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

all individuality goes. I can think of my painting only when I am alone, even less do any actual work.

But Romaine could no more find the perfect home than the perfect person. She excelled in making the places she acquired fit her laws of beauty, Natalie said of her. In 1918 in rue Raynouard – the road where Lily de Gramont lived – Romaine created a seemingly ideal studio designed entirely to her taste, but could not settle. She moved on to Capri, London, New York, then Florence, Venice, Nice.

After spending time with Natalie, then time apart, Romaine at first missed her greatly, then ‘regained that state of mind which constitutes my personal life’. When they were together for any length of time, Romaine lost her sense of self and needed to return to solitude. She also objected to Natalie’s lack of exclusivity, even though she found proximity taxing.

Natalie struggled with Romaine’s equivocation and what she called a ‘relentless quality’ that made Natalie behave like some ‘dumb, devoted, pitiable animal’. With Lily, Natalie was at ease. With Romaine, each time they separated, she feared she would not come back.

Nonetheless, Natalie’s relationship with Romaine was compelling. ‘My angel is my only real companion and friend’, she wrote, which was not quite what she had conveyed to Lily. They opened a joint Swiss bank account. Natalie talked of their being together for the rest of their lives and of sharing the same grave. In Paris they picnicked in the Bois de Boulogne. On Capri they stayed in the Villa Cercola, which Romaine acquired in 1918. At Honfleur they stayed with Lily de Gramont, but how to make both of them feel first best – or at least not to make either feel second best – was a difficult call.

Romaine did not care that the great Sappho had lived in harmony with a community of women. In summer 1922 she agreed to meet Natalie in Calvados for a holiday. Natalie wrote excitedly about plans: Lily would be there too, would Romaine find out about maps and roads, could they fit their trunks and Romaine’s maid into Natalie’s Buick, various friends would meet up with them at Chambourcy, they could all go to Capri.

Romaine’s reply was brutal: Natalie should count her out. She intended to holiday alone on the Italian coast. ‘Always remember, Nat, that I prefer Nat Nat to being alone, but alone to being with anyone else.’ Natalie, she said, had many friends and she, Romaine, had one ‘and therein lies the difference’.

Romaine’s haughtiness grated on Lily de Gramont: ‘Mrs Brooks’, she wrote in her memoir, ‘puts bars on the windows of her various establishments to keep out the disappointing human race and now no longer knows who is the prisoner.’

Natalie tried to be reparative but was not going to change. Nor did Romaine spare Natalie provocation and jealousy from her own involvements. An affair with the pianist Renata Borgatti, one of the Princesse de Polignac’s protegées, lasted some years. She painted her portrait and they holidayed together on Capri. ‘So Renata Borgatti is “on to you” as we say,’ Natalie wrote:

I am alone and you are with her. I know you have not bathed without everyone on that island desiring you – that they would follow the glimmer of your perfect form to the ends of the earth – yet can any of them but me so grasp the inner goddess, the real sense of your greatness.

Among Renata Borgatti’s other affairs on Capri was the writer and memoirist Faith Compton Mackenzie, whose husband, Compton Mackenzie, wrote a satirical and antipathetic roman à clef, Extraordinary Women, about lesbians on the island. And another of the ‘inner goddess’s’ affairs on Capri was with Luisa Casati, dubbed the patron saint of exhibitionists, who bought diamond collars for her pet cheetahs, dyed her hair flame red, gave extravagant parties and accrued debts of $25 million. Romaine painted her portrait too, as did Giovanni Boldini and Augustus John. Jacob Epstein sculpted her and she was photographed by Man Ray, Cecil Beaton and Adolph de Meyer. In 1932 her possessions were seized and sold to appease her creditors. After Romaine, she linked up with the Princesse de Polignac.

Partners changed in a game of musical chairs – or beds. There was no rule book for lesbians, no guide except perhaps gleanings from Sappho. They were outsiders. There was no family help, guidance or approval and there was something spoiling and irrelevant about the sexological notions and pathologizing of Freud, Krafft-Ebing, and Havelock Ellis.

the well of awfulness

After 1927, men rarely attended Natalie’s hazardous Fridays. Natalie then termed the gatherings the Académie des Femmes, a snook at the all-male Académie Française, which barred women. She sponsored a prize for women writers, encouraged and helped finance individual projects and forged connections for writers with publishers.

Attendees read from their work. There was a packed audience on the afternoon Radclyffe Hall read from her gloomy sapphic Well of Loneliness. In London in 1928, ten years after the censoring of Ulysses, it was condemned as obscene by a kangaroo court in an outcome-driven trial where no defence was allowed, then ‘burned in the King’s furnace’. In Paris, Sylvia Beach sold pirated copies in Shakespeare and Company.

England’s ruling class, the lawmakers and law enforcers, all aristocrats and members of the men-only Garrick Club, censored the book solely because of its lesbian theme. The Attorney General, Sir Thomas Inskip, held the book at arm’s length as he gave the court’s verdict. He had, he said, no idea whether the book had any literary qualities; it must be destroyed because its subject matter was obscene. It would corrupt the young and ‘suggest thoughts of a most impure, immoral, unclean and libidinous character’ to them. The practice in which its heroine indulged was referred to in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans and in the second satire of Juvenal. (He read Classics at Cambridge.) It glorified the vice of physical relations between women. It