Having absolutely nothing but time, given the limiting factors of the pandemic and of the fact that I am forcibly barred from gainful employment, it was another few days before I had my next Natalie-related epiphany. This was good, because I don’t think my poor gay heart could have taken them within 24 hours of each other, which is coincidentally why I did not write this post when I promised - far too much, far too soon, and really, you know, it’s incumbent on a writer of my eminent stature that I display consideration for the mental health of my readers.
The epiphany came about as I was reading this book, which was written by Despina the Younger’s great-grandmother, and which is an incredibly moving account of the Nazi occupation of Greece during WWII, rendered all the more moving by the force of inhabiting the apartment that she was writing from. Being able to look at the four walls around me and imagine Nazi soldiers trashing the place, or hearing the doorbell ring and imagine that it was Constantine Tsatsos home from exile, or an English soldier seeking protection was an experience almost beyond words. She even at one point mentions a tortoise that lives in the back garden, which prompted a very long and pensive staring contest with the tortoise that currently lives in the back garden (a lovely lady called Aristotle, which I find very dashing), from which I think gained much mystical insight.
You may remember that I mentioned in previous post that also among the previous inhabitants of this apartment was George Seferis: Greek poet laureate, Nobel prize winner, and brother of Ioanna Tsatsos. The case boils down to this: in the eponymous entry of her published journal, Ioanna Tsatsos recalls seeing the Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos attend the death of another famous Greek poet, Costis Palamas, in 1943. In 1907, Sikelianos was married in Bar Harbor, Maine to poet, performer and Greek revivalist Evalina Palmer, who ten years before THAT had seduced none other than the great grandaddy of lesbian foolery, our Natalie Barney. Despina had mentioned before, in an offhand way, that Seferis had been friends with Sikelianos, but I’m pretty sure I was 1.5 glasses of wine in at the time and WAY more focussed on a very different kind of Sapphic performance revival than the one Eva Palmer and Natalie Barney engaged in (okay, maybe not that different). In any case, I felt like someone had just taken a lighter to my hair! Eva Palmer was WAY better than Gerty Gerty Stein Stein, and if I could ever find any trace of her having been in the apartment, that’s a far sight closer to Natalie than being two degrees removed from boring old Monogamy-incarnate-Stein.
Realistically, it’ll probably be impossible to attain any level of certainty about this anytime soon/without some serious increase in material circumstances and/or working knowledge of Greek, but lying in that low iron bedstead completely deaf to everything being said to me, imagining Eva, her real self, her actual body, one hundred years ago looking up at the exact same crown mouldings and thinking of Natalie… that’s my religion, baby!
Circumstantial evidence attesting to the possibility of this ghostly reverie encompasses, in my limited recall and in what I can find via a quick Google (I had to give back some of the books I was using), the following:
Eva and Sikelianos lived in Athens from circa 1908 (with interruptions) to circa 1938.
Seferis lived in Athens from 1925 to 1931.
We know, through family lore and also from Henry Miller’s descriptions of the apartment in The Colossus of Maroussi, that Seferis entertained the Greek intelligentsia often while he lived there.
We also know that Eva was heavily involved in Greek intellectual life, through her revival of the Delphic festivals as well as various anecdotal and historical testimony. Even more saliently, we know that she had a close working relationship with Henry Miller, as evidenced by the fact that they collaborated to nominate Sikelianos for the Nobel prize.
I realise I haven’t given any background on Natalie, and I’ve decided to hold off on that, because writing about your heroes is scary, and writing about them before you’ve developed any confidence in your writing feels like bungie jumping without a harness. Eva, though - Eva was a willowy American heiress, spottily educated, with an obscene shock of red hair that fell - no, rippled - to her heels. She and Natalie began their relationship by engaging in a youthful evocation of late 19th century classical education as a literary and historical justification of their queerness - specifically, they invoked the poetry and cult of Sappho as a way of asserting their right to love each other. Each other, yes, and also a few neighbouring heiresses who could be persuaded to dabble in threesomes, because neopaganism does NOT ascribe to monogamy, baby. This revival included, among other, more family-friendly performances, sneaking off into the woods and taking 19th century nude selfies. Absolutely UNbelievable scenes.
(As an autobiographical sidenote, I tried to recreate these in the woods in Westport when I was there, but I was incapable of getting The Angles and too shy to ask for help. I will before I hit thirty though, mark my words!)
Natalie and Eva both retained this tendency to look backwards to Greece as a model for how to live until death, but whereas Natalie dabbled in classical revival the way she dabbled in… well, most things literary and artistic, Eva made the reinvigoration of ancient Greek values and traditions her raison d’etre. With the help of a cabal of Greek poets, artists, cultural leaders and dancers, she and her straight husband (booooo) revived the Delphic festivals. Natalie stan that I am, I have to admit that this was hella cooler than anything Natalie did with her neo-Sapphism, and not just because her later attempt to establish a lesbian commune on Lesvos with Renée Vivien amounted to little more than a pleasure cruise. But then again, little Natalie ever did amounted to more than that, and that’s okay for her. It’s why we love her.
Eva, on the other hand, injected life into Delphi, which had been somewhat mouldering away as a site of dead ruins to be looked at but not honoured, with the help of an élite cadre of intellectuals, administrators and public officials. At one point, the Greek Ministry of War supplied her with a truckload of literal soldiers to perform the Pyrrhic dance at the first Delphic revival. She oversaw productions of Prometheus Bound and was the backbone of administration, procuration and production management for the festivals, allowing her leech of a husband to “focus on his art.” Later on, he was - like Natalie before him - to seek her blessing when leaving her for another woman. Nevertheless, Eva’s legacy lives on - primarily in the spheres of performance and dance. Her autobiography, which I cannot WAIT to read, was published in a choreography and dance studies series by the University of Florida. Over the course of her life, she worked with Isadora Duncan and was asked to perform with Sarah Bernhardt, although this never came to fruition, and exerted a profound influence over the development of modern dance. She created an absolute media frenzy when she stepped off the boat in New York en route to introduce Sikelianos to her parents, clad shoulder-to-sandal in the traditional Greek attire that she made HERSELF on a loom she constructed with her friends in the ancient Greek style specifically for that purpose. She continued to dress this way, causing a perpetual scene anywhere she went, until her death. After WWII she was denied a visa to return to Greece, but managed to make it back in 1952 to attend more performances at Delphi, during one of which she suffered a fatal stroke.
I knew very little about Eva Palmer that was not mentioned in my reading on Natalie before writing this, except that I’d already pre-ordered her first biography, which is forthcoming in November. I feel kind of ashamed now that I didn’t look into her more closely, as it seems pathetically obvious that I could have been developing my connection to her - as a performer, a Sapphic, an American plagued by visa troubles and the existential geopolitical torture of being a non-national of your home country - instead of mooning after Natalie and Ireland by turns and drinking myself foolish. But, even so, it strikes me that rolling around the Athenian coast, one titty out for Apollo, drunk on visions of the past is not the worst tribute I could have done her.
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I finished this post on the plane to Paris! I think in the postscript to my previous post I said that I was going to try to write every day and I have fallen woefully short of that, but I WILL try and do one or two more posts about Greece while it’s fresh in my mind.