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

One of the interesting things about writing this blog – apart from finding new candidates, as yesterday – has been how it reveals connections between apparently disparate subjects. Numerous internal links testify to the myriad inheritances and borrowings from one unique individual to another. It’s as if these strange flowers were seeking out roots and branches to construct a family tree for themselves, one based not on blood but on sensibility. Perhaps nowhere is this network of elective affinities as crowded as around Marchesa Casati; once you start mapping the singular entities who moulded her and others who in turn claim her as an inspiration you end up with a pretty busy whiteboard.

For those who came in late, the marchesa, born Luisa Amman in Milan on this day in 1881, inherited a lorry-load of lire from her industrialist father and married the Marchese Casati in 1900. Not long afterwards she began a long affair with the poet Gabriele d’Annunzio, and it was around this time the Marchesa Casati of legend was born. She comes down to us as a serial provocateuse in a series of surreal vignettes; naked under a fur coat walking cheetahs on jewel-studded leashes, attended by black servants painted gold, wearing a necklace of live snakes to a ball. She burnt through her fortune, and then some, and retreated to London where she lived in modest circumstances until her death in 1957.

Casati as Sissi (Elisabeth of Austria) by Man Ray

Casati claimed – not without justification – to be her own work of art, but it was a work with its own set of influences. Her crepuscular glamour, for instance, owed much to the morbidity of Elisabeth of Austria and her cousin Ludwig II of Bavaria. She was similarly entranced by the unsurpassed narcissism of the Countess de Castiglione, and vied with Robert de Montesquiou as the countess’s posthumous BFF.

Among the numerous artists she sought out to portray her (of whom more tomorrow), there were a number of kindred spirits; suffice it here to mention Augustus John and Romaine Brooks, both renowned portraitists, who were intrigued by the contrast of flame-hued hair and cadaverous pallor. “Luisa Casati should be shot, stuffed and displayed in a glass case,” said John (which is more or less what she did; at least, she commissioned a wax effigy of herself). Alastair, himself no stranger to outlandish self-presentation, both fascinated and was fascinated by the marchesa, who hosted exhibitions of his sulphurous illustrations – some of which bore her features.

If Casati was exotic to the Continentals, she was positively alien to the bewildered English. Not surprisingly it was the gay aesthetes who flocked to her, including Ronald Firbank and Lord Berners. Collector and historian Harold Acton was bewitched even before meeting the marchesa; at prep school, when other boys showed pictures of their mothers, he apparently produced a reproduction of the famous Boldini portrait. Quentin Crisp encountered her towards the end and saw a reflection of himself, “a being of her own invention – not one of any particular sex or time or size or shape.”

Another witness to Casati’s decline was Philippe Jullian, the French archivist of aesthetic arcana, who continued to rhapsodise about her dark magic after her death, perhaps seeing in her an incarnation of the mad-eyed, murderous heroines depicted by the fin-de-siècle Decadent artists whose work he also championed. He was almost a lone voice until the publication of the biography Infinite Variety in 1999, which re-introduced Casati to society and became something of a standard text for fashion historians. Since then her name appears regularly when designers like Karl Lagerfeld and John Galliano, and lesser, less original talents, raid the dress-up box of spirited personae. “Oh it’s all going to be so very Casati this season” is the kind of airy, non-committal mission statement with just enough going on to appear substantial.

Casati’s public appearances were essentially haute couture shows in miniature – profligate, other-worldly, scandalous, ridiculous. But what would the Marchesa herself make of those now invoking her name, just as she once invoked Sissi and Castiglione? Casati the narcissist would probably relish the attention, but Casati the arch-individualist would disdain the herd mentality of fashionistas. But then that’s one of the drawbacks of being dead – you no longer get to choose whose muse you’re going to be.

So after yesterday’s look at Luisa Casati’s heirs and ancestors, today a brisk stroll through various representations of her, most of them commissioned by the marchesa herself.

Actually there was a time when you (or rather, she) really could visit a gallery full of such images. Casati’s cult of her own personality led her to fill a pavilion of the Palais Rose (which she had bought off the similarly self-glorifying Robert de Montesquiou) with her likeness as recorded by dozens of artists.

Never conventionally beautiful, Casati exaggerated her physical quirks to present a wraith-like mask to the world which proved irresistible to artists and she was depicted with a frequency normally reserved for crowned heads. From the classic Boldini portrait — in which the artist is still struggling to assimilate her into an orthodox Edwardian ideal — to the bold photographic experiments of Man Ray, Casati was the most compelling subject of the first half of the 20th century.

Images below by Giovanni Boldini, Augustus John, Romaine Brooks, Alberto Martini, Man Ray, Kees van Dongen.

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!]

Anyone who knows Romaine Brooks‘ work solely through her portraits may well be surprised by these drawings, all of which were executed in 1930. Where the portraits looked for some reflection of the artist’s own pain in the faces of her distinguished avant-garde circle, these pencil works concentrate on archetypes; common to both approaches is a deep pessimism about human relations. Brooks died in 1970 just as these drawings were being prepared for exhibition at the Smithsonian.

Further reading
Grey eminence
Salon queen

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

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

For rigorous elegance and fuss-free chic you really can’t go past Left Bank Lesbohemia*. Case in point: American painter Romaine Brooks, who died on this day in 1970. She was just one of an amazing group of women in the first half of the 20th century born to or drawn to the liberated atmosphere of France, “that country to which lesbianism is what cricket is to England”**. Four of the studies below are by Man Ray, which I only discovered recently***, along with a pair from a sitting with Carl Van Vechten (seriously, who did he not shoot in that era?)

* with thanks to John
** with thanks to Quentin Crisp
*** with thanks to butterscotchclouds

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)

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

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.

Another postcard from Naples: here we’re looking across the bay to Capri. A place of outsized significance in the atlas of Strange Flowers, it is the island where Evan Morgan encountered Denham Fouts, a stopping-off point for Jean Lorrain, the scene of Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach‘s last years, the short-lived abode of the Marchesa Casati, a place scandalised by Jacques Adelswärd-Fersen and (briefly) the Reverend Julian Henshaw, and one-time home to artist Romaine Brooks, who died on this day in 1970. For more background, read this fascinating post by historian Rachel Hope Cleves describing her encounter with Capri and its illustrious ghosts.

For me, though, despite the temptingly Brooksian palette of the windy, unsettled day, it was not to be. Time was short and I didn’t make it off the mainland. There will always be another time. Won’t there?

Happy 2016!

It’s usually about this point in the new year that I offer a rundown of interesting books appearing in the coming months. That’s up soon, but before that I wanted to look at a title which came out in September which I know will appeal to many of you, one that deals with one of the 20th century’s most intriguing and – as it turns out – misunderstood artists.

Romaine Brooks was born in 1874 to wealthy American parents in Rome, grew up largely in the US and spent much of her adult life in France, although she returned to Italy as a student and later during the Second World War. Her artistic career coincided with the first great flowering of Modernism, but her oeuvre, consisting primarily of portraits rendered in a signature grey palette, had few formal or temperamental points of intersection with the movement. She was one of a number of remarkable women, many of them American, to make the Left Bank of Paris their home in the first half of the 20th century. That group also included the writer and saloniste Natalie Barney, who was Brooks’ partner for many years, although they separated before the artist died in 1970.

Such are the bald facts of Romaine Brooks’ existence. Once you move beyond them, you soon find highly divergent accounts. Determined to put the record straight, art historian Cassandra Langer has spent many years researching the artist’s life, revealing a wealth of new material, some of which turns previous assumptions about Brooks upside down. The result of this labour of love is Romaine Brooks: A Life. It is a book with bold ambitions, one which aims to place Brooks in the pantheon of 20th century American artists. From the vital prose emerges a fully fleshed woman – complex, undeniably, but not the sour misanthrope of legend.

With Brooks’ portraits currently on show at Venice’s Palazzo Fortuny (and another show starting in Washington DC in June), this seems a perfect time to examine the artist’s life, and I’m delighted that Cassandra has agreed to discuss her book. We start by looking at Romaine’s childhood – not just a logical starting point in any biography but also because it resonates so loudly throughout her later life.

(To recap: Romaine’s father left the family early on, leaving the child to her cruel, overbearing mother and mentally ill brother. At one point her mother left her to stay with a laundress in slum conditions, and it says much about Romaine’s existence that she preferred this to her “normal” life, no matter what material advantages it might seem to offer. The title of the artist’s unpublished memoirs: No Pleasant Memories.)

James J. Conway: There is a line from one of Romaine’s letters that you quote which really took me aback. It comes rather late in her life when she is almost “courting” the photographer Carl Van Vechten as a friend. She writes: “As you know I have been fond of you & somehow I thought that perhaps you might become more fond of me if you knew what an awful life I had as a child.” Is she asking for his sympathy, begging his understanding? Was Romaine’s friendship conditional on acknowledgment of her background? What do you think is going on there?

Cassandra Langer: Romaine needed kindred spirits, especially male peers. This was because she always compared herself to her male counterparts. She sought out men who appreciated her “genius”. Van Vechten was gay, an artist and critic. She thought they could form a spiritual bond as equals. She wanted his sympathy and understanding of what she had lived through and overcome to be the artist she truly was. When he disbelieved how gothic her childhood had been she was deeply hurt and offended. She thought he would bear witness and validate how abused she had been and admire her ability to overcome such adversity. When he didn’t acknowledge her struggle, character, strength and mastery she wrote him off. She ascribed it to flaws in his character. This signified to her that he was unworthy of her friendship. She cut him off and spent several futile years trying to get him to give her back the portrait she had painted of him.

JJC: Romaine’s absentee father admired her drawings and even her mother, who initially stood in her way, recognized her undeniable talent in the end. However an independent life as an artist was highly unusual for a woman at the time. What kind of life might they otherwise have wished for her?

CL: Her father was out of the picture early on and could not risk having his wife cut off his allowance. Romaine’s mother was ambivalent, first grooming her to become a nun and then a marriageable lady. A life of servitude to some man was not what Romaine had in mind. She rebelled and made it clear to her mother that she would pursue an artist’s life.

JJC: Romaine’s paintings of young women tend to emphasize their vulnerability (La Débutante, La Jacquette Rouge). Are her own experience as an adolescent and young woman finding expression here?

CL: Romaine definitely had an agenda. Her sympathies were engaged by the vulnerability of these young women who modeled for her. She identified with them and attempted to portray them by projecting her own feelings on them. Through these portrayals she hoped to tell the world what it was like to be an innocent young woman who knew next to nothing of the world and had been sullied by it, as in her painting The White Bird.

JJC: Before she settles in Paris, Romaine appears like a character lost in the wrong film, or rather a series of wrong films, from the gothic horror of her childhood, the Roman sex farce of her artistic apprenticeship, a campy drama when she settles on Capri. When was she happiest, do you think? Was it in Paris when she first met Natalie Barney?

CL: Romaine herself tells us that she was happiest living in a run down rental studio with falling apart furniture and a dog named Marco. She was poor and had to earn money by painting portraits and still lifes. Many of her lost paintings are from this period.

JJC: You emphasize not just the relatively well-known bond between Romaine Brooks and Natalie Barney, but the triangle that further encompassed Lily de Gramont. Barney and Gramont entered a marriage contract (they even honeymooned at Niagara Falls!), but any bond with Barney was tacit. Would it be unfair to see Romaine as a junior party to this arrangement?

CL: Yes it would be unfair. No one was a third wheel in this relationship. Rather they were equal partners. We do not know if Natalie also made a marriage contract with Romaine. We do know that she made it clear to Lily that Romaine was crucial to her and that she was not about to give her up or treat her as a sad second. Lily’s biographer, Francesco Rapazzini and I disagree on this point. It is perfectly clear despite there being no written contract between Natalie and Romaine that there was a visual one in the form of the portrait that Romaine painted in 1920 as a gift to Natalie. Romaine’s language was visual. She was at her most authentic when painting and this portrait was her pledge to Natalie. Natalie kept the painting in her Rue Jacob house. Each woman in this relationship accepted the other as an equal. Romaine painted Lily’s portrait and admired Lily. They may have even slept together. Lily wrote the 1952 essay for Romaine’s catalogue that Natalie had published. Thus the triangle was one of mutual respect and love among the partners as peers. Romaine was never “a sad second.”

JJC: You re-examine the “Florence years”, when Romaine and Natalie sat out the Second World War in Italy, and you’re adamant that Romaine didn’t, as some have claimed, have fascist tendencies. How would you characterize her politics?

CL: Romaine was a conservative like many of her class and generation. She had Jewish friends and lovers and was still bigoted when it came to communism. She identified Jews with the Russian Revolution because of her former lover Ida Rubinstein and upper-class American prejudices against Jews in general. Natalie was a quarter Jewish and in constant danger. Romaine had to do everything she could to protect her from the fascists and Nazis. At first both she and Natalie felt that Italy would never get involved in the war and they could be safe there. Then when they wanted to escape to Switzerland and meet Lily there they could not. Romaine said outright that “no artist stands for war.” She and Natalie were both pacifists, saved three Jewish lives at the risk of their own, and protected Bernard Berenson from the fascists and Nazis during the six years of war.

JJC: You’re keen to challenge Romaine’s reputation as a misanthrope, but she still comes across as someone who would only engage with the world on her own terms. Would it be fair to characterize her as an elitist, at least?

CL: Absolutely, she was an elitist who only wanted to associate with the people she considered her own kind. The question of who she defined as her own tribe remains. It had little to do with money or class but rather artistic sensibilities and an appreciation for beauty. She was a perfectionist and demanded that others appreciate this in her. She was brutally honest in her portrayals and offended people. She gave no quarter and asked for none either in her work or life.

JJC: We often think of portraitists as dependent on commissions, brushes for hire who flatter their wealthy or influential subjects, but Romaine’s inherited wealth meant she had no need to do so. Why do you think she pursued portraiture?

CL: As with many abused children she suffered from PTSD. The trauma was such that she became hyper vigilant, alert to every nuance of facial expression, every variation in tone of voice, every gesture. She was ever on the alert for the slightest hint that would reveal a person’s intent, character or lack of it. Her anxiety was such that she became an acute observer of characteristics that remained hidden under a veneer of sophistication and civility. She saw through it all and painted what many in her circle preferred to have hidden. The pettiness, meanness, vanity and selfishness, the pretentiousness. Una Troubridge, Radclyffe Hall’s lover is said to have seen the portrait Romaine painted of her and comment “Am I really like that?”

JJC: One thing that struck me in the book was the absence of the normal clamour of the creative professional’s life familiar to us from other artist biographies. There is almost nothing of Romaine’s interaction with other artists, especially surprising considering she lived in Paris in the first half of the 20th century. Who, if any, of her artistic contemporaries do you think she felt kinship with?

CL: If she had any close artist friends she isn’t telling. She was very secretive and rarely revealed any influences. We do know that she liked Conder paintings, bought some from him and befriended him. She collected some contemporaries including Manet, Degas and Bonnard. She admired Italian painters of the Renaissance and Mannerists such as Bronzino. This is obvious from her own paintings and although she does not mention Ingres it is clear from some of her poses that she was well aware of him, especially his Roman portraits. Whistler she thought lacked imagination.

Cassandra Langer

JJC: Returning to Romaine’s paintings I was struck by the recurrence of animals alongside human subjects (Elsie de Wolfe, Natalie Barney, La Débutante, la Baronne Émile d’Erlanger, Femme avec des Fleurs); I was reminded at times of the German sculptor Renée Sintenis, who produced the most tender, beautifully modelled animal figures. What do you think was the significance of them, were they totemic figures, do they have something to say about the sitter?

CL: It is interesting that you should mention that. Many of her contemporaries referred to animals in their work, Ravel for instance. Romaine had a wicked sense of humor. She often uses animals to make comments on her sitters and their lives. You mention the Elsie de Wolfe portrait. In it she is making a tongue in cheek comment on Elsie’s lover the theatrical representative Bessie Mayberry.

JJC: You paint an evocative scene of Romaine watching the sea in Cornwall with its “endless gamut of greys”, and you also mention the influence of Whistler. What was it that drew her to this palette at a time when the Post-Impressionists and Fauvists, for example, were moving toward much more vibrant shades?

CL: She wanted to simplify everything and get down to the essence of the subject. She was in a somewhat melancholy mood because of the death of her brother and mother within a year of each other, and the breakup of her friendship and marriage with John Ellingham Brooks. So she felt lost and was grieving. A monochromatic pallet suited her and in it she discovered an endless variation of grays that suited her creativity.

JJC: One thing the book really brought alive for me was the intensity and consistency of Romaine’s aesthetic vision. Her paintings of course, but also her interiors and her own appearance. The photos of her by Man Ray in what appears to be a riding jacket are incredibly chic, referencing menswear but – again – on her own terms. How did this personal style evolve? Who or what influenced her look?

CL: Romaine loved fashion. This is obvious from early photographs of her. Her mother was a fashion plate and Romaine was taught from an early age how important dress was in creating an impression. Her mother regularly criticized her dress and made her acutely aware of style. As a young woman she favored a dandy style and created her own unique look, from the tip of her toes to the top of her head. She was fastidious, sartorial and knew the power of clothing in affirming the man in her as well as the woman. She was one of the first woman artists who took advantage of creating a persona because she was at heart a true introvert who hated to appear in public and in the limelight. Thus style afforded her a camouflage for her essential shyness and discomfort in social situations, for example Natalie’s salon.

JJC: You cite Romaine’s unpublished memoirs, No Pleasant Memories. What can you tell us about the book? How does Romaine come across as a writer?

CL: Parts of the memoir were published in the 1930s, mainly about her brother, St. Mar. The manuscript is available online at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art for those who wish to read it in full.

Romaine’s writing is a mosaic. She comes across as a storyteller of considerable charm and wit. Things, however, do not flow together in a seamless chronological order. No, on the contrary, they hop, skip and jump. You have to be nimble to keep up with her and fill in the gaps. This is what makes her memoir so interesting. She tells you only what she wishes you to know and the rest is secrets vaguely hinted at in elliptical ways. She will tell you about a love affair in which a jealous lover threw a pitcher of water at her and gave her a bloody nose. But never mentions the name of the woman she became lovers with. She will defend herself against society by informing you of how she has been insulted and wronged but never take any responsibility for thoughtless remarks that might have caused people to turn against her. She had a rapier wit but never intentionally meant to harm anyone, yet hurt she did.

JJC: With a number of books already published which jointly or solely address Brooks’ life, what was it in particular that inspired you to revisit her life?

CL: As a young woman I was fascinated by her resilience. I mention this in my introduction to Romaine Brooks: A Life. My encounter with her self-portrait of 1923 took me by complete surprise. I had never seen anything like it before. I saw in her portrayal a stoicism that inspired me. It was the first time I had seen a positive representation of a lesbian.

All the books I had managed to read as a young woman presented tragic portraits of lesbians who either had to give up the women they loved (The Well of Loneliness), or ended up hanging themselves as in The Children’s Hour. The only exception was Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt.

JJC: Biographers sometimes talk of a “love affair” with their subject, and you actually use that term, while others experience an intense antipathy to previously admired figures on uncovering fatal personality flaws. How would you characterize the transformation of your relationship with Romaine Brooks throughout the research and writing of the book?

CL: I am no different from most biographers. Our relationship to our subjects evolves over time and we go in and out of loving and hating them. We are never indifferent and we identify with them throughout the course of our time with them.

I started out totally enamored of Romaine. I knew nothing about her or her life. Over time I learned more than I perhaps wanted to know about her. I found her elitism distasteful, her conservatism was in direct opposition to my progressive politics, I was Jewish and she was a bigot, if not an anti-Semite. Moreover, she had been accused of being a fascist sympathizer. So I had to struggle with my own feelings about her throughout the research and writing of the book. In the end I came out still admiring her struggle and her genius but having a fuller understanding of her life choices and how little she cared about the opinions of others or felt any need to understand the politics of her times.

JJC: The Fortuny show in Venice will hopefully provide a chance to view Romaine Brooks’ body of work anew. What do you think Romaine’s place in the American art establishment is now, and where do you think it should be?

CL: Romaine Brooks should be in the pantheon of American and international art as are her peers; Sargent, Whistler, Mary Cassatt, etc. The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC will open a show of her work on June 10, 2016. It is my hope that her remaining family will cooperate in facilitating a major international exhibition of Romaine in context with her peers so that people can finally appreciate her unique place in the history of art.

My heartfelt thanks to Cassandra for her time and insights. You can find Romaine Brooks: A Life here. Romaine Brooks: Paintings, Drawings, Photographs continues at the Fortuny Palace in Venice until 13 March.

Growing up in Australia, Halloween was something I only knew about from American movies rather than a matter of lived experience. As an adult I happened to be in New York at the end of October one year and, rube that I was, entirely underestimated just how big a goddam deal the Halloween parade is, and emerging out of a subway station and trying to make my way to a restaurant I found myself kettled by revellers, which triggered something close to a panic attack. My adopted home of Germany has a half-hearted, ersatz Halloween culture (saving most of its dressing up for Karneval/Fasching), but with the very real horror of soaring infection rates, even that will be on mute this year.

In short – and not to rain on anyone else’s parade – I’ve never really taken to Halloween. For me, the last day of October means one thing: the birthday of Natalie Clifford Barney, the great writer, aphorist and saloniste who recreated Lesbos on the Left Bank, the woman whose horseback prowess inspired admirer Remy de Gourmont to dub her “l’Amazone”, the lover immortalised in the fiction of Liane de Pougy, Renée Vivien and Lucie Delarue-Mardrus. If you’re just joining us, here is a quick primer of at least some of her manifold romantic interests and other connections.

Many years ago on a trip to Paris I sought out Barney’s former home on the rue Jacob. There wasn’t much to see, just the usual slightly forbidding heavy Parisian apartment building door, and it is probably just as well that Natalie’s secret garden wasn’t visible. Its spell could never be as potent as it was in my imagination, or for that matter in Un soir chez l’Amazone. Francesco Rapazzini’s 2001 book imagines Barney at home on the evening of her 50th birthday, as she gathers friends and frenemies who just happen to number among the most fascinating people between-the-wars Paris had to offer: Colette, Rachilde, Paul Morand, Gertrude Stein, Janet Flanner, André Germain, René Crevel, Natalie’s two lovers of the time, Romaine Brooks and Elisabeth de Gramont, and a new arrival who has her wondering whether she can turn this triangle into a quadrilateral arrangement – Oscar Wilde’s niece Dolly Wilde.

I mention this now because an outstanding English-language, spoken-word version of Rapazzini’s book is now available, in time for Barney’s birthday this year. A Night at the Amazon’s is voiced by Suzanne Stroh to stunning effect (she also translated from the French with Sally Hamilton). She switches between characters with miraculous dexterity, fully inhabiting the personae of long-dead party guests. I had never previously pondered what a drunken Djuna Barnes doing an imitation of Gertrude Stein might sound like, but I am confident that I now know. Literary giants both present and gossiped about emerge as vividly human, as if enjoying a Rumspringa before settling into the canon.

The utterly captivating voice work is accompanied by an evocative soundscape, and together they manage something even cinema can’t sustain for this long – the sense of actually being there, an enveloping intimacy that draws you through space and time, your awareness catching on snatches of conversation, gaining illicit ingress into the minds of passing guests and stealing away with their thoughts. The mix of characters is electric, at times combustive, dividing along lines of class, generation, gender, sexuality, nationality, sensibility. Even the help is fractious. With prudent fictional licence the author has telescoped events, filling out the guest list and bringing forward Natalie’s encounter with Dolly Wilde, for instance (which happened the following year). And maybe ageing Decadent provocateuse Rachilde didn’t actually sniff around the hostess’s bedroom, but I can certainly imagine her doing so. Her disdain for Colette also squares with the record. Here fiction reveals the greater truth of its subjects.

Woody Allen’s facile Midnight in Paris, which shares a time, location and even a couple of characters with Un soir chez l’Amazone, did at least offer one solid observation that is borne out here: no matter how far back you go, the golden age is even further back. In the mid-1920s we find that many of the characters still seem to inhabit, or long for, the opulence, hedonism and spectacle of the Belle Époque. When Marcel Proust is invoked, it is not as a monolithic edifice of Modernism, but a recently departed associate hovering neurasthenically in the minds of guests, one who passed through these very rooms, in fact, as Natalie relates. Her mind also casts back to lover Renée Vivien, who died in 1909. It is, after all, the night when the veil between the living and the dead is thinnest and A Night at the Amazon’s is, in a sense, a ghost story.

So if your Halloween plans are on dry ice this year, or any time you want to be transported from your doomscrolling day, take off your mask and huddle up. You don’t even need to wash your hands if you don’t care to (but why is René Crevel taking so long in the bathroom?). Take a look here – yes it is that Large Shopping Platform, but the name at least is appropriate.

And I’ll be back soon-ish with a Bavarian interlude.

You didn’t see me.

I’m just going to leave these ten book selections here, but keep it to yourself. If you tell anybody they’ll be like “I don’t know what you think you saw, because James only does his book recommendations at the beginning and end of the year.” I’ll just deny it all, and they’ll think you’re losing your mind. You want that? You want people to think you’re crazy?

No, I didn’t think so.

In keeping with the season* this capsule collection focuses on travel, or at least a strong sense of place, book-ended by my city of birth and my city of residence. A recurring theme is writers making new lives for themselves away from their homelands, either by choice or necessity. This list also functions as tacit acknowledgement that our ongoing situation will prevent many of us from actually moving very far from where we currently dwell this year.

* the northern summer; I remember how annoying it was growing up in Australia when everyone on the top half of the world presumed their seasons were global. No, some of us were well acquainted with the two-bar heater come July. By way of compensation much of the country has, by northern European standards, at least nine months of summer a year.

Joyce Morgan: The Countess from Kirribilli

I grew up near Sydney Harbour. My childhood home overlooked a container terminal, not at all the sexy part of the harbour that you see on postcards, but nonetheless a compelling tableau which fired my young imagination. I would watch ships inch in and out of port and reflect that everyone, everything on board had seen more of the world than I had. Had I been born somewhat earlier to a shipping magnate perhaps I too might have grown up in the prime harbour frontage of Kirribilli like a certain Mary Beauchamp (1866-1941). A cousin of Katherine Mansfield, in later life she would be a sister-in-law to Bertrand Russell and mistress to H. G. Wells. But it was after travelling through Europe and marrying a Junker count that she became known as Elizabeth von Arnim. She had married into a storied family; as with the Mendelssohns, it’s extremely difficult to keep track of which Arnim is which (two of them turn up in entirely different circumstances here, for instance). It was on and inspired by the count’s estate in what is now Poland that our heroine penned the work that secured her reputation, the highly popular Elizabeth and her German Garden. All of this Joyce Morgan recounts in The Countess from Kirribilli.

Charmian Clift: Mermaid Singing (buy through Bookshop.org: UK/US)

Australian writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston moved in decidedly more bohemian circles. Shortly after the Second World War the married couple left Sydney and, after a spell in London, ended up on Kalymnos, one of the Greek islands that was all but emptied around this time with many residents ending up in – Australia. Johnston and Clift continued to swim against the tide, moving onto Hydra before it was discovered by international travellers, as captured in companion volume Peel Me a Lotus (UK/US). It offers the same acute, lyrical observations, but with an increasing note of sadness; Clift would commit suicide in 1969. Clift and Johnston, and Hydra, were later better known for their association with Leonard Cohen, but honestly that was one of the least of the attractions when I visited the island. Friends have tried to convert me to his music but it just won’t take, and it is now consigned to the “things that James has tried and never needs to try again” along with natural wine, olives, Wes Anderson movies, zip-lining, musicals and literally any spectator sport.

Alicia Foster: Nina Hamnett

God knows I love Nina Hamnett. I love her art, I love her lust for life, I love her filthy, hard-won wisdom, I love her fearless independence, I love the tales of her bohemian exploits – down but not out in Paris and London. Why she isn’t better known I couldn’t say; her work has become more or less invisible, and the last book about her was Denise Hooker’s 1986 Queen of bohemia (which is fine as an introduction, but overly reliant on the artist’s own memoirs). So the news of both a major retrospective of Hamnett’s work at Charleston (the Bloomsbury exclave once home to Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant) and a new book could not be more welcome. Alicia Foster’s Nina Hamnett is part of a series of compact monographs of women artists issued by Eiderdown Books, which also includes studies of Lee Miller, Eileen Agar and the magnificently dandyish Marlow Moss.

John Hopkins: Tangier Diaries (UK/US)

This reissue takes us to the Moroccan port where cheap living and the unique administrative anomaly of the international zone fostered a spirit of tolerance and hedonism. While the “Interzone” formally ended in 1956, that freedom persisted, supporting a bohemian community of foreigners. The diaries of English writer John Hopkins, who died earlier this year, offer a clear-eyed account of the city and its famous inhabitants and visitors, including his mentor Paul Bowles, William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. “Tangier is a lax place,” notes Hopkins. “Too much dope and too many servants. Food is fresh, booze is cheap and rents are low. In other words, paradise!”

Melanie C. Hawthorne: Women, Citizenship, and Sexuality: The Transnational Lives of Renée Vivien, Romaine Brooks, and Natalie Barney ( US)

You may recall Melanie C. Hawthorne as a translator of Rachilde and biographer of duellist, writer and sculptor Gisèle d’Estoc, a cross-dressing bisexual anarchist. The featured trio of her latest book will be familiar to long-term readers (and if not, here’s a fictional window into their world, and a primer on their complex, interlocking relations). In this academic text, Hawthorne shows how the three creative professionals from the US (Barney and Brooks) and Britain (Vivien) used the privilege bestowed by their wealthy families to explore the world and script new lives for themselves in France, but also the limits that their gender placed on even that privilege. “Drawing on the discourse of jurisprudence, the history of the passport, and original archival research on all three women, the books tells the story of women’s evolving claims to citizenship in their own right.”

Adrien Bosc: Outrageous Horizon (UK)

French writer Adrien Bosc’s Outrageous Horizon (translated by Frank Wynne) is a fictional rendering of events covered in the 2018 book Escape from Vichy, by Eric T. Jennings. In 1941, the Paul-Lemerle was the last ship to leave Marseilles before the port was blocked by the Vichy regime. The Martinique-bound voyage reads like a Modernist bottle episode, with passengers including exiled German writer Anna Seghers, French Surrealist André Breton and his wife, painter Jacqueline Lamba, along with French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and Russian revolutionary Victor Serge. But there are equally compelling characters to discover both before and after the voyage, including the American journalist Varian Fry, whose bravery helped thousands to escape from the Nazis, and Martinique writer Suzanne Césaire, whose encounter with Breton led her to develop the concept of Afro-Surrealism.

Thomas Sparr: German Jerusalem (UK/US)

This year marks a century since the establishment of the Jerusalem district of Rehavia, a planned, orderly contrast to the contested labyrinthine of the almost adjacent Old City. Along with nearby Talbiya, it later became a magnet for German-speaking Jews fleeing persecution in Europe, including philosophers Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem. It was in Rehavia, for instance, that the exiled Else Lasker-Schüler discovered the reality of the “Orient”, a realm she had long romanticised in her writing; she died here in 1945. Thomas Sparr’s study (translated by Stephen Brown) also offers a welcome introduction to writer Mascha Kaléko, who was starting to enjoy popular success for her poetry just as the Nazis took over. Although she had contact with Lasker-Schüler and other bohemian writers in interwar Berlin, Kaléko spent years of exile in the US before arriving in Jerusalem in 1959. Considering – well – everything that has happened in the region in the last century, it is also interesting to note that Rehavia was the birthplace of Brit Shalom, a movement through which Buber, Scholem and others voiced opposition to the Zionist project. Lasker-Schüler’s solution of sending Jews and Arabs off to a fun fair may have been slightly more whimsical, but it shared Brit Shalom’s far-sighted concern that simply introducing newcomers and displacing inhabitants would result in calamity.

Gesa Stedman, Stefano Evangelista (eds.): Happy in Berlin? (UK/US)

To an extent, the residents of Rehavia were seeking to recreate the intellectual openness and cultural vitality of Weimar Berlin, the setting for our last three selections. Happy in Berlin? is a modestly scaled exhibition currently running at Berlin’s Literaturhaus, which examines English writers who gravitated to the German capital in the 1920s and early 1930s. Christopher Isherwood may well be the first name that comes to mind here, and it is Christopher and his kind (including W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender) who dominate the exhibition, but the catalogue is a more rounded and nuanced study. We learn for instance that Berlin offered the best opportunities to view cutting edge cinema at the time, which proved an influence on the filmmaking activities of H. D. and Bryher after their visits to the city. Other writers featured include Vita Sackville-West’s camp brother Eddie, Wyndham Lewis, who rejected the “buggers’ paradise” beloved of Isherwood and his friends and succumbed to the allure of Hitler, and footnotes like Helen D’Albernon, an ambassador’s wife and Sargent subject who gave lavish parties but found at one such event that her distinctly ancien shepherdess costume struck a bum note in the fractious city.

Curt Corrinth: Potsdamer Platz (UK/US)

You would be forgiven for drawing a blank at the name Curt Corrinth. His 1919 novella Potsdamer Platz is best known for the accompanying illustrations by Paul Klee while the text itself reads like a Drunk History retelling of a Félicien Rops etching. The titular Berlin square, which in the Weimar era was a frenetic junction where two rail termini constantly disgorged goggle-eyed provincials into the heart of the teeming capital, becomes the centre of an orgiastic liberation movement, a pornocracy that seeks to supplant the young republic. Translated by W. C. Bamberger, Potsdamer Platz is best approached as a demented curio rather than a lost classic. But it is particularly striking how Corrinth, evidently in isolation, mirrored the messianic insanity of the “Inflation Saints” – Ludwig Christian Haeusser and the other wandering prophets who were starting to preach a gospel of violently libidinous salvation to traumatised post-war Germany around the same time.

Barbara Hales: Black Magic Woman: Gender and the Occult in Weimar Germany(UK/US)

This persistence of primal, arcane forces at a time of rapidly advancing mechanisation was typical of a city that attracted both Albert Einstein and Aleister Crowley, in a polarised period that embraced both the irrationality of Dada and the sobriety of the New Objectivity. Barbara Hales’s academic text investigates Weimar archetypes such as the New Woman, whose wilful independence could be read by the misogynistic observer as a dark force akin to witchcraft. “Whether fictive or historical, the occult woman’s supernatural ability to tap into an unseen world serves to reconfigure female identity in a time of social and political crisis in the in the popular Weimar imagination: from its traditional conception of woman as nurturing mother and demure housewife to a beastly monster, who threatens the enfeebled and emasculated post-World War One psyche.”

OK, I’m out.

Remember, you didn’t see me.

We open with the eagerly awaited biography of Joseph Roth, Keiron Pim’s Endless Flight, which I picked up last month in Winchester (where I also managed to walk straight past Jane Austen’s grave in the magnificent cathedral; too busy looking up). Thanks to extensive coverage it seems the great Austrian author is finally gaining the status in the English-speaking book world he deserves. Roth is among my very favourite authors and one I usually reserve for the colder months, so I am looking forward to finally reading this over the holidays. And if you’re new to Joseph Roth yet curious we have a brace of newly reissued translations, including the devastating Job (translated by Dorothy Thompson, all others here translated by Michael Hofmann), The Legend of the Holy Drinker, the reportage of What I Saw and The Hotel Years, The Radetzky March – often cited as his masterpiece – and its follow-up The Emperor’s Tomb. If pressed this might well be my pick of the Roths; I actually forgot to breathe the first time I read the piano scene, while the conclusion is an electrifying collaboration between Roth the novelist and Roth the reporter, incorporating the annexation of Austria in real time.

Roth’s first book was the extraordinarily prescient The Spider’s Web (1923), most likely the first novel to mention Hitler. That same year brought a tale that drew on the same anxieties, but which is now best remembered as a children’s film. Two new English editions of Austrian author Felix Salten’s Bambi (translated by Jack Zipes and Damion Searls respectively) show us the even darker themes behind a tale that has already traumatised millions of children. It can be read as both an allegory of antisemitism, “or a critique of humankind’s assault on nature,” as Maddie Crum writes, adding: “But why not both?”. Salten was both Jewish and a hunter, by the way. A fellow member of the early 20th-century Viennese avant-garde, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, is the subject of Walter Kappacher’s novel Palace of Flies (translated by Georg Bauer). No longer the precocious twink of Austrian letters, the middle-aged Hofmannsthal is holed up in a provincial hotel “plagued by feelings of loneliness and failure that echo in a buzz of inner monologues, imaginary conversations and nostalgic memories of relationships with glittering cultural figures”. This tension also haunts the stories of Johannes Urzidil collected in House of the Nine Devils (translated by David Burnett) in which “… the writing often blurs the border between reportage, memoir, and fiction, such as an encounter with Gavrilo Princip, wasting away in the Terezín prison after his assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, or a WWI soldier trying to evade military police and thus disrupting a night at Café Arco, a favorite haunt of the Prague Circle that included Brod, Kafka, and Werfel, as well as Urzidil, the group’s youngest member and one of the last links to that symbiotic milieu of Prague German-Jewish artists.”

In the provocatively subtitled The Last Inward Man, Lesley Chamberlain finds in Prague-born Rainer Maria Rilke a writer who “sought to restore spirit to Western materialism, encouraging not narrow introversion but a heightened awareness of how to live with the world as it is, of how to retain a sense of transcendence within a world of collapsed spiritual certainty” (Chamberlain’s vital Nietzsche in Turin has also been reissued). Still on an Austro-Hungarian vibe, we have Opium and Other Stories (translated by Jascha Kessler and Charlotte Rogers) by Géza Csáth, “a Hungarian psychiatrist, one of Freud’s first followers, as well as a music critic and opium addict. In 1919, at the age of 31, he killed his wife and then committed suicide, just one year after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire.” We can’t move on without dropping in on the most fascinating figure of that construct’s demise – Sis(s)i, Empress Elisabeth – recent subject of two feature films plus a Netflix series. The latter also comes as a historical novel, The Empress by Gigi Griffis, which concentrates on Sissi’s first few months at the Viennese court. Fictional licence adds a pivotal lady-in-waiting, an attempted palace coup by the Emperor’s ill-fated brother Maximilian, and a degree of romance that the real imperial couple seem not to have shared. But it also captures the real Sissi’s rebellious spirit and her conflict with courtiers, particularly her mother-in-law. Later Sissi kept her distance from the court; Stefan Haderer falls Under the Spell of a Myth as he traces the steps of the Empress in Greece, including her Corfiot hidey hole named for Achilles.

Like Sissi, the Austrian women in Sophia Haydock’s debut The Flames – models in Egon Schiele’s canvases – are fixed as images. “None of these women is quite what they seem. Fierce, passionate and determined, they want to defy convention and forge their own path. But their lives are set on a collision course when they become entangled with the controversial young artist Egon Schiele whose work – and private life – are sending shockwaves through Vienna’s elite.” There are more muses unmuted in Ruth Millington’s Muse: Uncovering the Hidden Figures Behind Art History’s Masterpieces, tackling the myth of the “passive, powerless model (usually young, attractive, and female) at the mercy of an influential and older male artist”. The role of muse was one proffered to, and roundly rejected by German-born Surrealist Meret Oppenheim. Drawing from her extensive career, My Album “assembles photos, objects, notes, and brief texts, as well as ideas and concepts for artworks, and offers very personal insights into Oppenheim’s private life and thought.” Her most famous object – Object, a fur-lined cup, saucer and spoon – was displayed at the famous 1936 Surrealist exhibition in London, which brings us to The British Surrealists. Desmond Morris’s study takes us from “the unpredictability of Francis Bacon to the rebelliousness of Leonora Carrington, from the beguiling Eileen Agar to the ‘brilliant’ Ceri Richard” (meanwhile Todd Longstaffe-Gowan’s English Garden Eccentrics offers sylvan Surrealism from uncommon gardeners whose creations were anything but common or garden). The evidently inexhaustible well of Surrealism has inspired two recent shows. At Potsdam’s Museum Barberini – which hit headlines recently after a climate activist thoughtfully shared their lunch with one of the gallery’s Monets – Surrealism and Magic revisits the movement’s representatives “who cultivated the traditional image of the artist’s persona as a magician, seer, and alchemist”. Meanwhile Surrealism Beyond Borders “traces Surrealism’s influence and legacy from the 1920s to the late 1970s in places as geographically diverse as Colombia, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Philippines, Romania, Syria, Thailand, and Turkey”; this comes from the exhibition shown at the Tate in London and the Met in New York.

Who – might you guess – was the first woman to enjoy a solo retrospective at the Met? The somewhat surprising answer is the subject of Florine Stettheimer: A Biography by Barbara Bloemink. “During her first 40 years in Europe, Florine Stettheimer studied academic painting and was aware of all the earliest modernist styles ahead of most American artists. Returning to New York, she and her sisters led an acclaimed Salon for major avant-garde cultural figures including Marcel Duchamp, the Stieglitz circle, poets, dancers, writers, etc. She showed her innovative paintings in over 46 of the most important museum exhibitions and Salons, wrote poetry, designed unique furniture and gained international fame for her sets and costumes for avant-garde opera.” It was Duchamp, by the way, who organised that (posthumous) retrospective, and two new books explore the outset of Duchamp’s New York activities during World War One. Ruth Brandon’s Spellbound by Marcel explores the love triangle of Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché and Beatrice Wood, while Corinne Taunay’s Marcel Duchamp: Paris Air in New York (translated by Doug Skinner) describes the revolutionary art that emerged at the same time.

Two recent books cover the life and career of Jewish-Austrian artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis who studied under cultish mystic Johannes Itten in Vienna before moving with him in 1919 to a new school in Germany called the Bauhaus, where among many other things she created a poster to celebrate Else Lasker-Schüler’s reading at the school. More of her images come to us in Friedl Dicker-Brandeis: Works from the Collection of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, while in Friedl Dicker-Brandeis: Bauhaus Student, Avant-Garde Painter, Art Teacher we discover a “painter, art teacher, and politically active poster artist. Initially, she specialized in textile and graphic design, and later she worked as an interior designer. Her paintings reflect her profound study of the classical avant-garde.” Deported to Theresienstadt, she taught art to hundreds of children; like most of her pupils, Dicker-Brandeis was murdered in the Holocaust. Not just a neglected artist overdue for rediscovery, but an example of the best of humanity in the very midst of Hell.

At a certain point a neglected artist becomes … an artist. In the case of Swedish abstract painter Hilma af Klint that point appears to have arrived. Following blockbuster exhibitions, numerous books (including a multi-volume catalogue raisonné), plus a feature film of her life, the narrative of non-figurative art has been corrected to incorporate her pioneering role. “Like many of the artists at the turn of the twentieth century who developed some version of abstract painting, af Klint studied Theosophy, which holds that science, art, and religion are all reflections of an underlying life-form that can be harnessed through meditation, study, and experimentation.” That’s from Hilma af Klint: A Biography by Julia Voss, who also wrote the afterword for Philipp Deines’s graphic novel, The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint. And the Pamela Colman Smith revival rolls on in another graphic treatment, Cat Willett’s The Queen of Wands. “From a childhood spent between the United Kingdom and Jamaica, to early artistic success in New York, to involvement in the secret occult society Order of the Golden Dawn … Though she received little money and almost no credit for her contributions to the magical realm in her lifetime, Pixie’s impact on tarot, divination, and the worlds of mysticism and the arts have reverberated for nearly 150 years, and her story serves as an enchanted spark.” Meanwhile, if you’re assembling your dinner-party-guests-from-history list, I can recommend Lisa Kröger & Melanie R. Anderson’s Toil & Trouble: A Women’s History of the Occult whose subjects range from “Dion Fortune, who tried to marshal a magical army against Hitler” to “Elvira, queer goth sex symbol who defied the Satanic Panic”.

Every time you mention the word “occult” a book about Aleister Crowley falls out of the sky. Don’t blame me, I don’t make the rules. Tumbling into our selection is the luridly titled Astounding Secrets of the Devil Worshippers’ Mystic Love Cult by William Seabrook, whom you may recall as the subject of wife Marjorie Worthington’s vexed biography. Here, in a series of early 1920s dispatches, Seabrook introduced American newspaper readers to the Great Beast’s orgiastic capers (that’s from Snuggly, of whom more later). Occult artist Austin Osman Spare had comparably earthly conjunctions in mind in his pan-sexual illustrations for Richard Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, published for the first time in a lavish Fulgur production. NSFW, naturally, if that’s even a thing any more (isn’t it NSFH? Oh and while I have you here between parentheses, Phil Baker’s bio, the standard work on Spare, is due for an expanded reissue next year). A dirty book gathers no dust, and we recover some primo Weimar smut in the form of a Berlin Garden of Erotic Delights (translated by Michael Gillespie), whose “charming, witty, and erotic tales capture the trials and triumphs of early twentieth-century gay life without apology or shame”. It was originally issued in the early 1920s by author “Granand” (Erwin Ritter von Busse), and its fate offers a useful corrective to the myth that Weimar Germany was an anything-goes free-for-all; it was banned upon publication and only reissued decades later. True-life transgressions are the subject of Peter Jordaan’s impressively thorough A Secret between Gentlemen, “a unique historical biographical trilogy revealing the gay scandal, hidden for 120 years, that embroiled the noted British M.P., connoisseur, and philanthropist Cyril Flower, Lord Battersea in 1902.”

In After Sappho we have a personalised queer history, a “joyous reimagining of the lives of a brilliant group of feminists, sapphists, artists and writers in the late 19th and early 20th century as they battle for control over their lives; for liberation and for justice.” Subjects include Natalie Barney (who needs no introduction to the readers of these pages), Virginia Woolf (who needs no introduction to anyone), along with many other lesbian or bisexual women of the 19th and 20th centuries. Author Selby Wynn Schwartz describes it as “a book about the desire to write your life for yourself, preferably in good company”. H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) writes her own (early) life in HERmione, now reissued. “She was in her early twenties—a disappointment to her father, an odd duckling to her mother, an importunate, overgrown, unincarnated entity that had no place.” Donna Krolik Hollenberg, an authority on the subject, offers us Winged Words: The Life and Works of the Poet H.D., which “explores her love affairs with both men and women; her long friendship with Bryher; the birth of her daughter, Perdita, and her imaginative bond with her; and her marriage to (and later divorce from) fellow poet Richard Aldington. Additionally, the book includes scenes from her relationships with Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and D.H. Lawrence; H.D.’s fascination with spiritualism and the occult; and H.D.’s psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud.” It’s unclear why there has been such a run on H.D. of late, but if anyone’s keeping track we’re at the lengthy-New-Yorker-article stage of the revival. The women’s suffrage movement is the subject of Wendy L. Rouse’s Public Faces, Secret Lives, specifically the “variety of individuals who represented a range of genders and sexualities,” yet “publicly conformed to gendered views of ideal womanhood in order to make women’s suffrage more palatable to the public.” Another highly welcome historical study to counter the grievous fiction that trans identity is a Western invention of recent origin: Before We Were Trans, in which Kit Heyam seeks “to widen the scope of what we think of as trans history by telling the stories of people across the globe whose experience of gender has been transgressive, or not characterised by stability or binary categories.”

A more localised piece of queer history in Places of Tenderness and Heat, which spirits us to fin-de-siècle St. Petersburg, “a city full of risk and opportunity”. Author Olga Petri “takes us through busy shopping arcades, bathhouses, and public urinals to show how queer men routinely met and socialized.” One of the most influential products of Silver Age St. Petersburg was Sergei Diaghilev, the revolutionary cultural catalyst and creator of the Ballets Russes, and the subject of Rupert Christiansen’s Diaghilev’s Empire. “Off stage and in its wake came scandal and sensation, as the great artists and mercurial performers involved variously collaborated, clashed, competed while falling in and out of love with each other on a wild carousel of sexual intrigue and temperamental mayhem.” Diaghilev also features in Helen Rappaport’s After the Romanovs: “Talented intellectuals, artists, poets, philosophers, and writers eked out a living at menial jobs, while others found great success. Nijinsky, Diaghilev, Bunin, Chagall, and Stravinsky joined Picasso, Hemingway, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein in the creative crucible of the Années folles …” In a similar vein comes Homeward from Heaven by Boris Poplavsky who shares the not exactly congested category of “Paris-based boxer-poets who died in their early 30s” with our old sparring partner Arthur Cravan. Translated by Bryan Karetnyk, Poplavsky’s novel was “… written just before his life was cut short by a drug overdose at the age of thirty-two. Set in Paris and on the French Riviera, this final novel by the literary enfant terrible of the interwar Russian diaspora in France recounts the escapades, malaise, and love affairs of a bohemian group of Russian expatriates.”

We remain in between-the-wars France for Anna de Courcy’s Five Love Affairs and a Friendship: The Paris Life of Nancy Cunard, Icon of the Jazz Age. “Dazzlingly beautiful, highly intelligent and an extraordinary force of energy, Nancy Cunard was an icon of the Jazz Age, said to have inspired half the poets and novelists of the twenties.” A year ago the great Josephine Baker was interred in the Panthéon, in a ceremony which sadly did not feature the current head of the FBI on his knees begging forgiveness of Baker’s spirit for the Bureau’s vicious campaign of harassment during her lifetime. The Flame of Resistance by Damien Lewis (NB not the actor) is an anomaly in the writer’s oeuvre in that it is not about the SAS. But it is a tale of wartime heroism which finds Baker – “one of London’s most closely-guarded special agents” – undertaking enormously risky clandestine operations. “Baker’s secret war embodies a tale of unbounded courage, passion, devotion and sacrifice, and of deep and bitter tragedy, fueled by her own desire to combat the rise of Nazism, and to fight for all that is good and right in the world.” Josephine Baker often appears in those “awesome women in history” books you grab when you’re panic-buying for a 10-year-old girl’s birthday; how grotesquely unjust that she should have to appear alongside that vile collaborator, Coco Chanel. More Americans in Paris: in Strange Impressions we have extracts from the previously unpublished memoirs of painter Romaine Brooks. The author’s own title, which may give you an insight into her childhood and how it shaped her later life, was No Pleasant Memories.

Natalie Barney (her again!) is the one degree of separation between Brooks (her lover) and our next subject (her sister), who helped popularise the Baháʼí faith in the West, as we discover in The Life of Laura Barney. Author Mona Khademi “traces the journey of Laura Barney from her pampered childhood to her life as a feminist, global-thinker and peace-builder who was twice decorated by the French Legion of Honoré.” (Natalie) Barney biographer Suzanne Rodriguez is the author of Found Meals of the Lost Generation: People, Stories & Recipes from 1920s Paris, now reissued and with which, among other things, “…you can transform your living room into Gertrude Stein’s famous salon”. Stein features in Aging Moderns: Art, Literature, and the Experiment of Later Life, in which Scott Herring offers “portraits of writers and artists who sought out or employed unconventional methods and collaborations up until the early twenty-first century. Herring finds Djuna Barnes performing the principles of high modernism not only in poetry but also in pharmacy orders and grocery lists. In mystery novels featuring Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas along with modernist souvenir collections, the gay writer Samuel Steward elaborated a queer theory of aging and challenged gay male ageism.”

Herring’s account includes a chapter on “The Harlem Renaissance as Told by ‘Lesbian Elder’ Mabel Hampton”, while a clutch of recent reissues introduces a new readership to the outstanding between-the-wars profusion of Black arts that was the Harlem Renaissance. They include The Blacker the Berry by Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes’s Not without Laughter, collections of short fiction and essays by Alice Dunbar Nelson and Zora Neale Hurston, respectively, Home to Harlem by Claude McKay (whose collected articles are now available in a single edition) and a convolute of Quicksand and Passing by Nella Larsen (the latter in a film adaptation last year). Passing is a dominant theme of James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, now reissued by Everyman’s Library, and Alexandra Lapierre’s Belle Greene (translated by Tina Kover), a novelisation of the fascinating real life of Belle da Costa Greene, director of the private library of banker JP Morgan. “Flamboyant, brilliant, beautiful […] Belle is among New York society’s most sought after intellectuals. Although she looks white, she is African American, the daughter of a famous black activist who sees her desire to hide her origins as the consummate betrayal.”

The magnificent Morgan Library that Greene built up was recently the venue for a major exhibition on the life and work of provocateur Alfred Jarry, whose works are still being rediscovered in English. Speculations, translated by R J Dent, is a “darkly comic collection of surrealist and satirical prose pieces … everything is worthy material for his surreal satire; the Passion is presented as a sporting event; buses are the prey of big game hunters, and even the Queen is licked from behind”. Something for everyone, then. By this stage of our Satanic selection, when talk turns to the umbral delights of the Belle Epoque, regular readers will know to expect a slew of Snuggly titles – and this year is no exception. New anthologies address the classic fin-de-siècle trope of the femme fatale and collate occult-related fiction while a new collection of works by Hersh Dovid Nomberg bears the delightful title of Happiness and Other Fictions (translated by Daniel Kennedy, who has more translations from the Yiddish at Farlag Press). From the late-breaking (1923) Decadence of Hélène Picard’s Sabbat (translated by Brian Stableford): “Seeing Satan emerging from a poppy and accepting him as her poetic savior …” OK, stop right there and just take my money. Snuggly have an impressive list of works by the similarly outré Jane de la Vaudère, to which they now add The Priestesses of Mylitta (again translated by Brian Stableford). Set in Babylon, it introduces us to “the cult of the eponymous goddess, whose worship consists, in part, of newly married women delivering themselves to haphazard lovers, the story, which was very probably the author’s last completed work, is one of both tenderness and torture, brutal bloodshed and the adoration held in delicious kisses.” Each of these rediscoveries points to an uncommonly interesting creative force, so how fortunate that this year also brings the first English biography of the author, Resurrecting Jane de la Vaudère by Sharon Larson. “A controversial figure who was known as a plagiarist, La Vaudère attracted the attention of the public and of her peers, who caricatured her in literary periodicals and romans à clef. Most notably, La Vaudère claimed to have written the Rêve d’Egypte pantomime, whose 1907 production at the Moulin Rouge featured a kiss between Missy and Colette that led to riots and the suspension of future performances.” From the same era the fascinating polymath Victor Segalen looks back at one of his idols in the 1907 Le double Rimbaud, here in a bilingual edition (English translation by Blandine Longre and Paul Stubbs). “While disclosing the two Rimbauds that most interested him, the writer and the adventurer, the seer and the outlaw, Segalen aims at overlapping his own shadow with Rimbaud’s and walking beyond the signposts of his own mind so as to confront the two roads taken by the other poet, the imaginative one and the real one.”

I don’t at all hold with Britain’s Daily Telegraph, the mouthpiece of the party that has screwed the country from top to bottom, but they do a good obituary, with some of the more diverting recent examples to be found in Eccentric Lives: The Daily Telegraph Book of 21st Century Obituaries. It was a Telegraph obituary that sparked the classic account of butch fatale island despot Joe Carstairs; author Kate Summerscale returns with The Book of Phobias and Manias: A History of Obsession (whose cover bears the classic image of the divinely manic Countess de Castiglione – who died on this day in 1899). You name it, someone somewhere is turned on or terrified by it, as we discover in this “history of human strangeness, from the middle ages to the present day, and a wealth of explanations for some of our most powerful aversions and desires.” Obsession drives Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte, “a carefully woven tapestry of death and melancholy that has seen numerous cinematic and operatic adaptations and inspired the source material for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo” (and also worked its way into Jean Lorrain’s Monsieur de Bougrelon). The translator is Will Stone, who also brings us the first English edition of Nietzsche in Italy, an account of the philosopher’s travels by Guy de Pourtalès first published in 1929 (which neatly complements Lesley Chamberlain’s Nietzsche in Turin, mentioned above). Friedrich Nietzsche’s own Thus Spake Zarathustra is available in a new translation by Michael Hulse in which “Zarathustra is revealed in all his bold and ironic splendor as a man who prizes self-worth above all else as a moral code to live by.” Salomo Friedländer (who published as Mynona) was the author of an influential study of Nietzsche; like many writers born around the beginning of the German Empire, he was in thrall not just to Nietzsche’s thinking, but his magisterial prose as well. But in the slim volume Black – White – Red (translated by W. C. Bamberger), Mynona works in the “grotesque” form, a mode that was enjoying renewed attention from Germany’s avant-garde in the early 20th century, including writers like Hermann Harry Schmitz, Oskar Panizza and Else Lasker-Schüler (a fellow devotee of Nietzsche).

Reaching further back in German cultural history, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self explores ideas to which Strange Flowers is irresistibly drawn – the modern conception of personality that arose in the wake of the French Revolution. Alongside familiar figures like Goethe, Schiller and Hegel, author Andrea Wulf introduces us to writer and translator Caroline Schlegel, whose salon brought these and other minds together. “When did we begin to be as self-centered as we are today? At what point did we expect to have the right to determine our own lives? When did we first ask the question, How can I be free? It all began in a quiet university town in Germany in the 1790s …” Simultaneously, the dandies were modelling another conception of self-will; British Dandies by Dominic Janes “explores that social and cultural history through a focus on three figures: the macaroni, the dandy, and the aesthete. The first was noted for his flamboyance, the second for his austere perfectionism, and the third for his perversity.” Their spiritual descendants haunt Nino Strachey’s Young Bloomsbury, which describes the moment in the movement’s history when a “group of queer young creatives joined their ranks, pushing at gender boundaries, flouting conventions, spurring their seniors to new heights of artistic activity.” Subjects include Vita Sackville-West’s dazzlingly camp cousin Eddy, who furthered the early 20th-century tradition of the cultured country house in “England’s last literary salon” as related in Simon Fenwick’s The Crichel Boys. “Sackville-West, Shawe-Taylor and Knollys – later joined by the literary critic Raymond Mortimer – became members of one another’s surrogate families and their companionship became a stimulus for writing, for them and their guests. Long Crichel’s visitors’ book reveals a Who’s Who of the arts in post-war Britain – Nancy Mitford, Benjamin Britten, Laurie Lee, Cyril Connolly, Somerset Maugham, E.M. Forster, Cecil Beaton, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson – who were attracted by the good food, generous quantities of drink and excellent conversation”. Country house social experimentation of a different kind in Anna Neima’s Practical Utopia: The Many Lives of Dartington Hall, a progressive community inspired by Rabindranath Tagore. The invented tongue of the original Utopia, Thomas More’s, joins “the linguistic fantasies (or madness) of Georgian linguist Nikolai Marr and Swiss medium Hélène Smith; and considers the quest for the true philosophical language” in Marina Yaguello’s Imaginary Languages (translated by Erik Butler). The island of Redonda comes closer to the original meaning of the word “utopia”, or “non-place”. Redonda is a place, just – an uninhabited outcrop in the Caribbean which makes Joe Carstairs’s Big Whale Cay look positively continental. But in Try Not to Be Strange, we discover the bizarre and remarkably persistent mythology which arose around the island “kingdom” and its succession of underworld overlords, largely fabricated in the distant bohemian enclave of Fitzrovia. Author Michael Hingston presents “the complete history of Redonda’s transformation from an uninhabited, guano-encrusted island into a fantastical and international kingdom of writers. With a cast of characters including forgotten sci-fi novelists, alcoholic poets, vegetarian publishers, Nobel Prize frontrunners, and the bartenders who kept them all lubricated while angling for the throne themselves …”

And with this very Strange Flowers selection of misfits we draw our Satanic selection to a close. My own publishing venture is winding up, so rest assured this will be the last time I shill for Rixdorf Editions (though I can’t promise I won’t put out anything under my own name and tell you all about it!). Most titles are still available but they’re selling fast at the five-year anniversary price of five yo-yos; have a look here. It will all be over at the end of this year; they’ll be gone forever and this will have been nothing but a strange and beautiful dream.