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Chapter One
The Making of an Expatriate
Sapphists had no doubt lived in Bliss, Utah, before. Our town certainly had more than its fair share of spinsters and maiden aunts. Their suspiciously private lives fascinated me. As a child, I used to spy on them between the perfectly regular slats of their picket fences. But it was a big fat waste of time.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, Sappho's daughters were painfully aware that theirs was the love that dared not speak its name. Even the most worldly women's magazines, like Vanity Fair and Harper's Monthly , balked at any mention of female sexuality, let alone sapphism. Their most daring features were corset ads.
Local housewives censored these ads, snipping them out with razor-sharp sewing scissors before letting their daughters read suitable articles devoted to etiquette and pioneering discoveries in domestic science. My mother was more fashionable, though no less upright. So she left our magazines intact, corsets and all. She was, in a word, straitlaced.
I got the message. Women were expected to confine their sexual desires within rib-cracking whalebone corsets. These instruments of torture were hidden, of course, under voluminous skirts that made bondage look proper, even dainty.
On some profound and inarticulate level, I think my poor dear mother suspected there was something different and more than a little dangerous about me from the start. I could tell, because she was even stricter with me than with my sisters, squelching every impulse except to grin and bear children. Intuitively, she knew that the sooner I started cinching in my errant tendencies, the better.
Show me a corset laced dangerously tight, and I'll show you a sapphist turning blue in the face, struggling to contain her bulging desires. With the clairvoyance of a child, I knew I had to escape. The alternative was to spend my life in a perpetual swoon, sniffing enough smelling salts to fill the Great Salt Lake.
Young girls in America's vast deserts were trained to aspire to the three P's, our most sacred Protestant virtues: propagation, propriety, and patent leather. As I look back, I realize the only real change in Bliss during the first quarter of the century was to add Prohibition to this hierarchy of Middle-American virtues. Outside of the realm of home appliances, true-blue westerners hate progress.
And we weren't even Protestant, just a family of stranded Catholics trying to hold on to a few decent bloody rituals in a town whose spirituality consisted of an endless round of pancake feeds. If there was one religious concept I really grasped while growing up, it was the notion of spending an eternity in hell. By the age of eighteen, when I finally left permanently to attend college at Radcliffe, I was a damned expert on the subject. The whole town mourned my defection to East Coast liberalism.
They thought I was rebelling. Really, I was just trying to survive. Growing up with all that well-intentioned hick morality was like being forcibly fed through the nose like the passivist suffragettes of the Great War. By the time I escaped to Radcliffe in 1918, I was starving for contact with what the dictionary at school called inverts . I was very shy in those days, so it took months for me to actually engage in a conversation with the real article. I shouldn't imply that there were no sapphists at Radcliffe. Of course there were. It was, after all, Gertrude Stein's alma mater. I used to watch them as they traipsed across campus as if they owned the place. In Bliss I reckon we would have tried to stuff the whole lot of them into one giant collective corset.
During the War, most of the sapphists still wore their hair long, tamed into prim buns that barely camouflaged the indecorous, swaggering way they held their heads. But though they masqueraded as genteel young ladies, they looked more like freight trains in dresses. Quite frankly, they scared the hell out of me.
Let's face it. The term mannish woman wasn't just a pejorative coined by sexologists. The inverts at Radcliffe were, in fact, mannish women. I was hopelessly confused, alternately titillated and repelled. It took me a while to understand that the masculine facade of inversion was just a clever disguise for female desire.
Despite my sexual ambivalence (so typical, it turns out, among virgins), I did finally manage to lose my hymen (which I didn't know I had until I lost it). But my heart wasn't in it. I simply chose the least mannish invert on campus and pretended to be in love with her.
In my heart of hearts I was dreaming of the sapphists I had become obsessed with in Variety , the highbrow magazine version of the syndicated newspaper gossip columns we all read at Radcliffe. We hung onto each delectable detail like survivors reading messages in bottles on distant deserted islands. Of course Variety never came right out and said Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas were homosexuals. But we could read between the lines. Basking in every minute description of Natalie Barney's soirées, even I knew that the word salon was just a euphemism for sapphic orgies.
In the glamorous scenarios that unfolded in my mind's eye, none of the Parisian sapphists were mannish, with the obvious exception of Gertrude Stein. But her genius, I told myself, excused her masculine proclivities. In the Paris of my dreams, all the femmes were both frilly and fatale.
Imagine my excitement when my parents finally agreed to fund a summer trip to France. European tours were actually standard at Radcliffe. Rich daddies were wont to give this one last lavish gift to fond daughters before they tied the knot with some blue-blooded bachelor upon graduation. Needless to say, I didn't really fit this profile, if only because my father was a cattle-rancher rather than a gentleman, a graduate of the potato famine rather than Harvard. But the price of beef must have skyrocketed that year, or someone discovered a cure for hoof-and-mouth disease, because my envelope on the tree that Christmas contained a promissory note announcing my parents' intention to foot the bill for my passage across the Atlantic to join the annual Radcliffe Art History pilgrimage to the Louvre.
Of course my family couldn't really afford it. My sister must have gone months without Saturday afternoon matinees at the brandnew movie palace. And I had visions of my Mom selling her pet pig to pay for second class rather than steerage. There was my family in Utah deprived and maybe even embarrassed, already the only household in a fifty-mile radius without an electric Victrola, because of my East Coast pretensions. And here I was gallivanting around Europe like some nouveau-riche heiress in a Henry James novel. Who was I kidding?
Imagine how guilty I felt, especially since I was misrepresenting my motives. First of all, I was much more interested in the Montmartre of Picasso, Matisse, and Braque than in the Rembrandts and Caravaggios in the Louvre. But more to the point, my real reason for traveling to France was not to witness Cubism and Fauvism firsthand but to see if it were really true that sapphists had colonized Paris. Unbeknownst to them, my poor parents were eating cube steaks instead of T-bones in order to fund my research into avant-garde sexuality.
Don't get me wrong. I loved the Louvre as much as all the other Radcliffe girls, with the possible exception of Martha Howell, who actually fainted in front of the Mona Lisa. But I also snuck off to renegade gallery exhibitions on the Left Bank and auctions on Montmartre. Parisian sapphists were decidedly artsy-fartsy, and there was no telling who might show up at even the most obscure atelier in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Maybe even the dashing painter Romaine Brooks herself. I had studied her photographs assiduously and assumed I could identify her by her hat alone--a bowler, a derby, or maybe even a top hat at more formal affairs.
Once, at a private showing I snuck into on Montparnasse, I could have sworn I spotted Lily de Gramont, the Duchess de Clermont-Tonnerre, across the gallery, perusing Head of a Young Girl with Upswept Hair . Her leopard pillbox gave her away, or so I thought. But by the time I wove my way through the throngs of gawkers to the Matisse in question, she had vanished.
It got to the point where my obsession proved embarrassing. When I was sure that my Radcliffe buddies were going somewhere particularly unpromising (what sapphist in her right mind would be caught dead shopping for seam stockings at Les Halles, for example?), I would feign a headache or feminine indisposition. My friends looked at me queerly. I had never been particularly given to illness. Like most westerners I had the constitution of a span of oxen. But finally they just gave up, regretting my inclination to rot in my hotel room. Or so they thought.
Almost before their tracks cooled, I was off stalking my prey. While the others went to La Comédie Française, I prowled the streets and gardens where I had read, in Variety and other chichi gossip columns, that the likes of Gertrude Stein and Natalie Barney took their daily constitutionals.
The Bois de Boulogne was my most frequent destination. There, it was rumored, one could catch a glimpse of a lone equestrienne on the horizon, her magnificent blond mane blowing in the wake of her galloping steed. It was none other than the Amazon, Natalie Barney herself. The image of the Amazon reining in her stallion with one hand as she whipped him over hedge after hedge with the other, was indelibly printed on my imagination. And I had yet to even lay eyes on her.
I had heard that Stein and Barney were rivals, vying publicly for the title of Paris's most influential salonnière. But I cast them as clandestine friends, maybe even lovers. In my mind's eye, they took long walks together, engaging in endless tête-à-têtes that determined the aesthetic future of the avant-garde.
For those two weeks in Paris, I was an habituée of the soft, romantic recesses of secret gardens. And though the Bois failed to produce real live sapphists, I saw any number of them like mirages in the distance, walking arm-in-arm and even beckoning to me as dusk fell and my fantasies took wing.
When it became too dark to make out even the figures in my own dreams, I proceeded to Café des Deux-Magots or le Dôme where I had heard tell that the writer Djuna Barnes sat on countless gray days, drowning her sorrows with Côtes du Rhône in the wake of yet another betrayal by her infamous lover, Thelma Wood. Rumor had it that Thelma had almost as many notches on her belt as Natalie Barney, who held the uncontested record for romancing more women than any other living soul in all of Europe, male or female, French courtesans not excluded.
I would have done anything to meet just one of their cast-off lovers, let alone gain access to Natalie Barney's salon. There, women purportedly took turns playing sexual musical chairs in her renowned Temple of Love. But on that, my first visit to Paris, I was left high and dry, with nothing more substantial than my fantasies to take back as souvenirs to Cambridge.
Disappointed, but not defeated, I vowed that I would return. Dreams of expatriation made me impatient to finish my degree. It wasn't that I didn't like Radcliffe. It was just that Paris had made me unfit for ordinary college fare. Boston seemed little better than Bliss in comparison with the city of love.
I took a girlfriend to pass the time--a woman named May whose claim to fame was that her uncle, a prominent American art dealer, had once attended Gertrude Stein's salon with his niece in tow. In fact, May's most appealing quality was that she indulged me by reminiscing about that one fateful night at 27 rue de Fleurus. To this day I still feel a little guilty about my relationship with May. I was so intent on finishing my degree and launching into my fantasy life as an expatriate, I was grotesquely inattentive. The last I heard, May was married with four kids. I've always felt vaguely responsible for her defection to heterosexuality, as if I could have had such a profound effect on a woman I treated like a hobby.
No matter where I went, or what I did, the memory of Paris tugged relentlessly at my imagination. Even in Bliss, when I went home to visit my family for the holidays, my mind wandered off, crossing the Rockies, the plains, the watery expanses of the high seas to Paris, the sapphic oasis beyond the desert that surrounded me.
Once, I made the mistake of mentioning moving to Paris to my mother. She crossed herself precipitously, as if to ward off temptation. Thereafter, I kept my dreams of expatriation to myself.
I desperately wanted to leave everything American behind me. I lived for the day when I could move to Paris, realizing only much later that I was cultivating the terrible habit of squandering the present, dreaming of elusive and seductive futures in typical Romantic fashion.
Truth be told, it took me a few years to finally get back to Europe. Unlike the Gertrude Steins and Natalie Barneys of the world, I didn't have the legacy that usually goes along with expatriation. After the War, the franc outdistanced the dollar by a long shot, and living in Paris was actually more economical for them. My dream was their expediency. But then expatriation isn't just about saving money, especially since homosexuality is grounds for confinement, and not just in those corsets I was talking about. In the salons of Paris, we were told, sapphists roamed free, unmolested except by each other.
After graduating from Radcliffe with a degree in Art History, I entered the field of journalism like Janet Flanner and Djuna Barnes before me, convinced by their example that the only way for a poor woman to travel was to make it her profession. I don't mean to sound conceited by including myself in their prodigious company; all we really had in common in this case was our poverty. After fighting in the trenches of New York City as a cub reporter, I finally established myself sufficiently as an art critic to land a job as a foreign correspondent. In 1925, I embarked on my real life as an expatriate.
Miss Henrietta Adams
69 Hudson Street
New York, N.Y.
February 28, 1925
Dear Miss Adams:
We are pleased to announce that after painstaking deliberation our Board of Editors has approved your proposal for a column covering the American involvement in the avant-garde art movement in Paris, France. You are authorized to book your passage immediately with a view to preparing your first submission to be included in the June issue of En Vogue. We suggest the S. S. Victorian leaving New York on March 18. Needless to say, this and all arrangements essential to your travel and lodging will be reimbursed by the magazine immediately upon receipt of your expense account. Congratulations! We are thrilled to have you on board and trust that your timely submissions will add tremendous breadth to our already unparalleled coverage of the American arts.
Sincerely,
Irving P. Dickey
Senior Editor
cc: Board of Editors
En Vogue
Excerpted from AN AMERICAN IN PARIS by Margaret Vandenburg. Copyright © 2000 by Margaret Vandenburg. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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