Wrapping up A Life in Ruins

Jun 30

Wrapping up A Life in Ruins

And Cueing Up A Night at the Amazon’s

It’s hard to believe that it’s only been a few short months since the world stopped and everybody took shelter in their homes.

If you’re like me, you haven’t really come out. Except to ride and walk the hills. And maybe get your haircut. I admit it.

We’ve lost friends, family members and loved ones. We’re struggling under increasingly heavy burdens. America has taken to the streets to protest police brutality and institutionalized racism that has crippled people of color for generations.

But Spring has always been a season of creative renewal. No pandemic can change that. And that’s what it’s been like in my house, too.

I built on a partnership with Berklee-trained composer, musician and audio producer Caleb Green. Caleb’s studio is in Harvard, Massachusetts. That’s, like, Road Warrior distance away. Stay-at-home orders meant stopping our plans to collaborate on an audiobook—until Caleb convinced me to build a recording studio of my own.

(Hint: I now worship the god Sweetwater.)

One frenzied month later, I’m recording the biography of Eva Palmer in the elevator shaft.

I can now truly say, like one cosmopolitan onlooker who came before me, that Eva is the only ancient Greek I ever knew.

The book details the flowering of arts and culture given to humanity by this American maverick who was almost lost to history. The story takes you from New York high society in the Golden Age to Belle Époque Paris, back in time to ancient Delphi and forward again to modern Greece between the Wars and across the ocean again to WW2 America, where she was part of a flourishing modern dance scene. There’s love and intrigue. There’s Sapphic poetry and Byzantine music. Above all, there’s the unfinished Megali Idea, or Great Idea, of Hellenism. And plus, there’s pan pipes.

Photo: unknown. Collection of Eleni Sikelianos.

Today, Caleb and I delivered EVA PALMER SIKELIANOS: A LIFE IN RUINS to Princeton Audio in the UK.

Look for it in about a month or so: say, the end of July, from Audible and wherever you get your podcasts and audiobooks. Here’s a sneak preview. I’ve chosen a section where Caleb’s original score really shines.

LISTEN TO A PREVIEW FROM THE UPCOMING AUDIOBOOK EVA PALMER SIKELIANOS: A LIFE IN RUINS BY ARTEMIS LEONTIS

What a wild and wonderful ride it’s been! Many thanks to the author, Artemis Leontis, for her strong support; to Romaine Brooks’s biographer Cassandra Langer, who also helped make this audiobook a reality; and to Peter Poulos at The Hellenic Initiative, bringing hope to families in need, which will distribute all proceeds from my artist royalty for emergency Covid relief in Greece. It’s a country devastated by the ravaging of the pandemic on tourism—an industry Eva Palmer had a crucial hand in developing , starting with her revival of the Delphic Festivals in 1927 and 1930.

Similar partnerships are springing up all over. Even in these tough times, we can’t deny the basic human need for joy and laughter, for lighting your creative spark, for lifting up the giants who inspire you as Nikkolas Smith is doing for the Black Lives Matter movement, and for nourishing the life of your mind. I love what the Alliance Francaise is doing together with Molière in the Park. Check out this review in The New York Times, “Where Trump Meets Tartuffe.”

The Fabulous French Five are virtually proving that great art never dies, only gets renewed, being seen through the lens of the lives we live today.

The same can be said for old languages. Reading A LIFE IN RUINS reminded me how much what I think about, and how I say it, is rooted in ancient Greek. A language I struggled to pronounce!

I wanted to know what my partner, Caleb Green, took away from our project as a musican.

“Well, how often does a jazz guitar player get to work with sounds and melodies this old?” Caleb said. “While composing the music for A LIFE IN RUINS, I had to really focus on the history, tradition, and culture of Byzantine music. Because it plays a huge role in this book.
In order to achieve an effective mood and timbre, I had to consider the microtonal vocal runs and the low droning vocal tones of traditional Byzantine chant.
So I started experimenting. First, to pay homage to the rich tradition of this music, I fleshed out a few Greek modal melodic ideas on instruments such as the lyre, harp, and panpipe that have been played throughout the ages in Eva Palmer’s adopted country. Then, I spent a lot of time listening to the Greek National Anthem, because it appears at a turning point in the life of Eva Palmer Sikelianos. I was also inspired by Eva’s own exploits in music.
As a nod to Eva’s development for a microtonal organ to be played with liturgical music, I used a church organ to simulate that low drone of traditional Greek orthodox chant.”

Caleb D. Green

how you can support our next project for charity

I’m excited to start work on our next project, “A Night at the Amazon’s” by Francesco Rapazzini. The hero is the notoriously sexy writer and arts patron Natalie Clifford Barney. She played a major role in A LIFE IN RUINS. So I’ll be among friends when reading all 32 dramatic roles in the comedy of manners set in Jazz Age Paris.

The story is perfect for those autumn evenings to come, when all our theaters and concert halls will still be shuttered. And there’s not a word of Greek!

In honor of Barney, Brooks, Palmer and all the LGBTQ+ pioneers born in the 19^th century who lit the way for us in the 20^th and 21^st, I’m donating proceeds from my royalty to The Stonewall National Museum and Archives in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. What with the Pulse nightclub shooting and the Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre, seems like Florida is the new Stonewall, the new Ground Zero, for LGBTQ+ young people.

I want to thank members of Natalie Barney’s family for their generous support of this new project. Their gifts helped get the project off the ground.

To help get this audiobook in your hands this September—and in the hands of listeners around the world–won’t you consider a donation to the Stonewall Museum to support the production?

DONATE HERE TO THE STONEWALL AUDIOBOOK PROJECT

Important: During checkout, make sure to check the box and write AUDIOBOOK to designate your gift to the audiobook project.

100% of donations received above the cost of producing the audiobook will be used for programming and education that benefit LGBTQ+ youth in America. Your gift (a new royalty stream for the organization) is one that will keep on giving. And your support means that future generations will never again forget the creative giants on whose shoulders we are all standing today.

Thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my καρδιά.

Interview with Melanie Hawthorne

Jun 11

Drifting Along with Pauline

Why Translator Melanie Hawthorne Launched the Renée Vivien Cocktail Hour

and what you can do to win free drinks

Poetry’s having a moment. Have you noticed? Here’s a piece in today’s New York Times to help you explore what everybody’s talking about—how a poem a day really can help us make sense of a battered world.

So anyway, June 2020 finds me staying at home and lying in perilously late: which is to say, closer than ever to Renée Vivien, who turns 143 today.

She was mobbed at her poetry readings, so she hired a man to stand in. Nobody noticed.

She was a privileged and gifted poet with refined sensibilities who might have epitomized the golden age she lived in, had she not suffered a horrific childhood or been a lesbian obsessed with death and decay. So maybe it’s no surprise that she saw the world through a darkening lens. She matched that darkness with stories and verse of over-ripe sensuality and erotic power.

Take the Renée Vivien Pride Month Challenge

This month, in her honor, I’m offering a gift certificate to a lucky reader who explores Vivien’s work in a uniquely 21st century way: by hosting your own cocktails & poetry party as part of Melanie Hawthorne’s new virtual salon. It’s a limited series starring new craft cocktail recipes, developed by an actual mixologist, and the sexy poet who inspired them.

Here’s how to win the prize:

(1) Visit The Renee Vivien Cocktail Hour in June and leave a comment for your gracious host.

(2) Follow the recipe to build your own Sun Goddess cocktails, pair them with friends and Vivien’s verse, and report back here (leave a comment) with compelling evidence of your Vivienesque exploits.

(3) The first visitor to complete the challenge fully and creatively wins next month’s party on me. Send me your bar tab/grocery bill and I’ll reimburse you for your Renée Vivien Cocktail Hour in July.

Meanwhile

Since it’s l’heure des mains vides, that empty-handed time of day the French reserve for legitimately not doing anything, why not pour a glass and settle in for a ten-minute read?

I want you to meet the Renée Vivien scholar who came up with this idea.

First: Renée Vivien? Remember her?

She was the rock star of French poetry and giving girls a hard time, which was how she got the award for Sapho 1900. Of all the talented women in Natalie Barney’s social circle, Renée Vivien died the youngest. Cancelled by failed suicide, finished off by drugged-out anorexia. She never lived to see the 1918 influenza epidemic. But her last years went dark out of self-imposed isolation. Which stamped itself on her poetry, too.

Weird, because most people who met her were struck first by a child-like quality that never seemed to desert Vivien, born Pauline Tarn. The first time Natalie Barney heard her recite one of her poems, it was the un-self-conscious clarity that seduced her. Natalie took it for purity. It was only later that Pauline’s “longing to be dead” (that apt description of Diana Souhami’s!) started to wear down even the Pope of Lesbos. People remembered Vivien’s kindnesses, even many years later. She never just gave you one of her must-have books to read, someone recalled. Instead, she’d always hide it under a nosegay. And maybe then she’d carry you to bed up four flights of stairs. But good luck sharing her orgasm. Bit of a wild card.

One of her many lovers, the American painter Romaine Brooks, remembered drifting along with Renee Vivien, not sure how to end it.

Things have come to a pretty pass
Our romance is growing flat
Cause you like this and the other
While I go for this and that
Goodness knows what the end will be
Let’s call the whole thing off

–The Gershwin brothers

He was mad for Renée, but only after she was dead: Salomon Reinach

After she died, Salomon Reinach (who was obsessed with Vivien’s tragic genius) was compiling the poet’s archive. When he interviewed Romaine, she confirmed that she’d been given Renée’s books, but she couldn’t remember where she put them.

When you were with Renée–between the English accent, the French poetry, the American back story, the Greek translating, the cross dressing, the endless spending, plus all the sex and drugs–when did anyone have time to read?

So that was Pauline. A poet who changed her name so she could be born again for one more chance to end it all.

Ever since, I’ve been catching up on my reading. Like from back in 2017.

In a paper for the journal Dix-Neuf, Melanie Hawthorne (professor of French literature and Humanities at Texas A&M University) reported a fascinating travel experience she had while doing research.

So this research trip Melanie Hawthorne took to Nice on the French Riviera (“Brighton but with a better climate”)? It was more of an excursion to learn what had doomed a certain pair of star crossed artist-lovers.

Hawthorne found her answer in the place that inspired them both. Turns out, you don’t need to whip out the star chart to learn why Brooks and Vivien had serious problems with “profound incompatibilities.” Everything you need to know, it’s right there in their neighborhoods.

If you never want to be haunted by a dead poet, don’t end up in a graveyard in Nice

The women had lived only blocks apart, yet in two totally different parts of the port city that grew up on the Bay of Angels. Where they settled (Brooks is buried there beneath her brother), and how each responded to her environment, speaks volumes about these mismatched LGBTQ+ pioneers.

By drifting through Nice, haunting the place in the way both women might have done more than a hundred years ago, Melanie Hawthorne started mind-mapping their personalities, their Muses and their creative spirits.

Melanie’s original goal was getting “the Humanities out of the ivory tower and into the street.” Well, Professor Hawthorne got more than she’d bargained for. A bout of food poisoning turned into an unexpected gift. Melanie spent the trip suffering from the same affliction as Renée Vivien: aversion to food. And to bad smells, which pretty much ruled out everybody in Nice. Which turned her into a loner like Romaine Brooks.

She was literally grounded in the sights, smells, sounds, places and routines of Nice as the poet and the painter would have experienced them. Armed with these strange new personality filters, which was almost like a channeling of her research subjects, Melanie gained new and especially valuable insights into Vivien’s poetry.

At one point, standing on the beach at dusk, she sensed the poet’s presence there. Melanie looked down to see the image of a howling wolf on a swizzle stick that had washed up on the shore. Weird, because she was working on a new translation of Vivien’s story about a woman who chooses to drown with her pet wolf in a shipwreck, rather than abandon the wolf for a lifeboat….

That ghostly experience was one of the catalysts for the mixology project that launches today on Melanie Hawthorne’s web site. Who knows, it may soon be bigger than Sangria and Secrets with Drag Queens from Airbnb!

Which I can recommend–at least for the excellent sangria.

And that story about the wolf who fatally seduced her well-heeled keeper? Melanie Hawthorne has undertaken a revised translation of that story and other works, to be simultaneously republished in French. Look for it this fall from Liverpool University Press, publisher of Hawthorne’s recent book about how women in the U.S. and Europe had no claim to citizenship until well into the 20th century. It’s one of those basic facts about the patriarchial societies we live in that you understand to be true, but really just can’t fathom–like the fact that women did not have the right to vote in this country until 1920. It took a gaggle of rich lesbians, of course, to change the Modern world. Or at least make a start. Barney, Brooks and Vivien provide the case studies. You can buy Melanie Hawthorne’s book here.

Suzanne Stroh: So Melanie, great article in Dix-Neuf called “Two Nice Girls.” First I inhabited Romaine Brooks’s favorite restaurant in augmented reality, because I think I’ve actually dined there once IRL. Your service was better. Then I felt virtually transported into Pauline’s bedroom above the orange grove. That was a trip.

Melanie Hawthorne: Glad you enjoyed it.

You’re launching a new kind of literary salon. What’s your vision for the Renée Vivien Cocktail Club?

“A l’heure des mains vides” (at the hour of empty hands) is a play on the title of one of Vivien’s poetry books, A l’heure des mains jointes (at the hour of joined hands), originally published in 1905. But what if, instead of being able to join hands (because we are all confined to our homes by the Covid virus, for example), you have empty hands? Then grab a glass, fix yourself a drink, and take a moment to read a poem (alone or with others). Each month will feature a different drink and a thematically related poem (in the original French but with a rather literal English translation for the linguistically challenged) along with a few comments on what is notable about the poem.

I love the word excursion, don’t you? As in, “deviation from a regular pattern, path or level of operation.” If we can ever travel again, isn’t that what it should really be about? Getting deviated?

And to study that is called psychogeography.

I’ll leave the pronunciation to you.

It reminds us that understanding comes from engaging directly with the world around us and bringing an active mind to bear on experience. If, as Rebecca Solnit suggests, to walk is to think, and if to think is to be, then ambulo ergo sum.

Drink in hand.

Of course.

Melanie, thanks again for stopping by. See you on the other side.

Click here for more at the Renée Vivien Cocktail Hour

COMING SOON: HOW YOU CAN MAKE A DONATION DURING PRIDE MONTH AND BECOME A PROUD SPONSOR OF MY QUEER NEW AUDIOBOOK, A NIGHT AT THE AMAZON’S!

(Hint: Wherein Renée Vivien comes back from the dead on Halloween to haunt Natalie Barney’s birthday party in 1926.)

Many happy returns of June 11, Pauline. I hope you like the audiobook I’ve just read for Princeton University Press about you and Eva Palmer gallivanting around naked in the Maine Woods and at Bryn Mawr. You’ll be able to buy it on Amazon, Audible and iTunes at the end of July. And if you haven’t yet read Artemis Leontis’s biography about the only ancient Greek you ever knew: well, it’s not as if you can’t find the time.

The Socially Distanced Romaine Brooks

May 1

May 1, 2020

Romaine Brooks by Forsyth Harmon

The Heroic Feminine

and other characters from “A Night at the Amazon’s”

Romaine Brooks Turns 146

Romaine Brooks was a voracious reader. One hundred years ago today in 1920, when she would have been waiting impatiently for Natalie Barney to turn up with birthday cake so they could celibrate, I imagine Romaine Brooks alone at home with a book and a steaming cup of coffee so strong that the spoon stood up on its own. She was contented to spend days at a time like this—as long as it was her choice. When solitude was imposed upon her, not so content.

Sound familiar?

The global influenza pandemic of 1918 had been over less than a year in May of 1920. During the second wave, the lethality was such that one night, four perfectly healthy ladies gathered to play bridge and said their goodybes before midnight. By dawn the next day, three of them were dead. That pandemic came in three waves and infected a quarter of all humans on Earth and killed more people than World War I, soldiers and civilians combined.

Ida nursing the war wounded

While waiting for Romaine’s birthday myself, I leafed through Cassandra Langer’s 2015 biography. I was reminded that Romaine hadn’t just survived the devastation; she had been determined to record it. And fully engage with its horrors. Romaine Brooks, a Philadelphian born in Italy, never considered leaving Europe during the war. She volunteered for ambulance duty on the front lines in France and used her wealth and influence to set up a fund for wounded soldiers. She pushed through as an artist to produce the masterpiece above. It’s a portrait of the woman who was her lover when the war began: Ida Rubenstein, the Lady Gaga of her day. Rubinstein had name recognition and star power. Everyone in Paris knew her on sight. Romaine’s portrait made her a Madonna for the relief effort.

It is hard to envision Ida Rubenstein, patron spirit of the Ballets Russes’ most erotic productions, nursing the war wounded. Before the Great War, her transparent costumes, outrageous movements, and passionate love affairs had scandalized many people in Paris, but now even she readily submerged her flamboyant personality for the sake of the country she loved. Ida responded by turning the Hôtel Carlton in Montmartre into a hospital for wounded Allied troops. Astonishingly, she transformed almost overnight from extravagent fashion plate to competent nurse, caring for the wounded herself.

Art didn’t play second fiddle to politics for people under extreme stress, the way it does today. Art had essential nutrients. Everybody knew that. You couldn’t just stop being an artist, even with the world falling apart. Art and service went hand in hand for Ida and Romaine.

Rubinstein also used her celebrity status to raise money for the war effort by giving public recitals of Montesquiou’s wartime poetry from his Offrandes blessées.

—from Romaine Brooks: A Life by Cassandra Langer

Langer comments that as an artist, Romaine considered it her duty to keep making art under duress, “confronting the enormous taks of depicting her feelings about the war.” Ida Rubenstein, dressed as a nurse towering over the ruins of Ypres in The Cross of France, sums up Romaine’s observation that a hundred years ago, our broken world yearned for the heroic feminine. Today, it still does. Sitting with her coffee in 2020, Romaine might be pleased to read this Forbes article by Stephanie Denning, “Why Have Women Leaders Excelled at Fighting the Coronovirus?”

Natalie: She brightened things up

Eventually, of course, Natalie Barney would turn up to brighten the pensive mood.

Natalie Barney: another rare American who’d stayed in Paris during the war because she couldn’t bear to be parted from her love, Lily de Gramont—a good friend of Romaine’s—who lived up the street. She’d just had a birthday last week.

Lily: She lived up the street

Now Romaine and Natalie were also in love. And somehow it was all working out between the three of them. And would for life. Plus, there was cake.

And somehow it was all working out

You can taste the flavor of this post-pandemic mélange and others in a fun book that’s great to read under a stay at home order, The Art of the Affair by Catherine Lacey, Illustrated by Forsyth Harmon. The portraits you see here are all available for sale from Harmon’s site. Don’t you think they’ll make fabulous birthday presents for the iconoclasts in your life?

Their sort of book

Back on you, Mrs. Brooks, I brought you something completely different for your birthday this time. Different from this afternooon’s impending delights (and the muguet you’ll be expecting later today from Lily). I spoke into a modern sort of gramophone horn and recorded scenes from the cast of characters in your life, all gathered for a birthday party at Miss Barney’s. Pierre Loüys once called her “the young lady of the future society,” which is why you won’t attend this party for six more years. But in 1926, you’ll be walking through this door (listen below) to greet your posse of famous feminines—heroics and eccentrics and free spirits alike. Some of them even men!

Click here to listen to another installment of “a Night at the Amazon’s” Audiobook on soundcloud

In the coming weeks, I’ll be looking for a patron to fund production so people can finally see you on the stage of their imaginations through something magical we’ve got these days, called Audible. I think you’d like it. And I’ll give my artist’s royalty to charity for doing good in the pandemic. Which goes without saying, I can hear you say.

Many happy returns of May Day to you, Mrs. Brooks. 146 looks good on you, even with extreme social distancing. That’s me tipping my hat on the bicycle path in the Bois.

Modern, Then and Whenever

Apr 23

April 23, 2020

Eliza Jackson

Her Second Pandemic

The Red DUchess COMES OUT AGAIN at 145

Elizabeth de Gramont turns 145 today, a bit late for her second pandemic but just in time for the e-launch of No Modernism Without Lesbians by Diana Souhami. This book brings us closer to a few women we almost forgot about: like British arts patron Bryher (a huge benefactor to Modern artists of color) and American painter Florine Stettheimer, part of the Harlem Renaissance (who will soon be getting a do-over by her incredible biographer, Barbara Bloemink). It’s good to know there’s more to come, especially about Eva Palmer Sikelianos. And Romaine Brooks. Every book lover under a stay at home order needs something to look forward to. I’m sad to read, on Diana Souhami’s website, that this book is to be the last of that ilk. Di’s Dykes are taking a bow.

“Modern, then and whenever” is what Souhami calls the contribution of Gertrude Stein. The same can be said of Lily de Gramont, whose avant-garde haircut inspired Alice Toklas to take the kitchen shears to Gertrude, predating COVID fashion by nearly a century. To return the compliment, Lily decided to translate Stein’s work for French readers. Et voilà. More proof that there’s no modernism without fearless lesbians. And that translators get the short end of the stick. It may have taken all afternoon for Alice to make Gertrude look like a Roman emperor. But we still don’t know how long Lily labored over Four Saints in Three Acts. Which never did get published.

Speaking of how hard it is to still find books in translation, there’s a wonderful and funny novel about Gertrude, Alice, Lily and Everybody Who Was Anybody of 1926. Hardly anybody knows about it: A Night at the Amazon’s by Francesco Rapazzini. That’s the book that launched this blog site. Sally Hamilton and I have translated it into English. It’s got everything you want in a comedy of manners:

witty banter
Encore EJ
pretty girls
sexy boys
a drunken cook
a cheeky butler who forgot to wash
Oscar Wilde’s niece who’s better than Oscar
social climbers you love to hate
a 1920s Bugatti roadster
romantic plots that run all the red lights
a famous chocolate cake fight
unveiling of a priceless painting
a bad wig
an erotic poetry recital
a new maid who’s just learned that her society boss is a rampant lesbian
Brava EJ
diamonds and tiaras (plural)
35 different accents
a polar bear rug in the bedroom
jealous spats
roasting the dead
truth in the garden
love in the loo
and a big reveal

In short: Everybody Being Geniuses Together. Will it all come to tears? Dear listener, this is the year to find out!

Last year (or so) had a few entries of note in Madame’s diary. In August (of 2018 but who’s counting), this letter to the editor of The New York Times was published, to the credit of Elisabeth de Gramont. Perhaps it was a tempest in a teapot when a biographer tried to hide the true identity of Proust’s model for the young Oriane de Guermantes in his magnum opus… but it didn’t seem like a TIATP to me, nor to Francesco Rapazzini, whose biography of EdG has still never appeared in English to set the record straight. Francesco always has interesting ideas and things to say. Have you read his dreamy, bittersweet third novel in French, Un été Vénitien? It has won prizes and won over influential critics. I tried to win a 2020 PEN/Heim Translation grant for translating it, but both grants for French translations went to colonial works of great merit. It’s a pity because now more than ever, Venice under COVID cries out for a novel like this by an actual Venetian about the city he loved as a boy and came of age in as a young man. So let’s hope that English publication of Venetian Summer is in our near futures.

Then, in July, there was this interesting conversation at the Proust Society with Cassandra Langer, the biographer of Romaine Brooks. Lily wouldn’t miss it for the world. It was about Proust’s lesbians, a subject she knew everything about on both counts. The YouTube recording is an hour long, and it’s an hour well spent.

It’s hard to know what Lily thought about Eva Palmer, the gate-crashing artist and performer whom Lily’s eternal mate Natalie Barney described in print as “the mother of my desire.” Eva’s monumental biography has now been published by Artemis Leontis, and last September at Brown University, the conversation between the author and Eva’s great grandaughter, the poet and memoirist Eleni Sikelianos, would have been a must-do on Lily’s calendar. If anyone has a transcript—or better, video—from that gathering, please let me know and I will post it here.

Well, look at the time. It’s midnight in Virginia, not April in Paris. Like everybody in lockdown all over the world, I’m wondering what tomorrow will bring. Today in your honor, Madame, I’m determined to do something really modern, really cutting edge. Just for fun, just for the sheer audacity of accomplishing something creative during a plague year, I want to bring out The Amazon’s as the first Audible audiobook to predate its translation as an English publication!

Here’s a snippet. Have fun listening. It’s only three minutes long.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE AUDIOBOOK TRAILER ON SOUNDCLOUD.

Dear reader of mine, or similar, won’t you follow along on the journey—or help us get the book published and produced as an audiobook? You can hear more audiobook demos I’m producing with Caleb Green by searching for me on ACX, the Audible marketplace. Caleb is a new alumnus of Boston’s Berklee College of Music & brilliant on sound design, scoring and audio production. We are absolutely looking for a patron to fund production of The Amazon’s. If you like, I can furnish a budget. A long demo is available, conforming to Audible’s requirements. I pledge my royalty to a charity of your choice. So if you are a bright light of artistic philanthropy in this hour of darkness, and if you long to be able to listen to A Night at the Amazon’s on Audible, shoot me an email: Suzanne@suzannestroh.com. And check out my portfolio at SuzanneStroh.com, my professional site.

Oh! I nearly forgot my curtsy. Your laughter, Madame, is my string of pearls. Many happy returns.

chez moi

Romaine Brooks 145, Stonewall 50

May 1

The biographer somewhere east of Los Angeles

“what a dump”

More conversation with Cassandra Langer

Born today in 1874, painter Romaine Brooks celebrated her birthday every year with writer Natalie Barney, her partner for life after they met in 1916. In search of evidence of their secret adventures, my traveling companion is Brooks biographer, Dr. Cassandra Langer.

Cassandra Langer: In 1929, Natalie and Romaine were living in Paris.

Suzanne Stroh: Check. Amusing themselves with the young ladies of the Left Bank. Then suddenly the lights went out. The party was over.

They hightailed it to New York in November after the Crash. Neither had been hit very hard by the stock market collapse.

Financial conservatives. Social liberals.

But Romaine’s family had suffered a major business failure in mining.

Romaine had to find out whether the crisis had been caused by her alcoholic cousin, Waddie Waterman, who was managing the family business.

That’s right. She left Natalie in New York and traveled alone to Philadelphia to investigate. She did not find the decorating up to her standards.

Why do you think Natalie stayed behind?

Well, this is only the 50^thanniversary of Stonewall. We forget that gay lovers were not always well received in family circles. Especially in times of crisis.

Not even if they held joint bank accounts.

And besides, Natalie was very judgmental about financial irresponsibility, not to mention drunkenness.

Her father Albert had been a heavy drinker. And homophobic.

Yeah, we know that because he bought up all the copies of Natalie’s Sapphic love poems and had them destroyed.

So I get it: Romaine might not have wanted Natalie going postal on cousin Waddie. And Natalie had family problems of her own. Let’s get into Alice.

Alice by Alice

That’s right, Natalie’s mother was spending money like water out in Hollywood. Natalie and her sister, Laura Barney, were afraid Alice would run through her trust fund. Laura charged Natalie with crossing the Atlantic, then crossing a continent, to rein in their mother’s spending. No easy task.

Alice Pike Barney: Washington socialite, Whistler’s acolyte.

Romaine considered her an amateur artist.

If only she’d kept her opinions to herself!

Laura Barney almost stopped speaking to Romaine over an unkind remark she made about Alice’s talent.

She threw him over

Laura took it as a slight, but Alice would have probably laughed it off. Now there was a force of nature. The famous African explorer Stanley named Lady Alice Falls after her, remember? Before she broke his heart. At the end of 1929, Alice was an impresario producing stage plays.

With plots derivative of Oscar Wilde.

Big on witty banter and arch aperçus. It went without saying that Alice would do anything to promote herself. She started that bohemian theater company in Los Angeles, passing off Natalie’s plays as her own.

Which around Christmastime in 1929, Natalie was soon to discover….

…because Natalie and Romaine had plans for Los Angeles after Christmas!

Well, we don’t know how they spent Christmas. We do know that Alice Barney was planning a big party in January to show off the celebrity painter, “Mrs. Brooks.” Alice had invited every big name in Hollywood. And I doubt that Romaine had any inkling of what was in store, either, when they boarded a train in New York that winter day, bound for Los Angeles. We think it was the first trip across the country for both women.

So, I’ve always wondered what Romaine sketched on that trip. We found out from her 1967 interview that, contrary to what we thought we knew, Romaine stated that she drew every day. Very little of that work has survived.

We know she carried notebooks with her, where she jotted down her thoughts and made quick sketches. It’s hard to imagine that in half a century of life together, Romaine never made a single nude study of Natalie.

What? Romaine Brooks painted giant portraits of celebrities in the nude! You’ve never seen a single drawing of Natalie?

Nobody’s seen one. That we know of, anyway…. I can’t imagine that Romaine would not have made sketches along the way from New York to Los Angeles. The rail journey alone would have taken about five days.

Thanks to the American Enterprise Institute, whatever it is that they really do, I’ve seen maps from 1932 published in The Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States showing that people could cross the country in as little as three and a half days. I bet the girls took it at a slower pace. Natalie loved boasting that she was born in the age of horse-drawn carriages.

There were so many new and strange sights to be seen.

I always wondered if they made the trip in a Barney Smith car, but on a recent visit to Dayton, Ohio, I learned that the cars were never used on cross-country routes. And they had long been retired from general use by 1929. They could have ridden in a private car.

Which is probably likely. But I think what would have interested Romaine from the outset was the American Streamliner engine. There wasn’t anything like it in Europe.

What were her impressions as she looked out the window or changed trains? She was seeing horses, people…

changing landscapes…

And Natalie.

Dallying, as usual. Pfaffing about.

Enjoying herself. The only landscape she was ever interested in exploring was herself.

[LOL]

But you and I were real continental explorers! So intrepid! We tried to find them in Jerome, Arizona. I forget, why did we go there?

In 1929, there was one American mining operation that was going strong. Somewhere between Phoenix and Sedona–

It was west of Sedona.

If you say so.

I do. If we left the driving up to you….

God forbid you should let anyone else drive the horseless carriage!

[LOL]

As you were saying.

So basically, out there in the Midwest…

Or, as it’s commonly known, The Southwest…

…in the middle of nowhere, this Jerome mine was producing more copper than anywhere else in the world. And we found out that the whole operation was funded by high hats from the east coast.

Mostly from Pennsylvania! Aha!

Pennsylvania mining industry—Isaac Waterman Jr.—Romaine Brooks!

So, only three degrees of separation from Rittenhouse Square to the Gold King Mine in Jerome, Arizona. Mysterious! Do we think the Watermans had an interest?

Well, we weren’t sure. So we went there to find out.

I rather wish we hadn’t.

What a dump. Romaine and Natalie would have stepped off the train to be welcomed by throngs of streetwalkers.

Like, hundreds of them. Their portraits are collected in the local museum.

Like a stage set erected inside a touristy shop selling t-shirts, tchotchkes and healing crystals.

Talk about bad energy! The womens history exhibit lionizes Jerome’s prostitutes for their industry and entrepreneurship. Then we learn how many of them were riddled with disease or beaten and left for dead on the job. Today, Jerome’s claim to fame is that it’s a ghost town. It makes you wonder if all the grumpy, unwelcoming shopkeepers we met aren’t the reincarnated spirits of working girls from days of yore.

“She was no Liane de Pougy!” Jerome’s local Madam and her posse back in the stagecoach days.

Please, no ouija boards. Romaine was traumatized enough without awakening the ghost hookers of Jerome. Her heiress mother, Ella Waterman, was a spiritualist who subscribed to Lucifer magazine and was a great séance holder. Romaine always steered clear of the occult. Whatever they knew about the history of Jerome, Natalie and Romaine would have sensed right away that they were out of their element.

We stood there imagining the looks on their faces.

We could almost see them on the hotel steps, checking the timetable for the earliest train out.

Have I mentioned that Jerome, Arizona was named for Downton Abbey?

No, it wasn’t. It was named for Jennie Jerome, the mother of Winston Churchill.

Exactly!

So do you think Romaine Brooks ever had a financial interest in that mine?

We haven’t found any record of that yet, but there was one fact that raised our eyebrows, remember? It seems like almost every engineer or senior manager came from Pittsburgh or companies with Philadelphia owners, and one of the exhibits explained that there were lots of silent partners backing many of the Arizona investors, who were trying to get a foothold in the state. So who knows?

Since we’re on the topic of the robber barons…. Romaine and Natalie had another life partner, Lily de Gramont, remember?

How could I forget her?

When you and I got to Jerome, we wondered if Lily could have been behind the whole visit. Lily was such a provocateur, such a harsh realist, so political. We could almost hear Lily daring Romaine to confront the source of her wealth in the exploitation of the mine workers.

The Girl in the Red Jacket by Romaine Brooks

The subject matter of women’s oppression always interested Romaine. One of your favorite Brooks paintings depicts a doleful sex worker undergoing one of the physical exams that were compulsory in Paris.

The Girl in the Red Jacket. In France, prostitution was legal. In Jerome, just deadly.

Natalie, Romaine (and Laura, for that matter) were aligned in their opposition to patriarchy and misogyny. Only a few years earlier, Romaine had painted another masterpiece, Weeping Venus, based on Natalie’s poem on that subject. The history that might have confronted Romaine in Jerome would have angered her.

So whether Romaine would have gone to Jerome on a dare (or someplace like it–maybe the Borax mining operation in Death Valley, run by another muckety-muck); or went there seeking a better investment to pitch to Waddie; or whether she would have been managing an existing stake in the operation…we could imagine them making that stop on the journey.

Which would have made everyone around them deeply uncomfortable.

It’s another reason why there’s more work to be done to unearth Romaine’s and Natalie’s accounts and ledgers. It would tell us so much about two pioneers of gay American life before Stonewall.

It just goes to show, gay icons like Romaine Brooks have left us the legacy of their artworks. But the details of their lives remain mysterious. I don’t know if Romaine and Natalie made that stop in Arizona, but I do know that both women were out and proud lesbian feminists, with Natalie in the vanguard of what we see today being celebrated by Stonewall 50.

Happy birthday Romaine and happy birthday Gay Pride! Many happy returns!

PS, don’t ever throw a surprise party for Romaine Brooks in Hollywood! That’s probably not going to go over very well.

We saw Garbo’s name on the guest list.

I wonder if there’s a lost drawing of Greta Garbo out there somewhere. Let me know if you find it.

Scorpions Club 2018

Oct 31

It’s All Hallows Eve around the world, and in Paris the graveyards must be buzzing with activity among members of the Scorpions Club, founded by Franco-American author and saloniste Natalie Clifford Barney, born this day in 1876, to honor a group of intimates who all shared her birthday.

20, rue Jacob (c) Eliza Jackson

Every year she threw a party in Paris at her famous address, 20 rue Jacob, to celebrate. Everybody was always there.

You can read about the spicy goings-on in Francesco’s Rapazzini’s delightful novel about the 1926 party, Un soir chez l’Amazone. I’ve made a translation with Sally Hamilton. This year, we added drawings by Eliza Jackson, befitting the tragicomedy. We’re seeking publication….

Here in Virginia under the Scorpions moon, my daughter is out walking the streets wearing black lipstick, channeling Wednesday Addams. I’m not sure Miss Barney would approve. Or would she?

Natalie in the mirror by (c) Eliza Jackson

I’m at home, dashing to post this before midnight on Mademoiselle’s 142^ndbirthday. My dispatch is a little thin, and for that I apologize.

This year, 2018, marks the 100^thanniversary of the marriage contract signed in France by Barney and Élisabeth de Gramont. What an extraordinary document. You can read it here on James Conway’s Strange Flowers, such a good site.

Lily and Romaine looking askance by (c) Eliza Jackson

When Natalie turned 42 in 1918, she was just settling into a three-way marriage with Gramont (1875-1954) and American painter Romaine Brooks (1874-1970) that would last their whole lives long. Strange how what’s so old still seems so new, so cutting-edge.

A remarkable one-woman show starring Amanda Boxer as Natalie Barney played at the Arcola Theater in London earlier this year. The creators talk about the project here on YouTube. The performances I saw were well-attended, and I hope this bodes well for more stories about NCB. The play, The Blue Hour of Natalie Barney by Frances Bingham, is a great read. Buy it here from the publisher, Pottery Press. They do extraordinarily beautiful, handmade books.

Installing “The Art of Romaine Brooks” at the Polk (c) Courtesy LAL Daily

The Smithsonian’s beautiful 2016 exhibition of works by Romaine Brooks has begun to travel. In Florida, “The Art of Romaine Brooks” runs through December 9 at the Polk Museum of Art. Dr. Cassandra Langer, Brooks’s 21^stcentury biographer, gave a talk there in October. “I was impressed by the intelligent questions coming from a mixed-age audience of people from different backgrounds,” she said. “People were interested in the everyday lives of all three women and their wide circles of artists, writers and musicians.” Here’s an LAL Daily article reporting on the unpacking. If you have photos of the installation, please email them and I’ll include them here.

Cassandra Langer and I are having fun working on a book of humor about the woman Robert de Montesquiou called “The Thief of Souls.”

Speaking of Montesquiou is speaking of Proust, and I see that Dr. Langer is to be giving a Proust Society talk in at the New York Public Library on March 14, 2019. Save the date. The subject is Proust’s lesbians, such an interesting topic, especially when approached from the lens of the Barney household! Lily de Gramont was Montesquiou’s cousin and one of Marcel Proust’s best friends (along with Lily’s childhood friend, Lucy Delarue-Mardrus, another one of NCB’s lovers). And yet when Natalie Barney met Marcel Proust on the pretext of his wanting to quiz her on lesbians, she came away convinced he didn’t know the first thing about the subject. (By the way, the YouTube video is misdated. The interview took place during the summer of 1967, not 1966.)

2019 will also be the year that their bohemian friend Eva Palmer Sikelianos (1874-1952) gets her first English biography. The author is University of Michigan Professor Artemis Leontis. Eva Palmer’s life story is fascinating, from New York Society to classical studies at turn-of-the-(20th)-century Bryn Mawr, to archaeology and theater, music and dance, to wartime and postwar (WW2) politics. Her lost letters, removed in 1969 from Natalie Barney’s house and discovered in Athens by Professor Leontis, are a treasure trove. Get ready to discover a great American woman, almost lost to history, who made major accomplishments in many fields. For example, did you know that without Palmer, who dedicated her life to the revival of ancient Greek culture, we wouldn’t have the excavation at Delphi, one of the most extraordinary sites of Greek antiquity? Follow the news here about Professor Leontis’s book, forthcoming from Princeton University Press.

A book by Lia Papadaki about Eva Palmer and her husband, Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos, was also published in Greek this year by the Benaki Museum. My efforts to learn Greek over the past couple years haven’t gotten me very far, so I’m sorry to say that I haven’t read it. But I look forward to picking up a copy the next time I’m in Athens. I’m sure it’s a beautiful book; the Benaki is incapable of second class design.

The home of Grace Frick and Marguerite Yourcenar in Northeast Harbor, Maine

From University of Minnesota Press this year, we also had the double biography of Barney and Brooks’s friends Grace Frick and Marguerite Yourcenar by Joan E. Howard. The title says it all: We Met in Paris. I’m told the Albertine bookshop was packed to the gills at Joan Howard’s reading in September. I was lucky to be at the book launch, back in July, on Mt. Desert Island in Maine, where Frick and Yourcenar lived and wrote Memoirs of Hadrian. The house has daily visitors from all over the world during the summer, with Joan Howard giving bilingual tours, and it is lovingly tended year-round by Jayne Persson, director of the Petite Plaisance Conservation Fund. I highly recommend a visit the next time you’re down east. You also might consider a donation. Cultural sites like this are so rare in the United States. Even rarer are houses of creative lesbian expatriates like Gertrude Stein & Alice Toklas, Natalie Barney & Co., and Marguerite Yourcenar & Grace Frick.

I enjoyed talking earlier this year with Texas A & M Professor Melanie Hawthorne about Natalie Barney’s old flame, another daughter of Michigan, Pauline Tarn, a Symbolist poet who wrote under the pen name Renée Vivien. Professor Hawthorne has interesting things to say. I’m so remiss! I’ll dispatch that interview to you soon.

And no, I haven’t seen two films about friends of Miss B, Rupert Everett’s The Happy Prince or Wash Westmoreland’s Colette.

Please write to me with news of new projects about Miss Barney and her circle. I hope NCB’s 143^rdanniversary will bring news that my translation of Francesco Rapazzini’s biography of Elisabeth de Gramont will finally be published.

The author at home in search of lost time.

For now, let’s congratulate Francesco Rapazzini on the success of his third novel, Un été vénétien, just out from Editions Bartillat, which sounds dreamy and Proustian and Venitian all at once. I’m so looking forward to reading it in French. Here’s a video review (in French) on Babelio. You can buy it here on Amazon for Kindle.

Oh my god look at the time. It’s the bewitching hour. I need to post this letter. Or else!

Many happy returns of your 142nd, Mademoiselle. You’re still every inch the young lady of the future.

April in Paris Again

Apr 30

(c) Eliza Jackson

APRIL IN PARIS AGAIN

This American life, 1937

If you find yourself stuck on an SNCF railway platform, a new book about Natalie Barney and her circle will take you back to a more civilized era when appointments could actually be kept: We Met in Paris: Grace Frick and her Life with Marguerite Yourcenar

Rénee Vivien Turns 139

Jun 11

Renee vivien turns 139

June 11 is the birthday of France’s best dressed Symbolist poet, Renée Vivien. Never mind that she was Anglo-American. Never mind that her real name was Pauline Tarn. She was all the rage on both sides of the Atlantic.
Her fictions of Sappho fired up le tout Paris where she settled with her inheritance in 1898. She was such a big deal at the turn of the 20^th century that they named an era after her: Sapho 1900.

To avoid the swooning frenzies that accompanied her poetry readings, the retiring Vivien hired a male stand-in. Would you have taken her for a girl?

Unknown She was as shy and awkward in conversation as she was confident in her written expression. It was, apparently, a heady mixture. If you asked for one of her books, she always gave it to you hidden in a nosegay. [Note to self!]

You can learn a bit more about two of Pauline’s many illustrious lovers, music patron Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac (1865-1943) and painter Romaine Brooks (1874-1970), at the first exhibition of Brooks’s work in many years. It opens June 17^th at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The symposium program, running 4-7:00 pm, includes talks by Singer’s biographer Sylvia Kahan (Music’s Modern Muse) and Brooks’s biographer Cassandra Langer (Romaine Brooks: A Life, interviewed here by James Conway in Strange Flowers). See you there!

Romaine drawings 1890s044

Many happy returns of your 139^th, Mademoiselle. Do tell what you did with the pretty blonde I Fedexed to your Parnassian heights in that coffin packed with lilies…

Interview with Dan Savage

Jan 6

Dan Savage

“We got stuck with the Puritans.”

Post-gay with Seattle’s “Savage Love” guru

Dan Savage published The Kid in 1999, when I was trying to conceive Wee Sprite. His page-turning memoir tells “What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant.” I was listening to my local NPR affiliate, WAMU, driving to the doctor’s office the day Kojo Nnamdi hosted Dan on his book tour. I got pregnant, devoured the memoir and have looked forward to this chat with my favorite sex guru ever since. This interview with Dan Savage was published January 1, 2016 in The Gay & Lesbian Review edited by Richard Schneider. The issue explores “the future of gay” and also contains a review of the book I edited, Romaine Brooks: A Life by Cassandra Langer.

DAN SAVAGE has been a fixture of LGBT culture and politics for over two decades—as journalist, author, media pundit, and founder of the sex advice column “Savage Love,” which is syndicated in several dozen U.S. newspapers. His media work includes recurring appearances on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, The Colbert Report, CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, and various gigs on MSNBC, among many others.

Savage’s most recent project to gain worldwide renown was the “It Gets Better” campaign, which targets LGBT youths who face bullying or isolation and may be at risk of suicide. The campaign generated a vast number of videos affirming gay lives, many from celebrities and many more that went viral. His more recent books include The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family (2005) and a collection of essays titled American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Flights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics (2014).

Something readers may not know is that Savage was part of a satirical theater group in Seattle starting in the ’90s. His interest in guerilla theater has made several appearances since, notably: his contest to redefine the word “santorum” in a way befitting the “man on dog” former senator; closely covering the Bruce Bauer campaign and even trying to give the candidate the flu; and his annual Hump Pornography festival, which features short video clips from
contestants.

Born and raised in Chicago, now a resident of Seattle, Savage married his partner Terry Miller in Canada in 2005 and in Washington in 2012, one of the first gay couples to do so in that state. He and Miller have an adopted son named D.J., who’s the title character in Savage’s 2000 memoir The Kid.

This interview was conducted by telephone in early November.

Interview with Christina Schlesinger

Oct 1

"Tomboy with Peter" (1994, oil and fabric on canvas, 16" x 20")

Christina Schlesinger, “Tomboy with Peter in the Sky,” 1994. Oil and fabric on canvas, 30″ x 40″.

Mother of all Tomboys

artist Christina Schlesinger on Romaine Brooks

October 2 is D-day for Cassandra Langer’s new biography of Romaine Brooks (you can buy it here), for which I furnished translations. Readers will soon take a fresh look at the Thief of Souls.

Christina Schlesinger started incorporating Brooks into her self portraits in the mid-1990s. To find out why, I caught up with the East Hampton based artist and activist after a late September swim.

Suzanne Stroh: “Lesbian Artist” is a strong piece. Tell me about it.

Christina Schlesinger, “Lesbian Artist,” 1994. Monoprint, 12″ x 16″.

Christina Schlesinger: It was based on a photograph I saw of Romaine Brooks. There she is in her smoking jacket wearing a bow tie with a kind of wild expression on her face. There’s so much spirit in her. In her gesture. It’s like my idea of the tomboy—defiant, intrepid, brave.

The photograph was black and white. Romaine’s own palette was famously subdued. Here, yours is bold.

I wanted her to stand out. Primary colors—red, yellow and Navy blue. The lesbian artist who’s out for a night on the town, ready to party, looking hot and jaunty. Making the scene.

Iconic really.

It’s a statement about being a lesbian artist. Romaine is the ultimate lesbian icon. She identified as a lesbian, she painted as a lesbian and she painted lesbians. I wanted to get across the idea of her as the model, the emblem, the forerunner.

“Romaine Brooks and Me” will be exhibited through mid October at New York’s Westbeth Gallery. It’s one in a series of portraits and self portraits. Have they ever been shown together?

As a matter of fact, no, they haven’t. I made several Romaine pieces, a total of about fifteen, several monoprints and other small paintings using images from Romaine Brooks. [Read more about the Peter Paintings here.] I painted them in my early 40s during a period of self-doubt.

In graduate school at Rutgers?

Around 1994. My thesis was on Romaine Brooks.

Why Brooks?

I just love her work. I read that first biography, Between Me and Life, and I was so intrigued to find that somebody was painting lesbians. People didn’t know – I didn’t know — about her work. I made a special trip to to DC to the National Portrait Gallery to see her work. I’ll never forget it.

She became an exemplar, a model. She was like an ancestress. A foremother. Somebody that I could look back to and draw inspiration from.

You know I’m a Guerilla Girl, right? Guerilla Girls take on the names of dead women artists. Mine is Romaine Brooks; I was the only lesbian at the time we founded the group. I identified with Romaine Brooks for a long time. So my “anonymous” Guerrilla Girl identity is Romaine Brooks.

Wait, that’s anonymous?

[Laughs]

So how did Brooks get into your self portraits?

I took her on as somebody whose work I admired and just decided to riff on it. In one, I took the palette from the seaside self portrait of Romaine Brooks. The one on the cover of Sandy’s new book.

Romaine Brooks, “Au Bord de la mer (At the Edge of the Sea),” 1914. Oil on canvas, 41-3/8″ x 26-3/4″. Musée de la Coopération Franco-Américane, Blérancourt, France.

That’s the lesser known of the two. What do you like about it?

I like how melancholy and strong it is. There is a sadness and strength that I like. That’s what I tried to put in my own painting.

I liked the very androgynous women that she was painting. So I used Peter as Romaine even though she’s not really Romaine. It’s Peter, but it’s by Romaine. I like the androgynous quality of the Peter figure. The name even. Peter.

Let’s take a look at “Self Portrait as Romaine Brooks.” The central figure is an artist. Clothed. Dressed in black and grey, she stands in profile holding a paintbrush with a dab of red paint at the tip of the brush.

It’s a clitoris. Men paint with their penises, right?

She stands between two female nudes.

Either she’s dreaming about the two women having sex, or…. She’s being sexual in her own creativity.

Christina Schlesinger, “Self Portrait as Romaine Brooks,” 1994. Oil and fabric on canvas, 52″ x 40″.

We gaze at their torsos. One nude figure wears a realistic-looking strap-on dildo. The other has the same thick dark bush that you like to paint.

Yes, I guess that dates this work! Young lesbians now don’t have bushes. They shave. But I think it’s sexy.

Their torsos are all we get of this pair, since both heads are obscured by a black-and-white checked waistcoat. You cloaked or draped the painted image in the fabric. Tell me about that garment.

It was one of my flannel shirts — only the front shirt panels, with the flannel arms missing. I use a lot of my own clothes in my work.

I saw those in the Tomboys series you exhibited in 2014 at the Leslie-Lohman Museum. The show was called “All True Tomboys.” You write of your quest for “that bright and sturdy tomboy spirit.”

I found myself wondering, “When did I feel good? When did I feel confident?” That’s when I started the series. Whenever I can get that feeling inside of me, it’s so important.

Where do you find it these days?

Hopefully, I only need to look inside.

Who first called you a tomboy?

I always called myself a tomboy. I loved being a tomboy. It’s who I was. I had a younger brother, and there was another younger boy living next door, and I was the leader of our little gang. It was two little boys and me. We built a fort, played marbles, wore Davy Crockett hats, stole comic books from the corner drugstore, and did all these tomboy things together.

Of course my mother was always trying to put me in dresses. So there were constant fights over that. My mother (who’s 103 years old, by the way, and still totally with it) is a painter. She used to paint portraits. She had a Rollieflex and took pictures of her subjects. And me. So I have a lot of photographs of my being a tomboy. I used them as a source for my art. There are also some photos of me in dresses where I’m looking really squirmy. The emotion is totally different. You can see the conflict with my mother. Whereas when I was photographed as a tomboy, I was completely at ease and self-confident.

So back to the flannel shirt draped over the painting of Brooks and her clitoris. What’s its function?

It frames her. It is almost like a pair of wings, surrounding and protecting her. It is also a sign, the flannel signifying lesbian.

Unifying all the figures is the color red—rouging an aroused clit, the lips of a sensitive mouth, the erect nipples on a pair of compact breasts.

It is a circle. Your eye jumps from one little pink dot to another in a kind of circle. The colors pop out against the dark gray and black palette of the painting.

All true tomboys are defiant, confident in their bodies, intrepid, tender and brave.

Christina Schlesinger

Christina Schlesinger, “Romaine Brooks and Me,” 1994. Oil on canvas, 24″ x 30″.

And then there’s “Romaine Brooks and Me,” a self portrait reproducing the Peter figure as a plinthless bust. Or maybe a poster child. What’s that pattern at the top?

The pattern is the blue scalloped edge of an actual bed sheet. Bed – sex!

There are two figures in the painting. The scale of the two figures is different. On the left you have a large profile of the Peter/Romaine; opposite and smaller stands the figure of a woman, arms crossed over a white T-shirt. She’s strong, lean, muscled. Fit. She stands confidently in mirrored blue shades with tousled hair and gazes straight at us. She’s cool. No hint that she’s an outsider. Except she’s nude from the waist down. It’s an unsettling effect similar to what I feel looking at the dildo paintings in the Tomboys series. I want to return her gaze but I can’t take my eyes off her crotch.

That’s me. The arms crossed in front—most of the tomboy paintings have that posture. Defiance and confidence.

Complete the sentence: “All true tomboys _________________.”

All true tomboys are defiant, confident in their bodies, intrepid, tender and brave.

What do you hope to learn from the new biography of Brooks?

Anything new that can illuminate her life will be very interesting. I’ve never really understood her drawings that well. I’m kind of curious about those.

I’m hungry for information. You know, “All True Tomboys” was exhibited in New York’s Gay and Lesbian Museum that hardly ever shows lesbians. I’m interested in writing something on lesbian sensibility and lesbian aesthetics. You have to begin with Romaine Brooks. Unless you go back to the Fontainebleau sisters.

Unknown artist, "Gabrielle d'Etrées et une de ses soeurs," c. 1594. Musée du Louvre, Paris, France.

Unknown artist, “Gabrielle d’Etrées et une de ses soeurs, duchesse de Villars” c. 1594. Oil on canvas, 37.7″ x 49.2″. Musée du Louvre, Paris, France.

That naughty picture of Gabrielle d’Estrées and her sister? With like the Heat Miser and Snow Miser hairdos? Big in the 16th century I guess. I know that one. They’re playing in the bath. And I know just what they’re playing in the bath. Anonymous artist. Fontainebleau school.

So: lesbian aesthetics and the history of lesbian sensibility in Western art. Apart from antiquity. Would you include Courbet?

I suppose you could put Courbet in there, of course. And Toulouse-Lautrec. But those are men.

For lesbian aesthetics do you need a lesbian artist?

I think so. Certainly there are men who can appreciate lesbians and make art about them but they are really only observers, even if very gifted ones. A lesbian paints from her experience as a woman and a lover of women.

What about Gluck? British painter Hanna Gluckstein. Great biography by Diana Souhami. Gluck is Peter.

Gluck is Peter? I had no idea.

I’ve always wanted to see Gluck’s portrait of Romaine. The one she never finished, after Romaine quit sitting. What do you think it looked like?

I would be very intrigued to see Gluck’s portrait of Romaine. I understand that it was not finished because Romaine didn’t like it, which makes the story even more intriguing. What didn’t she like about it? Did Gluck see something in Romaine that Romaine didn’t want seen? Was there an issue of privacy? Of being invaded in some way? Maybe it was too revealing. Romaine’s self portraits have veiled qualities. She’s kind of masked and enigmatic. I see Romaine as a very private, almost hidden person. Maybe she was being revealed in a way she found to be uncomfortable.

Up to now, I’ve been completely entranced with the Peter figure. I was so attracted to this image. I had no idea of the back story. This is a whole new avenue for me to go down. This is more hidden history. You just want to keep filling it in. I’m totally inspired. Entranced.

Romaine Brooks, “Peter, a Young English Girl,” 1923-24. Oil on canvas, 36-1/8″ x 24-1/2″.

Christina Schlesinger’s new work will hang in the group show “Figuring Abstraction.” It runs September 26-October 11 at Westbeth Gallery, 55 Bethune Street, New York. More about the show at www.westbeth.org

More about the artist at WWW.CHRISTINASCHLESINGER.COM.

All images copyright © Christina Schlesinger and reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. It is unlawful to reproduce or store these images on electronic media without the written permission of Christina Schlesinger.

Navigation

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Wrapping up A Life in Ruins

And Cueing Up A Night at the Amazon’s

how you can support our next project for charity

To help get this audiobook in your hands this September—and in the hands of listeners around the world–won’t you consider a donation to the Stonewall Museum to support the production?

Drifting Along with Pauline

Why Translator Melanie Hawthorne Launched the Renée Vivien Cocktail Hour

and what you can do to win free drinks

Take the Renée Vivien Pride Month Challenge

Meanwhile

Click here for more at the Renée Vivien Cocktail Hour

May 1, 2020

The Heroic Feminine

and other characters from “A Night at the Amazon’s”

Romaine Brooks Turns 146

April 23, 2020

Her Second Pandemic

The Red DUchess COMES OUT AGAIN at 145

“what a dump”

More conversation with Cassandra Langer

APRIL IN PARIS AGAIN

This American life, 1937

Renee vivien turns 139

“We got stuck with the Puritans.”

Post-gay with Seattle’s “Savage Love” guru

Mother of all Tomboys

artist Christina Schlesinger on Romaine Brooks

Christina Schlesinger’s new work will hang in the group show “Figuring Abstraction.” It runs September 26-October 11 at Westbeth Gallery, 55 Bethune Street, New York. More about the show at www.westbeth.org

More about the artist at WWW.CHRISTINASCHLESINGER.COM.