Lesbian Images: Essays

by Jane Rule

  Bored, with nothing to do all day to entertain herself, Violette encourages Hermine to take more and more pupils in order to have more money to spend. “The more I veered in practice toward masculine attire, the more I was gnawed inwardly by a desire for frivolities, for beautiful cars, for fine furs.”18 Hermine saves her money, buys Violette elegant clothes, but the more she gives, the more Violette wants. She wanders the streets accepting rides from strangers, but always her fear of men makes her escape. Telling Hermine of these adventures, Violette is irritated that Hermine is not jealous. Gabriel is, or seems to be, and finally his disgust drives him away. As Violette abuses Hermine’s generosity and tolerance more and more, Violette cries out, “She is killing me and there’s nothing I can accuse her of.”19 Except, of course, turning Violette into a woman: useless, dependent, bored, and greedy. Finally seeing a very expensive table she wants, Violette can’t persuade Hermine that there is enough money to buy it. Then in an encounter with a strange man, Violette explains her relationship with Hermine, and he offers to pay her to make love with Hermine in front of him. Hermine is not easy to persuade, but at last she agrees even to this in order to indulge Violette in getting the money for the table. It is, however, a test of love Hermine does not pass in her heart. She forms an attachment with one of the other teachers at the school as a way out and leaves Violette, abject and enraged, asserting, “Who, in the end, gave most to the other? I did.”20 What she gave was expulsion from school, the loss of her job and her health. Giving, for Violette Leduc, means nothing but sacrifice, the annihilation of self which she learned from Isabelle. Hermine is dismissed as a failed saint because she made a religion of Violette and then lost faith.

  Violette seems to have survived the rejection by resorting to masturbation, a practice she learned from Hermine, who “told me she’d learned from reading a book by Freud.”21 “At first I believed I was damning myself. I didn’t say to myself: chastity and repression drive people mad. I said: these are nasty habits that you must rid yourself of or keep quiet about.”22 In later years she says, “I desire, am only able to desire, myself.”23

  If she had other relationships with women, she does not write about them. She might have liked a sexual relationship with Simone de Beauvoir, who befriended her and encouraged her writing through long years of some recognition in the literary world but no success in the market place. Simone de Beauvoir was not interested, and Violette Leduc was so grateful for her loyalty and help with writing that she did not resent Simone de Beauvoir’s lack of erotic interest, which would not seem curious and, of course, was not, except as seen in the light of Violette’s relationships with homosexual men, whose attention to her work did not matter to her, from whom she always wanted instead the sexual attention they would never offer her.

  Aside from Gabriel, to whom she was finally married for a brief and unhappy time, all the men she cared about were homosexual. And even her relationship with Gabriel was sexually confusing. Once she decided to conquer her old fear of sperm she still did not want to play the role of a woman with Gabriel. She asked Gabriel to make love to her as a man would make love to another man. Gabriel’s solution was simpler. On their wedding night he suggested that they love each other like brother and sister. Though she tried and was sometimes successful in seducing him, he was never really interested in her sexually at all, and, because he was also bitter about the years in which she mistreated him, he had little sympathy for her suffering. “Why did I marry?” she asks herself. What a commonplace and depressing answer it is. “The fear of being an old maid, the fear that people might say: she couldn’t find anyone, she was too ugly.”24

  In some of the comments she makes it would be easy to assume that she really wanted to be a man. “Women are not men, I said to myself with inward desolation.”25 Women are inferior creatures. In reviewing her relationships she says, that Gabriel, Hermine, and Isabelle she remained a child to be taken care of, “an idiot woman jammed in neutral gear.”26 She bewails not only her ugliness but the feminine shape of her hips. During the period when she tries to make friends with Genet, she is abjectly flattering and servile, accepting his rude mistreatment of her. Her final fantasy about Genet is to dress herself in a light body stocking and wear a false penis to attract his attention. As a house guest of Cocteau’s, she tortures herself with the grief that she is “a mere woman.” Two male homosexuals at different periods of her life briefly took on responsibility for supporting her, but in their presence she had to subdue her own sexual desires and become, as she mockingly calls herself, “a sort of bluestocking made up mainly of runs.”27 When her mother suggests that she should find the sort of man really willing to take on the responsibility of a woman, Violette thinks such an attempt would be deceitful, an extraordinary piece of moral reluctance given her behavior in most intimate relationships. In one of the arrogant moods she uses to pull herself out of depression and self-pity, she says that she came into the world and vowed to entertain a passion for the impossible. To be a man? Or perhaps better, a beautiful boy? At moments, but for all her paranoid self-pity and enraged need, Violette Leduc chooses impossible relationships because they are impossible. However painful sexual indifference is, it keeps her free of the annihilation of self that sexual passion has been for her. Only in impossibility is there the space for herself that she needs to write, to love herself, to re-create herself as she has been and is, “intact, loaded down with defects that have tormented me.”28

  Very few people have abused themselves and others with such continuous rage, dragged such a defective spirit through the slums of human emotion, where self-respect is a concept never entertained, suffered it all with only one dream left, “To write the impossible word on the rainbow’s arc,”29 with this consolation: “I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer. My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music. It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips,”30 the fire of the onanist giving herself finally, in her books, to the world, not the genius as Gertrude Stein would be taken, not the martyred savior Radclyffe Hall offered herself to be, but simply an ugly bastard of a woman who will have her say.

  Margaret Anderson 1893–1973

  MARGARET ANDERSON, LIKE SO many other extraordinary and surprising people of her day, was raised a middle-class midwesterner who by the time she was twenty-one had bashed her way out of her family and charmed her way into the music and literary worlds of Chicago. Though she wrote for newspapers and played the piano, she did not think of herself as either a writer or a musician but as an appreciator and a touchstone of taste in the arts. Without experience or money, she determined to found a review which would publish all that was new and good in fiction and poetry and the best conversation there was about them and the other arts. From the beginning anti-intellectual in being antiacademic, Margaret Anderson attracted not only some of the most interesting writers in America but also eventually Ezra Pound and James Joyce. Pound became the overseas editor of The Little Review and arranged to have Ulysses serialized in it. For fifteen years, from 1914 to 1929, The Little Review survived and thrived, though there was never enough money, and though its issues were sometimes seized and burned by the U. S. Post Office authorities.

  In 1930, Margaret Anderson published the first volume of her autobiography, My Thirty Years’ War, in which she described the problems and triumphs of being the editor of what she knew was the best review of its time. The book is marvelous reading not only because it contains a great deal of literary and musical history but also because of the courage, arrogance, and high joy of its author, who should be exasperating and rarely is. Claiming to be breathless, she more often lets in great gusts of fresh air. Ruthlessly critical about types of people like intellectuals and socialists and bad poets and millionaires, her individual portraits are almost always generous and perceptive. There is the grand Amy Lowell in the office of The Little Review, determined to buy it so that she could have her revenge on Pound for refusing to welcome her into hi
s group of writers. Pound’s letters to Margaret Anderson are quoted at length, full of energy, personal wit, and critical acumen. Emma Goldman, the earnest anarchist, is coaxed to Margaret Anderson’s apartment with the reassurance that there is no furniture, just a grand piano. The brazen ingenuity by which Margaret Anderson got grand pianos, whether for a Chicago apartment or a California farmhouse, was as remarkable for producing Christmas trees in the most poverty stricken of seasons and just enough money for one more issue of The Little Review. Margaret Anderson was too much a free spirit to attract and keep sponsors for the magazine, too self-confident to seem as poor as she was, too certain of willed miracles to worry about it overly much.

  Her greatest talent, already evident in the first volume of her autobiography and far more the subject of her second, The Fiery Fountains, was for friendship. The art of friendship was as great for Margaret Anderson as the arts of music and literature. Her critical perceptions in the last volume, The Strange Necessity, are often defensive, slight, and perverse, but her description of the important relationships in her life and her insights into the requirements of relationship are both thought-provoking and moving.

  Margaret Anderson put convention behind her so early in her living that she does not seem to have had the conflicts evident in so many other women making her choices. Radclyffe Hall’s sense of her own freakishness and Violette Leduc’s paranoia, for instance, stand in direct contrast to Margaret Anderson’s attitude toward herself: “My unreality is chiefly this: I have never felt much like a human being. It’s a splendid feeling.”1 In an interview she confessed, “I’ve been called ‘a lovely freak of nature.’”2 A beautiful woman (an attribute she did anything but deny), she fended off numbers of men who would have provided for The Little Review if given any personal encouragement. She had no interest in any conventional role and proudly stated, “I am no man’s wife, no man’s delightful mistress, and I will never, never, never be a mother.”3 After her father’s early death, she broke completely with her mother. Though her relationships with her two sisters continued longer, she admitted that they found her completely crazy and could not really inspire in her any proper sisterly feelings. “I have always held myself quite definitely aloof from natural laws. …”4 To be a freak, to be aloof not only from convention but from nature, was a joy rather than a grief, for Margaret Anderson was never interested in anything but the extraordinary and rare, those people gifted in art and in life to be perceptive, to develop a high consciousness of their own and other people’s being. Much of The Fiery Fountains concerns her struggle to increase her own consciousness through long and often painful study with Gurdjieff in France, a teacher whose vision also inspired those closest to Margaret Anderson. If she did not know the pain of being different, evident for so many others who lost convention by default rather than by arrogant rejection, Margaret Anderson was not spared the pain of growth through which she would come to understand something of the nature of freedom and love.

  The first of what she called “all my lovely companions”5 was Jane Heap, who turned up shortly after Margaret Anderson had founded The Little Review and soon became co-editor. A photograph of her could be mistaken for that of a handsome young man, with eyes both intelligent and moody, the nose and chin strong, the mouth generous. Her attraction for Margaret Anderson was her great talent for conversation, original, well-informed, unpretentious. She wanted Jane Heap to write her views in The Little Review, and she did, but always reluctantly, always with the basic suspicion of the value of such an exercise, for she did not have Margaret Anderson’s zeal for informing and reforming the reading public. She complained good-naturedly that Margaret carried her around like a fighting cock under her arm to be thrown into any likely circle. Jane obviously enjoyed that role far more than she did that of writer for The Little Review. She and Margaret soon began to live together. They spent intense months in a farmhouse in California, talking through the night about everything there was to talk about, always returning to the nature and psychology of art, to human motivation about which Jane had “uncanny knowledge” and “unfailing clairvoyance.”6 Failing to make the contacts they wanted in California, Margaret decided they must move the magazine from Chicago to New York.

  Their domestic relationship lasted for nine years, by which time Margaret Anderson was tired of the magazine and strained to breaking by the relationship itself. Jane Heap would not give up The Little Review, and she edited it by herself for several years after Margaret left for France in the company of Georgette Leblanc, formerly the wife of Maeterlinck, a singer twenty years Margaret’s senior with whom she would live until Georgette’s death twenty-one years later. Jane Heap eventually moved to London, and she shared the experience of Gurdjieff with Margaret and Georgette, remaining one of their most intimate friends. In the last months of Georgette’s life, she kept up a correspondence with Jane, whose letters make it evident that Jane had come to love and admire Georgette in much the same way Margaret did. The irony of her messages to Margaret is tender, not bitter. “Give my love to Florence Nightingale Anderson. I was always afraid I’d be ill and that she would nurse me.”7 Jane’s letter to Margaret at Georgette’s death gives tribute to Georgette and loving support to Margaret.

  It is difficult to come upon an accurate description of the virtues and difficulties of Margaret’s relationship with Jane because Margaret had a habit of generalizing so that it is often not clear about whom she was talking. It was a means, of course, of protecting those people she cared about. Also she lived at a time when it was necessary to be delicate in reference to sexual love, a restraint she not only did not resent but celebrated against the “coarseness” of such writers as D. H. Lawrence. Her publication and defense of Joyce seem to have been an exception to her general taste and morality. Toward the end of her life even those books described as “delicate” seemed to her brutal and crude. “The truth is I feel so ‘pure’ … and I’m not ashamed of it, and I don’t care who knows it.”8 It is hard to know what she meant by “pure,” private perhaps, certainly not asexual, for she said, “I don’t know anything about sex for the sake of sex. I regret this. I am sure I have missed some of the bread and wine of life. I have known sex only as romantic love.”9 And of romantic love she said, “I have found romantic love where, alone, it can exist for me—in someone whose nature it is to regard sex as a mystery and a gift.”10

  The tension between Jane and Margaret probably resulted from their differences in temperament and emotional need. Jane was more gregarious and catholic in her social tastes, but she was also moodier, without Margaret’s willful optimism. Jane exerted a certain power over Margaret by mood and made her suffer. “Those rages and reconciliations on which lovers seem to thrive are an abomination to me,”11 Margaret said much later, but she made the same comment, less clearly, while she was living with Jane. “It is this—the human drama—that has always been unnecessary to me.”12 “I have always had something to live besides a private life.”13 That something was her passion for and faith in art, which was not so central to Jane and could not take the place of an intensely personal life.

  Jane kept a gun and threatened suicide. She resisted suggestions for change, sharing Margaret’s delight in making a place charming to live in but not her ability to leave it behind. When Jane had to give in, as she did when they moved to New York, she lay face down on a bed for days and would not move. Margaret, who thrived on new challenge, took to writing long and perhaps undeliverable letters about her own suffering under the tyranny of such need, wanting freedom of a kind Jane obviously didn’t understand, never herself needing to be alone, able to write an assigned three hours a day. Gradually Margaret felt she was giving up her own life, her own “wonderful life” for the sake of love, and she could not bear it. She cried out that life should be ecstasy, to which Jane laconically replied, “Why limit me to ecstasy?”14 It was a retort Margaret appreciated and never forgot, but it did not heal anything. Margaret later wrote, “I didn’t know what to
do about life—so I did a nervous breakdown that lasted many months.”15

  When she escaped from what had become the intolerable prison of that love, she established a very different kind of relationship with Georgette Leblanc, who made none of the demands that had limited and finally made life with Jane impossible. The freedom Margaret had longed for and hoped would finally develop with Jane existed from the beginning with Georgette, and “freedom is the only bond that could ever utterly bind me to another human being.”16 “During the twenty-one years that Georgette and I lived together I never once heard her make a disagreeable remark, exhibit a trace of bad humor, intrude on my privacy or freedom, admonish my way of behaving, show a sign of impatience with me, or speak a word of reproach.”17 It is an astonishing claim, made over and over again in the last two volumes of the autobiography as Margaret describes the perfect relationship they had because Georgette was so rare and marvelous a woman. Margaret did not define freedom in love as freedom from obligations and responsibilities happily accepted but as freedom from conflict, from possessiveness, and jealousy. “In real love you want the other person’s good. In romantic love you want the other person.”18 Her love for Georgette was obviously real rather than romantic, though it may be that one simply transcended the other. “I remember lighting a fire in the salon, in the rue Casimir Perier. I remember Georgette coming to sit down before it and holding her hands to its rays. I thought, ‘Fire is a recurrent miracle to her; her response to it is a radiance; there is nothing I wouldn’t do to invite, and bask in, this radiance.’”19 The ideal that this love was for Margaret would be harder to believe and accept if the details of their living were not given as often difficult and amusing as well as obsessed with “wonder and delight.”20