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

cared for by her Gramont grandparents, then married Margaretha von Rothschild and a share of the Rothschild millions. It was a pattern for aristocrats whose wealth was diminishing to marry ‘trade’, a title in exchange for money.

Elisabeth (Lily) de Gramont © Art Collection 4 / Alamy

Lily was not welcomed by her stepmother. ‘Everything was forbidden,’ she said. She studied – English, German, the piano, dancing, drawing – and lived in a world of splendour, of stately homes, footmen, sumptuous receptions and emotional neglect.

Aged eighteen, she was pushed into society and primed for marriage. Offers came from men she did not know. Father

used wake me up with a start at dawn to offer me now a young conseiller-général with a big future, now a young sprig of nobility who would inherit wonderful tapestry with friezes. ‘With friezes?’ I would repeat in a dazed way.

When she was twenty-one, she married Philibert, duc de Clermont-Tonnerre. She had two daughters, and two miscarriages caused by her violent husband viciously kicking her. Her respite was in books – she published the first translation of Keats’ poetry into French, wrote memoirs, poems, a novel – and in her friendships with Proust, Remy de Gourmont, Anatole France, and her close attachments to women – la chaîne des dames – the daisy-chain, the legion. Among her women friends were Anna de Noailles, Colette and her lover, Mathilde de Morny (known as ‘Missy’), Lucie Delarue-Mardrus and then, and above all, Natalie.

Natalie was drawn to women who rose above the cruelty of abusive childhoods but at core were wounded and set apart. Of Lily, she wrote: ‘If she has suffered much she has never told any one, it has stayed in her silences, in her voice, in her laugh and in the beauty of her face.’

Natalie wrote of her passion for her in 1911 in an unpublished autobiographical novel, ‘L’adultère ingénue’ (‘The Adulterous Ingenue’). In it, she was explicit about sex in a way Radclyffe Hall, in her banned Well of Loneliness seventeen years later, was not. She described a train journey she and Lily made together through France. Lily had a fever:

I undress her and take off all my clothes, sitting on the edge of her bed, lying under scant covers next to her. I let her feel my strength, my heat, she stops coughing. I try just to take care of her but of a sudden my mouth is drawn to hers. Our desires repressed for too long follow the crescendo of shivers and cries before pleasure comes… I hold her close to me as she sleeps, warming her neck with my breath that must burn her through her nightdress, while my hands hold her breasts, their palms dry and hot.

Sylvia Beach said ‘you can’t censor human nature’, but the censors would have consigned that to their bonfire. Lily was reticent about putting into print any mention of her relationship with Natalie. In her memoirs, without naming her, she wrote only of Natalie’s laugh, her freedom, her ardent heart.

Lily’s duc of a husband threatened to shoot her and Natalie. Lily had no option but to leave him and by doing so she was cut off from all rights to her children and all funds. Natalie helped her financially, loaned her money, paid towards the upkeep of her house in rue Raynouard, paid for holidays.

Separated from the duc and banished from French high society, Lily dressed in tailored suits and simple hats and had her hair shingled. In the 1914–18 war, she wrote articles for Le Radical, which earned her the nickname ‘The Red Duchess’.

Natalie meets Romaine

By 1916, nine years on from when she and Lily first met, Natalie had formed another relationship. She had not tired of Lily, far from it, but she was smitten with the artist Romaine Brooks, American, good-looking, rich, emotionally damaged and with a perversity Natalie was drawn to and understood.

Romaine was forty-one. For her life-size monotone portraits, she was called ‘the thief of souls’. She had had affairs with, among others, Renée Vivien, the dancer Ida Rubinstein, the poet, narcissist and fascist Gabriele d’Annunzio, the patron of music Winnaretta Singer. After mere months of marriage, Romaine discarded her homosexual husband, John Ellingham Brooks.

Lily voiced no expectation of fidelity, gave no ultimatum; she wanted to keep the relationship between her and Natalie, who, she said, was her ‘weakness’ and nothing would change that, but she wanted to be clear about the terms of their involvement. ‘The blonde and the brunette’, she wrote of Natalie’s new relationship, ‘very becoming. I wonder if it is right to try to separate that which life has brought together.’

Natalie’s reassurance was and was not convincing. She told Lily: ‘I shall have my room in your house… my life in your life, my sleep on your heart…’ But, she said, Romaine was too important, ‘too good and too real and too everything to be merely in 2nd place’.

marriage contract

Lily asked for clarification. If neither she nor Romaine was second place, where were they? On 14 March 1918 she wrote frostily to Natalie about the relationship with Romaine, which had gone on for eighteen months. As intended reassurance, Natalie, on 20 June, drew up, in French, a handwritten contract between her and Lily.

This contract was to protect ‘against whims, wanderings and changes’ between them and to assert their unbreakable bond. It iterated how they had been together for nine years, shared joys and worries and admitted to other affairs. Though the prospect of new affairs was ever present, they intended to safeguard and continue their relationship. They were not enough for each other but no one else was more important. They pledged never to part and to ‘bring the other back’ if separation threatened.

The years have tested our union: by the sixth, sexual fidelity failed. This was inevitable because our only commitment is to feelings and desire. Our love passion… pure, exclusive, devouring, free as fire – had become love love – another sort of beauty, a