might flirt, fall in love, and have long and intense platonic relationships with men. Certainly young men became very worked up about her, but that does not prove that she had or did not have any physical relationship with them. She might, after her loyalty to Steichen had run its course, have run her fingers through their hair and let them kiss her, but she did not sleep with them. She was a virgin when she married, and by her own account her love for her husband took off on to new planes when her son was born.
All this need not preclude an intense unfulfilled sexuality. It is hard to know what Crowley meant by ‘algolagny on the higher plane’, but presumably it refers to Von Schrenk-Notzing’s term for sexual masochism, algolagnia (from the Greek algos, pain, and lagnos, lust). His suggestion of marriage-breaking may be a misdated reference to a later development in her friendship with Steichen, when in the early 1920s his wife (Clara Smith, whom he married in America in 1903) pretended to attempt suicide, and his attentions to Kathleen were cited as one reason for it. ‘Our affair’, Crowley wrote, ‘was too much ginger for the hoi polloi,’ but it sounds rather more that she wouldn’t have him. Although she mentions a great many people in her diaries, Crowley does not appear until 1930, when someone tells her he has become very fat and she is not at all surprised.
At the end of 1902 Kathleen was back in London on a visit. On 12 December she went to the Slade arts ball with Rosslyn and their friend Nigel Playfair. He tells (in Hammersmith Hoy) how he arrived late at the party having been to review a play, and found that Kathleen had broken her leg.
We brought her back to Gray’s Inn, [where Playfair lived] and sent for a doctor who promptly decided that she must stay where she was for at least six weeks. Her brother, most Jesuitically I thought, decided that he could return to his own rooms in Soho Square, Mrs. Brooks my housekeeper, plus a leg in plaster of Paris, being ample chaperonage, and there we were, a fortnight before Christmas. [Another version says that Rosslyn came back and stayed too.]
My own family were to spend the holidays in Hampshire, but I thought that I must not neglect my guest and that I would give a dinner party in her honour, she being by then able to hobble. But though her brother and Mabel Beardsley were available, there was nobody else free, and you can’t have a real Dickensian Christmas banquet for four. So it occurred to me to advertise for guests! And this is how I did it, in the columns of the Morning Post, to secure a reasonable social atmosphere. ‘A brother and sister’ (note trifling hypocrisy, but Queen Victoria was only just dead) ‘living in rather pleasant rooms near the Temple invite any ladies and gentlemen who may be lonely to dine with them on Christmas Day. All ladies must prefer Lewis Carroll to Marie Corelli and the gentlemen must not wear made-up ties. Reply box xxx.’
It does not seem very daring today, but the sensation this advertisement caused was immediate and tremendous. I think it was the Daily Telegraph had a leader on the subject, and I don’t think any, unless it were The Times, refrained from comment. We had over four hundred replies, written with varying wit, and we chose eight or ten guests who promised to be the most amusing, writing (a heavy labour) polite regrets to the rest.
They were so busy they forgot to order any food, so at the last minute a local restaurant, Café Roche, was asked to send in the dinner, and although Rosslyn had been busy in church from 5.30 that morning Nigel found it ‘a most amusing evening … we played snapdragon and charades and whatnot, and parted with vows of eternal friendship at two in the morning’.
When her leg was better Kathleen went to Spain with Hugo Law and his family. They were friends initially of Rosslyn—Hugo’s father, the Chancellor of Ireland, was a neighbour of the Bruces at Downhill. Kathleen thought Lota Law, Hugo’s wife, ‘the beautifulest woman of all’, and took to Hugo when he tried to teach her to drive. She had two pieces in the Salon in Paris and learnt that ‘the papers have given me some rather nice notices … what they really appreciate was done in three hours so I think I shall give up working very hard,’ as she wrote to Rosslyn. Despite a fever and her new resolution of laziness, she was busy on this holiday learning Greek and sculpting the friends who came to stay.
Back in Paris, the company Kathleen kept was pretty mixed. On the one hand were the British: Eileen and Jessie and cousin Hener Skene, who had arrived in Paris knowing no one but Kathleen, and who played the piano to her for hours on end. He soon entered into Paris life: he met Crowley, and introduced him to Isadora Duncan’s companion Mary Desti, who became Crowley’s lover and his ‘seeress’ under the name of Sister Virakam, and wrote a biography of Isadora. It was probably Kathleen who introduced Hener to Isadora (whom, as we shall see, she met through Rodin, and it could well have been Hener who introduced Kathleen to Crowley).
Hener had been in Vienna, ostensibly studying the piano with Leschetizky, though in fact he never met him. He had given away his lessons with the maestro to a German girl called Else: after three years she said, ‘You have compromised me,’ so he married her, shook hands at the church door and left her. ‘She was a better pianist than me,’ he said. (Willie Skene, who had by now ‘absquatulated to the colonies’, thought Hener’s marriage shocking, and that Hener should have been made to do more sport at school. ‘He would have learnt that… one can’t compete with anybody without training,’ he wrote pompously to Presh, which coming from him was a bit stiff.) Hener had discipline, though. On one occasion he locked himself into his room for a week with an enormous bunch of bananas, to prepare for a concert. He became Isadora’s pianist, playing with her all over Europe; Eileen and Jessie took him up too, but Kathleen could never forget the cat being bashed against the wall.
Other foreigners she knew at this time included Gertrude Stein, whom Rosslyn described as ‘a bookish American lady writer who talks and writes any way she likes, mixing her tenses and first and third persons at will’, and ‘her odd companion and sounding-board Alice B. Toklas’. Stein was rather taken with Kathleen: she described her (in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas) as ‘a very beautiful very athletic English girl, a kind of Sculptress, [who] had at that time no money to speak of either but she used to bring a half portion of her dinner every evening for Penelope.’ (Penelope was Isadora Duncan’s sister-in-law, who was then both pregnant and impoverished.) Kathleen knew Picasso too, slightly; she introduced him to Rosslyn, who sold him a terrier.
On the other hand were the French. Her closest French companion was a successful painter seven years her senior, named Hofbauer. He was suffering slightly from resting on his laurels and spending more time on the town than in his studio. ‘He had dozens of mistresses’, but Kathleen confounded any improper intentions by agreeing to meet him only at six in the morning for her daily swim in the Seine, and calling him a coward when he didn’t turn up. She would meet him for breakfast, for a dawn stroll in the Luxembourg Gardens or on the roof of Nôtre Dame (when she could persuade the custodian to let her up) but she wouldn’t meet him indoors or in the evening. He was rather embarrassed by it. What would his friends think of ‘this subjugation to a badly dressed anglaise with virginal tastes’, as Kathleen described it? Luckily they would never see them together, because they were always still asleep at the times Kathleen and Hofbauer met. And if they did see the couple together at six in the morning, they would assume they had spent the night together. Kathleen didn’t like to think of that, but recognized that it was unavoidable.
Hofbauer became jealous of Hener (‘Ha ha! That was it! There was a cousin!’) and started following Kathleen about. Finally he lost his temper, and she explained her reasoning: ‘I wanted to learn French, I’ve done that. I wanted to get you to work in the morning, you’ve done that. And I wanted to get our friendship on to a proper sort of foundation. We’ve done that.’ Later on when his laziness was again being a problem she borrowed Hener’s idea and locked Hofbauer in his studio every day, bringing him food and not letting him out until the day’s work was done. The painting he produced under this discipline won the Prix du Salon.
Her other French friends were Monsieur and Madame P (though Madame was in fact South American), at whose house she met writers and poets, Henri
