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CHAPTER 1
Sapphic Performances
In the summer of 1900, Eva Palmer was reading the lines of Sappho in the company of her friends Renée Vivien and Natalie Clifford Barney, preparing for a series of Sapphic performances in Bar Harbor, a summer island resort on Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine. Of the three women, Barney and Vivien (who was later christened, in a portrait, "Sapho 1900") are well known as formative members of a Paris-based literary subculture of self-described women lovers, or "Sapphics." In a period that scholars have identified as "pivotal" in delineating modern lesbian identity, they interwove the fragmented texts of Sappho in their life and work, making the archaic Greek poet Sappho of Lesbos the quintessential figure of female same-sex desire and Sapphism, or lesbianism. They appear in the history of gay and lesbian sexuality as the women who contributed substantially to the turn-of-the-century decadent rewriting of Baudelaire's lexicon of the sexualized woman.
Eva Palmer is largely absent from this history. She has made cameo appearances as the "pre-Raphaelite" beauty with "the most miraculous long red hair" who performed in two of Barney's garden theatricals in Paris. Yet Eva's correspondence, along with such sources as photographs and newspaper coverage, indicate that she participated in many more performances. From 1900 to the summer of 1907, the years when she moved with Barney between the United States and Paris, she developed a performance style that complemented the poetic language of Vivien and Barney by implicating Sappho in the practice of modern life. Eva's acts helped transform the fragmented Sapphic poetic corpus into a new way of thinking and creating, before her differences with Barney propelled her to move to Greece to live a different version of the Sapphic life.
"Implicate" is a good word to think with as I begin to track Eva's involvement with Sappho's poetry. The word is rich in associations of braiding, twisting, weaving, and folding in its Greek and Latin roots ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], to weave; [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], lock or braid of hair; [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], tentacle; plico, to fold; and plecto, to fold, wind, coil, wreath). It calls up the body of the reader together with her mind. To study how Eva's reading of Sappho "implicated" or involved her in Sappho's poetic corpus on both a physical and literary level, I pay attention to Eva's hair, dress, and gestures; the photographs for which she posed; the letters she wrote; and the ways in which these different media delivered the pain and pleasure of Sappho's effects. I look at how she folded Sappho's extant words into her life, simultaneously living through her readings of Sappho and shaping Sappho's meaning through her life to turn her life of art into an art of life.
THE IMPLICATIONS OF READING SAPPHO
Signs of Eva's involvement with Sappho's poetry are subtly coded in an early twentieth-century photograph (figure 1.1). Eva, viewed in profile, is seated in a leather, cushioned chair. She holds a book upright on her lap, and a wall of books appears in the background to her left. She is elegantly dressed, with a white fur stole falling over her white lace dress, and her hair loosely braided and collected in a low chignon. While the picture represents an upper-class white American woman reading in a Victorian home study, the Greek prototype is suggested by the hair. The hair's styling combines with the whiteness of the dress to give a feeling of being Greek. This elusive Greekness then transfers to the reading pose. Eva is holding the book as if it were a scroll. She is posing as both a woman reading Greek and a Greek woman reading.
The pointedly Sapphic connections appear when the photo is set next to a line-drawn rendering of an ancient female reader painted on a fifth-century Attic red-figure vase (figure 1.2). At the turn of the century, Eva would not have seen the original vase, as it is displayed in the Greek National Archaeological Museum, and she did not travel to Greece before 1906. But she would have seen the line drawing reproduced in several books in the late nineteenth century. A likely source was Long Ago, a collection of Sappho-inspired poems with explicit references to erotic attachments between women, published under the pseudonym of "Michael Field" by Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who were aunt and niece as well as lovers. Eva, Renée Vivien, or Natalie Barney would likely have owned a copy of the 1889 edition, which included the line drawing in its front matter. The three women sought out books with references to Sappho. Might Eva be holding this book (which, at 10 cm × 21 cm, is just about the right size) in the photograph?
In the drawing, a seated woman, also in profile, directs her eyes downward to a scroll held upright on her lap, while a lyre is handed to her by a standing figure. Beneath the lyre, the first three letters of Sappho's name, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], form the arc of the reader's line of vision. What does the name of Sappho identify: the woman reading, or the author of the scroll she is reading? Is this an image of Sappho or of a woman reading Sappho? It is impossible to decide. This is just one of the drawing's many gaps, one of the troublesome lacunae of lost materials, context, and meaning. The photograph represents Eva's performance of the image of the woman reading under the name of Sappho — a performance that revitalized the ancient image by playing with its ambiguities. Eva holds a book as if it were a scroll, like the ancient woman reading. The lines of her body, and even the table with the vase and flowers in the foreground, perfectly reflect the shape of the drawn figure. The table cuts the view of Eva's lower limbs exactly where the ancient artifact is broken, where a piece of plain terra-cotta fills in the empty space. The photograph makes us see the negative space as a table. Thus it draws attention not only to the fragmented image but also to the many latent possibilities offered by the image. Eva might be playing the role of Sappho, or of a woman reading Sappho, or she might be making herself into a modern work of art in imitation of the vase painting, or she might be codifying her same-sex eroticism. These are all possible readings.
The play of the photograph with a classical image of Sappho was not an obscure allusion. The name of Sappho was known to people in the high society in which Eva traveled: wealthy vacationers such as the J. Pierpont Morgans, Pulitzers, George Vanderbilts, and Barneys, who all had homes in Bar Harbor. They were ferried from the mainland to Mount Desert Island on a steamboat improbably called the S. S. Sappho. And when, in the previous spring, Barney had published Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes (Some portrait-sonnets of women), a book of traditional sonnets dedicated to her female lovers (whose identities she hid behind initials such as "P.M.T." for Pauline Tarn, aka Renée Vivien, and "L." for Liane de Pougy), a tabloid article in her hometown of Washington, DC, exposed the same-sex love interest of the book with an article entitled "Sappho Sings in Washington."
What connotations did Sappho have for Eva and her friends and all those wealthy Americans? "Sappho" is the proper name attached to a collection of fragments of poetry dating from 630 to 570 BCE. In antiquity, Sappho was nearly as legendary as Homer. Her name identified an exceptional poet of verse in Aeolic Greek who happened to be a woman from the island of Lesbos. So great was her poetry and so symbolic was her female gender that the ancients called her the tenth Muse. Yet little is known about her life. Contradictory stories circulated among ancient Greeks and Romans, who drew on her poetry to shape her biography and introduced new legends into her corpus. Some said she was a good lyre player, daughter, sister, wife of a rich man, mother, and homemaker. Others featured her unrequited love for a man named Phaon, which sent her hurling in a suicidal leap from the White Rocks, a high promontory on the island of Leukas. Still others, associating her with a community of women on Lesbos, wondered if she wasn't " [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]" (in love with women), hence " [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ... [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]" (irregular in her ways). She became "mascula autem Saffo [masculine Sappho] either because she is famous for her poetry, in which men more often excel, or because she is maligned as a tribas [a woman who has sex with another woman]."
Everything having to do with the transmission of Sappho is elusive to the point of being powerfully suggestive. No book of her poetry survives. Indeed, hardly a whole poem is extant. Counted together, Sappho's poetry totals just over two hundred remaining fragments, preserved as passages quoted by ancient authors and on scraps of papyrus recovered from trash heaps at Oxyrhynchus, Egypt. Paradoxically, the fragmentary nature of the work and critical attention to the eroticism of her poetry have kept Sappho's name in circulation. In modern times, especially in the nineteenth century, the fragility of Sappho's words and reputation encouraged new uses of Sappho's name and the place name Lesbos. Baudelaire's usage was especially transformative: he cast Sappho as the muse of his decadent worldview, and his poem "Lesbos" (1857) made Lesbos, Sappho's supposed homeland, the "Mother of Greek delights" and generated "lesbians," female companions of the "virile" Sappho, on the island of Lesbos, who looked at each other with non-procreative sexual longing. Meanwhile Sappho became the Victorian figure of the poetess, denoting femininity, sentimentality, and the inevitable fall into obscurity of the female poetic voice. It has been said that Baudelaire invented the "lesbian" Sappho in the 1850s; British poet Algernon Swinburne imported her to Victorian England in the 1860s; H. T. Wharton assembled her corpus and translated it in equivocating ways in the 1880s; and Pierre Louÿs, with his literary spoof Songs of Bilitis (1894), a collection of female same-sex erotic poetry supposedly written by a companion of Sappho, renewed the shock value of the name of Sappho in fin de siècle Paris.
It is within this context that Eva, in the company of Barney and Vivien in Bar Harbor, was posing for a picture after an image identified with Sappho. I found the photo more than one hundred years later amid boxes of Natalie Barney's things deposited with the papers of Barney's mother, Alice Pike Barney, in the Smithsonian Archives. It offered a first glimpse of how Eva was reading Sappho's fragments in 1900: how she was animating those fragments with her body, costumes, and props to perform a new kind of art. The photograph she created after the line drawing of the ancient painting had several layers of meaning. People uninitiated in the secrets of Sappho's modern reception probably missed the reference to Sappho entirely. They saw just a picture of Eva reading. For Eva's female companions, however, who saw the photo from a standpoint of their growing intimacy and developing Greek literacy, Eva's pose drew lines of affiliation with the absent Sappho, adopting her as a powerful Greek prototype for living and making twentieth-century art. Indeed, her pose was so deeply implicated in their reading of Sappho's fragments that it is impossible to tell where the fragments ended and Eva's body and art began.
"OLD THINGS ARE BECOMING NEW"
But what was Greece to Eva? By what journey of intellect and desire had she come to embrace this particular Greek prototype?
A notion that the new world found creative ground in old things was integral to Eva's nineteenth-century upbringing. It aligned with the progressive ideas of her parents, both from prominent American families and advocates of well-reasoned social and political change to counter the effects of industrialization. Her mother, Catherine Amory Bennett, a member of the Amory family descended from Salem merchants and part of Boston's traditional upper class, was a classically trained pianist who dedicated herself to the arts and progressive causes such as women's suffrage. She gathered musicians in the family home to play in her small orchestra or to sing. Operatic divas Nellie Melba, Lillian Nordica, Emma Eames, Marcella Sembrich, and especially Emma Calvé were near the hearts of Eva and her siblings. Eva's father, Courtlandt, claimed he was descended from a knighted crusader and an ancestor who came over on the Mayflower.
Trained as a lawyer at Columbia Law School, he spent his days "investigat[ing] for himself the questions, the problems, the mysteries of life. ... No error could be old enough, popular, plausible, or profitable enough, to bribe his judgment or to keep his conscience still." When he purchased a stake in Gramercy Park School and Tool-House (also known as the Von Taube School, after its originator and director, G. Von Taube), he supported its "new education" model of self-directed learning harmoniously combining theoretical and practical learning to prepare students for a business or scientific course. Yet he also directed pupils to study "Greek, French, German and English systems of philosophy, following his motto, "old things are passing away; behold, old things are becoming new." This was his willful misreading of the passage in 2 Corinthians 5:17 that reads "all things are become new."
Old Greek things were deeply ingrained in the look and feel of the world that these Mayflower descendants had inherited. Greece entered America (as it did Germany and Britain) as a country of the imagination, a special locus of aesthetic and intellectual origins, practically from the country's founding moments. Initially the founders filtered Greece into American self-governance through the guise of Roman republicanism, considered a more congenial model than Athens's direct democracy.
Then, around the turn of the nineteenth century and coinciding with the receding of fears of the "perils of democracy," American elites began drawing visible lines of affiliation that filled the gap between the new world and ancient Greece through a variety of Greek "revivals." "Greek revival" architecture, for example, was seen first in the Bank of Philadelphia (Benjamin Harry Latrobe, 1798–1801) and quite creatively in the capitol building in Washington (Latrobe, 1803–17, and Charles Bulfinch, 1818–26), then in an increasing number of banks, universities, churches, town halls, plantation houses, and even small urban homes and farmhouses across the expanding nation, until it became known as the "national style" of architecture in the United States. The naming of more than one hundred American towns after cities in ancient Greek literature (Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, Delphi, Troy, Olympia) and even after a hero of the Greek rebellion against the Ottoman Empire (1821–28) (Ypsilanti) from the early 1820s through the 1850s expressed both attention to ancient Greek prototypes and sympathy for modern Greek independence, another spectacular materialization of the Greek idea in which American philhellenes participated.
Eva's parents and then her stepfather, Dr. Robert Abbe, themselves enacted Greek ideas on a daily basis. A case in point is a story Eva told about her maternal grandfather at his deathbed. His attending physician was Dr. Abbe, the man who would marry Eva's mother after her father's sudden death from peritonitis in 1888. An accomplished surgeon with strongtraining in Greek and Latin and a serious interest in archaeology, Abbe knew of his patient's love of ancient Greek. When he saw that the old man was "sinking into the last lethargy," Abbe "started reciting a Pindaric Ode" in order to gain time so that the patient's daughter Catherine could arrive to say her last good-byes. The dying man "recovered consciousness and finished the passage." Many years later, Eva's mother, now married to Dr. Abbe, worked with a small group in Bar Harbor to construct a building of the arts that was "severely classic" in design. The building opened its doors on Saturday, July 13, 1907, two months before Eva would return from Greece to introduce her mother and stepfather to Angelos Sikelianos. According to one eyewitness to the building's opening, "its red-tiled roof, its marshaled columns, and its fine proportions" offered not just "a glimpse of some forgotten Grecian temple" but also "echoes of a shepherd's pipe" and "the flitting passage of a flowing robe."
Such enactments confirmed the sense that America was rooted in Greek culture. Like Percy Bysshe Shelley's Britons, Americans were "all Greeks" when they moved in and out of Greek revival buildings designed to inspire "the highest aesthetic and intellectual stimulation." They were "all Greeks" when they decorated their homes using architectural pattern books with Greek-inspired designs. They were "all Greeks" when they played parlor games posing as Greek deities or joined Greek-lettered fraternities. They were "all Greeks" when they suffered diseases with Greek-inspired names and participated in democratic political processes.
A shift in the distribution of Greek learning across gender divisions impressed itself on Eva's youth. She was born into a world in which elite American males studied Greek sources as a "prerequisite for entry into public life," while their female counterparts, excluded from participation in governance, found ways to study Greek informally. Over time and coinciding with her coming of age in the late 1800s, changes in the value given to Greek learning broadened its social reach. Hellenism was proposed as an antidote to the crude anti-intellectualism of industrial society. It became a "platform for the perfection of the inner self." Thus imitation of the Greeks moved from elite domains of scholarship and governance to popular spheres such as athletics — for example, when the American team competed successfully, dominating the gold medal tally in the first international revival of the Olympic Games, held in Athens in 1896. Imitation of Greek prototypes became a private occupation too when figures such as the tragic heroine Antigone were upheld as good models for women of the rising middle class.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Eva Palmer Sikelianos"
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