In the spirit of actually posting something here, I am once again a̶s̶k̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶s̶u̶p̶p̶o̶r̶t̶ ̶ going to talk about something completely to the left of what I had meant to. I’m also once again going to have to beg your forgiveness, because in the spirit of actually having anything to say, I’m taking us all on another trek through Electric Ladyland 2: Dead Lesbian Boogaloo. I’m talking about Natalie Barney, of course, about whom alone I can always think of something to say, and my accidental quest to turn this European exile into a Dead Lesbian treasure hunt, which should surprise approximately no-one.
I’m writing this in the dark because I can’t sleep - currently I am staying in an in-between sort of place by the ports in Athens for a week before I leave for Paris. I have dizzyingly high hopes for being able to sleep in Paris, for absolutely no reason other than a vague sense of the mystical. But if I seem a little crazed, it’s because I am.
Yiannis Moralis
About a week and a half after I arrived into the last apartment, we had dinner with Despina’s 90 year-old grandmother in the courtyard of the building that their family owns. I’m not sure if I said this in the last post, but this grandmother - also named Despina - lives in the first floor apartment of the West wing of the building, directly above our pied-à-terre. Well, she came pertly down the steps of this matchstick and pristiq job of a wrought iron staircase that leads up to her balcony and managed to flatter, castigate, and flat-out insult me all within the space of time it took to set the table. I loved her! She reminds me of my own grandmother, who is also called Jessica, and whom I love more than anyone else in the world. They share a haircut, a high pair of cheekbones off of which hangs the entire face and which make the jowls of old age and impossibility, and a singular talent for being able to crack a joke a minute without ever being able to tell when anyone else is not being entirely serious.
About a week and a half after that, I was invited upstairs on the strength of a fig-and-honey cake I’d just taken from the oven, which was wafting its scent to the high heavens - that is, the cypress-panelled and stately first floor. Without going too hard into the chandeliers and the Persian carpets and the bespoke inlaid bookshelves crafted to fit the nearly 200 year-old leather-bound collected works of Balzac and Byron, the cake was delivered and I was set loose in the library to bury myself in books so as not to snap at Despina for the way she speaks to her grandmother, which gives me heart palpitations.
After about an hour of ecstasies, which is my upper limit for a natural high, I started looking around the room for specific things to compliment that would make myself look like an appreciative, and extremely cultured, guest. AND I CHOSE THIS:
I chose it because I liked the colours, because it is clearly Modern (and despite not previously having a taste for Modern art I’ve spent such stupid amounts of my time reading about Modern painting and Modern painters because they were all gay or gay-adjacent, gaydjcent, that I’ve developed one), and because in the purity of my innocence it looked to me like that Rodin sculpture that is basically the only sculpture I know the name of. I had no idea!
Despina the Elder informed me that the above is a painting by the Greek Modernist Yiannis Moralis, who gifted it to the family because she was one of his favourite painting students after he settled again in Greece after being forced to leave Paris with the rest of the Greek artistic and student community after the declaration of the second World War. It is the 19th Google image result if you search for him, and it was RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME, which did not impress me to the point of literally trembling until I got back to my computer and was able to confirm that he was, as I suspected, in fact, in Paris just before the second World War broke out.
Though I can’t find evidence of it on the internet, I would put my life on it that if I had any sort of access to even the meagre resources I’d been able to accumulate on the matter thus far, I would be able to prove that he attended Gertrude Stein’s Saturday afternoon salon at 27 Rue des Fleurus while in Paris. For one thing, we know that he was friends with the Greek painter Yannis Tsarouchis as well as Hadjidakis, which whom he formed an artistic association after the war, so he can’t have had a problem with gays. One Google is enough to show that Stein owned at least a Tsarouchis, and if my memory is anything to be relied upon, I just fucking know I read somewhere that he was THERE. HE WAS THERE!
Now, and don’t get me wrong - Gertrude Stein was a terrible person. BUT, so was Natalie Barney! And they were terrible, terrible friends for upwards of forty years! If this is correct, it currently puts me at three degrees of removal from Gertrude Stein and a MEASLY FOUR from Natalie Barney, which is impressive, because two is basically as close as any twentysomething (shut up) can hope for from anyone who was already well into middle age by the outbreak of the second World War. BUT THERE’S MORE.
However this has already gotten very long and I feel like I’m going to pass out in the heat with this little thing on my lap, blazing internally from all of the hell of this world that passes through it daily. Also, I want to keep writing every day until I either develop some kind of style and purpose or else prove to myself that I tried hard enough to be able to say with confidence that it’s never going to happen. Or else just manage to maintain some kind of connection to the outside world and have some kind of record of what the hell I’ve been up to here. So, with that in mind, I’ll tell you the rest tomorrow. See ya!