av福利社

I was myself introduced to Eva Palmer Sikelianos while leafing through books and magazines about Greece in my parents鈥� library in the 1960s and 1970s. The name and pictures of Eva Sikelianos appeared in several highbrow magazines of contemporary Greek culture. In one, I found a close-颅up of her middle-颅aged face and torso in a Greek tunic, with fashionable people in Western dress visible in the background. I was mystified by the caption: 鈥淗igh Priestess of Delphi.鈥�¹ The text around the picture spoke of her life with Angelos Sikelianos, and how she helped him to organize two revivals of the ancient Delphic Festivals in 1927 and 1930 as part of his plan to make Delphi an international center of culture and learning. Elsewhere I read that she had come to Greece in 1905 or 1906 (sources were inconsistent) with Raymond Duncan, brother of Isadora, and his Greek wife Penelope, after pursuing a life in theater in Paris for several years. She married Angelos Sikelianos, brother of Penelope, in 1907 and supported his poetic career with absolute dedication. Having spent all her money to produce the festivals, she returned to the United States to raise funds for Angelos鈥檚 larger project, his Delphic Idea. She failed; then World War II interrupted the Delphic plan. Now impoverished, she stayed in the United States. But, according to these sources, her love for Sikelianos never waned. In the last pages of a large volume celebrating her legacy, I found a photograph of an older Eva Sikelianos, in Delphi, near the end of her life, back in Greece to honor the dead Sikelianos. She was dressed in a Greek tunic again.² Always she was in her Greek tunic; her slight figure, penetrating eyes, plain face, and straight-lined dresses of natural fibers were an obvious display of fashion independence. Here, her tired body rested on the seats of the theater of Delphi. The same volume opened with a photo of a youthful Eva Palmer, fashionable and pretty, in the white satin tulle dress of her New York society debut.³ In this way, it set up a contrast between her life before and after Greece to make the narrative point, stretched out over four hundred pages of exposition, that Eva Palmer, once a beautiful, rich American, sacrificed herself for the love of Greece and Sikelianos. Thus, the images of the Eva Palmer before Greece underscored the overwhelming philhellenic passions of Eva Sikelianos after Greece, who absorbed the lessons of Greek national culture to help realize the dreams of her husband, the noted Greek poet. Eva Palmer Sikelianos struck me as a temporal misfit: lost in the past, misapprehending contemporary Greece, and underestimating the force of its forward-颅moving currents.

Decades later, a Kodak No. 1 snapshot of 1906 caught my eye (figure 1). I was drawn by its distinctly round shape, a charming by-颅product of the limited technology of the first roll film camera.⁴ A crowd of some fifty people is gathered in a street in Athens. It takes time to find Eva Palmer (then still unmarried) in the crowd. She is slightly off center to the left. She is turned away from the camera, and she wears a sleeveless white tunic that exposes her arms, shoulders, and back. Her hair is gathered in a low chignon. She looks like an ancient statue. Her classicizing dress and pose echo the rhythms of the city鈥檚 neoclassical buildings; but they collide with the appearance of Athens鈥檚 residents. Though Greek, they do not wear Greek-颅style tunics. Some men have on business suits topped with fedoras or straw hats, and others wear the uniform of the servant (shirt, vest, and fez) or laborer (jacket or vest and fisherman鈥檚 cap). There are child laborers present, perhaps also some street children. A woman dressed in the style of the Paris belle 茅poque is carrying a baby. At least half the men are staring at her. An unidentified man has stopped to confront her. The focal point falls on the tense space of interaction between them.

Though hard to read, the photograph confirmed my impression that Eva Palmer Sikelianos was a modern anomaly, focused on living in the past. My initial conclusion was challenged, however, by the volume in which the photograph appeared. Entitled 螕蟻维渭渭伪蟿伪 蟿畏蟼 螘蠉伪蟼 Palmer 危喂魏蔚位喂伪谓慰蠉 蟽蟿畏 Natalie Clifford Barney (Letters of Eva Palmer Sikelianos to Natalie Clifford Barney), this Greek translation of 163 previously unpublished love letters caused a bit of trouble in Greek literary circles. The collection covered the years 1900 to 1909, with a few stray letters from later decades. Published in Greece in 1995, the letters were appearing in print roughly nine decades after they were written, and yet, prior to the book鈥檚 appearance, no one in Greek circles publicly discussed Eva Palmer鈥檚 love life. After its publication, protectors of Angelos Sikelianos鈥檚 reputation scrambled to limit the book鈥檚 impact. They marginalized its editor and translator, Lia Papadaki, a scholar with encyclopedic knowledge of Sikelianos鈥檚 oeuvre. Suppressed in Greece and unpublished except in Greek translation, Palmer鈥檚 letters gained limited notice.

Though partial and one-颅sided, the letters were sufficient to identify Eva Palmer as a crucial member of Barney鈥檚 circle of self-颅identifying 鈥淪apphics.鈥�⁵ The young, upper-颅class artistic American, British, and French women formed a group in Paris in the first decade of the twentieth century and produced an 鈥渋ncredible Sapphic outpouring,鈥� in the words of Joan DeJean in her masterful study, Fictions of Sappho: 1546鈥�1937.⁶ DeJean and others have analyzed the parallelism that Barney and poet Ren茅e Vivien drew between themselves and the Greek poet Sappho of Lesbos, with a view to making Sappho a 鈥渄istant ancestor鈥� of their free-颅loving, woman-颅centered social order.⁷ The letters demonstrated that Palmer was another key player in this circle. Not only did her ties with Barney run deep; when she was a student at Bryn Mawr College in 1900, Eva Palmer introduced Barney and Ren茅e Vivien to ancient Greek learning, laying the ground for their learned appropriation of Sappho.⁸

I noticed a distinct interpretive approach in Palmer鈥檚 handling of the fragmentary corpus of Sappho, as represented in her letters to Barney. She immersed herself intuitively in the unreconstructed gaps, responding to the lacunae of lost words and meaning with creative restoration. Moreover, fragmentary poems allowed Palmer to experience a different flow of time: one that moves not progressively forward toward fulfillment followed by decay, but backward, into the holes of history, to recover a past that never was in order to suggest a future that will never be.⁹ Willful anachronism was part of the group鈥檚 creative practice. Palmer, Barney, and others frequently put on period costumes and photographed each other in carefully assumed poses that commented on, parodied, and transformed words received from the past.

Over the years, Palmer and Barney formed many love triangles. Indeed, they sought out love triangles quite deliberately as the building blocks of their sexual-social community. In this too, they were creatively reading Sappho. The pursuit of desire, the triangulation of love, the unbearable pain of jealousy and broken ties were running themes found in Sappho鈥檚 work and repeated in Eva Palmer鈥檚 love letters. The letters chart the evolution of her relationship to Barney: chilly to Barney鈥檚 approach in July 1900, Palmer became her learned adviser, stage manager, and costume designer, and still later, her sidelined, humiliated lover. The tensions between Palmer and Barney became unbearable in June 1906, just after Palmer, in a classicizing Greek costume, performed the role of Sappho鈥檚 runaway lover in Barney鈥檚 play Equivoque, a creative revision of several fragments in the Sapphic corpus. Palmer did indeed run away a few weeks later, to Greece, carrying the costumes she had made for Equivoque and another Greek-颅style tunic she wove while making the costumes.¹⁰

This last discovery stopped me in my tracks. Palmer鈥檚 unconventional Greek dress was the most conspicuous element in the round Kodak No. 1 snapshot, and it was rooted in her prior life: it was either a costume or the by-颅product of her costuming for Equivoque. It represented both a continuity in her conception of herself as she moved from Paris to Athens and a transition to another way of life. Reading Palmer鈥檚 correspondence from after her arrival in Greece, I gathered鈥攁nd later confirmed when I read Barney鈥檚 side of the correspondence鈥攖hat Barney was outraged to learn that Palmer was wearing Greek tunics in the streets of Athens. She was incensed that Palmer would make public modes of dress with in-颅group significance. For Barney, this kind of dress was meaningful only in private, carefully controlled settings. She was especially provoked because Palmer was making her public display in Athens, a place of no interest to Barney, filled鈥攊n her view鈥攚ith subaltern people who did not merit her interest. In a letter of her own, she rebuked Palmer鈥檚 鈥減erformance of defiance.鈥�¹¹ Palmer did not protest. She wrote of the freedom she felt in Greece, and she never took orders from Barney again.

From that moment, Greek-颅style tunics would become Palmer鈥檚 daily habit, part of a broader drive against the forward movement of modern time that aspired not exactly to 鈥渕ake it new鈥濃�攖he modernist slogan read for the value it assigns to novelty鈥攂ut to make it old: creatively to change the direction of modernity by implicating it in the revival of the inherited past.¹² Palmer鈥檚 return to old styles and forms was not a misunderstanding of the present. The fact that the first tunic she wore in Athens鈥檚 streets was a costume from a Sapphic performance in Paris showed me that her inhabitation of the past was an act, but it was also a piece of what would become a lifetime commitment to making herself different through imitation of the Greeks: a continuation, in other words, of her modernist engagement with missing elements of Sappho鈥檚 universe.

I became curious to trace this continuity: to follow what happened to the Sapphic modernity of Eva Palmer as she crossed into modern Greek society to become Eva Sikelianos.¹³ How did her former performance history of Sapphic roles in the circle around Barney inform creative activities such as her mastery of weaving and study, patronage, and composition of Byzantine music? By what genealogy was Eva Palmer, the performer in theatricals that made Sappho a model of emulation for a protolesbian movement, connected with Eva Sikelianos, the director of the Delphic Festivals and other ancient revivals?

This is an excerpt from Eva Palmer Sikelianos: A Life in Ruins by Artemis Leontis.

av福利社 the Author

Artemis Leontis is professor of modern Greek and comparative literature and chair of the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan. Her books include Topographies of Hellenism.

Notes

^{1. Corovilles, 鈥淭ragedies of Angelos Sikelianos,鈥� 5.}

^{2. EOS, 384.}

^{3. EOS, 8.}

^{4. National Museum of American History, 鈥淥riginal Kodak Camera, Serial No. 540.鈥�}

^{5. 鈥淪apphic鈥� (or the lowercase 鈥渟apphic鈥�) was becoming a term of self-颅ascription naming a specifically modern understanding of female same sex desire (Doan and Garrity, 鈥淚ntroduction,鈥� 5) and referring to women who desired women with awareness that the ancient poetess Sappho wrote about female same-颅sex love. The word 鈥淟esbian鈥� names a person from Lesbos, the birthplace of Sappho, and was not used with clear connotations of the woman with intimate attachments to women before the 1920s, with rare exceptions. Barney calls the woman who dares to become a creator after the 鈥渧irile鈥� Sappho a 鈥淟esbian鈥� (BLJD NCB 12 9995 Nos. 44鈥�50, discussed below). The lowercase 鈥渓esbian鈥� became a positive term of self-颅ascription in the 1960s, when it also acquired strong in-颅group associations. When not attentive to period self-颅ascription, I use 鈥渓esbian鈥� to denote female same-颅sex desire and 鈥渜ueer鈥� or LGBTQ for persons not subscribing to normative sexual or gender identities. On several occasions, I have found myself at a loss because the words available to me do not align with identities or acts of a given moment.}

^{6. DeJean, Fictions of Sappho, 282.}

^{7. Kantsa, 鈥溾�呪�楲esvia,鈥欌�呪�� 29.}

^{8. M. Reynolds, Sappho Companion, 291鈥�92.}

^{9. Freeman, Time Binds, especially p. 9.}

^{10. UP, 51.}

^{11. BLJD NCB 12 9995 Nos. 230鈥�34 Letter NCB to EP January 8, 1907, Paris to c/o Jean Siciliani Ile de St. Maure (les Ionienne), Greece.}

^{12. The newness to which contemporary modernists were devoted is epitomized by this phrase from Ezra Pound鈥檚 canto 53. 鈥淢ake it new, day by day, make it new鈥� is Pound鈥檚 phrase in full, and the antecedent of 鈥渋t鈥� is old material (Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Anglo-颅Saxon) that Pound considered to be worth reviving. Moreover, 鈥渄ay by day鈥� may be taken as the medium in addition to the temporal frame for this achievement. Eva Palmer鈥檚 working at transforming herself and the world by reviving the old 鈥渄ay by day鈥� was therefore not opposed to Pound鈥檚 meaning.}

^{13. Doan and Garrity, 鈥淚ntroduction,鈥� use the term 鈥淪apphic modernities鈥� to establish a link between cultural theories of modernity and 鈥渟apphism,鈥� a word connecting Sappho exclusively with same sex desire in English in the 1890s (3) and bearing connotations of modern urban life (8).}