No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  Arias and recitatives like no hymns that St Philip’s Protestant Episcopal Sunday School children ever sang are echoing through the old church building.

  There was panic and tears when the orchestra arrived close to the opening night and their understanding of the score was different from that of the singers.

  The opera had its premiere at the Atheneum on 7 February 1934. The gala audience wore evening dress and tiaras. The reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune wrote:

  Since the Whiskey Rebellion4 and the Harvard Butter Riots5 there has never been anything like it. By Rolls Royce, by airplane, by Pullman compartment and for all we know by especially designed Cartier pogo stick, the smart set enthusiasts of the countryside converged on Hartford on Wednesday evening.

  The New Haven Railroad ran special ‘parlor cars’ to ferry New York ‘fashionables’. Gershwin went to the opening night, and so did Toscanini, Cecil Beaton and Dorothy Parker. Carl Van Vechten and Mabel Dodge were there. So were Florine Stettheimer’s two sisters. So was Bryher. The engineer and designer Buckminster Fuller arrived in a three-wheeled Dymaxion car of his own design – an ‘omni-medium’ mode of transport he wanted to make fly – with the playwright and congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce and her friend the actress Dorothy Hale.

  The show began with a roll of drums and the red velvet curtain opening on Saint Teresa The First in purple, played by Beatrice Robinson-Wayne backed by a chorus of angels and saints. The cellophane cyclorama dazzled and from the moment the chorus started with Gertrude’s immortal words

  To know to know to love her so.

  Four saints prepare for saints.

  It makes it well fish.

  Four saints it makes it well fish,

  The evening was a dazzling success of sights, sound and spectacle. There were tangos, military marches, a dirge. There was no plot, but life’s modernist post-Christian narrative was, perhaps haphazardly, to begin, perform for a random time, then end. The seemingly nonsensical text offered not one narrative but many voices, different truths and liberated imaginations. It was an extravaganza that paralleled the first comprehensive American retrospective of Picasso.

  Here was a truly innovative piece with all the ingredients of modernism, rules broken, meaning, content and symbolism revised. More than Ulysses, which was bound within the traditional covers of a book, more than Madame Matisse with a green stripe down her nose, here was the essence of the new. Music, theatre, language, all took on new meaning.

  The audience was treated to a cast of African-American performers, a groundbreaking opera put on by influential gay cultural figures, a libretto by Gertrude Stein, composition by Virgil Thomson, experimental stage sets by a woman artist. Curtain calls went on and on. ‘A knockout and a wow’, Carl Van Vechten wrote to Gertrude, sad that she and Alice were not there.

  The significance of the production was clear to Bryher:

  It was the perfect moment for Four Saints to be performed… the evening remains for me one of the most triumphant nights that I have ever spent watching a stage. The Negro singers stood stiffly as in an eighteenth century painting of a courtly festival, there was a plaster lion though he had less to do than I had hoped, but Gertrude’s text soared out magnificently and with her, and our, rebellion against outworn art.

  Reviewers used superlatives: ‘an overwhelming and inescapable success’, ‘the most enlightening theatrical experiment’… ‘A spirit of inspired madness animates the whole piece’, wrote the The New York Times. Kirk Askew and Julien Levy, both directors of modern art galleries, called it ‘a glorious and redemptive affirmation of a new national culture’: ‘We didn’t know anything so beautiful could be done in America.’ The New Republic said it was the most important theatrical event of the season and the ‘first pure, free theatre’.

  The run was extended for two extra weeks, but the next show was pre-booked, so despite demand the run had to end. While fascism was eating at the heart of European civilization, Four Saints in Three Acts rang out – zany, inclusive, playful, joyful and open. It was fitting that it was produced in America, which at the time championed democracy and the unalienable right of every person to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. America was not America without African Americans, American Jews, American homosexuals, American lesbians and American zeal for new voices.

  Without discernible narrative or plot, Four Saints spoke for an inclusive, diverse world. It was camp and outrageous, the coming together of unfettered imaginations in a spectacle that sloughed off the past and let everyone have a good time. For Gertrude, the production was a revolutionary breakthrough in communication of her work, an interacting of the two mediums of music and literature, a popularizing of literary modernism without compromising her style.

  After its sold-out run at the Wadsworth Atheneum, the show transferred to Broadway, to the 44th Street Theater in New York, on 20 February 1934. Cast and crew had a week to adapt a production created for a 299-seat theatre to one of 1,400 seats. They worked all hours.

  Two days before the sold-out opening night, a fire marshal, who had read enthusiastic accounts of Florine Stettheimer’s use of cellophane, came to inspect. He:

  walked up to our highly publicized cellophane cyclorama, took out a penknife, cut off a strip, set a match to it and dropped it just in time to save his hand from being burned.

  He condemned the whole set. Only when everything was coated with a non-inflammable paste, which affected colour and weight and dripped under the heat of the lights and made the cellophane sag, could the show proceed. Florine Stettheimer ironed the cellophane after the inspector left so that it again reflected light. And the donkey had to be dropped because she too contravened safety regulations and was unpredictable.

  Never again was cellophane sanctioned for a Broadway stage.

  Four Saints had another run in November 1934 with the same cast in a downtown Chicago auditorium. Gertrude and Alice combined attending this with a six-month lecture tour in different states. They sailed on 17 October 1934 on the SS Champlain and there were flowers in their first-class cabin from Lily de Gramont. They stayed first in New York, at the Algonquin Hotel on 44th Street. There were pictures of them on the front pages of most of the papers and headlines like ‘Gerty Gerty Stein Stein Is Back Home Home Back’. In Times Square, in revolving lights, were the words ‘Gertrude Stein has arrived in New York’. ‘As if we did not know,’ said Alice. Gertrude met up with Natalie Barney, who was in America to see her lionized, and they went for a walk in Central Park. Natalie asked her why she crossed the road without waiting for traffic signals. ‘All these people, including the nice taxi-drivers, recognize and are careful of me,’ Gertrude replied.

  Curtis Air gave her and Alice complimentary first-class tickets to fly from New York to Chicago for the third run of Four Saints. Gertrude had to move from the VIP box of honour to an orchestra seat because she was deaf from the plane. At the after-theatre party she met George Gershwin, who was so taken with the Harlem choir he hired them the next year when his opera Porgy and Bess opened in Boston. John Houseman noticed Gertrude had dark spots on her lips and wondered if they were cancerous.

  At home with success, Gertrude gave lectures at the Colony Club New York and at the universities of Columbia, Princeton and Washington. In December 1934, she and Alice had tea at the White House with Eleanor Roosevelt and her lover, Hick – Lorena Hickok, who lived there for the twelve years of Roosevelt’s presidency. Gertrude then continued her tour to Toledo, Indianapolis, Houston, San Francisco, Pittsburgh… The years of negation were swept away.

  I cannot say that we don’t like it we do like it wonderfully every minute and everything has worked out so beautifully… I am delighted really delighted with the way all the audiences take the lectures and it makes me happier than I can say.

  She wanted more life for the opera but the people involved moved on and Virgil Thomson believed it was too soon for a new production; the original was too much in people’s minds. He thought Fou
r Saints would take its place in classical repertory.

  Reading of Gertrude’s success, James Joyce asked Virgil Thomson to compose a ballet based on a chapter about children’s games in Finnegans Wake. He hoped it would be produced at the Paris Opéra with choreography by Léonide Massine. Thomson declined on the grounds that ballets don’t have words, but his real reason was the rivalry between Gertrude and Joyce. He did not wish to play one against the other and his first loyalty was to Gertrude.

  She and he then had a falling out over money. Gertrude, or perhaps Alice, queried their fifty/fifty division of profits. Gertrude posited that the project only had life because of the commercial value of her name. Thomson was miffed:

  If you knew the resistance I have encountered in connection with that text and overcome, the amount of reading it and singing it and praising it and commending it I have done, the articles, the lectures, the private propaganda that has been necessary in Hartford and New York to silence the opposition that thought it wasn’t having any Gertrude Stein, you wouldn’t talk to me about the commercial advantage of your name.

  There was anyway not much money to be had for anyone, given the huge cast, lavish production costs and a run of only six months. They patched up their quarrel enough to embark on a second opera, The Mother of Us All, about the women’s suffrage movement in America, with the women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony as the central figure, but it was not put on until after the Second World War and Gertrude died without seeing it brought to life. It became one of the most widely performed American operas.

  the end of an era

  In January 1938, Gertrude and Alice moved from their Paris home of twenty-five years in rue de Fleurus. The landlord wanted their apartment for his son. They found a new apartment at 5 rue Christine in the Latin quarter. It had once been the home of Christina, Queen of Sweden and had the original seventeenth-century wall boiseries. Janet Flanner arrived on moving day with a pot of white flowers. Gertrude gave her a pencil and piece of paper and said, ‘Put the pot anywhere and make me an inventory of my art.’ She had never bothered to do this before. Janet Flanner’s inventory was a rather vague jotting, but she recorded 131 paintings including five Picassos ‘still in the china closet’. She listed Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude, his Young Girl with a Flower Basket, a ‘Full Length Nude’ from his Rose period, and nineteen small works ‘including four perfectly matched heads of the 1913 Cubist period, rare in their unity’. She listed various Cézannes and two still lifes by Braque. None of the pictures was insured because that would cost too much.

  this preposterous masculine fiction

  In Gertrude’s view, the only ones really grateful for the 1939–45 war were the wild ducks that lived in the marshes of the Rhône. Hunting guns were requisitioned so no one could shoot at them.

  They act as if they had never been shot at, never, it is so easy to form old habits again, so very easy.

  Right up until the summer of 1939, she would not believe there could be another European war. That ‘this preposterous masculine fiction’, as Virginia Woolf termed it, would again engulf the world. Gertrude regarded war as a plunge back into medievalism, a sign of arrested development. ‘It is queer’, she wrote, ‘the world is so small and so knocked about.’ She voiced the hope that war might go out of fashion, like duelling, and thought the quickest way to stop it might be to ban the salute: ‘That is what goes to everybody’s head. No saluting, no war.’

  She and Alice closed their Paris flat, loaded winter clothes, Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude and Cézanne’s portrait of Madame Cézanne into the car and headed for their country place in Bilignin. They could not find their passports when they packed. In a half-hearted attempt to leave for America, they drove to the consulate in Lyons to get new ones but there were queues so they did not wait. Then a neighbour advised them to stay, said they were known and liked and everybody would look after them. So even though they were Jewish and American and by 1940 Bilignin was in Vichy-occupied France, they stayed. ‘We always pass our wars in France,’ Gertrude said.

  As the war progressed they became short of funds, so they drove to Switzerland and sold the portrait of Madame Cézanne in order to buy food on the black market. ‘We ate the Cézanne,’ Alice said. Bernard Faÿ, translator of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas into French, negotiated with Marshal Pétain, head of the Vichy regime that collaborated with the Axis powers, to ensure their safety. He also secured extra rations for them of bread and petrol. He had been appointed head of the French collaborationist government at Vichy and was responsible for hundreds of Jews being sent to concentration camps. At the war’s end, both Pétain and Faÿ were imprisoned for life as Nazi collaborators. Faÿ escaped to Switzerland. Pétain was exiled to the Île d’Yeu off the Atlantic coast. He died there in 1951.

  Gertrude’s death

  At the war’s end, Gertrude complained of tiredness and stomach pains. By December 1945 she had colitis and had lost weight. Her doctor told her to wear her corset differently. In April 1946, in great pain, she was taken to the American Hospital at Neuilly and was told she had cancer too advanced for surgery. She would not accept this stark news and insisted on an operation. She found a surgeon, Louis-Pasteur Vallery-Radot, grandson of Louis Pasteur, who agreed to operate on 27 July 1946, a Saturday. Alice wrote:

  I sat next to her and she said to me early in the afternoon, What is the answer? I was silent. In that case, she said, what is the question? Then the whole afternoon was troubled, confused and very uncertain, and later in the afternoon they took her away on a wheeled stretcher to the operating room and I never saw her again.

  Alice lived frugally for her remaining twenty-one years in a vain effort to keep Gertrude’s art collection intact, rather than selling even one painting to raise capital. In her will, she stipulated that she be buried in the same grave with Gertrude in Père-Lachaise cemetery but that her own name be engraved on the back of the tombstone, behind Gertrude to the end.

  do you still love life?

  A decade after the war, in a changed and diminished world, Janet Flanner, in Cannes with a friend, visited Picasso’s studio at his Villa La Californie for a viewing of his work. She said his salon was crowded with art works ‘like an auction room’. In the halcyon days in Paris, she and Picasso had seen each other often in the Café de Flore at the corner of place Saint-Germain, but had never spoken. Picasso met her with his arms outstretched and said:

  ‘You! Why didn’t you ever speak to me in the old days at the Flore? For years we saw each other and never spoke, until now. Are you just the same as you are? You look fine. Not a day older.’

  ‘Nor do you,’ Flanner said.

  ‘That’s true,’ Picasso said. ‘That’s the way you and I are. We don’t get older, we just get riper. Do you still love life the way you used to, and love people the way you did? I watched you and always wanted to know what you were thinking… Tell me, do you still love the human race, especially your best friends? Do you still love love?’

  ‘I do,’ Flanner replied, astonished by what he was asking.

  ‘And so do I,’ Picasso said, and laughed. ‘Oh we’re the great ones for that, you and I. Isn’t love the greatest refreshment in life?’

  Then he hugged her.

  Janet Flanner © Library of Congress / Getty Images

  ‘No one alive today can know which side’s dead men will win the war,’ Janet Flanner had written in 1939. When she met Picasso in Cannes, that particular ‘preposterous masculine fiction’ of war was finished with 60 million dead on the winning and losing sides, 22 million of them soldiers. The old days at the Café de Flore were gone, Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company was closed, Natalie’s Temple of Friendship empty, the graveyards fuller, the puffins on the Isle of Bryher fewer, the zany poems, experimental films and little magazines finished. But love of life and love continued to find its way. All over the world there were still lovers of love of every sort. There was no cut down on kissing between those with the
impulse to kiss. Lesbians continued to find each other one way or another. There were people who were riper not older, wiser not meaner, kinder not more cruel. Lovers of the human race and friendship still loved life and lovers and love. And the lovers of love and refreshment in life still loved, and loved lovers and loved love.

  1 William James was the first to recognise psychology as an independent discipline.

  2 It arrived a year later.

  3 Equivalent to about $100,000 in 2020.

  4 A tax protest in 1791.

  5 A student protest of 1766.

  CITATIONS AND BOOKS

  From the late 1980s on I researched in the archives for my biographies Gluck, Gertrude and Alice, Greta and Cecil, Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall and Wild Girls. ‘Di’s Dykes’, I dub this oeuvre of my books about lesbians. In No Modernism Without Lesbians I aim for a wider picture – of what lesbians achieved and can achieve when, collectively, they dictate their own agenda.

  I have drawn on and added to past research. Access to material has now been revolutionised with online availability.

  Sources of quoted material are cited by page number and opening phrase.

  ii

  I think… if it is true

  Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

  As women we derive

  Adrienne Rich ‘It is the Lesbian in Us’ Sinister Wisdom

  Throw over your man

  1

  The world has always

  Janet Flanner, The Cubicle City, 1926

  2

  the all-time ultimate

  Truman Capote, Answered Prayers, 1986

  2

  I am a lesbian

  Natalie Barney, Éparpillements, 1910