No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  perverse, dissolute, self-centred, unfair, stubborn, sometimes miserly, often play-acting, irritating most of the time, a monster – but a true revolutionary who inspires others to rebel.

  Djuna Barnes and Ladies Almanack

  Djuna Barnes wrote Ladies Almanack at Natalie’s suggestion in the year Orlando was published and The Well banned. Organized according to the months of the year and illustrated with twenty-two pen and ink drawings, it was a bawdy satire on lesbians in Natalie’s circle.

  Djuna Barnes © Oscar White / Getty Images

  In 1917, in ‘The Mark on the Wall’, Virginia Woolf wrote of how Whitaker’s Almanack encapsulated patriarchal rule. Published annually in the United Kingdom from 1868, it was a trove of data, facts and figures about governments, rulers, kings and occasions.

  Djuna Barnes’s Almanack was designed as a manual for lesbians who ‘discard Duster, Offspring and Spouse’. Constructed like a medieval calendar with monthly entries and zodiac signs that corresponded to some aspect of desire – the ‘twining thigh’, the ‘seeking arm’, the language was a mix of flowery Elizabethan and colloquial English with much use of capital letters, neologisms, cryptic allusions and filthy jokes. It was irreligious and subversive, a raucous lampoon, hilarious to those who knew the references.

  Natalie, the central character, was Dame Evangeline Musset, a lesbian pope, whose desires were infinite and bed never empty. (Colette’s lover, Missy, had termed Natalie ‘the Pope of Lesbos’.) Dolly Wilde featured as Doll Furious or Doll on her Arm, or ‘my great big beautiful bedridden Doll’.

  ‘And’ said Dame Musset, rising in Bed, ‘that’s all

  there is and there is no more.’

  ‘But oh!’ cried Doll.

  ‘Down Woman,’ said Dame Musset in her friendliest,

  ‘there may be a mustard seed!’

  ‘A grain, a grain!’ lamented Doll.

  Janet Flanner and Solita Solano were Nip and Tuck, journalists hampered by censorship restrictions. Nip cannot publish anything about Dame Musset and her minions. Una Troubridge was Lady Buck-and-Balk, who sported a monocle and communicated with spirits. Radclyffe Hall was Tilly Tweed-in-Blood who ‘sported a Stetson and believed in Marriage’ but only between women. ‘One was to be a wife the other a bride.’ Mimi Franchetti was Señorita Fly-About. Lily de Gramont was the Duchesse Clitoressa of Natescourt who often ‘took tea’ with the Dame. Romaine, Dame Musset’s final choice in love, was Cynic Sal who wore a top hat, cracked a sharp whip and ‘never once descended the Driver’s seat to put her Head within’.

  When Dame Musset died aged ninety-nine, forty women shaved their heads, carried her corpse through the streets of Paris and laid her on a funeral pyre. She burned to ash except for her tongue: ‘it flamed and would not suffer Ash and it played about…’. Her acolytes sat on this tongue and ‘from under their Skirts a slow Smoke issued’. They put the tongue in an urn on an altar in Dame Musset’s temple of love, ‘where it flickers to this day’.

  Ladies Almanack, financed by Bryher, published by Contact Editions and printed in Dijon by Darantiere Press, had no expectation of general release. One thousand and fifty copies were circulated among friends and acquaintances. Djuna hand-coloured the illustrations in forty copies. She feared confiscation by the postal service if she had page proofs delivered to her address, so she asked Sylvia Beach to take them at Shakespeare and Company. Sylvia refused. She foresaw trouble with the authorities even beyond the sort she got into when she published Ulysses in 1922.

  Djuna managed to smuggle some copies into America:

  Sold all 50 Almanacks I brought in with me… and can sell 100 at $5 when they arrive if they get through the post. These problems are quite tame in comparison to the difficulties experienced by Hall in getting the Well published and distributed.

  Natalie and her salon attendees knew each other, painted each other, wrote about each other, slept with each other. Theirs was a microcosm, a world within a world. They devised their own almanack, found their own way of being true to themselves.

  For three decades, Natalie’s salon was the sapphic centre of the Western world, beyond interference from the patriarchs of England and America, the fathers, dictators, legislators with their stately homes, swathes of land and titles and honours conferred: the Home Secretary, the Lord Chief Justice, the Secretary General, the Director of Public Prosecutions, the Attorney General, the Supreme Court, protectors of the status quo as laid down by their forefathers, with their sense of entitlement, for whom women had no rights beyond those they deigned to confer, for whom wives were servants and daughters possessions, and for whom the word ‘lesbian’ was on a par with ‘pervert’ because women’s bodies belonged to men.

  In 1940, one power branch of patriarchy – militaristic, fascistic – destroyed Natalie’s particular kingdom of women, broke it apart and made them run for cover. Nor, in Paris, did they reconvene.

  death of Natalie

  Natalie stayed true to the main business of her life. In February 1956, aged eighty, she travelled to Nice to visit Romaine, but took rooms at the Hôtel d’Angleterre so as not to disturb her. They lunched together each day, but for the rest of the time Romaine wanted to be alone. ‘My angel’s weary look made me very remorseful,’ Natalie said. One afternoon in wintry sunshine, sitting on a bench in the Promenade des Anglais, she struck up a conversation with Janine Lahovary, who was Swiss, fifty-six, stylish and in a joyless marriage.

  Madame Lahovary knew of Natalie’s reputation. She described their ensuing relationship as a mental liberation and a resurrection. ‘Natalie Barney has a new love affair. Isn’t it wonderful?’ Alice B. Toklas wrote to a friend. ‘She’s the one bright spot in a fairly cheerless world.’ Romaine’s response to Natalie’s news was cool: ‘A love affair can cause trouble at our age, so do be careful,’ she wrote.

  Natalie reassured Romaine she was ‘as ever the nearest and dearest to my heart’. But Madame Lahovary wanted to be with her and Natalie was a pragmatist. She viewed an available lesser love as preferable to an empty bed. When Monsieur Lahovary asked Natalie to leave his wife alone, she asked him to leave his wife alone, too. After he died Janine moved from Switzerland to live with Natalie in Paris. She cooked for her and looked after her; when Natalie had a cold, Janine put cologne on cotton wool for her to sniff. To Romaine, Natalie described herself as quiet, well-fed and often bored. ‘Even at night, each time I awake, you are my greatest preoccupation and greatest love’, she wrote to her as late as May 1964.

  Natalie outlived her other lovers. She was ninety-six when she died on Wednesday, 1 February 1972 in Janine Lahovary’s arms. Two days later, she was buried near Renée Vivien in the cemetery at Passy. A photograph of Romaine was interred with her. Twenty people gathered for this, the last of her Fridays. One of them commented that Natalie would not have chosen to be among them. ‘She never went to a funeral in her life.’

  ‘We do not touch life except with our hearts,’ was Natalie’s view. Reaching out for love, was her life’s work. ‘It is not the love I receive, but the love I feel that matters,’ she had written when young. Her life was her work of art: defiant, questing. Her concern was the open expression of lesbian identity. ‘I am a lesbian. One need not hide it, nor boast of it, though being other than normal is a perilous advantage.’ Natalie dared openly to break the rules of patriarchy. She gave courage to others to be true to themselves. And yet she knew how elusive her quest for intimacy was. Of Romaine she said, ‘I belonged to everyone, she belonged to no one; we considered ourselves quite different, and yet in our loneliness we were alike.’

  1 Lytton Strachey was her brother.

  2 Natalie inherited this rug and kept it in her bedroom for most of her life.

  3 Violet died of typhoid fever in 1901.

  4 Now the Victoria & Albert Museum (the V&A).

  5 Equivalent to about $75 million in 2020.

  6 A patisserie on the rue de Rivoli with gilded mouldings, marble tables and frescoed walls.r />
  7 Berthe came from Bourgogne and for 40 years was Natalie’s librarian, manager, receptionist, nurse and cook.

  8 Edward Elgar wrote the song cycle Sea Pictures for her.

  9 ‘Voulez-vous savoir le grand drame de ma vie? C’est que j’ai mis mon génie dans ma vie; je n’ai mis que mon talent dans mes œuvres.’

  GERTRUDE STEIN

  ‘Pigeons on the grass alas.

  Pigeons on the grass alas…

  If they were not pigeons on the grass alas

  what were they.’

  Gertrude Stein © Hulton Archive / Stringer / Getty Images

  Gertrude Stein and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, were at the cultural heart of Paris for four decades. Intrinsic to the modernist movement, an indomitable duo, photographed by Man Ray, painted by Picasso, featured in memoirs, they were a sight to be seen.

  ‘The two things you never asked Gertrude, ever’, the composer Virgil Thomson said, ‘were about her being a lesbian and what her writing meant.’ Gertrude was terse on both subjects. About being lesbian she said: ‘I like all the people who produce and Alice does too and what they do in bed is their own business and what we do is not theirs.’ She was equally laconic about her writing. ‘Twentieth-century literature is Gertrude Stein,’ she said without irony. After a public reading of an unfathomable piece of her prose, an audience member asked her why she did not write the way she spoke, for she was direct and down-to-earth in conversation. ‘Why don’t you read the way I write?’ was her reply.

  She was large, though not in height. In portraits and photographs her eyes look thoughtful, her face strong. In bulk and stillness she was like a Buddha. Her handshake was warm, her laugh infectious and her hair brown. She liked loose comfortable clothes with deep pockets and she wore sandals over her socks in winter, made for her by Raymond Duncan, dancer, philhellene and brother to Isadora. Comfort dictated what she wore, but she cared about the quality of the silk of her shirts, the provenance of the brooch at her throat, the way her neck scarf was tied. Above all, she was comfortable with herself. People valued her friendship and opinion and had a good time in her company. As with Natalie, she thought living was the first of all the arts but whereas for Natalie that meant lots of lovers, for Gertrude living meant the uxorious company of her partner and home builder, Alice B. Toklas.

  Alice was under five feet tall and her legs dangled when she sat. She had grey eyes, dark hair and a moustache, which the editor of House Beautiful said made other faces look naked by comparison. Her senses of smell and taste were acute, though she was a heavy smoker. She took great care of her hands and nails, which she massaged and manicured daily, and she always carried both her own and Gertrude’s bags and umbrellas, or sat in the less comfortable chair, or walked behind Gertrude. But she fostered this image of the self-effacing handmaiden and it belied her forceful role in their relationship.

  Gertrude Stein with Alice B. Toklas and their dog Basket © Bettmann / Getty Images

  Gertrude achieved her status as notable lesbian and architect of modernism without seeming to expend effort. ‘To try is to die,’ she said. Though above all she championed her own work, she furthered a galaxy of careers. Before they were famous, and for not much money, she bought the work of and praised Matisse, Picasso, Cézanne and other artists whom the establishment decried as ‘wild beasts’. She guided and encouraged Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Paul Bowles early in their careers.

  In Gertrude’s view, she just happened to be a genius. ‘Think of the Bible and Homer think of Shakespeare and think of me,’ she advised. That was how things were, like oak trees were programmed to be oak trees and rivers ran down to the sea. She lived as she chose and thought others should do so too. The bones of her lesbian love life were that as a student at Johns Hopkins University in 1900 she had an unhappy triangular affair with May Bookstaver, a graduate student, and that in Paris in 1906 she met her partner for life, Alice B. Toklas. ‘Little Alice B. is the wife for me,’ she wrote. These were not topics for gossip, theory or censure. They were how it was and who she was. If others objected or took offence, that was their problem. Gertrude held libertarian views and was of a generous nature, but she was too comfort-loving and individualistic to struggle for a cause. Living happily with Alice, eating long lunches, talking with friends, walking the dog, driving the car, writing her modernist prose and being a genius took her time. She championed ordinary, homey living: ‘I have it, this interest in ordinary middle class existence’, she wrote in her autobiographical modernist magnum opus, The Making of Americans:

  in simple firm ordinary middle class traditions, in sordid material unaspiring visions, in a repeating, common, decent enough kind of living, with no kind of fancy ways inside us, no excitements to surprise us, no new ways of being bad or good to win us.

  She was born in 1874 and died in 1946: in that span of time she lived through political upheaval and the slaughter of a billion people in two world wars. This turbulence and carnage was, she averred, a product of patriarchy:

  father Mussolini and father Hitler and father Roosevelt and father Stalin and father Lewis and father Blum and father France… There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it, fathers are depressing.

  Gertrude was not answerable to any father, from God down. She was true to herself, pursued her own ambition and kept to her own theory of obligation and personal value judgements. Freedom of thought and expression defined her. To be lesbian was to differ from the mainstream, slough off the directives of fathers and depart from nineteenth-century thinking, but in her lifestyle, apart from her and Alice both being women, she did not want to change the recognized values of harmonious married life. It was in art and literature that she departed from patriarchal ideas, dogmas and past conventions of style and content, left behind old ways of seeing and saying, forged new ways of expression and took credit as the mother and father of modernism.

  She resented the attention given to James Joyce’s Ulysses and cancelled her subscription to the Shakespeare and Company lending library when Sylvia Beach published it. She viewed Joyce as her rival and said he smelled of museums and that was why he and not she was accepted. ‘You see it is the people who generally smell of the museums who are accepted and it is the new who are not accepted.’ They only met once, at a party given by the American sculptor Jo Davidson, who did a sculpture of Gertrude. Sylvia Beach introduced them. Gertrude said to Joyce, ‘After all these years.’ Joyce said, ‘Yes, and our names always linked together.’ Gertrude said, ‘We live in the same arrondissement.’ And with that their one and only exchange ended.

  Gertrude’s parents

  In her writing, the bones of biography, what happened when and where, did not concern Gertrude. She was laconic about her early years:

  I guess you know my life history well enough – that I was in Vienna from six months of age to four years, that I was in Paris from four years of age to five, that I was in California from six years of age to seventeen and that I was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania.

  That was as empirically revealing as Gertrude felt she needed to be. Her concern was with philosophical and psychological concepts: existence, identity, descriptions of fundamental aspects of human nature: ‘bottom nature’, she called it.

  The Steins were German-Jewish immigrants for whom English was a second language. For the first four years of her life Gertrude heard ‘Austrian German and French French’ then, when she was five, ‘American English’. ‘Our little Gertie is a little schnatterer,’ her Hungarian governess wrote in 1895:

  She talks all day long and so plainly. She outdoes them all. She’s such a round little pudding, toddles around the whole day and repeats everything that is said or done.

  Repeating everything figured in Gertrude’s adult writing too. Her detractors ridiculed the extent of it. ‘The hymn of repetition,’ she called it. It became her stylistic stamp:

  She had sound coming out of her. She was knowing that thing. She h
ad had sound coming out of her she was knowing that thing. He had had sound coming out of him she was knowing that thing. He had sound coming out of him she was knowing this thing…

  was immediately recognizable as Gertrude’s inimitable or imitable innovative prose. But her father, Daniel Stein’s, discursive letters, scornful of syntax, grammar or punctuation and eliding into a rambling outpouring, perhaps found echo in her own modernist, unbridled style. And her youngest brother, Simon, whom she described as simple minded, did seem to suffer from some sort of echolalia – a prolix rambling that Gertrude’s critics thought infused her writing too.

  Daniel Stein and his four brothers dealt in imported textiles. They prospered but quarrelled. Gertrude said her father ‘liked to buy things and have big undertakings’. He was uncertain whether to live in Maryland, Pennsylvania, California or Europe. He had little brown eyes, ‘sharp and piercing and sometimes dancing with laughing and often angry with irritation’. He had rapid mood swings and could be terrifying – he would pound the table, say he was the father, they were his children, they must obey him or he would know how to make them. They were afraid of and confused by him and never knew when playfulness would change to an outburst and how far that would go. In the street he muttered to himself, swept the air with his stick and held forth about the weather or the fruit and made them feel embarrassed. ‘Come on papa, all those people are looking,’ they would say. He took cake or fruit from street stalls and gave it to them, leaving them uncertain whether he would pay the vendor. Sometimes he forgot about Gertrude and her brother Leo if he was with them. He dragooned his children into card games then, after a few minutes, got impatient and told the governess to take over because he hadn’t time to go on playing. Then he left them with a game none of them was interested in or would have thought of beginning and nor could they abandon it because he would keep coming in to see who was winning.