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

‘gender fluid’. King Edward VII sent congratulations on this engagement. Fearing jeopardy of his political career by the Wilde scandal, Montagu broke from Bosie. Douglas wrote a sonnet – ‘Traitor’ – then, over dinner in Kettner’s in Soho with Olive, persuaded her to elope with him. They married by special licence at St George’s Church, Hanover Square on Tuesday 4 March 1902. They informed Olive’s parents by telegram, then took the ferry to Paris. Colonel Custance contacted the police but the deed was done. Olive and Bosie’s only child, Raymond, was born eight months later. Natalie was his godmother.

Bosie and Olive’s marriage was complex, stormy and destructive. The main casualty of it was their son. Caught in a web of hostile relationships, then diagnosed as schizophrenic, Raymond Wilfred Sholto Douglas spent most of his life in St Andrew’s Hospital in Northampton, the same hospital where Lucia Joyce was incarcerated.

Albert Barney’s death

In October 1902, Natalie’s father, ill with pleurisy, asked her to go with him to Monte Carlo for the sea air. Natalie was ‘too tormented’ over Renée to agree. Renée had met someone new and she wished to break free from Natalie. Their relationship had become one of separations and short-lived reconciliations. Natalie called it ‘defeated love’. But though she praised infidelity as a lifestyle, she was provoked by the jealousy it caused. Because Renée had a new lover, Natalie wanted her back.

Renée had met Baroness Hélène van Zuylen, poet, racing driver, socialite, daughter of Salomon James de Rothschild, known as La Brioche for the way she coiled her hair. In Souvenirs indiscrets, Natalie described her as a fat, rich, domineering Valkyrie. Renée was in La Brioche’s thrall and after 1902 she dedicated her books to her. They collaborated on works of poetry and prose. Their relationship lasted five years.

Albert Barney went alone to Monte Carlo with a nurse. Natalie’s concern was to meet with Renée. She heard she was going to Bayreuth with Eva Palmer for Wagner’s Ring Cycle and persuaded Eva to give her her ticket. ‘First our eyes met then our hands in the shadows.’ She implored Renée to agree to another meeting. Renée agreed, but did not show up. ‘One can’t play one’s life over again,’ she wrote. Natalie persisted.

On 5 December, Natalie was again summoned to Monte Carlo. Her father was dying. She arrived too late. His nurse met her at the station and told her the previous night he had dreamed of Natalie’s wedding and spoken of intending to divorce his wife and cut her out of his will. Natalie observed his dead body but felt no grief. She went alone to his cremation at Père-Lachaise cemetery, then sailed with his ashes to New York to meet up with her mother for funeral ceremonies and estate formalities.

life without father

Natalie returned to Paris richer than ever. Her share of her father’s estate was $2,500,000, the money hers to use as she would.5 She was richer than Bryher. She acquired a house in Neuilly and, in homage to Sappho, staged tableaux vivants in the garden. In Cinq petits dialogues grecs (‘Five short Greek dialogues’), 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.

She and Eva Palmer wrote and produced Equivoque, which extolled Sappho’s life and incorporated her writing. Raymond Duncan, Isadora’s brother, was choreographer, Penelope Sikelianos, his wife, played the harp, Eva, Renée, Colette – who was light-hearted about her lesbian affairs – and others danced in gauze togas around an incense-burning altar. In one tableau, the dancer Mata Hari rode, naked except for a crown, into the garden on a white horse with a bejewelled harness. (She joined the German secret service in 1907 and was executed as a spy by the French in 1917.)

Natalie Clifford Barney with dancers dressed in togas © Archives Charmet / Bridgeman Images

Neighbours complained. ‘What do I care if they vilify me or judge me according to their prejudices’ was Natalie’s view of any upset to others caused by her homage to Sappho.

Eva Palmer’s biographer, Artemis Leontis, described Natalie’s allegiance to and emulation of Sappho and the goings-on in her Neuilly garden:

Barney’s pavilion with its expansive garden became a gathering place. Women came and went, sometimes crossing paths and sharing in acts of love. Eva watched as Barney made love to others; or she made love while Barney or another woman watched her; or she read what Barney wrote about her other lovers; or she pursued lovers and wrote about them to Barney.

Eva Palmer aspired to reconstruct the Hellenic ideal and to that end seriously studied the language and culture of ancient Greece. Natalie favoured ‘inspiration independent of technique’. She wrote to Eva:

I am so glad that I have never carved a statue or painted a picture or produced anything as beautiful as yourself. Life has been your art – you have set yourself to music, your days are your sonnets.

Natalie’s plans were for the here and now.

For Colette, Natalie’s tableaux and Sapphic dances were French fun and games rather than Hellenic renaissance. Natalie went to tea with her after the publication of Liane de Pougy’s Idylle Saphique. ‘My husband kisses your hands’, Colette told her after this meeting, ‘and me all the rest.’ With similar light-heartedness, Colette began an affair with Renée, attracted to her superficial charm and style. She revised her view when she saw the dark side of Renée’s soul. They smoked Chinese tobacco together in miniature silver pipes and wrote numerous letters, most of them now gone. ‘Our intimacy did not seem to make any real progress,’ Colette said.

to Lesbos with Renée

Natalie’s past lovers were ever present with new ones in the wings. She did not accept being ousted from Renée by La Brioche, the forceful Baroness, née Hélène de Rothschild, the Valkyrie. She wrote Renée a prose poem, Je me souviens:

Let us forget the