No Modernism Without Lesbians, Diana Souhami [love books to read txt] 📗

down the Champs Élysées and the war was over and the piles of captured cannon that had made two pyramids were being taken away and peace was upon us.

She and Alice were awarded Reconnaissance Française medals for their war service to the French.

Gertrude the oracle

Gertrude thought that painting, after its cubist high point, lapsed into a secondary form of expression. After the 1914–18 war ended, the focus of the Saturday salons shifted from painters to writers, mainly young and American, who sought her views on their work. Her approval furthered careers. Her prestige was enormous. She had been the person to promote and encourage Picasso and cubism and there was high respect for her opinions, even if few managed to read her work.

Leo wrote to her in December 1919, hoping yet again to repair the breach between them. He told her he had spent nearly all his time in New York trying to cure his neurosis.

But they’re damned hard things to cure… and I was in almost utter despair. Then I got on a tack that has led to better states… and brought about a condition where it was possible to write to you.

The “family romance” as it is called is almost always central in the case of a neurosis, just as you used to get indigestion when we had a dispute. So I could tell pretty well how I was getting on by the degree of possibility I felt of writing as I am doing now.

Gertrude did not answer. She did not want to revisit neuroses, disputes, indigestion and the family romance. She had Alice.

Bravig Imbs

The American novelist and poet Bravig Imbs, author of Confessions of Another Young Man, said Gertrude had the secret of imparting enthusiasm, though she preferred to talk about baseball, or gardens, or the cuisine of the Ain rather than literary things. ‘It was those things that made her laugh and radiate,’ he said. He first met her when she was walking Basket by the Seine docks. He sought her guidance about his writing and showed her his short stories: ‘You have the gift of true brilliancy,’ she told him.

And less than anyone should you use crutch phrases. Either the phrase must come or it must not be written at all. I could never understand how people could labour over a manuscript, write and rewrite it many times, for to me, if you have something to say the words are always there. And they are the exact words and the words that should be used. If the story does not come whole, tant pis, it has been spoiled, and that is the most difficult thing in writing, to be true enough to yourself, and to know yourself enough so that there is no obstacle to the story’s coming through complete. You see how you have faltered, and halted and fallen down in your story, all because you have not solved this problem of communication for yourself. It is the fundamental problem in writing and has nothing to do with metier, or with sentence building or with rhythm. In my own writing as you know, I have destroyed sentences and rhythms and literary overtones and all the rest of that nonsense to get to the very core of this problem of the communication of the intuition. If the communication is perfect, the words have life, and that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles.

In the art world, Gertrude ‘could make or mar an exhibition with little more than a movement of her thumb’, Imbs said. With writing, as with painting, she was emphatic about what and who was good and what and who was not. With Alice managing them, her callers became like a court seeking the sovereign’s favour. Virgil Thomson thought the line that applied was: ‘Will you come into my parlour said the spider to the fly.’

only the men

Annette Rosenshine revisited after the war and found how impenetrable Alice’s power had become. She went to tea wearing a new Paris hat, hoping to show her small sculptures to Gertrude. Alice looked at the pieces in silence then, when Gertrude came over, turned off the lights. She answered questions Annette put to Gertrude, and when they went for a drive she chose what streets Annette should see. ‘I was ostracised as far as Gertrude was concerned,’ Annette said.

Only the men got to Gertrude’s sanctum. Alice directed wives to the kitchen. They sat with her. She said she would one day write her memoir and call it ‘Wives of Geniuses I Have Sat With’. When she did write her memoir, after Gertrude’s death, she called it What is Remembered. Time’s reviewer described it as the ‘book of a woman who all her life has looked in a mirror and seen someone else’.

Even Bryher was downgraded in the salon evenings:

the atmosphere seemed full of gold. There was a table piled with books and beyond this a high chair where Gertrude sat, surrounded by a group of young men. At first there was a little general conversation, then she would pick up a phrase and develop it, ranging through a process of continuous association… She offered us the world, took it away again in the following sentence, only to demonstrate in a third that it was something that we could not want because it never existed…

Gertrude had no use for me but she did not dislike me. I had nothing to offer her in the way of intellectual stimulus and, unlike her young men, brought her no personal problems. I knew this and so, whenever I could, I slipped away to join Miss Toklas in her corner.

Djuna Barnes thought Gertrude chauvinistic and disliked the Stein Toklas ménage:

Do you know what she said of me? Said I had beautiful legs! Now what does that have to do with anything? Said I had beautiful legs! Now I