No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  Natalie wrote of her passion for her in 1911 in an unpublished autobiographical novel, ‘L’adultère ingénue’ (‘The Adulterous Ingenue’). In it, she was explicit about sex in a way Radclyffe Hall, in her banned Well of Loneliness seventeen years later, was not. She described a train journey she and Lily made together through France. Lily had a fever:

  I undress her and take off all my clothes, sitting on the edge of her bed, lying under scant covers next to her. I let her feel my strength, my heat, she stops coughing. I try just to take care of her but of a sudden my mouth is drawn to hers. Our desires repressed for too long follow the crescendo of shivers and cries before pleasure comes… I hold her close to me as she sleeps, warming her neck with my breath that must burn her through her nightdress, while my hands hold her breasts, their palms dry and hot.

  Sylvia Beach said ‘you can’t censor human nature’, but the censors would have consigned that to their bonfire. Lily was reticent about putting into print any mention of her relationship with Natalie. In her memoirs, without naming her, she wrote only of Natalie’s laugh, her freedom, her ardent heart.

  Lily’s duc of a husband threatened to shoot her and Natalie. Lily had no option but to leave him and by doing so she was cut off from all rights to her children and all funds. Natalie helped her financially, loaned her money, paid towards the upkeep of her house in rue Raynouard, paid for holidays.

  Separated from the duc and banished from French high society, Lily dressed in tailored suits and simple hats and had her hair shingled. In the 1914–18 war, she wrote articles for Le Radical, which earned her the nickname ‘The Red Duchess’.

  Natalie meets Romaine

  By 1916, nine years on from when she and Lily first met, Natalie had formed another relationship. She had not tired of Lily, far from it, but she was smitten with the artist Romaine Brooks, American, good-looking, rich, emotionally damaged and with a perversity Natalie was drawn to and understood.

  Romaine was forty-one. For her life-size monotone portraits, she was called ‘the thief of souls’. She had had affairs with, among others, Renée Vivien, the dancer Ida Rubinstein, the poet, narcissist and fascist Gabriele d’Annunzio, the patron of music Winnaretta Singer. After mere months of marriage, Romaine discarded her homosexual husband, John Ellingham Brooks.

  Lily voiced no expectation of fidelity, gave no ultimatum; she wanted to keep the relationship between her and Natalie, who, she said, was her ‘weakness’ and nothing would change that, but she wanted to be clear about the terms of their involvement. ‘The blonde and the brunette’, she wrote of Natalie’s new relationship, ‘very becoming. I wonder if it is right to try to separate that which life has brought together.’

  Natalie’s reassurance was and was not convincing. She told Lily: ‘I shall have my room in your house… my life in your life, my sleep on your heart…’ But, she said, Romaine was too important, ‘too good and too real and too everything to be merely in 2nd place’.

  marriage contract

  Lily asked for clarification. If neither she nor Romaine was second place, where were they? On 14 March 1918 she wrote frostily to Natalie about the relationship with Romaine, which had gone on for eighteen months. As intended reassurance, Natalie, on 20 June, drew up, in French, a handwritten contract between her and Lily.

  This contract was to protect ‘against whims, wanderings and changes’ between them and to assert their unbreakable bond. It iterated how they had been together for nine years, shared joys and worries and admitted to other affairs. Though the prospect of new affairs was ever present, they intended to safeguard and continue their relationship. They were not enough for each other but no one else was more important. They pledged never to part and to ‘bring the other back’ if separation threatened.

  The years have tested our union: by the sixth, sexual fidelity failed. This was inevitable because our only commitment is to feelings and desire. Our love passion… pure, exclusive, devouring, free as fire – had become love love – another sort of beauty, a different purity: mature, patient, pitiful, supple, cruel, logical, human and complex as is life.

  Love had lost its freshness, not ‘its dominating faith, its purity, or its wings’. They would have other affairs and impose no restrictions but nonetheless live and die for each other:

  il ne sera pas d’union aussi forte que cette union, ni d’association aussi tendre – ni d’attachement aussi durable…

  no other union will be as strong as this union, or as tender, or as lasting…

  It sounded less specious in French. It seemed like a cover for all real and hypothetical events. I am true to you. I told you I could never be true.

  As a symbol of this promise we put a shining, unbreakable green ring, as wide as the universe, around our futures and ourselves… And you shall not be called my wife, or my slave, or my spouse, which are sexual terms for fleeting spans of time, but my one my eternal mate.

  They signed the contract. Lily wore the shiny green ring Natalie gave her. It was not as wide as the universe. From then on, they began their letters to each other to ‘my mate éternel’.

  Lily then started an affair with the playwright Germaine Lefrancq, who had also had an affair with Natalie. In 1922, Liane de Pougy, who had risen up the social ladder to become Princess Ghika, formed a sexual threesome with Natalie and Lily. ‘We laugh all the time, understand each other, melt into the other, undergo a fusion.’ When Lily met alone with Liane, Natalie was jealous, felt betrayed and told her to choose. Lily stopped seeing Liane, who noted that Natalie and Lily ‘almost never leave each other’.

  Was this a blueprint for lesbian marriage? It was not for the faint-hearted. Was it modernist? It did not fit the Judaeo-Christian orthodoxy. It was not what fathers prescribed for their daughters. It questioned the old order, required a thick skin, a good deal of spare time and an unusual capacity for adventure. As a lifestyle, it provoked anxiety, jealousy, insecurity and doubts about self-worth. But it surely allayed or avoided, at least for a while, feelings of boredom, entrapment or any sense of ‘ending up’.

  It was Natalie’s rationale for her polyamorous life. She did not want, like Gertrude and Alice, a replica of conventional marriage with a gender twist. She wanted validation for her feelings and behaviour, if only to herself and her lovers. Such validation was not on offer from society. She contrived it for herself.

  Romaine Brooks

  One tiresome practical complication was that 1 May, the day declared an anniversary for Natalie and Lily de Gramont, the day for plovers’ eggs, Sauternes and remembrance, was also Romaine Brooks’s birthday. Natalie had to juggle her commitment to love and no second place.

  Romaine, tall, slim, with dark hair and eyes, had no wish to live on Lesbos or emulate Sappho. Her ambition was to create works of art, not be one. She left an impressive oeuvre of portraits of the lesbians in her and Natalie’s circle. After the Second World War, Natalie took the novelist Truman Capote to visit Romaine’s Paris studio. She and Romaine were then in their seventies; Romaine was living in isolation in the South of France. Her portraits lined the walls. Capote compared the immense studio to ‘a shrine museum’ and called it ‘the all-time ultimate gallery of famous dykes… an international daisy-chain’.

  You know how you know when you’re not going to forget something? I wasn’t going to forget this moment, this room, this array of butch-babes.

  There were about seventy portraits. On the walls and propped against the walls were self-portraits and portraits of Natalie, Lily, the Princesse de Polignac, Gertrude Stein, Una Troubridge, Renata Borgatti, Radclyffe Hall, Gluck. In contrast to the passivity of the female model for the male artist, the reclining nude, Romaine’s butch babes stood tall, in high hats, with collars, coifs and jackets, monocles and riding whips.

  no pleasant memories

  Beatrice Romaine Goddard was born in a Rome hotel on 1 May 1874. Her father was an army major, her mother an heiress. Her parents divorced soon after her birth and her father did not
figure in her life. Her severely mentally ill brother, St Mar, five years her elder, was the total focus of her mother’s attention:

  She never failed to remind me that I was not good-looking like St. Mar, and indeed, my pale face and dark hair could in no way compare with his angelic blondness.

  Romaine Brooks © Mondadori Portfolio / Getty Images

  Major mental illness shrouded Romaine’s family history. Childhood, she said, was like living on an avalanche: ‘no fixity, no foundation, only unfractional time, carrying with it the sensation of danger more mental than physical.’

  As an adult, she spoke of herself to Natalie as a martyred child, her life blighted by her mother’s ‘mad egotism’. In the 1930s she drafted a memoir in which she described the chaos and anxiety her mother caused:

  my mother rarely slept during the night and never went to bed. Her meals were served at any hour of the day or night, and sometimes, by her orders, they were not served at all. Those in her immediate circle could but follow her example and accept the dictates of her eccentricities. Fortunately there were times when she was quite lost to the world, and these were our most pleasant moments. She would converse to herself, or rather to invisible friends. She was quite gracious with these phantoms, reserving for this world alone the incessant irritability of her other moods.

  Yet, in all this confusion, my mother always impressed everyone with the sense of her immense importance. Perhaps this could be accounted for by her arrogance, unusual culture, and personal elegance. The atmosphere she created was that of a court ruled over by a crazy queen; and before my brother showed definite and incurable signs of madness, she treated me either as one of royal blood – since I was descended from her – or else as a page-in-waiting rather than a little girl. There was even a time when she dressed me up in replicas of the clothes my brother had worn as a very small boy.

  Romaine called this memoir No Pleasant Memories. From the age of six, her escape was to draw. As she, her mother and brother moved from one country and hotel to another, she would find a quiet corner, get out her pad and pencils and draw the view from the window and childhood images of home: houses, trees, cats, flowers.

  From an early age, her interests defined as art, music and girls. She was sent to a convent, then to Mademoiselle Bertin’s finishing school in Geneva, to be taught how to manage the servants. She ran away to Paris, studied singing and French, and held hands with and kissed the English contralto Clara Butt.8 ‘My life was transformed’, Romaine wrote of Clara. ‘I now lived on a higher plane of love and adoration. My new friend radiated kindness and sympathy.’

  In Rome, Romaine studied art then went to Capri to paint, and while there made an impulsive and extremely brief marriage to John Ellingham Brooks, who was homosexual and wanted her money. She moved to England, took a studio in Tite Street in London, worked with the Newlyn School of artists in Cornwall, then returned to Paris. In 1906, she too had an affair with Renée Vivien:

  I found myself drifting along with her… If ghosts were wont to visit and haunt me, she, pale life, visited and haunted death.

  Renée told her La Brioche, the Baroness van Zuylen, was jealous.

  I willingly believed her and made it the pretext to end our friendship. But she had taken this indirect way hoping to attach me still further. Someone came to intercede for her. I would not go back… a few months afterwards I heard she was dead.

  Winnaretta Singer

  After her affair with Renée, Romaine’s ‘friendship’ was with Winnaretta Singer, the Princesse de Polignac, ten years older than Romaine, cultured, rich, and an extraordinary patron of modernist music and art. Winnaretta’s sexual appetite matched Natalie’s. Her salon was a huge contrast to Natalie’s ‘hazardous Fridays’. Her gatherings were serious and focused, though not such fun.

  Winnaretta Singer © Heritage Images / Getty Images

  Proust described her as ‘icy as a cold draught and with Dante’s profile’. Virginia Woolf said she was like ‘a perfectly stuffed cold fowl’. She lived in a mansion on the corner of avenue Henri-Martin and rue des Sablons (now rue Cortambert). She commissioned her portrait from Romaine, who made notes of the sitting:

  the head is bent forward with profile emerging from out of a profusion of dark hair. The lowered eye escapes detection. The nose is arched and noble, but the mouth with its protruding lower lip shows strong atavistic ruthlessness ever active in self-defence.

  Strong atavistic ruthlessness ever active in self-defence sounds all right for portrait painting but hard work in an intimate relationship. Romaine’s painting showed her in profile, wearing a white dress. Winnaretta was pleased. Other portrait commissions followed for Romaine, and a solo exhibition at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in rue Laffitte.

  Winnaretta was the twentieth child of Isaac Singer, who made a fortune out of the sewing machine he invented and patented in 1851. In total, he fathered twenty-four children from two marriages and various affairs. Winnaretta was born in January 1865. Her mother, Isabella Eugénie Boyer, was twenty-four, half French, half English, socially ambitious and musical. Her face was said to be the model used by the sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi for the New York Statue of Liberty. Isaac Singer was fifty-three when she married him and not officially separated from his previous partner.

  They lived first in The Castle, a palatial estate in 300 acres of land in Yonkers, north of New York, then when Winnaretta was six they moved to England, to Paignton in Devon, to Oldway Mansion, with 115 rooms, on a 17-acre estate. Singer died in July 1875, leaving $14 million in a much-contested will. Winnaretta was ten; her share of the fortune was about $1 million, to be invested and managed and hers when she was twenty-one.

  After Singer’s death, Winnaretta’s mother took her children to Paris and remarried: Victor Reubsaet, a Dutch violinist, the son of a cobbler, who falsely claimed an inherited title. She called herself Viscomtesse d’Estenburgh, bought a large townhouse at 27 avenue Kléber in the 16th arrondissement, and in the grand salon held weekly recitals played by the finest musicians. For her fourteenth birthday present, Winnaretta chose a performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14, Opus 131. When she was seventeen, her mother took her to Bayreuth, to one of the first performances of Wagner’s Parsifal. Bayreuth was an annual event from then on.

  She studied piano with the composer Émile Bourgeois and art at the atelier in rue de Bruxelles of Félix Barrias, who included Edgar Degas among his pupils. Winnaretta said the works of Degas, Monet, Sisley, Boudin and Manet ‘threw a fresh light and meaning on all that surrounded me in the visual world’. But home life was intolerable. Her mother criticized her appearance; her stepfather sexually abused her, spent much of her mother’s fortune and tried to acquire Winnaretta’s too. The papers wrote of a feud of ‘gigantic proportions’:

  The quarrel has reached such a pitch that Miss Singer has left her home and has gone to board at a convent. Lawyers have been engaged, members of the damsel’s family have been summoned and while the cause of the dissension continues to be a mystery to the world at large, the noise of the conflict has become distinctly discernible.

  The rumour was that her stepfather had raped her. She left Paris, stayed with friends and when she was twenty-one had her money transferred into a Rothschild bank, out of his reach. She bought the lavish property on the corner of avenue Henri-Martin and to deter suitors and deflect from being lesbian married Prince Louis-Vilfred de Scey-Montbéliard. He was twenty-nine. She was careful enough before this marriage to draw up a trust deed tying her wealth and property to her two brothers Mortimer and Washington Singer, for her benefit not her husband’s.

  Neither her mother nor stepfather attended her wedding on Thursday 28 July 1887 at the Église St Pierre de Chaillot. Washington Singer walked her down the aisle. A newspaper account described her as tall, lithe, with sweet blue eyes and wavy brown hair, then switched to the underlying scandal:

  The true reason for Miss Singer’s leaving her mother’s home was her utter inability to get
along with her stepfather, the Duke, whom his best friends admit to be a man of extremely uncertain temper. The Duchess does not lead the happiest of lives.

  On her wedding night, at Prince Louis’ family chateau in the Franche-Comté region of eastern France, Winnaretta told her husband that if he touched her she would kill him. Weeks later, her stepfather died of a heart attack; his funeral was held in the Église St Pierre. One newspaper commented that she had married to protect herself from the importuning of her mother’s husband but now might regret her haste.

  Winnaretta paid the Vatican enough to have the marriage annulled. Then in 1893, aged twenty-nine, she made a lavender cover-up marriage with Prince Edmond de Polignac, who was fifty-nine, homosexual, and a composer and musician. By the marriage, she acquired a title and social cover; he acquired money and opportunity to perform his music in public – which he did until his death in 1901.

  the salon of the Princesse de Polignac

  The Princesse de Polignac’s yacht was moored at Nice; in Venice she acquired a palazzo and in Paris she became a Right Bank institution. Her musical evenings were a showpiece for the Parisian musical avant-garde. Her salon, decorated in Louis XVI style, with wood panelling, a vaulted ceiling and a balcony around the upper storey, seated a hundred. In it were two grand pianos and a Cavaillé-Coll organ. To perform their own and others’ music, she commissioned the best organists in Paris. Debussy and Ravel came to hear new works in acoustically ideal surroundings. Proust, Cocteau and Colette all wrote of the musical soirées at the Polignac salon.

  Inscribed on the scores of many works she commissioned from Ravel, Fauré, Poulenc and Stravinsky was the dedication ‘À Madame la Princesse de Polignac’. Prokofiev wrote his piano sonata No.3 for her; Ravel dedicated his Pavane for a Dead Princess to her. She subsidized the Opéra de Paris, the Ballets Russes, the Paris Symphony Orchestra. A performance in her salon was a stepping stone to a wide audience, particularly when she interceded on the composer or performer’s behalf. She was as influential to new music as were Sylvia Beach and Bryher to new writing and Gertrude Stein to new painting. Stravinsky received a commission from her in November 1912: her appreciation of him was immediate, she said. ‘From the start it seemed to me impossible not to recognize the importance of this new genius’: