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

from his will. He made Pauline and her sister, Antoinette, sole joint beneficiaries when they married or reached the age of twenty-one, whichever was first. Pauline’s mother was resentful to the point of cruelty. Her relationship with Pauline, at no time good, became terrible.

She arranged their return to England four years later. Pauline knew no one in England; Paris was her city of choice.

Back in London, Pauline shut herself in her room, wrote poems, read Victor Hugo, Byron and Keats, played Chopin piano sonatas, felt daunted by ‘continual vexations, continual suffering and sorrow’ and tried to drown herself, tried to kill herself with chloroform. She confided her unhappiness to Amédée Moullé, a fifty-year-old Parisian poet who critiqued her work and sent her books. He offered to marry her so she could gain her inheritance and return to Paris.

To prevent this, her mother locked her in the house ‘as in a jail… all the doors were locked’. Pauline escaped through a window, pawned a brooch and stayed for five days in a lodging house until a maid found her and took her home. Her mother then tried to have her certified insane. Pauline thought she wanted her consigned to an asylum as a ruse to steal her inheritance. The case went to court, Pauline was made a ward of court and assigned a legal guardian. Her mother was foiled. As soon as she was twenty-one, Pauline left for Paris.

There she discarded the name Pauline Tarn, the tyranny of her mother and the repressions of English society. She recreated herself as Renée Vivien, ‘born again to life’, to be a lesbian poet and lover. She wrote only in French. With publication of her first poems in 1901 she hid her gender behind R. Vivien, then used the masculine form René, before settling for Renée Vivien. She was passionate about Natalie’s childhood friend, Violet Shillito from Cincinnati, who was studying French in Paris. She wrote poems to her and the violet became her lifelong symbol of love.3

Renée’s life was short, her output impressive: eleven volumes of poetry, two of them translations from Greek, collections of short stories, an autobiographical novel. Natalie became the inspiration for many of her poems, and for the novel. And it was Natalie who encouraged her to study Greek with her own tutor, Charles Brun, so as to read Sappho in the original. After two years Renée was fluent and known as ‘Sappho 1900’ for her openly lesbian poems and translations of Sapphic fragments.

Though Liane de Pougy was more fun and Eva Palmer ‘the mother of her desires’, Natalie, always energetically polyamorous, simultaneously pursued a relationship with Renée.

she had brown eyes which often sparkled with gaiety but when her beautiful swarthy eyelids were lowered they revealed more than her eyes – the soul and the poetic melancholy that I sought in her…

She had a sense of humor which was easy to restore and a childlike drollness which suddenly removed half of her twenty years. The weakness of her chin could be particularly noted in profile, but when seen from the front no one could resist the laugh on her full lips and her little teeth of which even the canines were not pointed. Her complexion uniformly smooth and enhanced by a beautiful texture, was virginally pink when she became animated. Her nose was fine and slightly turned up.

Colette, a fleeting lover of Renée’s some years later, confirmed the bursts of mischief that belied her melancholy:

Impossible to find anywhere in that face any sign of the hidden tragic melancholy that throbs in the poetry of Renée Vivien. I never saw Renée sad.

But, whatever the facade, Renée was self-destructive. She had read Byron, Huysmans, Keats and Baudelaire and melancholy was her territory. And addiction. From the start, her love for Natalie was tortured:

In you I find the incarnation of my deepest desire. You are more strange than my dream. I love you and I am already certain you will never love me. You are the suffering that makes happiness contemptible.

And suffer she did. She bombarded Natalie with flowers, jewels and poems. Her love, she wrote, was ‘like snow pure passion, like the attraction of deep water, like standing at the edge of an abyss, like wedding day chastity…’ She did not have Natalie’s self-belief or capacity for a good time. She could only bathe vicariously in Natalie’s Amazonian power. It was as if their destinies were in full view – Renée would have to die young, Natalie would sail on to grand old age.

Natalie was concerned by the quality of Renée’s devotion. She would have preferred something simpler. And sexually, Renée could not help but withhold. For Natalie, her lovers’ orgasms were a badge of honour. Renée was too anxious about her body, too troubled in her mind and, as time went by, too full of alcohol and drugs to be freely responsive.

Natalie regretted ‘throwing her soul into disarray’ and exacerbating her despair. ‘I did not want it to be like that, rather that she should love me just enough to bring sunshine into her life.’ For Renée, Natalie was a much-needed challenge to her despair. Death, sex and doomed love were recurring themes in her poetry. ‘Let the Dead Bury Their Dead’ was the title of one of her poems. ‘But not the Living’, Natalie wrote in the margin.

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Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes, Natalie’s book of love poems, was published in spring 1900 in Paris by Paul Ollendorff. A review ‘Yankee Girl, French Poet’, with the subtitle ‘Sappho Sings in Washington’, was printed in the Washington Post and read by Albert Barney. He instructed his staff to prepare Bar Harbor for the arrival of his family, then went to Paris, bought up and destroyed the printers’ plates and all unsold copies of Natalie’s book and insisted she return to America with him and her mother.

They sailed on the SS St Louis on 7 July 1900. Later that month he had a heart attack while playing golf, which