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

Solitude was Bryher’s natural state. She lived behind a wall of money and was not open to being loved. Her demeanour was sober and controlled, strangely mannish and she seemed in a sense closed. Years of psychoanalysis reconciled her to who she was. Behind the stern facade was a fierce and courageous heart. It was not easy for her to love H.D. with stalwart loyalty, rescue her from devilish mess, protect her from endless storms. Without Bryher’s unstinting patronage, many new voices would have stayed unheard. She always and discreetly helped. Her demeanour belied her passion to learn by heart all H.D.’s poems, travel the world, dare to fence and fly, flout convention, free the oppressed and probe the human psyche. Bryher flouted expectations of gender and rules of marriage, embraced the new, left the closed incoherence of her Victorian home and sought an inclusive world.

Bryher’s death

Bryher died at Kenwin on 28 January 1983, when she was eighty-eight. She left £462,000 in her will. The amount was residual, for while she lived she had given away much to her unorthodox family and to deserving and undeserving friends. By the terms of her father’s trust fund, her brother’s widow was the formal beneficiary of her estate, even though they had had no contact. Perdita benefited too.

On 1 February 1983, The New York Times printed an obituary:

Mrs Bryher was a minor member of the literary circle that included Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and André Gide…

Mrs Bryher lived with Hilda Doolittle, the Imagist poet and a distant cousin… Mrs Bryher helped to raise Miss Doolittle’s daughter Perdita, now Mrs John Schaffner of New York, who became Mrs Bryher’s adopted daughter and heir… Mrs. Bryher is survived by Mrs. Schaffner and four grandchildren.

It was as if a kindly grandmother had died. Deference to patriarchy was intact. Readers need not consider another Bryher, defined by a Scillonian island of granite hills, waves and sunsets, separated from the mainland by an ocean and a sea, or hear of that Bryher’s quest for liberation from the cage of gender, her disregard of conformity, passion for freedom, and unstinting generosity to those with minds like a diving bird.

1 Equivalent to £2.5 billion in 2020.

2 Sir John Ellerman, 2nd Baronet, had no children and died leaving half the amount he had inherited.

3 Cole Porter wrote the song ‘Miss Otis Regrets’ especially for Bricktop, who was born Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria Louise Virginia Smith, in West Virginia, to an Irish father and African-American mother.

4 A Parisian annual ball started by Henri Guillaume, the first one held in 1892.

5 Marriage to Alice would have protected Gertrude’s art collection from avaricious relatives.

6 Macpherson’s longest relationship was in the 1930s with the cabaret singer Jimmy Daniels, who focused on songs by George Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart and Cole Porter.

7 The film was thought lost until the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library acquired a copy in 2008 and restored and digitized it.

8 Sandhurst is the Royal Military Academy where British Army officers are trained. Woolwich was the location of the Royal Arsenal.

9 The equivalent of $255 an hour in 2020.

10 The equivalent of £2.5 billion in 2020.

11 The equivalent of £30 million in 2020.

12 This January Tale, 1966.

13 Ruan, 1961.

14 Roman Wall, 1955.

NATALIE BARNEY

‘I am a lesbian. One need not hide it

nor boast of it, though being other than

normal is a perilous advantage.’

Natalie Barney © Alpha Stock / Alamy

‘Love has always been the main business of my life,’ Natalie Barney said when old. 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 art upended nineteenth-century rules of narrative and form. Modernism in Natalie’s life upended codes of conduct for sexual exchange. For Natalie, modernism meant lovers galore.

Desire and Conquest were her twin themes. She was remarkable for her exuberant commitment to lesbian life. ‘Living is the first of all the arts’ was one of her epigrams. ‘My queerness is not a vice, is not deliberate, and harms no one’ was another. Throughout her long life, she managed concurrent affairs. She met her last amour on a bench by the sea in Nice when she was eighty.

Natalie liked drama and extravagant display. Jealousy and the florid feelings provoked by infidelity enhanced her desire. ‘One is unfaithful to those one loves so that their charm will not become mere habit.’ Many women fell in love with her, even more had sex with her. Of herself she said: ‘I have loved many women, at least I suppose I have.’ Her sexual enthusiasm was unwavering. She was rich – very – and felt entitled. Disinhibited, she did not stall at taking off all her clothes in or out of doors. There are photographs of her from the 1890s, naked in Acadia National Park in Maine. No pleasure was more intense for her than orgasm. In an autobiographical piece, she wrote of how, as a child at bath time, ‘the water that I made shoot between my legs from the beak of a swan gave me the most intense sensation’. Thereafter, she pursued this sensation with scores of women.

Her mother, whom she adored, was a diva, startling and theatrical. Her father was violent and alcoholic. Defying him was an essential component of Natalie’s freedom. ‘I neither like nor dislike men,’ she wrote. ‘I resent them for having done so much evil to women. They are our political adversaries.’ She said she became a feminist when travelling in Europe in her teens with her mother and seeing women treated as badly as mules and slaves. She scorned the view that a woman’s lot was to be wife to a husband for life and to give birth