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

spread that it was the city of like minds and hearts. On arrival, they headed to Natalie’s Friday salon in the same way as aspiring novelists headed to Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company. Many had a distinctive dress code, as Sylvia pointed out.

High collars and monocles, though not de rigueur, were clues. So was brilliantined short hair, a white carnation or sprig of violets pinned to a jacket lapel, a ring on the pinkie finger. Beyond such badges of allegiance, an appraising glance of recognition was universally understood.

At Le Monocle, a club in Montmartre, the clientele divided into butch and femme, the bemonocled and besuited who propositioned the befrocked. At 20 rue Jacob of a Friday, dress code was not prescriptive. Natalie liked her blonde hair long or up and wore jewels, furs and fripperies, high collars and high boots, fancy dress or nothing at all, according to the occasion and her mood.

fidèle/infidèle and idleness

Natalie described her nature as fidèle/infidèle and divided her amours into relationships, affairs and adventures. By fidèle/infidèle, she meant she would be steadfast to lovers in her way but would not, could not, be sexually faithful. She thought heightened desire in relationship did not last, and because heightened desire was imperative to her, she kept moving on. In her three categories, relationships were deep and long-lasting; affairs were serious but less compelling, and adventures too numerous to tally. Alice B. Toklas said she picked up her adventures in the toilets of Paris department stores.

Natalie had no need to earn a wage, publish for money or, like James Joyce and Sylvia Beach, make worried appeals for funding. She could be lofty about her unconcern for possessions. There was hauteur in her epigrams: ‘Why grab possessions like thieves, or divide them like socialists when you can ignore them like wise men?’ Or, ‘I dread possessions because they possess you.’ Or, ‘I can live without fear of robbers. You can’t rob an atmosphere.’ Such thoughts floated above an astonishingly large bank account.

From a bubble of privilege, she extolled idleness. ‘I think one must be idle in order to become oneself,’ she wrote. ‘If you have a profession you become part of that profession. With work you become a function. With idleness you become who you are.’ She had no need to submit to an occupation to pay the bills.

Paris was a grand place to be idle, to become who you are, to have relationships, affairs and adventures. Paris allowed such indulgence.

thoughts of an Amazon

Radical in her lesbian separatism for her own or any time, ironic and scathing of patriarchal power, in her writing Natalie voiced her thoughts on the folly of war, the nonsense of religious dogma and, most of all, her preoccupation with love between women and with the women whom she loved. Between 1910 and 1940 she collected her epigrams, aphorisms and quips, written on scraps of paper as and when they came to her, and published them in books – with gaps of a decade – with the titles Éparpillements (‘Scatterings’), Pensées d’une Amazone (‘Thoughts of an Amazon’), and Nouvelles pensées de l’Amazone (‘New Thoughts of the Amazon’).

The first novel, Adam and Eve’s, has been overprinted.

Marriage: neither alone nor together.

Fame: To be known by those one does not care to know.

Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth.

There are more evil ears than bad mouths.

Eternity – a waste of time.

At worst, her insistent pithiness made her sound like a scribe of mottoes for Christmas crackers: ‘My only books, Were women’s looks’ was one unworthy quip. Another was that her favourite book was her cheque book. She was not a self-censoring writer. The prose of her fiction was short on narrative outline, though not as bewildering or prolix as Gertrude Stein’s. ‘Gertrude chose the language of the stammerers’, she said. ‘I like to find a thought as in a nut or seashell.’ ‘While I make for a point Gertrude seems to proceed by avoiding it.’ Gertrude took no offence. They were lasting friends.

Natalie’s defining autobiographical epigram was ‘living is the first of all the arts’. How she lived her life was her gift and creation, and in her lifestyle she captured the essence of modernism: the shedding of past certainties and exuberance for the new.

Natalie meets Lily

Scornful of her mother’s marriage in 1909 to Christian Hemmick, the ‘worthless pederast’, Natalie, that year, embarked on a profound relationship for herself. It was with Lily de Gramont, duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre. Natalie was thirty-two, Lily was thirty-four.

They met in late April. The poet Lucie Delarue-Mardrus – who years earlier had been one of Natalie’s liaisons – introduced them. Lucie was described by the Belgian sculptor Yvonne Serruys as the ‘queen of Lesbos-Paris’. ‘Nature had fitted her perfectly for the role she played among the women of her time,’ Yvonne said of Lucie. She made and gave her a small bronze statue of her ‘superb androgynous body’.

Lucie talked with Lily of Natalie’s Sapphic ways. In love poems to Natalie, written in 1902/3 and published posthumously as Nos secrètes amours, she expressed turmoil at being one among many of her lovers:

My joy and my pain, my death and my life,

My blonde bitch.

Lily confided to Lucie her disaffection with men, her desire for women, her abusive childhood and marriage.

the duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre

On 1 May 1909, Natalie and Lily dined alone together. They ate plovers’ eggs, drank a glass of Sauternes, then stayed together for three nights and two days. By the end of that time, Lily was in love. ‘I kiss your hands, your caressing hands, fluid as the water we love! See you tomorrow, my love,’ she wrote to Natalie when finally she got home. From then on, until her death forty-five years later, they celebrated 1 May as their anniversary.

Lily, grey-eyed, tall, bilingual, was born into the French aristocracy. Her mother died giving birth to her on 23 April 1875. Her father, Agénor, duc de Gramont, handed her over to be