No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  Sappho was born in about 612 BC at Eressos, a seaside village in south-west Lesbos. She came from an aristocratic family, married, had a daughter and was widowed young. In a political dispute, she was exiled from Lesbos to Sicily. When she returned, she set up a school for music and dance for girls in Mytilene, the capital of Lesbos.

  This school became her life. The themes of her poetry were the pleasures and pains of her all-female community. These poems, written to be recited, used the vernacular of Lesbos. They revealed her love for a favourite, pain at separation, grief when girls left to marry, nostalgia at remembering pleasures shared, jealousy about rivals. In one fragment, she wrote of a lover who outshone all the women of Sardis as the moon outshone the stars. In another, she invoked Aphrodite to help her, not break her heart with pain and sorrow. In a third, she described her feelings on seeing and hearing the woman she loved.

  In classical Greece, no other woman poet achieved Sappho’s recognition. Fifth-century vases testified to her fame, her portrait was in the Acropolis at Athens, the Syracusans erected a statue of her in their town hall, the Alexandrians collected her work into nine books, she was read in schools up to the fourth century AD.

  Natalie, Evalina Palmer and others in their circle allied Sappho to their modernist view in much the same way as James Joyce reclaimed Odysseus. Role models for lesbians were few. Sappho was evidence that such desires were time-honoured, that there had always been women who felt as they did, whose emotions were pure and lifestyles self-willed, not prescribed or dictated by men.

  Natalie’s openness was contagious and gave courage to lesbians less bold than she. Those less confident to be true to themselves gravitated towards her and were emboldened by her candour. The pursuit of desire, love triangles, the pain of jealousy, infidelity and broken affairs became their interpretation of Sappho and a link to a classical culture.

  This swell of lesbian visibility was from the ground up, a heartfelt movement, an opposition to exclusion, denial and insult. Natalie aspired to make Paris the sapphic centre of the Western world. Unflinching, outspoken, unembarrassable, she did not hide behind euphemism, say what society might want to hear, or curry acceptance. Around her there formed a community of lesbians who could be who they were. Paris allowed such freedom.

  Liane de Pougy

  In spring 1899, Natalie was in Paris with her mother. She was twenty-three and glad to be rid of the ‘rigid protocol’ of Washington society. They shared a house in avenue Victor Hugo. Alice Barney enrolled for James Whistler’s course in portrait painting for women at the Académie Carmen in the Passage Stanislas, owned by Whistler’s principal life model Carmen Rossi, with whom Natalie had a fling. Natalie studied French classical poesy and Greek with a scholar and poet, Charles Brun, and wrote poems in French about love and her lovers.

  She began another ‘living as the first of the arts’ relationship. It caused a dramatic rift between her and her father. Liane de Pougy was a famous Paris courtesan, who numbered Albert, Prince of Wales and Maurice de Rothschild among her clients. Courtesan was a more respectable word than prostitute for women who had sex with rich clients for a lot of money. Born Anne-Marie Chassaigne in 1870 in the Breton city of Rennes, she fled to Paris to escape her humble roots, miserable marriage and young son, and joined the salon of the Comtesse Valtesse de la Bigne. She took her professional name from a favoured client, the Comte de Pougy. Society columns of the 1890s wrote of her beauty, her jewels, and the company she kept. In payment for a stint, she might receive ‘a necklace of the white pearls I love worth one hundred thousand francs’. The scrimping days of Anne-Marie Chassaigne ended.

  Liane de Pougy in 1902 © Bridgeman Images

  To deflect unwanted attention from her father and protect her inheritance prospects, Natalie declared her engagement to an ersatz fiancé, Robert Cassatt, whose family had made their money in railroads. He agreed in writing to a ‘chaste and intellectual marriage’. Natalie made clear their arrangement was a societal and financial cover; she desired women, not men, and that would always be so. Cassatt said he desired women too, so they had that in common. Out with him one afternoon in an open landau in the Bois de Boulogne, they passed Liane de Pougy’s carriage in the Passage des Acacias. Natalie and Liane ‘exchanged long looks and half glances’.

  Next morning, Natalie called with roses and cornflowers. Liane was in a blue silk bed. They soaked together in a perfumed bath and had sex on Liane’s polar bear rug.2 Liane praised Natalie’s white blonde hair, ‘like a moonbeam’, her blue eyes and ‘vicious white teeth’. In the evening they went to see Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet at her own theatre. Passers-by applauded Liane as she stepped from her carriage. Natalie compared Hamlet’s passivity to the subjugation of women. Men, she said, made laws for their own benefit. Her resolve was to revise these laws to favour women who love women. Her rejection of male orthodoxies was unequivocal: There was no God, the Bible was man’s fiction, an overprinted fable: ‘“God will punish you even to the third and fourth generation.” Let’s raise a glass of cool water to the health of the fifth generation.’

  Natalie pursued Liane out of desire, but also declared a half-hearted feminist intention to save her from prostitution. She suggested to Cassatt that, when married, they adopt Liane to provide income for her too, so she could retire as a sex worker. Cassatt was not keen. Marrying for money and agreeing not to have sex with his wife was one thing. His wife having sex with his daughter who was seven years older than he was and a famous courtesan was a stretch too far.

  Liane gave Natalie a silver and moonstone ring embossed with a bat, symbolizing rebirth, and inscribed with a message of love. It complemented Natalie’s anklet, commissioned from the jeweller René Lalique, of bats flying among diamond stars. They began a one-act play about Sappho, had fantasies about finding a ‘blessed little nook’ together, but until that happened, Liane explained,

  I still need 800,000 francs before I can stop. Then I shall cable you: ‘Come take me’ We’ll really live. We’ll dream, think, love, write books.

  They travelled to London together, booked a suite at the Hotel Cecil, hired a boat on the Thames. The papers praised Liane’s beauty, her ermine coat, her hat wreathed with roses.

  Mr Barney travelled to Paris, irate at what he was hearing about his daughter. His tolerance of alcohol had diminished; one whisky and he was drunk. He forbade Natalie to have anything more to do with Liane, and took her to Dinard in Brittany with her mother and sister, Laura. Natalie went for long horse rides, read the poetry of Verlaine, Baudelaire and Mallarmé, wrote poems in French about her lovers and sent letters to Liane about her beauty and skin like rose-tinted snow.

  Liane began a memoir, Idylle Saphique, a confession from the demi-monde, about their affair. ‘It’s going well’, she wrote to Natalie after twelve pages. ‘I think you’ll like it.’ She tried to join her in Brittany but was snubbed by the Barneys. Robert Cassatt wrote from Pittsburgh ending his engagement and la Valtesse wrote to Liane asking, where was she? A charming young man of good family was offering 500,000 francs for her. It was not possible to run a business this way.

  Back in Paris, Natalie and Liane resumed their affair. Mr Barney had his spies. He wrote to Natalie that he was informed of ‘things so repugnant that one has to pity the minds that have conceived them’ and demanded she end all contact with Liane or return to Washington. Natalie replied with scorn:

  Ever since I remember you your one ambition for us was petty and worldly. Even religion was made a sort of social duty. One should go to church because it looked well, or because people would think it strange if we didn’t. You must understand how petty, how ugly our whole upbringing was. You showed me at the age of twelve all that marriage means – the jealousness, the scum, the tyrannies – nothing was hidden from me. I was even made a witness when still a mere child of the atrocious and lamentable consequences an uncontrollable temper can have on a good and kindly woman… Seeing all this made me lose faith in you – respect for you.
I no longer felt myself your daughter.

  To keep him from coming to Paris, she gave false assurance she would ‘give up seeing this woman’. Liane wrote to her of her intention to end the relationship. ‘Everyone tells me to let you go, that we can have no future together.’

  Natalie worked on a collection, in French, of thirty-five of her love poems to and about her lovers, Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes. In them, she experimented with rhyme and verse. She wrote of breasts like lotus flowers on a tranquil pond, hearts pounding like the sea, the scent of her lover’s hair, her lovers’ orgasmic cries… In a personal preface, ‘for those who never read prefaces’, she apologized for daring to offer ‘French verses to France’. ‘Nothing about me must surprise you. I am American,’ she wrote.

  In another room of their house, Alice Barney did pastel portraits to illustrate the book. Her French was poor, she did not read the poems, but thought these friends of Natalie made beautiful models.

  Renée Vivien

  Natalie’s response to her father’s ultimatum about Liane de Pougy was to court additional scandal. Riding in the Bois one afternoon, she met a childhood friend from Cincinnati, Violet Shillito, and her sister Mary. Violet told her of her close friend Renée Vivien, and how she, like Natalie, wrote poetry in French. The four arranged to go to a matinée:

  The butler announced the arrival of the landau and at the same time handed me an envelope on which I recognised Liane de Pougy’s handwriting. She was travelling in Portugal.

  Natalie took little notice of the play or of Renée, whom she thought looked ordinary. She sat in the back of their box and read and reread Liane’s letter. Liane was with a client, a prince from somewhere, but her thoughts were of Natalie.

  The moon sulked and I thought of you moonbeam, of your fine, fine hair… my little blue flower whose perfume intoxicated me oh so sweetly, you, my fair one, my Flossie…

  Next evening, Natalie took Renée skating at the Palais de Glace in the Champs Elysées. Afterwards, they went back to Renée’s vast apartment in rue Crevaux. It was candlelit, perfumed with incense and the windows were heavily curtained. The place was adorned with gigantic Buddhas draped in black, masks, ancient instruments and snakes behind glass, and in every corner were vases of white lilies. Natalie left at dawn. It was, she said, ‘a disquieting beginning in which two young women try to find themselves in a mismatched love affair’.

  Renée Vivien © PDVE / Bridgeman Images

  Renée had blonde hair, a smooth complexion, heavy eyelids, a retroussé nose, a hand tremor and an engaging lisp. Though tall, she stooped to make herself appear less so. She wore unsteady hats and long purple or black dresses. She was clumsy, always losing her gloves, a scarf, or giving things away, her bracelets, a necklace. She would open her bag, spill out banknotes then scoop up most, though not all of them. She translated the poetry of Sappho from Greek to French and in refined French wrote her own poetry about her love for and scorn of women and her longing to be dead.

  She was born Pauline Tarn in England in June 1877; her mother was from Michigan and her father from Teesdale. Her paternal grandfather made a fortune by expanding a single grocery shop into chain stores. Her parents fought and her father, like Natalie’s, became an alcoholic.

  The family moved to Paris when Pauline was two. She had an English governess, went to a French school and by the age of nine was writing love poems in French to a girl called Blanche. Also when she was nine, her father died. Weakened by alcoholism, he developed pneumonia after bathing in the sea near Étretat in Normandy. His father accused his daughter-in-law of ruining his son’s life and in revenge excluded her from his will. He made Pauline and her sister, Antoinette, sole joint beneficiaries when they married or reached the age of twenty-one, whichever was first. Pauline’s mother was resentful to the point of cruelty. Her relationship with Pauline, at no time good, became terrible.

  She arranged their return to England four years later. Pauline knew no one in England; Paris was her city of choice.

  Back in London, Pauline shut herself in her room, wrote poems, read Victor Hugo, Byron and Keats, played Chopin piano sonatas, felt daunted by ‘continual vexations, continual suffering and sorrow’ and tried to drown herself, tried to kill herself with chloroform. She confided her unhappiness to Amédée Moullé, a fifty-year-old Parisian poet who critiqued her work and sent her books. He offered to marry her so she could gain her inheritance and return to Paris.

  To prevent this, her mother locked her in the house ‘as in a jail… all the doors were locked’. Pauline escaped through a window, pawned a brooch and stayed for five days in a lodging house until a maid found her and took her home. Her mother then tried to have her certified insane. Pauline thought she wanted her consigned to an asylum as a ruse to steal her inheritance. The case went to court, Pauline was made a ward of court and assigned a legal guardian. Her mother was foiled. As soon as she was twenty-one, Pauline left for Paris.

  There she discarded the name Pauline Tarn, the tyranny of her mother and the repressions of English society. She recreated herself as Renée Vivien, ‘born again to life’, to be a lesbian poet and lover. She wrote only in French. With publication of her first poems in 1901 she hid her gender behind R. Vivien, then used the masculine form René, before settling for Renée Vivien. She was passionate about Natalie’s childhood friend, Violet Shillito from Cincinnati, who was studying French in Paris. She wrote poems to her and the violet became her lifelong symbol of love.3

  Renée’s life was short, her output impressive: eleven volumes of poetry, two of them translations from Greek, collections of short stories, an autobiographical novel. Natalie became the inspiration for many of her poems, and for the novel. And it was Natalie who encouraged her to study Greek with her own tutor, Charles Brun, so as to read Sappho in the original. After two years Renée was fluent and known as ‘Sappho 1900’ for her openly lesbian poems and translations of Sapphic fragments.

  Though Liane de Pougy was more fun and Eva Palmer ‘the mother of her desires’, Natalie, always energetically polyamorous, simultaneously pursued a relationship with Renée.

  she had brown eyes which often sparkled with gaiety but when her beautiful swarthy eyelids were lowered they revealed more than her eyes – the soul and the poetic melancholy that I sought in her…

  She had a sense of humor which was easy to restore and a childlike drollness which suddenly removed half of her twenty years. The weakness of her chin could be particularly noted in profile, but when seen from the front no one could resist the laugh on her full lips and her little teeth of which even the canines were not pointed. Her complexion uniformly smooth and enhanced by a beautiful texture, was virginally pink when she became animated. Her nose was fine and slightly turned up.

  Colette, a fleeting lover of Renée’s some years later, confirmed the bursts of mischief that belied her melancholy:

  Impossible to find anywhere in that face any sign of the hidden tragic melancholy that throbs in the poetry of Renée Vivien. I never saw Renée sad.

  But, whatever the facade, Renée was self-destructive. She had read Byron, Huysmans, Keats and Baudelaire and melancholy was her territory. And addiction. From the start, her love for Natalie was tortured:

  In you I find the incarnation of my deepest desire. You are more strange than my dream. I love you and I am already certain you will never love me. You are the suffering that makes happiness contemptible.

  And suffer she did. She bombarded Natalie with flowers, jewels and poems. Her love, she wrote, was ‘like snow pure passion, like the attraction of deep water, like standing at the edge of an abyss, like wedding day chastity…’ She did not have Natalie’s self-belief or capacity for a good time. She could only bathe vicariously in Natalie’s Amazonian power. It was as if their destinies were in full view – Renée would have to die young, Natalie would sail on to grand old age.

  Natalie was concerned by the quality of Renée’s devotion. She would have preferred something simple
r. And sexually, Renée could not help but withhold. For Natalie, her lovers’ orgasms were a badge of honour. Renée was too anxious about her body, too troubled in her mind and, as time went by, too full of alcohol and drugs to be freely responsive.

  Natalie regretted ‘throwing her soul into disarray’ and exacerbating her despair. ‘I did not want it to be like that, rather that she should love me just enough to bring sunshine into her life.’ For Renée, Natalie was a much-needed challenge to her despair. Death, sex and doomed love were recurring themes in her poetry. ‘Let the Dead Bury Their Dead’ was the title of one of her poems. ‘But not the Living’, Natalie wrote in the margin.

  back to Bar Harbor

  Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes, Natalie’s book of love poems, was published in spring 1900 in Paris by Paul Ollendorff. A review ‘Yankee Girl, French Poet’, with the subtitle ‘Sappho Sings in Washington’, was printed in the Washington Post and read by Albert Barney. He instructed his staff to prepare Bar Harbor for the arrival of his family, then went to Paris, bought up and destroyed the printers’ plates and all unsold copies of Natalie’s book and insisted she return to America with him and her mother.

  They sailed on the SS St Louis on 7 July 1900. Later that month he had a heart attack while playing golf, which spared him news of the publication of Liane de Pougy’s raunchy roman à clef, Idylle Saphique. In Paris it was common knowledge that the Flossie Temple Bradford of this romance, who fervently kissed the ankles and thighs of its narrator, was Natalie Barney, the wild girl from Cincinnati, the ash-blonde heiress, who most mornings could be seen galloping bareback in the Bois de Boulogne.

  Albert Barney’s intervention was not successful. Confined to bed, he was too ill to surveil his daughter or his wife. Natalie persuaded Renée Vivien to come and stay. To Eva Palmer, who was in Bar Harbor on holiday with her sister May, Natalie sent a copy of Sonnets de Femmes with a note comparing Eva’s heart to the last days of autumn.