Self portrait

Once you start playing “Six Degrees of Natalie Clifford Barney” you soon encounter most of the interesting writers and artists active in Paris in the first half of the 20th century, who all seemed to have appeared at the poet’s Left Bank salon at one time or other. At the nearest remove is American artist Romaine Brooks; the two were lovers for the better part of 50 years, though monogamy was, much to Brooks’s dismay, a concept foreign to Barney.

Natalie Barney, by Brooks

Brooks and Barney

Like Barney, Brooks was born into a wealthy family but she grew up, according to her biographer, in “an atmosphere of supernatural evil”, with a cold and distant mother (cf. Edward James). It marked her for life, as the title of her unfinished autobiography — No Pleasant Memories — makes clear. Where Barney shined most brightly in company, Brooks actively disliked many of her circle and was often happiest alone. “I’ve always wondered how two such different women could have remained friends for 62 years,” commented Barney’s longtime housekeeper. “Miss Barney who laughed all the time, and Romaine who was in her studio painting, who never laughed, who hated to go out.” The nature of their relationship was shown in the name and form of their house in the South of France, Villa Trait d’Union (“Hyphen Villa”), a house of two wings — one for each — with one common room in the middle.

Una Troubridge, by Brooks

Brooks was known for her “lesbian Dandy” look, but it stopped short of drag; she thought Radclyffe Hall and her lover Una Troubridge, for example, had taken the whole butch thing a little too far. Brooks’s portrait of Troubridge is among her best works, though its subject is reported to have anxiously inquired “am I really like that?”.

Brooks’s paintings, with their subdued twilight palette in which grey predominates, found initial success in the years before World War I; the psychological insight into her subjects that so troubled Troubridge prompted Robert de Montesquiou to famously call her “the thief of souls”. Later, though, her works were dismissed as postcards from a vanished social circle or, as Truman Capote put it, “the all-time ultimate gallery of all the famous dykes from 1880 to 1935 or thereabouts”.

Brooks all but gave up painting in 1925, and in later life the mid-tones in her own life turned darker and she descended into depression and paranoia. Towards the end she refused even to see Barney, unable to endure her infidelities any longer. She died on this day in 1970.

Brooks’s reputation has greatly increased in recent years. Whereas Barney’s writings, for example, are all but forgotten, these fearless studies of strong, self-possessed women enjoy a critical reputation far beyond their significance as curios of early 20th century lesbian life.

Self portrait

Natalie Clifford Barney was born in 1876 into a Henry James-esque world of East Coast privilege and social anxiety. The intense amorous liaisons and illustrious literary connections which she maintained over a long life seemed to be foretold by an unusual early encounter. As a child of six Barney was playing on a Long Island beach one day when she met Oscar Wilde, then on a reading tour of the US.

Not only would she, like Wilde, become a pioneer of open and guiltless same-sex pairings and one of the best-connected, most talked about figures of her time, she also struck up a close friendship (and rumoured but improbable engagement) with Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas. Moreover she would have a long affair with the great playwright’s niece Dolly, also a lover of Joe Carstairs (at this point the keen-eyed reader may have discerned intersecting points between the last few days’ posts, overlapping like an exquisite corpse).

Like Carstairs, Barney used her inherited fortune to flee her origins and direct her life exactly as she wished. But if Carstairs essentially lived an action-adventure flick, Barney’s vision was something much more arthouse. Moving to Paris shortly before the turn of the century, she installed herself in a Left Bank pavilion where she would live for most of her life. With its overgrown garden and neo-classical temple dedicated to friendship, it was no less an island than Carstairs’ cay; for her exclusively female inner circle it was a refuge of fantasy, romance, sensuality, ideas and liberty which consciously, even self-consciously, alluded to another island, Lesbos.

It was there, too, that Barney would become the 20th century’s greatest saloniste, drawing together more or less everyone who was anyone in arts and letters of the time. A brief list of visitors to her Friday afternoon meetings might include Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, André Gide, Jean Cocteau, Colette and Rainer Maria Rilke; Barney had almost unerring prescience in encouraging writers whose works would be not merely successful, but canonical.

Barney’s zealous networking, fin-de-siècle affectations and Sapphic play-acting weren’t to everyone’s taste; the poet Bryher said she “was inclined to know the conventional French and was already considered a bit too Right Bank and smart.” Djuna Barnes, technically a friend of Barney’s, called her “a cheap—well kept, smug, over fed, lion hunting S.O.B.”, though at her insistence Barnes created a gently caustic parody of her milieu in the book Ladies Almanack. Along with Dolly Wilde, the roman á clef featured painter Romaine Brooks, who was the longest serving of Barney’s lovers, but suffered from her incessant indiscretions.

While Barney’s own writings – poems, epigrams, essays – never reached a broad public, her role as both a fearless free spirit and a facilitator of Modernism can’t be overestimated. After maintaining her salon for about 60 years, she was forced out of the pavilion and into a hotel, where she died on this day in 1972 at the age of 95.

There is so much more to say about Barney and her connections and her influence and the singular life she led, but for now – like a bad relief teacher – I will take a break and hand you over to a video, taken from a documentary based on Andrea Weiss’s book Paris Was a Woman:

[sorry, video missing!]

Dolly Wilde, in life, was like a character out of a book, even if it was never written…she seemed like someone one had become familiar with by reading, rather than by knowing.

- Janet Flanner

The study of Dolly Wilde belongs to a discipline that doesn’t exist.

While nominally listed as a “socialite” in biographical entries, she didn’t entertain on a grand scale, patronise genius or pioneer new ways of living, so you won’t find her mentioned in social histories of the 20^th century. Despite her wit and facility with words you will search in vain for a book by her, so she’s not a subject for literary history. Contemporaries never failed to mention her dazzling eloquence but her performances, it seemed, belonged to the moment.

After her death, friends compiled a book called Oscaria, an attempt to capture her evanescent qualities, largely through fondly-remembered anecdotes. But both this volume and Joan Schenkar’s 2000 biography Truly Wilde somehow serve to enhance rather than deconstruct the mysterious essence of their subject’s evident allure.

So who was this elusive character? Dolly – Dorothy – was born in London in 1895; her father was Oscar Wilde’s brother Willie, a successful journalist in his own right. Dolly never met Oscar – he was already doing hard labour when she was born – but like her cousin Arthur Cravan she was immensely proud of her famous uncle at a time when his reputation was far from rehabilitation. She was the only one to retain his name into the 20^th century; his immediate family abandoned it in the wake of his fall from grace.

Wilde began her continental adventures as an ambulance driver during World War I, during which time she had an affair with the younger Joe Carstairs. It was an occupation ideally suited to the dynamic Carstairs, but represented a rare burst of activity for Wilde whose preferred theatres of engagement were the salon and the bedroom.

Appropriately, then, it was to the company of Stephen Tennant, Brian Howard and the other Bright Young Things that she was drawn in the 1920s, sharing the group’s passion for parties, dressing up and hysterical chatter. While Cecil Beaton described her as “rather vulgar”, his portrait of her (main image) is one of the most glamorous of his early pictures.

Without riches to free or anchor her, Wilde lived out her life in hotels and the houses of generous friends. After a brief affair with the silent screen star Alla Nazimova she met Natalie Clifford Barney who, as we have already seen, had met Oscar Wilde as a child. She was just as warmly disposed to his niece, who counted as one of her most enduring liaisons, much to the distress of Romaine Brooks, Barney’s long-time partner.

Wilde was a hit at Barney’s Paris salon, her sparkling wit apparently a direct inheritance from Oscar; Lady Una Troubridge said Dolly was “much the better man” in comparison with her uncle. Dolly played up the connection, dressing as Oscar for a party in 1931.

As Janet Flanner observed, Wilde was “like a character out of a book”, which she duly became, captured as Doll Furious in Djuna Barnes’ roman à clef of Barney’s circle, Ladies Almanack. But Wilde was jealous of Barnes’ achievements, asking “Why should you be the one with genius? If anyone has it, it should be me.”

This frustration, a condition which both sprang from and inflamed her insecurities, led to heavy drinking, excessive even by the generous standards of her circle, and eventually supplemented with a heroin addiction. The thirties, which many of her friends experienced as a hangover to the excesses of the previous decade, were particularly hard on Dolly. She had developed a sleeping draught addiction during one of her attempted cures and towards the end of the decade she was diagnosed with breast cancer, but refused treatment.

While there had been at least one suicide attempt, when Barney broke off their affair and returned to Brooks, it’s not clear that Wilde was harbouring serious thoughts of self-harm as she retired to bed in her flat in London’s Belgravia on April 9, 1941. But the last of the Wildes was found dead the next morning, having overdosed on either sleeping draught or heroin, or a combination of the two.

On hearing the news, Barney commented that “just as no one’s presence could be as present as hers, so no one’s absence could be so absent.”

Thanks to Front Free Endpaper (now celebrating seven years of blogging, which is 415 lifetimes in real terms, or something) for highlighting this catalogue, written in French and English and detailing rare publications relating to Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen. He was, you may recall, the French Decadent aristo-poet who moved to Capri after his “at homes” were revealed to be less of the macarons-and-small-talk variety and more devil-worship-and-homoerotica. Some years after the baron died in obscurity in 1923 his reputation was revived by his countryman Roger Peyrefitte.

The catalogue offers much to gladden the heart of anyone interested in queer/Decadent undercurrents of the Belle Époque. Naturally almost all of Fersen’s own work is represented, largely in the form of very rare first (and usually only) editions, as well as issues of his literary journal Akademos (partly bankrolled by Mathilde de Morny). There are also original works by contemporary writers, some commenting on the Fersen scandal, others riffing generally on gay themes. They include (deep breath, pause for emphasis) Alfred Jarry, Jean Lorrain, Rachilde, Liane de Pougy, Renée Vivien, Natalie Barney, Marcel Proust and Robert de Montesquiou (with a letter in the count’s own hand), and outre-Manche representation from the likes of Marc-André Raffalovich and Oscar Wilde.

Basically it’s Strange Flowers’ letter to Santa, bound and illustrated.

From December 2009, the troubled life and work of an undervalued portraitist. You can find a different side to her art here, and explore her long, difficult relationship with Natalie Barney here.

•

Self portrait

Once you start playing “Six Degrees of Natalie Clifford Barney” you soon encounter most of the interesting writers and artists active in Paris in the first half of the 20th century, who all seemed to have appeared at the poet’s Left Bank salon at one time or other. At the nearest remove is American artist Romaine Brooks; the two were lovers for the better part of 50 years, though monogamy was, much to Brooks’s dismay, a concept foreign to Barney.

Natalie Barney, by Brooks

Brooks and Barney

Like Barney, Brooks was born into a wealthy family but she grew up, according to her biographer, in “an atmosphere of supernatural evil”, with a cold and distant mother (cf. Edward James). It marked her for life, as the title of her unfinished autobiography — No Pleasant Memories — makes clear. Where Barney shined most brightly in company, Brooks actively disliked many of her circle and was often happiest alone. “I’ve always wondered how two such different women could have remained friends for 62 years,” commented Barney’s longtime housekeeper. “Miss Barney who laughed all the time, and Romaine who was in her studio painting, who never laughed, who hated to go out.” The nature of their relationship was shown in the name and form of their house in the South of France, Villa Trait d’Union (“Hyphen Villa”), a house of two wings — one for each — with one common room in the middle.

Una Troubridge, by Brooks

Brooks was known for her “lesbian Dandy” look, but it stopped short of drag; she thought Radclyffe Hall and her lover Una Troubridge, for example, had taken the whole butch thing a little too far. Brooks’s portrait of Troubridge is among her best works, though its subject is reported to have anxiously inquired “am I really like that?”.

Brooks’s paintings, with their subdued twilight palette in which grey predominates, found initial success in the years before World War I; the psychological insight into her subjects that so troubled Troubridge prompted Robert de Montesquiou to famously call her “the thief of souls”. Later, though, her works were dismissed as postcards from a vanished social circle or, as Truman Capote put it, “the all-time ultimate gallery of all the famous dykes from 1880 to 1935 or thereabouts”.

Brooks all but gave up painting in 1925, and in later life the mid-tones in her own life turned darker and she descended into depression and paranoia. Towards the end she refused even to see Barney, unable to endure her infidelities any longer. She died on this day in 1970.

Brooks’s reputation has greatly increased in recent years. Whereas Barney’s writings, for example, are all but forgotten, these fearless studies of strong, self-possessed women enjoy a critical reputation far beyond their significance as curios of early 20th century lesbian life.

Self portrait

At first, when an idea, a poem, or the desire to write takes hold of you, work is a pleasure, a delight, and your enthusiasm knows no bounds. But later on you work with difficulty, doggedly, desperately. For once you have committed yourself to a particular work, inspiration changes its form and becomes an obsession, like a love-affair… which haunts you night and day! Once at grips with a work, we must master it completely before we can recover our idleness.

Further reading
Grey eminence
Salon queen
Goodbye Dolly

Art historian Kerrin Meis recently gave a lecture on Paris-based painter Romaine Brooks, long overshadowed by her charismatic lover. I quote from the lecture introduction, largely because it contains my favourite new word, ‘retardataire’:

Romaine Brooks is best known for her relationship with the American expatriate writer Natalie Barney, and her paintings have often been dismissed as retardataire because she embraced the figurative in a period of artistic upheaval. But Robert de Montesquiou dubbed her the Thief of Souls, recognizing her uncanny ability to capture the essence of her subjects. Meis will briefly review Brooks’ life, beginning with her bizarre childhood, her flings and affairs, her life with Natalie, and will then turn to her portraits. Who are these people? Why this gray palette? How does she shape a new concept of femininity?

You can listen to the lecture here, and there will be more on Barney’s overlapping worlds next week.

Brooks & Barney

Well…this was inevitable, wasn’t it? Once the idea of mapping connections between writers, artists and undefinable members of semi-forgotten scenes was in the air, it was a given that writer, saloniste and singular cultural catalyst Natalie Clifford Barney (born on this day in 1876) would turn up at the midpoint of one of these busy diagrams.

One of the most prominent of Paris’s 20th century American expatriates, Barney networked at an Olympian level. This diagram is largely limited to her close relationships, none of which was of greater duration or intensity than that with painter Romaine Brooks. But if you want to know who came to her weekly literary salon, which lasted an extraordinary 60 years, just make a list of every prominent author who lived in or spent any length of time in Paris during that period and it’s likely they would have been there.

Thinly veiled literary works both by and about Barney abound, full of tempestuous passions, relics of a time when you couldn’t even score a fingerbang on the Left Bank without someone penning a roman à clef about it.

click through for a more legible view

Further reading
Salon queen, Pearls: Natalie Clifford Barney
Grey eminence, Romaine Brooks | drawings, The Other Amazon (Romaine Brooks)
Goodbye Dolly (Dolly Wilde)
Caribbean Queen, Strange Flowers guide to London: part 3,  Before Whale Cay, Dress-down Friday: Joe Carstairs (Joe Carstairs)
Float like a butterfly, sting like a butterfly, Arthur Cravan: poet, boxer, blogger, Three shows, Arthur Cravan est vivant!, Pearls: Arthur Cravan
World Famous Aerial Queen, Dress-down Friday: Janet Flanner, El hombre elefante, Pearls: Janet Flanner
Dress-down Friday: Djuna Barnes, Djuna 40/80/120, Circles: H.D./Bryher, Djuna Barnes | drawings
Dress-down Friday: Thelma Wood
Dada Baroness, Strange Flowers guide to Berlin, part 2 and 4, I am such miserable thing (Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven)
Monsieur le Marquis, La Marquise de Sade, Dress-down Friday: Mathilde de Morny
Sodom’s ambassador to Paris, A Lorrain special, part 1 and part 2 (Jean Lorrain)
Pearls: Colette

Charles Henri Ford’s vanity turns 100 today. Its owner, poet and publisher Charles Henri Ford, was by all reliable accounts born in Mississippi on this day in 1908 but he insisted that he was born in 1913, a fudge which endures on his Wikipedia entry.

Beyond contention, however, is his status as a major cultural catalyst. His influence and relationships ranged from the Surrealists and the interwar expat community in Paris through to the Beats and the Factory, connections which he carried right into the 21st century, dying in 2002. Anyone whose address book has space for both Faulkner, William and Arcade, Penny is surely worth investigating further.

Even allowing for the half-decade headstart, Ford’s early activities are remarkable. At 21 he launched Blues, a literary journal which attracted contributions from the likes of Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. Soon he was off to Paris with The Young and Evil (co-written with long-time collaborator Parker Tyler) as his calling card. Edith Sitwell, shocked by the novel’s frank depiction of gay urban life, cast it onto a fire. Notorious closet case Edward James, who happened to be on hand, joined in the impromptu book-burning.

The twosome would recur in Ford’s life; James pursued his sister Ruth Ford while promoting the career of artist Pavel Tchelitchew, Ford’s partner. Said artist, meanwhile, was the unlikely object of Edith Sitwell’s passion; he painted a number of portraits of her and turned up in fictional form in her sole novel, I Live under a Black Sun. Sitwell evidently overcame her distaste for Ford’s writing, penning a preface for a volume of his poetry.

While Ford spent much of the 1930s in Paris, there was a sojourn to Morocco with Djuna Barnes. Their affair was a rare excursion to multi-gender relationships for Ford (though not so rare for Barnes). In Morocco they stayed with Paul Bowles and Ford typed up the manuscript of Barnes’ masterpiece, Nightwood. Back in New York at the outset of the Second World War, Ford sought out Tyler once more and they set to work on View, a hugely important journal of avant-garde writing and imagery from both sides of the Atlantic.

Some of Ford’s most fascinating connections elude diagrammatic rendering. While he was a subject for one of Andy Warhol’s famous screen tests, his involvement in the pop artist’s filmic endeavours goes even deeper. Ford, in fact, took Warhol shopping for his first camera. He also introduced him to visionary film artist Marie Menken, who would prove a major influence on Warhol’s moving images, as well as Gerard Malanga, who become a loyal adjutant.

Ford later hosted a salon in his apartment in the Dakota building; in Just Kids Patti Smith recollects attending with Robert Mapplethorpe, although she felt that Ford was intent on recreating his Parisian past. You can read up on the entire sweep of Ford’s career in this informative and entertaining interview from 1986. Meanwhile, here’s an attempt to map Charles Henri Ford’s most important connections:

click through for a more legible view

Further reading
Dress-down Friday: Charles Henri Ford, Charles Henri Ford | collages
Angel (Joseph Cornell/Pavel Tchelitchew)
Dress-down Friday: Djuna Barnes, Djuna 40/80/120, Circles: H.D./Bryher, Djuna Barnes | drawings (Djuna Barnes)
World Famous Aerial Queen, Dress-down Friday: Janet Flanner, El hombre elefante, Pearls: Janet Flanner (Janet Flanner)
Surreal estate, James and the giant artichoke, Strange Flowers guide to London, part 2 and part 3, The James Press, At home with Edward James, 13 books for 2013 (Edward James)
“A huge old baby vulture”, Circles; H.D./Bryher, Edith speaks, Dress-down Friday: Edith Sitwell, Pearls: Edith Sitwell (Edith Sitwell)
Salon queen, Pearls: Natalie Clifford Barney, Circles: Natalie Clifford Barney (Natalie Barney)
Look back with Anger, Go! Go! Go! (Marie Menken)
Review: Howl (Allen Ginsberg)

Like her great rival La Belle Otero, French Belle Époque courtesan Liane de Pougy was a hugely popular postcard motif of the era. Their blue-blooded suitors may have showered them with gifts and hard currency, but the humblest admirer could buy a piece of the grandes horizontales (or at least their likenesses) for just a few centimes.

Pougy had a home-crowd advantage against the Spanish-born Otero, and her risqué profession was balanced in the public imagination by her sophistication and culture. And while she attracted clients every bit as prestigious as Otero’s, Pougy was much shrewder in shaping and using her image to her own ends. Like Ganna Walska in later years, Pougy embodied a conception of fame which appears eerily redolent of our own age. She complemented her magnetic beauty with a keen fashion sense, sporting a Marcel wave from the hands of the original Marcel (Grateau) himself, with the creations of the age’s greatest designers hugging her snowy white shoulders and tiny waist. In an age of considerable social mobility, Pougy patronised the houses of Fortuny, Paguin, Worth, Poiret and Doucet alongside the noble and royal wives of her clients. She even appeared in fashion advertisements and was the first of many celebrities (including Ganna Walska) to launch a namesake scent.

Pougy also knew how to commoditise the public’s fascination with her love life, and in her book Idylle Sapphique she casts a gossamer veil of fiction over her affair with Natalie Barney. The famed saloniste first spied Pougy in the Bois de Boulogne, wrapped in ermine. Smitten, Barney presented herself en garconne as “the page of love”. She won Pougy over, despite the courtesan’s customary aversion to the mannish female (“We liked long hair, beautiful bosoms, pouts and glances, charm, grace; not woman-boys”).

In comparing the postcard images below with a similar set of Otero, there are some curious parallels. Both, for example, toy with improbable personae, appearing as humble Brides of Christ and in haughty regal splendour. For Pougy, these roles were prophetic – in 1910 she married a prince (Georges Ghika) and in later years served as a Dominican nun, dying in 1950.

It’s that time of the year again, when costumed apparitions turn society on its head, strange creatures emerge from the undergrowth, and the most diffident wallflower can blossom into a glamorous orchidaceous vision.

Yes, it’s Natalie Clifford Barney‘s birthday. And over at screenwriter Susanne Stroh‘s site, they’re celebrating with quizzes, giveaways and interviews: Jean-Loup Combemale discusses Élisabeth de Gramont, Cassandre Langer talks about Barney’s longtime partner Romaine Brooks, and Suzanne Rodriguez – author of the essential Wild Heart – will be sharing her insights into the birthday girl, so you’ll be in fine company. Find out what happened on Barney’s 50th birthday on this day in 1926 when Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Colette, Djuna Barnes and la toute lesbohème parisienne turned up at the famous salon.

If the above hasn’t sufficiently tempted you it remains only for me to say: THERE WILL BE CHAMPAGNE.

It’s not that Romaine Brooks’ portraits didn’t, as Truman Capote put it, represent “the all-time ultimate gallery of all the famous dykes from 1880 to 1935 or thereabouts”. They did, but there was a lot more besides that going on. The other oft-heard quote about Brooks (who died on this day in 1970), Robert de Montesquiou’s description of her as “thief of souls”, is a far better assessment. In her signature muted palette, she renders her subjects against sombre backdrops, sometimes with nothing more than a totemic animal for company, often revealing far more of themselves than they might care to. Much more on Brooks here.

Gabriele d’Annunzio

Jean Cocteau

La Marquise Casati

Madame Errázuriz

Natalie Barney

Peter, A young English girl (Gluck)

Renata Borgatti

Self portrait

Elisabeth de Gramont

Elsie de Wolfe

Further reading
Grey eminence, Salon queen, A Casati picture gallery, Romaine Brooks | drawings, The Other Amazon, Circles: Natalie Clifford Barney, Wild hearts at midnight (Romaine Brooks, plus Natalie Barney)
Death becomes her, Phantom of the empire, World Famous Aerial Queen, Berenice Abbott | portraits, Dress-down Friday: Barbette, Circles: Ludwig II/Sissi, Jacques-Émile Blanche | portraits, Circles: Erika and Klaus Mann, Pearls: Jean Cocteau, The ghosts of Versailles (Jean Cocteau)
Dress-down Friday: Eugenia Errázuriz
Places: Vittorialie degli italiani, D’Annunzio’s Cave,  Places: Palais Rose, Le Vésinet, Dress-down Friday: Gabriele d’Annunzio (Gabriele d’Annunzio)
The countess in the afterlife, A Casati family tree, A Casati picture gallery, Casati continues to captivate…, Strange Flowers guide to London: part 3, Requiem for a Marchesa, Dress-down Friday: Marchesa Casati (Marchesa Casati)

You may have missed this vital piece of astronomical news over the holiday season: a crater on the planet Mercury has been named for Left Bank lesbohemian legend Natalie Clifford Barney. She joins such honourees as Truman Capote and Erich Maria Remarque (extra points if you can trace those two back to La Barney; Six Degrees of Natalie Clifford Barney really is the game that never ends).

Further research into Mercurial craters reveals that the planet’s frigid depressions have previously been named for all sorts of interesting and creative people, including Alvin Ailey, Lord Byron, Italo Calvino, Salvador Dalí, Gustave Flaubert, Pablo Neruda, Marcel Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, Walt Whitman, W. B. Yeats and just about every major composer. As that list suggests it’s also a complete sausage fest, so Barney makes a welcome addition.

In honour of the Chinese New Year and the Year of the Horse which begins today, here is a look at some of our favourite strange flowers in equestrian elegance mode.  There’s Renée Sintenis (again), Hermann Pückler-Muskau in an early drag race with a coach, while Lord Berners, ever the individualist, has decided to paint rather than ride his mount. Sissi‘s imperial sidesaddle glamour could never be encompassed by just one post; find more here.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach

Count D’Orsay

Lady Hester Stanhope

Gabriele d’Annunzio

Renée Sintenis

Lord Berners

H.D.

Ludwig II

Natalie Barney

Hermann von Pückler-Muskau

Sissi

Thanks to Front Free Endpaper (now celebrating seven years of blogging, which is 415 lifetimes in real terms, or something) for highlighting this catalogue, written in French and English and detailing rare publications relating to Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen. He was, you may recall, the French Decadent aristo-poet who moved to Capri after his “at homes” were revealed to be less of the macarons-and-small-talk variety and more devil-worship-and-homoerotica. Some years after the baron died in obscurity in 1923 his reputation was revived by his countryman Roger Peyrefitte.

The catalogue offers much to gladden the heart of anyone interested in queer/Decadent undercurrents of the Belle Époque. Naturally almost all of Fersen’s own work is represented, largely in the form of very rare first (and usually only) editions, as well as issues of his literary journal Akademos (partly bankrolled by Mathilde de Morny). There are also original works by contemporary writers, some commenting on the Fersen scandal, others riffing generally on gay themes. They include (deep breath, pause for emphasis) Alfred Jarry, Jean Lorrain, Rachilde, Liane de Pougy, Renée Vivien, Natalie Barney, Marcel Proust and Robert de Montesquiou (with a letter in the count’s own hand), and outre-Manche representation from the likes of Marc-André Raffalovich and Oscar Wilde.

Basically it’s Strange Flowers’ letter to Santa, bound and illustrated.

Barney and Romaine Brooks in Florence (from Wild Heart, by Suzanne Rodriguez)

The writer/saloniste Natalie Clifford Barney and her early 20th century Left Bank circle are attracting more attention than ever. A long-time dalliance of Barney’s, Dolly Wilde, is a presiding spirit over Caitlin Moran’s recent How to Build a Girl, and will appear in Megan Mayhew Bergman’s collection of Almost Famous Women early in the new year. Just like last year, screenwriter Suzanne Stroh will be celebrating Barney’s birthday which rounds out LGBT History Month in the US, for which Barney is an honoree this year. Join Suzanne this Friday when she will be interviewing Artemis Leontis, biographer of one of the most intriguing of Barney’s associates. American-born Eva Palmer was not just one of Natalie’s early paramours, she was also married to Angelos Sikelianos, brother of Penelope Sikelianos and thus making her sister-in-law to Raymond Duncan. She shared the Duncans’ obsession with reviving the ways of the ancients in everyday life.

Suzanne also has some particularly exciting news about a film she is writing, a thriller set in Florence during World War Two and featuring Barney, Brooks, and other familiar faces. It is based on Francesco Rapazzini’s biography of Élisabeth de Gramont, as well the forthcoming book All or Nothing: Romaine Brooks (1874-1970). That book’s author, Cassandra Langer, will be giving a talk at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art on November 20, when a transcription and translation of the only known recording of Brooks (1968) will also be presented to the archives by Suzanne Stroh and Jean-Loup Combemale.

It’s been quite a January round Flowers’ way, so this selection of the year’s forthcoming titles of interest is a little later than hoped. But there’s still eleven months left in this thing. Please work through the required reading list below; there will be a comprehension test at the end of the year.

Actually looking down the list, there appears to be an even more marked Mitteleuropa tendency than usual, but hey – it’s where I hang out.

We open in Zurich, where around this time a hundred years ago the word “Dada” would become known to…well, a very select few, at first. But it was indeed in 1916 that the term first appeared, the Cabaret Voltaire (the venue, then the journal) was launched and Richard Huelsenbeck, Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara all produced manifestos – or manifesto-adjacent documents – for the young movement. Probably the most obscure figure to have a stab at defining Dada in print was Bohemian-Jewish writer Walter Serner. He wrote his Last Loosening: A Dada Manifesto around the end of the First World War, although it wasn’t published until 1920. It will soon be accessible to the English-speaking reader thanks to translator Mark Kanak and Prague-based publisher Twisted Spoon, which specialises in English editions of Central and Eastern European writings. Switzerland was just one stop in Serner’s trans-European odyssey; the term “rootless cosmopolitan”, Stalin’s disdainful code-word for “Jew”, actually fits Serner well. “Slightly revised later as Serner became disgusted with Dada, it forms the first part of this volume, its philosophical foundation. A playful “moral codex” to subvert the illusions and stereotypes underpinning society’s views on morality and decency, it attacks the contradictions between appearance and reality…” For the rest of his life Serner concentrated primarily on crime fiction; after a spell in Theresienstadt, he and his wife were murdered near Riga in 1942.

More doomed interwar relations…Pushkin Press follow up their extensive range of Stefan Zweig translations with a book which pairs him with Joseph Roth in Summer Before the Dark by German writer Volker Weidermann (translated by Carol Brown Janeway). It finds the two Austrian-Jewish authors in the incongruous setting of the Flemish seaside in summer 1936, because apparently we can’t get enough of a doomed idyll (tellingly, German Amazon pairs Weidermann’s book with 1913, another work of pre-cataclysmic cultural history).

Franz Hessel

And yet another translation from the German, this one originally penned by Franz Hessel who was interesting for more reasons than I can list here. Just quickly, then: he was part of the bohemian tumult of early 20th century Munich, with no less than Fanny zu Reventlow as a roomie (they remembered the experience in tit-for-tat romans à clef), he was a good friend of Walter Benjamin, and in Paris he embarked on a three-way entanglement with a Frenchman and a woman destined to be his wife, an arrangement which endured even after the two men found themselves on opposing sides in the First World War. And if that sounds like the plot to Jules et Jim, that’s because it is, that roman à clef’s author being said Frenchman, Henri-Pierre Roché. A wry, sensitive, occasionally mournful novelist, Hessel was also a wry, sensitive, occasionally mournful observer of his surroundings, producing the definitive flaneur’s account of Weimar Berlin, Spazieren in Berlin (although when it came to the theory of flanerie he left the heavy lifting to Benjamin). Now, an indecent time since its publication in 1929, it is finally to be made available in English as Walking in Berlin, translated by Amanda DeMarco, who also publishes brilliant, small titles under the name Readux Books, whose every instalment will bountifully reward your modest outlay of time and money.

Like Hessel – and Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth for that matter – Klaus Mann numbers among the prestigious list of exiles who passed through the French internment camp, Sanary-sur-Mer. While he survived the war (unlike the other three), it wasn’t exactly an easy ride as the title of the forthcoming Cursed Legacy: The Tragic Life of Klaus Mann makes clear. Frederic Spotts’s book is, amazingly, the first biography of the Mephisto author to appear in English, although it follows the subject’s own account, The Turning Point, and the excellent In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain (2008), which examined Klaus and his sister Erika (find out more about the siblings’ manifold connections here).

If you’re anything like me, you’ll greet the announcement of a forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Aubrey Beardsley‘s work much as you would news of a Klaus Mann biography in English: wait, there isn’t one already? It seems not. Linda Gertner Zatlin, one of the world’s foremost Beardsley experts, is responsible for the two-volume edition which will be landing with a resounding, expensive *thud* in March.

While we’re feeling arch, there is talk of a brand new biography of Ronald Firbank this year. I’m coming up cold on that search but in the meantime there’s a reissue of the essential Prancing Novelist, a study of Firbank originally published in 1973. Read this and I think you’ll agree author Brigid Brophy sounds like she would have been a right laugh over a boozy lunch (sadly I sense the same could not be said of fellow Firbankian Miriam J. Benkovitz, no matter how jaunty her cats-eye twinkle).

Meanwhile, David Tibet is presenting at least a taste of Count Eric Stenbock this year in his hand-picked anthology of strange fiction entitled The Moons at Your Door. The immortal count is joined by Arthur Machen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Ligotti and many others in a selection which stalks time and space in its search for the dark rush of the macabre:

I fell in Love with The Moons whom I had heard and seen at my door when I was a young boy in Malaysia. I have brought together, in this work, many of the short stories and texts that have made me what I am and what I will be, and it gives an insight into my Spheres for those who wish to read what formed me. I have never tired of these works, which still move me profoundly, and I will never will.

Last year a major exhibition at Berlin’s German History Museum explored same-sex attraction through the centuries. Among the exhibits was an 1868 letter by Hungarian writer Karl-Maria Kertbeny in which the word “homosexual” appears for the first time in history. The recipient of that letter, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, is now the subject of an English-language biography. If you read Robert Beachy’s 2014 Gay Berlin, you may well remember that Ulrichs was the very first gay activist. Ever. Were this not immediately apparent, the publishers have thoughtfully adorned the cover of Ralph M. Leck’s book with rainbow stripes.

Another exotic apparition of imperial Germany, an era whose oddities are very close to my heart, was Marie-Madeleine. It is a name unlikely to mean much to you, but then Anita Berber was all but unknown in the English-speaking world until Feral House issued Mel Gordon’s biography around a decade ago. The same publisher now presents Priestess of Morphine: The Lost Writings of Marie-Madeleine in the Time of the Nazis, translated by Eric A. Bye, although the prominence of the word “Nazi” in the title is, I suspect, in deference to Feral House’s brand of investigative paranoia (their backlist roams through NASA, UFOs, JFK, heavy metal, chemtrails, drug culture, the occult and secret societies). It’s an unfortunate misdirection, as Marie-Madeleine’s printed output was in fact almost entirely confined to the Wilhelmine era, and given its outré themes of sex, drugs and oom pa-pa, this is precisely what makes it so interesting. One hundred years ago, for instance, while the German imperial order was approaching its fiery end, Baroness Marie Madeleine von Puttkamer (as she was more formally known) was issuing the novella collection Der süsse Rausch – “Sweet Intoxication” – which huffed, humped, toked, slurped and licked its way through a wide assortment of pharmacological and sensual diversions.

Jean Lorrain

It was the kind of territory, in short, previously staked out by Decadent supreme Jean Lorrain. Now, use of the word “decadent” in present-day publishing usually presages either a) chocolate cake recipes, or b)  self-published rants about the collapse of Western civilization. But here’s the real thing, a sublime, perverse, uncut hit of 1890s corruption and splendour in the form of Lorrain’s Nightmares of an Ether-Drinker (in Brian Stableford’s translation).

(Aside: it’s high time someone reissued Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony.)

Connecting Jean Lorrain to anyone else in Belle Époque Paris is not the most difficult parlour game with which to hasten an inclement Sunday. With our next literary luminary, Natalie Barney, Lorrain shared the distinction of appearing, lightly camouflaged, in Liane de Pougy’s Idylle saphique, a – yes – roman à clef. In Women Lovers, or The Third Woman, Natalie Barney turns the tables and casts her own thin veil of fiction over her lover de Pougy. The recently rediscovered work is published by the University of Wisconsin Press – also responsible for Cassandra Langer’s study of Romaine Brooks which we looked at recently – with translation by Chelsea Ray, and an introduction by Melanie C. Hawthorne, whose 2013 biography of cross-dressing Gisèle d’Estoc you may recall.

Three more hits of Strange Flowers-flavoured cultural history come with the silver screen sapphism of Laura Norak’s Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, released today, the nocturnal wanderings of Joachim Schlör’s Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin and London 1840-1930 and The Glamour of Strangeness. From the title alone I guessed this would be my kind of book. Sho’nuff:

Focusing on six principal subjects, Jamie James locates “a lost national school” of artists who left their homes for the unknown. There is Walter Spies, the devastatingly handsome German painter who remade his life in Bali; Raden Saleh, the Javanese painter who found fame in Europe; Isabelle Eberhardt, a Russian-Swiss writer who roamed the Sahara dressed as an Arab man; the American experimental filmmaker Maya Deren, who went to Haiti and became a committed follower of voodoo. From France, Paul Gauguin left for Tahiti; and Victor Segalen, a naval doctor, poet, and novelist, immersed himself in classical Chinese civilization in imperial Peking.

It should be here in August, so I hope to take it with me on holiday somewhere else and read it while imagining I am somewhere else again.

The subject of our last work was previously unknown to me, but he seems to dwell at the always compelling intersection of academia and dementia. Marc Epstein’s Moths, Myths, and Mosquitoes: The Eccentric Life of Harrison Dyar appears in April, and looks highly promising:

On September 26, 1924, the ground collapsed beneath a truck in a back alley in Washington, D.C., revealing a mysterious underground labyrinth. In spite of wild speculations, the tunnel was not the work of German spies, but rather an aging, eccentric Smithsonian scientist named Harrison Gray Dyar, Jr. While Dyar’s covert tunneling habits may seem far-fetched, they were merely one of many oddities in Dyar’s unbelievable life.

So to recap: horror, language, drug references, scenes of an adult nature; translations, romans à clef, doom real and imagined, lady-lovin’ ladies and the ladies who love ’em; exile, campery, tunneling. Business as usual chez Flowers.

Oh, and if you’ve been keeping a tally you will know we’re one shy of the promised 16 books, so I’ll merely say that there should be at least one book with your blogger’s name on it by the end of the year…and leave it at that.

Were I to tell you that there exists interview footage of someone, somewhere, discussing Alice B. Toklas in the present tense while also recalling a midnight tête-à-tête with Marcel Proust and a childhood encounter with Oscar Wilde, I imagine this would be of more than passing interest.

Were I to add that the someone is in fact Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972), then in her nineties, and that the somewhere from which she summons these spectral luminaries is her legendary Left Bank lodgings in the rue Jacob where for the better part of six decades she hosted a salon through whose doors passed a selection of 20th century literary figures that, for want of time but with no undue exaggeration we can summarise as “everyone”…well, it’s just a little bit exciting, no?

The year is 1962. The interviewer is Miron Grindea, editor of the Adam International Review, an arts journal which that year devoted a whole issue to Barney’s life and work. But if you detect a note of impatience in Barney’s answers, it might help to know that she thought little of her interlocutor. The process of putting together the edition was one for which Grindea expected Barney to open not just her archives, but her purse as well; she complained to friends of the effort and expense of it all.

The all too brief interview finds Barney in her magic garden, the site of a temple to friendship (curious Francophones will find an exhaustive study of this structure here); the chatelaine refers to herself as its “vestal”. Referencing her “genius for friendship”, Grindea concentrates largely on Barney’s role as a cultural catalyst which, while crucial, is not the whole story. Her own work, which was addressed at length in Adam and is still being rediscovered (as we saw just recently), is passed over with barely a word here. Work, in general, is viewed with suspicion: “One must be idle in order to become oneself”, Barney announces in one of her characteristic aphorisms, addressing the camera directly as she warns us not to confuse personhood with profession.

Elsewhere, La Barney bitches – enchantingly, of course – about Lord Alfred Douglas and frenemy Gertrude Stein, her terse rocking the outward sign of a mind undimmed by age. It’s difficult not to be blinded by the sheer improbability of the footage; I also found the dreamlike atmosphere, overgrown gardens and palpable presence of spirits put me in mind of Rebecca, or Suddenly, Last Summer. Perhaps we will all wake tomorrow and discover that those patrician tones, august features, dappled drops of sunlight, haunting piano figures and talk of Belgian bells were but a dream. But for now – sleep on, enjoy.

My thanks to Cassandra Langer for alerting me to this treasure.

In a welcome recent phenomenon, gay men in a number of countries who were prosecuted for “gross indecency” in less enlightened times – often with catastrophic and even fatal consequences – have had their convictions overturned in acknowledgement of the injustice of earlier laws (see for example First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s moving apology in the Scottish Parliament last year). But if transgressions can be annulled, might same-sex unions entered into prior to the rise of marriage equality in North America, western Europe, Australia and elsewhere also be recognised?

One hundred years ago today, one such union was solemnised in a ceremony that as far as we know was attended only by the two people in question – both writers, one French and one American. The venue for the wedding of Élisabeth de Gramont and Natalie Clifford Barney was the Hotel de l’Europe et Villa Victoria in the Savoyard spa town of Aix-les-Bains, and the marriage contract was drawn up on the hotel’s letterhead. “Lily” de Gramont, it should be noted, was already married at the time. Her husband was a fellow member of the French aristocracy, and according to Gramont’s friend Marcel Proust he “was violent and led her a life of hell”, causing her to miscarry twice. Gramont had separated from this odious individual six years previously, by which time she had met and fallen in love with Barney. This was around the same time that the American began her renowned Paris salon on the Left Bank, which would continue, on and off, for around six decades. Setting a high bar for romantic gestures, Barney captured Gramont in the prose portrait The Woman Who Lives with Me and had it printed – in an edition of two. “Perhaps she is too limitless to be possessed,” writes Barney. “I fear that this is so, and sometimes I hope it is.”

The marriage contract in her hand sketches a similarly expansive horizon. It is a blazing testament to liberty and self-determination, a choice of freedom over fear, proclaiming a union with “no prejudice, no religion other than feelings, no laws other than desire”. It concludes:

Since the danger of affairs is ever-present and impossible to foresee, one will just have to bring the other back, neither out of revenge, nor to limit the other, but because the union demands it
No other union shall be so strong as this union, nor another joining so tender—nor relationship so lasting
As a token of this promise let us place our ring as wide as the universe around the horizon of the future and of ourselves.
This exclusive ring must be green, shining and unbreakable. And the one I marry shall not be called my wife, nor my slave, nor my spouse, which are sexual terms for fleeting times—but my one, my eternal mate.*

Its explicit acknowledgement of the pair’s other liaisons was both forward-thinking and realistic. Indeed Natalie had already embarked on the most famous partnership in her life, that with painter Romaine Brooks, following affairs of varying duration with the likes of courtesan Liane de Pougy and writer Colette (confused? Here, have a diagram).

The pair waited until after the war to take their honeymoon. Having married in Gramont’s homeland, they enjoyed their lune de miel in Barney’s. And not just anywhere, but Niagara Falls, long a byword for newly wedded bliss. The union made official on 20 June, 1918, repeatedly tested but ultimately resilient, endured until Gramont’s death in 1954.

* from the 2005 article “Elisabeth de Gramont, Natalie Barney’s “eternal mate”” for the South Central Review by Gramont biographer Francesco Rapazzini

Further reading
Circles: Natalie Clifford Barney
Last night I dreamt I went to rue Jacob again
Wild hearts at midnight
Wild hearts in wartime
Romaine Brooks: A Life
Amazons in space
Goodbye Dolly
Salon queen

Such are the peculiarities of this most seasonal of seasons that our rundown of forthcoming titles comes at an indecently brief interval after our last bookish blow-out; this Janus-faced time of year(s) looks back and looks forward and evidently needs something to browse wherever it casts its eyes. Our planned reading for the coming year sees us returning to familiar themes with hopefully enough new stimuli to repel middle-aged stasis.

We begin in Berlin where left-wing activist Rosa Luxemburg was murdered by a reactionary militia during the Spartakus rebellion 100 years ago today, her body dumped in the Landwehr Canal from which it was retrieved only months later. Early on, Luxemburg championed freedom of opinion and warned of the dangers of Russia’s emerging Soviet dictatorship, and the fact that her name continues to adorn public spaces in Berlin while no-one would think of reviving, say, Stalinallee tells us much about her enduring significance. Klaus Gietinger’s Eine Leiche im Landwehrkanal was published a few years ago and now appears in English as The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg (translated by Loren Balhorn) to mark the anniversary of her death.

If that occasion marked the violent baptism of the Weimar era, in 1931 German court reporter Gabriele Tergit provided a vital account of its sickly demise. Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm, her first work of fiction, addressed the machinations of the media itself, its core narrative offering us a largely talent-free singer who is suddenly elevated to ubiquitous renown. That alone makes it highly relatable in the present day, but it is also a brilliantly observed and bitterly funny account of Berlin as the lights started going out. It is great to see NYRB Classics bringing this scandalously forgotten piece of Weimar literature to English-speaking readers as Käsebier Takes Berlin (translated by Sophie Duvernoy).

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven didn’t quite conquer the Kurfürstendamm when she returned to Weimar Berlin toward the end of her life, in fact all she did there was sell newspapers. Now the artist and writer known as the ‘Dada Baroness‘ appears as an elusive presence in Siri Hustvedt’s forthcoming novel Memories of the Future. Another extraordinary, highly eccentric image-maker accedes to the fictional realm in French author Nathalie Léger’s Exposition, published by the wonderful, new-ish press Les Fugitives, which revisits the life of Second Empire self-portraitist Countess de Castiglione and is translated by Amanda DeMarco (who also translated Franz Hessel’s Walking in Berlin).

The task of fictionalising Arthur Cravan, the proto-Dadaist boxer-poet nephew of Oscar Wilde, was something Cravan himself managed quite well, even leaving us with a cliffhanger in the form of his mysterious (presumed) death. But his multiple identities and the irresistibly incongruous set of associations triggered by his existence mean there is still a lot to unpack in his life. Unsurprisingly he has been a subject of recurring academic interest, the latest example being The Fictions of Arthur Cravan by Dafydd Jones. Its cover is a naive image Cravan painted under another pseudonym, Robert Miradique, as explained in the extensive catalogue for last year’s exhibition Arthur Cravan: Maintenant?

Cravan’s uncle is never far from these pages. Despite the forbidding taboo around Wilde in the years following his death, a number of writers who came of age in that era – including Brian Howard, Ronald Firbank and the Sitwells – were drawn to the Yellow Decade they were too young to participate in, even as the 20th century brought new forms that cast the 1890s further into shadow. It was a paradox captured in Martin Green’s Children of the Sun: A Narrative of Decadence in England after 1918 (1976). Now comes Decadence in the Age of Modernism (edited by Kate Hext and Alex Murray) which “argues that the decadent principles and aesthetics of Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne, and others continued to exert a compelling legacy on the next generation of writers, from high modernists and late decadents to writers of the Harlem Renaissance.”

Returning to the source, it is highly surprising to discover that How to Become a Mage is the first English translation of French Decadent mystic Joséphin Péladan (courtesy of K. K. Albert with Jean-Louis de Biasi) in over a hundred years. Interest in Péladan was buoyed by the 2017 Guggenheim exhibition Mystical Symbolism, which explored Péladan’s own late 19th century exhibition series Salon de Rose+Croix, a landmark event of hermetic image-making in the modern era.

In a related vein, Visions of Enchantment: Occultism, Magic and Visual Culture from Fulgur looks at “the fascinating intersections between esotericism and visual culture through a decidedly cross-cultural lens, with topics ranging from talismanic magic and the Renaissance exploration of alchemy, through to the role of magic in modern art and 20th century experimental film.” Meanwhile Hilma af Klint’s moment continues in World Receivers, the catalogue to an exhibition currently to be seen in Munich in which the Swedish artist’s pioneering abstraction appears alongside images by English medium Georgiana Houghton and geometric patterns of compulsive intricacy by Swiss Outsider artist Emma Kunz.

Ilna Ewers-Wunderwald is a name even less likely to excite recognition than the above trio. An exhibition starting in Berlin next month, with accompanying catalogue raisonné from Zagava, aims to bring the early 20th century German illustrator to a wider public. Ewers-Wunderwald touched on occult themes in her work, with some of her best-known images adorning works penned by her husband, the notorious Hanns Heinz Ewers.

In 1898, the dandified bisexual Ewers encountered one of his heroes – Oscar Wilde (see? I told you. He’s everywhere). The setting was the island of Capri, “a wildly permissive haven for people – queer, criminal, sick, marginalized, and simply crazy – who had nowhere else to go” according to the forthcoming A Pagan Light: Dreams of Freedom and Beauty in Capri. They include Flowers favourites Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen, Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, Jean Lorrain, Romaine Brooks and the Marchesa Casati. James’s 2016 book, The Glamour of Strangeness, was a thrilling account of a diverse sextet – including Walter Spies, Isabelle Eberhardt and Maya Deren – and their respective pursuits of fulfilment in distant locations. His trip to Capri promises to be another genius combination of locus and persona and frankly I can’t wait. And an even more localised cultural history of an Italian island location awaits us at the distant horizon of the year in Grand Hotel, Palermo: Ghosts of the Belle Epoque, Suzanne Edwards and Andrew Edwards’ study of the Sicilian hotel where Wagner completed Parsifal and Raymond Roussel finally encountered oblivion in an act that may or may not have been suicide.

Similar uncertainty surrounds the early death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, who published a prodigious amount of Romantic poetry under the name L.E.L. which was highly popular in its time, fell into disfavour, attracted the posthumous scorn of Virginia Woolf and much later praise from Germaine Greer. Lucasta Miller’s new biography of the writer, L.E.L., highlights a life “lived in a blaze of scandal and worship, one of the most famous women of her time, the Romantic Age in London’s 1820s, her life and writing on the ascendency as Byron’s came to an end.” Her rapid fame came with rumours of sexual impropriety, as difficult to verify as the cause of her death in the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana).

Reaching even further back we find two highly contrasting responses to antiquity. In Heliogabalus, or The Anarchist Crowned (translated by Victor Corti), Antonin Artaud considers the legendary depravity of the emperor, ancient Rome’s ultimate teen tearaway, in a book originally published in French in 1934. Artemis Leontis, meanwhile, offers Eva Palmer Sikelianos: A Life in Ruins, the first biography of a woman who grew up in an eccentric and artistic milieu in New York City and later dedicated her life to the revival of ancient Greek culture, including a recreation of the festival of Delphi. She shared her passion with the similarly rigorous Raymond Duncan (brother of Isadora), who would become Eva’s brother-in-law when she married Greek writer Angelos Sikelianos (brother of Duncan’s wife). In the course of her research Leontis discovered a trove of correspondence that illuminated an even earlier liaison of the young Eva Palmer, with Natalie Clifford Barney.

You know me so you know I will have something to say about Wilhelmine Germany and its neglected treasures. This year’s bounty includes a new English translation (by Gary Miller) of Eduard von Keyserling’s pre-WWI masterpiece Waves, from Dedalus. Keyserling is Karl Lagerfeld’s favourite writer, well-respected in Germany, yet he remains criminally ignored in the wider world. He was one of the few German exponents of literary Impressionism, but is almost as well known for his alarming appearance as his exquisite prose. Lovis Corinth’s unsettling 1900 portrait of the author (above) was the subject of Klaus Modick’s recent book Keyserlings Geheimnis. Like Alvin Albright’s attic-bound portrait of Dorian Gray in the 1945 film adaptation of Wilde’s novel (see?!), it suggested not just physical but moral corruption as well; Keyserling was in the advanced stages of syphilis.

When translating Magnus Hirschfeld’s Berlin’s Third Sex, one of the many things that struck me was how utterly familiar the sexual and romantic practices of early 20th century Germany seemed. For instance – Hirschfeld describes a telegraph hook-up service by which subscribers could summon temporary companions corresponding to their fetishes and other preferences. So, basically Grindr over 100 years ahead of time. In Love at Last Sight, Tyler Carrington explores the technologically advanced means by which the lonesome and horny found like-minded strangers in Wilhelmine Berlin. This year will also highlight the visual sophistication of the era in Friedrich Nietzsche and the Artists of the New Weimar, based on an exhibition in Ottawa this year that examines the philosopher’s impact on art, and Constructing Imperial Berlin: Photography and the Metropolis by Miriam Paeslack, which captures the German capital at its most self-confident.

Finally, 15 January also marks the day on which this nonchalant chap – Austrian writer Hermann Bahr – died, in 1934. Bahr is interesting for more reasons than I can list, not least his crucial role in the cultural hothouse of fin-de-siècle Vienna, his championing of new forms in German-speaking Europe and his status as a catalyst of Modernism. Best known for drama (both as a critic and a creator), secondarily as a writer of transgressive prose, it was one of his non-fiction works that attracted my attention. It is my next translation for Rixdorf Editions and will appear later in the year.

Antisemitism, originally published in Germany in 1894, finds Bahr setting out to examine modern manifestations of an ancient hatred by interviewing the great and good. It was an extremely innovative approach; the word (and concept) “interview” had only just been adopted in German, and Bahr’s broad focus – talking to writers, politicians and others in Germany, France, Britain, Belgium and beyond – suggested that antisemitism was a pan-European problem that required a pan-European solution (Bahr later referred hopefully to the idea of a “United States of Europe”). His respondents included Social Democrat patriarch August Bebel, spiritual leader Annie Besant, French writer Alphonse Daudet and German scientific polymath Ernst Haeckel. Bahr’s survey is by no means an echo chamber, with his interviewees widely distributed across a spectrum of opinion from philosemitism to extreme prejudice.

Once again, so much here seems modern, not least the susceptibility of sections of the public to clueless, bigoted loudmouths. Antisemitism was nearing its pre-Nazi zenith, a rising political force in Germany and a major disruptive power in France which was about to descend into the rancour of the Dreyfus Affair. What is particularly striking is the number of well-meaning respondents who predicted that if everyone just ignored it, antisemitism would simply burn out and disappear. And how well did that turn out? It would be unfair to confront figures of the past with their lack of clairvoyance, but nor can we ignore this most glaring lesson from history: Don’t. Fuck. With. Fascists.

***

So that is our self-imposed lot, but there are still more titles that I should like to mention briefly; for example, In the Stillness of Marble, a “tragic and personal, visionary and transgressive” text by troubled Chilean writer Teresa Wilms Montt. The mysteries of the Czech capital reveal themselves to Surrealist Vítězslav Nezval in A Prague Flâneur (Twisted Spoon, translated by Jed Slast), while if you have five hundred free-falling British pounds burning a hole in your backstop you can treat yourself to the mammoth three-volume International Encyclopedia of Surrealism. And if you want to go full coffee table there’s John Richardson: At Home, highlighting the big-ticket boho interiors of the collector and Picasso biographer I will always remember as author of the hilariously snarky Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters.

OK, now I feel like I’m talking over the orchestra at the Oscars. But there’s more! The Kindness of Strangers by blacklisted emigré Salka Viertel, buddy of Greta Garbo! Edythe Haber’s Teffi: A Life of Letters and Laughter about a bizarrely forgotten Russian writer who rejected Rasputin and lived to tell the tale! My agent whose name I just forgot! A catalogue of an exhibition covering the gloriously queer life of Archduke Ludwig Viktor! The Caledonian cultural miscellany of Kirsten Norrie’s Scottish Lost Boys!

*crescendo, indistinct shouting, something about Oscar Wilde*