No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  Eva, provoked to learn that Natalie and Renée were lovers, and by a dedication that she saw as a denial of her own vitality and youthfulness, invited them to join her at Duck Brook, ‘you know the one I mean where the boys sometimes swim’. They read Swinburne and with a Kodak Brownie box camera took photographs of each other posing naked.

  In August, to raise money for the new Bar Harbor hospital, Natalie’s mother staged an all-women theatre piece, scripted by Natalie and her sister, Laura. There were four ‘charming tableaux’: Renée played a spoof Alice in Wonderland, May Palmer was Helen of Troy, Laura was Cleopatra, and Eva, with props of Doric columns and a harp, wearing Grecian robes, strap sandals and with a wreath in her red hair, was Bar Harbor’s Sappho.

  Albert Barney stayed in bed.

  Eva, Renée, Olive, Oscar, Bosie

  Natalie, Eva and Renée moved back to Paris together. For them all, Oscar Wilde was a revered figure from the recent past, a genius and champion of same-sex relationship and free expression, martyred by society. Sylvia Beach hung framed photographs of him on the wall in Shakespeare and Company. Natalie had met him when she was six in the Long Beach Hotel, New York. Boys had pelted her with preserved cherries, which stuck in her hair, and she had run across the hotel lobby crying. Oscar Wilde picked her up and calmed her with his story of The Happy Prince who was in love with a little swallow. Natalie wrote to Wilde when he was in Reading Gaol, saying she wanted to comfort him against his persecutors, as he had comforted her.

  Wilde, after persecution and humiliation, died in poverty in a Paris pension, the Hôtel d’Alsace, in November 1900. His lover, Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas, then turned against him, his own past, and any public support for homosexuality. Bosie determined to present himself as a heterosexual married man. He looked for a wife among Natalie’s circle – for a wealthy lesbian willing to share her inherited money with his title.

  Olive Custance, born in England in 1874, had affairs with both Natalie and Renée Vivien. Her grandfather was the High Sheriff of Norfolk, her father was a Colonel, home was Weston Hall, a sixteenth-century estate in twenty acres of land, and as the elder of two daughters she stood to inherit. Her first volume of poems, Opals, was published in 1897. She prefaced the initial poem, ‘Love’s Firstfruits’, with a quote from Sappho.

  ‘Opals’, she wrote, ‘are the stones of love and sorrow and they have suggested many of my songs to me.’

  Natalie wrote an admiring letter. Olive told the publisher, John Lane of Bodley Head:

  I had an adorable letter this morning from a beautiful American girl the author of a new volume of poems which she sent me… She had read Opals and fallen in love with my soul!

  Natalie met her. She was taken with Olive’s brilliant eyes, her breathless voice, as well as her soul. ‘Come my poet my priestess’, she wrote to her,

  Come it is Tuesday night! Come to me and we will be quiet. I only know that I so love your lips that I will do whatever they tell me.

  Olive, for her part, wrote to Bosie praising his sonnets. They exchanged letters, then arranged to meet at London’s South Kensington Museum.4 Bosie was thirty. He said he fell in love at first sight but ‘did not think he had the slightest chance of marrying her’. ‘You are a darling baby’, he wrote to her,

  and you are exactly like a boy and you know perfectly well that I love you better than anyone else, boy or girl… You have everything. I used to wish you were a boy, now I am glad you are not.

  Separated from him on holiday in France in 1901, Olive wrote,

  Oh how I miss you… your sweet golden head, your small red mouth always it seems a little shy of my kisses, and above all your great blue eyes… the most beautiful eyes a boy ever had.

  Natalie, she told him,

  is rather fascinating and clever but her life is ugly… and I cannot forgive that. She says she loves me, but some who have loved her tell me she does not know what love means… and from what I know of her I can well believe it… but because I am indifferent to her she has a passion for me that is almost beautiful at times. I have prayed all my life that I might meet a man I could love with all my soul.

  not all roses

  Renée, a part of the amorous circle, wrote to Olive in October 1901:

  Sweetest, how maddeningly exquisite it was to hold your fresh frail body in my arms – to clasp you and kiss you in a bewilderment of delight… I wrote to Bosie that you were like a wild rose, all faint perfumes and delicacy of colour, fresh and frail. I love you, who are the one entirely beautiful, entirely joy-giving thing in my life. You have brought me nothing but roses… the roses of Sappho.

  Olive, who wanted a husband, got engaged to George Montagu, MP for South Huntingdon, a friend of Bosie’s from their time at Winchester College and, like him, ‘gender fluid’. King Edward VII sent congratulations on this engagement. Fearing jeopardy of his political career by the Wilde scandal, Montagu broke from Bosie. Douglas wrote a sonnet – ‘Traitor’ – then, over dinner in Kettner’s in Soho with Olive, persuaded her to elope with him. They married by special licence at St George’s Church, Hanover Square on Tuesday 4 March 1902. They informed Olive’s parents by telegram, then took the ferry to Paris. Colonel Custance contacted the police but the deed was done. Olive and Bosie’s only child, Raymond, was born eight months later. Natalie was his godmother.

  Bosie and Olive’s marriage was complex, stormy and destructive. The main casualty of it was their son. Caught in a web of hostile relationships, then diagnosed as schizophrenic, Raymond Wilfred Sholto Douglas spent most of his life in St Andrew’s Hospital in Northampton, the same hospital where Lucia Joyce was incarcerated.

  Albert Barney’s death

  In October 1902, Natalie’s father, ill with pleurisy, asked her to go with him to Monte Carlo for the sea air. Natalie was ‘too tormented’ over Renée to agree. Renée had met someone new and she wished to break free from Natalie. Their relationship had become one of separations and short-lived reconciliations. Natalie called it ‘defeated love’. But though she praised infidelity as a lifestyle, she was provoked by the jealousy it caused. Because Renée had a new lover, Natalie wanted her back.

  Renée had met Baroness Hélène van Zuylen, poet, racing driver, socialite, daughter of Salomon James de Rothschild, known as La Brioche for the way she coiled her hair. In Souvenirs indiscrets, Natalie described her as a fat, rich, domineering Valkyrie. Renée was in La Brioche’s thrall and after 1902 she dedicated her books to her. They collaborated on works of poetry and prose. Their relationship lasted five years.

  Albert Barney went alone to Monte Carlo with a nurse. Natalie’s concern was to meet with Renée. She heard she was going to Bayreuth with Eva Palmer for Wagner’s Ring Cycle and persuaded Eva to give her her ticket. ‘First our eyes met then our hands in the shadows.’ She implored Renée to agree to another meeting. Renée agreed, but did not show up. ‘One can’t play one’s life over again,’ she wrote. Natalie persisted.

  On 5 December, Natalie was again summoned to Monte Carlo. Her father was dying. She arrived too late. His nurse met her at the station and told her the previous night he had dreamed of Natalie’s wedding and spoken of intending to divorce his wife and cut her out of his will. Natalie observed his dead body but felt no grief. She went alone to his cremation at Père-Lachaise cemetery, then sailed with his ashes to New York to meet up with her mother for funeral ceremonies and estate formalities.

  life without father

  Natalie returned to Paris richer than ever. Her share of her father’s estate was $2,500,000, the money hers to use as she would.5 She was richer than Bryher. She acquired a house in Neuilly and, in homage to Sappho, staged tableaux vivants in the garden. In Cinq petits dialogues grecs (‘Five short Greek dialogues’), she sketched her rules for sapphic love: women were to relinquish ties to family, – husbands, children and country – and instead write, dance, compose and act on their love and desire for each other.

  She and Eva Palmer wrote and produced Equivoque, whic
h extolled Sappho’s life and incorporated her writing. Raymond Duncan, Isadora’s brother, was choreographer, Penelope Sikelianos, his wife, played the harp, Eva, Renée, Colette – who was light-hearted about her lesbian affairs – and others danced in gauze togas around an incense-burning altar. In one tableau, the dancer Mata Hari rode, naked except for a crown, into the garden on a white horse with a bejewelled harness. (She joined the German secret service in 1907 and was executed as a spy by the French in 1917.)

  Natalie Clifford Barney with dancers dressed in togas © Archives Charmet / Bridgeman Images

  Neighbours complained. ‘What do I care if they vilify me or judge me according to their prejudices’ was Natalie’s view of any upset to others caused by her homage to Sappho.

  Eva Palmer’s biographer, Artemis Leontis, described Natalie’s allegiance to and emulation of Sappho and the goings-on in her Neuilly garden:

  Barney’s pavilion with its expansive garden became a gathering place. Women came and went, sometimes crossing paths and sharing in acts of love. Eva watched as Barney made love to others; or she made love while Barney or another woman watched her; or she read what Barney wrote about her other lovers; or she pursued lovers and wrote about them to Barney.

  Eva Palmer aspired to reconstruct the Hellenic ideal and to that end seriously studied the language and culture of ancient Greece. Natalie favoured ‘inspiration independent of technique’. She wrote to Eva:

  I am so glad that I have never carved a statue or painted a picture or produced anything as beautiful as yourself. Life has been your art – you have set yourself to music, your days are your sonnets.

  Natalie’s plans were for the here and now.

  For Colette, Natalie’s tableaux and Sapphic dances were French fun and games rather than Hellenic renaissance. Natalie went to tea with her after the publication of Liane de Pougy’s Idylle Saphique. ‘My husband kisses your hands’, Colette told her after this meeting, ‘and me all the rest.’ With similar light-heartedness, Colette began an affair with Renée, attracted to her superficial charm and style. She revised her view when she saw the dark side of Renée’s soul. They smoked Chinese tobacco together in miniature silver pipes and wrote numerous letters, most of them now gone. ‘Our intimacy did not seem to make any real progress,’ Colette said.

  to Lesbos with Renée

  Natalie’s past lovers were ever present with new ones in the wings. She did not accept being ousted from Renée by La Brioche, the forceful Baroness, née Hélène de Rothschild, the Valkyrie. She wrote Renée a prose poem, Je me souviens:

  Let us forget the days of anger and all that separates your hand from my loving hand… Close your eyes. Let me love you. Go mad with me…

  She implored Renée to accompany her to Lesbos where, as poets, they would live like Sappho. Renée finally acceded and in August 1904 they met in Vienna, took the Orient Express to Constantinople, then an Egyptian steamer, the Khedire, to Lesbos. Natalie, elated, said she was travelling to discover not a place but a person. Renée, as they arrived, stood at dawn at the ship’s prow to behold the island as it emerged from the sea.

  Disaffection was swift. This was not the classical Lesbos of their imaginations: no myrtle groves, hyacinth gardens, lesbians, or Sappho, only rough-looking fishermen and shepherds. They had each other and no one else. They rented two villas joined by an orchard, wrote and translated poems and talked of building a lesbian community on the island where women ‘vibrant with poetry, youth and love would come from all parts of the world’. An elderly woman cooked their food. Renée gave hers to the dogs and subsisted on wine and a few figs. Natalie viewed the island as an Aegean bed in the sun and hinted that for the first time in their affair, Renée reached orgasm. She saw this as a triumph, ‘smothered a cry of victory’, and spoke of their souls and bodies being deeply united.

  Deep unity ended after a month with a letter from La Brioche stipulating a date for meeting Renée in Constantinople. Renée telegrammed confirmation. Were she to refuse, she told Natalie, the Baroness might hire detectives, alert the embassies, abduct her, do anything to get her back. ‘Her power like her fortune has no limit,’ Renée said.

  Colette’s sane eye

  Colette was alone in discerning that Renée’s theatricality was a cover for sickness. Her house in rue Villejust, adjacent to the avenue du Bois where Renée lived, was a walk away across two courtyards. She visited often. Renée, in her lisping English accent, would say, ‘Oh my dear little Colette, how disgusting this life is!’ then burst into laughter. Colette said Renée’s apartment smelled like a rich man’s funeral. When she brought a lamp to brighten the darkness, Renée wept. She tried to open one of the leaded windows, but they were all nailed shut. La Brioche summoned Renée at whim and sent messengers with presents: a collection of ancient Persian coins, a glass cabinet of exotic butterflies, ‘a miniature garden of bushes having leaves of crystal and fruit of precious stones’. Renée referred to her as ‘the master’.

  Colette © Roger Viollet Collection / Getty Images

  Renée, alarmingly thin herself, served to Colette and friends lavish buffets with raw fish rolled on glass wands, foie gras, expensive champagne and lethal cocktails of toxic content:

  Among the beverages that she raised to her lips was a cloudy elixir in which floated a cherry harpooned on a toothpick. I laid a hand on her arm and cautioned her.

  ‘Don’t drink it… I’ve tasted it. It’s deadly… it tastes like some kind of vitriol.’

  … She laughed, flashing her white teeth.

  ‘But these are my own cocktails, ma pethith Coletthe. They are excellent.’

  Colette observed Renée’s disturbed relationship to food, her addiction to drink and drugs and the way she tried to conceal her addiction. In her memoir, The Pure and the Impure, she wrote how ‘the wiliest madwoman’ loses command if ‘through a narrow crack in her sealed universe, she lets a sane eye peer in and profane it’. She observed Renée’s ruse of how to drink to excess. The maid, Justine, was complicit. She sat, ostensibly sewing, in a room by the bathroom. Renée constantly went to her for help with her clothes, the food, some seemingly trivial domestic need. Each time, Justine gave her from under a chair a glass filled with alcohol and drugs, Renée then went to the bathroom, gargled with an ever-renewed glass of perfumed water, and rejoined her guests. Some supposed her to be drinking rosewater.

  Renée’s thinness was from anorexia, her hand tremor from alcoholism, her mood swings from drug addiction. She passed out in mid-conversation, then came to and behaved as if nothing had happened. She talked of physical lovemaking in crude language: how many times and in what way. She was secretive about her work, guarded about her feelings, concealing about her habits. In the middle of dinner she told friends she was summoned, she must go, then burst into tears. There was a carriage waiting. She wrote poetry of melancholy, originality and erudition. After Colette, with her sane eye, had peered into the tragedy of illness and addiction, her relationship to Renée turned to concern.

  Renée’s involvement with the Baroness lasted until 1907. La Brioche then left her for another woman. When Renée died in November 1909 of anorexia and drug and alcohol addiction, she weighed under six stone. She was thirty-one. Natalie heard she was dying and hurried to her house, but arrived too late.

  Eva Palmer leaves for Greece

  Most of Natalie’s lovers left after a time. It was hard for them to feel safe or special enough, given her terms. Her appetite for love was impressive, her transparency refreshing, but the jealousy and insecurity she provoked were as old as the Aegean hills.

  Eva Palmer was the next to go: ‘I have walked after you for years, like a high-heeled woman whose feet hurt but who is too proud to say so,’ she told Natalie by way of valediction. ‘If you care for me let our misery be between ourselves.’

  Eva’s commitment to the culture of ancient Greece was lifelong. As a model for living, she saw Hellenism as superior to the dystopia of the industrial age. Though in thrall
to Natalie as a life force, she did not trust her, could not stay in her orbit and was too serious-minded to accept Natalie’s hedonistic interpretation of Sappho and her lack of interest in social and political affairs.

  In the summer of 1906, Eva left for Greece with Raymond Duncan and his wife, Penelope Sikelianos. They planned to live by the unmechanized ways of the ancient Greeks; to adopt their techniques of spinning, skills in weaving, principles of theatre, ways of making music, poetry and art. Eva Palmer saw in these things a model to emulate, a higher plane of living. Most of all, she wanted to break with Natalie, who was scathing: ‘What you are doing is both sterile and valueless… as a continuous performance of defiance to the passer by I think you worthy of better things.’

  The trio lived in a restored villa outside Athens. Raymond made the furniture. They all wore ancient Greek togas made from yarn spun on their own loom and discouraged people in modern clothes from visiting.

  Eva began a relationship with Penelope’s brother, the poet Angelos Sikelianos. He was twenty-two, ten years her junior. They viewed their relationship as predetermined by fate. He was her Adonis, she was Aphrodite; together they would recreate an ideal time. When Eva told Natalie she was going to marry Angelos, live permanently in Greece and fulfil the Delphic ideal, Natalie tried to dissuade her.

  Eva’s abiding desire for Natalie was clear in her letters – ‘Oh hands that I have loved, eyes that I have followed, hair that I have sobbed to touch’ – but she was tired of her ‘intrigues and passions’. In the summer of 1907 she travelled back to Paris with the Duncans and Angelos to see if they and Natalie might all be friends. She put on ‘proper clothes’ before the meeting. Natalie showed Angelos a letter in which Eva had declared undying and passionate love for her. Angelos thought Eva to be still in love with Natalie.