The Book's Two Bodies, by Raphael Rubinstein Installment I: A Sense of Voluptuous Tension
A biblio-chronicle of some fortunate and less fortunate twentieth-century lives
in memory of
Joseph David Rubinstein
Rebecca Camhi Fromer
Andrea Wyatt Sexton
Introduction by the Author:
The Book’s Two Bodies begins with an inheritance: a copy of Stefan George’s Der Siebente Ring (The Seventh Ring) featuring the ownership signature of American painter Marsden Hartley passed to the 17-year-old author at his father’s death. Decades later in a quest to discover the history of this volume, the writer sets out to map overlapping artistic and intellectual networks that span the 20th century, from the aristocratic “George Circle” of prewar Germany to expatriate communities in 1920s Berlin and Paris, to the poets of the “Berkeley Renaissance” and their responses to McCarthy-era repression. While many well-known people appear, The Book's Two Bodies is especially concerned with “minor” figures, attempting to recover their largely forgotten lives. The title is derived from Ernst Kantorowicz’s famous study of medieval kingship The King’s Two Bodies—a prominent member of the George Circle, Kantorowicz later created his own cohort of young scholars in 1940s Berkeley, which included the author’s father.
I: A SENSE OF VOLUPTUOUS TENSION
Description of a book I own:
Stefan George, Der Siebente Ring, Georg Bondi, Blätter für die Kunst, Berlin, 1909, second edition. Bound in purple cloth (partly faded) with embossed gilt letters, 213 pages. At the bottom of the title page, written in ink, one can read:
Marsden Hartley
Berlin Jan 7th 1913
A second, more elaborate inscription can be found on the flyleaf. In contrast to Hartley’s casual and crabbed ownership signature on the title page where it tries to take up as little space as possible, this text occupies the entire page with two different colors of ink (purple and blue). It is written in stylish block lettering that is centered and carefully spaced out to resemble a typographic layout, and decorated with several design flourishes (two asterisks, one inverted triangle). The text itself reads:
* “Ein öffnen neuer duftiger räume Ein rausch der alle sinne mengt.” * Meinem Lieben Bob aus den Büchern des Freundes Weihnachten 1921 Arnold
Translated into English (using Olga Marx and Ernst Morowitz’s version for the lines in quotes, which come from a poem by Stefan George) it could read:
“The gift of new and fragrant spaces, A reel of senses fused in joy.” My Dear Bob from the friend's books Christmas 1921 Arnold
How is it, you might wonder, that I am in possession of this volume from pre-WWI Germany, an object that also happens to be a relic from one of the most momentous episodes in 20th century American art? The explanation is fairly simple. My father was a rare-book dealer. When he died (I was 17, he was 55), I set aside a few items from his stock to keep. One of them, and one of the few I still possess many decades later, is this copy of Stefan George’s book of poems Der Siebente Ring (The Seventh Ring) that once belonged to the painter Marsden Hartley, and subsequently to someone named Arnold, and then to someone named Bob. Possibly someone else, or more than one person, owned it between “Bob” and my father, but if so, they didn’t add their name(s), nor have I added mine. (I wouldn’t dare.)
This explains how Der Siebente Ring came into my possession, but not why I held on to it (nor does it say anything about how and why my father acquired it). Did I know, at 17 or 18, enough to appreciate the importance of this book? Did I know anything about Marsden Hartley or Stefan George? Perhaps it was just the exquisite quality of this volume, with its rich purple cloth binding (albeit faded in parts), its gold-embossed cover, its bold and elegant design, balanced between art nouveau and a more modern style, that initially impelled me to keep it. Or perhaps I just had a feeling that it was a thing of some significance.
Whatever I knew or didn’t know at the beginning, a time came when I realized who Marsden Hartley was, and also knew who Stefan George was, and I kept the book and it moved wherever I moved, always wrapped in the same creased brown paper, never exposed to sunlight (so the cover wouldn’t lose any more of its color), and also never read (my knowledge of German has always been near zero). I treasured the book because of its association with Hartley, but the dedication from “Arnold” to “Bob” bothered me. Despite its elegant calligraphy, this inscription seemed to diminish the volume’s specialness. How could, I thought to myself, some obscure German fellow named Arnold have the temerity to deface a book that had once belonged to the great painter Marsden Hartley just to please someone named Bob?
During the decades that followed, once every few years I would unwrap the book and peek at the title page, marveling at Hartley’s signature and inscription—Berlin, the year before the First World War! Then I would look, with a twinge of irritation, at the Arnold & Bob page, before closing Der Siebente Ring and returning it to its brown-paper home.
Something about this inherited object kept nagging at me. It should really, I thought, be in an archive or a library or a museum, not stuck away in a drawer, unread, unseen and unknown to anyone but me. As usual I did nothing, waiting for the situation to somehow resolve itself. Then the solution came to me: I couldn’t ever release this volume without trying to learn more about its history and maybe even discover the identities of “Arnold” and “Bob.” I had waited so long, perhaps too long. I was now older than my father had been at his death.
*
How did Marsden Hartley, born in Lewiston, Maine, in 1877 and until 1912 circulating between Maine and New York City, end up in Berlin in 1913? He probably would never have made it to Germany without the efforts of Alfred Stieglitz, the art dealer, benefactor and friend to whom he expressed his desire to spend time in Europe, especially Paris. After a lifetime of “denials,” as he put it, Hartley was eager “to strike out & get something of outer life” into his “blood.” Stieglitz obligingly raised money from a few wealthy New Yorkers for Hartley to spend a year in Europe. Arriving in Paris in April 1912, Hartley gorged on the city’s museums, its architectural beauty and its cafés. It was in one such establishment, the Café Thomas on Boulevard Raspail, that Berlin entered his life.
Outside of writings by and about Hartley, I have found no mention of the Café Thomas, even though it was apparently popular among artists and located just around the corner from the Rotonde, one of Montparnasse’s most famous haunts. In any case, it was there that Hartley, 36, met sculptor Arnold Rönnebeck, 27, and Rönnebeck’s cousin, Karl von Freyburg, a 24-year-old officer in the German Army. The three men soon became close friends. The two young Germans extolled the virtues (and, probably, the vices) of Berlin to the American painter, and helped him work his way through the German text of Kandinsky’s Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art), a book that spurred him to remake his own art.
Arnold Rönnebeck.
While in Paris, Hartley also became close to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, regularly visiting 27 rue de Fleurus, often in the company of Rönnebeck. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Rönnebeck is said to have been the first person who ever quoted to Stein something she had written. Stein had lent a manuscript to Hartley, who had lent it to Rönnebeck, who had repeated a passage to Stein, “and she naturally liked it" recalls the author of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Alas, history doesn’t tell us which passage it was, but the Autobiography repeatedly mentions how charming Rönnebeck was and how fond of him Gertrude and Alice were.
It didn’t take long for Hartley to fall in love with von Freyburg, and when von Freyburg and Rönnebeck (the latter had come to Paris in 1908 to study sculpture with Aristide Maillol and Emile Antoine Bourdelle), returned to Berlin, Hartley joined them. Before leaving Paris, Hartley made another important acquaintanceship at the café. In his memoir Somehow a Past, Hartley recalls how one evening chez Thomas there was only a single place left to sit and “an American came up and asked if he could have it and we said ‘yes.’ Then he said something funny—and I said “I guess you better come here all the time,’ and it has been like that ever since with Charles Demuth and me.” (Still developing as an artist, and years away from his Precisionist masterpieces, Demuth benefited greatly from Hartley’s friendly support.) Another customer of the Café Thomas was a young American music student named Alice Miriam Pinch, about whom more later.
*
It’s impossible to understate Hartley’s enthusiasm for both Berlin and Germany. While he had been initially enchanted by Paris, he claimed that after only a month of living in Berlin he felt that he had “come home” and had never experienced “such a sense of voluptuous tension in the air anywhere.” He loved Wilhelmine Germany’s “spic and spanness” and the pageantry of its military and imperial parades. Equally seductive to the gay artist was the relative tolerance of homosexuality in Germany, particularly in Berlin where, only four years earlier, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld had launched the world’s first homosexual movement and where in 1919 he would open the Institute of Sexual Research. And, of course, there was the German artworld (Kandinsky, Franz Marc, the Blaue Reiter) which was notably more sympathetic to his work than Paris had been.
*
The date of Hartley’s ownership signature, January 7, 1913, falls three days into his first visit to Berlin, a sojourn that lasted only three weeks but that would lead to the paintings that are generally considered as the summit of his career. It’s noteworthy that he acquired the book so soon after arriving. At this point, he didn’t speak much German, certainly not enough to tackle the poems in Der Siebente Ring. It’s easy to imagine that Rönnebeck and von Freyburg spoke to their American friend about Stefan George, though Hartley might have been aware of the poet because of Blätter für die Kunst, the influential journal of art and literature George had launched in 1892. Further, George was the most famous poet in Germany, and had gained a substantial international reputation, despite (or maybe because of) his strategy of elitism, his disdain for the masses.
In any case, Hartley was sufficiently aware of George to brag in a February 1913 letter to Stieglitz that he had met several members of George’s circle and that they “had heard of the nature of his work” and “expressed great interest in seeing it.” In an unpublished essay quoted by Jonathan Weinberg in his groundbreaking study Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avant-Garde, Hartley recalled that after his arrival in Berlin:
I soon began to hear the names of Rilke and of Stefan George. . . and there was a kind of religious glow over the place when their names were spoken.... The Siebente Ring of Stefan George had about that time made its appearance—bound in papal purple with rich gold letters and looked decidedly liturgical... a special breviary for the very few. No one knew just what either of these writers meant because it was cloaked in somber and untouchable occultism.In the same notebook, which can be consulted at the Beinecke Library (where a pair of epaulettes from von Freyburg’s army uniform and the embroidered pouch in which someone lovingly preserved them are also archived), Hartley also recalls Rönnebeck often speaking about George. Although not a member of George’s exclusive circle, the legendary George-Kreis, Rönnebeck knew the poet and admired him enough to create a plaster relief Portrait of Stefan Anton George (whereabouts currently unknown) in 1921. Another confirmation of Rönnebeck’s association with George can be found in a June 24, 1921 letter from Demuth to Scofield Thayer, the wealthy publisher of The Dial: “I wish if you go to Berlin you look up one of my very best friends. He is the one that knows Stefan George, and, I’m sure, many of the other people and things going on in Germany. If you wish I will give you a letter. His address and name are: Arnold Rönnebeck, 3 Offenbacher Str., (Friedsan) Berlin.” (I don’t know if Thayer made it to Berlin, but by the fall of 1921 he was in Vienna collecting art and being psychoanalyzed by Freud.)
Could this copy of Der Siebente Ring that Hartley describes as “bound in papal purple with rich gold letters” be the very book that sits before me now? How could it not be? It seems unlikely that Hartley would have owned more than one copy, and he couldn’t have been writing about the first edition of 1907—from reproductions I’ve seen, that edition is bound in very dark cloth, possibly black, but almost certainly not purple.
*
January 7, 1913: Hartley, newly arrived in Berlin, writes his name in Der Siebente Ring. Christmas 1921: “Arnold” inscribes the same copy of Der Siebente Ring to “Bob.”
Between those two dates, the First World War erupted and Hartley’s newfound Berlin paradise would never be the same. In October, 1914, Rönnebeck was seriously wounded in battle and, still worse, much worse, von Freyburg was killed. Hartley, by now living in Berlin for over a year (a long time for this perennially restless artist), fell into despair, mourning for von Freyburg, disturbed by the war, worried about money, unable to work. Yet, by the end of 1914, he had begun to paint again, producing what would become the most celebrated canvases of his career, the so-called German Officer or War Motif paintings that are at once songs of praise for German military prowess and emotionally charged elegies for Karl von Freyburg and other war casualties.
Writing to Rockwell Kent in April 1914, some four months before the outbreak of war, Hartley enthused about the young men thronging the streets of Berlin: “such wonderful specimens of health these men are—thousands all so blonde and radiant with health.” Hartley’s entrancement with these “wonderful specimens” and with one of them in particular, must have made the onset of war all the more painful for him. But how to express this in painting? In his tribute to von Freyburg, Portrait of a German Officer (1914), Hartley weaves a crowded icono-abstract composition from images of Imperial German banners, flags, military decorations, cavalry equipment, initials (“Kv.F”) and symbolic numbers: “24” (von Freyburg’s age at death), “4” (his regiment number). (Rönnebeck, who, like von Freyburg, was awarded the Iron Cross for his bravery, claimed some details in Portrait of a German Officer referred to him.) When Hartley exhibited this and other German-themed paintings at Stieglitz’s gallery 291 in 1916, he insisted in an accompanying leaflet: “There is no symbolism whatsoever in them,” a statement that in the face of canvases so freighted with symbolic imagery verges on the absurd but is perhaps understandable: Hartley probably didn’t want to seem pro-German at a moment when sentiment in the U.S. was edging away from neutrality in the European conflict, and his denial of symbolic meaning might also serve to deflect any speculation about the artist’s emotional attachment to the unnamed German officer.
Beset, as usual, by financial difficulties, which were made worse by the war, Hartley sailed back to New York at the end of 1915. Intending to soon return to Berlin, where he had found a sympathetic gallery to exhibit his work and where he could see Rönnebeck, whose friendship, especially since the death of von Freyburg, had become, he said, “the completest thing I ever had,” Hartley would not see Germany, nor Rönnebeck, for six years.
*
In May 1921, in order to finance an extended return to Europe, Hartley (once more with the help, though against the advice, of Alfred Stieglitz) arranged for an auction in New York of 117 of his paintings. It turned out to be more successful than anyone expected. With several thousand dollars in his pocket, he sailed for France in July, and after a stay in Paris, moved back to Berlin in November, drawn by his friendships and connections in the German artworld, by a far greater tolerance toward homosexuality than prevailed in the U.S., and by the fact that the money he had made from his New York auction would go incredibly far thanks to the dollar-to-mark exchange rate. In his biography of Hartley, Townsend Luddington describes the artist’s return to the German capital: “The Rönnebecks greeted him warmly, and other expatriates whom Hartley knew from New York and Paris drew him into their small society.”
In Somehow a Past, Hartley claims partial credit for Berlin’s growing expatriate community: “I had probably spoken of going to Berlin to McAlmon at least—so that by the time I got going myself a little bevy of boys and girls had got themselves up there.” “McAlmon” is the writer and publisher Robert McAlmon, a prominent figure among American literary expatriates whose Contact Editions would, two years later, bring out Hartley’s first book of verse, 25 Poems. McAlmon, who had met Hartley in 1919 in Los Angeles and would remain friends with him until the end of the artist’s life, penned portraits of Hartley in two of his books, Post-Adolescence (1923), an autobiographical novel set in pre-World War I Greenwich Village, and Distinguished Air (1925), a collection of stories set mostly in Berlin in the early 1920s. In the latter book’s title story, which is strikingly ahead of its time in how it depicts homosexuality, drug-taking, cross-dressing, and other then-taboo subjects, the narrator twice runs into “Carrol Timmons,” an American in Berlin who is clearly based on Hartley, first while window shopping and later the same day at the Germania Palast café, “which was rather a show hangout, mostly for men.” Timmons tells the narrator that he hasn’t been at the Palast for months: “This place is too erotically upsetting for me, as a steady diet.” Just as it would be for W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood when they arrived in Berlin at the end of the 1920s, the German capital was for Hartley a kind of homosexual haven, but unlike the younger British writers who were gravely alarmed by the rise of the Nazi Party in the early 1930s, Hartley was intrigued and excited by Hitler.
In 1930, Charles Demuth, by now back in his hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he was coping with isolation and with the diabetes that would kill him within five years, painted a watercolor inspired by McAlmon’s tale of drink, drugs and queer sex in 1920s Berlin. Also titled Distinguished Air, the picture shows five figures crowding around a caricature of Brancusi’s sculpture Madame X. Dated 1915-1916 and extant in three versions (one in marble and two in bronze), Madame X was removed from the 1920 Salon des Indépendants because it was perceived to strongly resemble a phallus rising from a pair of testicles, a reading Demuth exaggerates. The figures in Demuth’s picture include a provocatively dressed woman staring open-mouthed at the sculpture, an amorous homosexual couple (one an elegant gent sporting top hat, the other a sailor in uniform) and a heterosexual couple whose male half is sneaking a glance at the sailor. Although Brancusi’s sculpture isn’t mentioned in McAlmon’s story, there’s no doubt about the connection: in the lower lefthand corner of the watercolor Demuth wrote “For ‘Distinguished Air’ by Robert McAlmon.”
*
From a website devoted to Rönnebeck:
“He [Rönnebeck] had a studio in the Friedenau area at Offenbacher Strasse 3 (building now demolished). His parents lived across town in the Halensee area at Johann-Georg Strasse 20. Beginning in 1913, Hartley was a frequent guest at the Johann-Georg Strasse home, and in November of 1921, he stayed with them for a month…. Hartley moved to his own apartment at 150 Kantstrasse, Berlin, in December of 1921.”
This confirms that Hartley was in Berlin in December of 1921, the month that “Arnold” presents Hartley’s copy of Der Siebente Ring to “Bob.” But where was Rönnebeck when this transfer happened? As I try to determine whether or not he was in Berlin at the end of 1921, I realize that I have no evidence that the “Arnold to Bob” dedication was actually made in the German capital. It could have been written anywhere. A related question for which I also have no clues: How did “Arnold,” who I am increasingly convinced must have been Arnold Rönnebeck, come into possession of Hartley’s copy of Der Siebente Ring? A gift? A theft? A purchase?
*
In 1921-22 (or, according to other sources, 1920-21), Rönnebeck traveled to Italy with two German poets, Max Sidow and Theodor Daubler. At some point he stayed at a monastery in Fiesole and, still traumatized by the war, contemplated becoming a monk. Instead, in early 1922 he got engaged to Alice Miriam Pinch, the American music student who had frequented the Café Thomas a decade earlier and was now a successful 35-year-old opera singer who (under the name Alice Miriam) had toured with Caruso and sung two seasons with the New York Metropolitan Opera. The two had met in Paris around 1910—Rönnebeck was studying sculpture at Académie de la Grande Chaumière while Pinch was studying opera privately with Polish tenor Jean de Reszke. Tragically, Rönnebeck’s and Pinch’s time together was short: before they could be married Pinch died from appendicitis in New York on July 22, 1922. In his memoir, Hartley recalls how devastated he and his friends were by Pinch’s demise: “The death of Alice affected us all dreadfully for we had all gone through things together and it was our pride that Alice had come to her own and was getting recognition and engagements from all sides.” In fact, the Met had just signed her to another contract for three years. When, six months after Pinch’s death, Hartley’s 25 Poems was published, it bore a dedication to her.
*
It has not escaped me that Robert McAlmon’s first name could be rendered as Bob, nor that he was in Berlin in 1921, the date of the Arnold/Bob inscription. (In Being Geniuses Together, a memoir co-authored with Kay Boyle, McAlmon offers some vivid vignettes of Hartley living luxuriously in Berlin in the early 1920s; he also mentions “Ronnebeck, a sculptor” as one of Hartley’s Berlin friends.) I’ve found numerous instances of McAlmon’s friends referring to him as Bob. A photograph of him by Berenice Abbott is titled Bob McAlmon and in his autobiography William Carlos Williams writes: “Bob was a coldly intense young man, with hard blue eyes, who at that time found a living posing in the nude for mixed classes at Cooper Union.” (Elsewhere in the book Williams recounts how Hartley once made a pass at him—WCW declined, and Hartley lamented that Williams “would have made one of the most charming whores of the city.”) McAlmon’s finances improved dramatically when he married Bryher, née Annie Winifred Ellerman, a writer who was the heiress to a great British shipping fortune.
Another possible Bob: Robert Locher (1888-1956). Any link between Locher and Rönnebeck/Hartley runs through Charles Demuth. Both Demuth and Locher were born (five years apart) in Lancaster. According to one Demuth scholar, they began a sexual relationship in 1910, others describe their friendship as incredibly close but not sexual. In 1914, Locher moved to New York and shortly afterwards married Beatrice Howard Slack, who belonged to a wealthy Boston family. According to Locher’s grand-nephew (who refers to him as Uncle Bob), the couple lived on a large estate on Staten Island and traveled frequently to Europe. (The chronology in Barbara Haskell’s 1980 Marsden Hartley monograph notes that Hartley stayed with Locher on Staten Island in November 1916, so the two men knew each other.) Despite his wealthy spouse and his extensive travels, Locher was far from a dilletante. In New York he became recognized for his theater and costume designs, and his illustration work for Vogue, Vanity Fair, and other magazines. He also worked as an interior designer, most notably for Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Juliana Force at the original Whitney Museum on Eighth Street. When the museum opened in 1931, an Art News writer reported that Force’s offices “have been smartly decorated by Robert Locher.” Throughout this time, Locher and Demuth stayed extremely close, so much so that when Demuth died in 1935, he left to Locher all his unsold watercolors. (His remaining paintings were left to Georgia O’Keeffe.) When Demuth’s mother Augusta Demuth died in 1943, the Demuth family home in Lancaster was bequeathed to Locher, as Charles’s will had stipulated.
Was Locher the person to whom Rönnebeck (I’m now assuming that he is “Arnold” unless or until I find any evidence to the contrary) gifted Der Siebente Ring in 1921? Could Locher have been in Berlin that Christmas (assuming, despite the lack of evidence, that the Arnold-Bob inscription was made in Berlin)? In 1920, Locher designed the costumes for The Greenwich Village Follies which opened at the Greenwich Village Theatre on August 30 but soon transferred to Broadway’s Shubert Theatre, where it ran for 217 performances. Reviewers praised Locher’s designs: “It is a shimmering thing of silks and satins, of gold cloths and silver cloths, of soft drapes and splashing color effects, of costumes surely as stunning as ever have graced the revue stage,” noted the New York Times. He also designed the costumes for the 1921 edition, which opened in August, but he seems not to have worked in New York theater until another production, Jack and Jill, opened March 22, 1923. Given Locher and his wife’s penchant for traveling, it’s entirely possible that Locher could have been in Berlin at the end of 1921.
I’ve just come across a letter dated October 2, 1921, from Demuth to Thayer in which he announces that Locher and his wife are in France and that the three have plans to live together somewhere in Southern France through the winter. Demuth then adds, “I have hear[d] from Berlin and your visit. I am glad, so very glad, really, that you found Arnold [Rönnebeck], and that you liked some of his things and my head. I must have one done in bronze, I think. Maybe I’ll go to Berlin and have a look at it. I had almost forgotten it. Marsden goes to Berlin in about three weeks,--may do it with him.”
This letter places Rönnebeck in Berlin the fall of 1921. As for Locher: since he remained in Europe for a time, it’s possible he traveled to Berlin and met Rönnebeck there. . . and received the ex-Hartley copy of Der Siebente Ring.
McAlmon or Locher? Did Locher speak German? Did he have any particular interest in literature, in modern poetry? In truth, I have no idea. I do know, however, that McAlmon had spent considerable time in Germany and, as a poet and publisher, was deeply involved with modern poetry. He seems like a far more likely Bob. His close friendship with Hartley makes the connection even more plausible, and yet.
Both Bobs (McAlmon and Locher) married wealthy women. In the case of McAlmon and Bryher, who were only married for six years, it was very much a marriage of convenience, allowing Bryher to escape her family and pursue her same-sex relationship with the poet H.D., though “inconvenience” might be a better term since, by some accounts, McAlmon, although Bryher’s money allowed him to live very well and launch a small press and a literary magazine, was bisexual and was devastated when Bryher refused to have sex with him. (In his autobiography, William Carlos Williams recounts how once in a Paris taxi McAlmon took Adrienne Monnier in his arms and tried to kiss her—the adamantly lesbian bookseller sunk her teeth into the American’s lips so hard that he thought she would tear out a piece of his flesh.) For Locher, who was married to Beatrice Slack for 18 years (1915-1937), the nature of the marriage isn’t as clear.
A glimpse (courtesy of William Carlos Williams) of the two Bobs running in to each other in Paris in 1927: “Bob [McAlmon] and I walked about, talked at Café des Deux Magots. Met Locher, Charlie Demuth’s friend.”
*
I still have no idea how and why Hartley’s copy of Der Siebente Ring passed out of his possession, but at least I now have some plausible identifications for Arnold and Bob. I could stop here.
But, in fact, I’m just beginning.
Look out for the next installment of THE BOOK’S TWO BODIES, by Raphael Rubinstein in The Fortnightly Review this October!
