Make It New? Modernism, Fashion and Transatlantic Modernity Sophie Oliver Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Royal Holloway, University of London September 2017 1 I, Sophie Oliver, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: Date: 2 Abstract This thesis explores the role of fashion in the work and publication history of three female modernists: Djuna Barnes (1892–1982), Jean Rhys (1890–1979) and Mina Loy (1882–1966). It proposes that to think about fashion was to critically reflect on the position of women in modernity and on the business of being an artist. Fashion emerges from interpretation of their published writing, illustration, archives and correspondence, and in relation to the re- ception of their work, as an expression of affiliations and of their positions in aesthetic traditions, networks and systems of value. These issues are situated in the context of the relay of modernity from Paris, ‘capital of the nineteenth century’, to America, with fashion articu- lating the relationship between art and industry, national allegiances and – temporally – obsolescence, novelty, and cycles of return and renewal. The study ultimately asserts that these women’s work was subject to the same logic of fashion. Chapter 1 argues that Djuna Barnes’s work of the 1910s represents through fashion a translation of nineteenth-century Parisian modernity in the context of early twentieth-century New York. The second part presents the first study of Barnes’s writing for Charm, suggesting that her contribu- tions can be read in the light of this fashion magazine’s own transatlantic mediations. Chapter 2 argues that Jean Rhys’s affiliations, and those of her charac- ters, are articulated through fashion as restless negotiations between cen- turies and between such poles as America and Paris, standardisation and distinction, and high and popular cultures. The second part proposes that Rhys’s public reputation in the 1960s and 1970s drew on the same fashion discourses that were apparent in her work. Chapter 3 reprises the theme of reputation, in the late work of Mina Loy. Her novel Insel, employment by the Julien Levy Gallery, and poetic series ‘Compensations of Poverty’ are read as fashion-conscious confrontations with her declining renown in the context of a transatlantic shift in cultural authority. In the second part, the post-war revival of Loy’s reputation is as- sessed in light of her own literary take on the value of her work. The Afterword initiates some broader observations implied by the the- sis’s arguments, namely that – in line with the self-consuming and restless logic of fashion – the place of the modernist scholar is as unstable and con- tingent as that of her objects of study. 3 Contents 5 Acknowledgements 7 List of Illustrations 14 Introduction Chapter 1 ‘Paris Value’: Djuna Barnes 52 1.1 ‘Fleurs du Mal à la Mode de New York’: Consuming Paris 105 1.2 Make It New Jersey! Barnes in Charm magazine Chapter 2 ‘Paris again’: Jean Rhys 131 2.1 Fashion in Jean Rhys: Affiliation and Illusion in the Left Bank Fiction 188 2.2 Jean Rhys in Fashion Chapter 3 ‘In view of America’: Mina Loy 200 3.1 A Portrait of the Artist in the Age of Celebrity: Insel and the Julien Levy Gallery 246 3.2 Poetics of Reputation/Reputable Poetics: ‘Compensations of Poverty’ and Modernist Poetry after Loy 270 Afterword 274 Bibliography 4 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for fund- ing my PhD, and the English department at Royal Holloway, including the brilliant office staff, for backing the project and a number of other trips and whims. Those include a stay in Tulsa to consult the Jean Rhys archive in the McFarlin Library, where I was helped by Milissa Burkart. That summer I also spent several months at the Library of Congress in Washington DC on an AHRC-sponsored placement, which resulted in the work on Djuna Barnes and Charm included here. I am thankful to Mary Lou Reker, Dan- iele Turello and Jason Steinhauer of the Kluge Center for their enthusiasm about my research. I am also grateful to Lauren Brown of the University of Maryland Special Collections and to Susan Anderson of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, whose generous assistance eased a hot summer of archives and morning sickness. I have benefited immeasurably from stimulating academic environments and company, including a workshop on Literary Cosmopolitanism at Birk- beck in 2015, the Modernist Communities conference at the Sorbonne in 2014, Historical Modernisms at the Institute of English Studies in 2016, a seminar on women in periodical cultures at MSA 2016, and the ongoing London Modernism Seminar. These forums, along with friends and col- leagues in the British Association for Modernist Studies, have generated work and made me feel part of something exciting. I am especially indebted to Rod Rosenquist and Alice Wood, who liked a paper I gave at their con- ference in Portsmouth, ‘Modernism in Public’, and invited me to develop it for an article in Modernist Cultures. They were such encouraging and helpful editors. I must thank the journal, too, for publishing ‘Fashion in Jean Rhys/ Jean Rhys in Fashion’, which was based on Chapter 2.2 of this thesis. Chap- ter 1.1 has also been published in a revised form, in Literature Compass, for which I am grateful to Tory Young and to Cathryn Setz, a good friend and ally, who suggested I contribute to a special issue on Djuna Barnes. For their permission, information and conversation, I would like to thank: Willie Christie, Madeleine Harmsworth, Jo Hill, Isabel Howe, Paul Joyce, Julie Kavanagh, Diana Melly, Anna Poor, Peter Poor, Tristram Powell, Mark Tansey, Robert Vas Dias and Eva Wildes. And for professional and per- sonal support: Iain Bailey, Julie Bower, Sarah Chadfield, Susie Christensen, Irene Cioni, Philip Contos, Lydia Cooper, Tim Cowbury, Inga Fraser, David Gillott, Sigrid Goldiner, Sophie Gollop, Alex Goody, Beatrice Güllstrom, 5 Faye Hammill, Maroula Joannou, Jess Latowicki, Sophi Noble, Liz, Steve and Ed Oliver, Beth O’Rafferty, Alex and Pam Parkinson, Vike Martina Plock, Rebecca Pohl, Derval Tubridy, Kate Riggall and Stanley Wilson. Betty Jay has read much of the thesis; her questions and encouragement were galvanising. My supervisor Tim Armstrong is wise and kind. His judi- cious queries have improved this project but not more than his belief in it, which still gives me a spring in my step. Lastly, this is for my family, barely as old as the sentences but much stronger: Tom, my best collaborator, and Romilly, my most important dis- traction. They always make it new, no question. 6 List of Illustrations Fig. 0.1 Paris style versus New York style. Illustration from Murray Sices, Seventh Avenue (New York: Fairchild, 1953), reproduced in Nancy L. Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997) Fig. 0.2 Mark Tansey (b. 1949), The Triumph of the New York School, 1984. Oil on canvas, 187.8 x 304.8 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. © Mark Tansey Fig. 1.1 John Sloan (1871–1951), Hell Hole, 1917. Etching and aquatint. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio. Gift of Ralph King 1926.123 Fig. 1.2 Djuna Barnes (1892–1982), ‘The Tingling, Tangling Tango As ’Tis Tripped at Coney Isle’, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 31 August 1913. Courtesy University of Maryland Special Collections. Used with permission from the Authors League Fund and St Bride’s Church, as joint literary executors of the Estate of Djuna Barnes Fig. 1.3 Djuna Barnes (1892–1982), ‘’Round Ben Franklin’s Statue Forum Orators Fret and Fume’, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 24 August 1913. Courtesy University of Maryland Special Collections. Used with permission from The Authors League Fund and St Bride’s Church, as joint literary executors of the Estate of Djuna Barnes Fig. 1.4 George Bellows (1882–1925), Stag at Sharkey’s, 1909. Oil on canvas, 92 x 122.6 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio. Hinman B. Hurlbut Collection 1133.1922 7 Fig. 1.5 Djuna Barnes (1892–1982), ‘Russian Ballet’, from Bruno’s Weekly, 29 April 1916. Used with permission from The Authors League Fund and St Bride’s Church, as joint literary executors of the Estate of Djuna Barnes Fig. 1.6 ‘America Is to See It, the Magnificent Ballet Russe – Against Bakst’s Background, the Incomparable Nijinsky and Karsavina’, Vogue (US), 15 December 1915: 66. © Condé Nast Fig. 1.7 Photographer unknown, Set of the Ballets Russes’s Schéhérazade, with designs by Léon Bakst, 1910. Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington DC Fig. 1.8 Georges Lepape (1887–1971), Nijinksi in ‘Schéhérazade’ at the Théâtre du Châtalet, 1910. Gouache, 30.5 x 24 cm Fig. 1.9 Georges Lepape (1887–1971), Pour les beaux jours: chapeau, ombrelle et gants de jardin (‘For Fine Days: Hat, Parasol and Gloves for the Garden’), printed in La Gazette du bon ton, 4 (April 1914) Fig. 1.10 Georges Lepape (1887–1971), La Paresse (Laziness), 1911. Indian ink and gouache, 19 x 18 cm Fig. 1.11 George Barbier, Nijinsky as the Golden Slave in ‘Schéhérazade’, from Designs on the Dances of Vaslav Nijinsky, 1913. © The British Library Board Fig. 1.12 ‘Dobrujda’ [Djuna Barnes (1892–1982)], Illustration for ‘The Murder in the Palm-room: An Adventure in Silver and Black’, Vanity Fair, December 1916: 47. Used with permission from The Authors League Fund and St Bride’s Church, as joint literary executors of the Estate of Djuna Barnes 8 Fig.