#Violet Shillito

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Violet (Gaff) Shillito, also known as Violette, no date, unknown photographer.

Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Box 74, folder 2064a

[circeeoflesbos]

"July 31th 1901

Dearest, I have dreamt again of my Violet and I saw her, spoke to her, know that she was living, and I afterwards blessed the kindly sleep that brought her back to me, just as I saw her last.

[...]

One thing consoles me for having lived a foolish, useless, and wicked life, and that is, that no one will mourn for me as I have mourned for Violet, because I don't deserve it. —

August 10th 1901

[...] The thoughts of Violet never leave me and never will. Her portrait is always near me. I so constantly think of her, and every time the tears will come, though I know she is happy - safe - at peace."

"Ma très chère, j'ai à nouveau rêvé de ma Violette et je l'ai vue, je lui ai parlé, je sais qu'elle était vivante, et j'ai ensuite remercié ce doux sommeil de me l'avoir ramenée à moi, comme je l'avais vue la dernière fois.

[...]

Une chose me console d'avoir vécu une vie stupide, inutile et empoisonnée et c'est que personne ne va me pleurer comme j'ai pleuré Violette, parce que je ne le mérite pas. –

[...] Les pensées de Violette jamais ne me quittent et jamais ne me quitteront. Son portrait est toujours près de moi. Je pense constamment à elle, et tout le temps les larmes me viennent, même si je sais qu'elle est heureuse ‐ en sécurité - en paix.

Extraits de lettres manuscrites de Pauline Tarn (Renée Vivien) à une certaine Elsa, cités dans Le Papillon de l'âme, Œuvres intimes inédites.

[365daysoflesbians]

JUNE 11: Renée Vivien (1877-1909)

The British poet, noted Sappho fangirl, and one of the most high-profile lesbians of Paris’s Belle Époque days, Renée Vivien, was born on this day in 1877.

Pioneer of depressed moon lesbian culture, Renée Vivien poses with two black cats on her shoulders (x). 

Born in London on June 11, 1877, Renée’s wealthy British father and American mother originally gave her the name Pauline Mary Tarn, which she would drop later on in life. She was sent to Paris for school, but was forced to return to London when her father died in 1886. Renée made no secret of the fact that she loved Paris and hated her family, so the move was devastating to her. In a twist of events worthy of an American soap-opera, Renée’s mother attempted to get her declared legally insane so that Renée would be passed over for her father’s inheritance and all the money would go to her, but the plot failed and Renée was taken away from her mother and kept a ward of the court for the rest of her adolescence. When she turned 21, she finally inherited her father’s fortune and moved back to her beloved city of Paris where took on the name Renée Vivien. . 

In Paris, Renée became a notorious figure in Bohemian society; she wore lavish men’s suits and lived openly as a lesbian. She wrote two novels and fourteen collections of poetry throughout her lifetime and her writing was filled with allusions to Sappho, lavender, and her many relationships with women. She even refused to write in any language other than French because she found it to be the more romantic language. A woman named Violet Shillito was Renée’s childhood best friend and her first love; when she died of typhoid fever, Renée was inconsolable and many scholars interpret the frequent use of violets in Renée’s poetry to be a symbol for Violet herself. Renée also had a relationship with Natalie Clifford Barney, the American heiress and novelist. The relationship was passionate and often rocky due to both women’s jealous nature. However, there was a time when Renée and Natalie traveled to the island of Lesbos in Greece in an attempt to connect with their Sapphic roots and start a women’s artist colony.

Renée (left) and her partner Natalie Clifford Barney (right) photographed in 1900 (x). 

Renée ended the relationship with Natalie in 1901 and she would go on to have many more relationships with women such as the Baroness Hélène van Zuylen and Kérimé Turkhan Pasha, but as affair after affair ended, Renée sunk deep into depression and began to indulge even more in her party lifestyle of drugs, alcohol, and wild sex. Her close friend Colette (who we have also covered on the blog!) was known to base her fictional characters on real life people and she immortalized Renée’s character and self-destructive behavior in her 1932 novel The Pure and the Impure. As Renée’s mental illness worsened, she eventually died in 1909 from alcoholism and anorexia.

-LC

[returntomytilene]

'I sank into a colorless depression and all my bright fantasies deserted me. Away from Violet, I no longer thrilled to her; the wonder of life had departed. Even the meanings we had perceived together vanished from my recollection and everything in life seemed flat and hopeless to me . . . After the days I had spent near Violet, the contrast between her and other people seemed shocking.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

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‘I listened to the music in the days I spent at Bayreuth with so great an intensity and concentration that I learned it by heart and found afterwards that I had all the scores, including Parsifal (I should say particularly Parsifal) memorized forever. To this day I can hear Violet singing over the ta-tata-ta-ta-ta of the anvil motif, her fingers tapping it out on my hand.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

[returntomytilene]

‘I asked for a sitting-room of my own next to my bedroom and somehow secured it [at the Chevy Chase School], and there with my new collection of books, my large photographs of Mona Lisa and St. John the Baptist, together with some photographs of Violet, I made a kind of romantic retreat from the thoughtless gay, noisy girls in the house.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

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‘I did not see Mary and Violet any more that summer . . . I traveled about with my mother and I continued to read Alfred de Musset and the novels of George Sand, and so recovered a little of the mood that I had shared in Paris with the girls in the sweet secrecy of their little salon on the Avenue du Bois.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

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‘Violet did not draw away from me. Our natural harmony sang on through that night and the next, when we came together again. But into her eyes that compassionate look that was like a mother’s who knows more than the child can understand and is so mute, that sweet, rueful, loving smile was on her face now all the time we were together, and it was called there by that glad life of our blood, which for want of a better term I must call music—but she had named to me by the term sensualité.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

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‘I remember only the room in which I spent the night with Violet, Mary sleeping next to us in a small adjoining dressing-room. The picture comes back to me clearly: Violet and Mary and I standing on the old stone floor that had a few strips of rush matting on it, standing in our little flannel peignoirs, brushing our hair, while two candles on the muslin-covered dressed threw great shadows of us over the whitewashed walls.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

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‘I looked at Violet as she waited in the tall grasses, with the dark masses of the château behind her. And I thought that she looked as though she had come out of the round turrets to meet us, leaving her tapestry frame when she saw us on the road. She was always like that; she belonged to all ages, she was like a synthesis of the past.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

[returntomytilene]

‘Violet had come across the fields to meet the cart. She stood in the long grass and smiled at me with her deep, intentional, loving smile. Any one to whom Violet has given that look will never forget it. The words “look” or “smile” describe adequately enough the gestures with which people convey themselves outwardly to the world. But what happened between Violet and the one to whom she felt she could give her spirit was so vital and electric and intense that her buried ardor leaping to her eyes seemed to flash past the barrier of her flesh and enter one in a swift possession, and go running into one’s secret channels like a permeating, sweet elixir. No, the word “look” cannot tell about it—it made one understand the Immaculate Conception.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

[returntomytilene]

‘I saw Violet against the dark immovable mass of the château as she walked towards us, knee-deep in the grasses already yellowing, for it was July.  She had on a soft blue batiste dress open at the neck, and a coarse straw hat trimmed with black velvet bows and a wreath of poppies and wheat. Her arms were bare to the elbow and there was such an expression of something in their soft pink curves, in her substantial wrists and padded, intelligent hands. I could not think what it was they expressed so fluently, but it was something vital and feminine and even matronly.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

[returntomytilene]

‘It was such sweet pain to listen to music with Violet. Her pointed lips parted a little over her projecting teeth, her eyelids drooping over her slanted eyes, she sat motionless and absorbing the sound and interpreting in terms of her own the arabesques of sound.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

[returntomytilene]

‘Sometimes . . . Violet, noting my look of almost witty pain, would catch my face between the soft thick palms of of her hands and, bending her face over mine, would plunge her own gallant red-brown look into my eyes—deep, appreciative, encouraging—and she would murmur: “Ah, des yeux insondables!”’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

[returntomytilene]

‘When she [Pauline] got rid of the governesses and even of the guardian and began to write poetry and have poets come to see her, Mr. Shillito had forbidden any further friendship between the girls and her. She was no longer comme il faut. So Violet saw her seldom now—it was difficult to manage meetings. She slept all day and the Shillito girls slept at night! But once in a while Violet stole up there late to Pauline, who adored her younger friend and felt her rarity. Violet spoke of Pauline, three years her senior, as one would of a beautiful, helpless child: “Pauvre chérie!”’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

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‘On the floor above the Shillitos there lived another mysterious girl. They told me about her—the beguiling, lovely Pauline Tarne, whose parents were dead and who had all the money she wanted and who lived there alone, writing poetry alone at night in a kind of hidden chapel in which she burned incense. She and the Shillitos had played together in the Bois when they were little girls, and she had had a governess and a guardian. When she reached eighteen years of age she had been presented at court in England. Violet had a little photograph of her in a long white train. Her mutinous face looked eager and beautiful.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933