No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  Among Renata Borgatti’s other affairs on Capri was the writer and memoirist Faith Compton Mackenzie, whose husband, Compton Mackenzie, wrote a satirical and antipathetic roman à clef, Extraordinary Women, about lesbians on the island. And another of the ‘inner goddess’s’ affairs on Capri was with Luisa Casati, dubbed the patron saint of exhibitionists, who bought diamond collars for her pet cheetahs, dyed her hair flame red, gave extravagant parties and accrued debts of $25 million. Romaine painted her portrait too, as did Giovanni Boldini and Augustus John. Jacob Epstein sculpted her and she was photographed by Man Ray, Cecil Beaton and Adolph de Meyer. In 1932 her possessions were seized and sold to appease her creditors. After Romaine, she linked up with the Princesse de Polignac.

  Partners changed in a game of musical chairs – or beds. There was no rule book for lesbians, no guide except perhaps gleanings from Sappho. They were outsiders. There was no family help, guidance or approval and there was something spoiling and irrelevant about the sexological notions and pathologizing of Freud, Krafft-Ebing, and Havelock Ellis.

  the well of awfulness

  After 1927, men rarely attended Natalie’s hazardous Fridays. Natalie then termed the gatherings the Académie des Femmes, a snook at the all-male Académie Française, which barred women. She sponsored a prize for women writers, encouraged and helped finance individual projects and forged connections for writers with publishers.

  Attendees read from their work. There was a packed audience on the afternoon Radclyffe Hall read from her gloomy sapphic Well of Loneliness. In London in 1928, ten years after the censoring of Ulysses, it was condemned as obscene by a kangaroo court in an outcome-driven trial where no defence was allowed, then ‘burned in the King’s furnace’. In Paris, Sylvia Beach sold pirated copies in Shakespeare and Company.

  England’s ruling class, the lawmakers and law enforcers, all aristocrats and members of the men-only Garrick Club, censored the book solely because of its lesbian theme. The Attorney General, Sir Thomas Inskip, held the book at arm’s length as he gave the court’s verdict. He had, he said, no idea whether the book had any literary qualities; it must be destroyed because its subject matter was obscene. It would corrupt the young and ‘suggest thoughts of a most impure, immoral, unclean and libidinous character’ to them. The practice in which its heroine indulged was referred to in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans and in the second satire of Juvenal. (He read Classics at Cambridge.) It glorified the vice of physical relations between women. It asked for toleration of the people who indulged this vice. It was:

  propaganda for the practice which has long been known as Lesbianism, a well-known vice, unnatural, destructive of the moral and physical fibre of the passive persons who indulge in it, who are the victims of others, this book is a plea for the active persons who practice this vice… it is corrupting and obscene and its publication is a misdemeanour.

  The subject was off limits. Radclyffe Hall became a martyr and lesbian icon. Her Well of Loneliness, dubbed ‘The Bible of Lesbianism’, stood alone. Natalie was joyful about lesbian desire. Radclyffe Hall’s tortured and quasi-religious references to sex were, as Colette said, ‘terribly adolescent’. Janet Flanner, in her Paris letter for The New Yorker, called it an innocent and confused book that should have paved the way for better novels about lesbian love. Virginia Woolf said it was so dull any indecency might be lurking in it – she could not keep her eyes on the page. As a literary or psychological study, The Well received scant praise and much derision. ‘The Sink of Solitude’ was the title of one spoof. But the prurient scandal stirred by censorship meant millions of pirated copies were sold.

  Radclyffe Hall’s courage in speaking out was commendable, but her lack of wit, wisdom, irony, style, oomph and fun made her book a sorry candidate for lesbian literary accolade. Homosexual men had Oscar Wilde to cherish, grieve for and admire. Lesbians had Radclyffe Hall, who, in deference to Havelock Ellis, called herself a congenital sexual invert with ‘terrible nerves’.

  Her clothes were tailored, her demeanour patrician. She was everywhere accompanied by her partner, Una, Lady Troubridge, who called her John and revered her – until John fell for Eugenia Souline, ‘Chinkie Pig’, a Russian nurse, then all hell broke loose. At Radclyffe Hall’s salon afternoon in 1929 at Natalie’s, crowds of lesbians were eager to meet her. Janet Flanner was there. She described her as a strange but impressive looking woman, short of stature, with a disproportionately large head and perfect haircut. ‘Her hands and feet were also large as were the beautiful sapphires which she wore, one as a finger ring and one each as a cufflink.’

  the sapphic centre of the western world

  Natalie championed the way for lesbians who wanted more fun than down the gloomy Well. Many of her guests had been, were or would be her lovers. These lovers should have had a calligram to themselves: the Hellenist Evalina Palmer, the courtesan Liane de Pougy, the poets Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Renée Vivien and Olive Custance, the writers Lily de Gramont, Colette and Djuna Barnes, the portrait painter Romaine Brooks, the patron and socialite Nancy Cunard, Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux, an American fresco painter, artist and writer, who lived next door in rue Jacob and became intrigued by the visitors to Natalie’s temple. Year on year, the list grew longer.

  Dolly Wilde

  Oscar Wilde said to André Gide: ‘Do you want to know the great drama of my life? It’s that I’ve put my genius into my life; I’ve put only my talent into my work.’9 Natalie echoed this sentiment. From childhood she had a passion for Oscar and the theatre of his life.

  Dolly Wilde © Joan Schenkar

  Oscar’s niece, Dolly Wilde, lived in the shadow of her uncle. Born in 1895, the year he was imprisoned, she looked like him ‘except that she was handsome’, Janet Flanner said. Oscar’s homosexuality, glittering career and downfall informed Dolly’s own sense of self. The difference was that his genius triumphed over his downfall. Dolly’s personal connection to him was slight: from prison he sent her mother, his brother Willie’s second wife, £50 to pay for her birth. That was the extent of his concern for her. Nonetheless, she described herself as ‘more Oscar-like than he was like himself’.

  Dolly arrived at Natalie’s salon on 28 June 1927. She was thirty-one, Natalie fifty. The Oscar connection made seduction de rigueur. Natalie described Dolly as ‘half androgyne and half goddess’. ‘No one’s presence could be as present as Dolly’s.’ They began a love affair that lasted, on and off, for fourteen years, until Dolly’s death.

  Like Natalie, Dolly wanted to live her life as a work of art, but she had nothing of Natalie’s toughness or self-regard. Nor did she have a private income. She wanted to write. She earned occasional money translating work by Colette, Nancy Cunard and Lily de Gramont from French to English, but not enough to fund her lifestyle. She ran up bills at the Paris Ritz and hoped someone else would settle them, squatted in borrowed flats, left letters unanswered and Sylvia Beach’s library books unreturned. She was always late. She drove too fast in borrowed cars and moved from alcohol to heroin addiction.

  Joe Carstairs

  In the First World War, she lived in Montparnasse with Marion ‘Joe’ Carstairs. They both then drove ambulances at the front for the American Red Cross. Joe Carstairs was tattooed with stars, smoked cigars, had affairs with Marlene Dietrich, Gwen Farrar, Tallulah Bankhead and others, and apparently could ‘dance a Charleston which few people can partner’. Via her American mother and the Standard Oil Company, she inherited a fortune. She was not sure who her father was.

  After the war she started a London chauffeur service using all women drivers, bought a speedboat and became ‘the fastest woman on water’. In 1933, with mere thousands of the millions of dollars of her inherited money, she bought the Caribbean island of Whale Cay. ‘I am going to live surrounded only by coloured people,’ she told the press. She built a Great House for herself and her lovers, cottages for her workers, a dock, a school, a church, a fish cannery and a general store. She made laws: adultery
and alcohol were banned and miscreants punished by her private militia, who wore uniforms and wielded machetes. She was more than a little mad.

  Janet Flanner

  Janet Flanner was briefly one of Dolly’s lovers. She arrived in Paris in 1922, aged thirty and in love with the actress and writer Solita Solano. She had left the husband whom she had married to extricate herself from her family home in Indianapolis. For a year, she and Solita – born Sarah Wilkinson in Troy, in New York – absorbed the culture of Europe, travelling to Athens, the Greek islands, Constantinople, Rome, Florence, Vienna, Dresden, Berlin. In New York they were part of the literary and theatrical set, the Algonquin Round Table, who met for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street. Dorothy Parker was a member.

  Janet Flanner © Bridgeman Art Library

  In Paris, they wanted to live together openly, ‘begin anew’. Like-minded lesbians were already in the city: Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein, Natalie, Djuna Barnes. ‘I wanted Beauty with a capital B,’ Janet Flanner said. They rented rooms on the fourth floor of the Hôtel Saint-Germain-des-Prés at 36 rue Bonaparte in the 6th arrondissement for a dollar a day including heating. The charms of the place, Solita said, were not in its amenities. They rose at eight, had brioche and coffee for breakfast, ate lunch in a nearby bistro, La Quatrième République, wrote in the afternoons and early evenings, then met with Natalie Barney, Sylvia Beach and the ‘accents we hoped to leave behind’. Twice a week they took French lessons. Janet wrote an autobiographical novel, The Cubical City, lesbian poetry in the style of Sappho and articles for newspapers and magazines. In 1925 she became Genêt of The New Yorker with her fortnightly ‘Letter from Paris’.

  She compared Dolly to someone from a novel:

  On the street, walking, or at a Paris restaurant talking… she seemed like someone one had become familiar with by reading, rather than by knowing.

  Dolly had, she said, ‘a floral quality which was the bloom of her charm’. This charm was enhanced by Dolly’s drug habit. After shooting up heroin or snorting cocaine, she ‘scintillated with epigrams’ that no one could remember. She mixed with the Jean Cocteau set and scored her drugs from the marchands de paradis in the restaurants and bars off the Champs Élysées. Her father, like Natalie’s, had been alcoholic.

  the rat was Dolly

  Within weeks of beginning a relationship with Natalie, Dolly wrote of feeling tortured, of ‘struggling to get her hand out of the trap’. Her letters were desperate:

  Do you love me? I wonder! Not that it matters at all. Perhaps I shan’t even mind when you leave me – only then there could be no love making – impossible thought… Who will flee first? Just now I am too in love with you to dream of change… Did you know that it was nearly four o’clock when I left you last night? I ache with tiredness and darling I am bruised. Toujours. D

  Once again, Natalie had started up a ‘liaison’ with a self-destructive young woman who was provoked by her infidelity and composure. Dolly beseeched Natalie not to leave her, not to stop loving her. ‘You overshadowed me like a great mountain that at once uplifted me and awed me.’

  Her love for Natalie, she wrote, ‘shattered the fortress’ of her self-sufficiency:

  You have held so many hands, so many waists, written so many love letters.

  Always wonderful Natalie, I miss you every night with fierce discomfort…

  Darling Natalie, don’t shake me off. Don’t stop loving me. You are the only serious thing in my life emotionally.

  Natalie stored these letters in a wooden box. Dolly was not the only serious thing in her life emotionally. Always present were Romaine, Lily de Gramont, the marriage contract in a drawer, the liaisons and affairs.

  In 1933 Romaine gave Natalie a warning. She said she had ‘suffered it to pass’ as merely unpleasant while Natalie had ‘a not unfriendly tribe of second-rate young women’, but Dolly Wilde was too much. Romaine called Natalie weak and governed by vanity. ‘Your life at present is infested by rats, & one of these rats is gnawing at the very foundation of our friendship.’

  That rat was Dolly. Unless Natalie got rid of her, she would leave. ‘R might as well insist on your killing me as not to see you’ was Dolly’s response when Natalie told her of this.

  Dolly was a liaison, and Natalie was not going to sacrifice a relationship for her. As with Renée Vivien, heroin and drug addiction dictated Dolly’s demise. She tried cures, detoxifications, psychoanalysis, but always lapsed. She several times overdosed and slashed her wrists in suicide attempts. Natalie sent silk pyjamas and money. ‘Romaine and Lily are the only people you give spiritually to… to the others you give material gifts,’ Dolly told her.

  In 1938, when she was forty-three, Dolly was diagnosed with breast cancer. She refused surgery. On 21 July 1939 the manager of the Hôtel Montalembert in Paris wrote to Natalie:

  I am told by friends of Miss Wilde that you are the person with the most influence over her. She is drinking so much that delirium tremens will follow and probably suicide. Also she emits piercing cries all night, alternating with groans which disturb her neighbours. I would be infinitely grateful if you could remove her to a sanatorium.

  Dolly killed herself the following April with heroin and paraldehyde in a rented room in London. Ten years after her death, Natalie paid privately to publish In Memory of Dorothy Ierne Wilde: Oscaria. Printed by Darantiere Press, on the frontispiece was a photo of Dolly dressed as Oscar. It was an anthology of tributes: Janet Flanner called Dolly ‘utterly singular and unique’. She had, she said, ‘as many versions of herself, all as slightly different, as could have been seen in views of her supplied by a room lined with mirrors.’ Gertrude Stein said, ‘Well she certainly hadn’t a fair run for her money.’ Lily de Gramont wrote of her Irish beauty and social gift and ‘extraordinary verbal gift inherited from her famous uncle’. She died, she said, ‘encore jeune, encore belle, encore avide’ – still young, still beautiful, still eager. Natalie threaded her way among these tributes, pulling them together, much as she did with the guests at her salon.

  the wide literary lesbian web

  Natalie helped make Paris the sapphic centre of the Western world. Beyond a carousel of changing partners was the need for self-expression, a yearning for love, and a determination to be free. Tolstoy’s view in Anna Karenina that if there are as many minds as there are people, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts, resonated for lesbians who made their way to Paris. Expression of their love and interaction was disallowed in law. And so they wrote about themselves and each other, for themselves and each other. Their novels, poems and stories became a coded conversation.

  Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis together wrote a novel about their love affair. They variously gave it the title ‘Rebellion’, ‘Endeavour’ and ‘Challenge’. Conformity won the day. Vita’s mother, Lady Sackville, fearful of gossip, paid off the printer’s costs and had the plates destroyed. ‘If VT was a man I could understand,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘But for a woman, such a love beats me.’ ‘I hope Mama is pleased’, was Vita’s response, ‘she has beaten me.’

  ‘These Sapphists love women; friendship is never untinged with amorosity,’ Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary in December 1925. She did not view herself as one of ‘these Sapphists’. She described herself as ‘sexually cowardly’, and with ‘a terror of real life’. Her novel Orlando was her gift to Vita, with whom she was, in her way, in love. No scandal attached to it. Virginia Woolf wrote with a literary eloquence that defied censorship, though her inspiration was androgyny, lesbian love and the elopement of Vita with Violet. The book was published to critical acclaim in September 1928 and was in its third edition by December.

  Retaliation came from Violet, banished to Paris and forced by her mother into a sham marriage. She was depicted in Orlando as the evil fox for whom English was ‘too frank and candid a tongue’. Her reprisal, Broderie anglaise, was a roman à clef in French that was candid, frank and scathing. Broderie anglaise, a kin
d of English needlework that decorates holes, became her metaphor for the hypocrisy of her mother, Vita and Virginia. Virginia was portrayed as Alexa, ‘an old maid’, ‘incomplete as a woman’, her bed ‘so small and shy’ you can scarcely find it in the bedroom. Her hair was thin (Vita often talked of Violet’s ‘truly beautiful hair’). Everything about Alexa was cerebral: she had beautiful hands but was too thin, uninterested in food, wore dowdy clothes, was ‘very Oxford’. A fifteenth-century Flemish painter would, Violet wrote, have ‘portrayed her with a caged goldfinch and a carnation spotted with dew’.

  Publication of Orlando coincided with the censorship for obscenity of Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness. Virginia Woolf offered to testify in court in defence of The Well, though she thought it a ‘meritorious dull book’ and was relieved not to be called. Radclyffe Hall viewed her own sexual orientation as tragic. She called herself and Stephen Gordon, the hero of her book, ‘congenital sexual inverts’, using Havelock Ellis’s terminology. His textbooks about such matters were also censored.

  Natalie figured in The Well as Valérie Seymour, ‘a kind of lighthouse in a storm-swept ocean’ who in Paris gave courage to her dismal sisters in their tragedy of inversion.

  Natalie as a real or fictional lesbian appeared in many of the poems, novels and memoirs of her friends and lovers: Liane de Pougy’s Idylle Saphique, the poetry of Renée Vivien and Olive Custance, the landmark Well of Loneliness. Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, in her novel L’Ange et les Pervers (‘The Angel and the Perverts’, portrayed her as a wealthy manipulative lesbian who lived for seduction: