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

Raymond Duncan and his wife, Penelope Sikelianos. They planned to live by the unmechanized ways of the ancient Greeks; to adopt their techniques of spinning, skills in weaving, principles of theatre, ways of making music, poetry and art. Eva Palmer saw in these things a model to emulate, a higher plane of living. Most of all, she wanted to break with Natalie, who was scathing: ‘What you are doing is both sterile and valueless… as a continuous performance of defiance to the passer by I think you worthy of better things.’

The trio lived in a restored villa outside Athens. Raymond made the furniture. They all wore ancient Greek togas made from yarn spun on their own loom and discouraged people in modern clothes from visiting.

Eva began a relationship with Penelope’s brother, the poet Angelos Sikelianos. He was twenty-two, ten years her junior. They viewed their relationship as predetermined by fate. He was her Adonis, she was Aphrodite; together they would recreate an ideal time. When Eva told Natalie she was going to marry Angelos, live permanently in Greece and fulfil the Delphic ideal, Natalie tried to dissuade her.

Eva’s abiding desire for Natalie was clear in her letters – ‘Oh hands that I have loved, eyes that I have followed, hair that I have sobbed to touch’ – but she was tired of her ‘intrigues and passions’. In the summer of 1907 she travelled back to Paris with the Duncans and Angelos to see if they and Natalie might all be friends. She put on ‘proper clothes’ before the meeting. Natalie showed Angelos a letter in which Eva had declared undying and passionate love for her. Angelos thought Eva to be still in love with Natalie.

He and Eva sailed on to America for their wedding. Her arrival in September 1907, wearing a toga and Greek sandals, no hat, arms and ankles bare, made the front page of The New York Times and Washington Post. Her appearance was thought beyond eccentric. The papers wrote of the one-time debutante, ‘rich enough to do as she liked’, who had abolished lingerie and startled passengers on an ocean liner. ‘Her father who was president of the Gramercy club died fifteen years ago. Her mother is now Mrs Robert Abbe.’

Eva married Angelos in Bar Harbor on 9 September 1907. She returned to Greece as Kyria Sikelianou, Angelos Sikelianos’s wealthy American wife, in love ‘with his country, his people, his language and his dreams’. She did not revisit America for twenty years and only on one occasion did she again wear Western clothes – when she met up with her ailing mother at a spa in Aix-les-Bains. She bought fashionable clothes so as not to upset her, but threw them out of the train window when they parted.

In Greece, her money financed Angelos and their revival of Greek culture. She built a villa at Sykia and a stone house in Delphi. She grew crops, made wine, emulated how ancient Greeks wove and wore their clothes, concocted her own dyes from beets and flowers and shells and made connection with Greek women through spinning and weaving. Her dresses, beautiful and embroidered, copied the traditional folds depicted on ancient reliefs. She was attentive to Angelos. They replicated ancient ways of making music, of dancing, reciting poetry and staging plays. She held exhibitions of Greek folk art and handicraft and directed performances of traditional songs and dances by the villagers of Parnassos. She immersed herself in Byzantine music and planned to open a school for the preservation and teaching of ancient Greek music. She told Natalie she was happy,

After two years of marriage, she had a son. She then asked Natalie to stop writing to her.

By 1912 she no longer wanted sex with Angelos and voiced no objection to his relationship with his cousin Katina, a servant in their house. She continued to collaborate with him and to finance him.

Eva made Delphi the cultural centre of her revival of the Greek ideal. She directed two major international festivals of Greek drama in the sacred space of the ancient amphitheatre there, presenting pioneering productions of Aeschylus – Prometheus Bound and The Suppliant Women. She invited local people to a performance and asked their views of the play. An actor who worked under her direction said of her:

She was the only ancient Greek I ever knew. She had a strange power of entering the minds of the ancients and bringing them to life again. She knew everything about them – how they walked and talked in the market place, how they latched their shoes, how they arranged the folds of their gowns when they arose from the table, and what songs they sang, and how they danced, and how they went to bed. I don’t know how she knew these things, but she did.

Eva Palmer as a modern woman reached out to the classical past. For her, progress was to emulate a past Utopia. And yet ultimately hers was an isolated experiment. The marriage did not last, she overspent on the Delphic festival of 1927, lost her fortune, mortgaged her houses and ran up a debt of a million drachmas. She moved back to America in 1933 to try to raise money. Her autobiography Upward Panic made no mention of any lesbian involvement.

Alice Barney marries again

Alice Pike Barney did not mourn the death of her husband Albert. Merrily widowed, she aspired to make Washington the cultural centre of the Western world. As a showcase for contemporary American art, she founded Studio House in Massachusetts Avenue. Her oil paintings of women, many of them Natalie’s lovers, hung alongside those of Joshua Reynolds and James Whistler. She produced and directed plays and operettas for which she wrote the libretti, staged tableaux in which, scantily clad, she danced as a dervish, she set up a centre for decorative arts where she taught tie-dyeing, she became vice-president of the Society of Washington Artists. Mention of her in the society columns was frequent, with photographs of