Rebel Angel, page 6
A bright studio with a naked lady, a smoke-hazed bar with a small girl trembling under a spotlight, or Nicolas with the sweet smile who dances the tango with me or perhaps Madeleine stretched out under a woollen blanket, whom Marcel kissed …23
She evolved her characteristic way of looking, disguising or sublimating her sexual interest by adopting the persona or observing eye of a ‘young man … with a handsome child’s face’, a gender-bending formula employed in her first novel, Friends of Bernard. Changing the pronouns smuggled gay affections into the straight world of fiction, a fairly standard procedure for homosexual writers of the period. At times she hints at her own closeted state and the camouflage resorted to by women in order to pass in society:
I know other women who have draped so many veils around their souls that their face has become a mask, and life throbs behind it, as though threatening to suddenly flare up and scorch the veils.24
Paris, like Berlin, was awash with Russian émigrés. A Russian family saga morphing into a historical romance exercised Annemarie at the time.25 The story features Russian cafés and an excursion out of Paris to the forest, as well as an émigré family: Natasha, a singer who left St. Petersburg aged fifteen, eight-year-old Nikolai and their mother. ‘Nikolai wanted to be a General, or sometimes maybe the chamberlain of the little Tsarevich, or king of Poland.’26 The Russians like to sit in the Luxembourg gardens and watch the children playing with toy boats. A girl encountered in a library leads the uncertain narrator to Natasha:
Natasha is tall, slim and sophisticated. You can spot her from a mile away standing on the street, with her easy-going face, a face like a protective wall behind which tiredness, a little weakness, quick flashes of disappointment peep out.27
Five years older than Annemarie, Tania Doukhovetzky had attended the Notting Hill and Ealing High School for girls in England and was now resident at the Foyer International. ‘Tania is not happy and she will never be happy because she doesn’t want to be.’28 This hint of depression or something awry in Tania’s personality is borne out by correspondence from Renée and others. Tania’s influence on Annemarie’s early fiction as well as her presence at Bocken during the summer of 1929 suggest some degree of romantic involvement.
The male student narrator of a second story dated 1929 has an engaging, lyrical way with description: ‘I read through half of the night. In the evening we go for a walk on the boulevards, drink coffee and grenadine that is sweet and bright red, and when we get home I forget to be tired. The street lamps shine like moonlight into my room.’29 This tentative flâneur encounters a director called Hochberg, apparently based on the screenwriter Vollmoeller, who frequents the Coupole’s bohemian crowd. Hochberg ‘read my work, made some corrections and put it aside again’.30 The director tells the student the story of Lena, a dancer of Polish-Jewish origin who made her name in Berlin:
Hochberg tells how she showed up from somewhere back east, a little Polish Jew in a red velvet dress. Just the little red dress was all she had. And Lena sat up in all the Berlin cafés and made a name for herself. She was petite and attractive. Not very different from today, except that she was trim and now she has filled out, strong with broad shoulders. She was dark even then. I think she must have a drop of gypsy blood. Pure Jews don’t have those eyes. By the way, her eyes were this incredible blue …31
Lena marries three times, becomes rich from her first two husbands, and accompanies the director to Paris where she leads a bohemian life, painting and hanging around the Coupole. ‘Lena put the men and the dance school behind her and traipsed around all the studios in Montparnasse and fell in love with nobody.’32 This intriguing story within a story implies the author’s familiarity with the Montparnasse scene. ‘He comes to the Coupole every night to see Lena… So at midnight to La Jungle, the Bal des Quat’zarts.’33 La Jungle was an African-themed jazz bar and the Bal des Quat’zarts was an infamous annual arts students’ carnival where the dancers mislaid their clothes as the night wore on and licentiousness was on the menu.
Annemarie intercuts this account of bar-crawling with a description of Sorbonne life:
Students scurry on the stairs. The Sorbonne courtyard is bleary after rain. Out on the street two students are holding forth and handing out leaflets … A blond woman sits at the bar, sipping now and again from her drink and detaining one of the students by the nape. She is pale and approachable. More students come in after their lectures, immediately ordering coffee and tartines and hilariously reading out snatches of their notes to each other.34
A third story is set again among the Russians. This time the protagonist is called Madeleine, an émigrée who left Russia as a teenager, and a character called Marcel. Marcel attempts to introduce the narrator to a baby-faced gigolo: ‘“You look so nice together with your baby-faces. Madeleine has a weakness for them.” Madeleine laughed at the whole table. “How wicked you are”, she said, “but how true – both of them are cute with their baby-faces.”’35 The story comes to an end with a stroll through the Latin Quarter to the river: ‘I walk down the Boulevard St. Michel, where students are sitting out on the terraces drinking coffee and eating croissants. I cross the bridge from Place St. Michel towards Notre Dame …’36
These early writings about Paris show the twenty-two-year-old responding to young people in cafés, bars, attics and dancehalls. Her baby-faced male narrator is after the girls but, as Annemarie admitted to Erika Mann, this was merely a device: ‘I fully understand that the boy is not really a boy.’37 The Russian diaspora of the Left Bank and the jazz age provide a fevered sexuality. They also show a tug-of-war between the safe student world and the lure of a nighttime pleasure.
Shari Benstock underlines this need for discretion in her seminal account of lesbian women in Paris between the wars, Women of the Left Bank. 1928 was the year Virginia Woolf published Orlando, inspired in part by Woolf’s affair with the cross-dressing Vita Sackville-West. The two writers courageously took a stand on the grounds of freedom of speech in favour of a novel that was causing scandal on both sides of the English Channel – The Well of Loneliness:
All London, they say, is agog with this. Most of our friends are trying to evade the witness box; for reasons you may guess. But they generally put it down to the weak heart of a father, or a cousin who is about to have twins.38
The Well of Loneliness was quickly removed from circulation amid a flurry of immorality charges while Pegasus Press in Paris attempted to circumvent English censorship and create a succès de scandale. The French edition sold well, especially at the Gare du Nord news stand beside the Flèche d’Or deluxe express train to London.39 The obscenity trial of November 1928 echoed the Wilde trials of 1895 and gave a foretaste of the Chatterley ban some thirty years later: English prudery was in its element. Much of the medical establishment of the day echoed the legal view of lesbianism as an illness for which a ‘cure’ was needed. Because of the adverse publicity The Well of Loneliness had garnered, people began to question romantic friendships between women, to look askance at school girl crushes in novels and to regard spinster school teachers with suspicion.40 Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Monnier, Djuna Barnes and Sylvia Beach, all members of what Radclyffe Hall calls ‘the miserable army’ in Paris, were left in no doubt about the implications of this legal defeat.
Alexis Schwarzenbach has traced a copy of the German 1929 translation of The Well of Loneliness in the student library of Zurich University, and also a copy in the library at Bocken.41 It is quite likely that Annemarie read it either in French or German, soon after her return from Paris, and so was aware of its implications for her own coming out both in life and in fiction.
The Foyer International was a short walk from a number of lesbian salons and bars in Montparnasse. Le Monocle, the most popular and notorious of them, was located at 60 Boulevard Edgar Quinet and owned by Lulu de Montparnasse (not to be confused with Kiki). In the rue de Lappe behind Place de la Bastille, Les Trois Colonnes was frequented by corner boys and ephebes alike. In Klaus Mann’s 1932 novel, Vanishing Point, his protagonist accompanies a character called Annemarie there after meeting her in Montparnasse. ‘The romantically tricked-out little bar was enchanting and lively. Boys in caps, girls with bright scarves around their necks looked like an Apache chorus in an operetta.’42
While there is no firm indication of Annemarie’s wanderings at this time, there is no reason to think, given her lively circle of friends and her own explorer’s curiosity, that she didn’t venture out to sample the city’s nightlife.
Annemarie with Hélène d’Oliveira, 1927
Courtesy of Zentralbibliothek Zürich
*
A few weeks before the end of her two semesters in Paris, writing to Merz, Annemarie sounds a vague note about the changes it has wrought:
I will be leaving Paris in a few weeks. It has been good here, I learned a lot and stored away some feelings to savour later. It was here that I slowly sloughed off the last vestige of childhood, everything has become weightier, more responsible, deeper. There is also a new powerful urge to aim higher.43
Accompanying her home from Paris in June 1929 was the Russian exile Tania, who spent the summer at Bocken, and benefited from the care and attention paid by Annemarie’s family to their disturbed houseguest. A doctor at Bocken treated her during her three-month stay, and both Renée and Annemarie appear to have been helping her out (and Tania’s mother) with sums of money. Renée was of the opinion that the illness was hysterical, attention-seeking, describing the patient as ‘la reine douloureuse’ and blaming her for ruining Annemarie’s health, always a source of concern. By September Tania had returned to Paris, with a sigh of relief all round.
You’ve no idea the worries I’ve had with Annemarie’s ‘special friendships’ – but she eventually always makes good friends – and then there’s Vollmoeller and his crowd! – Poor Annemarie has such bad taste! Tania is not a bad girl – but she is suffocating her friend!44
In January 1929, during the Christmas holidays between semesters in Paris, Annemarie had encountered screenwriter Karl Vollmoeller in Badrutt’s Palace Hotel in St. Moritz. Whether she sought him out or he pursued her is moot: they met in the lobby. Certainly Annemarie was as capable as the next writer of networking to advance her career; and Vollmoeller always had an eye for a pretty girl, the younger the better. This meeting widened her circle to writers and cinema people, and precipitated a family row about what Renée called her ‘amitiés différentes’.45 Vollmoeller had co-authored the screenplay of the highly successful Blue Angel and was intimate with the world of Montparnasse cafés and the figure of Lena Amsel, all of which caused concern to Annemarie’s bourgeois family and began to make its way into her writing. His disreputable private life was well known in the opera world where Renée’s diva Emmy Krüger, always ready to be holier than thou, sniffed the wind.
Renée’s disapproval of Vollmoeller strained the atmosphere at Bocken following her daughter’s return from Paris. Annemarie’s association with him went against Renée’s need to control and her innate bourgeois tendency to observe the proprieties. While some friends found favour with Renée – Maria Daelen initially, the art historian Hannah Kiel, Jacqueline Nougarède – others fell foul. It was not just a matter of Annemarie asserting herself; guests too became aware of Renée’s overbearing manner, as Annemarie recognized: ‘These slow oppressive days, misunderstandings, slights, wounded sentiments, nerves, biting one’s tongue. Do you remember dinner at Bocken? Afterwards you admitted: “It’s the atmosphere. I’m suffocated.” Sometimes I too am smothered.’46
Pretty or handsome celebrities who die young tend to become the stuff of legend. Dancers, however, leave a light trace on history and Lena Amsel is remembered these days, if at all, for what others wrote about her, as the twenties came to an expensive crash. Writers Klaus Mann, Wilhelm Speyer, Ruth Landshoff-Yorck and Annemarie all traced Amsel’s Polish-Jewish origins, her burst of frenzied celebrity in decadent Berlin – short, fast, scattering ash – as a meteoric metaphor for the Weimar Republic itself. Perhaps too she appears spectre-like behind Waugh’s ditzy party girl Agatha in Vile Bodies (1930). Amsel’s death in a car accident in Paris on 2 November 1929, a taffeta and rhinestone princess bursting into flames, brought that decade to an abrupt close, as the Wall Street Crash seemed to bring an end to the roar and folly of the twenties.
Lena Amsel had been a protégé of Vollmoeller who likely encouraged Annemarie to look her up in Paris. Certainly, in November 1929, Annemarie took up the figure of Amsel, like many others, in her writing. Ruth Landshoff-Yorck, another protégé of Vollmoeller, remembered Amsel’s early appearance in Berlin’s Wintergarten in 1917:
She could not dance a farthing. Dressed in a yellow gown she was making steps intended to show her up as a seductive female, and towards the end two enormous negroes came on stage and gathered her in their four huge arms to carry her away while she wiggled her legs.47
Amsel and Landshoff-Yorck’s careers mirror each other. Both were teenagers advanced by Vollmoeller. They frequented the trendy Café des Westens in Berlin, where Jean Ross, aka Sally Bowles, lunched with Isherwood, Spender and Aaron Copeland in 1931. Both were Jewish girls married into German nobility – the most lucrative of Amsel’s three marriages was to Hugo Graf von Moy – whose palace still sits on the corner of Odeonsplatz in Munich. Her first marriage to an Argentinian riding instructor lasted three months and her last liaisons were with surrealist Louis Aragon and Swiss sculptor André Lasserre. Both women were able to conduct their lives thanks to wealthy husbands, Vollmoeller’s largesse and their own schtick. They emerged from the Berlin street and café life Vollmoeller knew so well:
She always came back to him, telephoned from somewhere, he rescued her, sent money or tickets or picked her up in his car, and she promised she would be faithful and never was.48
Amsel moved from cabaret to screen in the early twenties, working with the then unknown Marlene Dietrich. Annemarie and Landshoff-Yorck in their writing are drawn to Amsel as the epitome of the Polish Jew who has danced her way out of her origins. ‘Lena had come from Lodz, a fact most ambitious girls would have kept secret.’49 In a bar called the Tabarin, she encounters a compatriot from the Lodz of her past, from a culture that would be decimated in the coming decades:
‘Don’t you recognize me, little Lenachen? … Uncle Fränkel from Lodz? You don’t know your kind old Uncle Fränkel any more, Lenchen?’ He stood modestly still as Lena fell on his neck and embraced him. … girls were certainly not born in order to become dancers, but to be the future mothers of youthful Jews who got to study, to study …50
Klaus Mann’s character Greta Valentin, a former dancer, in Vanishing Point (1932) follows the same narrative arc of celebrity and accidental death:
The village deep in Poland, the sadness of the ghetto. A small ugly girl with the big eyes who gets swept up by a stable boy – what was she called then? Not yet Greta – and ran off with him to Warsaw; cursed by her father (father in a kaftan and ringlets), the eternally suffering mother (mother with wig and worried, sallow beaky face); what does the girl live on – the girl who’s not yet Greta – in the city of Warsaw? Who does she sleep with, and who teaches her the rudiments of dance?51
Greta has the same child-like, ingenue quality that Vollmoeller liked: the country girl given her start in the metropolis. Writer Stefan Grossmann also remembered Amsel sitting in Berlin’s Café des Westens:
… she had the look of a child, and spoke for the most part Polish and a bit of German, and was the sweetheart of a very young novelist-poet who, soon after he picked up this slender waif, had to defend his actions in a court of law because his beloved was not yet sixteen. The young poet died suddenly, just about the time Lena had picked up enough German to kick start her career.52
Berlin at the time was awash with such aspiring performers, girls and boys living hand to mouth in the hope of stardom or the next role, their looks quickly fading on the porous border between street, cabaret stage and silver screen.
By 1927 Amsel was living in Paris, in two rooms in the Hotel Raspail not far from the cafés and bars of Montparnasse. Man Ray photographed her and she had ended an affair with Louis Aragon. She drove a blue Bugatti ‘with a clumsily painted bird on the door’, and had recently taken up painting. Her dance-cabarets of preference were the Coupole, the Jungle and the Grand Écart. On 1 November 1929 Amsel was in Le Grand Écart on rue Fromentin with Kiki of Montparnasse – a small, mirrored, atmospheric bal-dancing that attracted an eclectic fashionable crowd. The painter André Derain invited her to his studio at Barbizon outside Paris. The next day, in their separate Bugattis, they drove back to the city with Florence Pitron as Lena’s passenger. Both cars drove at speed and in some accounts appeared to be racing each other. Amsel’s Bugatti skidded on the slippery road, overturned and caught fire. Both women died horribly burned in the conflagration.
Annemarie’s Pariser Novelle II, written shortly after Amsel’s death, memorializes the dancer. Her self-made persona was attractive to a writer like Annemarie: spirited, glamorous, denizen of bar and cabaret, motorcars and speed, tragic death. Annemarie’s description suggests more than just hearsay:
Lena left in her wake men and dancing lessons, hung around the studios of Montparnasse and fell in love with nobody. Her three marriages had exhausted her. Lena shuddered with disgust when she recalled them. What she wanted now was sun, trees, flowers, fine company to pass the time of day with and lie out on the summer grass. Every Saturday she drove off, trailer in tow, heading for the horizon’s dolce far niente …53
