No Modernism Without Lesbians

Throw over your man

‘The world has always had lovers. And yet as near as I can observe, for thousands of years the concentrated aim of society has been to cut down on kissing. With that same amount of energy […] society could have stopped war, established liberty, given everybody a free education, free bathtubs, free music, free pianos and changed the human mind to boot.’ Janet Flanner

In the decades before the Second World War, many creative women who loved women fled the repressions and expectations of their home towns, such as Washington and London, and formed a like-minded community in Paris. They wrote and published what they wanted, lived as they chose and were at the vanguard of modernism, the shift into twentieth-century ways of seeing and saying.I focus on the lives and contribution of Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein – three were American, one was English. All rebelled against outworn art and attitudes. Sylvia Beach started the bookshop Shakespeare and Company and published James Joyce’s Ulysses when no commercial publisher could or would. Bryher, born Winifred Ellerman, daughter of the richest man in England, used her inheritance to fund new writing and film. Natalie Barney aspired to live her life as a work of art and make Paris the sapphic centre of the Western world. Gertrude Stein furthered the careers of modernist painters and writers and broke the mould of English prose. All had women lovers whom they kissed, and they changed the human mind to boot.

Within each of their stories, other women figure large: where would Sylvia Beach be without Adrienne Monnier, Bryher without the imagist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Natalie Barney without all her lovers, too many to list, or Gertrude Stein without Alice B. Toklas (‘little Alice B. is the wife for me’). And then there were the women friends of the women friends, and the women they kissed too…

They gravitated to Paris and each other, turned their backs on patriarchy and created their own society. Rather than staying where they were born and struggling against censorship and outrageous denials and inequalities enforced by male legislators, they took their own power and authority and defied the stigma that conservative society tried to impose on them. Individually, each made a contribution; collectively, they were a revolutionary force in the breakaway movement of modernism, the shock of the new, the innovations in art, writing, film and lifestyle and the fracture from nineteenth-century orthodoxies.

In 1947 the novelist Truman Capote went to Romaine Brooks’s studio in Paris with Natalie Barney. Natalie’s relationship with Romaine lasted fifty-four years, until Romaine’s death in 1970. Romaine painted many of the lesbians in their set; the portraits were large scale and lined the walls of her studio. Capote called the collection ‘the all-time ultimate gallery of famous dykes’. They formed, he said, ‘an international daisy-chain’.

I call them all lesbians, but the words lesbian, dyke and daisy were not much used by them. ‘Friend’ was the usual catch-all, though Natalie Barney nailed her colours: ‘I am a lesbian. One need not hide it nor boast of it, though being other than normal is a perilous advantage.’ She drew up and signed a bespoke marriage contract with one of her partners, Lily de Gramont, duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre. Its terms would not have been countenanced in her home town of Washington or by the French aristocracy. Gertrude Stein freely called Alice her wife, and Bryher, who chose her own gender-neutral name, viewed herself from an early age as a boy trapped in the body of a girl.

I duck the initialism of the present age: the LGBTQIA, the QUILTBAG (queer or questioning, undecided, intersex, lesbian, trans, bisexual, asexual or allied, gay or genderqueer) plus the +. Added recently are P and K: P for pansexual or polygamous and K for kink. And now there is prescriptive use of the pronoun ‘they’ for a person resistant to he or she. I favour H.D.’s revision: ‘When is a woman not a woman? When obviously she is sleet and hail and a stuffed sea-gull.’ But in French, sleet is masculine and seagull feminine, so where to draw a line?

There are but twenty-six letters in the Roman alphabet and life is short. Gertrude Stein said of her large white poodle, Basket, that of his ABCs he knew only the Bs – Basket, Bread and Ball. With canine simplicity, of my LGBs I use only the Ls – Lesbians and Love. This is not to disrespect all efforts of inclusiveness and search for identity and self-expression. I want a place in the rainbow. But I am a tyro in this language class and when writing of past times, today’s language seems incongruous. I cannot talk about cisgender for Virginia Woolf, call Bryher they, or struggle with No Modernism Without QUILTBAG+. And all the initials in the alphabet will not help in what I hope shines through: the uniqueness, the utter singularity of each individual life. I juxtapose four women within the lesbian category. Their juxtaposition shows the inadequacy of any label. I marvel at how different, original and irreplaceable each one is, formed by their childhood, their nature and nurture, imaginative in their contribution, unique in who they happen to be. Lining them up highlights their differences. For, of course, what matters from A to Z is not what you are, but how you are what you are, and the contribution made.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, censorship laws in Britain and America prevented lesbians from publishing anything in fiction or fact about their love lives. The subject matter was deemed obscene. Sex between consenting men was a criminal act. The 1895 trial and ruin of Oscar Wilde hung in the air of English society. Sex between consenting women was not illegal. Silence was the weapon of its repression.

In 1920, Violet Trefusis and Vita Sackville-West caused a furore when they eloped to France and their respective husbands piloted a plane to bring them back. The following year, a Conservative member of parliament, Frederick Macquisten, a minister’s son, proposed that a clause ‘Acts of Gross Indecency Between Female Persons’ be added to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which indicted Oscar Wilde. Lesbianism, he told the House of Commons, threatened the birth rate, debauched young girls and induced neurasthenia and insanity. His clause was agreed and went to the House of Lords to be ratified.

Their lordships speculated on the effect of breaking silence. Lord Desart, who was Director of Public Prosecutions when Oscar Wilde was indicted, said: ‘You are going to tell the whole world there is such an offence, to bring it to the notice of women who have never heard of it, never thought of it, never dreamed of it. I think this is a very great mischief.’

Lord Birkenhead, the Lord Chancellor, agreed:

‘’I am bold enough to say that of every 1,000 women, taken as a whole, 999 have never even heard a whisper of these practices. Among all these, in the homes of this country, the taint of this noxious and horrible suspicion is to be imparted.’’

Whispered or heard, ‘these practices’, Birkenhead believed, would cause contagion. In the home of his mind, a woman’s place was on his arm and in his bed.

Then in 1928 came the startling trial and censorship of Radclyffe Hall’s anodyne novel The Well of Loneliness. The only sexy bits in it were ‘she kissed her full on the lips’ and ‘that night they were not divided’, but even such mild lesbian expression was deemed obscene and the book was ‘burned in the King’s furnace’. Radclyffe Hall left England for Paris with her partner, Una Troubridge. Sylvia Beach sold pirated copies of The Well from Shakespeare and Company.

Paris

‘England was consciously refusing the twentieth century’, Gertrude Stein said. America enforced prohibition of alcohol as well as censorship of literature and art. Lesbians with voices to be heard, who would not collude with silence and lying about their existence, got out if they could in order to speak out. Paris was waiting: the boulevards and bars, good food, low rents. It seemed on a different planet from London. Paris was where they formed their own community, fled the repressions and expectations of their fathers, took same-sex lovers, and painted, wrote and published what they wanted.‘Paris’, Gertrude said, ‘was where the twentieth century was’, ‘the place that suited those of us that were to create the twentieth-century art and literature’. Indigenous Parisians held their traditional views but did not mind these foreigners with alternative lives. Gertrude Stein said they respected art and letters: it was not just what Paris gave, she said, ‘it was all it did not take away’.

Modernism would not have taken the shape it did without the lesbians who gravitated to Paris at that time. There had been nothing like it since Sappho and the Island of Lesbos. Many of them learned Greek to read extant Sappho fragments and wrote their own verse in her honour.

                             Una, Lady Troubridge, painting by Romaine Brooks, 1924

As you were when the autobus called

Freedom of choice in dress and appearance was a crucial assertion. Why should fathers dictate what their daughters could or should wear? ‘As you were when the autobus called’ was a party inspired and orchestrated by Elsa Maxwell, who turned party-giving into an art form and profession.Elsa Maxwell lived for fifty years with ‘Dickie’, the socialite Dorothy Fellowes-Gordon. In interviews, Elsa just said she was ‘not for marriage’, it was ‘not her thing to do’ and that she belonged to the world.

Guests at her as-you-were party were picked up from their homes by bus at an unspecified time. They were to be as they were, dressed, groomed, ungroomed, when the driver sounded the horn. Cocktails were served to those waiting in the bus. For most, their ‘surprise appearance’ was contrived, costumes carefully unfinished: unzipped skirts, a woman with her face half made-up, a man wrapped in a towel with shaving soap on his face. But though guests were provocatively half-dressed, the implicit questions were: What is ‘correct attire’ and true appearance? Who is the real person, unmasked, as opposed to the presented self? Paris allowed candour, and was where pretence could be stripped, expectations confounded, identity fluid, and sexual relationships open. The autobus was a vehicle for transparency, free expression and the breaking of rules.

Modernism

Modernism sent fissures through a whole bundle of myths: that a narrative must have a beginning, a middle and an end, and romance be between a hero and heroine; that art should be representative and music follow familiar notations. The modernist movement questioned orthodoxies: that God made the world in seven days, that Christ was the Son of God, parented by a virgin and a ghost, that there were tangible domains of heaven and hell, that kings were in their palaces by divine right, that man was king of all species, and that war was an acceptable way of resolving conflict between nations.

Money

Virginia Woolf said a woman must have 500 guineas a year and a room of her own if she were to write fiction, plus the habit of freedom ‘and the courage to write exactly what we think’. It was hard for most women to come by one of those things, let alone all. The large bank accounts of Bryher and Natalie Barney came from wealth inherited from their fathers. Both subsidized and financed friends and fellow artists; Bryher in particular was a lifelong and unstinting patron of what was new in the arts. Gertrude Stein was comfortably off, her income managed by her savvy elder brother Michael, who invested in American railroads. Her true fortune was made by indulging her passion for buying paintings to hang on the walls of her rented home. She bought works by Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne while they were still young and unknown. Her collection was soon beyond price; she could not afford insurance cover. Sylvia Beach had no private income – her father was a vicar – and her constant problem was how to glean enough to keep her projects going. Bryher gave her money and so did Natalie Barney. More than the privilege of having wealth was how those with it used it. None of the moneyed modernist lesbians looked for profit. They used money made by men to further the modernist cause.

Escape from patriarchy

Same-sex relationships have always been there, have always been diverse, complex and individual. It was always far past time for the world to recognize that truth. ‘You can’t censor human nature’, was Sylvia Beach’s view. It was always senseless to close the door on benign relationships of the heart, which will express themselves, however brutal, damaging and disheartening any penalties imposed.The Paris lesbians had to free themselves from male authority, the controlling hand, the forbidding edict. They escaped the disapproval of fathers and the repression of censors and law-makers, defined their own terms and shaped their own lives. They did not reject all men – they were intrinsic to furthering the careers of writers, film-makers and artists whose work and ideas they admired. What shifted was the power base, the chain of command.

A community of women who called the shots was no bad idea 100 years ago, nor is it a bad idea now. Why are there still so few works by women in the art galleries, why are their symphonies and songs not filling the concert halls or their statutes defining the laws of the land?

‘It is true that I only want to show off to women. Women alone stir my imagination’, Virginia Woolf wrote in 1930 to the composer and suffragist Ethel Smyth, who had declared love to her. Women needed their 500 guineas, a room of their own and ‘the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think’. Three years earlier, Woolf had written to Vita Sackville-West, with whom she was, in her way, in love: ‘Look here Vita – throw over your man and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head… They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come.’

‘Throw over your man’ was quite a call. It might have been a way forward before the cataclysm of two world wars. War tore apart the lesbian web woven by the women in these pages. It might be a way forward now, in the dark, tipsy and in love, in the beautiful garden the world might be, before the moonlight disappears and all the things in women’s heads are lost forever.

‘Throw over your man, I say, and come.’

Excerpt from :  No Modernism without Lesbians. By Diana Souhami.   Diana Souhami.com

  No Modernism Without Lesbians launch video. Facebook , April 4, 2020. 

Diana Souhami has just published a new book titled 'No Modernism Without Lesbians'. Discussions in this episode centre around personal anecdotes and experiences, Diana's unique take on history and lesbian characters, as well as musings on what a post-pandemic future might look like. There are also reflections on the notion of identity and how labels such as, for example, the idea of 'Jewishness', 'Germanness' or 'Queerness' play into this.  Jess W. talks with her.

A Lesbian Affair.  Episode 008 - Diana Souhami. May 22, 2020. 

It was back in the eighties when I went to the British Library to start my research on lesbians which I had discovered in the very coded descriptions of Dale Spenders’ book, “Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them”. I was desperate to discover what lesbians had achieved before me, who they were and how had they acted in the world. I was an angry feminist lesbian trying to make sense of my life under patriarchy. The British Library was not much help. I was befuddled by the Dewey system and requests to the staff asking about lesbians were received with cold looks and little help.

However, I did discover the coterie of lesbians who went to Paris in the early 20th century to escape the strictures of the USA and Britain. I was both excited and shocked by what seemed to me then, their rather hedonistic, self-centred and privileged lifestyles.

I have read most of Diana Souhami’s previous books about several of these women. She enabled me to re-evaluate the legacy of these lesbians such as Gluck, Stein and Trefuse and to recognise that their lives were not as self-indulgent as I had thought.

This book, “No Modernism without Lesbians” forces me to further consider the roles of these lesbians in forming a cultural movement. Diana has chosen four lesbians to spotlight: Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, Bryher and Natalie Barney.  In her introduction Souhami quotes Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville West, “Throw over your man, I say, and come”. She posits that these women/lesbians/bisexuals/trans and all the others she so skilfully weaves into the book were challenging patriarchy by their very existence and choices.  She also makes the case for considering their roles in nurturing and supporting in many ways, the artistic movement known as ‘Modernism’. To quote Kathleen Kuiper: “Modernism, in the fine arts, a break with the past and the concurrent search for new forms of expression. Modernism fostered a period of experimentation in the arts from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, particularly in the years following World War I.”

The book’s premise, “No Modernism Without Lesbians” is a bold assertion and one that has caused a stir amongst historians.   Diana’s choice of women depicts the variety of ways that these lesbians contributed to and cradled the movement. Bryher and Beach primarily sponsored artists, giving them financial, residential and emotional support. Stein, like Barney held regular salons where artists met, networked and built their reputations. Both women were artists themselves; Stein was a writer and Barney made her life her work of art, as she proclaimed.

Souhami’s wealth of knowledge about all these lesbians and their intricate circles within circles is vast. The index is a who’s who of the rich, famous, infamous and should be knowns, of the times. Souhami makes it easy for anyone to follow up on these lesbians by providing us with a meticulous amount of information, image credits, citations, references all the books she used, and tells us where the archives are. She gives us lists of the works of each woman. This is a gift in itself and I hope will enable and inspire readers to produce plays, films and other writings so these extraordinary lesbians become better known and celebrated. She has enabled us to learn as she says, “to see what lesbians achieved and can achieve when, collectively they dictate their own agenda.”

I am in awe of how she organised all the facts, stories and quotes and then so deftly wove them, so we can see the glittering patch work of interlinked lives, broken threads and startling colours laid out before us. It is a challenging read because of its complexity, and it is a magic carpet that takes you into Paris at an extraordinary time of creativity and hedonism. It was the perfect book to read now, as I sit in quarantine.  It engulfed me in a different century, and I became enthralled with their lives, concerns of the heart and their determination to take some power in the world of publishing.

Gertrude Stein arrived in Paris, 1903, from the USA to join her brother. She was one of the first people to buy a ‘Picasso’ and for a while they were close friends. Picasso’s portrait of Stein took eighty to ninety sittings because they talked so much.  Gertrude thought their artistic intentions were similar – “to change ways or expression in art – she in words and he in paint, to move on from strictures, structures conventions, expectations and limitations to take risks and break moulds.” Her brother turns against them both, calling their efforts “God almighty rubbish,” “haemorrhoids, cubico-futuristic tommy rotting”. Stein disagreed with him and said they sought “to express things seen not as one knows them but as they are when one sees them without remembering having looked at them”.

Together they got to know Matisse, and Cezanne and buy their works.  They also purchased works by Toulouse- Lautrec, Bonnard, Vuillard, Gauguins and Renoirs. They bought them because as Souhami says, “for Gertrude, their ideas – resonant in their work — new ways of seeing and departure from received forms of expression, echoed her own thinking.” (If you have not read Stein this may not make sense.)

Steins says, “Cezanne gave me a new feeling about composition. I was obsessed by this idea of composition. It was not solely the realism of characters but the realism of the composition which was the important thing. This had not been conceived as a reality until I came along but I got it largely from Cezanne.”

Souhami’s chapter on Stein further demonstrates clearly to me how she was both involved and supportive of the new ways of working in the visual arts. She was herself an author of modernistic literature and she supported other writers of her era. She was a great friend to both Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. They sought and valued her opinions of their work.

Gertrude’s work was not always understood or valued by her fellow countrymen and getting it published was often an arduous process. It is worth noting that however, that her ‘Four Saints in Three Acts, became an opera with Virgil Thompson writing the music. It was performed with an all-black cast in 1934, at the Atheneum Theatre, New Haven, Connecticut, a part of the New York metropolitan area. It was a smash hit, and as Souhami says, “while fascism was eating at the heart of European civilisation, ‘Four Saints in Three Acts’ rang out — zany, inclusive, playful joyful and open.”  Such a different America from the one Stein and the others had fled earlier.  Souhami, makes it clear just how hard it was for books we now take for granted, to get printed. So many of them were published due to support of lesbians.

Sylvia Beach also arrived in Paris from America in 1903. But it was not until 1919, after she had discovered A. Monnier’s Bookshop.  Adrienne was to become both her business and life partner. She soon set up her own bookshop across the street in St Germain, the famous ‘The Shakespeare & Co’.  

Diana states “Making money was not the prime consideration. Neither of them was much good at that. Both loved books and their authors. Books were essential to civilised living. Both saw their work as contribution rather than commerce.”  Beach’s intention was to specialise in modern innovative writing in English. The shop acted as a lending Library and a welcoming meeting place for authors.  “Customers did not want to only buy books – she might have made some money if they had. Shakespeare and Company quickly evolved into a bookshop, library, a book club, bank, post office, hotel, referral agency, and a place to meet and talk about books and life and have tea. Her fame lasted for the whole tenure of Shakespeare and Company right up until Hitler’s Nazi army closed it down and interned her in 1942.”

Souhami went into detail about how Sylvia became involved with James Joyce. It was her unfailing support that enabled him to be published. She picked up the torch from other lesbians, Harriet Weaver and Dora Marsden, who had tried to serialize Ulysses in their literary magazine, ‘The Egoist’ which was England’s most important modernist periodical. Two other lesbians, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, had also wanted to serialise the book in their New York magazine, ‘The Little Review’. They published 23 instalments. On no less than four occasions, posted issues containing Episodes of Ulysses were confiscated and burned by the United States Post Office based on allegations of obscenity.

Beach spent years and money she could ill afford to get Ulysses published.  So much time and energy that her relationship with Adrienne was threatened. Bryher sent her money frequently to enable her to stay afloat. Ulysses was finally published in 1920, and banned in both England and the USA. In response to the publication, another lesbian, Harriet Weaver, got involved in attempting to distribute it in England, only to see 500 copies being burned in the ‘Kings Chimney’.

As an unintended consequence, Beach gained a reputation as a publisher and vendor of pornography. Many writers of books, censored as obscene, asked to be published by her. Richard Aldington and Aldous Huxley attempted to persuade her to publish DH Lawrence. She declined.  Diana tells us, “Tallulah Bankhead’s agent asked if she would publish Tallulah’s memoirs.  Sylvia doubted she would have turned that down, but no manuscript arrived.  Tallulah’s name, like Greta Garbo was another link in the daisy-chain of famous lesbians.”

 Souhami tells us, “Bryher felt trapped in the wrong body.  Even as a child she viewed her birth gender as a trick, a mistake.  She saw herself as a boy who needed to escape from the physical cage of a girl.  She was tormented by pressure to have curls, wear frocks, be called by her birth names, Annie Winifred, or her nickname, Dolly….… Bryher did not want the patronymic of her father, the matronymic of her mother or the name of any husband of convenience.  Bryher is one of the Isles of Scilly, off the Cornish Coast, a part of the world she came particularly to love.”

She was born into great wealth which she used to support artists and was a patron of the modernists. Of herself, Bryher says, “I have rushed to the penniless young, not with bowls of soup but with typewriters.” Diana credits Bryher as ‘the rock and saviour of her partner, the poet, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle).  She funded the Contact Publishing Company in Paris, supported James Joyce and his family with a monthly allowance, gave money to Sylvia Beach and subsidized Margaret Anderson’s ‘Little Review’, in New York.  She started the film company POOL Productions in Switzerland, financed its experimental films and founded ‘Close Up’, the first film magazine in English. She built a Bauhaus-style home in Switzerland.  She supported the emerging psychoanalytical movement in Vienna, and funded Freud and other Jewish intellectuals hounded by the Nazis to help them get out of Germany and Austria.”  Formidable accomplishments made possible by her great wealth and passion like Beach’s and Monnier’s, “to be of service.”

Natalie Barney, the fourth focus of Souhami’s book, says “Love has always been the main business of my life”. Diana comments, “This main business involved lots of sex.  Natalie went where desire led her.  She shared her bed, the train couchette, her polar bear rug, the riverbank or wooded glade with many women, and not always one at a time. Modernism in Natalie’s life upended codes of conduct for sexual exchange. For Natalie, modernism meant lovers galore. ”Barney was another rich refugee from the puritanical attitudes of the United States.  Like Bryher, she was very wealthy; however, she did not share the same passion to be of service, she was far too busy being busy. As she says, “The finest life is spent creating oneself, not procreating”. She was, however, a walking visual aid of queerness. Souhami puts it better, “Her inspired contribution was to be transparent about same sex desire in a repressed and repressive age.  Too impatient, privileged and self-occupied to give much time to a task or a cause, she led by candid example. Many women followed and were liberated by her courage.”

The list of her lovers includes many poets, writers and artists of modernism who she brought together to learn of each other’s works and ideas in her regular and extremely popular salons. She had a house in Neuilly and in homage to Sappho staged tableaus there.  Diana says, “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’.”

This was easier for some women than others, of course and possible for her as she had inherited the equivalent of about $75 million in today’s money!  It is perhaps difficult to imagine the world she inhabited and created but as Souhami plainly says, she created “the Sapphic centre of the western world.”

The list of lesbians who frequented her homes is long and what follows is by no means comprehensive: the Hellenist Evelina Palmer, the courtesan Lianne de Pougy, the poets Lucie Dearue-Marrus, Rene Vivien and Olive Constanve, the writers Lily de Gramont, Colette and Djuna Barnes, Dolly Wilde, Radclyffe Hall, Gertrude Stein, the portrait painters Romaine Brooks and Gluck, the patron and socialite Nancy Cunard.  These serve to demonstrate the ‘daisy chain of dykes’ referred to by Truman Capote. The richness of this book is that as well as Souhami’s choice of these four women she included a myriad of other lesbians who were active at the time and in and out of each other’s lives, beds and creativity. It is also a treasure in that she has done so much work in researching and documenting these lesbians and their archives, she deserves our massive thanks. That so many of the lesbians included will be unknown to me and you, is an indictment of our education and media. To bring them all together on one book in such a lucid and entertaining way is a valuable achievement. I am eternally grateful to her in pointing out not only their creativity and roles in birthing modernism, but also depicting their political work. They deserve our admiration for being out lesbians at a time of great oppression, active volunteers in wars caring for the wounded and as rescuers of people from certain death by facilitating their escapes from the Nazis. Diana Souhami has unearthed and brought to life a fascinating, formidable feast of lesbians of whom we can be proud when we look for role models.

“No Modernism Without Lesbians”, by Diana Souhami. By Andrew.  LGBT+ History Month. May 9, 2020.

I like a book that can put its point in four outrageous words and use it as its title. Diana Souhami might be right. Without the women her book is devoted to, literary modernism would have looked very different. A consciously new approach to writing met a body of women who were being heard for the first time; the results were compelling. At the beginning of a novel by one of them, Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, the terror of masculine traditions is concisely stated:

‘ Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. ‘Stop!’, cried the groaning old man at last, ‘Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.’

If culture were ever to break those bonds of duty and repetition, it might be in the form of women, bonded primarily to other women, and creating objects in prose and verse never conceived of before.

Lesbian women had appeared in Victorian novels, but depicted in a characteristically indirect, deniable way — Dickens describing Miss Wade, for example, or Wilkie Collins’s Marian Halcombe. The law in England never took any account of lesbianism: it wasn’t, contrary to myth, Queen Victoria’s intervention, but the belief of the House of Lords that no woman would ever think of doing such things unless it was brought to her attention by legal proscription.

In French literature, the question had long been addressed with more clarity, at least as far back as Diderot’s La Religieuse; there are unambiguous lesbians in Balzac’s La Fille aux yeux d’or and in Baudelaire. It is sometimes thought that the many lesbian relationships in Proust are rudimentary translations of his male lovers’ heterosexual flings, but to me he seems fascinated by the secretive circles that Albertine and Andrée move in, and to have observed the reality of lesbian society very carefully.

It won’t have escaped notice that all these examples are written by men. It wasn’t until the 20th century that lesbian women started not just writing from their own experiences, but publishing their writing. For the first time, they were in a position to live openly and play important parts in the literary world.

Perhaps encouraged by the long-standing openness of French literature towards their feelings, these women were drawn to Paris, where they made a stir. ‘Ils sont pas des hommes, ils sont pas des femmes, ils sont des Américains,’ Picasso said. Souhami’s book is about four of them, and the circles around them. Sylvia Beach was the founder of Shakespeare and Company in Paris, and the first publisher of Joyce’s Ulysses. Bryher was a poet and novelist, and the partner of the Imagist poet Hilda Doolittle, who wrote as H.D. Natalie Barney hosted the great Paris salon of modernism, living until 95 in an atmosphere of inexhaustible scandal. And Gertrude Stein was, of course, a novelist and early collector of Picasso, Cézanne and Matisse.

Two things are immediately apparent. The first is that most of these women were given the possibility of living openly by having independent means — sometimes as a result of immense inherited wealth. Bryher’s father left £36 million when he died in 1933, his legacy enabling her to live more or less as she liked — including building a Bauhaus villa at Vevey on Lake Geneva. She could also afford to heavily subsidise the one woman among them who didn’t have money of her own, Sylvia Beach.

The second point is just how many women mentioned by Souhami changed their names as soon as they were able. Pauline Tarn became Renée Vivien; Anne-Marie Chassaigne became Liane de Pougy. Girlish first names were easily dispensed with: Hannah Gluckstein became Gluck, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette became Colette tout court, and Radclyffe Hall, who started life as Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall, went on to be known as John in private. The phenomenon wasn’t limited to lesbians. Cicily Fairfield early on saw how hopeless her birth name was for a woman writer of serious tendencies, and called herself Rebecca West, after Ibsen’s heroine. Like West, Bryher felt that ‘Annie Winifred Glover’ just wouldn’t do. They renamed themselves, and something new began.

Sylvia Beach had no idea how bookshops were run, or how books were published, and everyone was the better off for her ignorance. The first of Shakespeare and Company’s ‘bunnies’, as she called its abonnés, or subscribers, was André Gide, closely followed by Gertrude Stein, who demanded that The Trail of the Lonesome Pine and Gene Stratton-Porter’s A Girl of the Limberlost (‘a sequel to her earlier novel Freckles’) be stocked. Forever afterwards the shop was run in the interests of undeserving writers.

Nor would any publisher have allowed Ulysses to run out of control in the way it did (Souhami says that at least a third of the novel was added at proof stage, enormously increasing the costs). The sad aspect of Beach’s inexperience was that she relied entirely on Joyce, and when he understandably decamped to Random House in 1933 she was emotionally and financially bereft.

Natalie Barney wrote herself — some Pierre Louys-like amorous poems about same-sex love as early as 1900 — but her main significance was as a hostess, and impresario of scandal. Another lesbian hostess, the Princesse de Polignac, formerly Winnie Singer, may have been more culturally impressive, commissioning music from Ravel, Prokofiev and Stravinsky, but Natalie sounds more fun. She described herself without qualification as a lesbian, and may have been the first in modern times to convert a cult of Sappho into a visit to Lesbos — which, even in 1904, was not quite the paradise of myrtle groves and hyacinth gardens of her imagination. (‘An elderly woman cooked their food. Renée gave hers to the dogs.’)

Souhami’s account of Barney’s life, her many affairs and excesses, has a breathless hilarity as one duchess succeeds another in Barney’s passions. (‘In 1922, Liane de Pougy, who had risen up the social ladder to become Princess Ghika, formed a sexual threesome with Natalie and Lily’.) She was still picking up women on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice in her eighties.

Gertrude Stein is at the other end of things; there was no marriage so utterly faithful and based in total mutual devotion as Gertrude’s with Alice B. Toklas. Souhami has already written a wonderfully entertaining joint biography of the two, but her new book places Stein in a more specific context than before. She had enough money to write as she chose, and the results were extraordinarily challenging. Oddly, I find her more readable as time goes on; even The Making of Americans now seems monumental but not impenetrable, and modern in places where Ulysses has an encyclopaedic, even Victorian air. She really was doing something new.

The figure who emerges with considerable credit is Bryher. She has been rather forgotten, apart from her connection with H.D., but she was evidently a clear-sighted and very intelligent woman. A small example: when she bought the magazine Life and Letters in 1935, she stockpiled so much paper in anticipation of the coming war that it could continue publication throughout the shortages.

A larger example might be her absolute clarity — in an article as early as 1933, called ‘What Shall You Do in the War?’ — that the Nazi attempt ‘to exterminate a whole section of the population’ would need to be confronted. ‘I cannot understand how any person anywhere who professed to the slightest belief in ethics could stand aside at such a moment.’

Not every member of a troubled minority has sympathy for the members of another, but Bryher had the sort of vision that often goes with impatience with the expectations of others. She turned up at the London opening of Show Boat at her parents’ demands, entering the Royal Box in a floral chiffon dress with

  ‘what was meant to be a draped cape behind hung down in front as if to conceal pregnancy. Bryher was wearing the dress inside out and back to front. ‘How is one to know?’, she asked.’

Souhami is one of our most rewarding and inventive biographers, and this book is a splendidly hectic and vivid read. She has a novelist’s gift for the deft evocation. Beach’s appearance was ‘sprightly but unremarkable. She was five foot two, thin, with a brisk walk, determined chin, bobbed hair and brown eyes behind steel rimmed glasses.’ Neither Gertrude nor Alice ‘ever wore trousers... on one occasion Gertrude was mistaken for a bishop’. And she is often funny. When quoting a terrible poem by a Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (‘So noble soul so weak a body/Thine body is the prey of mice’) Souhami just says: ‘It went on like that.’

There is a justifiable crusading element here, and there is no doubt that literary history has gone to some lengths to erase the presence, and nature, of lesbians. Souhami quotes with some scorn the absurdly misleading 1983 New York Times obituary of Bryher. Nowadays, these women are likely to be referred to under the euphemistic heading of ‘gender nonconformists’, when they were often absolutely clear about who and what they were. If No Modernism Without Lesbians goes some way towards making us understand how they thought of themselves, and what they did, it will have done some good.

The cult of Sappho in interwar Paris. By Philip Henscher. The Spectator , April 18, 2020

As Diana Souhami sees it, lesbianism is much more than a sexual preference: it extends into an artistic vocation, an enraptured emotional cult and a political campaign that challenges the bullyboy patriarchs who assumed that “women’s bodies belong to men” and should be consecrated to perpetuating the male line. Souhami has written several fine biographies of what Truman Capote once reprehensibly called the “daisy-chain” of “butch-babes”; now, in a comprehensive cultural history, she awards lesbians the credit for modernising art, manners and morals in the early 20th century.

Like a tabloid headline, her book’s title is intended to provoke, and it depends on a somewhat tenuous analogy: “modernism in art upended 19th-century rules of narrative and form”, so why shouldn’t modernity in life revise the “codes of conduct for sexual exchange”, licensing women to defy men or dispense with them and love each other instead? To paraphrase her slogan a little more modestly, what Souhami shows is that there might have been no modernism if the lesbian bookseller Sylvia Beach had not arranged to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses in Paris when editors in London and New York, fearing prosecution for obscenity, refused to touch it.

Beach, who founded the Left Bank bookshop Shakespeare and Company, behaved towards Joyce with a wifely devotion that was lacking in his actual spouse, the rebarbative Nora Barnacle. She happily performed the endless editorial chores he set her, and glorified the labour as her “missionary endeavour’. The moment that wealthier backers became available, Joyce of course forgot about her service to him. The ancient female function of helpmeet was hard to shed. Beach’s shop, installed in a former laundry, was a domestic space, furnished with comfortable chairs and vases of flowers; brewing tea or lending books to customers who could not afford to buy them, she officiated as a mother hen.

Another of Souhami’s characters dispensed patronage on a grander scale. Bryher – born Annie Winifred Glover, though she reinvented herself by borrowing a new name from one of the Scilly Isles – was the munificent daughter of a shipping magnate. She bankrolled the artistic whims of everyone she knew, paid Freud a small fortune to psychoanalyse her lover Hilda Doolittle, and presented Edith Sitwell with a house. In her saintlier or dottier moments, she played Lady Bountiful to strangers in the street: she bought new dentures for a woman she found toothlessly chomping in a bread queue, and replaced the ill-fitting wellington boots of a woebegone fireman.

Throughout her book, Souhami rails at the “old-style masculine domination” that results in war, mass murder and sexual repression. As the jack-booted invaders march into Paris in 1940, trampling what was once “the sapphic centre of the western world”, she calls patriarchy “militaristic, fascistic”. Yet power is not an exclusively male preserve, and it lurks in the relationships between women examined here. The painter and poet Natalie Barney appears as a reckless predator who breaks a sofa when pouncing on a supine seducee; the Princesse de Polignac – another heiress, born Winnaretta Singer, whose liberation was bankrolled by her family’s output of sewing machines – brings the skittish Violet Trefusis to heel with a whip.

Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas act out a paradoxical variant of this power play. Stein was cubistically solid, gruff and glowering, while Toklas, even with her bristly moustache, looked meek and dainty. Alice kept house, cooked, and allowed Gertrude to be a full-time genius, which was hard work because “you have to sit around so much doing nothing”. Yet the apparent weakling in this menage turned out to be the slave-driver, as Ernest Hemingway testified when he overheard Stein beg for mercy as she was tongue-lashed by the partner she called “Pussy”.

Stein made up for such grovelling when she announced her artistic status by declaring that “20th-century literature is Gertrude Stein”. Her self-puffery now sounds absurd, and Souhami’s view of her as “the mother and father of modernism” is not much more persuasive. At best, Stein was the fairy godmother of modernism. Like Beach and Barney, she kept a salon where she performed the traditional role of hostess, supervising the camaraderie of the male painters, writers and musicians who attended; armed with the inevitable private income, derived in her case from San Francisco streetcars, she amassed an uninsurably valuable collection of paintings by Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse, which she left unframed and sometimes casually stashed in closets.

Daunted by Stein’s droning epic The Making of Americans, Souhami has better luck with the avian burbling of her libretto for Virgil Thomson’s all-black opera Four Saints in Three Acts. Here Stein’s verbal tics are subsumed into music, and Souhami writes about the witty, frothy piece with verve. Then, getting overzealous, she claims that Four Saints was more epochal and innovative than Ulysses, if only because Joyce’s novel was still fuddy-duddily “bound within the covers of a book”.

Souhami ends with some blithe mimicry of Stein’s echolalia, rejoicing in a Parisian paradise where “lovers of love and refreshment in life still loved, and loved lovers and loved love”. I abbreviate a long alliterating paragraph of hallelujahs: here is Capote’s daisy chain made of words, though the repetitions hardly erase memories of the miserable childhoods and agonising affairs Souhami has chronicled. Love is lovely and even heavenly, but sex, regardless of gender, can be diabolical.

No Modernism Without Lesbians by Diana Souhami – review. By Peter  Conrad. The Guardian,

March 24, 2020.

                                  The Parisienne, Painting by Agnes Goodsir, 1924

During the second and third decades of the 20th century, Paris was home to a thriving lesbian subculture. In lively bars in Montmartre and elegant apartments on the Left Bank, women who loved women were forging new identities, innovating artistic forms and taking on centuries-old cultural institutions.

If you were a lesbian in Paris in the 1920s or early ʼ30s, on the lookout for love or something more short term, chances are you would have wound up at Le Monocle.

As a woman of means, you might have strode there in a finely tailored tuxedo, a white carnation in your buttonhole, a cigar between your lips and a monocle perched on your cheek, not a strand of closely cropped hair fluttering in the evening breeze; if, however, you came from the lower ranks of Parisian society, and were likewise inclined towards a more masculine attitude and style, your journey to the bar would likely have been more covert – no matter how stiffly the wind blew, it probably never quite explained the blanket wrapped around you from head to toe. But, once inside, every woman was free to sip champagne and dance with whomever she pleased.

During the interwar years, Paris was among the most liberal cities in the world – not quite as open-minded as Berlin but far more progressive than, say, London or New York – a haven for artists, writers and freethinkers. Against this relatively permissive backdrop, a vibrant lesbian subculture blossomed, out in public, in Montmartre bars like Le Monocle, and in private abodes, more often than not in the swanky apartments belonging to the Left Bank intelligentsia.

Foremost among the elite salons of the day was that of American playwright, poet, novelist and railroad-car heiress Natalie Clifford Barney – or The Amazon, as the poet Remy de Gourmont nicknamed her after she made headlines for riding astride, rather than sidesaddle, as was then customary for women of her standing. From 1909 until her death, in 1972, at the age of 95, Barney hosted her legendary ‘Fridays’ at her home at 20 rue Jacob. There’s not a famous Modernist or lesbian, let alone a lesbian Modernist, living in Paris at that time who didn’t pass through her doors.

Regulars at Barney’s soirées included Gertrude Stein and her long-time partner, Alice B Toklas – themselves hosts of a popular salon, one frequented by the painters, such as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, whose careers Stein helped launch – the American painter Romaine Brooks, known for her portraits of women in this particular social circle, the Anglo-American poet Renée Vivien and Colette, the pioneering French author who immortalised the prevailing dandy-esque look of certain, in her (affectionate) words, “mannish women” in her 1932 book The Pure and the Impure.

In 1927, in an attempt to promote women’s writing, Barney founded the Académie des Femmes. She intended it to be a counterpoint to the Académie française, the illustrious council tasked with ruling on all matters pertaining to the French language. Founded in 1635, it didn’t admit its first immortelle (its members have traditionally been known as les immortels, or the immortals, which, besides being more than a little grandiose, is an inherently gendered term in the French), Marguerite Yourcenar, until 1980. In the end, Barney’s initiative was short lived.

Rather than for her literary contributions, either as a writer or a benefactor, and quite apart from her achievements as a society hostess, Barney is remembered for her unashamedly public, and unashamedly numerous, relationships. Blessed with the financial and social security afforded by inherited wealth, she was able to openly pursue prominent women from the literary and art worlds as well as the lingering aristocracies of Europe. Her liaisons, rarely monogamous but typically life-long, earned her depictions in many important lesbian works – most notably as Valerie Seymour in Radclyffe Hall’s groundbreaking novel The Well of Loneliness (1928).

Indeed, it was the visibility and vivacity with which sapphic desire could be fulfilled in Paris (albeit relative to your position in the pecking order) that made it, as far as lesbians were concerned, the queer capital of Europe – even more so than Berlin. Women who had the money and freedom to travel came from the UK, the USA and across Europe to attend salons such as Barney’s and drink and dance in the city’s lesbian bars.

This heyday, however, was tied to the prosperity of les années folles (The Roaring ’20s), and did not last long into the 1930s. The nation’s politics lurched to the right following the Great Depression, and little of Paris’s lesbian subculture survived the German occupation of the capital, which lasted from 14 June 1940 until 25 August 1944.

As much as the Nazi regime drove queer people even further underground, and in many cases sent them to their deaths, it did not wipe them out completely. And, as Europe emerged from the shadow of war, so too did this community rebuild and reassert itself. In 1966, the legacy of Le Monocle, and those who brought it to life, took centre stage when Yves Saint Laurent unveiled his women’s tuxedo, Le Smoking, on a Paris runway. It was at once a radical statement of female empowerment amid the decade’s sexual revolution and a nod, with all the world watching, to the free-living, free-loving lesbians who first donned the look.

Between the Wars, Paris Was the City of Lesbian Love. By Paul McQueen,  an updated version of a story created by Jade Cuttle.  The Culture Trip, July 1, 2019.

Also interesting 

1928: Sapphic Modernity and the Sexuality of History. By  Susan S. Lanser. Modernismmodernity ,  October 25, 2016.