NOTE FROM THE EDITOR: Due to a scheduling error that is completely my fault, this diary is being published a week late (it should have been published on Sunday, February 22). I apologize profusely both to our regular readers and to our diarist tonight. We will still have our regularly scheduled March diary, which will be published on Sunday, March 29 (on time!). Apologies again for the mix-up. It won't happen again. Please enjoy this wonderful diary, which I promise was worth the wait. -- Chrislove
LGBT Literature is a Readers and Book Lovers series dedicated to discussing books that have made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any book that touches on LGBT themes is welcome in this series. LGBT Literature posts on the last Sunday of every month at 7:30 PM EST. If you are interested in writing for the series, please send a Kosmail to Chrislove.
I’ve found, time and again, that there are connections that resonate through space and time between people who have had similar experiences and, if we look in the right places, we can find others who speak to us of things only they can understand. Our stories come together, meeting on the edges of when and where, in spaces that only exist for those of us who have lived our entire lives being taught that there is something wrong with women who love each other. I think that, just maybe, our stories stay in those spaces, unheard, even though there are so many others who need them, too.
When my partner died I found myself in one of those spaces and I found the stories that were waiting for me. I’ve found repetitions of the experiences of lesbian relationships that stretch from ancient Sumeria until today. My partner wasn’t fortunate enough to hear these stories when she was alive so, now, I write them again, in letters to her, to all of the others like us, who have no one where they are who will tell them that there can never be anything wrong with loving someone, that in fact, love is the one thing that is always right. This lets me honor our history while, at the same time, I am also compiling a history of the women who came before us, in a way in which this hasn’t been done before, telling the stories experience by experience, through the repetitions that echo to us through time and space.
Many of the women writers who have influenced me, such as Natalie Barney, Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Beach, and Janet Flanner had chosen to emigrate to Paris during the Belle Epoque because they could be free in Paris is ways that they could not be in the United States. Once they were living in Paris they joined with many other women like them, some, like Colette and Liane de Poughy, who were from France, others like Radclyffe Hall and Renee Vivien, who were from England. These women made new ways of being and living, they created new art forms, reclaimed historical figures and myths, created new forms of literature, and made entirely new cultures in which they, and others like them, could be who they were without collapsing into the kind of assimilation that we see so often. These women laid the foundations for new ways of living that we can pick up the threads of even now.
All of the women who were working in Paris at that time have enriched my life greatly; they have given me a history, a culture, and a blueprint for life. The woman from that time who has had the greatest impact on me, though, is Natalie Barney. Natalie not only made a space in which others could learn to feel safe and to accept themselves so that they could grow, she also wrote about her separation from Renee Vivien and, later, Renee’s death.
This is some of my work, from one of my letters, my attempt to add to the culture that has been passed down, from woman to woman, to carry on the tradition of forming new traditions:
Sometimes I think about how many of us have been separated only for one to later die and how few times our stories have been told! Imagine how different things could be for other women who could read what I’m writing to you and maybe they could find out in time, before anyone else dies of hate. The more I learn about these women the more I need to tell you about them, about how they lived and the things that they did, about how they loved. Our love story is a part of their love stories, too. I think that if I put all of that love together that there will be a change, at least for us, even if you aren’t here. I know, too, that there are other women like us, now, who need to know about all of these loves so that, just maybe, they can have happier endings. Too many stories like ours have gone untold and you deserve more than that. Most of all I need to tell you these stories of us and of them and of me, without you. I know that I can’t send you these letters but I want all of this love to rise to you, like a prayer, so that wherever you are you can feel it.
I don’t know how it felt for you when you died but I do know that, when I heard those words, it felt like I was dying, too, and I hoped that I was. It felt like all of the oxygen just caught fire, like even molecules couldn’t bear to exist without you. Every cell in my body burned like that for the longest time, I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t get enough oxygen for months. It still happens almost every day, out of the blue, anything, a song, the sky, that shade of pink that you loved, anything, nothing and all of a sudden the air that I’m breathing is fire and no one else knows. I know, at those times, that what I am feeling is the LACK of you. The world is so heavy without you. Sometimes I panic because there is nothing that anyone can ever do to make this stop. Sometimes, when I see couples, like we were, young women, even though my heart dances to see them, able to be out, it hurts, so much, and I think about how amazing it was to have someone to share everything with, sometimes when I see couples, like we were supposed to be, older women, it’s like I lose you again, before we even were supposed to be them. How much history could we have had between us?
Natalie Barney and Renee Vivien
I used to try to find books about grief, about losing someone; I thought that they would help. They didn’t, you know, they were all about women and men and that is not at all the same thing. The only person I have ever read who can make me feel like she knows what I feel is Natalie Barney. Remember, I was telling you about her?
Natalie is so important to me for so very many reasons but, one of the most important is that I had started reading her the day before I found out that you had died! Anyway, for a few days I couldn’t read or do anything because every time that I started to do anything I would think how could she be dead? And then everything else would be gone in that fire I was breathing. So, on my birthday, I went to a café with my book of Natalie’s writings and I sat outside, soaking in the sun, you know, like you always did—I was, I’m sure, trying to soak YOU in. I had known that Natalie and Renee had been together for a long time and that their families had split them up and that Renee died, about two years later so I went right to the piece that she had written about Renee shortly after she died. She wasn’t there, either, when Renee died, she, too, wasn’t allowed to be. She got there right after, Renee must have died while she was walking there. The butler told her that Renee had just died. What she said next makes me pretty sure that she also knows what it feels like to have all of the air catch on fire: “I staggered away, back to the Avenue du Bois, and fainted on the nearest bench. When I regained consciousness I went home and shut myself up in my bedroom. Unable and unwilling to see her dead, I needed to get into contact immediately with all that I had left of her. Like a grave robber I fell upon the precious casket she had given me. The key was lost and I had to force the lock. It held so many tangible memories that I felt her presence around me. No one could stop her from joining me now May I be forever haunted! For if the haunting stopped, what would be left? Oblivion”. That is exactly how I felt! I know that she fainted from the way that the air catches fire when the woman that we have loved more than ourselves has died, alone, and we have not been permitted to tell her that we love her one more time. She even knows that the only way that she could have had Renee is for her to haunt her after she had died because, if they were both alive, no one would let them be together. When I read that I thought oh! Really! That is IT! I, too, hoped to be haunted. She also wanted to try to bring Renee back, through her writing and through her life. In a poem she wrote to Renee after she died:
And I say your name again in the pure and fiery breath,
And I hear the wind blow in like a murmur Of your voice: Can the Past become what is to come? What was the Past, can it be what is to come?
Her grief is affected by the enforced separation and by the kind of relationship they had before their families discovered their love. Unlike people who can openly be together, Natalie and Renee had to hide their love and to live in fear of being found out. While Natalie had a sense of herself that allowed her to believe that, no matter what others said, there is never anything wrong with love, Renee was not in a place from which she could believe that and much of their relationship had been taken up—just like ours!—with her guilt and shame about their love. You know what else, if I am telling you every little thing like always? Renee was a lot like you and she thought about dying and death much of the time. We can talk about that, later, though. Well maybe this now: Natalie thought that each of them were responding to their separation and the hate in their families courageously. She said, “Courage after love: She dared to die…I dared to live."
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