No Modernism Without Lesbians

Within each of their stories, other women figure large: where would Sylvia Beach be without Adrienne Monnier, Bryher without the imagist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Natalie Barney without all her lovers, too many to list, or Gertrude Stein without Alice B. Toklas (‘little Alice B. is the wife for me’). And then there were the women friends of the women friends, and the women they kissed too…

They gravitated to Paris and each other, turned their backs on patriarchy and created their own society. Rather than staying where they were born and struggling against censorship and outrageous denials and inequalities enforced by male legislators, they took their own power and authority and defied the stigma that conservative society tried to impose on them. Individually, each made a contribution; collectively, they were a revolutionary force in the breakaway movement of modernism, the shock of the new, the innovations in art, writing, film and lifestyle and the fracture from nineteenth-century orthodoxies.

In 1947 the novelist Truman Capote went to Romaine Brooks’s studio in Paris with Natalie Barney. Natalie’s relationship with Romaine lasted fifty-four years, until Romaine’s death in 1970. Romaine painted many of the lesbians in their set; the portraits were large scale and lined the walls of her studio. Capote called the collection ‘the all-time ultimate gallery of famous dykes’. They formed, he said, ‘an international daisy-chain’.

I call them all lesbians, but the words lesbian, dyke and daisy were not much used by them. ‘Friend’ was the usual catch-all, though Natalie Barney nailed her colours: ‘I am a lesbian. One need not hide it nor boast of it, though being other than normal is a perilous advantage.’ She drew up and signed a bespoke marriage contract with one of her partners, Lily de Gramont, duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre. Its terms would not have been countenanced in her home town of Washington or by the French aristocracy. Gertrude Stein freely called Alice her wife, and Bryher, who chose her own gender-neutral name, viewed herself from an early age as a boy trapped in the body of a girl.

I duck the initialism of the present age: the LGBTQIA, the QUILTBAG (queer or questioning, undecided, intersex, lesbian, trans, bisexual, asexual or allied, gay or genderqueer) plus the +. Added recently are P and K: P for pansexual or polygamous and K for kink. And now there is prescriptive use of the pronoun ‘they’ for a person resistant to he or she. I favour H.D.’s revision: ‘When is a woman not a woman? When obviously she is sleet and hail and a stuffed sea-gull.’ But in French, sleet is masculine and seagull feminine, so where to draw a line?

There are but twenty-six letters in the Roman alphabet and life is short. Gertrude Stein said of her large white poodle, Basket, that of his ABCs he knew only the Bs – Basket, Bread and Ball. With canine simplicity, of my LGBs I use only the Ls – Lesbians and Love. This is not to disrespect all efforts of inclusiveness and search for identity and self-expression. I want a place in the rainbow. But I am a tyro in this language class and when writing of past times, today’s language seems incongruous. I cannot talk about cisgender for Virginia Woolf, call Bryher they, or struggle with No Modernism Without QUILTBAG+. And all the initials in the alphabet will not help in what I hope shines through: the uniqueness, the utter singularity of each individual life. I juxtapose four women within the lesbian category. Their juxtaposition shows the inadequacy of any label. I marvel at how different, original and irreplaceable each one is, formed by their childhood, their nature and nurture, imaginative in their contribution, unique in who they happen to be. Lining them up highlights their differences. For, of course, what matters from A to Z is not what you are, but how you are what you are, and the contribution made.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, censorship laws in Britain and America prevented lesbians from publishing anything in fiction or fact about their love lives. The subject matter was deemed obscene. Sex between consenting men was a criminal act. The 1895 trial and ruin of Oscar Wilde hung in the air of English society. Sex between consenting women was not illegal. Silence was the weapon of its repression.

In 1920, Violet Trefusis and Vita Sackville-West caused a furore when they eloped to France and their respective husbands piloted a plane to bring them back. The following year, a Conservative member of parliament, Frederick Macquisten, a minister’s son, proposed that a clause ‘Acts of Gross Indecency Between Female Persons’ be added to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which indicted Oscar Wilde. Lesbianism, he told the House of Commons, threatened the birth rate, debauched young girls and induced neurasthenia and insanity. His clause was agreed and went to the House of Lords to be ratified.

Their lordships speculated on the effect of breaking silence. Lord Desart, who was Director of Public Prosecutions when Oscar Wilde was indicted, said: ‘You are going to tell the whole world there is such an offence, to bring it to the notice of women who have never heard of it, never thought of it, never dreamed of it. I think this is a very great mischief.’

Lord Birkenhead, the Lord Chancellor, agreed:

I am bold enough to say that of every 1,000 women, taken as a whole, 999 have never even heard a whisper of these practices. Among all these, in the homes of this country, the taint of this noxious and horrible suspicion is to be imparted.

Whispered or heard, ‘these practices’, Birkenhead believed, would cause contagion. In the home of his mind, a woman’s place was on his arm and in his bed.

Then in 1928 came the startling trial and censorship of Radclyffe Hall’s anodyne novel The Well of Loneliness. The only sexy bits in it were ‘she kissed her full on the lips’ and ‘that night they were not divided’, but even such mild lesbian expression was deemed obscene and the book was ‘burned in the King’s furnace’. Radclyffe Hall left England for Paris with her partner, Una Troubridge. Sylvia Beach sold pirated copies of The Well from Shakespeare and Company.

Modernism would not have taken the shape it did without the lesbians who gravitated to Paris at that time. There had been nothing like it since Sappho and the Island of Lesbos. Many of them learned Greek to read extant Sappho fragments and wrote their own verse in her honour.

Guests at her as-you-were party were picked up from their homes by bus at an unspecified time. They were to be as they were, dressed, groomed, ungroomed, when the driver sounded the horn. Cocktails were served to those waiting in the bus. For most, their ‘surprise appearance’ was contrived, costumes carefully unfinished: unzipped skirts, a woman with her face half made-up, a man wrapped in a towel with shaving soap on his face. But though guests were provocatively half-dressed, the implicit questions were: What is ‘correct attire’ and true appearance? Who is the real person, unmasked, as opposed to the presented self? Paris allowed candour, and was where pretence could be stripped, expectations confounded, identity fluid, and sexual relationships open. The autobus was a vehicle for transparency, free expression and the breaking of rules.

A community of women who called the shots was no bad idea 100 years ago, nor is it a bad idea now. Why are there still so few works by women in the art galleries, why are their symphonies and songs not filling the concert halls or their statutes defining the laws of the land?

‘It is true that I only want to show off to women. Women alone stir my imagination’, Virginia Woolf wrote in 1930 to the composer and suffragist Ethel Smyth, who had declared love to her. Women needed their 500 guineas, a room of their own and ‘the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think’. Three years earlier, Woolf had written to Vita Sackville-West, with whom she was, in her way, in love: ‘Look here Vita – throw over your man and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head… They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come.’

‘Throw over your man’ was quite a call. It might have been a way forward before the cataclysm of two world wars. War tore apart the lesbian web woven by the women in these pages. It might be a way forward now, in the dark, tipsy and in love, in the beautiful garden the world might be, before the moonlight disappears and all the things in women’s heads are lost forever.

‘Throw over your man, I say, and come.’