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

days of anger and all that separates your hand from my loving hand… Close your eyes. Let me love you. Go mad with me…

She implored Renée to accompany her to Lesbos where, as poets, they would live like Sappho. Renée finally acceded and in August 1904 they met in Vienna, took the Orient Express to Constantinople, then an Egyptian steamer, the Khedire, to Lesbos. Natalie, elated, said she was travelling to discover not a place but a person. Renée, as they arrived, stood at dawn at the ship’s prow to behold the island as it emerged from the sea.

Disaffection was swift. This was not the classical Lesbos of their imaginations: no myrtle groves, hyacinth gardens, lesbians, or Sappho, only rough-looking fishermen and shepherds. They had each other and no one else. They rented two villas joined by an orchard, wrote and translated poems and talked of building a lesbian community on the island where women ‘vibrant with poetry, youth and love would come from all parts of the world’. An elderly woman cooked their food. Renée gave hers to the dogs and subsisted on wine and a few figs. Natalie viewed the island as an Aegean bed in the sun and hinted that for the first time in their affair, Renée reached orgasm. She saw this as a triumph, ‘smothered a cry of victory’, and spoke of their souls and bodies being deeply united.

Deep unity ended after a month with a letter from La Brioche stipulating a date for meeting Renée in Constantinople. Renée telegrammed confirmation. Were she to refuse, she told Natalie, the Baroness might hire detectives, alert the embassies, abduct her, do anything to get her back. ‘Her power like her fortune has no limit,’ Renée said.

Colette’s sane eye

Colette was alone in discerning that Renée’s theatricality was a cover for sickness. Her house in rue Villejust, adjacent to the avenue du Bois where Renée lived, was a walk away across two courtyards. She visited often. Renée, in her lisping English accent, would say, ‘Oh my dear little Colette, how disgusting this life is!’ then burst into laughter. Colette said Renée’s apartment smelled like a rich man’s funeral. When she brought a lamp to brighten the darkness, Renée wept. She tried to open one of the leaded windows, but they were all nailed shut. La Brioche summoned Renée at whim and sent messengers with presents: a collection of ancient Persian coins, a glass cabinet of exotic butterflies, ‘a miniature garden of bushes having leaves of crystal and fruit of precious stones’. Renée referred to her as ‘the master’.

Colette © Roger Viollet Collection / Getty Images

Renée, alarmingly thin herself, served to Colette and friends lavish buffets with raw fish rolled on glass wands, foie gras, expensive champagne and lethal cocktails of toxic content:

Among the beverages that she raised to her lips was a cloudy elixir in which floated a cherry harpooned on a toothpick. I laid a hand on her arm and cautioned her.

‘Don’t drink it… I’ve tasted it. It’s deadly… it tastes like some kind of vitriol.’

… She laughed, flashing her white teeth.

‘But these are my own cocktails, ma pethith Coletthe. They are excellent.’

Colette observed Renée’s disturbed relationship to food, her addiction to drink and drugs and the way she tried to conceal her addiction. In her memoir, The Pure and the Impure, she wrote how ‘the wiliest madwoman’ loses command if ‘through a narrow crack in her sealed universe, she lets a sane eye peer in and profane it’. She observed Renée’s ruse of how to drink to excess. The maid, Justine, was complicit. She sat, ostensibly sewing, in a room by the bathroom. Renée constantly went to her for help with her clothes, the food, some seemingly trivial domestic need. Each time, Justine gave her from under a chair a glass filled with alcohol and drugs, Renée then went to the bathroom, gargled with an ever-renewed glass of perfumed water, and rejoined her guests. Some supposed her to be drinking rosewater.

Renée’s thinness was from anorexia, her hand tremor from alcoholism, her mood swings from drug addiction. She passed out in mid-conversation, then came to and behaved as if nothing had happened. She talked of physical lovemaking in crude language: how many times and in what way. She was secretive about her work, guarded about her feelings, concealing about her habits. In the middle of dinner she told friends she was summoned, she must go, then burst into tears. There was a carriage waiting. She wrote poetry of melancholy, originality and erudition. After Colette, with her sane eye, had peered into the tragedy of illness and addiction, her relationship to Renée turned to concern.

Renée’s involvement with the Baroness lasted until 1907. La Brioche then left her for another woman. When Renée died in November 1909 of anorexia and drug and alcohol addiction, she weighed under six stone. She was thirty-one. Natalie heard she was dying and hurried to her house, but arrived too late.

Eva Palmer leaves for Greece

Most of Natalie’s lovers left after a time. It was hard for them to feel safe or special enough, given her terms. Her appetite for love was impressive, her transparency refreshing, but the jealousy and insecurity she provoked were as old as the Aegean hills.

Eva Palmer was the next to go: ‘I have walked after you for years, like a high-heeled woman whose feet hurt but who is too proud to say so,’ she told Natalie by way of valediction. ‘If you care for me let our misery be between ourselves.’

Eva’s commitment to the culture of ancient Greece was lifelong. As a model for living, she saw Hellenism as superior to the dystopia of the industrial age. Though in thrall to Natalie as a life force, she did not trust her, could not stay in her orbit and was too serious-minded to accept Natalie’s hedonistic interpretation of Sappho and her lack of interest in social and political affairs.

In the summer of 1906, Eva left for Greece with