Lesbian Images: Essays

by Jane Rule

  Georgette, with Margaret as her accompanist, set out for France with high hopes because they had been given promise of permanent backing for concert tours. Two months later that backing was withdrawn, leaving the two women without financial resources. They had to live for a time with Georgette’s rich and parsimonious French relatives in large unheated and unlighted houses where baths were rationed. When Georgette was dangerously ill with pneumonia, all her rich brother could think of was the cost of the oxygen. The horror of these relatives in no way daunted either woman. They found a deserted lighthouse to live in and settled down with a third companion, Monique, who had begun as an admirer of Georgette’s voice and became something between a nurse and a friend, serving her and Margaret all her life. Perhaps her constant presence contributed to the decorum and independence of their relationship. It certainly never in any way diminished their pleasure. Both Georgette and Margaret wrote books which gave them money to live on, but they never had much. Georgette’s attempts at concert tours were abortive. Their life was instead rich with music, literature, and friends, centrally nourished by their study of Gurdjieff. Margaret often left Georgette to take trips with other friends. She returned to “that total presence which always came toward me as if she were carrying her life in her arms, putting it at my disposal, rescuing me from all the alien forces of the world.”21 When they traveled together, Georgette’s ingenious disorder prompted Margaret to draw up a document which all three would sign about what could and what could not be tolerated. It is full of good-humored fury at all the inconvenience of loose objects and animals in the car. Georgette and Monique dutifully signed the document, and “everything turned out as usual. I didn’t mind of course. I could stand physical disasters because, with Georgette, I never had to stand mental or emotional ones.”22

  Contrasting the serene joy of her central relationship is her discussion of romantic love, about which Margaret claimed to know all there was to know. She made a list of some thirty-four don’ts if one wants to be “wonderfully in love,” which include such commands as “Don’t be afraid of a tragic ending—romantic love is a tragedy to begin with” and “Don’t relate love to morals—chemistry is beyond morality.”23 “The world-well-lost was always the basis of romantic love to me,”24 she admitted. Did she then fall in love with other women while she lived with Georgette, lose herself in those “tragedies,” and return to Georgette when they had run themselves out? She spoke only in generalities. “If I’m in love—merely in love—and tempted to follow my infatuation to the ends of the earth, I’ve never done it.”25 When Georgette spoke of love in a letter to a young person, she seemed both wiser and more realistic. “When our love has both body and spirit, there is compensation. When ‘the revelation’ is not there, the body is an aid. It is also a cause of anguish. …”26

  As war threatened in 1939, Margaret and Georgette were still dreaming of a successful concert tour, but Georgette was in her late sixties, and she already had cancer. Her last two years were spent in a struggle against that disease and against the difficulties of living in occupied France. Only after Georgette died could Margaret be persuaded by Monique that she should return to the States since there was a threat that Americans in France might be put in concentration camps. Ernest Hemingway paid her fare.

  On the ship returning to America, she met Dorothy Caruso, the widow of the singer, who was taking her children to safety. Margaret talked to Dorothy about the teachings of Gurdjieff, admonished her not to play the widow of a famous man but to be a person in herself, encouraging her to take up writing. Margaret did not talk very much about that relationship, except in general and happy terms. She lived with Dorothy Caruso until Dorothy’s death in 1955, also of cancer. Then Margaret returned to France to the house where Georgette had died and lived there with Monique, now in her nineties, until Monique died.

  Margaret Anderson wrote a good deal about death, able to perhaps because she was basically a celebrator of life. For all her claim that she lived in “unreality,” she was a realist about loss as well as joy, contrasting herself with Alice B. Toklas, who could not even say, at the end of her book, What Is Remembered, that Gertrude Stein was dead, only that “I never saw her again.”27 Margaret Anderson saw Georgette again and again as she wrote about their life together, as she discovered some of Georgette’s beauty and charm and wisdom in other people like Dorothy Caruso, as she listened to her circle of friends remembering Georgette with love and praise.

  Not a “born” writer, without the discipline to be a pianist, Margaret Anderson, after her years as editor of The Little Review, lived her life for her own delight. Gertrude Stein dismissed her as a lightweight. She dismissed Gertrude Stein as a woman of monstrous ego whose obsession with repetition ruined what was good about her work. She also dismissed Isadora Duncan’s dancing, “being totally uninterested in it as sex.”28 Isadora Duncan did not have “the fragile mighty thing.”29 “Soul” was what Margaret Anderson looked for in people as well as in art, what catches the breath, makes the heart beat faster, fills the moment with radiant ecstasy. She loved those lines of poetry that are memorable for their sweetness of sound, for their elevation of spirit. She liked salon music. Her list of beloved songs was calculated to appall the taste of an intellectual. Called a dilettante, she took the word for her own and made it her title. She opened My Thirty Years’ War with the assertion “I have never been able to accept the two great laws of humanity—that you’re always being suppressed if you’re inspired and always being pushed into a corner if you’re exceptional. I won’t be cornered and I won’t stay suppressed.”30 She ended her final volume with “The blessings I have wanted were love and music, books and great ideas and beauty of environment. I have had them all, and to a degree beyond my asking, even beyond my imagining.”31 She apparently lived the life Colette imagined between two women without what Colette saw as its terrible limiting isolation, with joy and with freedom, rich in an extraordinary range of friends, having to face only the tragedy of death no love escapes, able to survive and love again, nourishing the new relationship with all she had learned from the old. She seems to have had not only the arrogance but the ability to be “inspired” and “exceptional” in love, to which her autobiography is ample and joyful testimony.

  When Jane Heap was asked, “What’s Margaret’s book about?” she answered with a laugh, “Herself—fiction!”32 But it is too willful to be fiction. In fiction Jane Heap would never have lasted the course and been given that ironic but loving voice to punctuate as well as challenge, and the unbelievable Georgette would have had to become believable. Finally a character like Margaret Anderson could never have been rewarded as her life did reward her. No “real” person could possibly deserve it, as she is the first to admit, but “I knew I would never know any story but my own.”33 That limitation too turns out to have been a great blessing.

  Dorothy Baker 1907–1968

  I KNOW ONLY THE barest facts about Dorothy Baker’s life: she was married; she had children; she loved music; she wrote four novels, two of which are of interest for this study. I know one other thing about her: she was very defensive when approached for an article or story by the editor of a lesbian magazine, The Ladder. She even denied that one of the two books about to be discussed had anything to do with lesbianism. I was also defensive when I was first approached by the editor of The Ladder back in 1964, and other writers have been before and since, fearful of being labeled, of being ghettoized. Since this is a chapter about changed perception, it is perhaps also the place to emphasize that writers’ attitudes can and do change not only because of their personal experience but because of what is happening in the world around them. If Dorothy Baker were alive today, I hope she would be pleased to find herself in such good company as this book has gathered together.

  If Dorothy Baker had written only Trio, published in 1945, her work could easily be classified along with dozens of other badly stereotyped moral melodramas about evil seductions of innocence, though Tri
o is better written than most; but she went on to write Cassandra at the Wedding, published in 1962, an unusually perceptive and subtle portrait of identical twin sisters whose relationship is the model of perfection for one, a limiting prison for the other. The moral simplicities which make Trio a vengeful and ultimately silly book have dropped away, and the psychological verities which take their place sometimes threaten but never destroy the validity of human experience in Cassandra at the Wedding.

  Trio is not only a diatribe against lesbian relationship but against academic ambition, corrupt critical principles, teaching when it is a process of perverting both mind and body.

  Pauline Maury, the arch villain of the book, is a professor of French literature who has just published a book which in one part explores the poems of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Valery with remarkable perception but in another argues that the lives of these men as drug addicts, homosexuals, and sadists are the sources of their great talent. Her critical insight into the poems has won her the respect of the academic community. Her defense of the poets’ lives has attracted the popular press.

  Janet Logan, a candidate for a Ph.D., is Pauline Maury’s teaching assistant who has also lived with her for several years. At a tea party, which opens the book, she fiercely defends her mentor’s theories against the amiable attack of the dean, who explains to her, “The poets Miss Maury writes about were what she says, they had these troubles or weaknesses, or sins, whatever you want to call them; and they wrote great poems. Now, the easy thing to say is that they wrote great poetry because they had these weaknesses.”1 The dean here makes clear that for him moral and psychological terms are really interchangeable for his point. “It’s much too easy. We could make a grand tour of all the jails right now, and find a thousand drug addicts and homosexuals who never wrote a line of poetry in their lives and never will. It isn’t because of these things that her poets were great, it’s in spite of them.”2 Janet Logan is shaken by the argument but not prepared to deal with it.

  As the story develops, it becomes clear that Janet Logan is Pauline Maury’s personal means of expressing her literary theories. There are no scenes of overt sexuality or drugged hallucinations. Rather, clues are planted: the misplaced riding crop by the picture of the young ballerina in the bedroom, the reference to Janet Logan’s recent “breakdown,” and Pauline Maury’s insistence that she take strong sleeping pills. The facts of the relationship are held off until very late in the book when Janet Logan is forced to tell Ray MacKenzie, with whom she has been having a secret affair, what her real circumstance is. She has been trying to tell him for some time because she is in love with him, but she is sure the knowledge of it will destroy their relationship. When he does react violently, as she has expected, she tries to explain. “Didn’t you ever know anyone older than you who seemed to be everything you wanted to be? … I went to live with her because she asked me to. I didn’t know there was anything wrong with it or with her. And the whole thing was so mixed up with everything else I liked and was just finding out about, like poetry and music and pictures.”3 Ray MacKenzie’s response is, “Did you ever hear of a fairy that wasn’t artistic? The main thing wrong with the arts is that they attract so many degenerates.”4 But even in this exchange, which ends with Ray MacKenzie’s rejection of her, the graphic details are withheld. Only in the last interview with Pauline Maury does Janet describe what she had been through.

  And you’ve tried to make me believe we were something we weren’t and that we lived on a higher plane and saw everything clearer and freer than anybody else. We were artists, and I believed that for a while. You had me thinking that if I stayed drunk long enough and kept myself far enough off center and knew what it was to have a whip bite into me until my nerves were all on the outside, that then I could arrive at something, a kind of sublime state of something.

  Well, I’ve been through it all now. I’ve learned everything you wanted me to learn. I’m a specialist in a very narrow branch of literature, and along with it I know what it’s like to be drunk for two weeks, and to sleep for three days in a big red fog, and to walk down the street and see a tree come at me fast and try to fall on me. And I know what it is like to lose hold of everything and lie wrapped up in a wet sheet until they’re ready to unwrap me and let me out. I’ve done the whole thing now. I know what higher morality’s like, and no decent person would be caught dead with me.5

  Punishment for Pauline Maury for such a betrayal of a teacher’s sacred trust must be thorough. Not only has she ruined Janet Logan’s health and life, it is now also discovered that she has plagiarized her book. The section which has won her genuine admiration in the scholarly community and a new specially endowed chair at the university was written by another of her students, Claire Blanchard, who left her husband to live with Pauline Maury for two years. Shortly after she returned to her husband, she died. Though Pauline Maury doesn’t offer the information, the implication is that Claire Blanchard killed herself. Her husband has now emerged to avenge his wife. Pauline Maury is also terrified that Ray MacKenzie will try to kill her. He does, in fact, appear, still in shock, but basically determined to help Janet escape. His speech to Pauline is summarized.

  All she’d tried was to lead her into a way of life and then leave her stuck with it. Because the way of life she wanted to get her into was no good, and she knew it. It was empty and hollow and there was no place to go in it, and no air in it, and all it could do was stifle anybody that got caught in it. It was a dead-end and a blind alley and a bottleneck of a way of life.6

  But, not knowing that she has just been discovered as a fraud, he makes the mistake of saying, “Only one thing you’ve ever done that she’s got respect for, and that’s the book you wrote. She admires you for that, and that’s the only thing, the only single damned thing.”7 For Janet, already resolved to leave, it is too cruel. She changes her mind, as she has in other attempts to leave, out of pity. “She’s sick. I can’t leave her. Not now.”8 Pauline is shown to be full of gratitude and wonder and perhaps contrition. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry if I’ve been bad for Janet. Perhaps I can …”9 But she does not finish that sentence. She leaves the room and the two young people, goes into the bedroom, and shoots herself with a gun carefully planted in the opening scene of the book. Janet tries to call the police but cannot pull herself together. The last line of the book is Ray MacKenzie’s: “Look, why don’t you let me do that?”10 Pauline Maury has been given her moment of real humanity, suicide, so that the natural order of things can be reasserted. Ray MacKenzie is also an artist but the right sort of artist with a healthy skepticism about the academy, a low opinion of critics, and the decency to see that “fairies” can give the arts a bad reputation. He can take over the care of Janet Logan, that piece of blotting paper who will now absorb, just as readily as she absorbed French literary vices, his virtuous prejudices for her dependent salvation.

  Cassandra at the Wedding is a very different sort of book. Calling it lesbian fiction could reasonably irritate its author, for, though Cassandra is clearly involved in sexual relationships with other women, her chief preoccupation is her relationship with her identical twin, Judith, who has come home after a year in New York with the young doctor she intends to marry. Most of the novel is written from Cassandra’s point of view as she drives home from Berkeley to the family ranch for the wedding, visits with her sister, alcoholic philosopher father, and practical, sentimental grandmother. At Cassandra’s attempted suicide the book shifts for a time to Judith’s point of view. But when Cassandra recovers, the book belongs to her again.

  Cassandra is just as dependent a character as Janet Logan, just as “wrong” as Pauline Maury, and even shares their academic concerns, but, since she is allowed to speak for herself, her terrible need of her sister to make herself seem complete, her fantasies about the kind of life they could lead together as special people, artists, aesthetes, her self-justifications are all understandable, sometimes funny, sometimes appealing. Even when Judith ha
s a chance to speak for herself and exposes, from her own point of view, the fiction of Cassandra’s past as well as her hopes, even when Judith confesses her own relief to escape her sister for a stable and happy marriage far from her lunatic and exclusive family, sympathy for Cassandra is not lost. Cassandra’s dream of psychic union with her sister, however preposterous and impractical, may evolve—once she can let go of a hope of salvation from the outside either in an idyllic relationship with her sister or a sister substitute—not into marriage but into art. Then her attempted suicide at her sister’s desertion becomes a death for rebirth into her own freedom. When alone, back in the Bay area, Cassandra is able to walk across the bridge without fear of jumping, to drop over the edge nothing more than a sock that has been irritating her. It is a good sort of gesture, unpretentious and comic. Her analyst has said, “After I sort it all out there’s still enough left for three or four girls like your sister. You’re quite a girl.”11

  The extreme narcissism Cassandra suffers in the fact of an identical twin, in whom she imagines all the qualities she lacks, with whom she wants to become one, is also evident in her relationship with her mother, recently dead of cancer; but in this case Cassandra is struggling away from relationship or identification, going as far as to refuse to write because her mother was a successful writer. Judith sees her sister and mother as nearly the same person, saying of her mother that she was more like a kid brother, gallant and full of deference to their father, lighting his cigarettes, opening doors for him, buying him expensive gifts she then wore herself. As the book ends, Cassandra says, “Could never write any of this until I could tear up the pawn ticket on the ghost of my mother …Don’t lean. Stand up. Find a way.”12