CHAPTER VI.

TWENTIETH CENTURY

Introduction

The early twentieth century has already been cited as relatively

tolerant of homosexuality. To the extent that it prevailed, this

tolerance was due to popular acceptance of hereditary theory. We have

noted Karl Ulrichs’ defense of male homosexuals in the 1860’s on the

ground that their proclivities were innate. Within the next three or

four decades, scores of case studies, current and historical, were

accumulated to support or to oppose this claim. On the one hand there

were exclusively homosexual histories of persons whose physical traits

approached those of the other sex. On the other were records of

homosexuals cured by hypnosis in the clinics of Charcot and Magnan. The

majority of cases fell between these two extremes. Many were bisexual.

Many persons reporting obsessive homosexuality were somatically normal.

Following the lead of the biological sciences, students of the problem

attempted to classify homosexuals. The subjects were variously divided

into “true” or born and “pseudo-” or elective; “masculine” and

“feminine” in general appearance; active and passive in the sexual role;

homosexual and bisexual. But the determining data were less objective

than is desirable for close classification. And although each dichotomy

was independently more or less sound, there was little correlation among

the logically related groups from the several divisions.

The resulting confusion seems now to argue against, rather than for, the

claim of somatic causation of variance. But at the time the recent or

current publications of Darwin, Mendel and Galton provided rich soil for

the cultivation of any hereditary theory; so the men best remembered

today for their work on homosexuality are Krafft-Ebing, Moll and

Hirschfeld in Germany, and in England Symonds, Ellis and Carpenter, all

of them strongly inclined toward a hereditary explanation of the

phenomenon. By 1900 most of these men’s contributions to the subject

were in print and widely disseminated, so that in scientific and

intellectual circles there was much talk of an intermediate sex whose

condition was referred to as _inversion_—Ellis’s term, as noted earlier.

The effect on homosexuals was naturally pronounced. From being generally

regarded as moral lepers they felt themselves restored to human dignity,

as biological sports, perhaps, and in a distinct minority, but no more

reprehensible than albinos or color-blind people. Many were encouraged

to write, many other authors took a more liberal view of them, and the

public began to accept the new outlook in literature. Tolerance was by

no means general, however, even in the great metropolitan centers where

for years a certain degree of it had obtained. In the medical profession

negative opinion was strong, and, of course, conservatives in all fields

battled against the new “demoralizing” influence as long and bitterly as

their predecessors had against Darwinian evolution.

Geographic infiltration of tolerance was markedly uneven. France, where

interest if not sympathy was already widespread, was comparatively

hospitable to the new attitude. Germany, despite its being the

birthplace of the hereditary viewpoint, was somewhat less so. Sentiment

there might have developed more favorably if, in 1906, military

interests had not used the charge of homosexuality as a weapon against

Philip von Eulenberg, whose pacific influence on the Kaiser they wished

to eliminate.[1] Even so, the effects of the Eulenberg affair were not

so sweeping as those of the Oscar Wilde case in England a decade

earlier.

A retrospective glance at England shows that during the 1880’s the

publisher, Vizetelly, had managed to get into circulation a million

copies of current French fiction before legal battles with the censor

impoverished him, and, also, that a number of major critics had

supported his efforts.[2] All were fighting for greater general

liberality in matters of sex, but after the Wilde scandal in 1895, the

public reacted strongly against homosexual activity. Havelock Ellis had

to publish his volume on sexual inversion (1896) in Germany, and even

there its appearance was not welcomed; consequently, his other _Studies

in the Psychology of Sex_ came out in America a decade before England

would permit their publication.

America was the scene of no dramatic inhibiting episodes; however, our

intellectual isolation retarded awareness of relaxing European attitudes

towards inversion until Freud’s influence had also been felt. While the

wave of tolerance was spreading slowly from its continental origins, a

counterforce was growing there. Sigmund Freud had begun his work with

Breuer and Charcot before 1890 and was a practicing psychoanalyst by the

turn of the century. The year 1905 saw the publication of his first

important treatise; and in 1909 G. Stanley Hall, psychiatrist, and

president of Clark University, invited Freud to lecture at a conference

in celebration of that institution’s twentieth anniversary.

Almost immediately the foundations of the hereditary theory were

threatened. For Freud’s thesis, as no one needs reminding in this

generation, was that the human personality passes through several phases

of sexual development, beginning in earliest infancy, and reaching

maturity only with complete heterosexual experience. All individuals, he

said, are potentially bisexual. In some, the homosexual component

becomes conscious and active, and unless this phase gives way with the

passing of adolescence to the heterosexual, the personality remains

arrested and immature. Such an arrest constitutes neurosis, whether or

not it becomes troublesome enough to demand psychiatric attention.

As is obvious, this view contradicts the hereditary theory at several

important points. It holds that the homosexual is not born, but made by

conditioning factors in his early life, chiefly family relations before

he is five years of age. He can usually overcome his neurosis if he

earnestly wishes, at least with the aid of psychiatry; therefore, he may

be considered more or less responsible for his state if he persists in

it. Furthermore, the bisexual is nearer to maturity than the homosexual.

This conclusion is particularly opposed to the tenets of the

Ellis-Hirschfeld school, which classed frigidity to the opposite sex as

a mark of “true,” that is, innate and blameless, homosexuals. The battle

between the hereditary and the Freudian theories can be detected in a

good deal of twentieth-century variant fiction.

The pendulum swung again toward physical causation with the development

of endocrinology, which at first held the individual’s glandular

endowment responsible for his sexual inclinations. This science began as

a branch of general physiology, and acquired major sexual importance

only with Steinach’s and Voronoff’s famous experiments in rejuvenation

through graft of sex glands or other reinforcement of sex hormones. In

the variant field, endocrinologists were first concerned with glandular

influence on secondary sex characteristics—breast development, hair

distribution, vocal register, et cetera. Thus, during the 1920s and

1930s a number of physicians were attempting to cure homosexuals by

dosing them with hormones which reinforced their biological sex and

tended to decrease variant traits. These experiments enjoyed some

publicity in medical literature but had only limited success. In the

meantime, disciples of Freud were bringing in evidence that

psychological disturbances alter endocrine balance. The final compromise

is the current school of psychosomatic medicine.

To bring scientific opinion on homosexuality up to date, attention must

be given to four further attacks upon the problem. Most closely in line

with early search for physical causation are accumulations of exact

somatic measurements by such different agents as the so-called Harvard

group in their _Explorations in Personality—a clinical ... study of

fifty men of college age_ (only a partial publication of their

findings), and G. W. Henry in his _Sex Variants_. Neither of these

studies has, so far as published material indicates, established

significant correlations between homosexuality and any somatic factor or

group of factors measured.

A statistical study limited to genetics was made in Germany during World

War II by Theodor Lang.[3] On the ground that the offspring of a large

group of parents should by the law of probability be equally divided

between the two sexes, he made a statistical count of the siblings of

several thousand homosexual men. He found a greater proportion of males

among these than among siblings of a control group of heterosexuals.

From this he argued that the homosexuals, though somatically male,

possessed more than the average number of female genes, their brothers

having in the aggregate more of the male determinants. Like all such

studies this has been attacked on the grounds of its statistical

soundness, but it has not been discredited. More conclusive in the same

field is J. F. Kallman’s study of twins, _Heredity in Health and Mental

Disorder_ (1953). Dr. Kallman compared, among other things, the

incidence of homosexuality in identical and non-identical twins.

Identical twins showed an enormously larger percent of similar sexual

behavior than the latter, and his evidence is conclusive that “a

genetically oriented ‘imbalance’ theory ... can no longer be regarded as

an implausible explanation for certain groups of ... homosexuals.”[4]

In the psychoanalytic field such dissenters from the so-called

pan-sexualism of Freud as Jung, Adler, Horney and others have assembled

evidence that sex is not always the prime cause of neurosis. Freud found

it to be so, they say, because in his day social taboo made it the most

common cause of insupportable tension. Now that sexual standards are

less rigid (thanks in part to Freud’s work), other factors such as the

thwarting of the ego or long-continued insecurity appear of almost equal

importance. To account for the homosexual, these later psychoanalysts

suggest such causal factors as early social humiliation resulting in

withdrawal from heterosexual competition, acute anxiety with regard to

childbearing, or reluctance to assume responsibility for a family. Still

regarding homosexuality as a neurosis, that is, an abnormal way of

escaping an untenable situation, they leave unanswered the question as

to what predisposes an individual to the choice of this particular

solution of his difficulties.[5]

Most publicized of this century’s contributions are undoubtedly the

monumental statistical studies of sex behavior by the biologist A. C.

Kinsey, which have shown homosexual experience to be more prevalent than

hitherto claimed even by Ellis or Hirschfeld. Insofar as Kinsey attacks

causes, he is with the Freudians in holding that all individuals are

potentially bisexual, but there the agreement ceases. Kinsey’s

contention is that the human sex drive will find outlet according to its

strength in a given individual, and that its satisfaction via the same

sex is due to the sensitivity of erogenous zones to any adequate

stimuli. This explains satisfactorily the behavior of bisexuals and of

homosexuals whose opportunities are largely confined to their own sex,

but to account for those who are frigid to the other sex Kinsey is

obliged to admit the importance of subjective factors.

This brief survey indicates how much the social attitude toward variance

has relaxed since the days of Belot and Peladan. Today the sternest

counsellors of youth—outside perhaps a few religious groups—no longer

talk of homosexuality in terms of depravity and corruption. And the

psychiatrist’s charge of arrested development weighs comparatively

lightly upon such variants as are fairly well adjusted to their

condition.

* * * * *

Factors other than the scientific have also affected this century’s

output of literature dealing with variant women. Until the beginning of

World War I, the Woman’s Movement figured sporadically in fiction, but

not in variant novels after 1900. As a force in practical politics,

however,—sometimes, as in England, a very noisy one—it had by the end of

the war won the suffrage battle throughout much of the western world.

Even where this end was not achieved, the movement widened women’s

educational and occupational opportunities, and thus tended to multiply

the total number of feminine authors. Next, the war opened a number of

men’s jobs to women, increased their financial and personal

independence, and encouraged tendencies toward masculine simplicity in

dress. It also brought about that relaxation of sexual standards in

general for which the 1920s have become notorious. Taken together, these

alterations in women’s status are held by some social historians to have

increased female variance. Certainly what may be called a first peak in

variant literature was reached between 1925 and 1935.

Thus, it is not surprising to discover that during the first third of

the present century, literary titles dealing with variant women averaged

more than one per year, that at least half were written by women, and

that a majority were more favorable to variance than otherwise.

Poetry—French

Since the discussion of conjecturally variant women closed with a

consideration of lyric poetry, the same literary thread will be traced

first in the twentieth-century pattern. More than a dozen poets have

celebrated love between women, three-quarters of them feminine and all

but two sympathetic. The earliest were two expatriates who adopted Paris

as their residence and wrote almost exclusively in French.

The lesser, from a literary viewpoint, was Natalie Clifford Barney, an

American with New York and Bar Harbor background who was able to live

independently in Paris and to maintain her own yacht. Born in 1877, she

had by the late nineties made contact with Pierre Louÿs, and she

introduced to him her British-American friend, Pauline Tarn. Both young

women were enthusiastic about Louÿs’s _Songs of Bilitis_, and seeing in

him ‘the champion of the young girls of the future,’ they submitted

manuscripts for his judgment. They found him more inclined to admire

“_jeux latins et voluptés grecques_” than the “exaggerated

preoccupations” of _femmes damnées_ whose sense of sin he suspected of

giving an edge to their passions. He pronounced Barney’s novel, _Lettres

à Une Connue_, unsuited for publication because of its outmoded poetic

diction, but concerning Tarn’s verses, which he praised, he afterward

wrote to Barney: ‘You must write your story and hers. It is the

indispensable first chapter to your complete romance.’[6] The

implication of some previous emotional connection between the two is

supported by evidence in the poetry of both.

Barney was a Maupin type, with ‘a fencer’s grace noticeable in an

all-too-feminine Paris; moonlight-blonde hair, blue eyes with a glint of

steel, made to observe and not (like most women’s) to be gazed into;

white gowns and a cape of ermine’—a composite description from later

articles by her fellow authors “Aurel” and Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, quoted

by Barney herself in her _Aventures de l’Esprit_.[7] In the garden of

her luxurious Paris residence she built a Temple of Friendship and

welcomed there many of the literary personalities of the day, evidently

in conscious imitation of certain esoteric groups of the eighteenth

century. Though many men were admitted, it was recognized that this was

an Amazonian cult dedicated primarily to women. In her Chart of the

Realm of Friendship she placed Remy de Gourmont first and Renée Vivien

(Pauline Tarn) second.

Barney’s literary output was comparatively meager, perhaps because she

did not care to publish too tangible evidence of her emotional bent. The

complete record of publication is as follows: _Quelques Sonnets et

Portraits de Femmes_ (1900), described by critics as sensuous poems of

restrained passion; _The Woman who Lives with Me_—possibly a version in

English of the novel Louÿs criticized—listed without date as a “roman

abrégé, hors commerce”; _Cinq Petits Dialogues Grecs_, printed in the

periodical _La Plume_, 1901; _The City of the Flowers_, “poème avec

enlumières, à un seul exemplaire”; _Actes et Entr’actes_, 1910;

_Poèmes—Autres Alliances_, 1920; _Pensées d’une Amazone_, and _Aventures

de l’Esprit_, 1929, both in prose.

She is probably best remembered in French letters for having inspired

two volumes by Remy de Gourmont, _Lettres à l’Amazone_, essays which

first ran serially in the _Mercure de France_ and were translated into

English by Richard Aldington (1931), and _Lettres Intimes à l’Amazone_,

1927.[8] The first volume, comparatively impersonal, includes

considerable analysis of Barney’s temperament, which has ‘the

superiority of a profoundly pagan spirit, determined to obey Nature only

in so far as it gives its consent.’ This, Gourmont says, is ‘so

different from ... Christian morality that ... some courage is needed to

express it so openly and so strongly.’ He defines as “chaste” any action

prompted by Love rather than by what Verlaine calls ‘the obscene

mechanism,’ and observes that women, who feel passion only when they

love, are spared men’s bondage to ‘that tyrant, sexual need.’ He says

that l’Amazone sets out to conquer without coquetry or any other passive

or impulsive feminine motivation, and he judges her self-willed and

egotistic.[9] Both he and the feminine commentators mentioned above,

picture Barney as merciless in her intellectual judgments, wanting in

tenderness, impatient of men, and scornful of all who abandon themselves

to their emotions.

Despite Gourmont’s analytic clarity, in the _Lettres Intimes_ we find

the spontaneous record of what he terms “une amitié violente,” springing

from Barney’s being not only “une amie mais un ami.” His volume includes

a good bit of his own verse, “des poésies sapphiques” about two women of

ancient Greece written earlier but not previously published, and several

poems to Barney herself, whom he describes as “un page et une femme ...

Natalie qui aimes tes soeurs et tes pareilles, Plus que toi même, et

plus que tout, l’Amour ... Natalie préférant bure et cuire à la soie,

Natalie souriante au bord de la géhenne.”[10]

His friendship with Barney began in 1910 and drifted along less and less

satisfactorily for three years. By 1913 Gourmont betrays continual

distress because she is so often absent, traveling with “une amie” and

leaving no address, since most of the time, she and the friend are on

the yacht he had helped her to procure. He owns to a resentment which

surprises him, and implies that had he been able to divine her

temperament at the outset he would not have permitted himself to become

so involved. Yet we have here a close copy of the situation he himself

had analyzed so clearly a dozen years before in _Un Songe de Femme_.

There could be no stronger testimonial to the truth of Proust’s later

contention that each individual follows repeatedly a compulsive

emotional pattern, and does not profit by experience. Nor could there be

a better picture of the difficulty the two sexes experience in mutual

comprehension, even when both parties are psychologically so close to

the intersexual borderline and have so many interests in common.

Barney’s _Aventures de l’Esprit_ record primarily her association with

the more or less notable literary figures of her day, and the judgments

expressed are clear-headed and relatively merciless. _Actes et

Entr’actes_, the only other volume available for examination, consists

of four poetic dramas ranging from twenty-five to seventy pages each,

and a dozen or so lyrics. One of the dramas, “Equivoque,” was presented

in her garden in 1906 with the film star, Marguérite Moréno, in the

leading role of Sappho. It represents Sappho’s death as resulting not

from love of Phaon but from the loss of a beloved girl, Timas, who

marries Phaon but subsequently, disgusted by her wedding night and

overwhelmed by nostalgia for her great earlier love, follows Sappho to

death in the sea.

Two of the lyrics, “Virelai Nouveau” and “Filles,” represent the poet as

following young _filles de joie_ on their twilight strolls and taking a

man’s sensual pleasure in their consciously seductive beauty, but the

enjoyment is detached, that of the _voyeur_ only. “Couple,” however,

explicitly champions variance in its description of a loving pair:

Se tenant par la taille—ainsi que deux bouleaux

Reliés par leurs branches—

Elles vont, ondulant leurs têtes et leurs hanches ...

Elles tachent de fuir l’été, son corps doré

Versant, comme une essence ...

Sa mâle adolescence.

(Compare Peladan’s Tammuz the sun god.)

Il leur fait peur ...

Et la brune qui parle á sa blonde compagne ...

Est-elle la dryade au long corps maigrelet

Qu’emprisonnant l’écorce

Et qui garde d’instinct la crainte de la force,

De la brutale force?

Elles sont dans la nuit ainsi qu’au seuil d’un temple,

D’un mystérieux temple ...

Si quelque homme, épiant ce couple insidieux,

De son mépris le couvre ...

Qu’il sache que tout don de beauté plaît aux dieux;

Que les lois ordinaires

Ne peuvent s’appliquer á ces noces lunaires ...

Elles ont, d’un élan plus divin qu’animal

Dans les vastes silences

Joint avec des baisers leurs ressemblances,

Toutes leur ressemblances.

Et par delà la terre, et le bien, et le mal,

Elles vont, diaphanes

Et troublantes, et ceux qui les jugent profanes

Sont eux-mêmes profanes.[11]

In three short “Paroles de Maîtresses” she depicts well the misery of a

woman awaiting passively the pleasure of a male lover. In a dozen

“Paroles d’Amants,” she pictures and rejoices in a man’s more active

pursuit, even though painful, of the dream and illusion of love,

“sublime, immense et limité.”

Je ne regrette rien, ni son bien ni son mal.

Sa douleur m’est utile et son mal nécessaire ...

... Je n’ai peur

Que de ne plus souffrir ...[12]

“Te Deum” expresses the same satisfaction:

Tes yeus cernés de noir

Et ta face plus pâle

Que n’est pâle le soir,

Et ma bouche—pétale

Entr’ouvert, frais piment

Trop rouge—un peu brutale,

Disent étrangement

A la bonne Déesse

Des féminins amants

Et des males maîtresses

Une long remerciement.[13]

A “Quatrain” sums up the debit side of her resolute assumption of

masculinity:

Je ressemble à ces rois qui vivent séparés

De la vie, et malgré leurs plaisirs, misérables

Et seuls, tendant en vain leurs bras lourds et parés

Vers quelque pauvre joie humaine et désirable.[14]

There remain a group of poems addressed to Renée Vivien, published after

the latter’s death, which will be mentioned later.

* * * * *

Of greater literary importance is Renée Vivien, whose poetry has been

pronounced most perfect in form of any French verse written in the first

quarter of the century, and this quality is the more remarkable in that

her native language was not French but English. As she died at

thirty-two, its quantity also deserves mention, for her collected poems

run to five hundred pages; besides she produced two volumes of

“prose-poems” which a decade later would have been called free verse, a

prose satire, and an autobiographical novel. In addition she and a

friend collaborated on a number of similar volumes of verse and personal

narrative under the pseudonym of Paule Riversdale. As originally

published her work appeared in this order: _Études et Préludes_, 1901;

_Cendres et Poussières_, 1902; _Evocations_, _Sappho_, and _La Vénus des

Aveugles_, 1903; _Kitharèdes_, 1904; _A l’Heure des Mains Joints_, 1906;

_Sillages_ and _Flambeaux Éteints_, 1908; and posthumously in 1910,

_Dans un Coin de Violettes_, _Le Vent des Vaisseaux_, and _Haillons_.

Prose-poems: _Brumes de Fjords_, 1902, and _Du Vert au Violet_, 1903;

_La Dame à la Louve_ (a collection of short stories), _Le Christ_,

_Aphrodite et M. Pépin_ (satire), and _Une Femme M’Apparut_, (novel),

1904.

Vivien was more openly lesbian than any woman so far encountered, but

the few selections and biographical notes found in anthologies are

careful to conceal this fact, and since further text and comment are not

readily available in this country, she will be discussed here at some

length. Almost the only sustained account of her personal life is

included in a critical volume by her good friend André Germain; however,

as it was published in 1917 when most of the persons concerned were

still living, it omitted all personal names and many details of the

poet’s troubled history. Her publisher and friend, Edward Sansot, has

attested that all her work was autobiographical in its inspiration, and

so from internal evidence and scattered fact it is possible to

supplement Germain’s picture.

She was born (1877) Pauline Tarn, daughter of a Michigan heiress and an

English gentleman of a Kentish family distinguished in law and the

church. The girl was born in Hawaii and spent her first dozen years in

travel, in French and German schools, and in Paris. From the fragmentary

accounts one infers a background to equal any of Henry James’s pictures

of international marriage and difficult childhood. Between twelve and

sixteen she was happy for a time with another English girl housed in the

same Paris _hôtel_, whom she met through the intimacy of their

respective governesses. Violet Shilleto was already a precocious mystic

whose concern with “the meaning of life” made a lasting impression on

her young companion. No shadow seems to have fallen on their passionate

friendship before Pauline was removed to England at sixteen.

There for several years Pauline underwent conventional preparations for

debut and marriage, including presentation in the Queen’s drawing room.

On this occasion she is described as a tall slim girl with delicate

features, a luminous halo of fair hair, and eyes of “brun doré,” which

court gown lent her the air of a “princesse de légende.”[15] But the

demure exterior concealed rebellion. She was still nostalgic for Paris

and Violet. The stuffy formality of social life in Chislehurst smothered

her. Above all she was revolted by “coquetry” and the prospect of

marriage. All this she poured out in letters to Violet, and the

interception of certain of these produced an uproar of which Germain

says that her later poem, “Sous la Rafale,” is not an exaggerated

picture:

De la nuit chaotique un cri d’horreur s’exhale.

Venez, nous errerons tous trois sous la rafale ...

L’éclair nous épouvante et la nuit nous désole ...

O vieux Lear, comme toi je suis errant et folle,

Et ceux de ma famille et ceux de mes amis

M’ont repoussée avec les outrages vomis.

Comme toi, Dante, épris d’une douleur hautaine,

Je suis une exilée au coeur gonflé de haine ...[16]

According to Germain’s implications and evidence in her poetry, her

relations with Violet, like those of Lamartine’s Regina with Clothilde,

were essentially innocent. But if her letters matched her subsequent

verses to Violet in loving eloquence, they would scarcely have sounded

innocent to conventional Britons in whose ears the Wilde scandal still

reverberated. It is certainly from this same experience that “Le Pilori”

grew, for the two poems are unique among her collected verse:

Pendant longtemps, je fus clouée au pilori,

Et les femmes, voyant que je souffrais, ont ri.

Puis, des hommes ont pris dans leurs mains une boue

Qui vint éclabousser mes tempes et ma joue ...

J’ai senti la colère et l’horreur m’envahir.

Silencieusement, j’appris à les haïr.

Les insultes cinglaient comme fouets d’ortie,

Lorsqu’ils m’ont détachée enfin, je suis partie.

Je suis partie au gré des vents. Et depuis lors

Mon visage est pareil à la face des morts.[17]

Whatever actually happened, peace seems to have ensued only with her

attaining her majority and returning to Paris, where she lived alone

save for a formal companion. She was obviously wealthy in her own right,

for within a few years she acquired residences in Paris, Nice, and

Mitylene, the first of which became legendary for its treasures of

antique and oriental art, and to the end of her days she was an

inveterate traveler.

At the outset of Pauline’s Parisian life, drunk with her new freedom and

the means to enjoy it, she found her old friend Violet too serious for

her mood, and some sort of “puerile” misunderstanding occurred. Through

Violet, however, she had met a ‘fellow-exile and nascent poet’ who was

undoubtedly Natalie Clifford Barney. Her new friend introduced her to

Sappho, as yet unknown to her. Until now, says Germain, she had been a

_jeune fille_, ‘doubly unawakened either as poet or as woman.’ The new

contact proved a double revelation, as well it might. Here was a

beautiful sophisticate whose poetic gifts and interests, worldly

resources, and emotional tastes matched her own; here, too, at last, was

the great classical poet who glorified those tastes. In order to know

Sappho better she set herself to learn Greek, and in her ‘passionate

fervor’ mastered it “avec une facilité qui stupéfiait ses professeurs.”

She and Barney lived together, and it must have been during these years

between 1898 and 1900 that she acquired the villa above Mitylene where

intermittently “for months at a time she attempted to recapture the

golden age of Sappho.”[18] We know from Gourmont’s account that both

young women were writing poetry, and as soon as she considered

publication (possibly even earlier) Pauline adopted the new name under

which thereafter she lived as well as wrote—Renée Vivien, suggesting a

radiant rebirth.

Two poems published in the same volume with those already quoted convey

her exaltation at this time better than any account of them can do. One

was “Ainsi Je Parlerai:”

Si le Seigneur penchait son front sur mon trépas

Je lui dirais: O Christ, je ne te connais pas.

Seigneur, ta stricte loi ne fut jamais la mienne,

Et je vécus ainsi qu’un simple païenne ...

Le monde était autour de moi, tel un jardin.

Je buvais l’aube claire et le soir cristallin.

Le soleil me ceignait de ses plus vives flammes,

Et l’amour m’incline vers la beauté des femmes ...

Pardonne-moi, qui fus une simple païenne!

Laisse-moi retourner vers la splendeur ancienne

Et, puisque enfin l’instant éternel est venu,

Rejoindre celles-là qui t’ont point connu.[19]

Far from being the mere defiant sacrilege this seemed to some readers,

it was the confession of a new faith to replace the one in whose name

England had damned her. In its entirety, much too long to quote, the

poem is also an apologia for her first love so slandered by her

“persecutors.” She elaborated her creed in “Psappha Revit,” among whose

fourteen quatrains appear such lines as these:

Celles que nous aimons ont méprisé les hommes ...

Et nous pouvons ...

Être tout à la fois des amants et des soeurs.

Le désir est en nous moins fort que la tendresse ...

Et nos maîtresses ne sauraient nous décevoir,

Puisque c’est l’infini que nous aimons en elles ...

Nos jours sans impudeur, sans crainte ni remords

Se déroulent, ainsi que de larges accords,

Et nous aimons, comme on aimait à Mitylène.[20]

Of this faith from then on she was the dedicated priestess.

Inevitably her attainment of the Golden Age was imperfect. Her poems are

full of evidence that from the start her second love was not too happy,

as exemplified by the following:

Nocturne

J’adore la langueur de ta lèvre charnelle

Où persiste le pli des baisers d’autrefois.

Ta démarche ensorcelle,

Et la perversité calme de ta prunelle

A pris au ciel du nord ses bleus traîtres et froids ...

Sous ta robe, qui glisse en un frôlement d’aile

Je devine ton corps—les lys ardents des seins,

L’or blême de l’aisselle,

Les flancs doux et fleuris, les jambes d’Immortelle,

Le velouté du ventre et la rondeur des reins ...[21]

Sonnet

... Tes lèvres ont pleuré leurs rythmiques douleurs

Dans un refrain mêlé de sanglots et de pauses.

Et la langueur des lits, la paix des portes closes,

Entourent nos désirs et nos âpres pâleurs ...

Tes yeux bleus aigus d’acier et de cristal

S’entr’ouvrent froidement, ternis comme un métal ...[22]

La Fleur du Sorbier

... Le couchant qui blêmit et rougit tour à tour,

La campagne morbide et l’heure de tristesse

Semblant nous reprocher d’avoir, o ma Maîtresse,

Accompli sans désir les gestes de l’amour ...

Ton regard sans lueurs paraît agoniser ...

Une phalène, errant dans le jardin, se pose

Sur la fleur du sorbier, d’un or pâlement rose

Comme la fleur secrète où j’ai mis mon baiser ...[23]

These carry no record of “désir moins fort que la tendresse,” nor indeed

of tenderness at all in the poet’s cold blonde partner. But it is not

difficult to understand the two girls’ basic incompatibility. Barney’s

refusal of self-surrender, her contempt for abandon in others, were

aspects of a resolute masculinity. Vivien, by nature feminine and

romantic, needed to give herself wholly and to be cherished in return.

An apparently love-starved childhood and an antipathy to everything male

sharpened her hunger for a feminine response. Nothing less than the

initial experience of passion, induced by beauty and blessed by Sappho,

could have bound her to Barney at all.

In 1900 the spell that held her was broken by tragedy. Early in that

year Violet Shilleto fell into acute depression, “finding her

intellectual mysticism empty” and doubtless also wounded by the loss of

the intimate friendship, and in the autumn she secretly joined the

Catholic church. Whether spiritual conflict undermined her health or

whether incipient tuberculosis precipitated the religious crisis, she

fell ill and was ordered to winter in Cannes. Vivien promised to visit

her there, but was too deeply entangled in her own affairs to sense the

gravity of the other girl’s condition. She seems instead to have made a

trip to America. When at last she responded to an urgent summons, it was

too late—her friend was dead before Vivien reached her.

Vivien’s grief and remorse were shattering. The fact that Violet was

given a “cold” Anglican funeral and interred beneath a church in the

Avenue de l’Alma instead of under clean earth and sky increased the

poet’s agony, and “for a long time she spent hours each day at dusk” in

the subterranean gloom beside Violet’s grave. This state of affairs

quite naturally moved Barney, who was nothing if not proud, to accuse

her of being more in love with Love than with reality, and to depart for

a protracted stay in the States. Thus Vivien was left doubly deserted,

and from this period stem many poems in her early volumes. In _Cendres

et Poussières_ (1902) we find “Devant la Mort d’une Amie Véritablement

Aimée”:

Ils me disent, tandis que je sanglote encore:

“Dans l’ombre du sépulcre où sa grace pâlit

Elle goûte la paix passagère du lit,

Les ténèbres au front, et dans les yeux l’aurore ...

Dans une aube d’avril qui vient avec lenteur

Elle refleurira, violette mystique.”

Moi, j’écoute parmi les temples de la mort ...

J’écoute, mais le vent des espaces emporte

L’audacieux espoir des infinis sereins.

Je sais qu’elle n’est plus dans l’heure que j’étreins,

L’heure unique et certaine, et moi, je la crois morte.

And in _Études et Préludes_ (1901):

J’attends, o Bien-Aimée! o vierge dont le front

Illumine le soir de pompe et d’allégresse ...

Notre lit sera plein de fleurs qui frémiront ...

Et la paix des autels se remplira de flammes;

Les larmes, les parfums et les épithalames,

Les prières et l’encens monteront jusqu’à nous.

Malgré le jour levé, nous dormirons encore

Du sommeil léthargique où gisent les époux,

Et notre longue nuit ne craindra plus l’aurore.

In _Evocations_ (1903) she is proclaiming a “Victoire Funèbre:”

Dans le mystique soir d’avril j’ai triomphé.

J’ai crié d’une voix de victoire: Elle est morte ...

—Quel sourire de paix sur tes lèvres muettes,

O soeur des violettes!

J’ai brûlé de baisers des pieds blancs de la Mort

Car elle t’épargna la souillure et l’empreinte,

L’angoisse de désir, les affres de l’étreinte,

Les ardeurs de vouloir, l’âpreté de l’effort.

—L’amour s’est éloigné de tes lèvres muettes,

O soeur des violettes![24]

The contrast between these devoted elegies and the poems to her second

love is striking, and one is aware of a revolt against passion _per se_.

For the first time the poet voices a longing for death which recurred

with increasing frequency in her later work.

Completely sobered by her double loss, Vivien seems to have spent some

part of 1901 in Scotland with her family. On her return to Paris she

leased the large residence which had housed her and Violet during their

early association, and made it her permanent home. Here she must have

worked on the three volumes which appeared in 1902 and on the

translation of Sappho which was among those of 1903. This last and

_Kitharèdes_ (renderings into French of all fragments from the Greek

Anthology written by or about women) were lauded by critics both as

translations and as poetry, the only adverse comment being that they

were so much wordier than the originals. What she apparently attempted,

however, was to expand fragments into plausible wholes, as many other

translators have done before and since (cf. especially Marion Mills

Miller).

The year 1902, says Germain, was probably the calmest of her life. She

was suffering from disillusion as to her own powers of emotional

constancy, and believed that the serious loves of her life lay behind

her. If in mid-twentieth century this sounds adolescent in a young woman

of twenty-five, one must remember that in the English-speaking countries

the emotional ideal popularly given lip service at the turn of the

century was still “One Great Love in a Life.” For a year she strove for

emotional quiescence, but there are signs even in _Evocations_ (1902) of

encounter with a new personality:

Sonnet

Ta royale jeunesse a la mélancolie

Du Nord où le brouillard efface les couleurs.

Tu mêles la discorde et le désir aux pleurs,

Grave comme Hamlet, pâle comme Ophélie ...

Mon coeur déconcerté se trouble quand je vois

Ton front pensif de prince et tes yeux bleus de vierge,

Tantôt l’Un tantôt l’Autre, et les Deux à la fois.[25]

Twilight

Les clartés de la nuit, les ténèbres du jour

Out la complexité de mon étrange amour ...

L’ambigu de ton corps s’alambique et s’affine

Dans son ardeur stérile et sa grace androgyne ...

In _La Vénus des Aveugles_ (1903) “La Perverse Ophélie” and “Sonnet à

une Enfant” are addressed to the same person, and they show Vivien

struggling to spare both the other girl and herself the fevers of such

an alliance as her second had been. This volume also reflects a more

bitter struggle which would have remained an enigma except for Germain’s

discreet sketch of what occurred during 1903. He describes the new

beloved as endowed with a cameo profile, a keen if ‘exclusively

practical’ intelligence, and a temperament in every respect different

from Vivien’s. It is clear that he did not like the girl, and he

attributes to her much of the suffering and catastrophe in Vivien’s

later life, although he grants that the poet produced the greater part

of her published work under the stimulus of the new association. She

was, in fact, the Hélène de Zuylen de Nievelt who collaborated in the

“Paule Riversdale” volumes, and to her (in part) Vivien dedicated

several original volumes and her collected poems of 1909. No

biographical data are discoverable, but the Hamlet and Ophelia

references above, and the fact that _Brumes de Fjords_ (1902), the first

volume dedicated to her, was announced as translated from the Norwegian,

suggest that she was from Northern Europe. (Her name, of course, sounds

Dutch.) A difference in the dedicatory initials between 1902 and 1909

suggests that the girl may have married in the interval.

In 1903, Vivien was apparently just entering with delicacy and caution

upon this new emotional adventure when Barney reappeared on the scene.

Like all women who know themselves weak, says Germain, ‘Renée armed

herself with a strong resolution’ not to see her old love. But Barney

was not one to be “congédiée” at another’s pleasure. When Vivien, at the

end of her endurance, left Paris and took refuge in her villa at

Mitylene, wanting only peace, she was run to earth even there. (This

may, of course, be a euphemistic version of the episode. It is not

impossible that Vivien went to Greece by secret pre-arrangement with

Barney.) In any case some weeks of renewed intimacy ensued of which _La

Vénus des Aveugles_ reflects the bitter and poisoned entrancement. To

her tormentor Vivien writes, among much in the same key:

Sonnet

Tes cheveux irréels, aux reflets clairs et froids

Out de pâles lueurs des matités blondes;

Tes regards ont l’azur des éthers et des ondes.

Pourtant je ne sais plus, au sein des nuits profondes

Te contempler avec l’extase d’autrefois ...

Je vis—comme l’on voit une fleur qui se fane—

Sur ta bouche, pareille aux aurores d’été,

Un sourire flétri de vieille courtisane.[24]

Cri

... Vers l’heure où follement dansent les lucioles,

L’heure où brilla à nos yeux le désir du moment,

Tu me redis en vain les flatteuses paroles—

Je te hais et je t’aime, abominablement.[25]

Full reaction came with return to Paris and to Violet’s grave:

La Nuit Latente

La luxure unique et multiple

Se mire à mon miroir ...

Ma visage de clown me navre.

Je cherche ton lit de cadavre

Ainsi que le calme d’un havre,

O mon beau Désespoir! ...

Mon âme, que l’angoisse exalte,

Vient, en pleurant, faire une halte

Devant des parois de basalte

Aux bleus de viaduc ...

Et, lasse de la beauté fourbe,

De la joie où l’esprit s’embourbe,

Je me détourne et je me courbe

Sur ton vitreux néant.[26]

Other poems in the same volume make it evident that at this time she

longed for the courage to kill herself, and in reverie dwelt upon the

death of both her current loves.

By 1904 she had apparently freed herself of the old entanglement and

yielded to the inevitable ripening of the new. _A L’Heure des Mains

Jointes_, published in 1906 but reflecting this emotional period, opens

with the idealistic title poem:

J’ai puérilisé mon coeur dans l’innocence

De notre amour, éveil de calice enchantée ...

Ma douce! je t’adore avec simplicité ...

Tes cheveux et ta voix et tes bras m’ont guérie.

J’ai dépouillé la crainte et le furtif soupçon

Et l’artificiel et la bizarrerie.

J’ai abrité ainsi mon coeur de malade guérie

Sous le toit amical de la bonne maison ...

This poem and many others in the volume have, indeed, a new simplicity,

occasionally sacrificing to it something of her earlier verbal magic.

They evoke the image of a soft-spoken, light-footed pale girl with tawny

hair who turns to her for comfort and peace as well as reciprocating

them. One sees, too, a garden above Nice, surrounded by pines and full

of pale iris, for Vivien carried symbolism into daily life—violets for

the first love, lotus and tiger lilies for the second, iris for the

third. The love celebrated here seems complete and happy, combining

passion with companionship, and it was during 1904 that Vivien tried to

link her friend’s life to hers even in authorship with the “Paule

Riversdale” experiment. From this year come three volumes under Vivien’s

name and three or four of joint authorship, justifying Germain’s

statement that this alliance was fruitful.

But the collaborative prose-poems, narratives, and verses were not well

received. Of “Riversdale’s” _Echos et Reflets_ the reviewer of poetry

for the _Mercure de France_ said merely, ‘Renée Vivien is no longer

alone in evoking the glorious and tragic shade of Sappho.’ On _L’Etre

Double_, one pseudonymous narrative, Rachilde’s total comment was:

Que de vers! Et que d’histoires japonaises. Le roman, peu chose du

reste, un amour de femmes, est complètement noyé par ce déluge de

citations. Trop de vers! trop de fleurs! trop de lucioles, trop de

poissons bleus![27]

Vivien’s own autobiographical tale, _Une Femme M’Apparut_, fared thus:

... Le texte est du même ordre avec ... le vieux style dit décadent,

mort hier, déjà horriblement pourri, et la pluie des androgynes, y

compris la Saint-Jean-de Vinci. Tout cela sent l’héroïne de _La

Passade_ de Willy, qui se tenterait de se faire prendre au

sérieux.[28]

The last comment is particularly interesting inasmuch as Willy (the

novelist Henri Gauthier-Villars, of whom more later) had called the

heroine of _La Passade_ “Mona Dupont de Nyewelt,” a name too like

Hélène’s to be a matter of chance, considering his notorious penchant

for including real persons in his fiction. He described her as a

_gamine_ given to roaming the streets of Montmartre at night and tossing

pebbles through fanlights for sheer deviltry—altogether, far from

innocent.

It may have been the critical cold douche of 1904 that kept Vivien

silent during 1905 and restricted her output during 1906 and 1907 to a

single volume per year, but it was more probably unhappiness. The drift

of her personal life is not difficult to discover from poems in

_Sillages_ and _Flambeaux Éteints_ of 1908. “Malédiction sur un Jardin”

bids the flowers fade, since her love no longer cares to walk among

them. “Vêtue” begs the beloved not to discard a gown, but

Garde-moi, parfumée ainsi qu’une momie

Ta robe des beaux jours passées, o mon amie!

“Amata” voices that ultimate plea of the desperate woman which tougher

spirits always take for hypocrisy:

Dis, que veux-tu de moi qui t’aime, o mon souci!

Et comment retenir ton caprice de femme?

... Ton vouloir est mon voeu, ton désir est ma loi,

Et si quelque étrangère apparaît plus aimable

A tes regards changeants, prends-la, réjouis-toi!

Moi même dresserai le lit doux et la table ...

Je mets entre tes doigts insouciants mon sort,

O toi, douceur finale, o toi, douleur suprême.

That this time the defection was not hers, that she had at last attained

to her own ideal of self-effacing constancy, seems to have saved Vivien

from bitterness. Only one later poem is tinged with it, “Terreur du

Mensonge,” in which her resentment is not for the defection itself but

for the lie which sought to conceal it.

Was this lie perhaps responsible for the gender of “prends-_la_” above?

For as was suggested earlier, the “ambiguë” Hélène may have married

before the end of 1908. It is certain that, in that year, Vivien

prepared the edition of her collected poems which she dedicated to her

friend under the new initials. It is also known that she made an

unprecedented visit to her family in England, and soon afterward

attempted suicide with laudanum. One biographical note[29] mentions that

during her last year she was suffering from “Basedow’s disease”

(exophthalmic goitre), and such an affliction might seriously depress a

hellenic worshipper of physical beauty. But it seems hardly adequate to

have made her seek death, without the added burden of emotional despair.

Her later poems record increasing misery and loneliness, restless

travel, “loveless loves” and premonition of death. From the three

posthumous volumes come such titles as “Solitude Nocturne,”

“Résurrection Mauvaise,” “Déroute,” “Vieillesse Commence,” “Détrônée,”

and “Cyprès de Purgatoire.” Short quotations will suffice to convey

their tone:

L’amour dont je subis l’abominable loi

M’attire vers ce que je crains le plus, vers toi![30]

or:

Les êtres de la nuit et les êtres du jour

Ont longtemps partagé mon âme, tour à tour ...

Les êtres de la nuit sont faibles et charmantes ...

On ne boit qu’un baiser décevant sur leur bouche...

Et leur amour n’est qu’un mensonge de la nuit ...[31]

or:

Le monde inhospitable est pareil à l’auberge

Où l’on vit mal, tout est mal, on dort mal.

Et pendant que le cri des femmes se prolonge,

Je cherche le Palais Impossible du Songe.[32]

The Dream here was not, of course, such as comes with sleep, but that

illusion of Love which she had pursued all her life. The final volume,

_Haillons_, is filled with cries of pain and horror, of foreseeing the

end and wanting it to come swiftly.

The known facts of her last year are gleaned from Colette’s _Ces

Plaisirs_ and from news notes following her death. She was living alone

in her Paris residence, an “Arabian Nights dream” of luxury crowded with

the trophies of her travels. Colette conveys vividly the macabre effect

of rooms hung with gloomy colors and inadequately lighted by brown

tapers; the exotic flowers and food and drink; and the unpredictable

eccentricity of the hostess, dressed always in diaphanous black or

violet, who might walk out in the middle of a dinner in response to

mysterious summons from a nameless “Friend.” This figure was so

anonymous and so capriciously tyrannous that Colette surmises she may

have been the figment of an imagination already clouded by intemperate

habits. It is known that the unhappy poet was drinking to excess, an

indulgence particularly dangerous in view of her thyroid imbalance.

A few weeks before her death she was to appear in a tableau as Lady Jane

Grey on the executioner’s scaffold, and wishing to enhance her

effectiveness as the tragic heroine, Vivien put herself through a

punishing regime of violent exercise, little food, and much alcohol. She

made a brilliant appearance, but fainted on the stage and was carried

home to bed. Soon afterwards, as the result of further drinking to

escape black depression, she strangled while attempting to eat and was

quickly stricken with pneumonia.[33]

It was at this point that, with the utmost secrecy, she joined the

Church of Rome, as Violet Shilleto had done before her. Colette’s

matter-of-fact surmise is that a dour and disapproving elderly maid was

responsible for summoning a priest while her mistress was delirious, and

Natalie Clifford Barney in the longest of her memorial poems to the dead

girl agrees with Colette in implying external pressure:

Et pourtant ils ont pris ton âme splénétique

Aux décevants espoirs du dogme catholique,

Voulant ouvrir tes yeux avides de repos

A leur éternité—mais tes yeux se clos ...

Tes esprits affaiblis, ils purent te changer,

Mais l’oeuvre de ta vie est là pour te venger ...[34]

But the consensus of popular opinion was that this was a deathbed

repentance inspired by sheer panic.

It is possible, however, to trace in life and work hints which acquit

the poet of mere faint-hearted apostasy from her devout paganism. The

first is her friend Violet’s similar step, marked upon her ineradicably

by her own remorse. Then there are the many “violette” poems celebrating

the beauty and innocence of that first love, which were written

steadily, except during the brief happy period of her third affair.

There is also the parallel theme of guilt when her ideal of love was

violated, as during her second liaison and her last reckless

extravagances. There are even one or two tenuous religious allusions in

late poems—“Chapelle,” “Chapelle de Marine,” “Dura Lex Sed Lex,” and

there is _Le Christ, Aphrodite et M. Pépin_, a bitter prose satire on an

age of scientific materialism which was giving only lip service to its

deity. But more significant is Germain’s report of what was to him the

most amazing aspect of her conversion—it was the concept of Mary the

Virgin which drew her to the Roman Church. How little after all even her

close friends comprehended the basic motivation of her life: a

compulsive seeking for maternal tenderness.

To understand the odd finale to her story one must return to a phase of

her life so far neglected—her many contacts with artistic and literary

men of her day. The critics Charles, Droin, and Germain were her

personal friends, Sansot, LeDantec and Brun her staunch allies. Her

collector’s interests had gained her the friendship of Ledrain, curator

of oriental antiquities in the Louvre, and her passion for music—she was

an accomplished interpreter of Chopin—had won that of Gauthier-Villars,

music critic as well as novelist, and of Saloman Reinach. One must also

return to the second portion of Barney’s already partially quoted

memorial poem:

Ils ont caché ton corps sous une pierre

Chrétienne, ton squelette émiette sa poussière

Très respectablement dans un tombeau banal,

Anonyme, et couvert du bloc familiale.

Et craignant pour leur nom ce scandale: la Gloire,

Ils offrent leur dernière insulte à ta mémoire ...

“Ils” were her relatives, and it is true that she was buried at Passy

beneath a slab bearing for identification only her father’s name, John

Tarn. Immediately upon her death the quick-witted and practical Reinach,

foreseeing attempts on the part of church, family and even some friends

to suppress evidence of her emotional history, took possession of

letters and unpublished manuscripts and deposited them in the

Bibliothèque Nationale, with the stipulation that they should not be

made public until after the year 2000 A.D.[35] It will, therefore, rest

with another generation to compile the definitive record of her work and

her essentially tragic life.

Some years later in _Notes and Queries_ Reinach wrote the following

informal tribute in response to an inquiry:

I could quote from those volumes at least two hundred verses which

rank among the finest specimens of French poetry. ... I am aware that

there are some objectionable elements in her books, and wish that

they should not be dwelt upon; but her genius—for genius she had—is

the more extraordinary as she wrote in a language not her own. I feel

sure she will be famous some day, and think it desirable that we

should try to know more about her before it gets too late.[36]

All the critics who grant her this superlative poetic quality agree that

she has received nothing approaching her due recognition because of the

lesbian element in her work. In view of the small number of persons in

any generation who are tolerant of such love, it may be that she will

never receive it.

* * * * *

There remains little to mention in the way of variant French poetry,

though occasionally some isolated chance-encountered fragment—like a

sonnet to Hermaphroditus by Marguérite Yourcenar—stimulates a fruitless

search for more of an author’s verse. The _Mercure de France_ reported

in 1902 Henry Rigal’s _Sur le Mode Sapphique_, of which Pierre

Quillard’s review says that it was prefaced by a quotation from Pierre

Louÿs: ‘When a loving pair is composed of two women, then it is

perfect.’[37] The slim volume was made up of a dozen brief episodes laid

in a dimly distant Ionic island setting, and recounted in antiphonal

stanzas the love between Chrysea and Mnais. It was apparently a close

imitation of Louÿs’s _Songs of Bilitis_, with Mnais in the more

masculine role. It ends with a shepherd lad catching Chrysea’s eye one

evening and piquing her imagination by dreams of “a stronger and better

love.” Were it not for the title, says Quillard, one could well believe

the amorous dialogue one between a girl and an _éphèbe_—an effeminate

man.

The only other woman poet sufficiently variant to attract critical

comment was Paule Reuss, noted by Clarissa Cooper in her _Women Poets of

the Twentieth Century in France_. Reuss’s volume _Le Génie de L’Amour_

(1935) was dedicated to her fellow poet Anna de Noailles, and is said

“to breathe a pure idealistic love like that of Dante for Beatrice.”

Cooper’s only quotation is:

Vous demandez d’aller vous voir!

Mais serait-ce quitter ce soir

Vos mains jointes dans la mienne?

Sera-ce vous quitter au matin?

J’ôterai ma robe blanche;

Au clair de lune de la lampe,

Sera-ce toi vers moi qui te penches?

Je passerai dans les sentiers

Déjà connus ou oubliés

Et je dirai: Madame! alors

Que j’avais dit mon trésor![38]

This suggests a proud and ironic restraint to equal Natalie Clifford

Barney’s.

Poetry—German

The first contemporary variant poetry in German was probably an item

cited in Hirschfeld’s _Jahrbuch_ simply as: Plehn. _Lesbiacorum Liber_.

1896. As it is not listed in the German publishers’ catalog during the

1890s, it must have appeared in a periodical or as a part of some longer

volume. The only possible author is a Marianne Plehn who produced a long

monograph on geology during the same decade. Her interest in a field

cultivated chiefly by men supports the assumption that her literary

outlook was also masculine, and her rather labored Latin adjective would

imply that her “Book of Lesbians” celebrated women of similar

temperament.

In 1898 considerable notoriety attended the publication of _Auf Kypros_

by Marie Madeleine (Baroness von Puttkamer), an author included by a

later literary historian among “exponents ... of the right to

unrestrained sexual freedom even if perverse,” and described as “so

brazenly pornographic [an adjective which the critic employed freely]

that the less said the better.”[39] The volume was later privately

reissued in a de luxe edition with color plates by nine or ten

established contemporary artists.[40] Though most of the poems in _Auf

Kypros_ are heterosexual, six or seven match Renée Vivien’s in lesbian

frankness, e.g. “Vergib” and “Greisenworte.” “Sappho” too much resembles

other imitations of that poet’s most passionate ode or Louÿs’ _Songs of

Bilitis_ to need special attention. Another, almost flippant in tone, is

from a group entitled “Aus dem Tagebuch einer Demi-Vierge,” and sketches

with great economy what is evidently a tranvestist episode. The speaker

has given her “Kätzerl” sweets, liqueurs, cigarettes (“natürlich Kyriazi

Frères!”)—and kisses—and has kept up her “strenges incognito” so

successfully that her Puss really believes her a Man-About-Town. Only

the American “Götze” on the end-table (surely Billikin) grins wickedly

to hear the impostor repeatedly promise the frustrated girl

‘Everything!!—next time!’

The remaining three lesbian poems express tragic regret for initiating a

younger girl. “Vagabunden” is a prophetic warning:

Verlassen wirst du Haus und Herd

um meiner Augen dunklen Schein.

Du wirst verachtet und entehrt

und wie ein Bettler wirst du sein ...

Und um uns her ist Hass und Hohn,

und alle werden uns verdammen,

und alle Pfaffen werden droh’n

mit Strafen und mit Höllenflammen.

Wir sind verflucht für alle Zeit!

und wirst doch Haus und Herd verlassen

um meiner Augen Müdigkeit.

“Crucifixa” pictures the innocence of a young girl before her initiation

and her plight afterward:

Ich sah an einem hohen Marterpfahle

an einem dunklen Kreuz dich festgebunden.

Es glänzten meiner Küsse Sündenmale

auf deinem weissen Leib wie Purpurwunden ...

Ich gab dir von dem Gift das in mir ist;

ich gab dir meiner Leidenschaften Stärke,

und nun, da du so ganz entlodert bist,

graut meiner Seele vor dem eignen Werke.

Ich möchte knie’n vor einem der Altäre

die ich zerschlug in frevelhaftem Wagen—

Madonna mit dem Augen der Hetäre,

ich selber habe dich ans Kreuz geschlagen!

And a later untitled poem goes even farther, in wishing the beloved dead

rather than as she has become:

Ich wollte, es läge kühl und blass

dein geschändeter Leib unterm Kirchhofsgras,

erlöst von Schmerzen und Sünd’,

und fleckenlos wärst du auf’s Neue—

ein Lilie im Morgenwind.

One cannot help wondering whether Vivien, who knew German well and

doubtless read these poems at about the time she was writing her own

impassioned elegies to Violet, may not have felt their influence.

During the 1890s the picturesque vagabond, Peter Hille, was roaming the

country with his scribbled manuscripts in the pockets of his shabby

jacket. He was so indifferent to publication that nothing was printed

until after his death in 1904, when his friends assembled his _Collected

Works_. Of these, the first volume is made up of poems, among them a

long rhapsodic biography of Sappho,[41] representing her as devoted

wholly to Beauty. She worships nature, women, and particularly youth as

embodiments of beauty, and wants to remain young and free herself,

leaving only her poems as offspring. But Hille hears premonitory echoes

of “the thunder of Jove”—passion—which will presently overcome her.

Therefore, his picture is that of an emotional adolescent; it evades her

variant loves and stops short of her marriage, her childbearing, and of

her hypothetical passion for Phaon. Among the prose “Aphorisms” in his

second volume Hille includes a severe indictment of current

lesbianism,[42] which he considers as depraved as any other illicit

passion. He says that only women so dedicated to spiritual beauty as to

forego all physical expression are entitled to call themselves disciples

of Sappho. Thus he is a precursor of Rilke, who similarly idealized her

emotional experience as nearer the “divine intent” even than happy

heterosexual love. In short, both men are basically ascetic.

In the same year that Hille’s work appeared in print a lesser lyrist,

Ernst Stadler, then only twenty, published in _Das Magazin für

Literatur_ a poetic drama, “Freundinnen.”[43] It presents the

culmination of an ardent friendship between Sylvia and Bianca, one

fifteen, the other eighteen, in their mutual awareness of passion under

the spell of a full summer moon, but it does not have specific lesbian

implications.

A second woman poet, more restrained than Madeleine, is Toni Schwabe,

whose _Komm kühle Nacht_ appeared in 1909. Its first group of “Lieder”

celebrates the loss of a male lover remembered with bitterness, for his

ruthless passion threatened the girl’s life and destroyed her love. The

poet sees ahead no feminine happiness, no home or children—a brief

cradle song speaks of a child abandoned to others’ care while the singer

roams the world, a slave to desire—but only ‘a mad riot of roses and

dancing’ and the brief ecstasy that comes with night and dies at dawn.

(Dowson’s _Cynara_, written in the nineties, “I have ... gone with the

wind, Flung roses, roses, riotously with the throng Dancing ...” comes

inevitably to mind.)

A later group of sonnets are like Louise Labé’s in concealing the sex of

the beloved, but are aggressive and masculine in mood. A “Lied der

Bilitis an Mnasidika” borrows the most fervent of Louÿs’s lesbian

episodes, and some pages of “Translations from the Danish,” said to be

of Schwabe’s own composition, begin with two “Songs to Lenore.” The

first poem in “Die Stadt mit lichten Türmen” is a dream in which a young

count bears the singer into a beech wood and tries futilely to possess

her, never divining that only her ‘smiling pity’ prevents her from

dealing him a death blow. Probably the most typical mood of the whole

volume is represented in “Nie traf ich einen,” in which she says that

‘no one has ever curbed me with the bridle of love. Where I was

weaker I refused myself altogether.... I have caressed only those who

craved my love and wanted my violence, and them I have contrived to

satisfy and to make dependent upon me. Me—me alone no one can succor,

for though I have known every kind of love, no one has ever truly

possessed me, made me surrender.’[44]

This is exactly the mood of Rachilde’s and Schreiner’s heroines and of

Barney’s poems.

Only one variant poet has been traced in Germany subsequent to World War

I, a woman who wrote under the pseudonym of Iris Ira. Her volume,

_Lesbos_ (1930), consists of free renderings of Sappho’s and Anacreon’s

surviving fragments, and a similar rendering of the _Songs of Bilitis_,

complete with introductory narrative. (Richard Dehmel had translated in

the 1890s only two dozen of its prose-poems.) A translator’s preface to

the volume pleads the necessity of maintaining mood rather than literal

accuracy, but while the verse displays skill and grace, its tone

throughout is more charming than passionate. And passion, of course, was

the very essence of Louÿs’s own work.

Poetry—English

Poets in English offer nothing as explicitly lesbian as the work of

Vivien or Madeleine, and they seldom equal Barney or Schwabe in

frankness of implication. Indeed, last century’s “thick veil of ellipse

and metaphor”[45] still shrouds most of our feminine variant lyrists,

and even where it has thinned, critics in general have either failed or

refused to penetrate it. Consequently some readers may incline to

skepticism concerning already familiar material cited below, but in that

case they are urged to re-examine it with open mind, not in anthologies

but in the authors’ original context, and not for overt lesbianism but

for clearly variant significance.

In America, Amy Lowell was the first poet to venture at all openly upon

variant ground. She was born three years earlier than Vivien and Barney,

the granddaughter of James Russell Lowell and sister of a president of

Harvard. In spite of this formidably respectable heritage, she did not

escape to Paris but lived out her life in the family mansion in

Brookline, though she did create within it her own particular haven. As

surely as Renée Vivien felt herself born in the wrong era, Miss Lowell

was born in the wrong flesh for a worshipper of female beauty. Even in

her adolescent journals she bemoans the excessive weight which robbed

her of appeal. Living too early for endocrinology to aid her, she tried

rigid dieting, but succeeded only in doing permanent damage to her

health. Something of a tomboy in her younger days, as she matured she

adopted also the male psychological role. Clement Wood has documented

for her as thoroughly as did Moore and Wilson for Emily Brontë this

consistent assumption of masculinity, and the reader must be referred to

the final chapter of his biography for detailed evidence. He lists there

all Lowell’s poems written from a male viewpoint, but for the present

purpose only such require mention as are love lyrics addressed to women

and spoken as if by the poet in her own person, not through the lips of

a fictitious man.

Miss Lowell published nothing until 1912, when she was nearly thirty,

but then in _A Dome of Many-Colored Glass_ she included a number of

variant verses. “Hora Stellatrix,” for instance, contains the following

lines:

’Tis night and spring, Sweetheart, and spring!

Starfire lights your heart’s blossoming.

In the intimate dark there’s never an ear ...

So give; ripe fruit must shrivel and fall.

As you are mine, Sweetheart, give all!

The poem entitled “Dipsa” is virtually an epithalamium fifty lines in

length, among them:

I wonder can it really be that you

And I are here alone, and that the night

Is full of hours, and all the world asleep,

And none to call to you to come away;

For you have given all yourself to me,

Making me gentle by your willingness.

There is also a sequence of nine sonnets in slightly less specific

vein,[46] as plainly written to a woman, and as plainly spoken by the

poet herself.

In _Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds_ (1914) five of the last poems—“Blue

Scarf,” “White Green,” “Aubade,” “A Lady,” and “In a Garden”—are written

to women and are full of passionate imagery. In _Pictures of the

Floating World_ (1919) there is a sixty-page sequence, “Planes of

Personality: Two Speak Together,” more extensive and unmistakably

variant than anything found elsewhere in Lowell. In the first poem,

“Vernal Equinox,” one finds: “Why are you not here to overpower me with

your tense and urgent love?” The second is the often quoted “The

Letter,” empty of variant suggestion when lifted from its context, but

ending:

I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against

The want of you;

Of squeezing it into little ink drops

And posting it.

And I scald alone here under the fire

Of the great moon.

In her final volume, _What’s O’Clock_, there are thirty pages beginning

with “Twenty-four Hokku on a Modern Theme” and ending with “Onlooker,”

which are comparable with, though less passionate than, the sequence

above.

Charlotte Mew, a woman who by date of birth (1870) should precede Miss

Lowell, took her own life in 1928. Virginia Moore describes her as

definitely variant.[47] Unhappily for literature she destroyed all

traces of that fact even more carefully than did Emily Brontë or Emily

Dickinson—so completely that we have of her work only two thin volumes,

scarcely fifty poems in all. This meager remainder is of high enough

quality to gain her inclusion in the _Dictionary of National Biography_

and in virtually every anthology of twentieth-century poetry. It does

not, however, include a single poem of which one can say “this is more

variant than otherwise,” though two or three (especially “The Farmer’s

Wife”) are poignantly successful in expressing a man’s emotional

viewpoint. Several (e.g., “Madeleine in Church”) show a deep religious

conviction of sin, and doubtless this, as well as a passion for privacy,

led her to the wholesale winnowing which critics, being unaware of her

emotional bent, laid to rigorous self-criticism of an aesthetic sort.

Certainly if what she destroyed was at all comparable to what remains,

there has been no more tragic literary, as well as personal, suicide

since Chatterton.

* * * * *

Writing undoubtedly at the same time as Amy Lowell, for she was born in

the same year, was Rose O’Neill. This woman is likely to be recalled

today as the creator of the Kewpies, those coy cherubs which became a

national fad early in the century, rather than as a serious artist and

writer. Nevertheless, she was poet, novelist, and illustrator, the

income from her juvenile and humorous works enabling her to pursue her

deeper interests. Her claim to inclusion here rests on her single volume

of serious verse, which was not published until 1922. Of it, Clement

Wood says in his _Poets of America_:

Her poetry will lose a certain Puritan following because of her

cryptic frankness on the theme of love. She does not write this

across the sky; neither does she, as is the convention, make this

creep into a hole and draw the hole in after it. It is here, in a few

poems; those who are not offended by this note in the masters since

the Greeks, will not be offended by it here.[48]

Its title, taken from Shakespeare’s most debated sonnet, is _The Master

Mistress_, and the title poem hymns “a lovely monster ... seeming two in

one, With dreadful beauty doomed,” but the subsequent references to

variance are comparatively few and almost equally vague. Only a dozen

poems among some two hundred are unmistakably variant—ten written “To

Kallista” (that notation appearing as subtitle); “Lee: A Portrait,” and

“A Dream of Sappho.” None but the last alludes vividly to any physical

expression of love, but all are passionate, and many are specific in

their praise of feminine beauty. The third poem in the volume reads:

The sonnet begs me like a bridegroom,

“Come within.”

“This palace! Not for me, the desert-born!”

I turn me, as from some too lordly sin,

And like a singing Hagar, pause and pass—

To lift for night’s sweet thieves my restless horn

In broken rhythms of the windy grass.

I will not be the measure-pacing bride,

But where the flutes come faintly,

Sing outside.

Like drifting sand my love doth drift and change—

I strangely sing because my love is strange.

From the lot of these variant poems the reader retains half-realized

images of two different loves, one a delicate and feminine personality,

“ceaselessly weeping,” the other:

Mimic, dancer, cavalier,

Silky hand the proud horse loves to fear;

Sailor and adventurer ...

She who lingers, loves, and goes alone.[49]

Though verses spoken through the lips of a fictitious man are much less

frequent than in Amy Lowell’s work, two such poems occur. And there are

many to which a Celtic titanism—fancies of removing mountains or seizing

the moon and stars for toys—lends a definitely masculine tone. Such

phrases as “in your princely fashion” and “fitting for you who feast

upon fierce things” indicate, moreover, that the poet glories in the

masculinity of one of her woman-loves.

Since this volume, whose quality Wood compares to that of the

Elizabethan Thomas Campion, is far superior to even the best of

O’Neill’s prose, the same question arises as in the case of Louise Labé:

how is it that from so articulate a writer, one who rhymed as she

breathed, we have no greater quantity of surviving verse? The answer may

well be the same, in view of her history.

She was born in Pennsylvania, but lived in no state long enough to call

it her own. Her father was a bookseller of more literary than practical

gifts, and there is little doubt that the swarming, hilarious and

penniless family in her first novel[50] is based on her own background.

From infancy the gifted child was destined for a stage career, but it

was discovered early that she was too high-strung to endure public

appearances. She then chose illustrating as her métier, and although

self-taught, was already selling drawings in her early teens. From

Omaha, where she attended a convent day school, she went alone at

fifteen to New York to seek a better market for her work, and lived

there in another convent until her marriage three years later. When her

husband died, she was twenty-three and already an established

illustrator and the financial mainstay of her family.

The humorous magazine _Puck_ soon became her chief outlet. She joined

its staff, and in 1902 married its editor, Harry Leon Wilson, later

famous as author of _Ruggles of Red Gap_ and _Merton of the Movies_. In

1904 O’Neill published _The Loves of Edwy_, which like two of her three

subsequent novels, is written in the first person and from a man’s

viewpoint. It is significant that the narrator of this story spends his

life in fruitless love of the bewitching heroine, a term in jail for an

altruistic forgery being the somewhat strained device which deters him

from marrying. The girl, who has returned his love since adolescence,

finally accepts another man, but a total psychological block prevents

her consummating the marriage.

In 1905 Wilson met Booth Tarkington and the two at once became intimate,

going to winter on Capri at Elihu Vedder’s “beautiful, unbelievable

villa,” and there collaborating on _The Man From Home_. O’Neill studied

art in Rome and Paris from 1905 to 1907, and twice exhibited in the

Paris Salon. She and her husband apparently did not return to America

until 1912, living in the interim in their own Villa Narcissus on Capri,

which is mentioned as one of her several residences later. Upon her

return to the States she was separated from Wilson, and thereafter lived

in the Ozarks, in Connecticut, and in New York on Washington Square,

where she became a close friend (as was Millay) of Elinor Wylie. In 1929

and 1930 she produced her last novels, _The Goblin Woman_ and _Garda_,

in the latter of which the heroine and a twin brother, Narcissus, are

“the two parts of a single whole,” she, the pagan and undisciplined

body; he, the sensitive poetic soul. In her first two novels (the second

was a whimsical mystery) the central feminine figure embodied soul and

conscience, the man being the pagan spirit.

One gains in the end the picture of a dual personality, whose loves may

well have changed like the drifting sand, and who made her most profound

effort toward sincerity in _The Master Mistress_. It is known that Capri

early in the century was the home of an international homosexual colony,

and O’Neill could scarcely have lived there for several years without

being drawn into the circle, at least superficially. But her early

religious training would have made it difficult for her to freely

embrace or champion its way of life. Embodied in her novels are many

charming light love lyrics, written by male characters to their loves,

and in all probability her private notebooks contained a good bit of

more personal variant poetry which will never be made public.

* * * * *

In 1906, at the age of thirteen, “E. Vincent Millay,” as she then signed

herself, saw her first verses printed in the young writers’ section of

_St. Nicholas Magazine_, and four years later her farewell

poem—seventeen was the age limit for the “League”—won the year’s cash

prize. Entitled “Friends,”[51] this poem presents in two neatly balanced

stanzas the incompatible temperaments of an adolescent boy and girl. The

girl’s rejection of the senseless brutality of football was the poet’s

own, as the hatred of all cruelty in her later work attests. The girl’s

occupation—embroidery—was unlikely to have been that of young “Vincent,”

who enjoyed a boy’s outdoor activities as well as a boy’s name.

From her debut in _St. Nicholas_ to the end of her life, virtually all

of Millay’s work appeared first in periodicals, so that for tracing its

chronology Yost’s bibliography of 1937 is invaluable. From this we know

that “Interim,” her first poem of variant significance, was written in

1912 along with the better known “Renascence.” “Interim” is a threnody

which at least two critics[52] have meticulously insisted is the product

of pure imagination, since no one intimately known to the poet had died

when she wrote it. It is possible, however, to suffer tragic loss

through separation, especially when young, and every homely and poignant

detail of “Interim” speaks of immediate experience. One passage near the

middle needs particular attention:

... That day you picked the first sweet pea—

I know, you held it up for me to see

And flushed because I looked not at the flower

But at your face; and when behind my look

You saw such unmistakable intent

You laughed and brushed your flower against my lips

(You were the fairest thing God ever made

I think). And then your hands above my heart

Drew down its stem into a fastening

And while your head was bent I kissed your hair.

I wonder if you knew ...

... If only God

Had let us love—and show the world the way!

Strange cancellings must ink th’eternal books

When love-crossed-out will bring the answer right![53]

The experience described here obviously involved another woman, and

remained unconsummated. Like Hille and Rilke, the poet feels such love

to be potentially the most perfect in the world; but, unlike them, she

sees perfection only in completion, not in abstinence. Furthermore, the

last two quoted lines have a kind of classroom echo, as of discipline by

some harsher agent than the deity of “God’s World.”

When Millay submitted this poem along with “Renascence” for inclusion in

_The Lyric Year_ she herself so much preferred “Interim” that she

ventured to plead by mail for its inclusion.[54] As it is inferior to

“Renascence” in both profundity and restraint, her preference argues

that it had been written too recently for her to gain perspective upon

it. She was twenty at the time, three years out of high school, and

living in a small Maine town of rather limited intellectual and personal

opportunities, according to her sister Kathleen’s later picture of it in

_Against the Wall_. It is also clear from all her poetry and her

correspondence that hers was a highly emotional temperament. All this

suggests that for a considerable time in her late teens Millay was

completely absorbed in a passionate variant attachment, which then

suffered some abrupt termination. Out of her grief grew “Interim” and a

number of other laments which trickled into print throughout the next

two or three years. Examination of her first published volume

(_Renascence_, 1917) shows that save for “God’s World” and “Afternoon on

a Hill,” the whole collection sounds a note of personal loss and

melancholy.

During her years at Vassar (1913-1917, her twenty-first to twenty-fifth)

she admitted an attachment to another fair delicate girl, at least to

the extent of her own “Memorial to D.C. (Vassar College, 1918),” which

appeared in the volume _Second April_. Death actually terminated this

friendship, but the group of “little elegies” assembled under the title

above are merely slight and graceful by comparison with “Interim” and

its aftermaths. It is probable that certain later laments, such as “Song

of a Second April” and “To One Who Might Have Borne a Message,” were

truer expressions of this later loss. A third woman is pictured in a

sonnet in _The Harp Weaver_:

Love is not blind. I see with single eye

Your ugliness and other women’s grace.

I know the imperfections of your face—

The eyes too wide apart, the brow too high

For beauty. Learned from earliest youth am I

In loveliness, and cannot so erase

Its letters from my mind, that I may trace

You faultless, I must love until I die....[55]

This is less passionate than many of her love lyrics, and it alone among

them speaks of lifelong constancy. It might have been written to the

poet’s mother, to whom, as her letters testify, she was ardently

devoted.

That variant emotion was at least an intermittent preoccupation with

Millay until she was thirty is evident from examination of her total

work before 1923, the year of her marriage. There are a number of

sonnets and other verses in which the sex of the subject is uncertain,

if not deliberately concealed, but which do not have the tone of those

specifically written to men. Then there is her poetic drama, _The Lamp

and The Bell_, written during a sojourn in Paris soon after graduation

from Vassar, and presented at the college in 1921. Its theme is an

undying devotion between two young women, and Elizabeth Atkins’s

description of it is so delightful that it must be borrowed:

The kingdom of Fiori is Poughkeepsie-on-the-Hudson, and college

students and faculty keep looking straight through their Italian

veils, very much as Elizabethan Londoners keep lifting their masks in

Shakespeare’s Illyria and Verona and Messina.

The theme is that one of burning concern in any girls’ school—the

theme of friendship; and the play takes up their endless arguments as

to whether it will last. Octavia, the very mildly wicked stepmother

in the play, supposedly a queen but essentially a dean of women,

avers that the friendship of the princess and her own daughter is not

healthy and will not last. Of course the girls prove her wrong. The

princess, without a murmur, gives up her lover to her friend; and

long afterwards she consents to violation by her most loathed enemy,

in order to be permitted to reach her friend as she lies dying.

The theme is surely Elizabethan. From Lyly to Beaumont and Fletcher,

Elizabethan literature is filled with asseverations that friendship

is a stronger thing than sexual love.... The only novelty is that

this twentieth century play deals with the friendship of women

instead of men....[56]

Friendship, however, is much too cool a description for the love between

the princesses. The relation is passionate, though as always in her

variant verse Millay avoids any implication of physical intimacy.

By the time that this drama was written, however, Millay also had

published a number of lyrics of heterosexual inspiration. Indeed, among

the conventionally minded she had gained a quite shocking reputation on

the strength of them, for they antedated the now notorious Twenties.

Many of them are flippant or bitter in comparison to those inspired by

women, and they flaunt inconstancy and promiscuity. See for instance the

sonnets “Oh think not I am faithful to a vow,” “I shall forget you

presently, my dear,”[57] “What lips my lips have kissed ... I have

forgotten,” and “I being born a woman....”[58] In short, these betray

conscious striving toward a masculine sexual standard to match that of

her partners. They remind one that “Vincent” had concealed her sex at

the date of her first publication. A critic, citing in an adult review

the “phenomenal” quality of a _St. Nicholas_ entry Millay wrote at

fourteen, confessed uncertainty whether the poem was written by a boy or

a girl.[59] Fellow poets reading “Renascence” thought it a man’s work,

and a Barnard professor during her brief months there (repairing

entrance requirement deficiencies for Vassar) pronounced “Interim” to be

written in the character of a man.[60] The same viewpoint marks her

libretto for Deems Taylor’s opera, _The King’s Henchman_.

After her marriage in 1923 all of Millay’s published verse was marked by

greater emotional reticence, and if she wrote privately anything

comparable to her earlier variant lyrics the chances are against its

ever being made public. (There has been no providential Reinach to

salvage her reliques for posterity, and it is rumored that censorship is

being exercised. Letters have been admitted to the published volume of

her correspondence which imply some early heterosexual indiscretion,

while all variant traces have been eradicated save a proper name or

two[61] in connection with which the published implications are

unrevealing. To the student of variance, however, they are significant.)

The one notable exception to this general reticence is _Fatal Interview_

(1930), of which Atkins said in 1936 that she, herself,

must be the first post-Victorian critic on record to state in cold

print ... that a still breathing married woman, name and dates given,

has written a poem of extra-marital passion, not as a literary

exercise in purple penmanship, but as an honest record of immediate

experience.[62]

The experience did not occur very close to the date of the volume’s

publication, however, for many readers will remember individual sonnets

coming out in this or that magazine over a considerable number of years,

and not in the order in which they finally stand. The majority might, as

far as verbal evidence goes, have been written to a person of either

sex, and they differ so sharply among themselves that even allowing for

the poet’s mercurial temperament and the gamut of emotion she wished to

record, one sometimes feels they cannot all have been inspired by the

same individual. It may be brash to suggest that they could have grown

out of more than one experience, and that the fifty-two were merely

assembled into one matchless tracing of the birth, growth and decline of

human passion. But one of them, numbered XXI, demands special attention:

Gone in good sooth you are: not even in dream

You come. As if the strictures of the light,

Laid on our glances to their disesteem,

Extended even to shadows and the night;

Extended even beyond that drowsy sill

Along whose galleries, open to the skies

All maskers move unchallenged and at will,

Visor in hand and hooded to the eyes.

To that pavilion the green sea in flood

Curves in, and the slow dancers dance in foam;

I find again the pink camellia-bud

On the wide step, beside a silver comb—

But it is scentless; up the marble stair

I mount with pain, knowing you are not there.

This verse was originally written either to a woman and fitted later

into the artistic pattern of the whole, or the man who inspired it could

appear (without incongruity in the dreamer’s mind) to have lost a

masquer’s accessories—pink camellia-bud and silver comb—which are

scarcely masculine. Was he one whom a woman’s costume would have become?

Did the dreamer at times secretly wish him a woman? Or was this sonnet

(and just possibly others in the sequence also) written specifically to

a woman?

It has been the critical fashion for some time to discount Millay’s

literary importance because of the sharp decline in the quality of her

work after _The Buck in the Snow_. Her “Epitaph for the Race of Man” in

that volume may be seen almost as her own poetic abdication. An artist

whose gods were Life and Beauty and whose devil was Cruelty may well

have found herself paralyzed by the horror of global and total war. If

one predicates also the burden of a dual emotional nature, one half of

which was in later years censored by the other—for no mature modern of

her intelligence would lightly court the charge of arrested adolescence,

no daughter of New England would willingly display what her generation

considered emotional deformity—one has supplementary explanation of her

creative paralysis.

* * * * *

Not all of this country’s variant poetry has been written by women; at

least two men have contributed narrative verse. Edgar Lee Masters’s

_Domesday Book_ (1929) follows Browning’s _Ring and the Book_ in that it

begins with a girl’s death and traces the history which led up to it,

through the memories of far more than Browning’s dozen persons. In the

end Elenor Murray is seen as a woman too passionate and open-hearted to

live peacefully or to end her days in happiness. Within a decade she

gave herself lavishly to several men but was self-defeating in her very

generosity, and finally ended her life because her efforts to meet her

lovers’ need only brought suffering to others as well as herself.

One of the earlier reminiscences in the book comes from Alma Bell, a

high-school teacher who knew Elenor at seventeen and loved her deeply.

Recognizing the dangers ahead for one so susceptible to passion, she

attempted to help the girl “to ripen to a rich maturity” unscathed. She

had success in warding off certain unsavory male advances, but not in

avoiding emotional involvement herself, since, as she observes, few

persons are wholly either masculine or feminine in spirit.

... the flesh’s explanation

Is not important, nor to tell whence comes

A love in the heart—the thing is love at last ...

My love for Elenor Murray never had

Other expression than the look of eyes,

The spiritual thrill of listening to her voice,

A hand to clasp, kiss upon the lips at best,

Better to find her soul, as Plato says.[63]

Despite this conscientious restraint the town became aware of the

intimacy, and Alma Bell was forced to resign her position and leave

... under a cloud

Because of love for Elenor Murray, yet

Not lawless love, I write now to make clear.[64]

The exceptional small town coroner, tolerant and philosophical, who

elicits the stories which compose the pattern, is an evident mouthpiece

for the poet himself. His final estimate of the girl’s character is one

of human dignity and largeness of spirit surpassing that of her

calumniators and even her lovers and friends. But the early suspicion of

lesbianism cast one of the shadows which reached beyond the limits of

her little Midwestern community and augmented the difficulties of her

later life.

The single protesting voice in American poetry is that of George

Stirling, whose _Strange Waters_ is a brief narrative related to the

work of Robinson Jeffers in both its Pacific coast setting and in

grimness of theme. To a childless, but quite happy, poet and his Irish

wife are sent the latter’s eighteen-year-old twin nieces. They are the

children of her much older brother, to whom she has alluded only once

during her married life proclaiming him a monster. His deathbed letter

implies some ironic justice in their being left to her. They are

fiery-haired beauties, abnormally reticent except with one another, and

their mutual devotion is marked. The more boyish twin exhibits a

brilliant intellect which fascinates the poet, but he intuitively senses

something amiss, and listens at the door of the bedroom where they sleep

together. To his horror he hears evidence of active lesbianism, and in

the morning he accuses them openly. Refusing to answer him, the two set

out for their usual day-long roaming on cliffs and shore. However, they

do not return. When their bodies are washed in from the Pacific, one

proves to be a boy. The subtle implication is that they are the

incestuous offspring of the poet’s wife and her brother. Their relation,

then, is not variant, but it gives Stirling opportunity to pass upon

lesbianism a judgment quite as black as upon incest, for which in this

case a hereditary etiology is implied.

* * * * *

From England the variant contribution is even thinner and more evasive

than from America. Richard Aldington’s _Loves of Myrrhine and Konallis_

(1926) is yet another derivative from Louÿs’s _Songs of Bilitis_. Its

pair are the young goat-girl, Konallis, and the prosperous courtesan,

Myrrhine, who bids her maid close her doors to male lovers, “for this is

a sharper love.”[65] The tenuous drama progresses through white nights,

bacchic revels, momentary unfaithfulness, and philosophic communing, and

ends with Myrrhine’s death and Konallis’s subsequent marriage. Though

graced with felicitous phrasing and vivid evocation of passionate mood,

it is the weakest of the echoes from Louÿs’s original because the least

direct in presentation of its theme.

Victoria Sackville-West’s _King’s Daughter_ (1930) is very different but

even more cryptic. Its echoes are wholly English and recall the

Elizabethan lyrists from one of whom the poet is descended. The scant

two-dozen pages, full of country images sharp and delicate as frost,

conjure up the spirit—seldom the physical presence—of an elusive

coquette and of the proud speaker, who

Although the blackness of her heart torment

Me and her whiteness make me turbulent,[66]

will commit neither pleas nor actions to paper. One early line disclaims

intimacy: “How shall I haunt her separate sleep?” The only others nearly

as explicit are:

Estranged from all, and rapt, I only ask

To be alone when I am not with you.[67]

It is not until reaching the final poem, “Envoi,” that the poet

indicates that anything has actually occurred outside of her haunted

imagination.

The catkin from the hazel swung

When you and I and March were young ...

The harvest moon rose round and red

When habit came and wonder fled ...

Snow lay on hedgerows of December

Then, when we could no more remember.

But the green flush was on the larch

When other loves we found in March.[68]

Here, for a moment, is the flavor of Millay, but not the intensity, and

to give evidence that the whole volume breathes subjective passion one

would need to quote it entirely, which is scarcely practicable. The most

vivid of the poems is also one of the best known:

Cygnet and barnacle goose

Follow her when she passes

Barefoot through daisied grasses.

Briars blown straying and loose

Catch at her as she goes

Down the path between woodbine and rose.

Seeking to follow and hold her,

The silly birds and the thorn.

But her laughter is merry with scorn.

What would she say if I told her

That the goose, and the swan,

And the thorn, and my spirit, were one?[69]

A negative note, barely audible, is sounded in the _Scrapbook_ of

Katherine Mansfield, published by her husband, Middleton Murry, in 1940,

a dozen years after her death. The poem is dated 1919, and entitled

“Friendship.”

When we were charming Backfisch

With curls and velvet bows

We shared a charming kitten

With tiny velvet toes.

It was so gay and playful;

It flew like a woolly ball

From my lap to your shoulder—

And oh, it was so small,

So warm and so obedient,

If we cried: “That’s enough!”

It lay and slept between us,

A purring ball of fluff.

But now that I am thirty

And she is thirty-one,

I shudder to discover

How wild our cat has run.

It’s bigger than a tiger,

Its eyes are jets of flame,

Its claws are gleaming daggers;

Could it have once been tame?

Take it away; I’m frightened!

But she, with placid brow,

Cries: “This is our Kitty-witty!

Why don’t you love her now?”[70]

Obviously Mansfield, unlike Millay, did not see perfection in the

fulfillment of variant love. Or at least not in this particular

fulfillment. Passages scattered through the _Scrapbook_ and the more

reticent _Journal_ (1928) reveal a compulsive and abject devotion in the

lifelong friend alluded to in the poem above. (See, for example,

“Toothache Sunday” in the _Scrapbook_.) The intensity of her friend’s

emotion troubled Mansfield, who sometimes felt herself “a callous brute”

to be unable to return it in kind or to make its possessor happy. “I

don’t know why I always shrink ever so faintly from her touch. I could

not kiss her lips.”[71] But, however innocent of expression, the

relationship was a problem she could never discuss with her husband, and

she felt that it cast a permanent, if faint, shadow between her and “J.”

(Murry).

(From the recent sympathetic biography of Mansfield by her fellow New

Zealander, Antony Alpers, several supplementary impressions emerge: 1)

Ida Baker (“L.M.”) was never abject, but rather a dedicated priestess

most happy to be elected and given a direction in life. 2) It was not

her shadow which fell between Mansfield and Murry so much as the

former’s compulsion to write. Katherine repeatedly blamed Murry’s

self-absorption for the difficulties in their relations (Nelia Gardner

White takes the same view in her novelized biography _Daughter of Time_,

1941) but surely her own was quite as marked. 3) While she was in

Queen’s College, London, between fourteen and seventeen, there seems to

have been some talk of her “unwholesome” friendships. Alpers uses the

plural, but discusses only her domination of Ida Baker, unless her

wooing of her feminine cousin Sidney Payne for a couple of years was

also suspect. According to Alpers this courtship proceeded largely by

letter, one of which he quotes to refute the charge. 4) From the picture

of her two unhappy marriages (the first almost farcical) and her

obviously ambivalent feeling for Ida Baker, it seems that she was a

person unable to give herself completely to either man or woman. Was

this because of her obsession with writing, or was that relentless

creative urge the result rather than the cause of some deeper emotional

block?)

The most notable feature of all these twentieth century lyrics is the

women’s relatively articulate confession of variant interests. Before

1900 only “Michael Field” and Matilda Betham-Edwards (to be mentioned

later) admitted inclination toward their own sex. Now the Catholic

O’Neill, the New England Lowell and Millay, the British Sackville-West

reveal it without apology. Schwabe and Madeleine offer their testimony

still more openly, and Barney and Vivien, with the independence of

expatriates and women of fortune able to create their own milieu,

proclaim it not only in writing but in their lives. Indeed Vivien at

least promises in any long view of western literature to figure as a

minor Sappho, the greater part of her work dedicated to this limited but

seemingly imperishable theme.