though Barney nurtured a hope that they would be.

  Brooks might not have been as promiscuous as Barney, but she was equally averse to the bonds of a monogamous union. Her commitment to Natalie Barney was the only romantic partnership she entered into, unless one includes her marriage to John Brooks, and it remained strong almost to the end of her life, in 1970, more than half a century after the two women met. It was an attraction of opposites, which might have played a part in the durability of the relationship. Natalie Barney was a warmly affectionate woman, always demonstrating her love, whereas Brooks, a loner since childhood, became ever more misanthropic in later life. She seemed to be almost incapable of feeling jealousy and as a rule took scant interest in Barney’s perpetual philandering. Brooks inspired hot passions but experienced them herself rarely after the affair with Gabriele D’Annunzio.

  Brooks had no interest in establishing a flamboyant public identity as a lesbian, as Lily de Gramont had done, and shunned the company of lesbians who campaigned for social acceptance, such as Radclyffe Hall, the “digger-up of worms.” Natalie Barney did not campaign for gay rights, but she had been open about her sexuality since girlhood. Her outrageous gestures arose from an enlightened idealism that may appear naive to a contemporary eye, yet it anticipates late twentieth-century feminism in a classical mode that verges on camp. Barney dedicated a Doric “Temple of Friendship” in her garden, where she and her devotees dressed in white robes and recited Sapphic verse as they strummed tortoiseshell lyres. In 1927, she established an Académie des Femmes to honor French women writers, fifty-three years before Marguerite Yourcenar, an habitué of Barney’s salon, became the first woman to be elected to the French Academy.

  If male homosexuality in the early decades of the twentieth century was poorly understood, a subject for lawyers and judges more than doctors and scientists of the mind, its female counterpart was all but unknown. The principle underlying the legend that Queen Victoria asked Parliament to strike a proposed law forbidding sexual activity between women, on the grounds that “women do not do such things,” might apply just as well to the medical establishment of the day. One of the pioneers of the scientific study of female homosexuality was Allan McLane Hamilton, the alienist who lived in Villa Castello until he sold it to Thomas Jerome and Charles Freer. In 1896, he published an article in The American Journal of Insanity, which applied to lesbians the prevailing classification of male homosexuals into active predators and passive victims: “The offender was usually of a masculine type … and she nearly always lacked the ordinary modesty and retirement of her sex. The passive agent was, as a rule, decidedly feminine, with little power of resistance, unusually sentimental or unnecessarily prudish.”

  From a modern perspective, it is difficult to accept that Hamilton was among the more enlightened early investigators of the phenomenon, despite the asperity of his terminology, simply by raising the subject. In his article, he complained that gathering data about lesbians was difficult because the “mental perversion was not of a recognized kind.” The tale of Queen Victoria’s intervention in the British criminal code is apocryphal, but it is true that sex between women was not prohibited by law. While male homosexuals lived in a perilous social penumbra, lesbians occupied a nonexistent terrain, which freed them to live as openly as they dared. Radclyffe Hall and Lady Troubridge claimed martyrdom because people whispered and sneered behind their backs when they came to the opera dressed in tuxedoes, but sneers and whispers were the worst they could expect at a time when gay men were being led to prisons and workhouses in shackles.

  * * *

  AS THE CATASTROPHIC war was grind
ing to a close, in 1918, Romaine Brooks returned to Capri and took up residence at Villa Cercola, where her husband was living with Maugham and Benson when she first met him. It was one of the best houses in the village, built at the end of the nineteenth century in plain boxy island style, with an interior space of six hundred square meters. The principal attraction of the villa was its garden, nearly an acre in extent, including an olive orchard and a pergola hung with grapevines. It was a sentimental choice: Brooks painted her early picture of a pergola in fruit, which she sold to Charles Freer, at Cercola. The house had three inconspicuous entrances on the footpaths winding up to Tiberius’s palace. The marble doorstep of the upper gate was engraved with the Latin motto Cave hominem (Beware of the man!), a learned joke that had John Brooks’s classical fingerprints on it, playing on the familiar injunction Cave canem (Beware of the dog), a warning to intruders, which was the subject of a famous mosaic at Pompeii.

  The house had six bedrooms, two dining rooms, two bathrooms, and at the rear, most enticing for Romaine Brooks, a long studio with a northern exposure, which looked out on a terrace and beyond to the Gulf of Naples. When Brooks took the house over, it had a ballroom with a wooden dance floor, one of just two on the island. In Final Edition: Informal Autobiography, Benson wrote that in 1913 he “moved into a most delightful house,” which he had long coveted. “A plumbago ramped up the whitewashed rough-cast of the house wall. From the terrace ran out a short vine-covered pergola over the cistern for rain water, and in the garden, lying rather steeply down the hillside, grew a great stone-pine which whispered to the slightest breeze and roared when sirocco blew.” A tangle of passionflower and morning glory hung over the garden wall. Benson’s description of his life with John Brooks at Villa Cercola in the summer before the First World War is a lyrical evocation of Capri’s sirenic allure, which may not seem overripe to those who have experienced it: “Long mornings of swimming through translucent waters interspersed with baskings in the sun, siestas, fresh figs, walks up to the top of Monte Solaro, homecomings in the glowing twilight, dinner under the vine pergola, games of piquet in the café, strolling on to the piazza at night to look at the lights of Naples lying like a string of diamonds along the main, with the sultry glow of Vesuvius behind.”