HOLY SKIRTS
By René Steinke. Morrow. 360 pp. $24.95
Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven turns up in virtually every history of New York's World War I-era avant-garde, usually depicted as a nut case. It's easy to caricature a woman who favored such fashion accessories as a birdcage hat (complete with chirping bird) and appeared in a film that showed someone shaving her pubic hair. Even her friend Jane Heap, who published many of her poems in the Little Review, described the baroness as leading a life "unhampered by sanity." Yet in her Greenwich Village heyday, it was also a life of radical freedom, conducted with a proud disdain for any imperatives other than her own. René Steinke's sympathetic, well-written novel thoughtfully explores the personal sources of Freytag-Loringhoven's flamboyant challenge to social and artistic norms, unbuckling the straitjacket of Colorful Village Character to discover (or at least persuasively imagine) the human being underneath.
"Elsa had never been like the other girls she knew," we're told in Holy Skirts's first sentence. She's openly sexual and sure enough of what she doesn't want -- a stifling existence in the German provinces -- to run off to Berlin at age 19 in 1904. (In fact she was 30 that year; Steinke justifiably alters and compresses chronology throughout to suit her artistic purposes.) Her mother's madness and death have led Elsa to a credo she holds to the end: "Women who were cowards ended up married to brutes . . . their backs bowed." Elsa bows her back to no man, though she happily sleeps with lots of them. When she has an attack of syphilis, it's not a consequence of her actions but of her father's: Elsa was born with syphilis, the doctor tells her; she concludes that her mother contracted it from her father and died of it.
So much for "decent" society and its hateful hypocrisy. Elsa seeks out rebels like herself in Berlin's flourishing prewar bohemian circles. Determined never to be a victim like her mother, she doesn't so much defy traditional notions of femininity as ignore them. She rejects "the fussiness of most poetry" and begins to write her own; she goes to parties in "corsetless dress and barbaric jewelry." Her audacity attracts but ultimately frightens first one husband, then a second. Fortuitously, number two abandons her in New York, and she finds her natural home in a city where "things changed so quickly one could never be certain what one saw." Among the familiar names and places of American bohemia Elsa encounters are Walter and Louise Arensberg, Mabel Dodge, Mina Loy, Polly's Restaurant, the Liberal Club and many, many others. She makes a bigamous third marriage to expatriate gambler Baron von Freytag-Loringhoven, but he eventually retreats to Europe. Elsa is alone and broke as Part Two begins in April 1917.
Absorbing though Holy Skirts has been to this point, Steinke's narrative really catches fire as it follows Elsa on a journey of self-creation. Her high-flying artistic quest is counterpointed by sordid physical squalor, increasingly dangerous sexual escapades and terrifying hallucinations of her dead mother. The novel's best passages vividly capture her creative process. Elsa's Greenwich Village apartment gets filthier and smellier as she frantically scribbles her Dadaist poems, snatching phrases from conversations overheard on the sidewalk and from advertising ("these little songs . . . America's real art") to forge lyrics that refract the shifting, unstable nature of modern life. She falls in love with Marcel Duchamp, who shares her zest for assembling the detritus of the streets into a new kind of art. But Duchamp can behave conventionally enough to reassure wealthy patrons. Elsa can't. As the voice of her muse grows more insistent, her appearance gets more bizarre and her actions more confrontational: To protest the war, she crashes a Daughters of Democracy fundraiser, her shaved head painted vermilion, and holds aloft an enormous model of a phallus as she recites a poem.
"No one saw a protest," her friend Sara Albright says wearily. "People saw a male sexual organ in your hand." Elsa's reckless courage is beginning to look like lunacy even to her bohemian comrades. Steinke wisely leaves the question open; we know that Elsa's syphilis is flaring up, and the illness could be driving her mad. The fragments of her poetry in the text are provocative and oddly beautiful, but the author makes no claim for her protagonist as a world-class artist. Instead, this fascinating and moving novel celebrates the baroness as a remarkable woman whose boldness took her to extremes that make most of us flinch. •
Wendy Smith is the author of "Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931-1940."
