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

Ever since I was a child I have loved you. Lesser loves have had greater rewards – you don’t know what you have been – what you are to me: just the force of life; just the raison d’être.’

In 1923, Winnaretta was fifty-eight and Violet twenty-eight. Proust’s analogy for the Princesse was an icy draught, Virginia Woolf’s was a stuffed fowl, Violet’s was a rock face:

She hung over life like a cliff; her rocky profile seemed to call for spray and seagulls; small blue eyes – the eyes of an old salt – came and went; her face was more like a landscape than a face, cloudy of hair, blue of eye, rugged of contour… Like all fundamentally shy people she was infinitely intimidating. People quailed before her.

The Princesse and Violet were partners for ten years. Violet wrote polished, clever, subversive and underrated novels in French and English. Her themes were betrayal, marriage for gain, malicious matriarchs, love versus possessions. On the first page of the manuscript of her first novel, ‘The Hook in the Heart’, she wrote: ‘Less voluntary than grief or death is the choice of desire.’

Violet wanted to escape from England, forget Vita and win back her mother’s approval. Denys Trefusis wanted freedom and travel. Mrs Keppel wanted the restoration of social status. Winnaretta satisfied all of them. In December she arranged a cruise, in her yacht, up the Nile to Egypt and Algeria. In her party were Violet and Denys, Mr and Mrs Keppel, the pianist Jacques Février and Winnaretta’s nephew Jean de Polignac and his fiancée, the composer Germaine Tailleferre, from whom Winnaretta had commissioned a piano concerto earlier in the year. In January they disembarked in Algiers and stayed at Bordj Polignac with panoramic views of snow-capped mountains and desert plains.

The writer Harold Acton said:

Princess Winnie taught Violet discretion, it was rumoured with a whip – so her subsequent liaisons with ladies were less advertised.

His friend, the society celebrity Diana Cooper, ‘told a marvellous story that was going the rounds’:

a Mrs Blew-Jones, who was taking some furs to the Polignac house at eleven one morning, was asked by the servant at the door whether she was the lady who was expected. She said she was, and was immediately shown into a large room where she was greeted by the old Princess in a dressing gown and top boots. On a sofa in another part of the room she saw Violet Trefusis and another woman both stark naked locked in a peculiar embrace. She ran from the room in terror. It sounds incredible, may be exaggerated but can’t be quite invented.

Perhaps Mrs Blew-Jones was both exaggerating and inventing. But as well as being a discerning patron, the old Princess was an audacious lesbian. And if Ethel Smyth, who was in love with her, said she once pounced so hard she broke the sofa, then who knows, perhaps she did.

St Loup

Don’t Look Round was the title of Violet’s memoir. In it she wrote of meeting Marcel Proust at a lunch party not long before he died in November 1922. He advised her to visit the hilltop town of Saint-Loup de Naud on the road to Provins, 80 kilometres from Paris. She went there with Winnaretta and they found an ancient tower in a dilapidated state, which had once been part of an eleventh-century abbey. The Princesse bought and restored it for Violet and this ‘romantic and mysterious’ tower became the setting for their relationship. Violet projected a personality on to her tower:

It is sensuous, greedy, ruthless, vindictive. If it takes a dislike to you, you are done. If on the other hand, you have the good fortune to please St Loup it is equally unscrupulous. No scène de séduction is too crude, no posture too audacious. It beckons, importunes, detains.

Crude seduction scenes and audacious postures might bear out the gossip of Diana Cooper, Ethel Smyth and Mrs Blew-Jones, the lady who was not expected.

Natalie and Romaine

Natalie’s ease and warmth were a welcome gift to Romaine after the rocky profile and icy draught of the Princesse. Natalie told Romaine she was beautiful, a genius, her singing voice perfect, her paintings immortal, she had no disguise, no pose and was ‘a real head and soul in an unreal world’. Romaine was, Natalie said, dearer to her than her own life. ‘I love my Angel better than anything else in the world and prove it.’ In return she asked only that Romaine should need her above all others. And Romaine said Natalie ‘had an unusual mind of the best quality’, but she decried her Friday salons as gatherings of drunkards and society women, which perhaps was not a fair description of Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, Djuna Barnes, Colette, Janet Flanner and the rest.

After meeting Natalie, Romaine painted the portraits of lesbians that so riveted Truman Capote, the women who attended the Friday gatherings: ladies with high collars and monocles. She painted Radclyffe Hall’s partner, Una, Lady Troubridge, with two of their show-dog dachshunds, did a memorable self-portrait in high hat and gloves, made Lily de Gramont look plain and bushy-browed and Natalie serene and gentle with nothing wild about her, a small model of a prancing horse the only tribute to de Gourmont’s Amazonian view. She and the English society painter Gluck did reciprocal portraits. Romaine called hers ‘Peter a Young English Girl’. Gluck’s portrait of Romaine stayed unfinished. They quarrelled over the sitting and Romaine stormed out.

no second best

Where to live was for Romaine an unresolvable problem. For Natalie, Paris was essential – her Friday salons and community of lesbians. If she and Romaine lived in the same house or near to one another, as she hoped, ‘and walked out hand in hand at the end of the day’, it would have to be in Paris, which Romaine called a desert, ‘wanting all calm, beauty and dignity’. ‘No Paris for me’, she wrote.

I suppose an artist must live alone and feel free otherwise