She asks what I do for a living. I stumble out that I write, “but it’s not like my book’s at a Barnes & Noble,” I say. “I don’t make any money at it.” She gives me a small, pitying smile.
As with everyone she is curious how I’ve come to this town. John and I are obviously strangers, in northeastern Ohio, the two of us citified, wearing all black, but most noticeably here, everyone white, blonde, nice.
Everyone is just so friendly around here, she is saying. It’s true they are friendly, I agree. Although their faces are not all open, of course.
It’s just so pleasant she says as she lines a strip under my eyebrows (incidentally, she fucks up my eyebrows, rendering them two scare quotes, also ripping a patch in my left inner brow. I say nothing, it is my fault, for going to a salon here, and then she charges me an unbelievable amount).
Yes it is, I say. It is very pleasant.
Something about this town is making me become a good citizen again. I must rebel. I must rally against the hygienic.
When I mention how expensive everyone’s yoga wear is, how rumpled I feel, John says, Fuck them. He clomping around after class in his German boots.
I try to imagine the Baroness strutting down the streets here. Impossible! Although she too wandered around the Midwest, coming after her husband, the novelist Felix Greve, the German translator of Oscar Wilde who staged his suicide with her help in order to evade his debts, afterwards changing his name to Frederick Grove. From Ellis Island to Pittsburgh, then for a time on a farm in Kentucky, then a tent, then once he abandoned her she was even an artist’s model in Cincinnati, wandering up through the East Coast, Philadelphia, Connecticut. During this time marrying, briefly, the German baron, who enlisted in the army and never returned.
This period adrift mirroring her twenties uprooted in Europe, Berlin, Rome, Munich, Dachau, taking up with different lovers — a career, from the French for carrière, that which takes you from place to place. For these girls, career was a matter of falling madly in love, or being carried away through the force of someone else’s desire, being allowed to travel in exchange for their bodies and a bit of their self, their soul — the Baroness modeling for the stained-glass artist, the playwright who wrote a play about her, the husband-novelist who wrote books about her. This is what allowed them temporary access into artistic circles and allowed them EXPERIENCE. (Better than other careers for bright intellectual girls at that time, such as being an invalid.)
A young Jean Rhys traveling with her first husband John Lenglet, the Dutch journalist. She remembers those early days in Good Morning, Midnight, so dreadfully poor in Holland, rainy, cold, tulips on the table. In Vienna less poor, she can buy dresses, then Paris, where she was pregnant. She taught English with a round belly, all while her husband got work of an indeterminate and vague nature. Her husband arrested for selling foreign currency illegally (like Elsa’s husband, all these confidence men, the music of charm they are selling). The Paris jobs she remembers in Good Morning, Midnight, salesgirl in dress shop, artist’s model, mannequin.
In New York City, Elsa resurrected herself as a living sculpture. She was also an artist’s model for Duchamp and others. She who used to pose in pornish tableaux vivants as a libertine 20-year-old. Her costumes which resulted in her arrest. When she “paraded the streets wearing only a Moroccan blanket.” The shaved head sometimes shellacked in red, the yellow face powder, stamps for blush. Her bolero jackets gilded with carrots and beets, body adorned with tomato cans, her elaborate head-dresses. The wooden birdcage around her neck with live canaries inside.
If she was a performance artist in Hudson, Ohio, she would go to the local grocery store here, like she did at the Manhattan Woolworths and steal things for jewelry — teaspoons for earrings, an electric battery for a bustle. She who flashed at the French Consulate in Berlin, while in the 1920s, broke, desolate, dying to get out. She later lived in a shelter, then a psychiatric asylum, where she wrote her memoirs.
These vivants who later became authors, these girls who later became unsightly spectacles, brilliant and angry hags. If the alluring young woman in modernism is the femme fatale, the older or ugly woman who won’t shut the fuck up is also represented as deadly, a scary contagion, something syphilitic.
She would surely get arrested almost immediately here, I realize. Towns like this are like Disney World, they clean out the vermin, the shit, like it’s never even there. They close themselves off to the outside, the outsiders.
Most unhygienic, I think, would be her female aggressiveness, her rage. She madly pursued these Great Men. William Carlos Williams who called her insane, she fought him in poetry, a warfare. How she’d bellow after Marcel DuChamp, who was horrified of her: MARCEL MARCEL I LOVE YOU LIKE HELL MARCEL! Marcel Duchamp had a revulsion boner for the Baroness like André Breton was a bit horrified by the younger Claude Cahun, who would also shave her head and use her body as her own performance in her Autoportraits, sometimes playing the dandy, other times androgynous alien. (Allegedly Cahun was in love with him, but I like to think of this as a performance too.) Like Bataille’s revulsion-boner for Simone Weil, depicted as a radical harbinger of doom in badly cut black clothes in the character Lazare in his Blue of Noon. Women who nakedly threw off the mask of femininity, who were depicted as grotesques in these texts. The Baroness who subverted being the muse, the art-object, through her aggressive, devouring sexuality. Her ecstatic violent poems, the aggressive thrust of her letters, her capital-lettered scream. (She was not the silent or chattering pretty Surrealist femme-enfant.)
In her never-finished biography of the Baroness, Djuna Barnes called her “a citizen of terror, a contemporary without a country.” Writing or living as terrorism: Claude Cahun’s and Marcel Moore’s insurrectionist pamphlets they slipped into the pockets of Nazi soldiers. (Both the Baroness and Claude Cahun only let in provisionally to the Dadaist and Surrealist movements, respectively, these women seen more as living embodiments than practitioners. Outsider artists.)
Jane Heap the editrix of The Little Review, the journal that serialized Ulysses, publishing the Baroness’ poetry in the same issue, defended her art as an “art of madness.” She wrote to angry readers: “Madness is her chosen state of consciousness. It is this consciousness she works to produce art.” A difference of privilege, the male modernists who could cultivate this aesthetic of madness, and still be viewed as sane, and these women, who were criminalized.
The Baroness was kind of like a Lady Gaga of her day, although she would be seen now just as insane. Like a bag lady. Especially here. Her extreme poverty later on in Germany, where she sold newspapers. Like Sasha Jensen in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight or the elderly woman of the streets in Violette Leduc’s The Little Lady and the Fox Fur. In Berlin, she launched a desperate epistolary campaign to Djuna and others. Like Vivien(ne)’s SOS’s to Ezra Pound. These elliptical, raw, emotional, final fragments, begging to be saved.
It’s all context, I suppose. Or perhaps Lady Gaga gets away with it because she is young.
During yoga class I measure my white hairy legs against the women on either side of me. It is very un-yoga to think about ungroomed bodies. This studio is very un-yoga. It’s “power yoga”—which is mostly aerobic. The blonde perky bodies wrapped in their Lululemon yogawear, the teacher with her microphoned headpieces extorting us to think about tightening up for bikini season.