No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  He and Eva sailed on to America for their wedding. Her arrival in September 1907, wearing a toga and Greek sandals, no hat, arms and ankles bare, made the front page of The New York Times and Washington Post. Her appearance was thought beyond eccentric. The papers wrote of the one-time debutante, ‘rich enough to do as she liked’, who had abolished lingerie and startled passengers on an ocean liner. ‘Her father who was president of the Gramercy club died fifteen years ago. Her mother is now Mrs Robert Abbe.’

  Eva married Angelos in Bar Harbor on 9 September 1907. She returned to Greece as Kyria Sikelianou, Angelos Sikelianos’s wealthy American wife, in love ‘with his country, his people, his language and his dreams’. She did not revisit America for twenty years and only on one occasion did she again wear Western clothes – when she met up with her ailing mother at a spa in Aix-les-Bains. She bought fashionable clothes so as not to upset her, but threw them out of the train window when they parted.

  In Greece, her money financed Angelos and their revival of Greek culture. She built a villa at Sykia and a stone house in Delphi. She grew crops, made wine, emulated how ancient Greeks wove and wore their clothes, concocted her own dyes from beets and flowers and shells and made connection with Greek women through spinning and weaving. Her dresses, beautiful and embroidered, copied the traditional folds depicted on ancient reliefs. She was attentive to Angelos. They replicated ancient ways of making music, of dancing, reciting poetry and staging plays. She held exhibitions of Greek folk art and handicraft and directed performances of traditional songs and dances by the villagers of Parnassos. She immersed herself in Byzantine music and planned to open a school for the preservation and teaching of ancient Greek music. She told Natalie she was happy,

  After two years of marriage, she had a son. She then asked Natalie to stop writing to her.

  By 1912 she no longer wanted sex with Angelos and voiced no objection to his relationship with his cousin Katina, a servant in their house. She continued to collaborate with him and to finance him.

  Eva made Delphi the cultural centre of her revival of the Greek ideal. She directed two major international festivals of Greek drama in the sacred space of the ancient amphitheatre there, presenting pioneering productions of Aeschylus – Prometheus Bound and The Suppliant Women. She invited local people to a performance and asked their views of the play. An actor who worked under her direction said of her:

  She was the only ancient Greek I ever knew. She had a strange power of entering the minds of the ancients and bringing them to life again. She knew everything about them – how they walked and talked in the market place, how they latched their shoes, how they arranged the folds of their gowns when they arose from the table, and what songs they sang, and how they danced, and how they went to bed. I don’t know how she knew these things, but she did.

  Eva Palmer as a modern woman reached out to the classical past. For her, progress was to emulate a past Utopia. And yet ultimately hers was an isolated experiment. The marriage did not last, she overspent on the Delphic festival of 1927, lost her fortune, mortgaged her houses and ran up a debt of a million drachmas. She moved back to America in 1933 to try to raise money. Her autobiography Upward Panic made no mention of any lesbian involvement.

  Alice Barney marries again

  Alice Pike Barney did not mourn the death of her husband Albert. Merrily widowed, she aspired to make Washington the cultural centre of the Western world. As a showcase for contemporary American art, she founded Studio House in Massachusetts Avenue. Her oil paintings of women, many of them Natalie’s lovers, hung alongside those of Joshua Reynolds and James Whistler. She produced and directed plays and operettas for which she wrote the libretti, staged tableaux in which, scantily clad, she danced as a dervish, she set up a centre for decorative arts where she taught tie-dyeing, she became vice-president of the Society of Washington Artists. Mention of her in the society columns was frequent, with photographs of her at first nights and comment on what she wore – black tulle patterned with peacock eyes and with ostrich plumes in her hair.

  In 1909, aged fifty-two, seven years after Albert’s death, she married Christian Hemmick, her ‘pink pet’ she called him, the male lead in many of her productions. He was twenty-two, bleached his hair and fancied young male dancers. Natalie asked her mother why, after a ghastly first marriage, she wanted to tie herself to another man, particularly a pederast. Perhaps it was not Natalie’s place to question unorthodox behaviour, given her display with Liane de Pougy and half the lesbians of Paris. Her sister, Laura, thought that Hemmick was after their mother’s money. As a precaution, before the ceremony, Alice assigned her properties to her daughters.

  Christian Hemmick was not an ideal husband. Alice was always busy, while he fooled around. She wrote cheques to him and financed his enthusiasm for dubious business ventures. For one project – the making and marketing of scented household cleaning products – he took stuff from the scullery, mixed it with Alice’s perfumes and designed labels for the jars. She set him up in an office but instead of working, he wrote letters on scented notepaper to young men.

  Natalie castigated her mother for her lavishness to this ‘worthless boy pederast husband and the thousands of dollars wasted on him’. By 1918 Alice wanted a divorce. Hemmick objected that he was Catholic and marriage a divine contract. When she learned he was having an affair with the dancer and artist Paul Swan, dubbed ‘the most beautiful man in the world’, she told him the marriage was over and she would be writing no more cheques. She reverted to being Mrs Barney.

  the temple of friendship

  For her part, Natalie, freed from her father’s pressure to conceal her lesbian identity and rich in her own right, consolidated her Paris life.

  In 1909, aged thirty-three, she rented 20 rue Jacob. The house became her home for sixty years. In its garden was a small eighteenth-century pavilion with, carved above its entrance, the dedication À L’AMITIÉ, and in this pavilion, which Natalie called her Temple of Friendship, her famous or infamous salons began, held between the hours of four and eight on Friday afternoons.

  These afternoons evolved into a showcase for artistic innovation. ‘I didn’t create a salon’, Natalie wrote, ‘a salon was created around me.’ Her initial hope was for French, American and English writers to meet and disseminate new writing and ideas beyond national boundaries, but over time these meetings took on their own life. Paul Valéry called the gatherings ‘the hazardous Fridays’, they became so unpredictable.

  ‘The universe came here’, wrote the French writer Edmond Jaloux, ‘from San Francisco to Japan, from Lima to Moscow, from London to Rome.’ Natalie’s visitors were drawn to the cutting edge of art, the conversation, the strawberry tarts and the prospect of finding lovers and friends.

  The word got round, and among a roll call of lesbians were Gertrude Stein with Alice B. Toklas; Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier; Janet Flanner and Solita Solano, who was drama editor of the New York Tribune; Bryher and H.D.; Colette, Djuna Barnes, Romaine Brooks, Nancy Cunard, Liane de Pougy, Olive Custance, Lily de Gramont, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Mimi Franchetti, Radclyffe Hall….

  Visitors spilled from the Temple into the garden and then the ground-floor dining room, its walls covered in red damask, the domed ceiling painted with nymphs, its furniture haphazardly acquired: an Empire couch, Spanish chairs, portraits on the walls of Natalie’s lovers painted by her mother, Lalique lamps sculpted as bouquets of roses, photographs of friends framed in gold and tortoiseshell: Apollinaire, Proust, Gide, Picasso, Cocteau, Sarah Bernhardt, Stravinsky, the Queens of Spain and Belgium, Nadia Boulanger, Greta Garbo with Mercedes de Acosta… On an oval table at the room’s centre were a tea urn, glass pitchers of fruit juice, triangular sandwiches and little cakes from Rumpelmayer’s.6 On a side table were port and whisky. Natalie’s famous housekeeper, Berthe Cleyrergue, did not arrive until June 1927.7 Before her, domestic helpers came and went. Natalie said she preferred them ‘a little blind and deaf’. Berthe did not speak Eng
lish.

  As a frontispiece to her publication Aventures de L’Esprit, Natalie doodled a calligram in the style of the poet Apollinaire. It showed the pavilion with L’AMITIÉ scrawled across its doors leading to the garden and dining room, and crowded into and spilling out of every space were the handwritten names of the visitors to her Fridays. It was a roll call of modernists – French, American, English – who all contributed to new ways of expression in the decades before the Second World War. Making threads of connection, drawing these disparate names together, weaving in and out among them was their host, Natalie Barney. The Amazon.

  Remy de Gourmont, symbolist poet, novelist and critic, gave her the Amazon soubriquet. De Gourmont was in his fifties when they met. His face was ravaged by lupus and Natalie described his clear blue eyes as like ‘two children living in a ruin’. Fortnightly from January 1912 until October 1913 he published a letter, written ostensibly to Natalie, in the Mercure de France – ‘Lettres à l’Amazone’, he called these essays. In them, he extolled her and the thoughts and feelings she inspired in him. He said whenever he saw her, he felt a quickening of his heart. ‘If I dared I would have you read everything I write,’ he told her. For him, she encapsulated the exuberance of the new.

  Natalie, however daunting her sex life, was true to her dedication to l’Amitié. In 1966, aged ninety-one, still straight-backed and strong-faced, she described friendship as the most lasting virtue, ‘the most free of passing emotions’, sustained by loyalty and choice. ‘I’ve never given up my friends,’ she said. ‘They’ve given me up but I’ve never given them up.’

  ladies with high collars and monocles

  In the early decades of the twentieth century, literary lesbians from America and England left their home towns for Paris. News spread that it was the city of like minds and hearts. On arrival, they headed to Natalie’s Friday salon in the same way as aspiring novelists headed to Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company. Many had a distinctive dress code, as Sylvia pointed out.

  High collars and monocles, though not de rigueur, were clues. So was brilliantined short hair, a white carnation or sprig of violets pinned to a jacket lapel, a ring on the pinkie finger. Beyond such badges of allegiance, an appraising glance of recognition was universally understood.

  At Le Monocle, a club in Montmartre, the clientele divided into butch and femme, the bemonocled and besuited who propositioned the befrocked. At 20 rue Jacob of a Friday, dress code was not prescriptive. Natalie liked her blonde hair long or up and wore jewels, furs and fripperies, high collars and high boots, fancy dress or nothing at all, according to the occasion and her mood.

  fidèle/infidèle and idleness

  Natalie described her nature as fidèle/infidèle and divided her amours into relationships, affairs and adventures. By fidèle/infidèle, she meant she would be steadfast to lovers in her way but would not, could not, be sexually faithful. She thought heightened desire in relationship did not last, and because heightened desire was imperative to her, she kept moving on. In her three categories, relationships were deep and long-lasting; affairs were serious but less compelling, and adventures too numerous to tally. Alice B. Toklas said she picked up her adventures in the toilets of Paris department stores.

  Natalie had no need to earn a wage, publish for money or, like James Joyce and Sylvia Beach, make worried appeals for funding. She could be lofty about her unconcern for possessions. There was hauteur in her epigrams: ‘Why grab possessions like thieves, or divide them like socialists when you can ignore them like wise men?’ Or, ‘I dread possessions because they possess you.’ Or, ‘I can live without fear of robbers. You can’t rob an atmosphere.’ Such thoughts floated above an astonishingly large bank account.

  From a bubble of privilege, she extolled idleness. ‘I think one must be idle in order to become oneself,’ she wrote. ‘If you have a profession you become part of that profession. With work you become a function. With idleness you become who you are.’ She had no need to submit to an occupation to pay the bills.

  Paris was a grand place to be idle, to become who you are, to have relationships, affairs and adventures. Paris allowed such indulgence.

  thoughts of an Amazon

  Radical in her lesbian separatism for her own or any time, ironic and scathing of patriarchal power, in her writing Natalie voiced her thoughts on the folly of war, the nonsense of religious dogma and, most of all, her preoccupation with love between women and with the women whom she loved. Between 1910 and 1940 she collected her epigrams, aphorisms and quips, written on scraps of paper as and when they came to her, and published them in books – with gaps of a decade – with the titles Éparpillements (‘Scatterings’), Pensées d’une Amazone (‘Thoughts of an Amazon’), and Nouvelles pensées de l’Amazone (‘New Thoughts of the Amazon’).

  The first novel, Adam and Eve’s, has been overprinted.

  Marriage: neither alone nor together.

  Fame: To be known by those one does not care to know.

  Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth.

  There are more evil ears than bad mouths.

  Eternity – a waste of time.

  At worst, her insistent pithiness made her sound like a scribe of mottoes for Christmas crackers: ‘My only books, Were women’s looks’ was one unworthy quip. Another was that her favourite book was her cheque book. She was not a self-censoring writer. The prose of her fiction was short on narrative outline, though not as bewildering or prolix as Gertrude Stein’s. ‘Gertrude chose the language of the stammerers’, she said. ‘I like to find a thought as in a nut or seashell.’ ‘While I make for a point Gertrude seems to proceed by avoiding it.’ Gertrude took no offence. They were lasting friends.

  Natalie’s defining autobiographical epigram was ‘living is the first of all the arts’. How she lived her life was her gift and creation, and in her lifestyle she captured the essence of modernism: the shedding of past certainties and exuberance for the new.

  Natalie meets Lily

  Scornful of her mother’s marriage in 1909 to Christian Hemmick, the ‘worthless pederast’, Natalie, that year, embarked on a profound relationship for herself. It was with Lily de Gramont, duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre. Natalie was thirty-two, Lily was thirty-four.

  They met in late April. The poet Lucie Delarue-Mardrus – who years earlier had been one of Natalie’s liaisons – introduced them. Lucie was described by the Belgian sculptor Yvonne Serruys as the ‘queen of Lesbos-Paris’. ‘Nature had fitted her perfectly for the role she played among the women of her time,’ Yvonne said of Lucie. She made and gave her a small bronze statue of her ‘superb androgynous body’.

  Lucie talked with Lily of Natalie’s Sapphic ways. In love poems to Natalie, written in 1902/3 and published posthumously as Nos secrètes amours, she expressed turmoil at being one among many of her lovers:

  My joy and my pain, my death and my life,

  My blonde bitch.

  Lily confided to Lucie her disaffection with men, her desire for women, her abusive childhood and marriage.

  the duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre

  On 1 May 1909, Natalie and Lily dined alone together. They ate plovers’ eggs, drank a glass of Sauternes, then stayed together for three nights and two days. By the end of that time, Lily was in love. ‘I kiss your hands, your caressing hands, fluid as the water we love! See you tomorrow, my love,’ she wrote to Natalie when finally she got home. From then on, until her death forty-five years later, they celebrated 1 May as their anniversary.

  Lily, grey-eyed, tall, bilingual, was born into the French aristocracy. Her mother died giving birth to her on 23 April 1875. Her father, Agénor, duc de Gramont, handed her over to be cared for by her Gramont grandparents, then married Margaretha von Rothschild and a share of the Rothschild millions. It was a pattern for aristocrats whose wealth was diminishing to marry ‘trade’, a title in exchange for money.

  Elisabeth (Lily) de Gramont © Art Collection 4 / Alamy

 
; Lily was not welcomed by her stepmother. ‘Everything was forbidden,’ she said. She studied – English, German, the piano, dancing, drawing – and lived in a world of splendour, of stately homes, footmen, sumptuous receptions and emotional neglect.

  Aged eighteen, she was pushed into society and primed for marriage. Offers came from men she did not know. Father

  used wake me up with a start at dawn to offer me now a young conseiller-général with a big future, now a young sprig of nobility who would inherit wonderful tapestry with friezes. ‘With friezes?’ I would repeat in a dazed way.

  When she was twenty-one, she married Philibert, duc de Clermont-Tonnerre. She had two daughters, and two miscarriages caused by her violent husband viciously kicking her. Her respite was in books – she published the first translation of Keats’ poetry into French, wrote memoirs, poems, a novel – and in her friendships with Proust, Remy de Gourmont, Anatole France, and her close attachments to women – la chaîne des dames – the daisy-chain, the legion. Among her women friends were Anna de Noailles, Colette and her lover, Mathilde de Morny (known as ‘Missy’), Lucie Delarue-Mardrus and then, and above all, Natalie.

  Natalie was drawn to women who rose above the cruelty of abusive childhoods but at core were wounded and set apart. Of Lily, she wrote: ‘If she has suffered much she has never told any one, it has stayed in her silences, in her voice, in her laugh and in the beauty of her face.’