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

Cynic Sal who wore a top hat, cracked a sharp whip and ‘never once descended the Driver’s seat to put her Head within’.

When Dame Musset died aged ninety-nine, forty women shaved their heads, carried her corpse through the streets of Paris and laid her on a funeral pyre. She burned to ash except for her tongue: ‘it flamed and would not suffer Ash and it played about…’. Her acolytes sat on this tongue and ‘from under their Skirts a slow Smoke issued’. They put the tongue in an urn on an altar in Dame Musset’s temple of love, ‘where it flickers to this day’.

Ladies Almanack, financed by Bryher, published by Contact Editions and printed in Dijon by Darantiere Press, had no expectation of general release. One thousand and fifty copies were circulated among friends and acquaintances. Djuna hand-coloured the illustrations in forty copies. She feared confiscation by the postal service if she had page proofs delivered to her address, so she asked Sylvia Beach to take them at Shakespeare and Company. Sylvia refused. She foresaw trouble with the authorities even beyond the sort she got into when she published Ulysses in 1922.

Djuna managed to smuggle some copies into America:

Sold all 50 Almanacks I brought in with me… and can sell 100 at $5 when they arrive if they get through the post. These problems are quite tame in comparison to the difficulties experienced by Hall in getting the Well published and distributed.

Natalie and her salon attendees knew each other, painted each other, wrote about each other, slept with each other. Theirs was a microcosm, a world within a world. They devised their own almanack, found their own way of being true to themselves.

For three decades, Natalie’s salon was the sapphic centre of the Western world, beyond interference from the patriarchs of England and America, the fathers, dictators, legislators with their stately homes, swathes of land and titles and honours conferred: the Home Secretary, the Lord Chief Justice, the Secretary General, the Director of Public Prosecutions, the Attorney General, the Supreme Court, protectors of the status quo as laid down by their forefathers, with their sense of entitlement, for whom women had no rights beyond those they deigned to confer, for whom wives were servants and daughters possessions, and for whom the word ‘lesbian’ was on a par with ‘pervert’ because women’s bodies belonged to men.

In 1940, one power branch of patriarchy – militaristic, fascistic – destroyed Natalie’s particular kingdom of women, broke it apart and made them run for cover. Nor, in Paris, did they reconvene.

death of Natalie

Natalie stayed true to the main business of her life. In February 1956, aged eighty, she travelled to Nice to visit Romaine, but took rooms at the Hôtel d’Angleterre so as not to disturb her. They lunched together each day, but for the rest of the time Romaine wanted to be alone. ‘My angel’s weary look made me very remorseful,’ Natalie said. One afternoon in wintry sunshine, sitting on a bench in the Promenade des Anglais, she struck up a conversation with Janine Lahovary, who was Swiss, fifty-six, stylish and in a joyless marriage.

Madame Lahovary knew of Natalie’s reputation. She described their ensuing relationship as a mental liberation and a resurrection. ‘Natalie Barney has a new love affair. Isn’t it wonderful?’ Alice B. Toklas wrote to a friend. ‘She’s the one bright spot in a fairly cheerless world.’ Romaine’s response to Natalie’s news was cool: ‘A love affair can cause trouble at our age, so do be careful,’ she wrote.

Natalie reassured Romaine she was ‘as ever the nearest and dearest to my heart’. But Madame Lahovary wanted to be with her and Natalie was a pragmatist. She viewed an available lesser love as preferable to an empty bed. When Monsieur Lahovary asked Natalie to leave his wife alone, she asked him to leave his wife alone, too. After he died Janine moved from Switzerland to live with Natalie in Paris. She cooked for her and looked after her; when Natalie had a cold, Janine put cologne on cotton wool for her to sniff. To Romaine, Natalie described herself as quiet, well-fed and often bored. ‘Even at night, each time I awake, you are my greatest preoccupation and greatest love’, she wrote to her as late as May 1964.

Natalie outlived her other lovers. She was ninety-six when she died on Wednesday, 1 February 1972 in Janine Lahovary’s arms. Two days later, she was buried near Renée Vivien in the cemetery at Passy. A photograph of Romaine was interred with her. Twenty people gathered for this, the last of her Fridays. One of them commented that Natalie would not have chosen to be among them. ‘She never went to a funeral in her life.’

‘We do not touch life except with our hearts,’ was Natalie’s view. Reaching out for love, was her life’s work. ‘It is not the love I receive, but the love I feel that matters,’ she had written when young. Her life was her work of art: defiant, questing. Her concern was the open expression of lesbian identity. ‘I am a lesbian. One need not hide it, nor boast of it, though being other than normal is a perilous advantage.’ Natalie dared openly to break the rules of patriarchy. She gave courage to others to be true to themselves. And yet she knew how elusive her quest for intimacy was. Of Romaine she said, ‘I belonged to everyone, she belonged to no one; we considered ourselves quite different, and yet in our loneliness we were alike.’

1 Lytton Strachey was her brother.

2 Natalie inherited this rug and kept it in her bedroom for most of her life.

3 Violet died of typhoid fever in 1901.

4 Now the Victoria & Albert Museum (the V&A).

5 Equivalent to about $75 million in 2020.

6 A patisserie on the rue de Rivoli with gilded mouldings, marble tables and frescoed walls.

7 Berthe came from Bourgogne and for 40 years was Natalie’s librarian, manager, receptionist, nurse and