1 May 2014

Corps à Corps with Romaine Brooks

Tête à tête with her biographer, Cassandra Langer

Suzanne Stroh: Thanks for popping by the site yesterday, and welcome back. It’s been six months since we talked on Natalie’s birthday. You’ve finished your biography of Romaine Brooks. Perfect timing; today is her 140^th birthday. If today was 97 years ago in 1917, Natalie Barney would be taking her leave of Lily de Gramont after celebrating their anniversary in the morning, and looking for Romaine with a birthday cake in her arms. Where would we find her, and what would she be doing?

Cassandra Langer: She seems to have enjoyed traveling this time of year. She liked roaming around the Algerian countryside, or else making new forays in Italy, her spiritual home. It’s a little too early in the season after such a cold winter to spy on her swimming in the Blue Grotto on Capri, where she had a villa, but we might find her sunbathing on a rock in the arms of a pretty woman, like Lily de Gramont did in the early 1920s when she visited Romaine.

Lily wrote Natalie Barney that she liked looking at Romaine’s legs.

Who didn’t? (Laughs.) Natalie was encouraging a love affair between them.

She’d call it a corps à corps.

She took that letter for evidence that they’d gotten together.

Do you think they ever were lovers?

I can’t say. Not yet, anyway. But new information about Romaine is turning up all the time. I’ve made so many new discoveries since last year, and a whole new Romaine has emerged. We never knew her. This is a person who has been misrepresented in biography and in art history. She has been presented as a misanthrope, a recluse and somebody incapable of really intimate relationships. None of it is true.

As we can see, looking over there on that rock by the sea, with Lily edging closer!

Romaine knew Lily long before she met Natalie Barney in October 1916. They were friends. Lily sat in Romaine’s box at the opera. They’d known one another for a decade at least. Then, in 1918, their lives took a new turn. Romaine and Natalie had fallen in love, but Natalie was also still very much in love with Lily. The situation came to a flash point. Natalie and Lily married in secret. Romaine had a decision to make.

Did Romaine ever consider walking away from Natalie?

No, there was no question in Romaine’s mind that Natalie was the love of her life. Natalie wrote to Lily defiantly that she alone would decide whether to leave Romaine, and she never did. They were kindred spirits. They felt they were both “double beings.” Romaine was Natalie’s “Angel,” in the sense of an ideal being who possesses masculine and feminine qualities in equal measure. So the issue was really how to build a life that would suit all three women. By the time Lily visited Romaine on Capri, they had been organizing their lives around one another without incident for nearly a decade. They were a happy threesome.

The stable triangle that Natalie writes about in her 1926 roman à clef, Amants féminins ou la troisième, contrasting the unstable, destructive love triangle she gets involved in. She never showed the book to anyone, because Lily and Romaine were the keys.

And Romaine was intensely private. If Lily was the stable, organizing principle that held the system together, and Natalie was the nurturing unconditional love, Romaine was the protector. She didn’t want them being talked about. She hated gossip and she wasn’t going to open herself up to it. My book goes into this in detail.

It’s to be published next spring in 2015, right?

Yes. Meanwhile, I’m helping other biographers deal with the difficulties in writing about GLBT subjects, especially historical ones like Romaine who veiled their own family lives—domestically and emotionally. If they recorded them at all.

Which of course were not recorded by their contemporaries, either.

Right. I’ll take part in a panel discussion about that at the BIO International Conference in Boston on May 17^th. Anyway, how did you spend your birthday?

Let’s see. What have I been up to? (Rummages through papers on desk.)

No good, I see. (Laughs.)

You gave me your birth details, and I took the liberty of consulting an astrologer to compare your chart with Romaine’s. Only we don’t have the time of birth for Romaine.

That’s something I’d really like to hunt down. Anybody who can help will be doing me a huge favor.

Jo Cooke, the British astrologer I contacted, used a complex method to estimate Romaine’s birth time as 4:34 in the morning. So we’ll have to go with that. Jo is a journalist who overcame her skepticism and trained up in astrology. She has worked pretty extensively with groups of artistic people linked in complex relationships, like in the Bloomsbury group. That matches up pretty well with the complexity in Romaine’s life.

I have to admit, I know very little about astrology. But this is intriguing, partly because I have had to use intuition all along to investigate Romaine’s life. Any insight is welcome. So tell me what you came up with. Would Romaine and I get along?

She seems to think the two of you share some important characteristics, based on your astrology. Tell me if any of this rings a bell.

Okay.

You and Romaine share a reluctance to reveal much about the origins of your creative drive. How did you find out what drove and inspired Romaine?

That’s uncanny, and it’s true. How did I discover Romaine’s aesthetics? I found out by reasoning backwards. Her friendship with Gertrude Stein is well documented. In the mid 1930s they spent time together in New York, when Gertrude was in America promoting a best seller. The two women had always disagreed about Cubism in general and Picasso in particular, whose work Stein championed and Brooks disdained, thinking he was wasting his talent. So art theory was an ongoing conversation between them. Romaine wrote a letter to Natalie describing everything she hated about Gertrude’s aesthetics, listing the principles of Stein’s that she disagreed with. It was a scathing critique, and it even contained racial slurs. So this was a passionate outpouring of Romaine’s feelings and philosophy. By learning what she rejected, I was able to ascertain her positive values. From there, it was a matter of tracking her development by connecting dots in her biography where I could find them.

Lily de Gramont wrote a short, intimate and insightful introduction to one of Romaine’s exhibitions. That essay made it sound like everyone knew Brooks was influenced by Whistler.

Romaine Brooks was highly esteemed and much better known in her own day than she is today. As for Whistler, it’s true. She studied his work in London in 1903-4 and when you put Whistlers alongside Brookses, you can see the affinities. You can see what Romaine was aiming for, and in some cases even surpassed. She was the only woman working in the era with the audacity to produce big portraits of culturally significant subjects that could hold up against Whistlers and Sargents. These were huge canvases. Difficult to paint under any circumstances. Much harder to control such vast surfaces at the highest quality standards she held herself to. Romaine Brooks was a perfectionist.

Your charts show compatibility. Like for instance, you can both be trusted with secrets, and neither of you is shocked by taboos.

Otherwise, how could I have lasted this long with Romaine Brooks? (Laughs.)

And there are complimentary differences. Romaine, like Lily, had the assertiveness and relentless drive of her type of Taurean, which is pretty rampant. I mean look at all those planets and things she has in Taurus. The sun, the ascendant, Venus and Mars, Pluto and even something called the true node. Whereas your type is more cautious, more apt to take measured steps. What do you make of that?

Pretty accurate. Ok, I’m now more interested in astrology than I was before. She’s got three planets right next door in Aries. Mercury, Chiron and Neptune. Obviously there’s an intensity suggested there that is totally Romaine.

So how did you interpret Romaine’s volatility?

With caution! I see here that Jo Cooke describes Romaine as an extremely loyal person who could wither you with a glance if you crossed her, if not destroy you in outrage. This is totally on the mark. Perhaps it takes somebody like me to patiently build the case that has never been made before, which is that most of Romaine’s outbursts were her way of blowing off steam under extreme pressure. I looked carefully for signs of that pressure, and I found them. So yes, Romaine could be quite rude, and Natalie was the first to warn people of that.

Lily just took her in stride.

Of course. Look, Lily’s got almost as many planets in Taurus and Aries herself. Jo points out how perfect they both were for Natalie, being so grounded and comfortable being alone with themselves, which is so appealing to a Scorpio. And of course you need that independence when you’re shuttling between two women. Conversely, for Romaine, with Venus and Mars so close together in the same house, Natalie was the perfect partner for somebody whose sex drive was unquenchable. (Points to notes from meeting with Jo Cooke.) What does that say?

“You would be crazy to turn down a night with Romaine Brooks.”

That’s so interesting, because Romaine never wrote about their sex life. She wrote about their family life—what gifts to give Romaine’s nieces and nephews, how to manage their joint Swiss bank account, when to spend time at the house they built together near St. Tropez. Her way of indicating how close she felt to Natalie was telling us they wound their watches together sitting on a park bench.

Do you think Romaine was interested in astrology?

We know she believed in spirits. She sketched angels, devils and spirit worlds from childhood. It’s safe to say she had mystical experiences. She’d been steeped in the occult from birth by her mother, who fashionably indulged in all the pseudo sciences of the era and even had a live-in psychic after the death of Romaine’s brother. Romaine grew up in a house with séances, spiritualists, table lifting, esoteric magazine subscriptions, obsession with Houdini, you name it.

Her mother took a young lover who killed himself after she rejected him, and much time was spent with a medium trying to contact this guy in the beyond to get his forgiveness. Romaine’s mother and brother died within a year of one another, and as much of a realist as Romaine was, she felt haunted by them for the rest of her life.

Menaced. Which triggered her fears that she had inherited their mental illness.

Yes. So we can see acceptance that her life was affected by esoteric factors beyond her understanding.

Did she take as active an interest in astrology or the Tarot as Natalie or Lily? Don’t know. We do know that none of these women was a Freudian, even though they had friends who had been analyzed by Freud. They all went against the grain in that regard. Freudianism was the predominant psychological system of their day, and while Romaine acknowledges an understanding of “the subconscious,” there’s no evidence that she felt Freud’s philosophy or experiments adequately explained the human condition, let alone people’s behavior. It’s hard for us to understand today how radical this was, rejecting Freudian psychology, but it was. Romaine saw herself as a martyr, and it’s definitely true that her artistic reputation was sacrificed for her open, unapologetic Sapphism.

The classical term for lesbianism.

Half pagans, half classicists: that was Natalie and Romaine.

No regrets and no surrender. That was Lily too. What else strikes you in this astrological profile?

Well, Romaine has been portrayed as severe, withdrawn and cold, even “reptilian,” according to the English art critic John Usher. She was severe. Rigorous, demanding people are not easy to live with, even if they only demand perfection of themselves. But Somerset Maugham called her “Romantic Romaine,” and I never knew why. I’m surprised to see clues in this chart. So for instance, the perfect birthday present for me, according to Jo, is some cool gadget like a MacBook Air.

Spot on.

But here, for Romaine, it says that the perfect birthday present to give Romaine is a bubble bath with tea lights, champagne and oysters, followed by sex all night. There’s a lot of warmth, a lot of emotion, a lot of sustained intimacy in that picture. It squares with Romaine’s demands that Natalie not squander her attention and resources on Dolly Wilde, for instance.

In their own home!

Exactly. Romaine kept her own Paris apartment and studio (by the way, it was in the same building as Laura Barney’s and just up the street from Lily’s house), but she expected Natalie to make a home for her when Romaine visited Paris. She liked hanging around having quiet chats in the kitchen with Berthe, the cook. She expected 24/7 access rights to Natalie’s bedroom. She needed romantic attention.

Natalie speaks! This YouTube excerpt may be the first time anyone alive has seen film footage of Natalie Barney interviewed at home about Mata Hari in a documentary produced by Philip Nugus. Many thanks to researcher Giulia Napoleone for tracking it down. And thanks to Jean Chalon for confirming that the location is 20, rue Jacob and that the speaker is Natalie Barney, looking just as he remembers her. In days to come, I hope to learn more about this film shoot and gather more footage.

Let’s give Romaine a new reputation for her 140^th birthday. Where do we start?

First, let’s give her general appreciation for her work and young viewers. Today’s art lovers are open to subject matter that shocked Romaine’s contemporaries. People no longer see her depictions of bold, strong women as taboo. Photography dominates portraiture today. Think of the work of Cindy Sherman, for instance. Why not bring back painted portraiture that’s equally arresting? What’s more, realism itself isn’t tainted any more. Since Hitler had declared abstract art to be “degenerate,” there was a backlash after World War II, when realism was rejected, tarred with the brush of fascism. In the second half of the 20^th century, you had to be an abstract painter to get critical acclaim. Meanwhile, the work of great realists was being forgotten or passed over. That’s over now. Realism is hip again. Finally, people will be interested to see that Romaine’s drawings predated Picasso by 50 years or more.

What?

Yes, critics wanted to bury Romaine in the 19th century with Symbolism, maybe because she sometimes dressed like Rimbaud and one of her girlfriends, Renée Vivien, is considered a great French Symbolist poet. Like Brooks, Vivien was an expatriate lesbian living in Paris, and a famous lover of Natalie Barney. So I guess people just thought it would be convenient to lump them all together. But Eduard McAvoy hailed Brooks as the first Surrealist. She was really in advance of much of the art she later disdained as unfulfilling abstraction. She had already digested those ideas and moved on.

So she’s getting a total makeover.

She’s very chic in France, you know. She’s seen as an innovator in black, white and grey, the palette that dominates so much modern design. Brooks is a byword of good taste. Critics accused Romaine’s work of coldness because of the limited palette. Today her paintings seem monumental.

Should we give her a coming out party?

Let’s stick to a major retrospective exhibition. In her own day, Romaine’s reluctance to come forward as a celebrity, like Balthus, worked against her. Today, this is pretty refreshing. We’re glutted with vapid celebrity. It’s great to have an enigma on our hands. Terrific to grapple again with some mystery.

Would she come to her own retrospective?

Oh yes, I think so. She would be proud. Woe to the curator who would have to paint the gallery and hang the show with her! And Romaine would hope they’d publish her memoirs alongside. She’d want Lily as her PR agent. But she’d arrive at the opening in a trouser suit of her own design, she’d be happy to give interviews and sign books, and Natalie would be greeting people and directing them toward the paintings. Lily would be explicating and Romaine would be holding her own, flirting, joking, telling anecdotes just like in the interview we finally unearthed at the Archives of American Art. Charming.

Who goes home with whom?

It’s May 1st. Natalie goes home with Romaine.

 

Cassandra Langer’s book, All or Nothing: Romaine Brooks (1874-1970) will be published in 2015 by University of Wisconsin Press.

Jo Cooke is a journalist and astrologer. Learn more at www.jocookeastrologer.com.