The years assayed in Selby Wynn Schwartz’s new novel, After Sappho, between 1885 and 1928, are perhaps for women in the West some of the most remarkable in our history. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the bicycle and typewriter were changing women’s lives, bringing freedom of movement and the possibility of skilled wage labour to millions who were previously corseted and – in the case of middle and upper class women – cosseted. Within forty years we were moving through cities in unprecedented number, driving automobiles and working heavy machinery during the war, dressing in loose-fitting garments and beginning to vote. How did this happen? It wasn’t just technology that drove the revolution in everyday life, transformed relations between the sexes, and fundamentally altered the way women looked at one another and understood themselves. Women, individually and collectively, fought to make this happen. “Power lies in the shadows”, Rebecca Solnit wrote recently, and Wynn Schwartz gathers a teeming cast of American and European women who broke out of marginal existences where they lived overshadowed by men, to seek the light.
After decades of feminist scrutiny of this history, Wynn Schwartz is just one of a group of writers, scholars and thinkers who are now asking us to reconsider the period, and in particular, the part that lesbians played in it. Among their books are No Modernism Without Lesbians (Head of Zeus, 2020) Diana Souhami’s recent biography of four key players in the development of modernism: Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney, and Gertrude Stein; Lesbian Modernism (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Elizabeth English’s study of the narrative strategies that writers used to outwit censorship; and Susan S Lanser’s work on how lesbian literature shaped the modernist era (rather than the other way around) in The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
But in Wynn Schwartz’s seductive, elegiac and unclassifiable work (After Sappho is a fiction that contains a multitude of ‘real’ women) the case is made for lesbian pre-eminence in this era not only with the weight and detail of accumulated fact – she gives us biographical information, precis of misogynist laws and court cases brought against the “Cult of the Clitoris”, descriptions of books, bodies, paintings, buildings and furniture – but in the way her protagonists float through the narrative as her writing absorbs and articulates history’s more intangible flows. With great finesse, Wynn Schwartz conjures the feelings, atmospheres, influences, rumours and desires that emanated from these women and swirled around them. She creates a style akin to the optative in ancient Greek grammar, a mood of hovering uncertainty with which lesbians, she tells us, in the precariousness of their lives, were well-acquainted (“if only, if only…let it be so”).Wynn Schwartz also dramatizes those complex questions of identity and solidarity the women faced, elaborating the pathways of connection they built by studying, gathering, and, most mysterious of all, by “becoming”. What they found in Sappho’s poetry were “words we had crossed centuries to find”, words that proposed daring alternate ways of being, liberating them from the bonds of patriarchy. In After Sappho, Wynn Schwartz follows scores of these women who having encountered the poet’s words, abandoned their old lives and – like all good modernists – went in search of the new.
Why Sappho?
A classical education, Virginia Woolf observed in 1925 in her essay ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, is the bedrock of learning in the west, and, as the disgraced ex-Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has been keen to remind us, it is also a badge of elitism and a weapon of rhetorical power. If state education is denied us, Woolf and others argued, it must be fought for. But alongside this we should seek out Sappho and the women who subsequently taught her work for ourselves. Threaded through After Sappho is the idea that for many women at this time, to become a lesbian meant a life of study and devotion, meant becoming an inveterate reader. A surprising number of Wynn Schwartz’s retinue turned themselves into autodidacts, making pilgrimages to Lesbos, teaching themselves Greek, and creating their own translations of ancient texts. Others, in a concerted act of overturning, rewrote classical histories and myths in the light of feminism. This project of remaking the classical world was in line with advice given by one Woolf’s lovers, Vita Sackville West: “The only revenge one could take on certain men was to brazenly rewrite them”. But besides redressing perceived injustices to women in stories written by men, this revisionary imagination was perhaps most pointedly applied to the story of Sappho’s death, which, some male scholars claimed, saw her committing suicide by flinging herself of a cliff for the love of a man.
The repeated act of looking back to Sappho lends Wynn Schwartz’s novel a mood of retrospection, a mood, she explains, that is expressed in Greek grammar as the genitive of remembering. Greek “is the language that has us most in bondage” Woolf wrote, “the desire for that which perpetually lures us back”. Part of the lure of Sappho’s poetry, of course, is that is comes down to us in pieces – something which has been attributed in part to the sexism of early male scholars who believed that, as a woman, her work was unworthy of preservation. Despite this, the portions we have of Sappho’s writing imbues in our contemporary appreciation of what remains of her work, and the little we know of her life, a sense of longing – for something that in its piecemeal state is forever in need of completion. This state of imperfection is mirrored throughout After Sappho in the struggle to “become” a lesbian, to find oneself in a denied and disregarded Sapphic tradition, and to imagine a future “Afterworld”, as Sappho called it, in which women might live and love freely.
The fragmentation of Sappho’s work also acts as an analogue for the fascination that many modernists had for Classicism. When turn-of-the-century archaeologists began uncovering the ruins of Ancient Greece, their discoveries excited the modernist imagination, encouraging writers and painters to look for new forms in very old ones, and influencing the apocalyptic aesthetic which found its way into the poetry of, among others, T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats (“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”/”somewhere in the sands of the desert”). The two movements also had in common a pared-back aesthetic, a belief in the centrality of art, and democratic impulses – until, in the case of modernism, these were hijacked in the 1920s by fascist populism, something to which a handful of Wynn Schwartz’s women were drawn.
Who are “We”?
Wynn Schwartz’s narration takes place in the plural first person and there are many elements to her collective “We” and “Us”. First it is affirmative of numbers, companionship and solidarity, a radical assertion of a common history and a mutual understanding of what “We” think about ourselves and the world at any one moment. As with the use of “We” in Annie Ernaux’s sweeping history of postwar France , The Years (Fitzcarraldo, 2018), Wynn Schwartz’s collective approach asks the reader to endlessly rethink the narrator’s identity as her fluid multiple narrator morphs in shape and meaning. Mostly in After Sappho, the “We” denotes a lesbian identity, but it also encompasses straight women engaged in the cause of female liberation, bisexual women, and transvestites – women who wanted to be male, or those who presented themselves as masculine in order to refuse the cramped space of femininity. There is even the occasional male, Oscar Wilde, or Isadora Duncan’s brother, Raymond, included within the elastic parameters of the story. And finally, towards the end of the novel, there is a Black woman, the dancer Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith, and Nathalie Barney’s servant, Berthe Cleyrergue (“she could cook, she could sew, she had intelligent green eyes”), gesturing towards the lives otherwise missing from this collective identity.
Within her broader narrative, Wynn Schwartz threads the stories of individual women and their amorous, friendly and sometimes fractious relations with one another. Some are well-known (Woolf, Colette, Gertrude Stein) others less familiar: much of the early part of the story relays the battles of Italian feminists, communists and lesbians against their country’s draconian laws. There are the women who acted as salonistas, teachers, leaders and icons (Nathalie Barney), and around these, acolytes and followers, a chorus giving voice to questions, rumours and praise songs. Others are activists demanding the vote, rights, and access to education; then there are artists of all kinds: writers and translators (Djuna Barnes, Renée Vivien, Sibilla Aleramo), painters (Romaine Brooks), designers such as Eileen Grey who wanted to reinvent everyday life and turn houses inside out, as well as actresses (Eleonora Duse, Sarah Bernhardt) and dancers (Liane de Pougy, Maud Allan, Eva Palmer-Sikelianos), some of whom who specialised in Greek song and culture, dressing in robes and making their own leather sandals. There are the “voyantes”, those Cassandras and Sibyls who imagined what most of us cannot, the lamplighters shining the way to possible futures in the Afterland. Finally, there is The Author herself, making the book into a collaboration between the past and the present, and proving by her words the vindication of posterity. In After Sappho, Wynn Schwartz draws lesbians out of anonymity and into history, ensuring that those who were ignored, excluded or denigrated will now and in the future be looked back upon as trailblazers. As Sappho predicted: “You may forget but let me tell you this: someone in some future time will think of us.”
What did “We” do and how did “We” do it?
It’s worth noting that one of the reasons for the freedoms gained by women in this period was due to the money many had available to them. An unusually large number of Wynn Schwartz’s women were American heiresses and some were members of the European aristocracy, though often, like La Duchesse, Elisabeth de Gramont, they were also class traitors (“as noble in blood as they come but hardy as a wildflower, and a communist to boot”). Others, like Wilde’s niece, Dolly, were relatively poor and made an art of living off their friends. But to create the precious spaces (the salons, the stages, the islands villas) where women could breathe freely, required not only ingenuity but hard cash. Unlike the young heiresses in Edith Wharton’s The Bucaneers (1938) who came to Europe in the late 1880s only to tie themselves down to the fag end of the English aristocracy, these daughters of American industrialists and business barons, on inheriting vast fortunes, understood that money gave them the freedom to run their own lives. And this is what they set about doing: challenging themselves to consider what their existences had been and might yet become, and testing the extent of the liberty they had been accorded. Very few of them attempted to follow in their father’s footsteps and build business empires, instead they sought to dream up alternate versions of themselves through art; others found a different kind of reverie in their pursuit of women, alcohol or drugs.
For many the first sign of defiance was in the renunciation of the name they inherited, adopting instead one of their own devising. Then they took to nature (“out the back window and into the pine tree to read poems from a century less muffled in fabric”), draping themselves sensually over some hanging bough, at ease to think with a book in hand or to contemplate the vast blue sky. This was a trial version of living like the Greeks, out in the open rather than shut in as so many women had been cloistered throughout history. It was, after all, in the name of the “natural order” that women had been held back and kept indoors, but what exactly is “natural” many began to ask, as they undid their corsets and took to wearing trousers. From these acts of self-conjuring, and having opened themselves up to the sensuous pleasures of the physical world, they were better equipped to follow their dreams, for each woman to think about building an “island of her own invention”.
One way to announce the changes they were making was to write a manifesto, letting the world know what was on your mind, and inciting in others the demand for change. Another was to embark on a portrait of the newly-fashioned women in whose company you now resided in Paris or on some Greek island. Romaine Brooks’s muted and stripped-back paintings declared the boldness with which many had reinvented themselves, and the seriousness of their enterprise, with none displaying the collusive charm of traditional female portraiture (“Amazons not nymphs, Romaine said brusquely”). In literature, too, it was necessary to find new forms to express new selves (“some acts can only be written as fragments”). Woolf’s Orlando was so radical it made “no recourse to a category at all” – a lesson learned by Wynn Schwartz who, in After Sappho, has triumphantly devised her own free-floating form that glides through collective history while presenting, just as Brooks had, sharp vignettes of individual lives.
Unlike the portraits of many lesbians in literature, Wynn Schwartz avoids the damnation inflicted upon them in narratives that end, ineluctably, in bitterness, recrimination or death. Radyclffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) is, of course, the template for many such stories and Wynn Schwartz rightly categorises the novel as a kind of wrong turn or dead end. Her novel, by contrast is partisan, often celebratory, and frequently characterised by surges of hope. But this does not mean it is sentimental in its portraiture. She does not shy away from the fact that some women put themselves on the wrong side of history, siding with the enemy in debates about empire and war. Perhaps the most egregious of these examples were those who succumbed to the fantasy of fascist modernity. The majority of women, of course, were horrified by “the virile hour”, seeing in its ultra-masculine culture the antithesis of everything they had being trying to give birth to.
Why Lina?
After Sappho draws to a close with a chapter called “Afterwords” which follows the last days of molten-eyed Lina Poletti as she fights against the virile hour, writes countless manifestoes and broadcasts to her compatriots, proclaiming “We are the chorus…the voice of us shall never be silenced”. Poletti was one of those Italian activists, name changers (“Cordula sounded like a heap of rope, Lina was a swift sleek line”), lovers and poets. But she was often misunderstood by her sisters. Even after we’ve written her, Wynn Schwartz avers, she still seems elusive and beyond our comprehension. In other words, Lina is like Sappho, and the thousands of other women lost in history that we must recover, because they can take us to novel states, “beyond ourselves”. The act of searching, studying and rediscovering goes on. La lotta – et l’amore – continuano.
