No Modernism Without Lesbians by Diana Souhami (latest books to read txt) 📕

other men when in London. Abortion was illegal in Germany, as in England and America. H.D. went to Berlin; Sachs found a doctor, who ended the pregnancy.

Borderline

In 1930, POOL Productions made Borderline, their only full-length feature film. Pabst called it ‘the only real avant-garde film’. Macpherson was director. Paul Robeson starred in it. It focused on race, class, sexuality and gender and was set in an unspecified border town in some mid-European mountain area. The characters were people ‘not out of life, not in life’, H.D. said. Her borderline was between creativity and madness. The symbolism of her poetry was given parallel expression in filmed images: a stuffed bird, a witch-like doll, a rose.

Front cover of Borderline magazine © TCD / Prod. DB / Alamy

Paul Robeson was an activist for black civil rights as well as an actor and singer. In the late 1920s and early 30s, black, Jewish and homosexual identities were all targeted by fascist power. In mainstream entertainment, white actors ‘blacked up’ to avoid giving acting roles to people of colour. If black actors were included, they reinforced the idea of white superiority. They were servants, slaves, doormen, villains. In Showboat, Paul Robeson was the simple-minded ‘darky’. Skin pigmentation was used to reflect gradations of moral worth. The blacker the skin, the worse the character; the whiter and blonder, the purer. This prejudice snaked through society, language and popular culture.

Artists who wanted a better world tried to address issues of race. H.D., in February 1927, said she had been ‘reading a good deal on the “darky” problem lately’. In August 1929, Close Up ran an issue on black cinema. Robert Herring argued for a pure Afro-American cinema: ‘Not black films passing for white and not please white passing for black.’

Janet Flanner, Genêt of The New Yorker, in her ‘Letter from Paris’ in 1925, wrote of Afro-American jazz in Paris and Josephine Baker’s star performance, aged nineteen, in La Revue Nègre at the Théâtre des Champs Élysées. Sidney Bechet played the clarinet. Josephine Baker:

made her entry entirely nude except for a pink flamingo feather between her limbs; she was being carried upside down and doing the split on the shoulder of a black giant. Mid stage he paused, and with his long fingers holding her basket-wise around the waist, swung her in a slow cartwheel to the stage floor, where she stood, like his magnificent discarded burden, in an instant of complete silence… A scream of salutation spread through the theatre. Whatever happened next was unimportant. The two specific elements had been established and were unforgettable: her magnificent dark body, a new model that to the French proved for the first time that black was beautiful, and the acute response of the white masculine public in the capital of hedonism of all Europe – Paris.

This was a breakthrough. Black was beautiful, naked and free. Paris was at the vanguard of liberation. Josephine Baker, born in the slums of St Louis, Missouri, to a single mother, worked her way from dresser to chorus girl in an all-black show, The Chocolate Dandies. In Broadway auditions, she was rejected for being ‘too black’. In Paris, by 1935 she was singing Offenbach’s La Créole at the Marigny, a role created in 1875 for Anna Judic, who ‘blacked up’ with liquorice for the part.

Gender and colour were at the heart of modernist revision. Barbette starred with a trapeze act at the Cirque Médrano in Paris; his given name was Vander Clyde but ‘he was only himself when dressed as a woman’. He performed to the music of Scheherazade wearing diaphanous white skirts and white ostrich plumes. The audience gasped when he removed his wig and revealed himself to be a man.

In Borderline, Bryher wanted Macpherson to explore conscious and unconscious mental processes in relation to colour. She wanted visual expression of Freud’s ideas. Macpherson used light and shadow to focus in close-up on tense expression, the veins in hands, the sweat on a brow.

Paul Robeson was on his way to Berlin to perform in a stage version of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones. He was travelling with his wife, Eslanda, who was also his manager and herself an actor and activist. She acted in Borderline too. Robert Herring, who was homosexual both in and out of Borderline, brought the Robesons into the film. He played the part of the pianist. A friend of his, Gavin Arthur, also homosexual and a grandson of the twenty-first American president, Chester A. Arthur, was the violent husband. Kenneth Macpherson’s father was the film’s lighting manager.

For the Robesons, the whole thing was a lark and a diversion ‘time out from the hectic pace of touring’. Filming took nine days, they stayed for ten. Macpherson’s fascination with Robeson’s body was plain in the shooting. H.D. wrote of her sexual feelings towards Robeson in various poems like ‘Red Roses for Bronze’, where Robeson was the bronze god.

The film’s plot was secondary to its social purpose and experimental themes: Pete (Robeson) works in a cheap café in this border town. The café’s gay pianist (Herring) lusts after him. The café manager (Bryher) lusts after the barmaid. Pete’s estranged wife, Adah (Eslanda), is in the same town, though neither is aware of the presence of the other. Adah is staying in rooms with a married couple, Thorne (Gavin Arthur) and Astrid (H.D.). Thorne and Adah become lovers. In a quarrel, Thorne stabs Astrid, his wife. Adah is blamed and Thorne acquitted. The mayor, acting for the townsfolk, orders Pete out of town – he goes, a scapegoat for the crimes and neuroses of the whites.

Robeson was depicted as the hero, not the victim. Racist words rebounded on who spoke them: ‘Nigger lover.’ ‘You brought him here.’ ‘If I had my way not one negro would be allowed in the country.’ Robeson was accorded the beauty of the femme fatale. Blackness was co-opted. Pete had no character beyond his beauty. Eslanda Robeson wrote in her diary that she and Paul