No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  It fired my imagination because I was just the same age as Hannibal when he had sworn his famous oath to fight Rome… I wanted to be a cabin boy and found that I could reply to tiresome arguments ‘if Hannibal was old enough to go on a campaign when he was nine, I am old enough to go to sea.’

  Bryher, photograph by Islay Lyons, 1966, Bryher Papers General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Permission to reproduce granted courtesy of the Schaffner family and Manop Cheroensuk

  In her first autobiographical novel, Development, written in her early twenties, she voiced her own desire to be a writer:

  Work was difficult in an unbroken isolation which fettered thought and plundered her of dream, yet, sharp as it was to wait for life, there were days she was glad of her solitude, the solitude which had taught her the loneliness, the transience and the loveliness of words.

  Solitude was Bryher’s natural state. She lived behind a wall of money and was not open to being loved. Her demeanour was sober and controlled, strangely mannish and she seemed in a sense closed. Years of psychoanalysis reconciled her to who she was. Behind the stern facade was a fierce and courageous heart. It was not easy for her to love H.D. with stalwart loyalty, rescue her from devilish mess, protect her from endless storms. Without Bryher’s unstinting patronage, many new voices would have stayed unheard. She always and discreetly helped. Her demeanour belied her passion to learn by heart all H.D.’s poems, travel the world, dare to fence and fly, flout convention, free the oppressed and probe the human psyche. Bryher flouted expectations of gender and rules of marriage, embraced the new, left the closed incoherence of her Victorian home and sought an inclusive world.

  Bryher’s death

  Bryher died at Kenwin on 28 January 1983, when she was eighty-eight. She left £462,000 in her will. The amount was residual, for while she lived she had given away much to her unorthodox family and to deserving and undeserving friends. By the terms of her father’s trust fund, her brother’s widow was the formal beneficiary of her estate, even though they had had no contact. Perdita benefited too.

  On 1 February 1983, The New York Times printed an obituary:

  Mrs Bryher was a minor member of the literary circle that included Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and André Gide…

  Mrs Bryher lived with Hilda Doolittle, the Imagist poet and a distant cousin… Mrs Bryher helped to raise Miss Doolittle’s daughter Perdita, now Mrs John Schaffner of New York, who became Mrs Bryher’s adopted daughter and heir… Mrs. Bryher is survived by Mrs. Schaffner and four grandchildren.

  It was as if a kindly grandmother had died. Deference to patriarchy was intact. Readers need not consider another Bryher, defined by a Scillonian island of granite hills, waves and sunsets, separated from the mainland by an ocean and a sea, or hear of that Bryher’s quest for liberation from the cage of gender, her disregard of conformity, passion for freedom, and unstinting generosity to those with minds like a diving bird.

  1 Equivalent to £2.5 billion in 2020.

  2 Sir John Ellerman, 2nd Baronet, had no children and died leaving half the amount he had inherited.

  3 Cole Porter wrote the song ‘Miss Otis Regrets’ especially for Bricktop, who was born Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria Louise Virginia Smith, in West Virginia, to an Irish father and African-American mother.

  4 A Parisian annual ball started by Henri Guillaume, the first one held in 1892.

  5 Marriage to Alice would have protected Gertrude’s art collection from avaricious relatives.

  6 Macpherson’s longest relationship was in the 1930s with the cabaret singer Jimmy Daniels, who focused on songs by George Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart and Cole Porter.

  7 The film was thought lost until the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library acquired a copy in 2008 and restored and digitized it.

  8 Sandhurst is the Royal Military Academy where British Army officers are trained. Woolwich was the location of the Royal Arsenal.

  9 The equivalent of $255 an hour in 2020.

  10 The equivalent of £2.5 billion in 2020.

  11 The equivalent of £30 million in 2020.

  12 This January Tale, 1966.

  13 Ruan, 1961.

  14 Roman Wall, 1955.

  NATALIE BARNEY

  ‘I am a lesbian. One need not hide it

  nor boast of it, though being other than

  normal is a perilous advantage.’

  Natalie Barney © Alpha Stock / Alamy

  ‘Love has always been the main business of my life,’ Natalie Barney said when old. This main business involved lots of sex. Natalie went where desire led her. She shared her bed, the train couchette, her polar bear rug, the riverbank or wooded glade with many women, and not always one at a time. Modernism in art upended nineteenth-century rules of narrative and form. Modernism in Natalie’s life upended codes of conduct for sexual exchange. For Natalie, modernism meant lovers galore.

  Desire and Conquest were her twin themes. She was remarkable for her exuberant commitment to lesbian life. ‘Living is the first of all the arts’ was one of her epigrams. ‘My queerness is not a vice, is not deliberate, and harms no one’ was another. Throughout her long life, she managed concurrent affairs. She met her last amour on a bench by the sea in Nice when she was eighty.

  Natalie liked drama and extravagant display. Jealousy and the florid feelings provoked by infidelity enhanced her desire. ‘One is unfaithful to those one loves so that their charm will not become mere habit.’ Many women fell in love with her, even more had sex with her. Of herself she said: ‘I have loved many women, at least I suppose I have.’ Her sexual enthusiasm was unwavering. She was rich – very – and felt entitled. Disinhibited, she did not stall at taking off all her clothes in or out of doors. There are photographs of her from the 1890s, naked in Acadia National Park in Maine. No pleasure was more intense for her than orgasm. In an autobiographical piece, she wrote of how, as a child at bath time, ‘the water that I made shoot between my legs from the beak of a swan gave me the most intense sensation’. Thereafter, she pursued this sensation with scores of women.

  Her mother, whom she adored, was a diva, startling and theatrical. Her father was violent and alcoholic. Defying him was an essential component of Natalie’s freedom. ‘I neither like nor dislike men,’ she wrote. ‘I resent them for having done so much evil to women. They are our political adversaries.’ She said she became a feminist when travelling in Europe in her teens with her mother and seeing women treated as badly as mules and slaves. She scorned the view that a woman’s lot was to be wife to a husband for life and to give birth to his children. ‘The finest life is spent creating oneself, not procreating’ was Natalie’s view. ‘What makes marriage a double defeat is that it works on the lowest common denominator; neither of the ill-assorted pair gets what they want.’ Natalie was not going to battle with the male establishment to change man-made laws, or march for women’s right to vote or be deans of colleges, or lawyers, doctors, politicians. Nor, like Sylvia Beach, did she set herself a mission to accomplish, a goal to achieve. She took her own freedom as a birthright. Her defining characteristics were independence of thought and doing as she pleased.

  Her inspired contribution was to be transparent about same-sex desire in a repressed and repressive age. Too impatient, privileged and self-occupied to give much time to a task or a cause, she led by candid example. Many women followed and were liberated by her courage. She bleached of stigma the language of same-sex love, was proud of her love affairs and cocked a snook at her detractors. ‘Why should I bother to explain myself to you who do not understand – or to you who do?’

  Natalie Barney © Eyevine

  She had a sort of moral compass, though of her own calibration. She valued and sustained friendship, dispensed with euphemism and guilt and tried to live the truth of what she felt. She bore no grudges, was patient with difficult partners and emotional frailty, and her lovers felt understood by her. ‘You are capable – and it’s your only fid
elity – of loving a person for that which she is. For that I esteem you,’ the poet Lucie Delarue-Mardrus wrote to her. ‘I often reflect that nothing has come to me from you, great or small, that has not been good’ was Colette’s view.

  On the downside, her multiple and overlapping involvements hurt many vulnerable women. Dolly Wilde, Renée Vivien, Romaine Brooks, Eva Palmer were among those who suffered being adored by Natalie one night but left alone because she was with someone else the next. And after a time, with the litany of so many women, and Natalie’s reluctance to draw a line as her list of lovers accrued, more really did come to seem like less.

  mother. the first relationship

  The first woman for whom Natalie said she felt ‘an absolute emotion’ was Alice Pike Barney, her mother:

  When she bent over my bed before she went out to a party, she seemed more beautiful than anything in my dreams. I would stay awake anxiously waiting her return, for whenever she was away I was afraid something terrible might happen to her…

  When she came home with my father, often very late at night, I would hear the rustling of her dress as she passed my bedroom. I would tiptoe barefoot toward the strip of light which shone under her door. I could not leave until she put out her lamp…

  Mother – beautiful, beyond any dream, a strip of light under the door – induced sleeplessness and anxiety, was out of reach and set the bar for unattainable love.

  Alice Pike Barney © Everett Collection Historical / Alamy

  Alice Barney, a woman of formidable energy, enthusiasms and self-regard, was thwarted and denied expression, in her own and Natalie’s view, by her husband, Albert. On honeymoon in 1876, Alice realized that her marriage was a mistake. To her diaries she confided her contempt for Albert: his eyes were set too near together, his ideas were prejudiced and narrow, he had no soul.

  Albert Barney, mortified and frustrated by her rejection, sought consolation in whisky and other women. He viewed the artistic aspirations of his wife and Natalie, his elder daughter, as affectations and an undermining of his authority as head of the household. His dissatisfaction was at its worst when he was drunk. He became alcoholic and abusive. Natalie thought he wanted to love his family, but his love was thwarted. ‘His affection for me was demonstrated with gifts and bruises: he would pull me back from the traffic with such vigor that I would have preferred the accident.’

  She thought her mother responded to his behaviour with saintly restraint:

  ‘Live and let live’ was her motto. She had great patience with difficult characters, ungenial though they might be. The desire to control other people was foreign to her. When anyone failed her she was more sorry for them than for herself.

  For herself, Natalie resisted her father’s authority, shunned his presence and would not do as he instructed. She would not allow him to thwart her lesbian identity, curtail her freedom or interfere with her intention to live her life as a work of art. Scornful of his drinking, she disdained alcohol. Liquor, she said, brutalized the mind and body. Drinking someone’s health in it was a contradiction in terms. ‘I loathe the enthusiasm, the writing, friendships and love affairs that come from being drunk.’ Her self-expression took root in opposition to him. ‘I can’t and won’t submit to his whims as you do’, she told her mother. ‘It doesn’t pay. I think I shall be very polite and never answer him back, but have my own way when it’s reasonable just the same.’

  Having her own way became Natalie’s creed for life. Her sexuality was her business, not her father’s or any man’s. She said she once had eighteen assignations in one night. But though her compulsion was to explore and gratify the range of her desires, she stayed true to the ideal of love. There was a questing nature to the transference chain, a search for purity of feeling, a desire freely to evolve, defy, be true to herself and to live life to the full.

  Natalie matched her mother in theatricality. She saw her parents’ marriage as a disaster, a trap to curtail her mother’s freedom and artistic aspiration. To conform was to deny and repress. She was glad to be ‘naturally unnatural’ and spared desire for any man. She would not comply with society’s expectation of a woman’s place. Were she to wed, it would be solely to gain her inheritance.

  cultural forces

  In her writing, as in her life, Natalie scoffed orthodoxies, heterosexuality and male traditions of style and narrative. She was dismissive of the literary elite:

  mind pickers and culture snobs… I do not understand those who spend hours at the theater watching scenes between people whom they would not listen to for five minutes in real life.

  She wrote mainly in French, in which she became fluent. As a child in Washington she had a French governess; America looked to Europe for its culture. In her teens she went to a girls’ boarding school, ‘Les Ruches’ (‘The Beehives’) in Fontainebleau. The school’s headmistress, Marie Souvestre, was lesbian and founded the school with her partner, Caroline Dussaut. They separated in 1883; Marie Souvestre went to England with another teacher, Paolina Samaïa, and together they started Allenswood, a school for girls in Wimbledon. Among their pupils were Dorothy Strachey1 and Eleanor Roosevelt, who married her distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When first lady of America, Eleanor took as her lover Lorena Hickok, known as Hick, a reporter with Associated Press. Hick moved in to the White House and stayed with Eleanor for most of the twelve years of Roosevelt’s presidency. Eleanor kept a photo of Marie Souvestre on her desk.

  When she was eighty-three, Dorothy Strachey wrote the novel Olivia about being a pupil at Allenswood, and her passion for Marie Souvestre (Miss Julie). Published by the Hogarth Press in 1949, the year the censorship of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness was finally lifted, and dedicated ‘To the beloved memory of V.W.’ (Virginia Woolf), Dorothy Strachey said she wrote Olivia to please herself ‘without considering whether I shock or hurt the living, without scrupling to speak of the dead’. She wanted to recapture the emotions she felt when she was sixteen. To do so, she said she needed to overthrow the theories and dictates of ‘the psychologists, the psychoanalysts, the Prousts and the Freuds’, whom she accused of ‘poisoning the sources of emotion’, of applying ‘poisonous antidotes’ to the romantic realities of life.

  ‘Love has always been the chief business of my life,’ Dorothy Strachey, like Natalie Barney, wrote. Her childhood passion was succeeded by other loves. Nonetheless, at the grand age of eighty-three she ‘felt the urgency of confession’, the need to assail and stand up to the cultural forces that had compelled her to conceal her deepest feelings, kept her ‘from any form of unveiling’, forbidden her ‘many of the purest physical pleasures’ and denied her literary expression of who she quintessentially was.

  It was a heartfelt cry from an old woman. Dorothy Strachey died in 1960 at the age of ninety-four.

  So as a girl Natalie learned something of how to be lesbian and a lot of how to speak French. ‘Being bilingual is like having a wife and a mistress, one can never be sure of either,’ she said. Writing in French freed her from Washington constraints of expression but restricted her readership. In her lifetime she published, mostly privately, five volumes of poetry, three of epigrams, two of essays and three memoirs. She did not write stories with a linear narrative, paragraphs and chapters. For punctuation, she favoured ellipses and dashes. She liked fragmented ideas – ‘scatterings’, she called them, pensées, maxims, aphorisms – the stuff of short attention span. She wrote some poetry in English. Her only novel in English was semi-autobiographical: The One Who Is Legion. Her writing was personal, her topics same-sex love, feminism, Hellenism, pacifism, paganism… Unambitious for professional success, the life she lived was the work of art that mattered.

  Eva Palmer and Sappho

  Natalie met Eva Palmer on vacation in Bar Harbor in Maine in 1893. She called her ‘the mother of her desires’. Natalie was eighteen, Eva was twenty. They began a relationship that lasted a decade and set the paths of both their lives. Over that period they exchanged ab
out a thousand letters. Bar Harbor was a summer resort for the wealthy and the Barney ‘summer house’, castellated in the style of an English castle, had twenty-six rooms. Eva’s family too was hugely wealthy. Her father, Courtlandt Palmer, was heir to a million-dollar fortune made in real estate, though he died when she was fourteen, several years before she first met Natalie.

  Eva Palmer-Sikelianos © Wikimedia Commons

  Eva had studied classics at Bryn Mawr college. Both she and Natalie dignified same-sex desire by reference to the mores of classical Greece. Eva wanted to live the ideals of Sappho. Both she and Natalie dreamed of a utopia, modelled on Sappho’s community on the island of Lesbos, where creative women supported and loved each other.

  Eva’s plan had an intellectual underpinning but she was in thrall to Natalie’s verve, courage and braggadocio. She fell in love with her and idealized this love with reference to Sappho’s writing:

  Your letter folds me as closely as your arms and touches me as marvelously as your lips, I am bound by it as though all your body were over me, held by it as by your eyes when they glitter like jewels in the sun. My poet, my mistress, my lover! I love you all ways tonight, but most of all for the grace of your lines.

  Sappho

  Though mere fragments of Sappho’s poems and thoughts survive, these were inspiration to the lovers and poets in Natalie’s circle. They learned Greek to understand Sappho and wrote verse in homage to her.