Anarcho-syndicalists, Sapphic Paris and QUILTBAG

Threatened new restrictions or not, John-John and I were determined to "form a bubble" and get to Friday's outing of "London's peerless gay literary salon" Polari at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern - especially as the readers were favourites of ours; two of the most distinguished writers of their genre, Philip Hensher and Diana Souhami.

By happy circumstance we were seated at a shared table not with complete strangers, but with fellow longtime Polari-ites, our chums Emma and Toby. The "bubble" extended...

Our faboo host Paul Burston opened proceedings with typical aplomb, and it was on with the show!

Our opening reader, the engaging Philip Hensher entertained us with some extracts from his (somewhat delayed due to COVID) new novel A Small Revolution in Germany, the complex tale of a group of typically pompous and over-confident teenage self-styled "anarcho-syndicalist" radicals rebelling against their mediocre school, the Establishment, and indeed anything that they perceive as "getting in the way" of some kind of imagined worldwide revolution, including CND - whose meetings they (amusingly, from one of the pieces Philip read) disrupt with gleeful cacophony and bags of flour. Of course, as the story unfolds, it would appear that the passion for rebellion has faded from most of the group, with the exception of the "anti-hero", the book's narrator Spike and his Chilean-exile lover Joaquin.

From the review by Elizabeth Lowry in The Guardian:

 ...“From now on,” announces a smitten Spike, “I resolved to devote my life to the liberation of the urban proletariat.”

We may smile knowingly, but he means it, whereas the others don’t. The novel moves easily between Thatcherite Britain and the present, by which time everyone except Spike and Joaquin has shed his or her youthful convictions. Ogden has become a journalist with a facile line in wokeness, Kate is a mediocre but lauded poet, Milne a peer and QC, and James Frinton is not just home secretary, but has turned into a Tory (though as someone points out, ‘he had to do that before he could be turned into the Home Secretary’). His one-time friends are proof, as Spike remarks, that “there is so much difference between the espousal of principles and the living of lives”. The political purity of his beliefs, on the other hand, “has been untainted by any deals with what may be achieved now, today, this minute”, although he adds ambiguously: “I had kept my principles. I had remained what I was, a boy.” Have the others sold out for the sake of power, or simply grown up?

You'll need to purchase a copy of the book to find out...

With her typical articulate and wry humour, the lovely Diana Souhami introduced us to what she has promoted as the last of her "Di's Dykes" series of acclaimed biographies of famous lesbians [that includes Gluck, Radclyffe Hall, Violet Trefusis and Vita SackvilleWest] - No Modernism Without Lesbians, a study of the interwoven lives of arty lesbians in inter-war Paris, and their contribution to the "making of a new world" (that was sadly interrupted by the advent of war).

From her introduction to the book:

In the decades before the Second World War, many creative women who loved women fled the repressions and expectations of their home towns, such as Washington and London, and formed a like-minded community in Paris. They wrote and published what they wanted, lived as they chose and were at the vanguard of modernism, the shift into twentieth-century ways of seeing and saying. I focus on the lives and contribution of Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein – three were American, one was English. All rebelled against outworn art and attitudes. Sylvia Beach started the bookshop Shakespeare and Company and published James Joyce’s Ulysses when no commercial publisher could or would. Bryher, born Winifred Ellerman, daughter of the richest man in England, used her inheritance to fund new writing and film. Natalie Barney aspired to live her life as a work of art and make Paris the sapphic centre of the Western world. Gertrude Stein furthered the careers of modernist painters and writers and broke the mould of English prose. All had women lovers whom they kissed, and they changed the human mind to boot...

..."England was consciously refusing the twentieth century", Gertrude Stein said. America enforced prohibition of alcohol as well as censorship of literature and art. Lesbians with voices to be heard, who would not collude with silence and lying about their existence, got out if they could in order to speak out. Paris was waiting: the boulevards and bars, good food, low rents. It seemed on a different planet from London. Paris was where they formed their own community, fled the repressions and expectations of their fathers, took same-sex lovers, and painted, wrote and published what they wanted."Paris", Gertrude said, "was where the twentieth century was", "the place that suited those of us that were to create the twentieth-century art and literature". Indigenous Parisians held their traditional views but did not mind these foreigners with alternative lives. Gertrude Stein said they respected art and letters: it was not just what Paris gave, she said, "it was all it did not take away".

Modernism would not have taken the shape it did without the lesbians who gravitated to Paris at that time. There had been nothing like it since Sappho and the Island of Lesbos...

Stirring stuff!

No Modernism Without Lesbians is available from Gay's The Word bookshop.

After a break for a fag and a (socially-distanced, be-masked) mingle, it was time for part two, as Paul convened a panel discussion and Q&A session with our "stars".

Diana commented on her slight sense of progress at the fact her book was practically encouraged - by a mainstream publisher, yet - to include the word "Lesbian" in its title. An achievement in itself, the panel noted, in these days of multiple acronyms and self-identities, where the words "gay" and "lesbian" seem to be treated with something resembling disdain - a point I do so agree with!

Returning to the introduction to her book:

I duck the initialism of the present age: the LGBTQIA, the QUILTBAG (queer or questioning, undecided, intersex, lesbian, trans, bisexual, asexual or allied, gay or genderqueer) plus the +. Added recently are P and K: P for pansexual or polygamous and K for kink. And now there is prescriptive use of the pronoun ‘they’ for a person resistant to he or she...There are but twenty-six letters in the Roman alphabet and life is short...all the initials in the alphabet will not help in what I hope shines through: the uniqueness, the utter singularity of each individual life...For, of course, what matters from A to Z is not what you are, but how you are what you are, and the contribution made.

Amen, sister!

Questions and answers dealt with, and with resounding applause for another brilliant evening's entertainment, there was hardly time enough to say our farewells [and for me to do a little "vox-pop" of praise for Polari for some kind of podcast being organised by the lovely Sophia Blackwell, accomplished poet and fellow longtime Polari-ite] before the bar closed and it was time to wend our way home again.

Too soon.

Apparently, the next outing on 25th November will be another "Polari at Heaven" extravaganza - and that is definitely something to look forward to! Can't wait.

We love Polari.

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Footnote:

"Di's Dykes":

[Clockwise from top left: Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Natalie Barney]