QUEERING COUPLES

- by diana souhami

  • the acclaimed writer, diana souhami, explores some of the many extraordinary lives of the women who helped shape modernism.
  • Alice B. Toklas first met Gertrude Stein in Paris on 8 September 1907. She heard bells ringing in her head,... Alice B. Toklas first met Gertrude Stein in Paris on 8 September 1907. She heard bells ringing in her head,...

    Alice B. Toklas first met Gertrude Stein in Paris on 8 September 1907. She heard bells ringing in her head, proof she thought, of being in the presence of genius. From that meeting on they were never apart. They called each other Lovey and Pussy (Alice was Pussy) and created a happy marriage. They fell in love, saw life from the same point of view, and lived openly as a couple with much emphasis on domestic harmony until parted by death. 

     

    Paris was essential to this happiness. `It wasn’t just what Paris gave you,’ Gertrude said. `It was all it did not take away.’ In Paris in the early decades of the twentieth century, creative women who loved women, escaped the repressions and expectations of their home towns, like Washington and London, lived openly and were true themselves. Their contribution to modernism, the shock of the new, the break from nineteenth century orthodoxies to new ways of expression and being, was huge. 

     

    Gertrude and Alice were at the cultural core of this revolution for four decades. An indomitable duo, photographed by Man Ray and Cecil Beaton, featured in memoirs, they were a sight to be seen.

  • Less photogenic but just as intrinsic to modernism were Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier. Sylvia, too, escaped the strictures of... Less photogenic but just as intrinsic to modernism were Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier. Sylvia, too, escaped the strictures of...

    Less photogenic but just as intrinsic to modernism were Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier. Sylvia, too, escaped the strictures of her American home town. In Paris in October 1917 her heart found its wings. She visited La Maison des Amies de Livres, Adrienne’s French-language bookshop in rue l’Odeon. She was wearing a dark cloak and wide Spanish hat. She peered through the shop window, Adrienne came out to greet her, a gust of wind blew Sylvia’s hat down the road. Adrienne rushed after it, brushed it down and they went into the shop. `That was the beginning of much laughter and love. And of a lifetime together’, Sylvia wrote.

     

    Under Adrienne’s guidance Sylvia created Shakespeare and Company, her legendary English language bookshop. It became the meeting place for expatriate cutting-edge writers: Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Paul Bowles, Ezra Pound. James Joyce was Sylvia’s star customer. She said she had three loves `Adrienne Monnier, Shakespeare and Company and James Joyce’. No publisher dared touch Joyce’s novel Ulysses. Even excerpts were censored as obscene. Single-handedly, from Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia published and distributed this seminal modernist novel. 

  • Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge with their dachshunds at Crufts dog show, 1923. (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Natalie Barney at the Temple of Friendship on the Rue Jacob, Paris. (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Sylvia Beech outside Shakespeare & Co. (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Romaine Brooks in her studio in Nice. (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).

    Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge with their dachshunds at Crufts dog show, 1923.

  • She also stocked pirated copies of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, censored as obscene in 1928 by the British... She also stocked pirated copies of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, censored as obscene in 1928 by the British...

    She also stocked pirated copies of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, censored as obscene in 1928 by the British government. It was condemned solely because of its lesbian theme. Nothing hot goes on in it. `That night they were not divided’ is its sexiest line. Una, the Lady Troubridge, left her husband, an Admiral, to live with Radclyffe Hall. She called her John, kept a daily journal addressed to her and, like Alice, was the power behind the throne. Trouble came after 19 years when John fell for a Russian nurse, Evgenia Souline, hired when Una got gastroenteritis after drinking iced water in the Paris heat. `Chinkie Pig’, John called Evgenia. `You shall tremble in my arms,’ she warned.

         

    `At Miss Barney’s one met lesbians,’ Sylvia Beach wrote of Natalie Barney’s salons. They were known as `the hazardous Fridays’. Natalie’s contribution to modernism was her lifestyle.` She said living was the first of all the arts. By living she meant lots of sex. `People call it unnatural. All I can say is, it’s always come naturally to me,’ she wrote of being lesbian. Her love affairs were too many to count.  The portrait painter Romaine Brooks was her longterm long-suffering partner. Romaine painted many or most of the Paris lesbians. After the second world war - which came down like a shutter on all their lives - the writer Truman Capote visited her abandoned studio. He called the portraits arrayed there - about 70 of them - `the all time ultimate gallery of famous dykes… I wasn’t going to forget this moment, this room, this array of butch-babes’ he wrote of Romaine’s tribute to the lesbians who escaped patriarchy and embraced modernism. 

  • We would like to express our gratitude to Diana Souhami for writing this article for us. Souhami  is the author of many widely acclaimed books and biographies including Gluck (1988),  Gertrude and Alice (1991), The Trials of Radclyffe Hall (1998), Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter (1996), and Natalie and Romaine (2004). Her latest book, No Modernism Without Lesbians is published by Head of Zeus and is available from all good bookshops, small and large.

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