No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  You know my very great admiration for your talent. You will not be surprised then that I thought of you to write for me a work, which would belong to me and which I would have played in my music room which you are familiar with. It would obviously have to be a short work and for a small orchestra—maybe 30 to 36 musicians.

  She told him the piece should last around fifteen minutes and have two pianos or four hands so she could perform with another pianist. She offered him 3,000 francs and suggested a deadline of 8 April so the piece could debut around the end of April or the beginning of May. Stravinsky proposed a concerto for piano and orchestra:

  I would need 2 flutes (the first changing to the piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets (the 2nd changing to the bass clarinet), 2 bassoons (and the contrabassoon if possible), 2 horns in F, 2 trumpets in C, 2 tympani, a grand piano, a harp, 2 first violins, 2 second violins, 2 violas, 2 cellos and a double bass.

  Lily de Gramont described a salon evening at Winnaretta’s mansion at avenue Henri Martin:

  a large room is reserved for music. The platform is at the far end, the Princess rustles her train of silver-grey satin going up and down the middle of the nave, the faithful gather to the right and left… the groups go to their places: the first three rows for the American billionaires, white hair and diamonds and the British duchesses; three other rows for the important French women with tinted hair; the youth gather at the back…

  There was a sense of a bygone age. It was not like Natalie’s hazardous Fridays. One visitor spoke of a stampede for the buffet between concertos. Moneyed, powerful, entitled, imperious, the Princesse de Polignac shored up tradition even while she embraced the new. She viewed change as evolution rather than departure. Down the years, as well as Proust, Colette and Cocteau, Kurt Weill and Cole Porter attended her salons, and so did Isadora Duncan, Cecil Beaton, Benjamin Britten.

  She was patron to Nadia Boulanger, Clara Haskil, Arthur Rubinstein, Vladimir Horowitz, Ethel Smyth, Le Corbusier. In a piece for The New Yorker, Janet Flanner described her as eccentric. She was parsimonious over small payments and careless about her appearance; she had panic attacks about thunderstorms or street demonstrations.

  Isadora Duncan, who married Winnaretta’s brother Paris Singer, said she looked like a Roman emperor (Ernest Hemingway thought the same of Gertrude Stein), and that ‘when she spoke her voice had a hard metallic twang’. She thought her harsh demeanour was a mask to hide ‘extreme and sensitive shyness’. Virginia Woolf, on first meeting her in 1936, wrote:

  I saw La Princesse de Polignac… whatever she was born she’s grown into the image of a stately mellow old Tory; and to look at you’d never think she ravished half the virgins in Paris and used, so Ethel Smyth tells me, to spring upon them with such impetuosity that once a sofa broke.

  The composer, conductor, pianist and teacher Nadia Boulanger called Winnaretta ‘one of the last great patrons in history’.

  Her collection of paintings was fabulous… She’d arrive in London and an hour later you’d be playing music or reading poems. How many soirées we all went to where we played lots of Monteverdi, Schütz’s Resurrection, Carissimi’s Jephte, and then all the works she commissioned… There was the famous evening when her butler entered appalled, ‘Madame la Princesse, four pianos have arrived’. Stravinsky’s Les Noces was to be played for the first time.

  Winnaretta’s lovers

  Winnaretta had lovers galore. She said that after confessing to a priest, he refused her a second hearing. She neither advertised her relationships nor concealed them. She practised and expected discretion and left instruction for her personal papers and letters to be burned after her death.

  Colette, to whom Winnaretta gave extravagant gifts, wrote of ‘a deep blue-eyed gaze, a conqueror’s chin, an air of indestructibility’. Among the gifts Winnaretta sent her were a vase of flowers with a diamond necklace hidden among them, a red Renault car, an antique writing table. Maurice Goudeket, who in 1935 became Colette’s third husband, thought Winnaretta always seemed like a guest in her own house.

  Ethel Smyth

  Winnaretta went to the first night of Ethel Smyth’s second opera, Der Wald (The Forest), at Covent Garden in 1903. Ethel, smitten by her, gave her an inscribed copy of the opera and said she had met ‘the most adorable human being in the world […] grave, natural, don’t-care-ish, the soul of independence – in short all the things I like.’ She stayed at the Singer mansion in Paignton and at the Palazzo Polignac in Venice, and from England sent declarations of love:

  It is difficult to stand up against my feeling for you… your personality has the inevitableness, the rare finality of nature itself… Other people seem to me so fussy, so personal – so bereft of possibilities… You are the only human being I ever saw who combines limitless serenity and limitless passion… I am as certain of one thing as of death – I love you more in five minutes than anyone else ever did in five years.

  Her love was not reciprocated. Winnaretta’s involvement in 1903 was with Olga de Meyer, tall, red-headed, an artists’ model to Whistler, John Singer Sargent and Walter Sickert, and said to be the daughter of Edward VII when he was Prince of Wales. Villa Olga in Dieppe, the house she grew up in, was bought by him for her mother. Her marriage in 1899 to the Vogue photographer Adolph de Meyer was, as with Winnaretta’s, a cover to conceal same-sex relationships.

  Spurned, Ethel Smyth then thought Winnaretta ‘the worst’ as a human being. And she ‘detested and distrusted’ the Meyers.

  Romaine Brooks met Winnaretta at a salon evening of Olga de Meyer’s in 1904. She had hesitated between a singing or painting career and she and the Princesse shared a passion for culture and an imperious manner. And for Romaine it was a relationship that furthered her career in Paris as a portrait painter.

  Though Ethel Smyth’s love was rebuffed, Winnaretta supported both her music and her fight for suffrage. Ethel wrote the suffragettes’ rallying cry ‘The March of the Women’, worked with Emmeline Pankhurst and the Women’s Social and Political Union and was imprisoned in Holloway in 1912 for throwing a rock through the window of the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lewis Harcourt. Emmeline’s daughter, Christabel, went to France to avoid arrest and stayed with Winnaretta, who helped her financially. Emmeline’s deputy, Annie Kenney, a Lancashire mill worker, visited her there:

  I was shown into the largest room I had ever seen in a private house. There were beautiful books everywhere. I picked one up and found it to be a translation of Sappho’s poetry. The colour of the leather binding was the shade of a ripe pink cherry.

  Ethel thanked Winnaretta on the Pankhursts’ behalf: ‘You are a brick and I think Mrs P’s greatest comfort is to know she has friends like you.’

  philanthropy

  Winnaretta was a brick for many good causes. In the First World War she paid for X-ray units needed by Marie Curie, bought an old hotel in Paris and had it converted into a hospital for the blind, and gave money for welfare and to supply ambulances for Belgian soldiers. She continued her music patronage during the war. In spring 1916 she gave Erik Satie a commission to set to music The Death of Socrates from Plato’s Phaedo. Satie, who was short of money, described himself as ‘swimming in happiness and free as water’.

  After the war, Winnaretta withdrew from society for some years. The death in 1920 of a lover, Isaure de Miramon, aged forty-one, from a drug overdose sent her into deep depression. Madame de Miramon, unhappily married, beautiful and musical, had been introduced to opium by Jean Cocteau. ‘We go on because we have to, but with a heart full of shadows and distress that time will not alter,’ Winnaretta wrote to a friend.

  In January 1923 Winnaretta offered Paul Valéry 12,000 francs to arrange monthly lectures in her home for a year. He could choose the topics. That year too, Violet Trefusis became her lover.

  Violet Trefusis

  Violet had been exiled to Paris from England after the intensely public scandal of her love affair with Vita Sackville-West. Her mother, Alice Keppel, so
cially acceptable as Edward VII’s mistress, forced Violet into a sham marriage with Denys Trefusis and packed them both off to Paris. Violet, broken-hearted, wrote to Vita:

  What a dreadful thing is marriage. I think it is the wickedest thing in the universe. Think of the straight, clean lives it has ruined by forcing them to skulk and hide and intrigue and scheme, making of love a thing to be hidden and lied about. It is a wicked institution. It has ruined my life, it has ruined Denys’s – he would give his soul never to have married. It has ruined – not your life but our happiness…

  Ever since I was a child I have loved you. Lesser loves have had greater rewards – you don’t know what you have been – what you are to me: just the force of life; just the raison d’être.’

  In 1923, Winnaretta was fifty-eight and Violet twenty-eight. Proust’s analogy for the Princesse was an icy draught, Virginia Woolf’s was a stuffed fowl, Violet’s was a rock face:

  She hung over life like a cliff; her rocky profile seemed to call for spray and seagulls; small blue eyes – the eyes of an old salt – came and went; her face was more like a landscape than a face, cloudy of hair, blue of eye, rugged of contour… Like all fundamentally shy people she was infinitely intimidating. People quailed before her.

  The Princesse and Violet were partners for ten years. Violet wrote polished, clever, subversive and underrated novels in French and English. Her themes were betrayal, marriage for gain, malicious matriarchs, love versus possessions. On the first page of the manuscript of her first novel, ‘The Hook in the Heart’, she wrote: ‘Less voluntary than grief or death is the choice of desire.’

  Violet wanted to escape from England, forget Vita and win back her mother’s approval. Denys Trefusis wanted freedom and travel. Mrs Keppel wanted the restoration of social status. Winnaretta satisfied all of them. In December she arranged a cruise, in her yacht, up the Nile to Egypt and Algeria. In her party were Violet and Denys, Mr and Mrs Keppel, the pianist Jacques Février and Winnaretta’s nephew Jean de Polignac and his fiancée, the composer Germaine Tailleferre, from whom Winnaretta had commissioned a piano concerto earlier in the year. In January they disembarked in Algiers and stayed at Bordj Polignac with panoramic views of snow-capped mountains and desert plains.

  The writer Harold Acton said:

  Princess Winnie taught Violet discretion, it was rumoured with a whip – so her subsequent liaisons with ladies were less advertised.

  His friend, the society celebrity Diana Cooper, ‘told a marvellous story that was going the rounds’:

  a Mrs Blew-Jones, who was taking some furs to the Polignac house at eleven one morning, was asked by the servant at the door whether she was the lady who was expected. She said she was, and was immediately shown into a large room where she was greeted by the old Princess in a dressing gown and top boots. On a sofa in another part of the room she saw Violet Trefusis and another woman both stark naked locked in a peculiar embrace. She ran from the room in terror. It sounds incredible, may be exaggerated but can’t be quite invented.

  Perhaps Mrs Blew-Jones was both exaggerating and inventing. But as well as being a discerning patron, the old Princess was an audacious lesbian. And if Ethel Smyth, who was in love with her, said she once pounced so hard she broke the sofa, then who knows, perhaps she did.

  St Loup

  Don’t Look Round was the title of Violet’s memoir. In it she wrote of meeting Marcel Proust at a lunch party not long before he died in November 1922. He advised her to visit the hilltop town of Saint-Loup de Naud on the road to Provins, 80 kilometres from Paris. She went there with Winnaretta and they found an ancient tower in a dilapidated state, which had once been part of an eleventh-century abbey. The Princesse bought and restored it for Violet and this ‘romantic and mysterious’ tower became the setting for their relationship. Violet projected a personality on to her tower:

  It is sensuous, greedy, ruthless, vindictive. If it takes a dislike to you, you are done. If on the other hand, you have the good fortune to please St Loup it is equally unscrupulous. No scène de séduction is too crude, no posture too audacious. It beckons, importunes, detains.

  Crude seduction scenes and audacious postures might bear out the gossip of Diana Cooper, Ethel Smyth and Mrs Blew-Jones, the lady who was not expected.

  Natalie and Romaine

  Natalie’s ease and warmth were a welcome gift to Romaine after the rocky profile and icy draught of the Princesse. Natalie told Romaine she was beautiful, a genius, her singing voice perfect, her paintings immortal, she had no disguise, no pose and was ‘a real head and soul in an unreal world’. Romaine was, Natalie said, dearer to her than her own life. ‘I love my Angel better than anything else in the world and prove it.’ In return she asked only that Romaine should need her above all others. And Romaine said Natalie ‘had an unusual mind of the best quality’, but she decried her Friday salons as gatherings of drunkards and society women, which perhaps was not a fair description of Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, Djuna Barnes, Colette, Janet Flanner and the rest.

  After meeting Natalie, Romaine painted the portraits of lesbians that so riveted Truman Capote, the women who attended the Friday gatherings: ladies with high collars and monocles. She painted Radclyffe Hall’s partner, Una, Lady Troubridge, with two of their show-dog dachshunds, did a memorable self-portrait in high hat and gloves, made Lily de Gramont look plain and bushy-browed and Natalie serene and gentle with nothing wild about her, a small model of a prancing horse the only tribute to de Gourmont’s Amazonian view. She and the English society painter Gluck did reciprocal portraits. Romaine called hers ‘Peter a Young English Girl’. Gluck’s portrait of Romaine stayed unfinished. They quarrelled over the sitting and Romaine stormed out.

  no second best

  Where to live was for Romaine an unresolvable problem. For Natalie, Paris was essential – her Friday salons and community of lesbians. If she and Romaine lived in the same house or near to one another, as she hoped, ‘and walked out hand in hand at the end of the day’, it would have to be in Paris, which Romaine called a desert, ‘wanting all calm, beauty and dignity’. ‘No Paris for me’, she wrote.

  I suppose an artist must live alone and feel free otherwise all individuality goes. I can think of my painting only when I am alone, even less do any actual work.

  But Romaine could no more find the perfect home than the perfect person. She excelled in making the places she acquired fit her laws of beauty, Natalie said of her. In 1918 in rue Raynouard – the road where Lily de Gramont lived – Romaine created a seemingly ideal studio designed entirely to her taste, but could not settle. She moved on to Capri, London, New York, then Florence, Venice, Nice.

  After spending time with Natalie, then time apart, Romaine at first missed her greatly, then ‘regained that state of mind which constitutes my personal life’. When they were together for any length of time, Romaine lost her sense of self and needed to return to solitude. She also objected to Natalie’s lack of exclusivity, even though she found proximity taxing.

  Natalie struggled with Romaine’s equivocation and what she called a ‘relentless quality’ that made Natalie behave like some ‘dumb, devoted, pitiable animal’. With Lily, Natalie was at ease. With Romaine, each time they separated, she feared she would not come back.

  Nonetheless, Natalie’s relationship with Romaine was compelling. ‘My angel is my only real companion and friend’, she wrote, which was not quite what she had conveyed to Lily. They opened a joint Swiss bank account. Natalie talked of their being together for the rest of their lives and of sharing the same grave. In Paris they picnicked in the Bois de Boulogne. On Capri they stayed in the Villa Cercola, which Romaine acquired in 1918. At Honfleur they stayed with Lily de Gramont, but how to make both of them feel first best – or at least not to make either feel second best – was a difficult call.

  Romaine did not care that the great Sappho had lived in harmony with a community of women. In summer 1922 she agreed to meet Natalie in Calvados for a holiday. Na
talie wrote excitedly about plans: Lily would be there too, would Romaine find out about maps and roads, could they fit their trunks and Romaine’s maid into Natalie’s Buick, various friends would meet up with them at Chambourcy, they could all go to Capri.

  Romaine’s reply was brutal: Natalie should count her out. She intended to holiday alone on the Italian coast. ‘Always remember, Nat, that I prefer Nat Nat to being alone, but alone to being with anyone else.’ Natalie, she said, had many friends and she, Romaine, had one ‘and therein lies the difference’.

  Romaine’s haughtiness grated on Lily de Gramont: ‘Mrs Brooks’, she wrote in her memoir, ‘puts bars on the windows of her various establishments to keep out the disappointing human race and now no longer knows who is the prisoner.’

  Natalie tried to be reparative but was not going to change. Nor did Romaine spare Natalie provocation and jealousy from her own involvements. An affair with the pianist Renata Borgatti, one of the Princesse de Polignac’s protegées, lasted some years. She painted her portrait and they holidayed together on Capri. ‘So Renata Borgatti is “on to you” as we say,’ Natalie wrote:

  I am alone and you are with her. I know you have not bathed without everyone on that island desiring you – that they would follow the glimmer of your perfect form to the ends of the earth – yet can any of them but me so grasp the inner goddess, the real sense of your greatness.