Everybody I Can Think of Ever - Part Two by francis booth

In this book there will be discussion of pairs of people and their relations. . . everybody I can think of ever, narrative after narrative of pairs of people. Gertrude Stein, A Long Gay Book

Copyright © Francis Booth 2018 The right of Francis Booth to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. No part of this publication can be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author.

How do you get from Igor Stravinsky to Elvis Presley via Benny Goodman and the King of Thailand? From Henry Miller to Patti Smith via Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass? Ezra Pound to Coco Chanel via Shakespeare and Company? James Joyce's daughter to Peggy Guggenheim via Samuel Beckett? How did the most beautiful woman in the world come to design a radio-controlled missile with the bad boy of music? Did Jackson Pollock learn his drip technique from the man who tried to assassinate Trotsky? Did Stalin turn the inventor of electronic music into a Soviet spy? This book tells the stories – sometimes unlikely but always fascinating – of first meetings between members of the twentieth century avant-garde, who were all connected to each other in a complex web of relationships; stories of how the artistic baton was passed from the past to the future.

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The core of the 'Crowd' was the largely lesbian New York circle that included Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap and Georgette Leblanc. Djuna Barnes was a lesbian by that time but, like Georgette, she hadn't always been. Barnes was a close friend of the very heterosexual English poet Mina Loy (pictured together left); Djuna told Mina, in the presence of Mina's teenage daughter Joella, that she had had nineteen male lovers, most of them Americans, before she had given up on men and taken a female lover. She took many others later, though not Mina, however much she might have wanted to – Loy was famously beautiful. Margaret Anderson said that the 'Crowd' included three 'raving beauties': Mina and her two daughters, Joella and Fabienne.

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William Carlos Williams was among the men attracted to Mina, though he seems never to have done anything about it – he may be the only person in this book who was faithful to a single life-partner, if not entirely voluntarily. In an interview in I Wanted to Write a Poem he said 'I had a flirtation with Mina – fruitless.' His wife, Flossie, who was present, said 'I don't think you had enough money for Mina.' He had met Loy when she first came to New York in 1916; they had acted together in the Provincetown players, Williams playing Loy's husband. He said that Mina was 'a very English, very skittish, and evasive, longlimbed woman too smart to

involve herself, after a first disastrous marriage, with any others – though she was friendly and had written some attractive verse.'

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Mina was a futurist who had lived in Italy with Marinetti and wrote Aphorisms on Futurism, which begins 'Die in the Past / Live in the Future'. She also wrote a Feminist Manifesto in which she advocated that girls should have their virginity surgically removed

at puberty to take away men's power over them. The fictitious value of woman as identified with her physical purity – is too easy a stand-by – rendering her lethargic in the acquisition of intrinsic merits of character by which she could obtain a concrete value – therefore, the first self-enforced law for the female sex, as a protection against the man made bogey of virtue – which is the principal instrument of her subjection, would be the unconditional surgical destruction of virginity through-out the female population at puberty. Loy's poetry was considered erotic and avant-garde; though it was probably her unashamed chronicling of female sexuality and bodily

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functions that led to her lack of support among her male colleagues rather than her formal experimentation. Long before Sylvia Plath wrote about her periods and her miscarriage and Anne Sexton wrote 'The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator', Loy wrote a poem called 'Parturition' which begins: I am at the centre Of a circle of pain Exceeding its boundaries in every direction The business of the bland sun Has no affair with me In my congested cosmos of agony From which there is no escape On infinitely prolonged nervevibrations Or in contraction To the pin-point nucleus of being

After the failure of her first marriage to Stephen Haweis, Loy lived with writer and boxer Arthur Cravan, who broke into Paris society by claiming to be Oscar Wilde's nephew. Loy took Williams to meet Cravan at a party in 1916, where Williams also first met Marcel Duchamp.

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I was a bit late and the small room was already crowded – by Frenchmen mostly. I remember of course, Marcel Duchamp. At the end of the room was a French girl, of say eighteen or less, attended by some older woman. She lay reclining upon a divan, her legs straight out before her, surrounded

by young men who had each a portion of her body in his possession which he caressed attentively, apparently unconscious of any rival. Two or three addressed themselves to her shoulders on either side, to her elbows, her wrists, hands, to each finger perhaps, I cannot recall – the same for her legs. She was in a black lace gown fully at ease. It was something I had not seen before. When she first saw Arthur, Mina had 'no premonition of the psychological infinity that he would later offer my indiscreet curiosity as to the mechanism of man', he was merely 'dull and square in merely respectable tweeds; not at all homosexual.' The next time they saw him he was drunk; Duchamp and Francis Picabia had made sure that he would be in

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bad shape for a lecture he was giving on 'The Independent Artists of France and America'. He swayed and shouted and banged the table. He was arrested and taken to jail; Duchamp said 'what a wonderful lecture.' The next day Mina was present at a costume ball where everyone was watching Arthur. He had come wearing a bedspread as a toga, which he took off before sitting down next to Mina and putting his arm round her. His 'unspoken obscenities chilled my powdered skin'. At the time Cravan was largely homeless and often slept on park benches. He asked if he could stay at her apartment and sleep on the table. Loy agreed, but he didn't sleep on the table; they became lovers. She stayed with him and went to Mexico with him, where they were married in Mexico City in 1918. Soon afterwards

Cravan disappeared in Mexico, presumed drowned off the coast, one of two writers in this book to drown off the coast of Mexico. He was never found and the mystery has never been solved. Philippe Soupault, whose novel William Carlos Williams translated, wrote a poem about his

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presumed death: 'Good old boxer / You died down there / You don't even know why / you yelled louder than all others in the palaces of America / and all the cafes of Paris'. Loy wrote her own elegy to Cravan in a 1927 poem 'The Widow's Jazz', where she refers to him as Caravan. It ends: Caravan colossal absentee the substitute dark rolls to the incandescent memory of love's survivor on this rich suttee seared by the flames of sounds the widowed urn holds impotently your murdered laughter Husband 12

how secretly you cuckold me with death while this cajoling jazz blows with its tropic breath among the echoes of the flesh a synthesis of racial caress The seraph and the ass in the unerring esperanto of the earth converse of everlit delight as my desire receded to the distance of the dead searches the opaque silence

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Sylvia Beach said that, of the three beauties in the 'Crowd' – Mina and her two daughters – Mina 'would have been elected the most beautiful of the three' but that James Joyce, 'who could see as well as anyone when he wanted to, observed that Joella was a beauty according to all the standards: her golden hair, her eyes, a complexion, her manners.' (Mina and Joella are pictured right.) So Joella had Joyce's vote, although she was born in the same year as Joyce's own daughter Lucia, who will appear in this story later on. Joella had Robert McAlmon's vote too; he recalled some of the women in Paris at that time in Being Geniuses Together: 'Mary Reynolds, Mina Loy and her daughter Gioella [sic], Catherine Murphy, Djuna Barnes stand out in my memory as the more elegant, witty, beautiful of the girls or women about at the time'. His

description of Joella as a teenager is rather disturbing, given her age at the time, though not as disturbing as his reference to the 'lovely twelve-yearold Fabie' [Fabienne], Joella's younger sister. [Fabienne was 'done' by Berenice Abbott, looking very

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fetching in a fashionable Louise Brooks bob; Joella was ‘done’ in a solarised print by Man Ray, below.] McAlmon here sounds like Humbert Humbert describing Dolores Haze: Gioella was then a bit gangly with adolescence, but very lovely, with sleepy blue eyes, long pale eyelashes, and slender, childish

arms which made Mariette Mills [a sculptor who did a head of McAlmon] wish to sculpt her, and abstract painters talk of doing her portrait. Gioella had a proper youthful scorn for me and used to ask when I was going to pull myself together and why I acted like a cynical old uncle to her. We took long walks in the wood; deer crossed our path from time to time, and Gioella lectured, and she didn't think for a second that any of us were getting satisfaction out of being 'intellectual.' Only occasionally she would cease being patronising and confess wonder and confusion. Generally, however, she preferred scolding me mildly.

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McAlmon published, and misspelt the title of, Mina Loy's poetry collection The Lost Lunar Baedecker. He was with her when he met Sinclair Lewis, first American winner, in 1930, of the Nobel Prize for literature; his novel Babbit, about middle-American boosterism was published in 1922. Lewis introduced his wife to McAlmon. Over gin fizzes she suddenly 'fired three questions at me: if I thought Lewis the greatest American writer, a fine artist, America's first. Her questions were too fast, and I said so, whereupon she flew out of the door, refusing to drink with me.' That was their first proper meeting but McAlmon had nearly met Lewis earlier when he was with Djuna Barnes in a bar one night. He had 'known Djuna slightly in New York, because Djuna was a very haughty lady, quick on the uptake, and with a

wise-cracking tone that I was far too discreet to rival.' But one night, when he was out with a male friend, after a few drinks 'I finally asked her to dance with me, drink having freed me of the fear of rebuff. As we danced

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she said, "Bob McAlmon, why do you act so nice to me? You know you hate my guts"'. He denied it, she wasn't convinced, but nevertheless they became friends, if only in the literary sense. One night when he

was out with her: Sinclair Lewis barged in, some three sheets in the wind. He had once written a story about hobohemia and evidently feared Djuna would believe he had used her as one of the characters in it. Or perhaps he merely had an admiring eye for Djuna or a respect for her undoubted talent, however uneven it may be. But Djuna was well up with drink too and was not going to get chummy. I recall that Lewis looked wistful and went away from the table, with Djuna not having introduced him. At the time McAlmon hadn't read Lewis's work; when he did he concluded that Lewis didn't 'know a bit more about Main Street, or Minneapolis, or Babbitts, than did I.'

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The only record of Barnes' and Loy's first meeting is the fictionalised version in McAlmon's novella PostAdolescence, a roman à clef in which they both appear, as does Marianne Moore, thinly disguised. In the novel, the fictional version of Barnes wants to meet Loy and gets McAlmon to introduce them, in a New York cafe on Sixth Avenue that sells bootleg whiskey. Barnes tells McAlmon that 'she doesn't sound a hell of a lot different from the rest of us, except I suppose she's more of a lady than I am.' The two women become confidantes and the fictional Mina tells the fictional Djuna about her lost husband, a fictional version of Arthur Cravan. She tells her she wishes it had been her first husband who had disappeared. Barnes also talks about her disappointments with men. The Loy character says to her: 'We'll have to form a union of women to show

the men up'. The Barnes character replies 'and make ourselves exhibits A and B.' Barnes seems at one time to have been in love with Margaret Anderson's then-partner Jane Heap, a very masculine woman with cropped hair and men's clothes; William

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Carlos Williams described her as a 'heavy-set Eskimo' (right, below), whereas Margaret (left) was 'an avowed beauty in the grand style'. Djuna also seems to have been jealous of Margaret, and vice versa. Margaret was a friend but only on the surface. Anderson says in My Thirty Years' War that, after they published Barnes'

story 'A Night Among the Horses': Djuna and the Little Review began a friendship which might have been great had it not been that Djuna always felt some fundamental distrust of our life – of our talk. Her intense maternity covered the resentment for the first year or so.

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You two poor things, she would say in her warm laughing voice. You're both crazy of course, God help you. I suppose I can stand it if you can, but someone ought to look out for you. The artist Maurice Sterne describes an incident between Barnes and Anderson in a restaurant. I had dinner with Djuna Barnes, the avant-garde writer, occasionally. She ordinarily spoke very little, being more interested in observing the people she was with. One night at Polly's Restaurant in Greenwich Village, Djuna suddenly exclaimed that she saw someone she knew. She took me over to a table where a mousy girl was dining with some friends. Djuna began hissing – I hate you, I hate

you, I hate you over and over again. The tan mouse smiled sweetly but there was an electric spark in her smile and they had an ominously quiet, violent fight before Djuna stalked out with that long stride of hers.

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The mouse was Margaret Anderson, who ran Little Review with Jane Heap and lived with her in an apartment with, as William Carlos Williams noted, 'a huge swinging bed

suspended from the ceiling. We poor males would look timidly at it and marvel.' Anderson tells a good story about how she met Heap in February 1916. Anderson was already running Little Review by herself, though she had many 'camp followers'. One of them was a rich woman from whom she was trying to get money; Margaret called her Nineteen Millions, because that was how much money she was reputed to have. They were talking about Eleanora Duse, the Italian prima donna who died in New York in 1924 and her mistreatment by the politician/playwright Gabriele D'Annunzio. (An interesting parallel to the other playwright/diva pair Georgette Leblanc and Maeterlinck. The world would have to wait for Arthur Miller to meet Marilyn Monroe for a similar pairing; their first meeting is now legendary: Miller

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said he knew that if he were to be drawn in to her he would be 'doomed'. But he wasn't, she was.) Jane Heap had come in and started to listen, when she immediately interrupted the millionaire's flow. God love Duse, said Jane, she has always given me a large pain . . . Nineteen Millions was furious. She left the studio saying that she disliked frivolity. She had always felt that the Little Review was a sanctum one could depend on for serious and inspiring conversation. My reaction was different. I felt that I could never henceforth dispense with Jane Heap's frivolity. Anderson lost a patron but gained a lover. In her novella Forbidden Fires Anderson fictionalises the triangle of herself, Jane and Georgette Leblanc. She says that her 'French friendship'

came 'after I had met the extraordinary American whom I shall call Kaye [Jane]. We embarked on a literary companionship which was to last until she died, and which brought humour and vitality into my personal history. Kaye was too human to be defined merely as an intellectual, and

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she had a vigour that balanced what she called my "mistiness". I loved her sardonic bite and attack, especially her laughter – but such warm laughter!' Even the notoriously formidable anarchist Emma Goldman was slightly intimidated by Jane Heap, and she had

survived prison; she had been jailed in 1917 for organising opposition to the draft of young Americans into the army, was released in 1919 and immediately rearrested. Presumably she had a hard time in jail, being so 'unpatriotic' and became very hardened. But even Goldman said, on

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first meeting Heap, 'I felt as if she were pushing me against a wall'. Anderson was a big admirer of Goldman and promoted her views on anarchism regularly in Little Review, sometimes to the dismay of her contributors and patrons. Goldman wrote to her saying how much she appreciated Anderson's article on anarchism; she then wrote to say she was passing through Chicago and would like to meet her. Margaret was 'exalted. To know the great martyred leader!' Anderson invited her to her apartment but Goldman replied that she never visited families, that would be too bourgeois for her. But she invited Margaret to come to the Lexington Hotel, which she did. As my elevator reached her floor she was standing near it, waiting for me. She wore a flowered summer dress and a straw hat

with a ribbon. She was made all of one piece. When I stepped from the elevator she turned her back on me. I was amazed and hurt. I decided that I probably looked so frivolous she was scorning me. But I took courage and asked her if

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she weren't Miss Goldman, and she turned a welcoming face to me, saying she hadn't been sure it was I. Later she explained that this was because I looked too chic. She hadn't been prepared for it. Despite her feelings for Jane Heap, Djuna Barnes did not get on very well with that other masculine, cropped-

haired literary commander: Gertrude Stein. Barnes remembered much later what she took as Stein's lack of respect for her as a writer; she was still obviously offended by it. D'you know what she said of me? Said I had beautiful legs! Now what does that have to do with anything? Said I had beautiful legs! Now I mean, what, what did she say that for? I mean, if you're going to say something about a person . . . I couldn't stand her. She had to be the centre of everything. A monstrous ego. But Stein liked Jane Heap and wasn't intimidated by her. She described Heap in her own unique, playful style in a piece in the final issue of Little Review in 1929 called 'An Appreciation of Jane'.

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Jane was her name and Jane her station and Jane her nation and Jane her situation. Thank you for thinking of how do you do how do you like your two percent. Thank you for thinking how do you do thank you Jane thank you too thank you for thinking thank you for thank you. Thank you how do you do. Thank you Jane thank you how do you do.

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Like Jane Heap and unlike Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy was a big supporter of Gertrude Stein. In the Lost Lunar

Baedeker (spelt correctly in later editions) there is a poem called 'Gertrude Stein' in which she compares Stein to Marie Curie, an immigrant to France who was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only woman to have won two. She won the first one for finding a new element: radium. Curie of the laboratory of vocabulary she crushed the tonnage of consciousness congealed to phrases to extract a radium of the word Loy's own poetry was often compared and sometimes published next to that of the Baroness. Anderson and Heap put them

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together in the issue of Little Review that immediately followed their obscenity conviction for printing Ulysses. Man Ray took photographs of both of them specially; opposites in looks but potential sisters in their view of female sexuality. And the only issue of the magazine New York Dada had both an article mocking Loy's relationship with Cravan and a portrait of the Baroness, this time wearing only her jewellery, as the 'naked truth' of Dada. Loy was also often compared to Ezra Pound; she wrote a paper called 'Modern Poetry', in which she talks about the relationship of poetry to music. In it she says that only one poet has really ever made 'the logical transition from verse to music': Pound.

To speak of the modern movement is to speak of him; the masterly impresario of modern poets, for without the discoveries he made with his poet's instinct for poetry, this modern movement would still be rather a nebula than the constellation it has become.

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Like William Carlos Williams, Loy believed that it was 'inevitable that the renaissance of poetry should proceed out of America, where

latterly a thousand languages have been born, and each one, for purposes of communication at least, English.' Loy is not interested in the past, only in the future, and one of the most futuristic poets for her is ee cummings; where 'other poets have failed for being too modern he is more modern still, and altogether successful'. She does admire some poets from what she calls the past though, including HD and Marianne Moore, 'whose writing so often amusingly suggests the soliloquies of a library clock'. This is not necessarily praise from such a freethinking and passionate woman – the words 'library' and 'clock' suggest the aloof austerity of which HD was in awe; Moore was in fact a librarian. Marianne was never close to Ezra, Bill or Hilda throughout her life; she was never part of any movement or any set, and in both her life and her

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poetry she was quite reserved and austere. Moore lived in a tiny apartment with her mother, who was gay, sharing a bed until her mother's death. Both men and women were attracted to Moore but she seems to have had no real relationships with either sex. HD seems to have been rather in awe of Moore. As late as October 28, 1934, HD wrote to Bryher 'I have had my first real fan letter from a woman – Marianne – of all people – write this in letter of gold – "And I hope you will never doubt from such worms as myself the admiration which the shining face of your courage evokes!" . . . I am positively limp!!!! I was terrified of M.M.' William Carlos Williams was also slightly in awe of Moore. She had a head of the most glorious auburn hair and eyes – I don't even know to this day

whether they were blue or green – but these features were about her only claim to physical beauty. We all loved and not a little feared her not only because of her keen wit but for her skill as a writer of poems. She had a unique style of her own; none of us wanted to copy it but we admired it.

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Moore's poems, like their author, are austere and intellectual. One of the most well-known is called 'Poetry'; she revised it many times, eventually reducing it in a 1967 version to just three lines. Here is the full, 1924 version:

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine. Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise if it must, these things are important not because a high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are useful. When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible the same thing may be said for all of us, that we do not admire what we cannot understand: the bat

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holding on upside down or in quest of something to eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea the baseball fan, the statistician— nor is it valid to discriminate against "business documents and school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, nor till the poets among us can be "literalists of the imagination"—above

insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them," shall we have it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, you are interested in poetry.

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In Moore's only published reference to Loy she talks about Loy's 'sliced and cylindrical, complicated yet simple use of words'. Again, not exactly pure praise. Around 1920 many people were comparing Loy and Moore. Ezra Pound bracketed them together, calling their style logopoeia, the poetry of ideas. This wasn't praise either; at the time he was promoting Imagism, the poetry

of things, in the work of HD and Amy Lowell. Pound said that Loy and Moore didn't use arresting images or noble sentiments, their work was just 'a dance of the intelligence among words and ideas. . . A mind cry, more than a heart cry'. TS Eliot, in The Egoist ranked Moore higher than Loy in his personal pantheon but Pound quickly replied saying that some of Mina's lines were 'perhaps better than anything I have found in Miss Moore.' In practice, Pound championed and supported them both. In a very long letter of April 22, 1921 to Anderson and Heap, soon after they had been fined $50 each for publishing sections of Ulysses and barred from publishing any more, Pound lists his suggested contributors for the next issue; referring to Mina and Marianne only by their first names.

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Cocteau ourselves illustrations of work by Picabia W. c. Williams Brancusi etc. Cendrars Marianne Picasso Cros Mina Lewis Morand The two women first met in 1916 when Marianne saw Mina playing the wife opposite William Carlos Williams at the Provincetown Players. They met again in 1920, when McAlmon took Loy to the apartment at St Luke's Place in Greenwich Village where Marianne the librarian lived with her mother, as if playing to her image as a timid spinster. In McAlmon's fictional version in Post-Adolescence, Loy says that her life must be the result of 'some suppression or cowardice.' But

Marianne is very welcoming and tells Mina she has wanted to talk about her poetry, saying that her job keeps her from writing. Mina says to her: 'you observe things too uniquely to let any paid job interfere, though I presume you believe in self-discipline and duty more than some of us.'

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Williams knew both Moore and Loy, and recorded a dinner where both women were there so everyone could compare them – their physical appearance if not their poetry.

Marianne Moore, like a rafter holding up the superstructure of our uncompleted building, a caryatid, her red hair plaited and wound twice about the fine skull, though she was surely one of the main supports of the new order, was no luckier than the rest of us. One night (Mina Loy was there also) we all met at some Dutchtreat party in a cheap restaurant on West Fifteenth Street or thereabouts. There must have been twenty of us. Marianne, with her sidelong laugh and shake of the head, quite childlike and overt, was in awed admiration of Mina's long-legged charms. Such things were in our best tradition. Marianne was our saint – if we had one – in whom we all instinctively felt our purpose come together to form a stream. Everyone loved her.

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In her article 'Modern Poetry', Loy singles out Williams for special praise as one of the few writers who embodies her idea of a bridge between the past and the future. Williams brings me to a distinction that it is necessary to make in speaking of modern poets. Those I have spoken of are poets according to the old as well as the new reckoning; there are others who are poets only according to the new reckoning. They are headed by Dr. Carlos Williams. Here is the poet whose expression derives from life. He is a doctor. He loves bare facts. He is also a poet, he must recreate everything to suit himself. How can he reconcile these two selves? Williams will make a poem of a bare fact – just show you

something you noticed. The doctor wishes you to know just how uncompromisingly itself that fact is. But the poet would like you to realise all that it means to him, and he throws that bare fact onto paper in such a way that it becomes part of Williams' own nature as well as the thing itself. That is the new rhythm.

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One of Williams' best known poems, an untitled, early imagist work of 1923, does exactly this. Like a Japanese haiku it evokes a moment in time, a season and a place, as well as creating a mood of nostalgia and longing. Williams said of its genesis:

it sprang from affection for an old Negro named Marshall. He had been a fisherman, caught porgies [sea bream] off Gloucester [Massachusetts]. He used to tell me how he had to work in the cold in freezing weather, standing ankle deep in cracked ice packing down the ﬁsh. He said he didn’t feel cold. He never felt cold in his life until just recently. I liked that man, and his son Milton almost as much. In his back yard I saw the red wheelbarrow surrounded by the white chickens. I suppose my affection for the old man somehow got into the writing.'

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Gallery owner Peggy Guggenheim was a patron of both Mina Loy (pictured with her below in Loy’s lampshade shop) and Djuna Barnes. She was the niece of the very wealthy Solomon R Guggenheim, who

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founded the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1937; it now has franchises in Bilbao, Abu Dhabi and Berlin. It also administers the Guggenheim Venice, which was the villa Peggy lived in during her later years and where she kept her collection. She 'only' had 326 works left – she had given most of her vast collection away over the years – but the museum is still one of Venice's biggest attractions. Guggenheim had an extraordinary early life, even

before she came to know almost every significant artist of the midtwentieth century. Her father died on the Titanic, one of her two sisters died in childbirth, the other sister threw both her children from the roof of a hotel rather than let them go to their father in the divorce. Peggy had seven abortions and two children, one of whom – Pegeen, who was an artist – killed herself. Guggenheim had come into her inheritance in 1919, but by the winter of 1920, 'being very bored, I could think of nothing better to do than have an operation performed on my nose to change its shape. It was ugly, but after the operation it was undoubtedly worse. I went to Cincinnati where there was a surgeon who specialised in these beauty operations.' The nose job was definitely a failure – the diarist and novelist Anaïs Nin said Guggenheim's

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nose job made her look like WC Fields, which is waspish but fair, as you can clearly see in the 2015 documentary film about her: Art Addict. Guggenheim kept it anyway, as a sign of her individuality. Soon after the failed cosmetic surgery, Peggy decided to become a patron of the arts and made one of her first donations. Margaret Anderson asked her for money for the Little Review: 'She said that if people believed in preventing war the best possible thing to do was to subscribe to the arts. Being young and innocent, I hoped I had put off the next World War for several years by contributing five hundred dollars.' Soon afterwards Guggenheim met Laurence Vail, an aspiring French writer who had studied literature at Oxford University in England. She said in her autobiography Out of This Century, a reference to her much

later New York gallery Art of This Century: At this time I was worried about my virginity. I was twenty three and I found it burdensome. All my boyfriends were disposed to marry me, but they were so respectable they would not rape me. I had a collection of photographs of frescoes I had seen at Pompeii. They depicted people making love in various positions, and of course I

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was very curious and wanted to try them all out myself. It soon occurred to me that I could make use of Laurence for this purpose. And so she did. Later they got married, though Laurence subsequently divorced her and

married Kay Boyle, novelist, coauthor with Robert McAlmon of Being Geniuses Together and friend of Lucia, James Joyce's daughter. The first of Boyle's many books was published by Harry and Caresse Crosby of the Black Sun Press, of whom more later, in March 1929 and dedicated to Laurence. After she divorced him, Peggy found out that 'Laurence was living with a woman called Kay Boyle whom he had allowed to take him in hand during his great misery and she was already giving him a child.' Perhaps not surprisingly, Guggenheim was not a fan of Boyle's writing, describing her as 'a second-rate novelist, but not quite bad enough in those days to make the large sums of money she did later, when she frankly became a pot-boiler writer.' Anaïs Nin was no fan of Boyle either; in October 1941 she wrote in her journal:

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My first meeting with Kay Boyle took place in a Paris cafe. She was an intimate friend of Caresse's and I knew her only through Caresse. I knew about her books, her children, her life. We all admired Monday Night [Boyle's sixth novel, the only one not to have a female expat protagonist]. Henry [Miller] had written her a fan letter and she thought it came from a very young reader, who was praising her while imitating her style. We met on a Monday evening, and I observed how fitting that was. I always have difficulty with people who are not openly warm, expressive. I need a certain sign, a certain invitation. Kay's face was inexpressive, a mask. She had a sharp profile, her talk was glossy and impersonal. We made no contact. . . I seek to see deeply

into whomever I meet, to pay attention, as I did the first time I met Kay Boyle, but her surface style was created to establish distance, to preserve a kind of human invisibility, and such distance cuts off communication.

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Guggenheim said that, when she met him, Vail was considered the 'King of Bohemia'. He knew many American and French writers and artists, and introduced Peggy to most of them. 'I soon met two great friends of Laurence: Mary Reynolds [she later introduced Guggenheim to Marcel

Duchamp] and Djuna Barnes. They had both been his mistresses. There were very beautiful women. They had the kind of nose I had gone all the way to Cincinnati for in vain.' Barnes had had an affair with Laurence much earlier in New York when they were both in Greenwich Village writing plays for the Provincetown Players where, as you may remember, Mina Loy shared a bill with William Carlos Williams. But before Guggenheim met Barnes she met Barnes' lover Thelma Wood (pictured together, left), one night at a 'very wild' party at Laurence's mother's apartment. I received a proposal (I can hardly say of marriage) from Thelma Wood, the girl who was to become the well-known Robin of Nightwood. She got down on her knees in front of me. Strange things were happening everywhere.

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Laurence's father was at home and was very annoyed by the confusion the party caused. In desperation he retired to the toilet where he found two delicate young men weeping. He retired to another bathroom where he disturbed two giggling girls. [Berenice Abbott 'did' Thelma Wood, in a typically striking portrait; you can also find online a sketch by Wood of two women kissing that may represent herself and Barnes.] Nevertheless, despite the shaky start, Guggenheim and Barnes became friends. Peggy gave Djuna money to help her come to Paris from New York where, as we saw, she was writing newspaper articles on Greenwich Village life. At the – rather bizarre – suggestion of Helen Fleischmann, James Joyce's son Giorgio's future wife, she bought

Barnes some underwear when she got there. 'A disagreeable scandal ensued as the underwear I gave was Kayser silk and it was darned.' Barnes complained and Guggenheim gave her some of her second-best underwear, 'new, but unadorned'. Peggy later

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went to visit her. 'She was sitting at the typewriter wearing the secondbest underwear. She looked handsome with her white skin, her magnificent red hair and her beautiful body. She was very much embarrassed to be caught wearing the underwear after all the rows that

had been made.' After that Peggy sent Djuna a monthly check, continuing into the 1970s. But Peggy's checks were always late and Djuna was often in financial trouble in the short term; Mina Loy, who lived in the same apartment complex as Barnes, asked her why: 'Somehow, the only pleasure I get while I give is when I withhold for a while to give them pain. That's the only way I can feel good about it, know they'll appreciate it'. Years later Peggy took Djuna with her to England, without Laurence but with the children and her servants. She had rented a large house in Devon, where 'the bedrooms were simple and adequate except for the beds which were as hard as army cots. One bedroom, however, was rather dressed up in rococo style and it looked so much like Djuna that we gave it to her. It was in this room, in

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bed, that she wrote most of Nightwood.' From England they moved to Paris and then Laurence and the pregnant Peggy moved to New York – they moved into the Brevoort Hotel, a little piece of Paris in America. Before she left, Mina Loy asked for her help. Mina Loy, who was not only a poetess and a painter, was always inventing something new by which she hoped to make a fortune. She had just created a new, or old, form of papier collé – flower cutouts which she framed in beautiful old Louis Philippe frames she bought in the flea market. She asked me to take these to New York for her and sell them. Peggy did, and had them exhibited on Madison Avenue, with great success. After their baby was born, Peggy and

Laurence moved back to France and took a villa in a remote area in the south. 'One of our first guests was Mina Loy, who came with her daughters, Joella and Faby. Mina painted a fresco in her bedroom. She conceived lobsters and mermaids with sunshades tied to their tails.' Later, back in Paris, Mina and Peggy

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went into business together: they opened a lampshade shop. I had set up in a shop on the Rue du Colisée, and she had a workshop next to Laurence's studio on the Avenue du Maine where she employed a lot of girls. I ran the shop and she and Joella, her daughter, ran the workshop. . .

We allowed my mother to invite her lingère to exhibit some underwear at the same time, as we then thought to make some money; this upset Mina so much that she refused to be present at the vernissage.' Peggy eventually relented on the underwear and the shop became very successful, so much so that Mina had no time to write. So instead, she put the celestial imagery that had been in her poetry into the lampshades, designing illuminated globes that she called mappemondes [world maps] and globes célestes [celestial globes] advertised under the name l'Ombre féerique [fairy shadow]. Sadly, as the name suggests, they were very delicate and none are known to have survived.

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Lucia came to see her one day in 1928.

Sylvia Beach wrote in Shakespeare and Company about James Joyce's family: 'I was very fond of them all: Giorgio, with his gruffness, hiding or trying to hide his feelings; Lucia, the humorous one – neither of them happy in the strange circumstances in which they grow up; and Nora, the wife and mother, who scolded them all, including her husband, for their shiftlessness.' People didn't normally think of Lucia as the humorous one; she was generally seen as being rather tragic, and later in life was in a mental institution for many years. In her contribution to Robert McAlmon's Being Geniuses Together, Kay Boyle talks tenderly about how the fragile

Whether it had been suggested to her that she come, or whether she had come of her own accord, I did not know. But as she sat in the sunlight that came hot through the plate-glass window, I felt her tragically reaching, seeking for

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what could probably never be found and for a fearful moment I believed I was looking at my own reflection in a glass. She was like the high, perishable, wishful tendril of a vine moving blindly up a wall, and the vine from which she sought escape was rooted in a territory that had for her no recognisable name. I thought of

Joyce's poem to his blue-veined daughter, and there in her delicate wrists I could see the veins, so vulnerable under the silky, transparent skin. She was then (as perhaps I too was then, and as perhaps all daughters are until they cease being merely daughters) precariously only half a person, and the other half she sought for in panic first in one direction and then in another, not knowing in whose mind or flesh or in what alien country it might live. The poem that Boyle refers to comes from the small selection of Joyce's early poems, Pomes Penyeach, which was published with Lucia's illustrations and facsimiles of Joyce's handwritten texts by Jack Kahane's Obelisk Press in 1932, though Sylvia Beach had published a regular edition in 1927. Harry and Caresse Crosby of

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the Black Sun Press had originally suggested the idea of a deluxe, illustrated, facsimile, limited edition to Joyce; he was happy for Lucia's work to be published, happy for her to have something, to be something in her own right. Not that it was

really anything very much in her own right to illustrate her father's work; her drawings would never otherwise have been published, and she would have been in no doubt about that. Still, Joyce made sure she got a third of the royalties. Only twenty five

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copies of the deluxe edition were printed, on lustrous Japanese nacre, with Lucia's illuminated capitals delicately coloured; all were signed by Joyce. The British Library has number 25. It's very beautiful. Number 3 was auctioned in 2015 with an estimate of $40,000 - $60,000 but failed to sell. This is the poem about Lucia that Kay Boyle referred to:

'A Flower Given to My Daughter' Frail the white rose and frail are Her hands that gave Whose soul is sere and paler Than time's wan wave. Rosefrail and fair – yet frailest A wonder wild In gentle eyes thou veilest, My blueveined child. Boyle knew Lucia on and off through her life; many years later, after Lucia's death in 1983, Boyle had an exchange of letters about her with Joyce's first major biographer, Richard Ellman; she told him how she and Samuel Beckett had spent an evening together sometime in 1932 when he tried to convince her that unhappiness and madness were not the same thing – Lucia was unhappy but that was not

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all there was to it. Boyle wrote to Ellman: One day, when we chance to meet again, I want to tell you of my first meeting with Samuel Beckett. It was in the sad time of Lucia's first crisis, the beginning of it all, and Sam and I talked together at a crowded party in Walter Lowenfel's apartment in Paris. We both remember every word of that talk of over fifty years ago, talk which lasted from nine in the evening until two o'clock the next morning, during which he convinced me that there is such a thing as madness, and that love or understanding or any emotional response to that condition is not the cure. Beckett first met Lucia Joyce the same evening he met her father, at

their apartment in Paris sometime early in November 1928, soon after Beckett had arrived in Paris to take up his teaching post at the École Normale. He was introduced by fellow Dubliner Thomas MacGreevy, who had preceded Beckett as a lecturer there in 1926. He and Beckett quickly became close friends, a friendship that lasted their lifetimes; a large number of Beckett's letters

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are to him, perhaps the only person, and almost certainly the only man he ever seems to have truly confided in. As well as the Joyce family, MacGreevy while in Paris soon became a friend of Sylvia Beach, Nancy Cunard and especially Richard Aldington, husband of HD, who

described Beckett as 'the splendidly mad Irishman'. In Beckett Remembering, Beckett describes that first meeting, though he doesn't mention Lucia. I was introduced to Joyce by Tom MacGreevy. He was very friendly – immediately, to the best of my recollection. I remember coming back very exhausted to the École Normale and, as usual, the door was closed and I climbed over the railings. I remember that: coming back from my first meeting with Joyce. I remember walking back. And from then on we saw each other quite often. I can still remember his telephone number! Joyce was keen to ask Beckett about everything that had been going on in Dublin and was also keen to find an assistant to help him transcribe

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sections of what was then called Work in Progress but eventually became Finnegans Wake; Joyce's eyes were by now very weak and painful. Beckett says that he was never officially Joyce's secretary, but he was at Joyce's apartment a lot of the time. It was through Joyce that Beckett met Ezra Pound, at one of Joyce's favourite Paris restaurants. Pound was in a bad mood, possibly because he was having to dine at a restaurant favoured by Joyce – we have already seen how Joyce liked eating at the Trianon. Beckett still remembered the dinner and Pound many years later, though not warmly: 'The only time I remember having met Pound was one evening at dinner with the Joyces in the Trianon, Place de Rennes. He was having great trouble with a fond d'artichaut and was very aggressive and disdainful.'

When Beckett first met Lucia there was no suggestion of her madness, though she was already troubled and in conflict with her parents, particularly Nora, who did not want her to pursue the dancing career she felt was her chosen path. She and her brother Giorgio had

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been moved between several countries while they were younger and had to learn a new language every time – someone said that Lucia was illiterate in four languages. And being the daughter of such a universally-revered father was difficult for her. Nora saw her main duty as being to allow Jim the quiet and space he needed to write – the children came second. But despite her parents' objections, Lucia took dancing lessons, and took them very

seriously. She performed in public several times. Beckett went with the Joyces to a dance performance she was in at the Bal Bullier on May 28, 1929. Joyce's niece wrote about Lucia's shimmering costume. 'It was in silver sequins edged with green. One leg was covered to the heel and the other came right through the costume, so that when she put one behind the other, she created the illusion of a fishtail. Green and silver were entwined in her hair.' Shortly after that, Lucia began to have doubts about herself and by November of that year she had given up dance forever. When she met Beckett, Lucia was twenty two and he was twenty three but he was already much more mature than her; she was still really a girl, still having difficulty differentiating herself as an individual from the strong personalities of her mother and

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father. Lucia was both attractive and attracted to men; Joyce's niece said she was 'pretty, with dark, curly shoulder-length hair and blue eyes with a slight cast but. . . attractive in spite of it'. In photographs like the portrait by Berenice Abbott it is easy to see the strabismus or squint in Lucia's eye, which she had tried to have corrected, unsuccessfully. It does give her a rather wild look; any doctor inclined to think she was mad would not have a hard time convincing other people. No one knows whether Beckett and Lucia slept together, but everyone agrees that she was the one pursuing him. Of course there are precedents for artists becoming close to the daughters of their artistic mentors: Wagner and Liszt's daughter Cosima; Pound and Dorothy, the daughter of Olivia Shakespear, Yeats' mistress. And

there are many precedents for daughters looking for a partner who can substitute for their genius father. It might have been the perfect match but Lucia seems to have pressured Beckett too much and for too long. He wrote to MacGreevy on July 17, 1930:

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. . . a letter from Lucia too. I don't know what to do. She is unhappy she says. Now that you are gone there is no one to talk to about that. I do not dare go to Wales [the Joyce family were staying in Llandudno], and I promised I would if they were there on my way through. But that is impossible. There is no solution.

What terrible instinct prompts them to have the genius of beauty at the right – or the wrong – moment! Years later she was still pursuing him, even though he had told her one day in May 1930 at her parents' apartment that he only went there to see her father and not her. She was devastated and told her mother. Nora took her daughter's side; she told Beckett not to play with her daughter's affections. James Joyce told him he was not welcome at their apartment any more. The rift between the two writers lasted until Joyce finally realised that his daughter was genuinely ill and that a serious relationship with Beckett would have been a disaster. Years later, Beckett described his relationship with Lucia to his biographer James Knowlson curtly and rather cruelly, as if she had

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meant very little to him. He minimises the rift with Joyce and Lucia's part in it. He says that when he went to Joyce's apartment that day: Lucia was there, already very disturbed mentally. Sometimes she was perfectly normal. I had to tell her finally that I went to the house not to see her, but to see Joyce. Joyce was my interest. And, according to some accounts, Joyce was very upset. . . And we used to walk, when she was perfectly normal. And then she had these crazy spells. I never saw her in them though. They all understood that she was incurable. But Joyce could never agree with them. He was all for trying different treatments, with Jung and so on.

Despite his later attempts to play down Lucia's importance to him, she undoubtedly played a big part in Beckett's life. In 1932 he wrote a novel, only published posthumously, called Dream of Fair to Middling Women. In the novel there are three women, one of whom is called SyraCusa, representing Lucia – St Lucia of

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Syracuse is the patron saint of eyesight, a very good saint for Joyce, with his lifelong eye problems, to name his daughter for, but a cruel Joycean irony that she too had an eye problem in spite of, or perhaps because of it. The narrator in the novel, obviously a version of Beckett

himself, describes her – although she is fictional she is quite similar to the actual Lucia whom Kay Boyle describes. The Syra-Cusa: her body more perfect than dream creek, amaranth Lagoon. She flowed along in a nervous swagger, swinging a thin arm amply. The sinewy fetlock sprang, Brancusi bird, from the shod foot blue arch veins and small bones, rose like a Lied to the firm wrist of the reins, the Bilitis breasts. Her neck was scraggy and her head was null. . . She was prone, when brought to dine out, to puke, but into her serviette, with decorum, because, supposedly, the craving of her viscera was not for food and drink. To take her arm, to flow together, out of step, down the asphalt bed, was a foundering in music, the

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slow ineffable flight of a dreamdive, a launching and terrible foundering in a rich rape of water. Her grace was supplejack, it was cuttystool and cavaletto, he trembled as on a springboard, jutting out, doomed, high of a dream-water. Would she sink or swim in Diana's well? That depends what we mean by a maiden.

Like Joyce, Beckett here needs footnotes, two in particular: Brancusi was the sculptor whose drawing is on the title page of Harry and Caresse Crosby's publication of Joyce's Tales Told of Shem and Shaun, from Work in Progress, and Songs of Bilitis is an 1894 erotic, lesbian, fin de siècle sequence of prose poems written by Pierre Louÿs – a friend of André Gide, Oscar Wilde and Claude Debussy –

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who claimed to have translated from a previously unknown Greek original; it has been published in many versions, mostly with erotic illustrations by well-known artists fascinated by the nubile, Sapphic Bilitis. As for being a maiden, Lucia's former love interest claimed that she was when she left him for Beckett. But if Beckett thought he could get rid of Lucia so easily, he was mistaken. She continued to stalk him, as we would say now, for years. In a letter to MacGreevy of February 20, 1935 he is still saying: 'She wrote wanting to see me. I have done nothing – except make détours.' In Middling Women, the narrator says:

We thought we had got rid of the Syra-Cusa. No such thing, here below, as riddance, good, bad or indifferent. Not having the stomach formally to disprove her letters merely, quickly, cite a circumstance of no importance to tickle our fauces. For days, holidays, she came not abroad, she stayed mewed up in her bedroom. What was she up to? Hold everything now. She was doing abstract drawing! Heavenly Father! Abstract drawing! Can you beat that one? We will return to the subject of abstract drawing.

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From the station we walked down the road to Avon, to the end of the village where a forest begins. At the right was a garden door in a high wall. Jane pulled the bell and it tinkled long and softly. A boy with alert eyes opened the door, smiled without curiosity, and asked us to come in. He said that Mr Gurdjieff had driven to Paris, would be back for dinner; would we walk through the gardens where we would find our American friends. We entered a grass courtyard enclosed by the château and the wall. It had the aspect most becoming to courtyards – that of a garden half-abandoned. In the

centre was a fountain; its gentle water dropped upon stone night and day. The boy led us through the château, which had once belonged to Mme de Maintenon and was now called the Château du Prieuré.

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That was Margaret Anderson, from her book The Unknowable Gurdjieff. She, Jane Heap and Georgette Leblanc first encountered the Russian mystic George Gurdjieff's ideas in 1924, at a talk in New York by the Englishman AR Orage, editor of New Age magazine. That night changed

their lives. Margaret and Jane had been looking for 'something else' ever since their early days together living in a hut across the bay from San Francisco. 'We had never thought of art simply as painting, poetry, music, sculpture. We thought art was an expression, through the arts, of a need of something else. It was about this something else that we talked all those summer days.' They already knew something about Gurdjieff's ideas from his disciple PD Ouspensky, whose Tertium Organum was published in 1922. Orage had been studying with Gurdjieff in France for two years when he arranged the 1924 lecture in New York. Anderson and Heap went with him afterwards to a nearby restaurant and 'asked him all the questions we had been hoarding. By midnight we had learned that this doctrine would not fulfil our hopes, it

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would exceed them. And then Gurdjieff came.' Margaret didn't meet Gurdjieff in person on this occasion, but subsequently went to a performance of his mystical dances, which she didn't really understand, despite Orage's explanations. But the point was not to understand, the point was to become absorbed. 'Everyone in the audience (except for the genus intellectual) realised that he was in the presence of a manifestation which had its roots in a source of which we knew nothing.' Gurdjieff himself never spoke in public, never explained anything in any rational way, never set down his ideas in a succinct form. It was his personal magnetism that counted. And once a person was under his influence they had to follow him. In June 1924, Anderson, Heap and Leblanc did. They went to stay in

Gurdjieff's château outside Paris where he 'lived and received people who sought him out from all over the world.' Georgette was at least as smitten as the other women. In The Courage Machine she said: ''My impression of Gurdjieff was that he resided on the earth as on a planet

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too limited for his own needs and function. Where did he manifest his real existence? In his teaching, in his writings, not at all in ordinary social life which he seemed to regard as a joke and manipulated with resignation or impatience.'

They stayed at the Prieuré, on and off for two years. 'From then until 1935 we encountered Gurdjieff more rarely but we continued to live, as far as we could, according to his principles, incorporating his doctrine more and more deeply.' They were followed by a second wave of female expatriates, who came to be called The Rope. One of the first to come was Solita Solano. [Apart from the very striking portrait of her by Berenice Abbott there are two wellknown photographs of Solano and Djuna Barnes outside a Paris café, one of which was used as the poster for the film Paris Was a Woman by Andrea Weiss and the cover of the book of the film by Greta Schiller.] Solano, born Sarah Wilkinson, always wanted to be a writer. Her lawyer father disapproved and locked his library to keep her out. He died when Solita was fifteen. In his will he

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stipulated that if his rebellious daughter married without her mother's permission she would lose her inheritance. Naturally she married an engineer at age 16 and ran away with him to Shanghai. Four years later she ran away again, to New York to try to join the theatre. She failed, but ten years later, in 1918 she was drama critic for the New York Tribune. Solano met Janet Flanner, the journalist whose pieces from Paris for the New Yorker became the book Paris Was Yesterday, in New York and they went travelling, ending up in Paris via Constantinople in 1922. They were friends with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, neighbours of Cocteau and frequent visitors to Shakespeare and Company. Solano published two novels, both championing the dangers of jealousy and the joy of sexual freedom, which she and Janet tried to

live up to. Flanner worked slowly on her own novel but took the day job with the New Yorker to support them. They maintained their sexual freedom until February 19, 1927, when Solita first met Margaret Anderson and they began a serious relationship, though

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Solita continued to live with Janet and Margaret doesn't mention Solita once in her autobiography. Margaret often talked about Gurdjieff and Solita finally went with her to the Prieuré. She wasn't impressed. It was in 1927 that I first met Mr Gurdjieff. Margaret Anderson and

Jane Heap had invited me to go with them to the Prieuré at Fontainebleau, saying, 'There you will see not one man, but 1 million men in one'. The magnitude of this interger [sic] excited me. I hoped for a demigod, a Superman of saintly countenance, not this 'strange' écru man about whom I could see nothing extraordinary except the size and power of his eyes. The impact everyone expected him to make upon me did not arrive. In the evening I listened to a reading from his vaunted book. It bored me. Thereupon I rejected him intellectually, although with good humour. A week later, sitting next to him in a restaurant with Margaret and Jane, she listened as for two hours he 'muttered in broken English. I

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rejected his language, the suit he was wearing and his table manners; I decided that I rather disliked him.' But years later, 'in a crisis of misery, I suddenly knew that I had long been waiting to go to him and that he was expecting me. I sought him out and sat before him, silent.' Like the other women, she was hooked. Gurdjieff's ideas are impossible to summarise or explain logically. Gurdjieff himself didn't even try. His influence came from his personal magnetism not his writings, though he did in fact write a good deal. His autobiographical Meetings with Remarkable Men, about his travels through Central Asia, which was translated by Orage though not published until 1963 is relatively well known and easy to read, but his major work, the enormous Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson is, deliberately, almost incomprehensible

as it was not meant to be read in isolation but in groups where Gurdjieff himself was present to interpret. It contains three books which are the first of ten, presented as three series, of which Meetings with Remarkable Men is the second

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and Life Is Real Only Then, When 'I Am' the third. Gurdjieff 'explained' the three series: All written according to entirely new principles of logical reasoning and strictly directed towards the solution of the following three cardinal problems:

FIRST SERIES:

To destroy, mercilessly, without any compromises whatsoever, in the mentation and feelings of the reader, the beliefs and views, by centuries rooted in him, about everything existing in the world. SECOND SERIES:

To acquaint the reader with the material required for a new creation and to prove soundness and good quality of it. THIRD SERIES:

To assist the arising, in the mentation and in the feelings of the reader, of a veritable, nonfantastic representation not of that illusory world which he now perceives, but of the world existing in reality.

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Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson begins with a fifty page preamble, after which is a chapter titled 'Introduction: Why Beelzebub Was in Our Solar System', which begins: It was in the year 223 after the creation of the World, by objectivity time-calculation, or, as it would be said here on the 'earth,' in the year 1921 after the birth of Christ. Through the Universe flew the ship Karnak of the 'trans-space' communication. It was flying from the spaces 'Assooparastta,' that is, from the spaces of the 'Milky Way', from the planet Karatas to the solar system 'Pandetznokh,' the sun of which is also called the 'Pole Star.' On the said 'transspace' ship was Beelzebub with his kinsmen and near attendants.

He was on his way to the planet Revozvrandendr to a special conference in which he had consented to take part, at the request of his friends of longstanding. And so it continues for another 1,200 pages. None of Gurdjieff's followers left any notes explaining the impenetrable text.

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Although it was mainly gay, white women who followed Gurdjieff, one of his most devoted followers was a straight, black male, though with a skin colour that allowed him to pass

as white and a name that made some people think he was a woman: Jean Toomer, whose novel Cane was finished in 1922 as we saw earlier. Toomer, born Nathan Eugene, was a friend of the poet Hart Crane, who we will see a lot of later. In 1924 Crane was living in the room above Anderson and Heap's Little Review offices on 16th Street in New York. Crane and Toomer first saw Gurdjieff on the same occasion as Anderson and Georgette Leblanc. In a letter to his mother of February 3, 1924, Crane tells her about the evening. Last night I was invited to witness some astonishing dances and psychic feats performed by a group of pupils belonging to the now famous mystic monastery founded by Gurdjieff near Versailles (Paris), that is giving some private demonstrations of their training

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methods in New York now. You have to receive a written invitation, and after that there is no charge. I can't possibly begin to describe the elaborate theories and plan of this institution, nor go into the details of this single demonstration, but it was very, very interesting – and things were done by amateurs which would stump the Russian ballet, I'm sure. Georgette Leblanc, former wife of Maeterlinck, was seated right next to me (she brought them over here, or was instrumental in it, I think) with Margaret Anderson, whom I haven't seen since she got back from Paris in November. Georgette had on the gold wig which the enclosed picture will show you, and was certainly the most extraordinary looking person I've ever seen; beautiful, but in a rather hideous way.

Crane invited his friend Susan Jenkins Brown to the lecture; she describes it in Robber Rocks, her memoir of him, but remembers him being less keen than his letter to his mother would suggest. She said that it might 'illuminate the converts but was less comprehensible to me. Hart found it

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"vague and arbitrary"'. Brown also describes the appearance of Anderson and Leblanc: They stood, side-by-side, in the third row with their backs to the stage most of the evening, facing the audience. Margaret was her

usual handsome self, very pleasant to look at. But Georgette was got up in a peculiar, exotic style, especially as to make-up, which she had used to emphasise, rather than conceal, departures from the facial smoothness of youth – a decided contrast to the attractive 'Martie' as Miss Anderson was called by her friends. Hart was so convulsed that he had to duck his head. Crane never got involved with Gurdjieff, but Jean Toomer became one of his most devoted disciples, spending some years in Paris and most of the rest of his life spreading the word around Harlem and elsewhere. Crane mentions his friendship with Jean, rather proudly, in an earlier letter to his mother, dated October 12, 1923; he says 'Toomer and I are great friends.' It is

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not clear whether his mother realised that Hart was gay and that Jean was black and male. Crane tells his mother he is sending her a copy of Toomer's novel Cane, which had recently been published, so that she can read the inscription Toomer wrote in it: 'For Hart, instrument of the highest beauty, whose art, four-

conscinal [sic], rich in symbols and ecstasy is great – whose touch, deep and warm, is a sheer illuminant – with love, Jean. – New York, twentyfourth September 23.' Crane and Toomer were also connected by someone who affected them both personally and artistically: the editor Waldo Frank. Crane met

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him through his close friend Gorham Munson, to whom a lot of his letters are addressed; Munson offered Toomer the opportunity to stay at his apartment at 4, Grove Street in Greenwich Village once Crane moved out. (Crane found his own apartment on Gay Street.) Munson himself went to one of Gurdjieff's dance performances. He wrote about it in a

letter to Frank on February 15, 1924. The sensation in New York for the past month has been the visit of Gurdjieff, Orage, and a troop of pupils from Fontainebleau. They came unheralded, give out no addresses, assign no purpose for their visit, and put on quite suddenly demonstrations for invited audiences. It is the very

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devil to find out when and where they are demonstrating and it is the very devil to get admitted. . . Gurdjieff is the most powerful man I have ever seen: God or Satan himself – almost. Everyone is talking – literati, society, little girls – amazing rumours spread. Toomer first met Frank at a salon in 1920 at the home of Lola Ridge, an Irish-born socialist who at that time was American editor of the magazine Broom, which ran from 1921 to 1924 and published sections of Cane as well as work by William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein and many others [details of Broom can be found online at modernistmagazines.org]. Toomer, as a relative novice as a writer and as an African-American, felt out of place in this literary company though not in any way inferior. In his collection of

autobiographical writings The Wayward and the Seeking, he remembers the occasion: There was not a person in the room whom I felt to be a better man or as strong a man as myself. As for writing – well, we'd see

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about that. That would depend upon how much talent I turned out to have, and upon what I could make of it. In terms of life, of experience and understanding of life, of overcoming difficulties, of struggles, and so on, I felt I had as

much or more than anyone I saw. Frank and Toomer met again by complete coincidence in New York's Central Park a week or so later. The two sat on the grass and talked about literature; Frank offered to help the younger man in any way he could and gave Toomer his address. As we have already seen, it was Frank to whom Toomer sent his ecstatic note on finishing Cane in 1922. Frank wrote the introduction to it, as he later did to Crane's The Bridge. He did not make modest claims for Cane or its author. A poet has arisen among our American Youth who has known how to turn the essences and materials of his southland into the essences and materials of literature. . . Who writes, not as a southerner, not as a rebel against southerners, not as a Negro, not

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as an apologist or priest or critic: who writes as a poet. . . For Toomer, the southland is not a problem to be solved; it is a field of loveliness to be sung: the Georgia Negro is not a downtrodden soul to be uplifted; he is material for gorgeous painting; the segregated, selfconscious, brown belt of Washington is not a subject to be discussed and exposed; it is a subject of beauty and of drama. Cane is an extraordinary work. It is a mixture of stories and poems that feels as though it originated in shorter pieces, as in fact it did. The book – it is hard to call it a novel – contains stories about several black characters, who bear comparison with Gertrude Stein's black female character Melanctha in her Three Stories of 1909. The Jamaican-

American poet Claude McKay – the friend of the Baroness whom we have already met and of whom we will see a lot more later – did in fact make the comparison. The first story in Cane is about Becky, and was published originally in the Liberator in October 1922, when McKay was one

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of the editors. He later commented unfavourably on Stein's characterisation of black people in his autobiography A Long Way from Home. If [James] Joyce was le maître of the ultra-moderns, Gertrude Stein was the madame, and her house

was open to all without discrimination. Even Negroes. I cannot remember how often people said to me: 'Haven't you been to Gertrude Stein's?' . . . 'Everybody goes to Gertrude Stein's'. . . 'I'll take you to Gertrude Stein's'. . . 'Gertrude Stein does not mind Negroes'. . . 'Gertrude Stein has written the best story about Negroes, and if you mean to be a modern Negro writer, you should meet her'. . . I never went because of my aversion to cults and disciples. I liked meeting people as persons, not as divinities in temples. And when I came to examine 'Melanctha', Gertrude Stein's Negro story, I could not see wherein intrinsically it was what it was cracked up to be. Gertrude Stein reproduced a number of the common phrases relating to

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Negroes, such as, 'boundless joy of Negroes,' 'unmorality of black people,' 'black childish,' 'big black virile,' 'joyous Negro,' 'black and evil,' 'black heat,' 'abandoned laughter,' 'Negro sunshine,' all prettily framed in a tricked-out style. McKay was right about Stein's story: even by the standards of the time it is racist and very patronising. 'Melanctha Herbert was a graceful, pale yellow, intelligent, attractive Negroess. She had not been raised like Rose by white folks but then she had been half made with real white blood.' Although Melanctha's friend Rose had been brought up by 'white folks', her 'white training had only made for habits, not for nature. Rose had the simple, promiscuous immorality of the black people.' Unlike Stein's story, which skirts

around the issue, the Becky section in Cane tackles head-on what was then called miscegenation – like Melanctha and Becky, Toomer himself was from the South and of mixed race; considered black by whites but treated with suspicion by blacks.

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Becky had one Negro son. Who gave it to her? Damn buck nigger, said the white folks' mouths. She wouldn't tell. Common, Godforsaken, insane white shameless wench, said the white folks' mouths. Her eyes were sunken, her neck stringy, her breasts fallen,

till then. Taking their words, they filled her, like a bubble rising – then she broke. Mouth setting in a twist that held her eyes, harsh, vacant, staring . . . Who gave it to her? Low-down nigger with no selfrespect, said the black folks' mouths. She wouldn't tell. Poor Catholic pro-white crazy woman, said the black folks' mouths. White folks and black folks built her cabin, fed her and her growing baby, prayed secretly to God who'd put His cross upon her and cast her out. But although McKay was right to criticise Stein, his own characterisation of African-Americans in his novels did not please everyone. The leading Harlem poet Langston Hughes was very supportive of McKay's novel Home to Harlem, published in 1928, but the Black civil

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rights activist WEB Dubois and others accused McKay of the same stereotyping of which he accused Stein. Dubois had a point: the novel is full of patronising stereotypes. The main character in McKay's novel, is Jake, who is living with the amoral Rose, who is almost as much of a caricature as Stein's Rose. 'At the Congo she sat and drank and flirted with many fellows. That was a part of her business. She got more tips that way, and the extra personal bargains that gave her the means to maintain her style of living.' She wants Jake to be like a pimp to her: 'Rose was disappointed in Jake. She had wanted him to live in the usual sweet way, to be brutal and beat her up a little, and take away her money from her.' As well as stereotyping the characters, McKay makes them speak in embarrassing dialect:

One thing I know is niggers am made foh life. And I want to live, boh, and feel plenty o' the juice o' life in mah blood. I wanta live and I wanta love. And niggers am got to work hard foh that. But it, I'll tell you this and I'll tell it to the wo'l' – all the crackers, all them poah white trash, all the nigger-

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hitting and nigger-breaking white folks – I loves life and I got to live. Back to Jean Toomer: he sent Waldo Frank a very challenging invitation: to visit the 'southland' with him. In his essay 'Our America to City Block' Frank records the implications of this.

'I received an interesting invitation from Jean Toomer. This may be nothing to the younger reader, but in the early 1920s Jean Toomer was for many the great promise among Negro writers. Toomer invited me to go south with him, which meant of course to live with him among Negroes as if I were a Negro.' Toomer was himself light-skinned – his grandfather had been governor of Louisiana, part Dutch, part English, part African. 'What Toomer was offering me was the chance to see and feel the Negro from within the inside angle of the Negro.' And he did, in South Carolina. Frank was quite swarthy and while he was with Toomer he was taken for black himself. Toomer warned him: 'if you act white and anyone has seen you with me and other colored folk, you will be in trouble.' It was Frank's first introduction to racism from the

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other side. 'I looked at the drugstore where I could buy medicines but not Coca-Cola, at the movie theatre where I must sit only in the balcony for the colored, at the restaurant where I could serve but never sit. My world had frighteningly shifted!' In The Wayward and the Seeking, Toomer describes their initial relationship. I sent the manuscript to Frank. He took it to Horace Liveright. Liveright accepted it, but wanted a foreword written by Frank. Frank himself had a book to write, based on Negro life. It was arranged that he come to Washington and then both of us would go South. Frank came. He stayed at the apartment with us. I took this opportunity to convey to him my position in America. I read to him

'The First American'. . . We went South. We came back. Frank returned to New York. In several of his letters he referred to what he called my 'vision,' and seemed to feel that it 'protected' me. Perhaps it did. But because of the

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way he used this word 'protected,' I was mainly concerned with whether or not he understood that it was not a vision, but an actuality.

It was not long after the publication of Cane that Toomer fell, and remained, under the spell of Gurdjieff. Toomer's time with Gurdjieff may have improved him as a person but it destroyed him as a writer; Frank wrote: 'Toomer's trauma was deeper than the others. In his need to forget he was a Negro he joined the transcendental pseudoHindu cult of Gurdjieff, whose psychological techniques aimed at obliterating in the catechumen the condition of being a man. Cane, a chaotic beginning, became Toomer's only publication. As a poet, and as a natural leader of his folk, he vanished.' But Toomer himself seems to have known that after he finished Cane he would not write anything again, certainly nothing of the same quality, not because of his personal situation but because of the situation of African-Americans in general: the

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demise of the 'folk-spirit' that Toomer so much admired. I realised with deep regret, that the spirituals, meeting ridicule, would be certain to die out. With Negroes also the trend was towards the small town and then towards the city – and industry and commerce and machines. The folk-spirit was walking in to die in the modern desert. That spirit was so beautiful. Its death was so tragic. Just this seemed to sum up life for me. And this was the feeling I put into Cane. Cane was a swansong. It was the song of an end. And why no one has seen and felt that, why people have expected me to write a second and a third and a fourth book like Cane, is one of the queer misunderstandings of my life.

Near the end of Claude McKay's novel Banjo, written in Marseille and Barcelona between 1927 and 1928 but not published until 1932, one of the characters expresses similar feelings about the effect of 'industry and commerce and machines' on African-Americans. The novel is set in

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Marseille and includes characters from Senegal, the Caribbean and the United States who drift around drinking, dancing – the main character plays the banjo – womanising and philosophising:

The Africans gave him a positive feeling of wholesome contact with racial roots. They made him feel that he was not merely an unfortunate accident of birth, but that he belonged definitely to a race weighed, tested and poised in the universal scheme. . . He did not feel that confidence about Aframericans who, long-deracinated, were still rootless among phantoms and pale shadows and enfeebled by self-effacement before condescending patronage, social negativism, and miscegenation. . . The more Ray mixed in the rude anarchy of the lives of the black boys – loafing, singing, bumming, playing, dancing, loving, working – and came to a realisation of how close-linked he was to them in spirit, the more he felt that they represented more than he or the cultured minority, the irrepressible exuberance and legendary vitality of the black race. And the thought kept him wondering how that race would fare

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under the ever tightening mechanical organisation of modern life. . . The hand of progress was robbing his people of many primitive and beautiful qualities. He could not see where they would find greater happiness under the weight of the machine. It was partly through Frank that Toomer had met Gurdjieff, or at least through Margaret Naumberg, his wife, with whom Toomer was having an affair that lasted until the summer of 1926. She seems to have awoken in him a spiritual feeling – an echo of the 'folk-spirit' perhaps – that laid him open to Gurdjieff's influence. Toomer said in 'Outline of an Autobiography' that when he met Margaret at Frank's house in Darien, Connecticut he 'felt the whole world revolve.'

My birth, and it was truly a birth, came from my experiences with Margaret Naumberg. I do not wish to put these in outline. It is enough here to say that the very deepest centre of my being awoke to consciousness giving me a sense of myself, and awareness of the world and of values, which

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transcended even my dreams of my experience. Gorham Munson said that Toomer was very attractive to women; he spelled out explicitly that white women were attracted to his dark complexion. 'His sex nature was

sweet and pure and I imagine that he was a genuine lover and a genuine person in his sex contacts.' Munson was being quite generous; while Toomer was staying in his apartment he had an affair with Munson's sisterin-law. But, less generously, he mentioned that Naumberg was quite wealthy in her own right and supported Toomer financially. 'The Naumbergs were a wealthy family, and Margaret was pretty well-heeled. Waldo Frank had been pretty fairly well-heeled too. Jean had nothing.' Naumberg took Toomer to one of Orage's lectures; Toomer wrote about his experience. There was no printed program. You were not given through the mind in advance the slightest idea of what to expect. You did not know what to call the various exercises and dances. You were in

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no way helped to label and classify. . . . [but] the dancers caught hold of me, fascinated me, spoke to me in a language strange to my experience but not unknown to a deeper center of my being . . . Though I could have listened to it again and again, I had a sense from the very first that the music had not been composed to be listened to, but to be enacted. It was a call to action in those very moments that were being performed on the stage, or in a march of men and women towards a destiny not even foreshadowed in the ordinary world. And so it moved me. Toomer first saw Gurdjieff himself some days later at the dance performance also attended by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap. Toomer said Gurdjieff looked like ‘a

monk in a tuxedo’, but he was hooked. Later that year Toomer decided to visit Fontainebleau. He wrote to Waldo Frank on July 17, 1924: ‘I am off to Fontainebleau. But not simply to Fontainebleau; rather to a place where someone whom I believe to possess adequate

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knowledge had conditioned things that I may the better examine myself.’ Although Toomer had never exchanged a word with Gurdjieff himself while he was at the Prieuré, Orage persuaded him to return to New York and run a group in Harlem in 1925. Langston Hughes recorded:

One of the most talented of the Negro writers, Jean Toomer, went to Paris to become a follower and disciple of Gurdjieff’s at Fontainebleau, where Katherine Mansfield died. He returned to Harlem, having achieved awareness, to impart his precepts to the literati. Wallace Thurman and Dorothy Peterson, Aaron Douglas and Nella Larsen, not to speak of a number of lesser known Harlemites of the literary and social world, became ardent neophytes of the word brought from Fontainebleau by this handsome young olive-skinned bearer of Gurdjieff’s message to upper Manhattan.’

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When Claude McKay wrote his autobiography A Long Way From Home in 1936 at the age of forty seven, he had already had a varied and interesting life; being a gay, black, communist poet travelling the world was never going to be boring. He didn't talk in the book about being gay but he did say that being black in America was more dangerous than being a communist. Most of McKay's life was indeed spent a long way from his home in Jamaica, moving between London, Berlin, Paris, Moscow and New York, meeting many other interesting people along the way. As we saw, his first major publication outside Jamaica was the 1922 poetry collection

Harlem Shadows, an early landmark in the history of the Harlem Renaissance. When McKay had moved to America in 1912 aged thirty two he had already published poetry in his native country, but he published nothing major in the

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United States until Harlem Shadows appeared. When it did appear McKay was in the Soviet Union but before that, in 1918 as a struggling poet in New York, he had met one of his literary heroes, the very interesting Frank Harris. Harris was published by Jack Kahane, publisher of the luxury

edition of Pomes Penyeach; we will see more of Kahane later. The first four volumes of Harris's notorious, erotic autobiographical series My Life and Loves were dictated by Harris between 1921 and 1927 to a number of female secretaries. They were mostly in love with Harris but by then he was already impotent. Kahane's son Maurice Girodias later forged a fifth volume. Harris was born in Ireland in 1856, as was George Bernard Shaw, who called him 'the most impossible ruffian on the face of this earth'. That other notorious Irish writer Oscar Wilde, born two years earlier, also thought Harris was an egotistical rogue; Wilde said that Harris had 'been to all the great houses of England – once'. Wilde once stayed in the same Paris hotel as Harris but even though his room was four floors below Harris's he could still hear him: 'Frank Harris

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is here thinking about God, Shakespeare and Frank Harris at the top of his voice', he wrote. Whatever his personality flaws, Harris was a serious writer and editor; he wrote biographies of both Shaw and Wilde and from 1916 to 1922 edited Pearson's, a literary magazine with a socialist bent. In 1918 Harris invited McKay to visit him at his house in Greenwich Village. McKay was impressed, overawed and nervous. 'Frank Harris appeared to me then as the embodiment of my idea of a romantic luminary of the writing world. He struck me sometimes like Byron and Heine, Victor Hugo and Rimbaud.' McKay was mindful that when Harris took over Pearson's he had said that its purpose was 'to reach and discover the obscure talents of America who were perhaps discouraged, engaged in uncongenial

labor when they might be doing creative work. I took his moving message personally, for I was one of those talents.' It was 9 o'clock when I got to Frank Harris's house in Waverly Place. Opening the door for me

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himself he said the butler had gone home. I was surprised by his littleness. I knew that he was small of stature, but did not expect him to be as diminutive as he was. But his voice was great and growling like a friendly lion's with strength and dignity and seemingly made him larger than he actually was . . . The door

opened and a woman, wearing a rich-looking, rose-colored opera cloak, stood poised on the threshold like a picture. I stood up and Frank Harris said: 'this is the Negro poet.' She nodded slightly and vanished. 'My wife is going to the opera,' Harris explained. 'She adores it but I don't care a rap about the opera. Of all the arts of the theatre it is the tinseliest. A spectacle mainly for women.' I said I liked the opera rather well, such of it as I had seen, especially the chorus and the dancing. Frank Harris said he was surprised that I should, because the art of the opera was the most highly artificial of the civilized arts. Harris was very complimentary about McKay's poetry, including the poem 'Harlem Shadows', which became the

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title poem of his 1922 collection. Harris said McKay had 'the classical feeling and a modern way of expressing it.' In McKay's telling, he and Harris drink and talk about literature for the whole evening; they are still talking when his wife returns from the opera. Harris tells McKay that he knows how to pick winners and McKay is a winner: 'I picked Bernard Shaw when he was unknown and started him in the theatre on the way to his great success. I picked HG Wells and Joseph Conrad and others. You are an African. You must accomplish things, for yourself, for your race, for mankind, for literature. But it must be literature.' However, Frank advised him to write prose not poetry. 'This is an age of prose . . . Language is loosening and breaking up under the pressure of new ideas and words. It requires the flexibility of prose to express this age.' Harris did

publish some of McKay's poetry, though they weren't his first poems to be published in America: in 1917 Seven Arts, co-edited by Waldo Frank, had published two of his sonnets under the pseudonym Eli Edwards [all issues of Seven Arts can be seen at

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modjourn.org]. The next year McKay visited England and met George Bernard Shaw for himself. Shaw was a huge success at the time and had three plays on in London that season. Shaw received me one evening alone in his house in Adelphi Terrace. There was an elegance about his reedlike black-clothed figure that I had not anticipated, nor had I expected such a colorfully young face and

complexion against the white hair and beard. I told Shaw that Frank Harris had been extremely kind to me and that when he gave me the letter to him, he had said that Shaw was perhaps the only friend he had left in London. Shaw wanted to talk only about the 'Irish Question' but McKay was not interested. Shaw then talked rather patronisingly about 'some of the interesting exotic persons with whom he had come in contact', including a Chinese 'intellectual' and an Indian playwright. He 'turned to his Negro visitor' and said to him 'it must be tragic for a sensitive Negro to be a poet. Why didn't you choose pugilism instead of poetry for a profession?' Shaw had been a pre-war Fabian socialist, he was from an older generation of social activists, but the

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next interesting character McKay met was a leading current activist: Sylvia Pankhurst, daughter of the suffragette Emmeline. (In 1918 the British government passed the Representation of the People Act, giving the vote to women over the age of thirty who owned property.) An activist like her mother, Sylvia was the editor of the Workers Dreadnought. McKay approached her hoping she would publish a letter he had written in 1919 to the editor of the Daily Herald, George Lansbury, complaining about the racist articles they were printing concerning the French employing 'colored troops in the Rhineland.' The articles were attempting to stir up fear in their English readers by alluding to the supposed sexual prowess of black men. McKay said that perhaps he himself was 'not civilized enough to understand why the sex of the black

race should be put on exhibition to persuade the English people to decide which white gang should control the coal and iron of the Ruhr.' McKay found the English to be racist in general, that 'prejudice against Negroes had become almost congenital among them. I think the

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Anglo-Saxon mind becomes morbid when it turns on the sex life of colored people.' The Herald wouldn't publish his letter, so McKay sent it to Pankhurst, who in 1918 had started the Russian Information Bureau in London. She wouldn't print it either because 'we owe Lansbury twenty pounds.

Besides, I have borrowed paper from the Daily Herald to print the Dreadnought.' But Pankhurst was happy to meet McKay, who subsequently did some work for the Dreadnought. Pankhurst was imprisoned for six months in 1920 for her activities though in McKay's view she was 'a good agitator and fighter, but she wasn't a leader. She possessed the magnetism to attract people to her organisation, but she did not have the power to hold them.' The final interesting character McKay met in London was CK Ogden, the philosopher and linguist who, as we have seen, translated Wittgenstein's Tractatus in 1922 and in the same year published The Foundations of Aesthetics. Later he would write a book called Basic English, which reduced the English language to around 850 words; he

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spent most of the rest of his life advocating its use. In 1929 he asked James Joyce to do a reading of Tales Told of Shem and Shaun, for which Ogden wrote an introduction when it was published that year by the Black Sun Press; it eventually became part of Finnegans Wake, as did Anna Livia Plurabelle, which Ogden also recorded Joyce reading; in 1932 Ogden translated it into basic English. (It is hard to imagine a writer whose work would resist translation into Basic English more vigorously than Joyce.) Despite Ogden's importance to McKay and other writers, as a supporter and editor, McKay only spends one paragraph of his autobiography on Ogden, saying that 'besides steering me round the picture galleries and being otherwise kind, [he] had published a set of my

verses in his Cambridge Magazine. Later he got me a publisher.' To digress for a page or so, having re-introduced Ludwig Wittgenstein through CK Ogden: Wittgenstein appears, if only at a distance, at two other points in our story. In 1914 he decided to distribute some of his money – he was from a very wealthy and artistic family but disdained money and worldly things in general –

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to a group of young Austrian poets, one of whom was Rainer Maria Rilke who got 20,000 crowns, the equivalent today of around $15,000. Wittgenstein never met Rilke, or any of the other recipients in person though he did like Rilke's poetry. In fact he didn't know any of the recipients personally, relying on a friend to pick their names for him. He picked well. Another of the recipients, whom Rilke greatly admired, might have become one of the greatest German poets of all time if he had not died in the First World War: Georg Trakl. But Rilke lived, as we saw, to finish his Duino Elegies in 2, the same year in which his Sonnets to Orpheus were published. These two works are unarguably among the most powerful poem sequences of the twentieth century, if not of all time. Rilke cries out, appalled and terrified, into the darkness of his 100

post-war world, like a Lear on his own blasted heath. Even the angels cannot help him, or us. The first Elegy begins (my translation):

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Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' ranks? and then, if one of them took me suddenly to its heart: I would perish from its stronger being. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, we barely endure, and we adore it so, because it disdains, to destroy us. Each angel is terrifying. The other connection Ludwig Wittgenstein has with our story is that his older brother Paul, who was a concert pianist, lost his right arm in the First World War. He commissioned several composers to write works for the left hand only, including Ravel who, as we have seen, declined to give Gershwin

composition lessons. Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand has subsequently been played and recorded by many two-handed pianists. Back to Claude McKay. After leaving London, he went back to New York where he joined the staff of the Liberator, a socialist magazine

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that had replaced The Masses, which had been closed down in 1917 when the US government, which had just joined the war, refused to allow it to be mailed. While he was at the Liberator he had received submissions from Jean Toomer, who began sending excerpts from Cane in December 1921 for possible

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publication. The staff at the Liberator were divided; McKay was intrigued but on the whole they decided not to publish them. On December 6, 1921 McKay wrote to 'Miss Toomer' that the story was 'a little too long, not clear enough, and quite lacking in unity. Perhaps if you would send us a very short sketch that could hold the reader's attention all through, we might be able to use it.' By July 1922 McKay realised that Toomer was a man and in September and October 1922 the Liberator did publish two stories (including the Becky story from Cane) and a poem by him. McKay wrote to Toomer: 'I liked your poem in the September Liberator – the sketch not so particularly well in spite of its high points. Someday I hope I shall be able to talk to you about such things.' He probably didn't; there is no record of the two having met, though Toomer

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did write to McKay on August 19, 1922 about the issue of race. Racially, I seem to have (who knows for sure) seven blood mixtures: French, Dutch, Welsh, Negro, German, Jewish, and Indian. Because of these, my position in America has been a curious one. I have lived equally amid the two race groups. Now white, now colored. From my own point of view I am naturally and inevitably an American. I have strived for a spiritual fusion analogous to the fact of racial intermingling. Without denying a single element in me, with no desire to subdue one to the other, I have sought to let them function as complements. I have tried to let them live in harmony. Within the last two or three years, however, my growing need for artistic

expression has pulled me deeper and deeper into the Negro group. And as my powers of receptivity increased, I found myself loving it in a way that I could never love the other. It has stimulated and fertilised whatever creative talent I may contain within me.

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We don't know if McKay replied, but Toomer's letter may have sat well with his own feelings, which are not always reflected in Harlem Shadows. Despite the book's title only a few of the poems are about the issue of race, let alone class. The title poem however is about both; the first and last verses of it are: I hear the halting footsteps of a lass In Negro Harlem where the night lets fall It's veil. I see the shapes of girls who pass To bend and barter at desire's call. Ah, little dark girls who in slippered feet

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Go prowling through the night from street to street! Ah, stern harsh world, that in the wretched way Of poverty, dishonor and disgrace, Has pushed the timid little feet of clay, The sacred brown feet of my fallen race! Ah, heart of me, the weary, weary feet in Harlem wandering from street to street.

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This poem clearly shows McKay identifying strongly with his own race, as well as with world socialism. But only one poem in the collection explicitly unites the two themes in a call to action: a very powerful and relatively well-known poem called 'If We Must Die'.

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From New York McKay went to Moscow in 1922, though not as a part of the official American delegation to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International. This put him in a difficult position, as the Russians were paranoid about spies, but he had friends who helped him to meet some of the Soviet leaders.

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McKay was amazed at his reception, a complete contrast to the bigotry of Americans. 'Never in my life did I feel prouder of being an African, a black, and no mistake about it. . . From Moscow to Petrograd and from Petrograd to Moscow I went triumphantly from surprise to surprise, extravagantly fêted on every side. I was carried along on a crest of sweet excitement. I was like a black ikon in the flesh.' Despite the influence he had as a member of the Liberator team, McKay did not get to meet his idol Lenin, who had been ill. But McKay did get to meet Trotsky. He was told that any personal message to Trotsky, who at that time was Commissar of War, would be considered and it was. Within two days he had received a positive reply.

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Exactly at the appointed hour the following day, as I descended the stairs of the hotel, an official automobile drove up with a military aide and I was escorted to the war department. I passed through a guard of Red sentries and was ushered immediately into Trotsky's office. Trotsky was wearing a commander's uniform and he appeared very handsome, genial and gracious sitting at his desk. He said that he was learning English and would try to talk to me in that language. Trotsky asked me some straight and sharp questions about American Negroes, their group organisations, their political position, their schooling, their religion, their grievances and social aspirations and, finally what kind of sentiment existed between American and African Negroes.

Trotsky gave McKay a permit allowing him to travel around the Soviet Union; because of Trotsky's signature he was treated with great respect everywhere he went. 'For about a month I was fêted by the military forces. I was introduced to

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military and naval officers and experts. I was shown the mechanism of little guns and big guns.' Starting in Moscow, he was taken around the Kremlin military schools and was finally invited onto the stage at a

student celebration of the anniversary of the Red Army. I made a brief martial speech and was applauded for more. . . Someone demanded a poem, and I gave, 'If We Must Die.' I gave it in the same spirit in which I wrote it, I think. I was not acting, trying to repeat the sublime thrill of a supreme experience. I was transformed into a rare instrument and electrified by the great current running through the world, and the poem popped out of me like a ball of light and blazed. No gay man, no black man, no poet and certainly no gay, black poet had ever been accorded such an honour in America.

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speak at a conference on surrealism in Mexico City and met Trotsky on a long boat ride. They agreed to write a joint manifesto, to which Diego

It may not be obvious how Leon Trotsky fits into our story of meetings between artists of the twentieth century avant-garde but apart from his meeting with Claude McKay he has at least two claims to a place in this book, even if one of them was not an actual meeting and nearly led to his death. After Lenin died in 1924, Stalin took over and Trotsky was on the run for the rest of his life, largely in Mexico. While he was there he met the artist husband and wife team Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, along with the French communist and surrealist André Breton. Breton had been invited to

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Rivera also signed his name: 'Towards a Free Revolutionary Art', first published in Partisan Review in February 1938. Part of it says: The communist revolution is not afraid of art. It realizes that the role of the artist in a decadent capitalist society is determined by the conflict between the individual and various social forms which are hostile to him. This fact alone, insofar as he is conscious of it, makes the artist the natural ally of revolution.

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The manifesto is explicitly anti-Stalin, as if Trotsky was not in enough trouble already. Stalin's forces tried several times to assassinate Trotsky, eventually succeeding in 1940 when he was famously killed with an ice pick. But before that there was another attack on Trotsky, led by another Mexican artist: David Alfaro Siqueiros. Siqueiros was the principal author of the earlier Mexican artists' proclamation 'A Declaration of Social, Political and Aesthetic Principles' in 1922. He had been a soldier in the Mexican Revolution at the age of eighteen and was a committed communist; he had also recently been fighting in the Spanish Civil War against the Fascists. Siqueiros believed Trotsky was working against the world revolution he had fought so hard for. Unlike Breton, Siqueiros was a genuine and lifelong

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revolutionary, both in his life and his art; he wrote: The Army of the Revolution brought us to the geography, the archaeology, the traditions – and to the people of our country with their complex and dramatic social problems. Without this participation, it would not have been possible later to conceive and activate an integrated modern Mexican pictorial movement. Siqueiros believed that Rivera, a cosignatory to Trotsky and Breton's manifesto, was not a genuine revolutionary. He said of Rivera: 'in Paris he was the most outstanding mental snob of his time. . . His preCubist, Cubist and post-Cubist work in Europe demonstrated his absolute detachment from the social problem.

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Thus it was, that he, the snob, later appropriated the Revolution exclusively as a platform for his declamations.' This was despite the fact that Rivera had very controversially painted a portrait of Lenin as part of his huge mural 'Man at the Crossroads' in the Rockefeller Centre in New York in 1933. It was soon painted over. Siqueiros accused Rivera of painting for 'tourists' who 'wanted little paintings that could be shipped easily and one had to comply with their commercial demands.'

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Although Rivera was ostensibly a socialist, Siqueiros accused him of painting 'only general themes, abstract symbols, Scholastic, pseudoMarxist lectures.' Siqueiros wanted Trotsky out of Mexico though, contrary to the belief at the time, he didn't want Trotsky dead and an international martyr. What he wanted was to show the Mexican government that Trotsky's round the clock protection was too much of a burden and that he should be expelled from Mexico. In April

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1940 Hitler's forces were at the Russian border; Siqueiros strongly supported the Soviet Union and believed that Trotsky was using Mexico as a base to attack it. But he was almost certainly not working under Stalin's orders; Stalin had other things to worry about in 1940. On May 24, Siqueiros and a small army of twenty five men disarmed the police guards, entered Trotsky's house and fired around 200 shots, none of them aimed at Trotsky or his wife. Rivera, thinking he would be blamed, immediately left for America. Siqueiros went into hiding but was caught later in the year and imprisoned in Mexico City. By this time Trotsky was already dead from the ice pick. Siqueiros defended himself, outlining in detail how the attack on Trotsky was politically necessary.

I considered that as a Mexican revolutionary there would be no greater honour for me than to contribute to an act that helped expose the treason of a political centre of espionage and provocation that was seriously contrary to the national independence of Mexico, the

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Mexican Revolution – that counted me among its soldiers and militants from the year 1911 – and of the international struggle for the cause of socialism. Siqueiros was set free on bail; as he left the prison the warden was waiting for him – they had both fought in the Revolution and the warden treated him with respect. He was shown into a limousine in which

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the attorney general of Mexico was sitting. The warden got in too. Siqueiros was taken to the private mansion of the president where he was received by the chief of the presidential guard. It turned out that during the revolution Siqueiros had given shelter to the man who was now president; Siqueiros didn't remember the incident but the president did. He gave Siqueiros his freedom but only if he left the country. In trying to get Trotsky expelled from the country he got himself expelled instead. Before he was expelled from Mexico, Siqueiros had been expelled from the United States, on more than one occasion. The FBI considered him a dangerous revolutionary and had a file on him over 5,000 pages thick. In 1935 he had been expelled from the west coast of America but soon entered again on the east coast

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after a period in Argentina. He rented a studio in New York and arranged an exhibition of paintings he had done while he was in Argentina, in defiance of the FBI, who don't seem to have been watching. While he was in New York at this time, Siqueiros renewed his

friendship with George Gershwin, whom he had met in Taxco in Mexico a few years earlier; both men saw a strong connection between music and painting; Siqueiros recalled that Gershwin said he could hear sounds in Siqueiros' colours and that he saw colour and form in Gershwin's music.

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The year before Gershwin died of a brain tumour on July 11, 1937, at the tragically young age of thirty eight, Siqueiros painted a portrait of him. At first Gershwin just wanted a head but when Siqueiros arrived at his Park Avenue apartment with a canvas only 60 x 40 cm Gershwin changed his mind and asked for a full-length portrait. But when Siqueiros brought round a larger canvas Gershwin asked if he could be painted playing the piano. Siqueiros loved working on a large scale – you can see many of his

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huge murals on the web but they don't convey the overwhelming experience of seeing them on a vast scale; some have elements like clenched fists painted on raised plaster to make them threedimensional. One of the greatest, an overwhelming mural called 'The New Democracy', covers a whole, huge wall at the top of the staircase in the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City (illustrated below; the earlier picture of the mural with Siqueiros holding out his fist is also colossal and three

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dimensional and also in the Palace of Fine Arts). Siqueiros' final canvas for the Gershwin painting turned out to be 2.5 metres by 1.6 metres. It is extraordinary. Seen from the back of the stage in a large, packed concert hall Gershwin is at the foreground of the picture and the audience at the rear, the curves of the balconies seeming to form a wave, a musical rhythm of their own. Gershwin loved it but asked if Siqueiros could paint Gershwin's own friends and family members' faces onto the people in the front row. Siqueiros agreed, and put himself on the last seat on the left of the painting. [The picture is currently on long-term loan to the Blanton Museum in Texas; you can see it on their website where all the faces in the painting are identified.] Gershwin, a painter himself, was delighted with the picture and took Siqueiros out for a celebration at the

Waldorf Astoria. Siqueiros said that Gershwin's wealth and fame ensured that, although they were the only two men present, there were around thirty Broadway show girls. Siqueiros doesn't say how he reconciled his Communist beliefs with his friend's wealth and extravagance, but perhaps the show girls helped him loosen his principles, if only for a night.

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Caresse Crosby enters with the buoyancy of a powder puff, caressing voice (was this how she gained the nickname of Caresse from Harry Crosby?), her fur hat, her eyelashes, her smile all glittery with animation. The word on her lips is always YES, and all her being says YES YES YES to all that is happening and all that is offered her. She trails behind her, like the plume of a peacock, a fabulous legend. She ran the Black Sun Press in Paris, lived in a converted windmill, knew DH Lawrence, Ezra Pound, André Breton, painters, writers. At the Quatre Arts Ball she once rode on a horse as Lady Godiva.

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That was diarist and novelist Anaïs Nin – of whom much more later – on Caresse Crosby, born Mary Phelps Jacob in 1891, the first recipient of a patent for the modern bra, patent number 1,115,674, granted on November 3, 1914, titled M. P. JACOB BRASSIÈRE.

Caresse’s husband Harry was the Harvard-educated nephew of JP Morgan. Together they ran the Black Sun Press and were publishers, supporters and patrons of many young writers, including Kay Boyle, DH Lawrence, Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, and Anaïs

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Nin. As we saw, they published Tales Told of Shem and Shaun and got James and Lucia Joyce's Pomes Penyeach published in a special edition. As publishers and patrons they were magnificent, as writers less so, though it is hard to agree with Robert McAlmon when, with his usual sexist

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tone he describes Caresse as 'an attractive, smartly-dressed woman but I did not take her literary interests or tastes seriously.' The publishing house got its name because, as Caresse said, 'black was Harry's favourite color and he worshipped the sun.' It was sun worship – in the atavistic sense not in the modern sense of sunbathing – that first led Harry to DH Lawrence. While he was in Egypt in 1927 Harry read Lawrence's Mexican novel The Plumed Serpent which had been published the year earlier; he recognised Lawrence as a kindred spirit in relation to the idea of a sun god. Harry immediately wrote to him. He asked Lawrence to send him, for publication, 'any sun story' that he might have, offering him $100 in 'twenty-dollar gold pieces, the eagle and the sun.' Lawrence did have a story, titled Sun which he sent to

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Harry. True to his word, Harry did pay him in gold coins in a 'small square Cartier box' and later sent him two copies of the book in golden boxes. Lawrence said he loved the book and found the 'print and the paper very elegant and aristocratic and lovely'. By 1929, Lawrence was looking for a publisher for Lady Chatterley's Lover. He was prepared to underwrite the costs himself but he was still having difficulty. He had written to Sylvia Beach asking her to take the book on, but she had not replied. He then asked Richard Aldington, still HD's husband, and Aldous Huxley to intervene with Beach but they had had no success. Lawrence was reluctant to leave his home in the warmth of the south of France in March, but decided he would have to go to Paris. While he was there the Crosbys invited him and Frieda to

stay at their mill outside Paris. Harry and Caresse had first met and fallen in love with the mill, the scene of so many literary stories, while they was staying with the Duc de la Rochefoucauld in his château – being the nephew of JP Morgan assured Harry the best invitations. Strolling around the vast estate they saw the old mill, semi-derelict but beautifully located. They immediately told the owner that they wanted to buy it; Harry did not have his cheque-book

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on him so he ripped the cuff off the sleeve of Caresse's white blouse and wrote him a check on that. Naturally they called it the Moulin de Soleil [Sun Windmill]. When the Lawrences arrived at the mill Harry wasn't impressed and their first meeting did not go well. He recorded it in his diary.

DH Lawrence for luncheon and we disagreed on everything. I am a visionary I like to soar he is all engrossed in the body and in the mushroom quality of the earth and the body and in the complexities of psychology. He is indirect. I am direct. He admits defeat. I do not. . . Lawrence stayed until four attacking my visionary attitude but my thought withstood the bombardment and I marshalled my troops and sallied out to counter-attack all of which took time. At the mill, Harry played Lawrence a recording of James Joyce reading from Ulysses. Lawrence was not impressed by Joyce's reading. 'Yes I thought so a preacher a Jesuit preacher who believes in the cross upsidedown'. The Lawrence's second visit to the mill, with Aldous Huxley, went slightly better, but they were

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still far apart in literary taste; Harry said: 'Caresse and I pro-Joyce, Lawrence and Huxley anti-Joyce and I proclaim the Word itself the Word is a talent of gold but it is a friendly discussion this time (no need to call out my shock troops) and there was tea and glasses of sherry.' The meeting of minds was eventually complete when Lawrence wrote an introduction to Harry's book of poems Ladders to the Sun, dated May 1, 1928, as from one sun-worshipper to another. It is poetry of suns which are the core of chaos, suns which are fountains of shadow and pools of light and centres of thought and lions of passion. Since chaos has a core which is itself quintessentially chaotic and fierce with incongruities. That such a sun

should have a chariot makes it only more chaotic. And in the chaotic re-echoing of the soul, wisps of sound curl round with curious soothing – likewise invisible winds. Drink fire, and all my heart is sun-consoled.

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Caresse and Harry heard about James Joyce through Sylvia Beach, as did most people; they were just starting the Black Sun Press and they 'yearned for a piece of the rich Irish cake then baking on the Paris fire.' But when they first met him 'Joyce was uncommunicative and seemed bored

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with us, retreating behind those thick mysterious lenses until something was said about Sullivan's concert the evening before, then suddenly he came to life – talking all the while about great Irish tenors'. Joyce was a tireless supporter of John Sullivan and the talk brought him to life. Harry and Caresse joined him in his enthusiasm. Joyce invited them back the next week for a concert and finally they worked up the courage to ask him if they could print some of what he was then calling Work in Progress, which eventually became part of Finnegan's Wake. Joyce agreed, if only because they did not want many pages and they promised unlimited corrections – something Sylvia Beach had unwisely offered Joyce some years earlier. They also agreed to pay him whatever he asked for in advance; Joyce was always short of money.

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The Crosbys began to visit Joyce regularly, when he gave them his 'corrections and additions'. Harry noted in his diary that Joyce 'seemed very blind and he knocked into the tea table trying to show us the painting of his father by an Irishman named Thohey who has also painted

Joyce and his son'. Joyce asks him to read aloud one of the passages they were about to edit; Harry finds it rather obscure and does not really understand it but 'Joyce explains this passage and I realise how ignorant I am from the scholastic point of view and how sane a writer is Joyce . . . I

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liked the flash of triumph when Caresse asked him how much he enjoyed doing this new work, the same flash of triumph as when one is sleeping with a woman one loves, the same flash of triumph when one bets high on a horse and sees him gallop past the winning post a winner.'

Joyce signed a contract for the publication on April 3, 1929; the Crosbys paid him $1000 as a halfpayment. Joyce went through the proof sheets in mid-April, mostly at the Crosbys' Paris apartment, but only after they had assured him that they would tie up and muzzle their dog Narcisse Noir while he was there. He worked in the library which had a lamp with 'an enormous lightbulb' in deference to the weakness of Joyce's eyes. As he had been with Harry earlier, Joyce was always keen to show off his cleverness. Caresse wrote about this time in The Passionate Years: 'Now, Mr and Mrs Crosby,' Joyce said, 'I wonder if you understand why I made that change?' All this in a blarney-Irish key. 'No, why?' We chorused, and there ensued one of the most

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intricate and erudite twenty minutes of explanation that it has ever been my luck to hear but unfortunately I hardly understood a word, his references were far too esoteric. Harry fared better, but afterward we both regretted that we did not have a dictaphone behind the lamp so that later we could have studied all that had escaped us. Joyce stayed three hours, he did not want to drink, and by eight he hadn't got through with a page and a half. It was illuminating. The Crosbys wanted to commission Picasso to do a portrait of Joyce for the book. Harry noted in his diary for May 3, 1929: C spends the morning with Picasso I with Joyce. Picasso told her he wouldn't do a portrait of Joyce

because he never did portraits anymore but that sometime he would do a drawing for the Black Sun Press. . . Joyce this morning was feeling very poorly – he had been working terribly hard on the three fragments for the Black Sun Press, he has a cold, he is nervous

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because his daughter [Lucia] is dancing this afternoon in a public performance at the Femina and he has to go to it.' Caresse asked the sculptor Brancusi for a drawing instead; he agreed and did several sketches. They were good likenesses but the Crosbys really wanted something more abstract. Brancusi agreed provided he was

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given complete freedom. The resulting 'portrait' is just three vertical lines of various lengths and a spiral; not a literal portrait in any sense but the Crosbys and Joyce loved it, though Sylvia Beach thought it was 'a bit too basic'. When the book was finally ready for publication the printer had to come back to the Crosbys, very embarrassed, to tell them that the final page only had two lines; could Mr Joyce perhaps provide an additional eight lines. Caresse was too frightened to ask him but the printer went behind her back directly to Joyce and got the lines; apparently Joyce had wanted to add more but was too frightened of Caresse to ask her. The Crosbys first met Picasso's friend and patron Gertrude Stein in 1928; they were not received warmly.

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To Gertrude Stein's we went but once. I do not recall that Harry ever met her again. We were only three or four. She wanted to look at our editions and we wanted to look at her Picassos. We did both. Her portrait is well-known now, but then it had not yet met the public. The story goes that a friend complained to Picasso, 'it doesn't look like her.' 'It will,' he replied. Harry and Caresse did meet Stein again, in the Midi in France in 1934 when it was Alice Toklas who was the 'star' of the luncheon. 'She was in top form and led us through many a merry adventure, as she told us tales of her travels with Gertrude while Gertrude sat smiling upon us all like a happy Buddhess.' The last time Caresse met Gertrude 'I liked her best of all'. It was autumn 1945, in Paris, immediately after the war;

Caresse was one of the first Americans to return. Stein had brought over drawings by American artists that she arranged to show in a gallery on the Rue Furstemburg.

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Paris was starving for contact with the American world of art and everyone flocked. Gertrude Stein came stalking in with her white poodle [called Basket] at her heels. She sat in the centre of the tiny room and almost stole the show, my show, but even when she walked off with the best-looking GI in the place, I forgave her. As Picasso had foreseen, his portrait now looks just like her.

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In The Passionate Years, Caresse also tells a nice story of how she first met F Scott Fitzgerald: she was passing through Baltimore on her way to the ship that would take her to Europe. She had never met him before but had been given his number and phoned him to introduce herself. It went beautifully. He would wear a red carnation. He would meet me in the bar of the Lord Baltimore at twelve, he would take me to lunch, he would see that I reached the pier by two. . . I confidently entered the bar. It was 12:15 but no Scott – so I sat down and told the waiter I would order when the gentleman arrived – but no gentleman arrived. Then someone who was no gentleman insisted on joining me. I got up flurried and went to the telephone. I had forgotten the number which I

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had had from a friend in New York. The operator could find no record of Scott Fitzgerald whatsoever. I was furious, and then I heard my name being paged. I was wanted on the telephone. My barroom friend retreated. It was Scott full of apologies, he had been working he said, forgot the time etc. etc. Would I jump in a cab and come to the house. Did I like beer? I didn't, but I answered, 'Love it.' If it hadn't been for the barroom beau I'd have gone back and had a snifter myself. We drew up in front of a rather sinister-looking house, and as I

remember, I had to go around to the back to get in. Scott answered the door in a flapping dressinggown, hair tousled, but with a smile that unlatched my heart. 'So you're Caresse Crosby,' he said. 'And you are you.'

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One of Caresse and Harry Crosby's greatest successes as publishers came when they acted as midwives at the birth of one of the great American poems: they bullied, blackmailed and kidnapped Hart Crane into finishing his monumental poem sequence The Bridge – which, along with Allen Ginsberg's Howl and William Carlos Williams' Paterson, is one of the great pillars of American twentieth century epic poetry. Harold Bloom, the doyen of twentieth-century American letters believes that Crane, if he had lived, would have been the great American poet of his century. In his essay 'On Gertrude Stein' Virgil Thomson mentions Crane as one of only three contemporary Americans in relation to Stein: the other two being Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson. 'I do not know the real cause of her break with Hemingway, only that after a friendship of several 132

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years she did not see him any more and declared for ever after that he was "yellow". Anderson remained a friend always, though I do not think she ever took him seriously as a

writer. The poet Hart Crane she did take seriously.' In his introduction to Crane's complete poems, Waldo Frank compares Crane to Walt Whitman,

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not as an 'epigone' but as an inheritor of his tradition. The first section of the sixty page poem The Bridge, titled 'Proem: Brooklyn Bridge', is a soaring, lyrical, almost ecstatic hymn, mythologizing the great steel structure of 1883.

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But before Crane met the Crosbys he met Otto Kahn, at the time probably the sixth richest man in the world and known as the Maecenas of modernism. He partly financed the legal defence of Ulysses and later took James Joyce to the opera in 1930. They saw Rossini's William Tell, hardly a modernist masterpiece. Kahn lent money to Margaret Anderson for Little Review and sometimes wrote off the loans. Later he met Ezra Pound too, in the spring of 1931. They didn't see eye to eye. Pound of course thought that he, Pound, was the great manipulator of modern art, not some financier, however advanced his taste or generous his patronage. Pound was not pro-capitalist, but then not many artists and intellectuals were, especially after the Wall Street crash of 1929. Though Pound would soon come to be labelled pro-Fascist, he denied that any rich person had ever

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been part of the creation of any great work of art. 'During the past twenty years I have known a fair number of the best creators in Europe . . . No ploot [plutocrat] has ever been in touch with any of them'. In March 1932, in a letter to Kahn, Pound wrote about the 'open and increasingly acute question whether a man of letters can honestly support an economic system which does no better than this'. Both he and Kahn had influence at the Guggenheim Foundation but Pound believed his own influence should be more important than that of any banker. 'The endowed foundations, as I told you in Paris, AVOID the best as if it were bubonic plague.'

Pound was annoyed with Kahn and the Guggenheim because the Foundation ignored his nominees to fellowships, except once when Kahn intervened on behalf of George

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Antheil. Hart Crane had known about Otto Kahn's philanthropy for several years when, on Wednesday December 2, 1925 the unemployed poet rang Kahn's office to request an interview. A secretary told him he needed to write a letter. Crane did and included personal references from, among others, Waldo Frank and Eugene

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O'Neill, together with reviews of his published work. He talked about 'the pressure of my present circumstances' and his idea of an epic poem to 'enunciate a new cultural synthesis of values in terms of our America.' He explained in the letter that the completion of the poem needed a 'steady application and less interruption' than a job would provide. He asked for a loan rather than a grant, which was how Kahn liked to operate. Crane said the money would allow him to live 'cheaply in the country for at least a year and not only complete this poem, but work on a drama'. He ended the letter: 'I honestly feel that my artistic integrity and present circumstances, merit the attention of one like yourself, who is and has been so notably constructive in the contemporary and future art and letters of America.'

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On Saturday the secretary offered Crane the opportunity to visit Kahn's mansion the next day, Sunday. He went, they got on well, they talked about music. Crane got the money – $1,000 – but it didn't last him a year and he didn't finish the poem before the money ran out, never mind the drama. By March 1926 he was asking Kahn for money again, sending him details about the progress of the poem, which he said 'will be a dynamic and eloquent document'. He got the money but still didn't finish the poem. Crane didn't write again to Kahn until September 12, 1927, when he sent a long letter and a nearlyfinished manuscript along with a request for more money and Kahn's impressions of the work. Kahn took the manuscript home with him on the weekend of September 18-19 where he 'perused' it. No one knows if he read it carefully or completely,

or even at all, but he may already have seen parts of it which had been published in little magazines. He wrote to Crane on the Monday: Owing to the overwhelming demands to which my time is

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subject, I must ask you to excuse me from stating in writing my 'impression of the poem as it now stands,' except to the extent of saying that I am confirmed in my opinion of your great and singular talent. It is too bad that your efforts to find employment have been unsuccessful thus far.

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Kahn talks as he might have talked to a shiftless son who had chosen poetry rather than banking: his lack of a job appearing more important than his completion of the poem. But still his letter is friendly enough; he offers to help Crane find a job and invites Crane to come see him whenever he is in New York. Crane was happy to take the money but disappointed with Kahn's apparent lack of appreciation for the stature of the work which he had funded. Kahn was not alone in his lack of any great enthusiasm however: when the complete work finally appeared the critics were divided, the public were not impressed and sales were not impressive. We don't know exactly when Hart Crane began writing The Bridge, but in a letter to Waldo Frank dated February 7, 1923 he wrote outlining 'a few planks of the scaffolding' of his

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latest long poem. 'Part 1 starts out from the quotidian, rises to evocation, ecstasy and statement. The whole poem is a kind of fusion of our own time with the past.' And in a letter of February 18 to Gorham Munson, Crane thanks him for the praise of his earlier poem For The Marriage of Faustus and Helen, but seems entirely preoccupied with his new project. Your summary of praises for 'F and H' was such a fine tribute that it might account for my backache and confinement to the bed yesterday. But the more probable cause for that, however, is liquor and the cogitations and cerebral excitements it threw me into regarding my new enterprise, The Bridge on the evening precedent. I am too much interested in this Bridge thing lately to write letters,

ads or anything. It is just beginning to take the least outline. . . Very roughly, it concerns a mystical synthesis of 'America.' History in fact, location et cetera. All have to be transfigured into abstract form that would almost function independently of its subject matter. The initial impulses of 'our people' will have to be gathered up

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towards the climax of the bridge, symbol of our constructive future, our unique identity, in which is included also our scientific hopes and achievements of the future. The mystic portent of all this is already flocking through my mind. . . but the actual statement of the

thing, the marshalling of the forces, will take me months, at least. It took more than a few months. When Crane met the Crosbys in 1929 The Bridge was still not finished and Crane's personal life was a mess; he was nowhere near fulfilling his promise. Crane had never come to terms with his homosexuality, he drank heavily and his behaviour was never even close to being socially acceptable. Virgil Thomson remembers him: he had hosted large parties at his flat in Paris the year before, but Crane was among those not invited. Not Antheil, who was in America. Nor Ernest Hemingway, whom I never asked. He was part of a Montparnasse hard-liquor set which, though thoroughly

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fascinated by itself, was less interesting to people not also drinking hard liquor. Robert McAlmon I did find interesting; I also esteemed him as a writer; but just like Hart Crane, who was around for a while and whom I also admired, he was too busy

drinking and getting over it to make dates with. Both were better when casually encountered. Even Crane's closest friends and biggest supporters worried about his drinking. In his essay 'Two Faces', Waldo Frank says Crane was a

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'confirmed drinker. He drew from alcohol sleep that was a promise and the sense of death. There was so much in daily life that was death to the life he sought.' But Frank also understands the importance of drink to Crane's creativity. 'Crane was a homosexual with a weakness for fresh sailor boys. And when drenched with drink he needed strong

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reverberations to become a song. He was capable of throwing a chair out of the window. Sober, which was most of the time, he was cool as a field of daisies.' Crane occasionally tried chastity and sobriety but it stopped him working; he wrote to Frank: 'Lately my continence has brought me nothing in the creative way.' Crane and the Crosbys were introduced in Paris by Eugène Jolas, Joyce's French translator, whom they had met though Sylvia Beach and who had also introduced them to Joyce. You may remember that Maria Jolas introduced Kay Boyle to Joyce. Jolas published Crane's poems in transition, including some early parts of The Bridge; he called the Crosbys the 'mad millionaires'. They were certainly eccentric, among other things they had dogs named Clytoris and Narcisse Noir (rather more

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exotically-named than Gertrude Stein’s poodle Basket). Crane describes his first meeting with them in a letter to Malcolm Cowley dated February 4, 1929. Have just returned from a weekend at Ermenonville (near Chantilly) on the estate of the Duc du Rochefoucauld where an amazing millionaire by the name of Harry Crosby has fixed up an old mill (with stables and a stockade all about) . . . I'm invited to return at any time for any period to finish The Bridge, but I've an idea that I shall soon wear off my novelty. Coincidentally, in Crane's complete letters, the letter before this one, dated January 3 was a note of introduction to Gertrude Stein and the letter following it, on February 7,

is to Waldo Frank reporting on his visit: 'I went to see Gertrude Stein despite my indifference to most of her work. One is supposed to change one's mind about her work after meeting her. I haven't, but I must say that I've seldom met so delightful a personality. And the woman is

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beautiful.' Perhaps he had been drinking. Crane's novelty did wear off, though not immediately. By the time the Crosbys met Crane they had already read what then existed of The Bridge. They were impressed. They

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wanted to publish it as it was in a limited deluxe edition of 200 copies with the Italian-American Joseph Stella's soaring, futurist painting Brooklyn Bridge, first exhibited in 1920, on the cover. But the poem still needed some additions; the Crosbys decided to help Crane finish it, whatever the cost, personal and financial. It turned out to be a high price to pay but they paid it and they did publish the finished work. They didn't use the painting for the cover though, which was a shame as it would have been an ideal match to Crane's text: in a much later article in Art News, Stella said that while imagining the painting he had 'appealed for help to the soaring Walt Whitman's verse and to the fiery Poe's plasticity. Upon the swarming darkness of the night, I run all the bells of alarm with the blaze of electricity scattered in lightnings

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down the bleak cables, the dynamic pillars of my composition'. Like Georgette Leblanc's evocation of the bridge ten years earlier, Stella's description in the essay 'Brooklyn Bridge, A Page of My Life', printed in transition in June 1929, is almost as ecstatic as Crane's poem. For years I had been waiting for the joy of being capable to leap up to this subject – for BROOKLYN BRIDGE had become an ever growing obsession ever since I had come to America. . . . To render limitless space on which to enact my emotions, I chose the mysterious depth of night. . . Many nights I stood on the bridge – and in the middle alone – a defenseless prey to the surrounding swarming darkness – crushed by the mountainous black impenetrability of the skyscrapers

– here and there lights resembling suspended falls of astral bodies or fantastic splendors of remote rites – shaken by the underground tumult of the trains in perpetual motion like blood in the arteries – at times ringing as alarm in a tempest, the shrill voice of the trolley wires, now and then strange mouldings of appeal from

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tugboats, guessed more than seen, through the infernal recesses below – I felt deeply moved – as if on the threshold of a new religion or in the presence of a new DIVINITY. In its October 1929 issue the magazine The Arts devoted an article to Stella, with quotes from him about The Bridge: 'the painting to me is

more real, more true than a literal transcription of the bridge could be. The cables are ghostly threads, as they approach the electric lights, only to be lost in darkness as they go up into space.' Crane not only knew and admired Stella's work but had compared his process of composition to the process of organising a painting. In his September 1927 letter to Otto Kahn he had said: Thousands of strands have had to be searched for, sorted and interwoven. In a sense I have had to do a great deal of pioneering myself. It has taken a great deal of energy . . . Which has not been so difficult to summon as the time . . . Until my instincts assured me that I had assembled my materials in proper order for a final welding into their natural form. For each section of the entire poem has

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presented its own unique problem of form, not alone in relation to the other parts. Each is a separate canvas, as it were, yet none yields its entire significance when seen apart from others . . . One might take the Sistine Chapel as an analogy. Stella himself, on the other hand, said his painting's design was as 'compact as in a Luca Signorelli'. Crane wrote directly to Stella: 'I should like permission to use your painting of "The Bridge" as a frontispiece to a long poem I have been busy on for the last three years . . . called "The Bridge." It is a remarkable coincidence that I should, years later, have discovered that another person, by whom I mean you, should have had the same sentiments regarding the Brooklyn Bridge which inspired the main theme and pattern of my

poem.' It is however likely that Crane didn't discover Stella 'years later': Little Review had published a 'Stella Number' in Autumn 1922, which reproduced Brooklyn Bridge and several other works. The same issue contained a letter from Crane to Jane Heap complaining about her criticism

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of Secession magazine and a portrait of Stella and Duchamp taken by Man Ray, as well as pieces by Gertrude Stein and Jean Toomer. Remember that Crane lived above the Little Review offices and was notionally advertising manager at one time [the whole Autumn 1922 issue is online at modjourn.org]. Crane might also have been inspired by Stella's colossal, twenty three foot long, five panel painting of bridges, New York Interpreted, of which Brooklyn Bridge was the central panel, although he was not in New York in January 1923

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when it was exhibited there by the Société Anonyme in a solo show at 19, East 47th Street. It is now across the Hudson River in the Newark Museum, fifteen miles from William Carlos Williams' former home in Paterson [you can see it on the museum's website]. Nevertheless Stella's painting did not appear on the cover of the Black Sun Press edition, though Walker Evans' superb photographs do appear on the inside pages. Crane was pleased with the photographs; he wrote to Caresse on January 2, 1930: 'I think Evans is the most living, vital photographer of any whose work I know. More and more I rejoice that we decided on his pictures rather than Stella’s'. (A silver gelatin print of Evan’s 1929/30 portrait of Crane was recently sold at Christie’s for over $1,000.)

While they were in New York and planning to force Crane to finish The Bridge, Harry and Caresse Crosby had been decorating their daughter Polleen's room ready for when she came home from Swiss boarding school. She was due home on the Monday but on Saturday Harry brought Hart Crane home for the

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night. They had no guest room so had to put him up with his 'sailor's duffel bag and his hobnailed shoes' in Polleen's newly decorated room. Caresse describes his appearance in The Passionate Years: Hart was stocky and bristly, rather like a young porcupine. He had a lot of gusto and a Rabelaisian

laugh. He even held his belly when he laughed. I think he had a moustache that year, his mouth looked that way. He was young and cocky. We were aware of Hart's midnight prowlings and also aware, to our dismay, of his nocturnal pickups. He said he'd go out for a nightcap so it was with great relief that I heard him come in about 2 am and softly close the stairway door. Thereafter it was quiet. But in the morning, what a hideous awakening! Crane had completely wrecked Polleen's room. 'On the wallpaper and across the pale pink spread, up and down the curtains and over the white chenille rug were the blackest footprints and handprints I have ever seen, hundreds of them. No wonder, for I heard to my fury that he had

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brought a chimney-sweep home for the night.' At least it made a change from sailors. Caresse forgave him and stuck with him through to the publication of The Bridge, going so far as to lock him in and forcing him to write. The tough love strategy worked and Crane finally finished the poem. On December 7, 1930 they held a party to mark the completion of The

Bridge under the shadow of the actual bridge which it celebrates. William Carlos Williams was there, as well as several sailors from the Brooklyn Navy Yard who used the bridge as a pathway to the South Street bars (which explains the line: 'Under thy shadow by the piers I waited' – it was a gay meeting place). Harry and Caresse were due to sail for France on the 13th. They never made it.

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During the night of December 8, 1929 Harry Crosby suddenly told Caresse he wanted them both to leap from their hotel window and achieve a 'Sun-Death' on this winter day. Caresse ignored him, he was drunk. It was six weeks after the Wall Street Crash and many financiers did in fact jump from tall buildings. On the tenth Harry met his mistress, whom Caresse called the Fire Princess. He was supposed to meet Caresse later at the Lyceum Theatre, with Hart Crane and others. When there was no sign of Harry the party went into the theatre but Crane left his number at the box office in case a call came. It did. Crosby and his mistress were dead in a hotel room. They each had a bullet to the head and Harry still had a gun in his hand. Harry's last entry in his diary was December 9:

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And again my Invulnerability is put to the test. One is not in love unless one desires to die with one's beloved there is only one happiness it is to love and to be loved Caresse thought she was his beloved but she was obviously wrong. There had been plenty of signs of Harry's intentions, even before he asked Caresse to join him in a Sun-Death. There was an essay in his book Ladders to the Sun called 'Sun-Death'; in it he quotes the famous ending of TS Eliot's The Hollow Men: 'This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper'

and Elliott is right, absolutely right, as regards the majority, as regards the stupid Philistines, whose lives have always been a whimper, whose lives could never be anything else but a whimper, whose lives must inevitably end with a whimper, they who prefer

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senility, who prefer putrefaction of the brain, who prefer hypocrisy, stability, imbecility (do not confound with madness) impotence, to the strength and fury of a Sun-Death dead bodies and dead souls dumped unceremoniously into the world's latrine.

But for the Seekers after Fire and the Seers and the Prophets (hail to you o men of transition) and for the Worshippers of the Sun, life ends not with a whimper, but with a Bang – a violent explosion mechanically perfect ('Imperthnthnthnthn') a SunExplosion into Sun – Their friends rallied around Caresse. Kay Boyle wrote to her on December 17, 1929 from Neuilly: dear darling child – I want to be near you and kiss you 1000 times and tell you how enormous how magnificent you are – I cannot say anything to you that is in my heart – but I see you like a fiery little steed and I worship you for it. Here is my devotion and my love and my homage forever and ever – your/Kay

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The June 1930 edition of transition included a section called 'In Memoriam: Harry Crosby' including Kay Boyle's 'Homage to Harry Crosby' and poems by Hart Crane and Archibald McLeish. Kay wrote again to Caresse that month: 'I have transition and I am proud to be on the same pages with Hart Crane's poem and to a lesser extent with McLeish's. I am proud to be on the same page as sleeping together. I am proud of everything Harry ever did.' As if that weren't enough for Caresse to bear, Hart Crane killed himself two years after Harry, on April 27, 1932. Crane had a girlfriend at the time, but he still liked to pick up sailors; he had tried to pick one up on a boat the night before he died, after he and his girlfriend had a row. They had been on a Guggenheim Fellowship in Mexico; on the boat on the way back to America from 156

Havana they had another row and Crane got so drunk that the purser locked him in his room. Hart broke the door down and went out looking for a sailor for comfort. In the middle of the night he was back on deck bruised and bleeding, his wallet and

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ring had been stolen. He tried to jump over the railings but the night watchman stopped him and he was taken back to his room again. Later that morning one of the passengers saw him on deck: he placed both hands on the railing, raised himself on his toes, and . . . dropped back again. We all fell silent and watched him, wondering what in the world he was up to. Then, suddenly, he vaulted over the railing and jumped into the sea. For what seemed like five minutes, but was more like five seconds, no one was able to move; then cries of 'man overboard' went up. Just once I saw Crane, swimming strongly, but never again. Like – presumably – Arthur Cravan, Hart Crane died in the sea off

Mexico. Waldo Frank was Crane's friend and editor, as he was Jean Toomer's. Crane knew him through Gorham Munson, who had written Waldo Frank: A Study, and to whom Crane had written almost weekly from Akron and Cleveland since 1920. Crane first wrote to Frank on November 30, 1922 (just before

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Toomer wrote to Frank that he had finished Cane), praising Frank's story 'Hope'. Frank quickly replied in what Crane called 'a very cordial letter.' In the introduction to a 1957 edition of Crane's complete poems, Frank comments on Crane's suicide: 'The principle that Crane needed and

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sought, to make him master of his sense of immediate continuity with a world increasingly chaotic (America had lurched into the depression of the 1930s), gave Crane The Bridge – but in actual life did not sustain him.' Frank talks about how, in Mexico, 'Crane was invaded subtly by a cult of death old as the Aztecs, ruthless as the sea.' Crane was 'possessed by a demon that gave him no peace' according to the painter Peggy Baird, the girlfriend who was there with him. Baird was the wife of playwright Orrick Johns before marrying Crane's friend Malcolm Cowley. She had gone to Mexico to get a divorce from Cowley and become Crane's lover; possibly his only heterosexual affair. The demon seems to have thrived on alcohol. Baird reported a typical drunken incident concerning a portrait that David Alfaro Siqueiros –

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who, as we saw, didn't assassinate Trotsky but did paint George Gershwin – had painted of him. Crane was very proud of the painting; in a letter of 1931, Crane referred to Siqueiros, 'whom I consider to be the greatest of contemporary Mexican painters. He has painted a portrait of me that is outstandingly close'. But Baird said that one day while Crane was drunk: suddenly he stopped before the Siqueiros portrait, which normally he admired greatly. He flung out his hand, pointing at it with a gesture of disgust, and his enunciation became clearer. 'Look at that piece of trash!' He laughed derisively. 'One of Mexico's greatest painters! What a travesty! Do you think that jackal will be known ten years after he dies? Why, that picture hasn't

been painted a year and the paint is already cracking. It's a daub executed with house paint. Siqueiros did indeed use house paint, as well as car paint; it was egalitarian. After the Mexican Revolution, painters were paid a plumber's wages

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by the state to create public murals, being considered workers like everyone else. In Waldo Frank's introduction to Crane's poems, he explicitly links Mexico with the origin of the idea of death in Crane's mind. Hart Crane fought death in Mexico. He wanted to escape. But as his boat turned toward what seemed to him the modern chaos of New York, there was the sea.

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And he could not resist it. On April 27, 1932, a few moments before noon, Hart Crane walked to the stern of the Orizaba. The ship was about 300 miles north of Havana, leaving the warm waters which fifteen years before he had first known and sung as a mythic haven of rest. He took off his coat quietly, and leaped. In 'Two Faces', Frank also says that the death of Crane's father and his Mexico experience, with its 'revelation of the cult of death' had affected him profoundly and 'he decided to go home.' Crane had tried to 'overcome his homosexuality', though that was for him 'the mark of his self'. And again, Frank points out the fatal attraction that the sea had for him, especially when he considered that 'his prospects were

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slight' after the lukewarm reaction to The Bridge. The water which alone could save him from them was getting colder.

Then came the grain of sandstone that blinds. His attempt to normalise his sex life must have been pitiful. He stretched out his hand to close his cabin, and the

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door slammed on a finger. The whole universe flooded with pain, all seemed to be pain: there was no escape from its ubiquity. He was part of it, and there was no Whole but pain. In the last quarter of the night, after the ship left Havana and when it was nearest the northern waters, a

sailor on watch saw a figure clad in pyjamas rapidly cross to the stern deck, mount the aft rail, face south only an instant, and then leap into the churning waves. Frank's account here of Crane's suicide is imaginary and contradicts his other account and the evidence of the eyewitness, but Frank knew something about near-death experiences in Mexico: in his 1929 essay 'Mexico and Don Quixote' he talks about his first meeting with Diego Rivera in Veracruz. Diego Rivera offered me a dinner of welcome at a famous and ancient restaurant. The great painter chose the menu which was to introduce me once and for all time to the classic Mexican dishes. My host at the long table watched me take on specialty after

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specialty. Innocently I delighted in them all, from subtle to fiery, with foretones and aftertones like music. Next day, I was deathly sick, intestines writhing, bowels flooding. The press got wind of it and accused Diego, who was already a communist, of poisoning the Yanqui visitor. I had come to tell the Mexicans my plans for a

cultural union of the Americas through the minorities of each: I had not guessed that my problems would begin with dysentery and acute indigestion. Before my first lecture, the Yankee invader had learned that it was possible for a radical head to be overthrown by a Conservative stomach.

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After Harry's and Hart Crane's suicides Caresse Crosby continued

her work and continued to meet new people. In her autobiography, The Passionate Years, she remembers meeting Ezra Pound for the first time; he had the same striking effect on her as on everyone else. It was in the early spring of 1930 and he had been living in Rapallo in Italy for some time. She had already had many letters from Pound 'interlarded with his vivid designs and graphic flourishes' but had not yet met him in person. Like HD, Caresse notes Pound's lack of awareness of his own clumsiness as a dancer. We Parisians were rigidly pale with winter, but Ezra arrived from Rapallo bronzed and negligé – there was a becoming saltiness to his beard. I asked him to dine with me in the Rue de Lille, and afterwards he asked me to do the town with him. He wanted, he

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said, to savour the immediate flavour of Paris by night. I took him to the Boule Blanche where a remarkably beautiful and brilliant band of Martinique players were beating out hot music. We had a ringside table, Ezra was enthralled – I with my broken heart could not dance, which was perhaps just as well. As the music grew in fury Ezra avidly watched the dancers, 'These people don't know a thing about rhythm,' he cried scornfully, and he shut his eyes, thrust forward his red-bearded chin and began a sort of tattoo with his feet – suddenly unable to sit still a minute longer he leapt to the floor and seized the tiny Martiniquaise vendor of cigarettes in his arms, packets flying, then head back, eyes closed, chin out, he began a sort of voodoo prance, his tiny

partner held glued against his piston-pumping knees. The hot music grew hotter. Ezra grew hotter. One by one the uninspired dancers melted from the floor and formed a ring to

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watch that Anglo-savage ecstasy – on and on went the two, until with a final screech of symbols [sic] the music crashed to an end. Ezra opened his eyes, flicked the cigarette girl aside like an extinguished match and collapsed into the chair beside me. The

room exhaled a long orgasmic sigh – I too. From that time on we became the best of friends and the following year the Black Sun Press brought out a limited edition of Imaginary Letters by Ezra Pound. Anaïs Nin's memories of first meeting Caresse, at a party at the surrealist painter Yves Tanguy's house in the winter of 1939, with which we started a previous chapter, continued: The life of certain women dresses them in anecdotes which become more visible than fur coats or silk dresses. Stories surround Caresse like a perfume, a necklace, a feather. She always seems fresher and younger than all the women there, because of her mobility, ease, flowingness. DH Lawrence

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would have called it her 'livingness.' A pollen carrier, I thought, as she mixed, stirred, brewed, concocted her friendships by a constant flux and reflux of activity, by curiosity, avidity, amorousness. In her journals for the winter of 1954/55, Nin is still in awe of Caresse Crosby: The dress is airy, winged. It is of black but transparent material, it is inflated and crisp by new chemistries, as organdy once was by starch and ironing. It gives her the silhouette of a young woman. Her hair, though grey, is glossy, and brushed and also starched and the opposite of limp, because the spirit in Caresse is airy and alive. . . Age can wrinkle her face, freckle her hands, ruthlessly drop

the eyelids over opened eyes, can tire her, but it cannot kill her laughter, her enthusiasm, her mobility. Her second husband, Harry Crosby, committed suicide at the side of another woman (but Caresse had been invited first to share the suicide pact). Her

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adored son Bill died asphyxiated by a faulty gas heater in Paris [like the Baroness]. She lost two fortunes, but she wears at her neck a huge bow because dress and body and hair reflect the alertness and the discipline of her spirit. Nin had been sent to interview Caresse for the magazine Eve. She still thought Caresse was 'an extraordinary woman'. Caresse had designed a sculpture to express her

concept of the Citizen of the World. She erected it on a promontory she owned in Delphi in Greece. The Greek government considered it disrespectful and sent soldiers to arrest her. But, as Nin put it 'the soldiers were the young peasants who knew her as Lady Bountiful and that helped to build the structure. They were devoted to her.' The soldiers were carrying guns but put flowers in them out of respect for her. Nin reports that: Caresse Crosby returned to Paris and on the Black Sun Press she printed the first World Citizen Passport, reading: 'This passport has little meaning in itself. Its importance lies in the fact that you have sought and accepted it. It stands for something that cannot be printed on cards or imposed by

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leadership – your own willingness to respect your fellow man; your own readiness to try living at peace with him.' Anaïs is obviously infatuated with Caresse, with her 'lively and gay blue eyes, her constant sparkling laughter, a short humorous nose, a warm manner which wins everyone and a gift for making friends. . . She never commands, but whatever she asks is immediately accomplished.' Caresse wasn't the only woman Anaïs was infatuated with, as we will see.

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Anaïs Nin wasn't even slightly infatuated with Peggy Guggenheim, nor vice versa; you may remember

Nin saying Guggenheim looked like WC Fields. In his introduction to Guggenheim's Confessions of an Art Addict the equally waspish writer Gore Vidal says: 'Peggy never liked Anaïs. For some reason, to this day, I have never asked her why. Last year, shortly before Peggy's eightieth birthday, we were sitting in the salone of her palazzo on Venice's Grand Canal. . . Peggy suddenly said, "Anaïs was very stupid wasn't she?"' Vidal relates how Nin introduced him to Guggenheim in the winter of 1945/46: In the early part of that winter I had met Anaïs Nin. I was twenty. She was forty-two. Our long and arduous relationship, or Relationship, began in the cold, as the sweet singer of Camelot would say. Anaïs was a shining figure who looked younger than she was;

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spoke in a soft curiously accented voice; told lies which for sheer beauty and strangeness were even better than the books she wrote – perhaps because what she wrote was always truthful if not true while what she said was intended only to please – herself as well as others. . . Anaïs always called me 'chéri' [after the novel by Colette about a young man and his much older lover] with a slightly droll inflection. . . So 'chéri' and Anaïs went to Peggy Guggenheim's house and 'chéri' has never forgotten a single detail of that bright, magical (a word often used in those days) occasion. In a sense, like the character in Les Grandes Meaulnes [a nostalgic coming of age novel by Alain-Fournier; its title inspired the title of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby], I still think that somewhere, even

now, in a side street of New York City, that party is still going on and Anaïs is still alive and young and 'chéri' is very young indeed. . . Recently I came across an old telephone book. I looked up Anaïs's number of thirty-five years ago. Watkins something-or-other. I rang the number; half-expected

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her to answer. If she had, I'd have asked her if it was still 1945 and she would say, Of course. What year did I think it was? And I'd say, No, it's 1979, and you're dead. ('Chéri' was never noted for his tact.) And she would laugh and say, Not yet.

Men mostly adored Nin, even if they were falsely encouraged by her erotic writing into thinking she would be easy to seduce; she wasn't. Waldo Frank was one of them, even though when he met her she hadn't yet published her diaries or novels. He was disappointed. Nin had admired Frank's 1922 novel Rahab and got a letter of introduction to him from his French translator in April, 1935. He took me out to dinner. He looks like a Spaniard, dark hair, not tall, dark eyes. He called me La Campanilla [The Bell]. He is alert but seems a little bitter. 'I am more loved in South America than I am in my own country.' [Perhaps because he ate all the food Diego Rivera gave him.] He also talked about his theory that woman is given too high an importance in America because

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she was so rare in the early days, there were so few of them and men prized them. They retained their privileged position ever since. When he assumed I would spend the night with him I was annoyed, because there had been no gradual courting, no effort made to sense how I felt, no subtle interplay. It was as plain and simple as ordering a dinner. I laughed. He said: 'I can see you are not filled with me, not deeply interested in me.' Frank's views on a woman's place were hardly likely to seduce Nin. He then made it worse by taking her to a burlesque on Fourteenth Street in New York. 'Only men in the audience. We sat in a red plush box. The art of teasing, and not revealing. The woman who took off everything but kept her long white gloves on.'

Frank probably didn't appreciate the irony of her discreet eroticism but Nin obviously did. She didn't sleep with him, though she did see him again; this time he was 'gentle and human, mellow, and he talked about writing with sensitivity. He received me with such a look of faith and

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wonder that it made him seem very young. Here I could talk freely. There was a core to him, something rich and true, insight too.' She still didn't sleep with him. Nin was at least as attracted to women as to men – as writers and characters if not necessarily as sexual

conquests. One of the women she admired to the point of obsession was Djuna Barnes. In Nin's 1968 nonfiction work The Novel of the Future – which argues for the poetic novel, her own genre as a novelist – she says that critics had seen Barnes' writing as 'effete'. But, she says, 'there is nothing effete about Nightwood . . . Djuna Barnes dealt with the anguish of love instead of the horrors of destruction and sadism. Possibly because I also dealt with love and not with cruelty, I was labelled effete, precious, esoteric, and strange'. Nin had written admiringly, almost breathlessly, to Barnes in August 1937: I would like you to know what your book has touched, illumined, awakened. But it is not in a letter, to someone I only know in her created world, that I can say it. I

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would like to install myself in your created world, which I feel so keenly, and from there address you. I would like to break through the barrier of the exterior you. It is strange, several years ago our names were on the same page, I heard about you, one of your books and mine on DH Lawrence were announced by a 'barker' called Drake. Once you were pointed out to me in a cafe. I saw a beautiful woman. But had I known then you were the woman of Nightwood. . . I have been truly haunted by Nightwood. Haunted really by the emotional power, the passionate expression. A woman rarely writes as a woman, as she feels, but you have. It is easy to see why Nin liked Nightwood, with its sensual writing and lesbian sensibility. In his

introduction to the first edition, TS Eliot discusses Barnes' prose, which he says is really 'written' in comparison to most novels. Eliot says that, although it is definitely a novel, because of its style Nightwood will 'appeal primarily to readers of

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poetry', because 'prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novelreader is not prepared to give'. This is exactly what Nin argued in The Novel of the Future. The central

character is the amorphous Robin Vote, who destroys those around her: 'what is this love we have for the invert, boy or girl? It was they who were spoken of in every romance that we ever read. The girl lost, what is she but the Prince found?' Robin was based, as we know on Thelma Wood, Barnes’ long term partner, who tried to seduce Peggy Guggenheim. Robin attracts everyone, male and female, even 'the doctor', one of fiction's strangest characters. Yes, oh, God, Robin was beautiful. I don't like her, but I have to admit that much: sort of fluid blue under her skin, as if the hide of time had been stripped from her, and with it, all transactions with knowledge. A sort of first position in attention; a face that will age only under the blows of perpetual

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childhood. The temples like those of young beasts cutting horns, as if they were sleeping eyes. And that look on a face we follow like a witch-fire. But Anaïs Nin wasn't only attracted to women, and is best known as Henry Miller's muse. Miller was the author of banned, erotic novels like Tropic of Cancer and Black Spring, originally published by Jack Kahane's Obelisk Press in 1934 and 1936 respectively. As we saw, Kahane also printed the beautiful limited edition of Pomes Penyeach illustrated by Lucia Joyce. Henry was married at the time he met Anaïs, to June Anderson, the second of his five wives; Nin wasn't one of the five. She was married at the time also, to Hugo. After seven years of marriage, she and Hugo already had a stormy relationship, even before she met Henry. 'We

have never been as happy or as miserable. Our quarrels are portentous, tremendous, violent. We are both wrathful to the point of madness: we desire death.' Anaïs discussed her marriage with her lover and cousin Eduardo, and notes his

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advice in her diary for October 1931. We talked for six hours. He reached the conclusion I have come to also: that I needed an older mind, a father, a man stronger than me, a lover who will lead me in love, because all the

rest is too much a self-created thing. The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it. I will work, I will love my husband, but I will fulfil myself. So when Anaïs met Henry she was ready for him and he was ready for anything. She describes their first meeting in her journal for December 1931. I've met Henry Miller. He came to lunch with Richard Osborn, a lawyer I had to consult on the contract for my DH Lawrence book. When he first stepped out of the car and walked towards the door where I stood waiting, I saw a man I liked. In his writing he is flamboyant, virile, animal, magnificent. He is a man whom

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life makes drunk, I thought. He is like me. . . We talked for hours. Henry said the truest and deepest things, and he has a way of saying "hmmm" while trailing off on his own introspective journey. . . A few days later I met Henry. I was waiting to meet him, as if that would solve something, and it did. When I saw him, I thought, here is a man I could love. And I was not afraid. Hugo knew all about her relationship with Henry and feared he would lose Anaïs to him. 'Hugo admires him. At the same time he worries. He says justly, "you fall in love with people's minds. I'm going to lose you to Henry."' He did lose her, even though they stayed married. But he lost her to June at least as much as to Henry. Henry had met the dark, exotic June

Mansfield, fictionalised in his novels as Mona or Mara (and played by Uma Thurman in the 1992 film Henry and June) in Times Square in 1923. 'It must have been a Thursday night when I met her for the first time at the dance hall' he wrote in Sexus. She was 21, he was 31 and married. June

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was born Juliet Smerth in 1902 in Bukovina, a region now divided between Romania and the Ukraine, and came to America in 1907. It was June who first took Henry

to Paris, having saved the money for the trip; and it was June who encouraged him to write full time and supported him by driving taxis; she also gave him the money she got from other men, though she was at least as interested in women. In 1926 June moved a young poet – the woman she called Jean Kronski, but who was probably really named Martha Andrews – in with them. Miller hated Jean, whom he called Thelma in his short book on Rimbaud, The Time of the Assassins. Though Rimbaud was the allengrossing topic of conversation between Thelma and my wife, I made no effort to know him. In fact, I fought like the very devil to put him out of my mind; it seemed to me then that he was the evil genius who had unwittingly inspired all my trouble and misery.

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I saw that Thelma, whom I despised, had identified herself with him, was imitating him as best she could, not only in her behaviour but in the kind of verse she wrote. . . In that state of despair and sterility I was naturally highly sceptical of the genius of a seventeen-year-old poet. All that I heard about him sounded like an invention of crazy Thelma's. I was then capable of believing that she could conjure up subtle torments with which to plague me, since she hated me as much as I did her. Henry also fictionalised June's relationship with Jean in Crazy Cock, the central novel of his autobiographical series, written in 1930, but not published until 12 years after his death. June and Jean left together for Paris in

April 1927 but by July their relationship fell apart and June moved back to live with Henry. Perhaps two-way relationships couldn't satisfy her. Henry left June to go to Paris in 1930; June followed him in 1931 and met Anaïs when she visited him. June seduced Anaïs, whether physically or just psychologically isn't clear: Nin's diaries don't refer to any physical

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relationship with June, just a passionate, emotional one. She was as smitten by June as she had been by Henry, but in a completely different way; her passion for June was physical, whether consummated or not, where her passion for Henry was certainly consummated but was mainly intellectual: 'I am already

devoted to Henry's work, but I separate my body from my mind. I enjoy his strength, his ugly, destructive, fearless, cathartic strength'. If Henry was ugly, June was irresistibly beautiful. Nin made their first meeting seem like a stroke of fate. A startlingly white face, burning eyes. June Mansfield, Henry's wife. As she came towards me from the darkness of my garden into the light of the doorway I saw for the first time the most beautiful woman on earth. Years ago, when I tried to imagine a pure beauty, I had created an image in my mind of just that woman. I had even imagined she would be Jewish. I knew long ago the color of her skin, her profile, her teeth. Her beauty drowned me. As I sat in front of her I felt that I would do

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anything she asked of me. Henry faded, she was color, brilliance, strangeness. The relationship between Anaïs and Henry became three-way: the controlling June seducing the passionate Anaïs. Ironically, though Henry fictionalised June and even Jean, he didn't write about Anaïs, fictionally or factually; all we know of their relationship is what Anaïs writes about it in her journals, which is quite a lot and often explicit, though entirely from Nin's point of view. She said in her journal: 'I want to do [write] June better than Djuna Barnes did Nightwood.' But that is a novel. Barnes understood the difference between fiction and non-fiction: her early reportage of New York is totally objective and her fiction, even if closely drawn from the people she knew, totally fictional. Nin never did

draw that line; the journals are a product of her imagination as much as her novels. Henry and June ends: Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a

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child with the child's blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality – to Henry's selfishness, June's love of power, my insatiable creativity which must concern itself with others and cannot be insufficient to itself. I wept because I could not believe any more and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without

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believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because from now on I will weep less. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence. So Henry is coming this afternoon, and tomorrow I am going out with June.

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Mr Kahane used to drive up in his convertible Voisin, a sort of glassenclosed station wagon, for a chat with his colleague at Shakespeare and Company. He would ask, 'how's God?' (meaning Joyce). He admired me 'no end' for my discovery of such an 'obscene' book, as he termed it, as Ulysses, and never relinquished the hope of persuading me one day to let the Obelisk Press take it over. That was Sylvia Beach. She never did let Mr Kahane take it over, though he did publish extracts of Joyce's Haveth Childers Everywhere, despite it lacking 'sex interest', and of course his Pomes Penyeach, with illustrations by Lucia.

Henry Miller met Jack Kahane though Sylvia Beach. She was fond of the Paris-based Kahane, whom she referred to as 'a gassed war veteran from Manchester, England'. (Unlike Ford Madox Ford, he was a genuine

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one.) Beach had first met Henry Miller in her shop when he approached her about the publication of Tropic of Cancer; she suggested that Miller approach Kahane. Beach remembered that Miller and 'that lovely Japanese-looking friend of his, Miss Anaïs Nin', came in to see if she would publish 'an interesting novel'

that he had been working on. She told him that Kahane's Obelisk Press published mainly 'the spicy kind of books', and she didn't, even though, after Ulysses everyone thought she did. Kahane's logo was an obelisk standing on a book, the phallic implications of which were unlikely to have been coincidental. (It was based on a drawing of the obelisk on the Place de la Concorde by Kahane's wife Marcelle.) As we know from DH Lawrence's attempts, Miller was not the first writer of racy literature to approach Sylvia Beach after the success of Ulysses, which was mainly notorious for its salaciousness; most people hadn't actually read it and only knew it by its sordid reputation. Writers flocked to Shakespeare and Company on the assumption that I was going to specialise in erotica. They brought me their

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most erotic efforts. And not only that; they insisted on reading the passages that couldn't, they thought, fail to tempt a person with my supposed tastes. For instance, there was the small man with whiskers who drove up to the bookshop in a carriage – a barouche and pair hired for the occasion to impress me, as he afterward confessed. His long arms swinging apelike in front of him, he walked into the shop, deposited on my table a parcel that had the look of a manuscript, and introduced himself as Frank Harris. I had liked his book The Man Shakespeare. I had also liked the volume on Wilde, and especially Shaw's preface about Wilde's gigantism. So had Joyce. I asked Harris what his manuscript was about. He undid the parcel and showed me a thing called My

Life and Loves, which he assured me went much further than Joyce. He claimed he was really the only English writer who had got 'under a woman's skin.' We met the roguish Harris earlier through Claude McKay; no one

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except himself would say he 'got under a woman's skin', certainly not Anaïs Nin. Beach sent Miller and Harris to Jack Kahane, who was 'fond of a certain forthright sexiness', works that combined 'literary and sex value' and might be interested. He was, and published both Miller's and

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Harris' work. In his Memoirs of a Booklegger Kahane tells how he read his first Henry Miller manuscript, sent to him in 1932 as he recalls, by a literary agent he knew slightly, not by Miller or Nin: the twilight was deepening into night when I finished it. 'At last!' I murmured to myself. I had read the most terrible, the most sordid, the most magnificent manuscript that had ever fallen into my hands; nothing I had yet received was comparable to it for the splendour of its writing, the fathomless depths of its despair, the savour of its portraiture, the boisterousness of its humour. Walking into the house I was exulted by the triumphant sensation of all explorers who have at last fallen upon the object of their years of search. I had in my hands a work

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of genius and it had been offered to me for publication. The name of it was Tropic of Cancer and Henry Miller the man who wrote it. But Kahane's French publishing partner was not convinced. 'A clever description of underclothes was more the thing we wanted, with plenty of spicy references to their contents. You could sell a book like that, but this – this Tropic of Cancer, people would take it for medical treatise. . . What the public wanted was sex, dressed up or in the gradual process of being undressed.' And of course, Miller was unknown in Paris at the time. 'Who was Henry Miller, had anybody heard of him? One of those down and out Montparnasse rejects, probably'. Still, Kahane persisted and thanks to 'one subterfuge after another of which I am not proud, at last in the spring of

1934 I got the book out. The reception of it by the trade was one of cold hostility; the wholesalers would have nothing to do with it, the bookshops handled it with the utmost caution as if it had been a lump of gelignite.' Miller sent out 'thousands of letters' and Kahane

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sent out many review copies, but most reviews were unkind. 'A few copies got through to the critics; TS Eliot, Ezra Pound was splendidly appreciative', but they were not the audience Kahane was aiming for and it took nearly three years to get rid of the first thousand copies, many of which were given away. But by the time Miller's second book Black

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Spring appeared his reputation – or at least, notoriety – had made him a big seller. Anaïs Nin tells the story rather differently, as does Kahane's son Maurice Girodias, who later founded the Olympia Press and continued, in many respects, his father's work. (He changed his name from the Jewish Kahane to his French mother Marcelle's maiden name Girodias as the Nazis were invading Paris.) According to Girodias' first autobiography The Frog Prince, he had been involved with Miller since the age of fourteen, when his father had asked him to design the cover of Tropic of Cancer in 1934. He did; it's pulpy and terrible, with a huge green/black crab-like monster – a literal but incorrect interpretation of the title; maybe young Maurice hadn't read it, it's not very suitable for a fourteen year old. The gigantic crab is

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holding a woman in its claws who may be both naked and dead and is dripping what may be blood. The sensationalist cover probably didn't hurt sales though; Maurice always did understand how to appeal to the baser side of literary taste; we will see more of him later. According to Girodias, from the day the contract for the book was signed in 1932 Miller began to swagger like an established, acclaimed author. His self-confidence derived to a large extent from the encouragements he was receiving from the growing number of his supporters, and singularly from the active friendship of one Anaïs Nin, a young American artist who had become his mistress and literary disciple. Anaïs was cosmopolitan, conspicuous, and she behaved with the generosity only a rich person

could afford, although she didn't appear to have much money of her own. A mystery woman. But Miller had a problem: although the contract had been signed, Kahane had no money to publish the book –

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as he said above, he had to engage in a subterfuge or two. According to Girodias, Miller sent Nin to Kahane to seduce him into publishing it; he had already made her seduce his literary agent. Henry was Anaïs' pimp, said Girodias. 'But at least he was a literary pimp.' Miller sent her to Kahane 'in person, duly perfumed,

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and instructed her to go the whole way if called upon to do so.' We don't know what happened when they met, neither of them recorded it. But either way Kahane simply didn't have the resources and in the end it was Nin's money rather than her sexual willingness that got the book published. Kahane found out early on in his career that banned books sold well. His own first novel, Laugh and Grow Rich, published in 1923 in London was banned by the two large subscription libraries of the time in England: WH Smith and Sons and Boots. Despite, or more likely because of the ban, by the end of June 1923 just over 1300 copies had been sold and it was reprinted in September. The publisher said 'of precious few first novels can it be said that a second edition has been needed.' Encouraged by his success, Kahane continued

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writing novels under the pseudonym Cecil Barr. His second novel was 'a good deal more daring' than his first and he had difficulty finding a publisher; this was when he first thought of publishing in Paris. But generally his novels were light and frothy; Henry Miller told Lawrence Durrell that they were 'vile vile crap, the vilest of the vile – and he admits it, but with that English insouciance that makes my blood creep.' Kahane founded the Obelisk Press in 1931 after two years in partnership with a French publisher. Of the books they published together, one was prosecuted in London in 1929 and suppressed as obscene and the other was unexpurgated edition of the novel by HD's husband Richard Aldington, Death of a Hero of 1930, which included descriptions of sexual behaviour and words that could never have appeared in books

published in Britain or America. But Kahane also had literary aspirations: My ambition for the Obelisk Press was that it should cover as wide a range as possible. I didn't want it to be dominated by one type of book, or one literary creed. But I had the curious mental quirk of

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wanting to make it pay. In which I seemed to be alone amongst publishers in Paris, whose habit, so far as I could see, was to begin a publishing business with or without capital and then run its nose into the ground with all possible speed. To me it seemed elementary that, in the interests of contributing writers themselves, the business should pay, for, if a business does not pay, the writers are the first to be made to forgo the just reward

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for their labours. But difficult experimental literature never pays, at first, and so it seemed logical to me to publish, concurrently, stuff that did pay, and if it happened to be written by me, the publisher, there was a double advantage. From its founding until the beginning of the Second World War, Obelisk Press published several books banned in Britain and America that pushed the boundaries: Radclyffe Hall's now classic celebration of lesbian love The Well of Loneliness in 1933, Frank Harris's memoirs My Life and Loves in 1934 and DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1936. Radclyffe Hall's book was banned because of its lesbian content; Kahane also printed a book in 1933 about male homosexuality that would certainly have been banned in America if anyone had tried to publish it: The

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Young and Evil by Charles Ford and Parker Tyler He also printed Lawrence Durrell's The Black Book, as well as a number of erotic novels of dubious literary value by himself under the pseudonym Cecil Barr. Miller's Tropic of Cancer was published by Obelisk in 1934 with a preface by Anaïs Nin, Black Spring in 1936 and Tropic of Capricorn in 1939. In the same year – the year he died, on September 3, 1939, two days after the beginning of World War II – Kahane published Nin's collection of novellas The Winter of Artifice with a purple cover that has the title printed over the very phallic-looking obelisk. Nin liked it but regretted the timing. In her diary for October 17, 1939 she wrote: My beautiful Winter of Artifice, dressed in an ardent blue, somber, like the priests of Saturn in

ancient Egypt, with the design of the Obelisk on an Atlantean sky, stifled by the war, and Kahane's death.

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Winter of Artifice was reprinted later but without the first story, Djuna, her earliest published version of the love triangle with herself, Henry and June. In the fictional version she is Djuna; an unusual name and presumably indicative of her respect for Nightwood which was published in

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1936. Maurice Girodias paints a different picture of Nin than the one she paints of herself, as a self-absorbed sensualist caught up in events. For Girodias she is ruthless and controlling, masochistically submitting herself to Henry's whims. He also casts her as a muse, though not necessarily in a good way, not only to Miller but to other writers like Antonin Artaud and her psychoanalyst Otto Rank, 'with quite a few lesser luminaries in between'. And in his own way Henry, who 'dreaded women with a mind' acted as a kind of anti-muse to Anaïs. She already had fifty volumes of writings when she met Henry, but he never encouraged her, never took her writing seriously. Miller never understood how his works, and his life, demeaned women; he saw himself as a sexual liberator, but all

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he was liberating was the male sex drive. Nevertheless, regardless of Henry's lack of encouragement, Anaïs began to write serious fiction, while continuing her journals, from a woman's perspective. 'She would do for the world of women what he claimed to have achieved for that of men.' She quickly wrote two erotic works: House of Incest, loosely based on her relationship with Henry and June, and Winter of Artifice. She approached Kahane in 1935; he declined House of Incest, but accepted Winter of Artifice. However he still didn't have the money to publish what he wanted – despite all this talk about wanting to make a profit, he was not very much the businessman – and it had to wait until 1939 when Henry's friend Lawrence Durrell agreed to pay the costs; his The Black Book had been published by Obelisk

in 1938. Nin published House of Incest herself under the Siana imprint – Anais backwards. Neither Kahane nor Nin say much about each other in their memoirs. Nin writes in her journal for June, 1935: 'Jack Kahane agreed to publish

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Winter of Artifice and made me sign a contract. Yes, I have a contract in my pocket.' And Kahane does mention in Memoirs of a Booklegger an unnamed woman who sounds a lot like Nin, though not in a fond way.

I would like one day to publish the correspondence of one woman writer I had the misfortune to publish. As a specimen of concentrated, virulent hysteria it must be unique. This woman had nothing against me except that I refused her second book. Much later, in May 1945, Miller mentioned Girodias to Nin in a letter. Went to bed last night with an excellent idea about your diary. Suddenly I sat up in bed and asked myself why had we never thought of Maurice Girodias as a publisher for the diary? . . . What do you think? Should I write to him at length? I had an idea that when printing each volume he could bring out a small deluxe edition by facsimile process which would

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establish the authenticity of the work and be a handsome product at the same time. Many of your friends would like to have these. By this time Girodias had his own Paris-based publishing house, Olympia Press. He was to the second Lost Generation – British and American expat writers of the 1950s who, like their forbears, had gathered in Paris after a war devastated Europe – what Sylvia Beach and Margaret Anderson were to the first. He did publish a lot of erotic fiction, most notoriously The Story of O. He commissioned expat avant-garde writers like Alexander Trocchi (who really did pimp his wife, and not in a literary way) to write pseudonymously what he called his 'dirty books': novels of sado-masochism that make Fifty Shades seem a very pale Grey. In the

third volume of his autobiography, Girodias says: I have never set foot in the United States and I published the most American work of American authors. . . I consecrated my youth to mystical philosophy and chastity and I transformed myself into an editor of pornography . . . Shy and reserved adolescent, my metamorphosis into seducer leaves me perplexed. . . Bizarre, bizarre. As well as his dirty books, Girodias published Beckett, Terry Southern and JP Donleavy, pushing the boundaries of censorship like his New York contemporary and counterpart Barney Rosset. But he never did publish Anaïs Nin.