On Mon, 14 Mar 2005, PAGE SIX was quoted:
> MEOW, MEOW
I think this article isn't catty so much as gossipy. This seems to have become basically Castle's shtick; she's kind of like a lesbian intellectual's Page Six. Except that unlike Page Six, she mocks herself too. Below is a sample from the last article she wrote for the LRB.
Michael
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21 October 2004 London Review of Books
Love-of-One's-Life Department Terry Castle
Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho and Art The Lives and Loves of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks by Diana Souhami Weidenfeld, 224 pp, £18.99
The island of Lesbos: talk about a small world. Pick up any edition of Sappho's fragments and the same old names keep coming up: Erinna, Gongyla, Attis, Kleis, Anactoria. You would think that after two thousand years these girls would be ready to quit the scene, but no, here they come again -- a bit leathery from all the centuries of tennis and golf, but still the only game in town. When, you wonder, will someone new turn up? If it's true -- as a famous gay male writer has suggested -- that there are really only 500 people in the world and after a while one has slept with most of them, then the sapphic dating pool has got to be even smaller: eight or ten perhaps, 12 or 15 at most. It's pathetic, really. Trundle through the Gobi Desert, lift a random tent flap: the bearded Mongolian gal inside was once involved with your college girlfriend.
The upside in this scarcity economy is that one doesn't have to go too far to start connecting with some fairly celebrated figures in the lesbian haut monde. A friend of mine once had dinner with Elizabeth Bishop and her lover. Another met Marguerite Yourcenar. At Yale in the 1980s one of Blakey's best friends slept with -- well, perhaps you can guess. (True -- the closet case actress!) Someone else I know went to a party in a Chicago highrise and both Martina Navratilova and k.d. lang were there. Just hanging out! I myself once met Rita Mae Brown, author of those lesbian mystery novels featuring the talking kitty cat.
Stranger still: how quickly the links can go back to women born over a hundred years ago. A late (and much missed) Stanford colleague, Ian Watt, once told me that as an undergraduate at Cambridge he was put in charge of escorting Gertrude Stein when she came to give a lecture in the 1930s. He took her to a tea shop for a snack and Virginia Woolf was sitting at the next table. (Neither great lady deigned to acknowledge the other.) And not long ago I met an elderly female couple -- two very elegant Syrian women -- who had lived for many years in Paris on the rue Jacob, across from the house in which the flamboyant lesbian writer and expatriate Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972) held her renowned weekly salons for over half a century. They knew Barney's former housekeeper, Berthe Cleyrergue, and had even toured the Temple à l'Amitié, the legendary garden folly around which Barney and her girlfriends used to perform moonlit eurythmic dances in the early years of the last century. If only I'd been in Paris in the 1970s, they exclaimed, they could have introduced me to la belle Natalie herself! Barney, after all, was still carrying on love affairs into her eighties and lived to the great old age of 96. Who knows what might have happened. If the pair from Damascus had any inkling that in 1971 I was a spotty adolescent in college -- charmless, adipose and entirely hidden from the world in the dank rainforests of Tacoma, Washington -- they were polite enough not to let on.
All this 'degrees of separation' maundering is inspired by Diana Souhami's enjoyably jaded new book on Barney and her circle. Not least because I sort-of-but-not-quite know Souhami herself. No, we've never met, but Blakey once sat next to her one summer in the old British Library Reading Room. They began discreetly eyeballing each other's book request slips and went on from there to Mytilenean chit-chat. B. and I weren't yet together -- wouldn't be for five more years -- but I was jealous nonetheless when she described the encounter in an email. Blast that Souhami! Not only was she the author of a series of stylish biographies of Rich and Famous Lesbians -- Stein and Toklas, Violet Trefusis, Radclyffe Hall, the 1920s society painter Gluck -- she seemed adept at sticking her oar in. Thank goodness the still-to-be-snagged B. finished whatever it was she was doing with Adam Smith's _Theory of Moral Sentiments_ and had to go back to the States not long after.
But Souhami's book itself offers proof of the 'small world' phenomenon -- and of the oddly claustrophobic aspect of lesbian life...
Rest at: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n20/cast01_.html
(if you're a subscriber)