“Fashionable Contrasts” by political cartoonist James Gillray
I’m putting the finishing touches on a new story, “Patrimony.” Set in London and Chicago, it’s inspired by the efforts of Mary Macleod MP, Lord Lucas, Liza Campbell and others working for inheritance equality in Great Britain.
KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS: greatest movie ever made?
They’ve set up shop here on Facebook to circulate a petition signed by 319 Britons as of July 31. It’s nice to see the names of a few friends on the list.
And the campaign has inspired people like author Kathryn Heyman to write to Entrenched Male Bastions That Matter in Publishing, like The London Review of Books, demanding gender equality. You can read her letter, and the dispiriting response, here. Apparently, finding women who can write is “complicated” at the LRB.
Alec Guinness playing Gascoyne d’Ascoyne’s uppity forebear in KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS. Bears a striking resemblance to Lily de Gramont, don’t you think? Hat not quite du bon ton. But we certainly catch the whiff of Legroux on the winds of change.
The vote on whether to end gender discrimination that has been entangled with primogeniture for centuries will affect about a thousand women and their “family firms” in Great Britain. More will potentially be affected in Spain. In Pakistan, Madeeha Maqbool’s op/ed piece ran July 23 in the independent weekly’s Friday Times Blog.
If you’re wondering why anyone else would care about Equality for Women in the Peerage… well, you’ll see. “Blood flows in women’s veins too,” says Liza Campbell. “Patrimony” will be ready for publication October 15.
With a feature film produced in 2012, award-winning screenwriter Suzanne Stroh’s period drama Scotch Verdict is in development at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Suzanne hails from Michigan, where her family brewed Stroh’s beer for five generations. She lives with her family in the Virginia countryside.
Spring’s half sprung! And it’s full of artistry. Never a drab moment spending it with family members as talented as this.
In Middleburg
The artist Weatherly Stroh was back in Middleburg this week, exhibiting her new work at Middleburg Common Grounds and visiting Uncle Gari Melchers’s studio at Belmont. I feel very lucky to have put a red dot on this painting of a hound just picking up the scent.
The equine sculptor Susanne Stroh, my stepmother, showed equally beautiful work.
my sister the painter Weatherly Melchers Stroh
Come visit us in the Virginia countryside and check out Susie’s bronzes and Weatherly’s latest series of animal portraits and hunt country landscapes, with settings in Metamora and Ocala.
Near Fredericksburg
It’s also the best time of the year to spend time sketching in the garden, strolling through the gallery or writing in the gazebo above the Rappahannock at Belmont.
Belmont, house and studio of Gari Melchers near Fredericksburg, Virginia
Self portrait by Uncle Gari
Fredericksburg is always closer than you think.
Virginia in springtime by the American Impressionist, Gari Melchers (1860-1932)
Munnings in Middleburg
And then there’s the Alfred Munnings exhibition happening at the National Sporting Library Museum. Dozens of really gorgeous paintings by my favorite equestrian painter of all time. Many of them are masterpieces from from private collections. Honestly: it’s worth the trip.
Sir Alfred Munnings (1878-1959)To my eye, Munnings’ old fashioned, elegant, painterly style embodies the best of two ways of seeing horses in the landscape: impressionistic and anatomical
With a feature film produced in 2012, award-winning screenwriter Suzanne Stroh’s period drama Scotch Verdict is in development at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Suzanne hails from Michigan, where her family brewed Stroh’s beer for five generations. She lives with her family in the Virginia countryside.
Business and pleasure rarely mix, except in the company of Élisabeth de Gramont.
Or so I discovered today, when my translation crossed paths with the research on the rise and fall of wealth I’m doing for Professor John Davis of the Harvard Business School and the Cambridge Institute, where I work.
“Keep your mouth shut and don’t look her in the eyes.”
Join me 119 years ago in the Paris ballroom of the Duke and Duchess de Gramont, Agénor and his second wife, born Marguerite de Rothschild. It’s just this side of midnight on a warm spring night like tonight’s: May above the Seine, with silvery gardens stretching down to the river. I’m dressed as a man. As Francesco Rapazzini, in fact, the handsome young Italian who loaned me this tailcoat. And who apparently has better things to do with his evening than go to another boring bal blanc.
Don’t worry, he said to me when tying my cravat. She will nod from across the room, and that means, ‘Now you may write about me.’
What about Proust? I’ll never hold up, I said, itching under my collar. With Proust (I coached myself once again), reply with an allusion that refers to an irony over a double entendre.
Francesco ran his finger under the collar, saying only, We haven’t met him yet. This is 1894.
I have no Italian, I whined.
So much the better, he murmured, flicking lint and turning me, pleased with his work. Men don’t need language anyway. Keep your mouth shut. He stood back. You’ll do. Prettiest girl at the ball. All the boys will think so.
Don’t you think we’re messing a bit with history here? What if the sight of me sets her down her merry way too soon? It’s fifteen years yet before she meets the lusty gaze of Natalie Barney.
Just don’t look her in the eye, then. He handed me a pair of sunglasses with my gloves and pushed me into the moving carriage.
And now here she is.
Dressed in the loveliest pink ball gown money can buy, eighteen year-old Élisabeth is not very keen on finding a husband. She’d much rather be having a left-leaning political discussion with her war-hero-turned-pacifist uncle Horace de Choiseul-Praslin. She regards the ubiquitous, bachelor museum specimens swirling around her with disdain. Where is that arty biographer person she just waltzed with? Granted: a mute; even so… She’s intrigued.But it is not permitted to dance twice with the same man. How does anybody find out anything at a May Ball?
Were she the sulking type, Lily would sulk. And I would catch her at it from across the room and make her laugh. We’d slip outside and go for a walk. That’s if I wasn’t “Francesco.” And if her stepmother Marguerite, guarding Lily like a prize, wasn’t trying so hard to “make tonight a success.” Lily does her duty, remains seated, inclines her head and forces a docile expression. When she finds me lurking against the wall, she nods slightly.
Now you may write about me.
Consuelo Vanderbilt…
There; across the room; so expensively decked out and dressed in a brand new creation by Worth.
Lily removes her lorgnette; she compensates for myopia with superb intuition and even better hearing. She tunes in on the girl’s bizarre accent. Is she American?
Can she be anything but? I tease silently.
They’re an invading force.
Never look the gift force in the mouth.
Lily looks down just in time to avoid bursting into laughter, since she does not blush. Well, let her have her four marriage proposals. Who is that awful woman? The girl’s mother?
She’s not as pretty as the dressmaker made her out to be.
And I wasn’t staring. I was gawking. Her grandfather died the richest man in the world.
Well please never go to those lengths to please me, Monsieur.
Certainly not. Her mother will piss away sixty-five million before she’s finished.
…and her mother, Alva, lording over $65 million
Sixty-five million! That’s more than my richest cousin is worth. Or so they tell me, anyway. Elisabeth shoots a glance, first at her stepmother, and then at the American heiress. And it’s at that moment that she gets a new idea about how to please Marguerite. I press for details, but she dismisses me. Later, Monsieur, she says, trying to hide the ironic twinkle in her eyes. I am very bored of writing now.
I wonder. What does Élisabeth really think of the tall, gawky American her age whose mother, Alva Vanderbilt, will bill this as Consuelo’s “social début”? That’s before marrying her off and being the first one in their set to divorce a Vanderbilt. The pioneer strain, indeed.
The other side of midnight, I made my report. And as Francesco would write, a hundred years later:
Many years afterwards, looking back on these parties, Élisabeth de Gramont would describe them in acidic tones. The rooms became “foul-smelling furnaces,” the men pinned to the scene like ornithological specimens, the girls being “herded like sheep.”
Élisabeth never really trusted girls her own age with nothing on their minds but landing a husband. She was already beginning to wonder, at eighteen, whether a husband could be anything but a jailer. More or less cruel, perhaps, but a jailer nonetheless. It was unthinkable that the happiness of one being could depend solely on the actions of somebody else. The knowledge that these lovely girls would spend their whole lives brooding, staying up nights waiting for their unfaithful husbands to return home, seemed like a blot on the whole female sex.
With a feature film produced in 2012, award-winning screenwriter Suzanne Stroh’s period drama Scotch Verdict is in development at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Suzanne hails from Michigan, where her family brewed Stroh’s beer for five generations. She lives with her family in the Virginia countryside.
I’ve begun a new literary adventure, and I look forward to sharing it with you in the year to come. I’ll be translating the raucous biography of an incredible woman, Élisabeth de Gramont, from French into English. If you read French, you can buy the book here.
Here’s a sketch by André Rouveyre of them visiting their friend Rémy de Gourmont, the literary tastemaker responsible for lionizing Barney and giving her the name she spent a lifetime living up to: L’Amazone
2018 will mark the 100th anniversary of the first modern marriage contract between two women, made by Élisabeth, Duchess of Clermont-Tonnèrre, a central figure in the artistic and political history of modern France, and her “eternal mate,” Natalie Barney, that consummate American in Paris.
The amazing untold story of a secret lesbian marriage
Their beautiful, radical, non-monogamous and staunchly faithful union lasted a lifetime until Élisabeth’s death in 1954, which shattered Natalie to the core. Astonishingly, all this was kept secret until Francesco Rapazzini published his biography in 2004, with the full support and generous cooperation of Élisabeth’s very private family.
Wild Blue
As a daughter of Michigan and a lesbian with a family business background of my own, I knew all about the railway carriage heiress of the Belle Époque when I was growing up. It may have been the heyday of NCR, but my father still taught me to pinpoint Dayton, Ohio on the map as the home producer of Barney cars. Barney was a great family business that he rued the end of. For as Walter Matthau’s butler quips famously in A New Leaf, my father (like Natalie herself, whose beautiful French was more 1793 than 1923) was a modern man who liked to keep alive traditions that were dead before he was born.
As I grew older and understood the gayness that he had taken for granted all my life, Dad made it quietly known that the wild child from Cincinnati was no role model. She was a model for bad behavior on par with the wayward Peggy Guggenheim. Certainly not a fit spiritual great-granny for a girl like me. Wild Blue, I always thought of Natalie with her untamed blonde mane and her steel-blue gaze. I’d find myself shaking my head in grudging admiration of her outrageous exploits in Bar Harbor and Washington, not to mention her audacious seduction of Liane de Pougy, the world’s most desirable woman, as a nineteen year-old American in Paris.
It goes without saying that my dance card was never as full, nor were my date nights. In fact we couldn’t have been more different.
Natalie was a much better rider, for one thing. She fenced and spoke French bilingually. My eyes and hair were dark, like Élisabeth’s, and like Lily de Gramont, I had a commanding voice that drew attention, a quick long laugh and a love of the countryside, the water and the wild places. And if my gaze was sometimes just as imposing, it was never predatory. Natalie’s was.
It was better in a Barney car
Like every other girl of my ilk, though, I found it hard to ignore Natalie Barney, even though she, too, was dead before my gay history was born. We were worlds apart in many of our tastes if not in our drives. She never set foot in a café, for instance, whereas I could live in them. I prized domestic anchorage; I valued love and loves placed in a lifelong context, while Natalie appeared to have no use for such things as marriage or children or even for making her life with animals. But my God, what a lover….
They got it wrong–for 40 years!
Natalie died in Paris in 1972 when I was seven. I watched and read, during my lifetime, as an entire cottage industry was built up around Barney as a legendary (some would say fatal) seducer, largely for her leading role as a patron of the arts to the Lost Generation. And now I realize that, in key respects, all the scholars and memoirists got it wrong. Like majorly wrong. It’s like that great Cary Brothers song…
Blue eyes, you’re the secret I keep
Cary Brothers, “Blue Eyes” from “Who You Are”
By translating EDG, I’ll start putting it right by getting to know the wonderful secret Natalie kept so close to her heart, hiding her in plain sight. You will not believe the passion, the fireworks, the honesty and the agony in their love letters.
“Je vous présente Élisabeth, la duchesse rouge”
More importantly, I’ll introduce English readers for the first time to the incredibly full and rich (and, yes, complex) life of an extraordinary character in 20th century history. Élisabeth was a Marxist descended from Henri IV who shrugged off the slur “red duchess.” She was a popular author and sculptor and librettist, a music patron and the major clef to Proust’s great roman. Lily was another wild child who would never be tamed. She was the only woman Natalie Barney could never control. Élisabeth was also the clef to Natalie’s own living work of art, the one she dedicated her life to and hoped and dreamed it would become. Above all, Lily loved to laugh.
So if you are a reader of belles-lettres, a student of French cultural history from the Belle Époque through World War II, or a reader of the biographies and scholarly studies of the great lesbians of the 20th century, I hope you will enjoy my field reports in 2013.
If I complete four pages a day, I should have a draft ready by next Christmas. For now, glad to have you on my rope. We’re off into the wild blue yonder.
In Good Company
By the way, my first impression of this job is that literary translation hasn’t changed much since antiquity. It’s laborious, and taxing, and when you admire the author and have great affection for the subject, like I do, it’s incredibly satisfying. The loneliness sometimes brought about by the solitary nature of the work is more than compensated by the excellent company I keep at the end of my shift. My veteran editor, Jean-Loup Combemale, grew up in Paris on the rue Jacob and visited his grandparents a few doors down from Élisabeth on the rue de la Faisanderie. My able researcher, Vanessa Coulomb, brings an M.B.A.’s focus to the job of helping today’s English readers relate to la vieille France, along with a storied Norman childhood of her own. Thanks in advance to you both.
Acts of love and literature
Given today’s economy—less than 5% of all books sold annually in the US are translations of works published in a foreign language, according to The Nation—a major literary translation is usually an act of love, an undertaking in the great amateur tradition, which Élisabeth herself joined the ranks of when she translated the poems of John Keats as a young woman.
There are those who play for money, babe
There are those who play for fame
There are still those who only play
For the love of the game
T Bone Burnett, “Kill Switch”
from “The Criminal Under My Own Hat”
It’s a band of brothers and sisters I’m proud to be a part of. As I learn more about them and their august tradition dating from the advent of written language, I’ll pass it on. And if you have any questions or interests or stories of your own to tell, please share.
With a feature film produced in 2012, award-winning screenwriter Suzanne Stroh’s period drama Scotch Verdict is in development at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Suzanne hails from Michigan, where her family brewed Stroh’s beer for five generations. She lives with her family in the Virginia countryside.
