round the drab wall I hung posters. It sufficed. For several months we two lived together, but our friendship in no way developed.
Eileen used to visit Jessie in her rather grander quarters; Kathleen used to work, either at home or taking the evening classes at the studio. Most evenings she would eat quickly, cheaply and alone. ‘I almost always had my meals in the same restaurant. I took a book. I always sat at the same table. Opposite me, two tables away, sat a romantic-looking, upstanding, dark, very wavy-haired American artist, Edward Steichen, a photographer. He also brought a book.’
Steichen was the same age as Kathleen, the son of Lithuanians who had emigrated to Michigan. He was living in Montparnasse, studying, painting and photographing. At the time that Kathleen first met him he was doing a series of portraits for Alfred Steiglitz’s magazine Camera Work; and had photographed the artists Mucha and G.F. Watts, the symbolist poet Maeterlinck and the sculptor Rodin. His portraits are as far removed from the average turn-of-the century photograph as Robert Mapplethorpe’s are from a bulb catalogue. ‘There are certain things that can be done by photography that cannot be accomplished by any other medium, a wide range of finest tones that cannot be reached in painting,’ he wrote, and his photographs achieved them.
The question for Steichen was whether or not photography was art; Rodin and Maeterlinck believed that Steichen’s work proved that it was. Rodin wrote, ‘I consider Steichen a very great artist and the leading, the greatest photographer of the time,’ and Steichen wrote proudly to Steiglitz in 1901 that Rodin had described one of his pictures (Self-portrait with brush and palette) as ‘a remarkable photograph and a remarkable work of art—a chef d’oeuvre’. In 1906 Maeterlinck wrote an introduction to a volume of Steichen’s work, which he called ‘une admirable, une incomparable realisation d’art. Vous avez discipliné directement les rayons de soleil comme un peintre discipline ses pinceaux.’ [An admirable, incomparable work of art. You have exercised the same direct control over the rays of the sun as a painter exercises over his brushes.] In later years Steichen burnt all his paintings (all he could find) and became the highest-paid fashion photographer of his age, working with the US publisher Condé Nast and photographing society ladies such as Rita de Acosta Lydig, who used to tip her dressmaker with loose emeralds.
But in 1902 Steichen, with his ‘grey linen shirt with loose kimono sleeves, short turnover collar and black ribbon scarf at the throat’ and ‘hair of a significant length and degree of unkemptness’, as a press notice of the time described him, ate at the same cheap restaurant as Kathleen.
Day after day, [she wrote] lunch after lunch, dinner after dinner, for five months, we two sat opposite each other, scarcely ever looking up save to catch each other’s eye and look down again. Never once did we speak. Yet each knew when the other was gay or worried, had toothache or was happy. Even in those early days in Paris any student could talk to anybody he or she pleased, yet we two deliberately refrained. I knew his work. It was well known. It was good. One day, after not having seen him for a few meals, I overheard someone say ‘You know Steichen is going back to New York on Tuesday.’ ‘As soon as that, is it?’ was the uninterested reply. My heart beat preposterously. ‘He can’t go back on Tuesday. It’s Sunday today.’ Would he lunch at the restaurant on Monday? I went early with my book, Le Temple Enseveli by Maeterlinck. No waiting, no!—hardly had I settled in the usual place and ordered my meagre meal than Steichen passed me and sat down at his usual table. He glanced up at me with his usual half-smile, neither less nor more. Was he really leaving for America the next day?
I ate my lunch slowly, wondering would he not perhaps at last speak to me? He made no sign, so I got up and quietly crept to the door. As I paused at the caisse for change he came up behind me, and said very quietly: ‘You know, Esmeralda, that I’m going home tomorrow?’
Esmeralda—why Esmeralda? I never knew.
‘I know,’ I said, without turning my head.
In the street I found his tall figure walking beside me in a silence through which I dared not even look up at him. At long last he touched my yellow covered book.
‘What are you reading, Esmeralda?’ I showed him. ‘Oh, Maeterlinck, he’s good, stick to him. Well, goodbye.’
And he turned abruptly and went back towards his studio. I tore across the road to my school without looking back. What had I said—nothing. What had I looked like?—half-witted probably. Oh dear, oh dear!—his voice was gentler than I expected, and he was going away tomorrow.
There was dinner! Would he come to dinner? Probably not, he would be packing, but I went early…
He did come to dinner, in his cloak and wide-brimmed black hat, and as he left he mentioned that he happened to have a picture he’d taken of Maeterlinck, and would she like it? He knew where she lived, he said, and he’d drop it round later.
Kathleen spent the evening tidying her room, doing her hair, straightening her books, changing her dress, looking at her watch, wondering if he were making fun of her, wondering why she always thought people were making fun of her, imagining reasons why he wouldn’t come. And he came, and said things like, ‘What will become of you, Esmeralda?’ and ‘Why didn’t I find you before, Esmeralda?’ and ‘You oughtn’t to be here by yourself, you’re not like the others.’ Then he kissed her on the doorstep.
No notion had he that this was the first event of my prudent little life. The clouds of convent faith had long been dispersing—all but gone by now. Nevertheless I flung myself on my knees by the friendly old box-mattress. Glory and gratitude must be expressed to something. ‘… In the heights and the depths be praise!’ The odd thing is that it was all I wanted. I was glad, exhilarated, with the knowledge that he was going away. I was drunk with the joy that this one hour had come as the climax of those five months of reticence, and that it was finished. For four stormy years I was faithful to that hour.
Steichen returned to New York in 1902, the same year that Aleister Crowley, the notorious decadent and practitioner of black arts, first met Kathleen, according to his Confessions. Crowley’s view of Kathleen is wildly different to her description of her first kiss:
She was strangely seductive. Her brilliant beauty and wholesome Highland flamboyance were complicated with a sinister perversity. She took delight in getting married men away from their wives, and the like. . . Love had no savour for her unless she was causing ruin or unhappiness to others. I was quite ignorant of her intentions when she asked me to sit for her, but once in her studio she lost no time, and ‘The Black Mass’, ‘The Adepts’ and ‘The Vampire’ describe with ruthless accuracy our relations. She initiated me into the torturing pleasure of algolagny on the spiritual plane. She showed me how to intensify passion by self-restraint … She made me wonder, in fact, if the secret of Puritanism was not to heighten the intensity of love by putting obstacles in its way.
Either immediately after her first kiss with Steichen she changed from a chaste though romantic ex-convent girl into a practised pricktease, ‘a devil gloating on the pain’, ‘playing the whore’ to ‘her troth-plight lover’, with the blood of her victims ‘glittering a diadem upon [her] dazzling brows’, as Crowley described her in his poems, or their world views were simply miles apart.
The only point, which coincides, is that of ‘reticence’ and ‘restraint’. Kathleen was puritanical, partly by upbringing but enough too by personal taste that, as she shed habits of her upbringing, the puritanism remained. In particular, she was sexually puritanical. The reasons for this are manifold. It was the habit of her class, her sex and her time. She was romantic, insecure and self-protective. The most individual reason was her intensely idealistic attitude towards motherhood. Her passion for babies in general had matured into a particular passion for a particular baby—her future son. This was very important to
