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.

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