Most visibly, fashion reflected the era’s confusion. There was, of course, the 1920s “flapper” look—the bobbed hair, the scandalously short waistless dress. But actually, what women wore was less uniform than that. A person was almost as likely, in those years, to see a woman wearing harem pantaloons, or an asexual smock, or a face with obliterated eyebrows, or a “little girl frock,” or a plain gray shirtdress, or a mask of make-up with orange cheeks and orange lips, or even a coif that resembled a rooster’s comb. After the demure, long dresses of the turn-of-the-century, it’s not hard to imagine how a woman could cause a flap, walking down the street flashing her legs. But some women also took up the habit of binding their hips and breasts to obscure their curves. Fashions included both revelations and disguise, and there was much debate about what it all meant in terms of new moral standards.
Men and women must have been thrilled, and sometimes terrified, to see what a woman might do—or be—next. In the 1920s, the same decade that American women were granted the right to vote, the nation’s first female governor was elected in the state of Wyoming, and its second was elected in Texas. Just as more women were eschewing marriage for sexual freedom, the first rubber diaphragm came on the scene in 1923 (making it even easier to avoid the consequences). The suffragettes insisted that women should work outside the home, and as if to help this along, the first Maytag Gyrofoam washing machine was invented in 1922. In 1924, General Electric had an advertisement that said, “Shall the men work—or shall you? Back of every great step in woman’s progress from a drudge to a free citizen has been some labor-saving invention.” And by 1926, the General Electric advertisement was: “Any woman who does anything which a little electrical motor can do is working for 3 cents an hour.” There were endless debates about what a woman could do and couldn’t do, and should do and shouldn’t do, and what can only be described as a kind of mania for defining the New Woman, who refused to be defined.
Dekobra seems to slyly poke fun at this impossible quest to pin down the New Woman, for instance in the line, “Why should we classify all women on the basis of the worn out models on display in Destiny’s Bazaar?” (this page). Lady Diana, the beautiful, capricious heroine of this novel, can barely make sense of all the different parts of herself, when called on to explain to Gerard Séliman, our narrator, why she needs him as her personal secretary:
“If I add that my banker cheats me, that each year I have seven hundred and thirty invitations to dinner, all of which I couldn’t accept unless I cut myself in half at eight o’clock every evening; if I go on to say that I have, on the average, six admirers a year, without counting casual acquaintances and some exploded gasoline which sticks to the carburetor; that I keep an exact account of my poker debts, that I always help every charitable undertaking, that I am the honorary captain of a squad of police women and I was a candidate in the elections for North Croydon; if I finally admit that I have a very poor memory, that I love champagne and that I have never known how to add …” (this page)
Through Séliman’s narration, Dekobra writes with a dapper prose, reminiscent of Raymond Chandler in its surprisingly apt descriptions of faces. A policeman has “the profile of a clam” (this page), and a servant is drawn as “a silhouette of white wood, crowned above the mouth with the yellow wisps of a drooping mustache” (this page). He also describes places with a witty baroqueness: “This ancient palace was protected by a great many trees and it reminded me of a piece of cold meat surrounded by a quantity of water cress” (this page). And Séliman’s reflections are charmingly philosophical in a way that deepens the story, without ever slowing it down:
“He resembles most human beings whose souls are leopard skins, spotted with unconfessed vices and excusable weaknesses.” (this page)
“Humanity seems to be an infirmary filled with suffering people. Happily some of them get well.” (this page)
Séliman, though he’s the main character, is willingly duped by beauty, happy to be bossed, polite to a fault, and he gallantly cedes the story to the females around him.
In the first chapter he accompanies Lady Diana to her appointment with a Freudian disciple, who produces a fantastic “magic eye” of his own invention, a “radiograph” with “Roentgen rays” designed to capture the innermost emotions of a person. When the magic eye is aimed at Lady Diana, the contraption doesn’t work very well, and she remains stylishly opaque. The pseudo-psychoanalysis also doesn’t reveal much, though it’s highly entertaining to read. Lady Diana leaves in a huff, annoyed that, after she tells the doctor about a disturbing dream, he cannot foretell her future. This scene is the perfect beginning for a story in which the unpredictability of Lady Diana supplies so much of the fun. Within a few pages, she’s dancing in the nude.
With her erotic dancing and sexual forthrightness, Lady Diana resembles a more conventionally glamorous, less self-destructive Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who, in the 1910s and early 1920s, paraded Greenwich Village wearing a bra made of two tomato cans tied together with string, and often made nude appearances, as a kind of performance art, thumbing her nose at the censors. Just as the Baroness’s nudity was not mere burlesque, but in the service of art and protest, Lady Diana’s disrobed performance is designed to draw the press’s attention away from her financial ruin, and to benefit charity in the meantime. Lady Diana’s unabashed promiscuity, though less aggressive, is just as pointed as that of von Freytag-Loringhoven, who insisted, for instance, that the poet William Carlos Williams should have sex with her and contract her syphilis, so he could free his mind for art. Lady Diana uses her sexuality to get money from men, but it’s on her terms: “ ‘I am neither a semi-idiot, nor a nymphomaniac. I do what I do quite openly and without the slightest regard for that false modesty which is so dear to my fellow countrymen’ ” (this page). Men are her inferiors, and she takes pains to let them know that, even if they are also her means of traveling the world—they are her “sleeping cars.” She’s also smart enough to be an actress when she needs to be. Lady Diana is witty, canny, and careful (around the men at least) not to appear the intellectual. (In 1922, Rudolph Valentino famously said, “I do not like women who know too much.”) The novel often tells us of her double-sidedness:
I imagined the “Madonna of the Sleeping Cars” in her Berkeley Square boudoir, keeping Varichkine at arm’s length, awaiting my reports before opening her heart to him. Yes, Lady Diana at that very moment was probably exercising her seductive wiles from a divan of embroidered velvet.… I could see Varichkine with eyes shining with hope, stalking his prey, chained by the stubbornness of a panther’s heart hidden deep in the alluring body of a defenseless woman. (this page)
The New Woman is the perfect character for a spy novel, because she frequently played a feminine part. Part of the testimony during the 1927 trial of American housewife Ruth Snyder for the murder of her husband went like this:
Question: “In other words, you want the jury to believe that you were a perfect lady? […] You did nothing to make your husband unhappy?”
Answer: “Not that he knew about.”
The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars ingeniously seizes on the unknowability of the New Woman and translates the fear and giddiness surrounding her into a story of international intrigue. “Would she be the first woman capable of wearing a mask in order to deceive someone?” sarcastically asks the Communist delegate, Varichkine (this page). The suspense is heightened because Séliman is continually astonished that the women are not who they at first appear to be. Klara, the easily seducible, blonde German widow, Séliman’s “little Lorelei” (this page), turns out to be an agent for the Soviets. Lady Diana—promiscuous, fickle, a proponent of free love—suddenly announces that she wants to get married. Madame Irina Mouravieff, “a tiny woman,” “rather more beautiful than ugly” (this page), is actually a “breaker of hearts and torturer of bodies” (this page), “the Marquise de Sade of Red Russia” (this page).
Dekobra’s writing style earned the term “
dekobrisme” in France, to describe a method of using journalistic components in fiction. While Dekobra’s tone is nearly always light, even in the prison scenes, it’s fascinating how he surveys the political landscape via the emancipation of his female characters. In fact, the story equates a woman’s liberty (in Lady Diana) with the freedom enjoyed by citizens of free countries. The Communist Varichkine says, “With us, the freedom of the press, along with the other sorts of freedom, has not existed since nineteen-eighteen, and it’s a good thing because liberty is as injurious for a race of people as it is for women” (this page). And Madame Mouravieff, despite all of her own sadistic power, also criticizes Lady Diana’s liberty, albeit out of fear that Lady Diana’s lax morals will embolden her to steal her lover away:
“I know them, those emancipated females, whose souls are studded with gems from Cartier’s, and whose bodies are accessible to any sort of voluptuous pleasure. They would eat snobbery out of the hand of a leper and sacrifice their standing to astonish the gallery. Their colossal conceit bulges like a goiter in the center of their otherwise emaciated hearts.… They are above conventions. They laugh at middle-class morals. They prod prejudices with their fingers and they lift their skirts in the face of disconcerted virtue.” (this page)
As Lady Diana’s nemesis, Madame Mouravieff actually steals the novel for several chapters, and she’s an alluring villain. Although she dresses like a sober suffragette, in a plain gray suit, she holds a potent appeal for Séliman, in her pure foreignness. She might have even reminded readers of the hugely popular film star of the day, Theda Bara, nicknamed “the serpent of the Nile” for her portrayal of Cleopatra, and whose image was crafted around her exotic, dark beauty, her fake foreign parentage. There was a popular song that described Bara’s eyes, which were rimmed with black kohl to emphasize their intensity: “She got the meanest pair o’ eyes, Theda Bara eyes.” Madame Mouravieff’s cruel beauty is similarly often communicated through her eyes:
The flash of Madame Mouravieff’s eyes underlined her warning. (this page)
“Madame Mouravieff is not a she-devil and I shall certainly not cancel my passage … just because of the flash in her beautiful eyes.” (this page)
[T]he blue eyes set in the pallid face of that Muscovite cut like knife-blades through my tightly shut lids. (this page)
During the prison passages, her eyes gain an entire chapter title: “A Woman’s Eyes.” Her sadism against Gerard and the other male prisoner (who she forces to undress in front of her before his execution) suggest darker fears about females with power, but, as with any good villain, her cruelty is perversely amusing, especially when the ferocity of her class warfare becomes mixed up with the battle for her love object. Dekobra’s tale is by no means a patent feminist one, and it’s more rich for its contradictions. Madame Mouravieff may be the villain, but there’s no denying Séliman’s fascination for his torturer, his attraction to her brutal strength. Is it some sexual lack that makes Madame Mouravieff so dangerous? Or has her power somehow taken her beyond sex?
The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars was one of the first popular spy novels based on international intrigue and sophisticated travel, and the novel’s success did much to increase the legends surrounding the Orient Express. But it’s the women who, literally, make the story move. Marcel Duchamp’s famous painting, Nude Descending a Staircase (1913), was controversial because it showed a nude in motion, and because her nudity was made abstract (and therefore ugly to many). It alluded to a science of seeing, rather than to the traditional aesthetic of male desire, which required a nude to lie still. The “French humorist” who gave Lady Diana her nickname, “The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars,” invents a similar ironic pun. As Lady Diana herself states, she is no Madonna, no virgin. And Madonnas, like nudes, are still, static in their sanctity, not moving on a train, not doing whatever it is that happens in a sleeping car. Traveling, after all, as Lady Diana says, is “to change one’s ideas” (this page). Where she goes off to at the end of the novel is anyone’s guess.
What did chance hold in store for her at the journey’s end? A park full of orchids or a corner in a cemetery shaded with cypress trees? A massive golden throne or an operating-table? A lover’s arm or a strangler’s bony fingers? (this page)
It’s the final charm of the book that Dekobra grants Diana her life’s open destiny.
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The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars Page 23
