Bernard Berenson and the Fields

When Bradley and Cooper met Berenson they had already penned several volumes of poetry and drama. Berenson was a late nineteenth-century Jew apparently possessing somewhat of a feminized, maternal nature, notably sensitive and well kept. In his autobiography he even termed himself feminine and maternal in nature, declaring that he was drawn to falling in love as a means to be ‘absorbed’ by his female counterpart. Much of this image of Berenson was serviced by the prejudice against Jews: he was already deemed inherently effeminate and half-demonic. Perhaps this was why the Fields thought it humorous to attribute him more nicknames. Upon meeting them he was soon referred to as the “Faun”, even as “Dionysus” – an amusing oxymoron, Vicinus notes [1], when considering he was also “Doctorine” – all of which was well suited to his dark, curly hair, lovely hands and finely trimmed beard.

Bernard Berenson came to be a significant figure in the lives of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper. They offered to pay for his art history lessons and he flourished under their admiring, thoughtful reactions to his art theories. According to Vicinus, they “spent hours talking about life, aesthetics, and creativity. Bradley and Cooper were happily smitten with Berenson’s intelligence, beauty, and respect for them; he was the first man they had met who seemed to take their ideals seriously.”[2] Equipped with American candour, an alleged Slavic soul and Jewish intelligence, he was incredibly attractive to both women.

His androgynous ‘Faun’ nature also helped cultivate the rich gender fantasies of Bradley and Cooper. Often batting around masculine nicknames as a means of gender play, they welcomed the incorporation of a new erotic masculinity into their lesbian relationship and their literary works. Previously female subjectivity and distinctly lesbian homosexuality had been explored in their literature – Sappho in Long Ago, the kings and queens of Fair Rosamund and Callirhoe – but now there was Berenson, who, as Vicinus puts it, “championed Walter Pater’s aestheticism of pleasure, became both their muse, teaching them to see art more fully, and their beautiful faun, an art object that they partially possessed because they supported him financially and emotionally.” [3] Berenson was swiftly becoming an integral part of their literary inspiration and romantic motivation.

For Edith Cooper, the integration of Bernard Berenson into their world meant that she become the adolescent boy in the relationship. Though she had always enjoyed her “aunt’s loving poetic gaze” [4] as the youngest in the Field partnership, she was now also the subject of Berenson’s gaze. She began to model herself on Berenson a little, so that she could ‘masculinize’ herself more, attempting to differentiate herself from her aunt so that she could reach an androgynous boy-role of her own somewhere between her biological identity as a woman and her literary identity as a man.

This meant that Katherine Bradley assumed a more maternal, guiding role in this three-way association. For Bradley, Berenson was an intellectual mirror and catalyst, believing that his ideas nourished her art. Berenson made her feel grounded in the scholarly realm. He gave her masculine intelligence merit and validation. More than a mere muse, he made her able to participate as a full citizen in a world so discriminatory against women and less respectful towards older, wiser, women in particular.

This was until Mary Costelloe began an affair with Berenson in the summer of 1891. At first the Fields considered Costelloe no threat, but when the Fields went with Berenson and Costelloe to Paris to study art in 1892, their three-way bond began to deteriorate. Costolloe instead began winning Berenson’s affections rather than his art lessons with the Fields, and Cooper’s diary entries turned sour, expressing her jealous “burning stares” after Berenson and Costelloe and her “dull rage” [5] that took over in the face of his revolving favour. Sickened by the way in which Berenson caused them to question themselves and their shared identity of ‘Michael Field’ by becoming distant, things began to change. For Bradley, she realised that Berenson had undermined the foundation of her creative being, her lesbian love, betraying the Fields for Costelloe. Without his love, this impacted her power to write. For Cooper, the distance of Berenson rattled her artistic philosophies. Without his presence in her life, she felt that she lacked the ability to give ‘life’ to her art, her poetry. Berenson began to prefer his role of expert – as art critic, becoming an art connoisseur in Italian renaissance paintings with Costelloe beside him – over his former role as art consumer, abandoning his art lessons with the Fields. He sided with the critic over the artist, while ‘Michael Field’ had always had his allegiance to art and the artist over the critic. Here, then, was where their three-way union crumbled. Worse, Bradley and Cooper began to feel divided in their own feelings towards art. Thus the identity of Michael Field began to suffer. A title which once drew them together became difficult to navigate as a joint force. Cooper’s aesthetic position began to change, influenced by her new feelings regarding the shift in Berenson’s absence. With Berenson gone, things grew dark for ‘Michael Field’.

However, Vicinus writes that:

“The two women, divided by an unrequited passion, tried to reunite via the written word. The diary became their preferred form of reconciliation. They had always written their poems separately and then edited each other’s work; now their diary entries reveal an ongoing dialogue of love, jealousy and division. Cooper’s aesthetic position, which combined the personal and the artistic, required an audience. She knew she had Bradley’s attention, whatever happened to Berenson. Bradley’s sympathy and pain fuelled Cooper’s unrequited passion, helping her to transform it into art. The two poets were locked in a symbiotic artistic relationship, in which Bradley encouraged and feared Cooper’s new feelings and new writing.” [6]

Therefore the identity of ‘Michael Field’ soldiered on, though never quite the same. It was not reinvented so much as it was altered in parts: Cooper and Bradley used their diary to carry on communicating their fluctuating feelings towards art which evolved over time. Cooper’s lyric output changed character, growing less sensuous but more serious and philosophically daring, as we see in Underneath the Bough. Masculinity was no longer something that they could masquerade in, a mask they could assume whenever they desired, but rather something complicated, something desired as a goal but ever distant for Cooper. Bradley did not quite feel the same, still connected to her masculinity through her part in the title of ‘Michael Field’. Katherine Bradley was, after all, the masculine ‘Michael’, as Edith Cooper was the reflective ‘Field’ (though more often nicknamed ‘Henry’ [7]). But this concept of masculinity troubled and continued to divide them. Masculinity was no longer a part of Cooper’s identity without Berenson around, it seemed, while for Bradley it always had been, for masculinity could be found in art, which they themselves had already represented. Masculinity was fracturing their literary persona.

They rebuilt their shared identity, of course, but it took much effort. On Cooper’s birthday in 1897 Bradley wrote her ‘The Art of Love’. The poem, and Bradley in turn, argues that their love is eternal because it originates in their shared art which comes from their poetic energy and their literary work. Love was not in competition with art, instead it came from it; was given life by it. As Vicinus summarises it, the poem “confesses that their oneness rests in being Michael Field; from that identity springs their lesbian love.” [8] After that Cooper began to side more with Bradley again in her attitudes to art. Bradley had won her back, but Cooper had lost much of her creative energy, writing little for a time. Bradley remained unfaltering, however, in her belief in ‘Michael Field’. Some time after the marriage of Mary Costelloe and Bernard Berenson she wrote, in comparing her and Cooper to the well-known Elizabeth and Robert Browning: “those two poets, man and wife, wrote alone; each wrote, but did not bless or quicken another at their work; we are closer married“. [9]

Both poets believed in themselves as ‘Michael Field’ and thus were dedicated to the name. But while Cooper separated her love and love of art from their shared identity, Bradley instead channelled these emotions into Michael Field. It was this that had caused a divergence, and this that made it more difficult for Cooper to accept the loss of Berenson as an early part of this shared identity, pining for him even after he married Costelloe. Bradley had recovered quicker, only ever needing Cooper as her foundation for literary and personal existence, having used Berenson as a mirror rather than another soulmate. This had not been the case for Cooper.

Caught in a wave of radical aesthetic and political change, the fin de sièclehad been a turbulent and transformative time for Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, and more so for the identity behind ‘Michael Field’.

Bernard Berenson remained, to some extent, in their hearts, but had become less a collaborative companion and more a distant friend by the end of the nineteenth century.

Footnotes

[1] See Martha Vicinus, “Faun Love: Michael Field and Bernard Berenson,” in Women’s History Review 18, (November 2009): No. 5: 754.

[2] Vicinus, “”Sister Souls”: Bernard Berenson and Michael Field (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper),” in Nineteenth-Century Literature 60, No. 3 (2005): 329.

[3] Vicinus, “Faun Love: Michael Field and Bernard Berenson,” in Women’s History Review 18, 755.

[4] Vicinus, “Faun Love: Michael Field and Bernard Berenson,” in Women’s History Review 18, 755.

[5] Vicinus, “Faun Love: Michael Field and Bernard Berenson,” in Women’s History Review 18, 756.

[6] Vicinus, “Faun Love: Michael Field and Bernard Berenson,” in Women’s History Review 18, 757.

[7] Jill R. Ehnenn, Notes of “”Our brains struck fire each from each”: Disidentification, Difference, and Desire in the Collaborative Aesthetics of Michael Field,” in Economies of Desire at the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Libidinal Lives, edited by Jane Ford, Kim Edwards Keats and Patricia Pulham, (Routledge: London, 2015), 201.

[8] Vicinus, “Faun Love: Michael Field and Bernard Berenson,” in Women’s History Review 18, 761.

[9] Bette Lynn London, “”Something Obscurely Repellent”: The Resistance to Double Writing,” in Writing Double: Women’s Literary Partnerships, (Cornell University Press: Cornell, 1999), 67.

The Poetic Drama of Michael Field

Though perhaps better known for their poetry – Long Ago (1889), Sight and Song (1892) and Underneath the Bough (1893) to name a few – the Fields were large contributors to the world of fin de siecle poetic drama. An argument may even be made that they were one of the most important and prolific verse dramatists of their time.

Vadillo writes that:

“Reading the poetic dramas of ‘Michael Field’ … one is continuously astonished by the extravagant plots, the audacity of their verse, and the uncontained character of their plays … The breadth of history and scholarship is bewildering, with plays rooted formally and thematically in the traditions of Classical Greek, Latin, Medieval, Renaissance, and Romantic poetic drama.” [1]

Certainly, their coverage of European culture is vast, and the intellectual depth of each play is astounding to a modern audience. While the twenty-first century has lost its appetite for poetic drama and it is, as Vadillo says, seemingly “a dead genre” [2], the Fields remind us just how significant dramatic verse could be to an interested late nineteenth-century audience. In a time of shifting literary tastes and experimental form, the Fields attempt to assimilate this traditional format into the realm of modernist thought. In a way, it can be said that they attempted to use the ‘old’ to communicate the ‘new’ (putting “Old Wine in New Bottles“, to borrow a name of one of Edith Cooper’s unpublished plays from 1892). Their modernist voice was appropriating historical myth and literature through poetic drama.

A Timeline of Published Poetic Drama

The best known and first published entries of dramatic verse written by Michael Field are Callirrhoë (1884) and Fair Rosamund (1884) which recieved a positive reception. These dramas employed hellenism as a scholarly, respected discourse allowing them to subversively author notions of same-sex passions and pleasures. Immediately the poetic verse reminded readers of Swinburnian ballads and poems from twenty years earlier, which had also enjoyed hellenic subjects and revelled in mad, irrational Greeks. (This would come of no surprise later in their literary career, when Michael Field reveal that they were devotees of the work of Swinburne).

Kindly reception for the Fields’ early literary career

They also published The Father’s Tragedy (1885), William Rufus (1885) and Loyalty or Love? (1885) following that. Untiring, they continued to bring Brutus Ultor (1886) and Canute the Great (1887), with The Cup of Water (1887) squeezed out just after.

However, as the identity of the two women behind ‘Michael Field’ became more widely known, the Fields began to attract growing negative criticism. They did not back down in the face of scathing reviews and harsh remarks but the 1890s marked a more intense desire for the lyrical at the cost of the dramatic. As Vadillo puts it, the “decadent 1890s brought to this avante-garde poet a difficult battle: to make the genre matter again or disappear” [3]. Fewer and fewer readers were drifting towards Scottish kings and the dramatis personae of England’s eleventh-century royals found in the likes of Fair Rosamund and Loyalty or Love?. They were craving newer, fresher subjects.

‘The Race of Leaves’ as illustrated by Charles Ricketts. (1901 edition, Hacon & Ricketts, New York: John Lane)

So too then did the Fields’ tastes change a little. But this was not by bringing in modern history. The Tragic Mary (1890) was their last renaissance play before they moved further back in time to a more Roman-centric sphere, churning out a ‘Roman Trilogy’ of sorts – The World at Auction(1898), The Race of Leaves (1901) and Julia Domna (1903). For Bradley and Cooper, this meant revisiting their Homeric and Virgilian learning, but more importantly, revisiting the themes of their original debut Callirrhoë which celebrated a Grecian cult dedicated to Dionysus, the god of winemaking, madness and theatre among other practices. In this spirit of rebelliousness, the writings of the Fields took a noticeable change for the turn of the century.

Notably, they had to be careful in distributing this kind of content after the trails of Oscar Wilde, since Latin decadence as they were dabbling in was under attack and hefty scrutiny. But this did not stop them from re-conceptualising the genre of dramatic verse from this decadent angle. They also began to adopt the philological criticism of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s newly reissued The Birth of Tragedy (1886) philosophised the cultural binaries of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, which again allowed them to touch back on Callirrhoë and the mad Dionysus. In fact, the Fields even often referred to themselves as ‘maenads’ – female followers of Dionysus – in their private letters, playing with the concept of themselves as ‘mad women’.

Original German copy of Nietzsche’s ‘The Birth of Tragedy’, 1872

One of the things Nietzsche had considered which became equally apparent to them through their talks with close friend Bernard Berenson was the issue of giving historically-derived plays secular meaning. As Vadillo remarks, these “talks, which Cooper recorded in their diary, were important for Michael Field because they helped them articulate the problem they were dealing with in their verse dramas: how to make historical plays be about life, not history” [4]. As the tastes of the literary masses were changing, the direction of authors and their works had to change too. Everyday readers wanted historical material that was in some way relatable. The format had to adapt, and the Fields felt that Nietzsche understood this as they did.

The year 1890 was also the year that the papal apartments used by Pope Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia, were opened to the public for the first time since his death in 1503. The Fields had much to consider and write on this front. They published Borgia (1905) as a tribute to the new emerging information and resurfacing rumours surrounding the historical Borgia legacy.

The 1890s also brought Stephania, a Trialogue(1892), A Question of Memory (1893) and after a pause in literary inspiration, Attila, My Attila(1896). Despite their difficulties in finding motivation at the hands of turmoil in their personal and aesthetic lives, the Fields also managed to publish World At Auction (1898) alongside help from their friend Charles Ricketts over at the Vale Press, swiftly accompanied by Noontide Branches(1899) and Anna Ruina (1899) in the year after.

It was also during this turning of the century that Edith Cooper became curious about Catholicism and lost her father who died in 1899. His death allowed them to purchase a new residence. Then, thrusting forward into the new twentieth century, the Fields – mostly Edith Cooper to begin with – began to contemplate a conversion to Catholicism, though they would not become Roman Catholics until 1907.

After a tumultuous 1890s for themselves and their literary career, the Fields continued to suffer a somewhat waning legacy and they conversed with fewer friends. History has been rather unkind to the Fields, by this point regarding them as merely “pathetic literary hangers on” [5] to quote Emma Donoghue, their status as illustrious aesthetes dissolving. But still they wrote and still they published verse drama, bringing about a more cheerful Wild Honey from Various Thyme (1908) and Queen Mariamne (1908). This was followed by a constant string of verse drama all in the same year: Tragedy of Pardon (1911), Tristan de Léonois (1911), Dian (1911), The Accuser(1911) and The Messiah (1911).

Sadly, Edith Cooper had passed away as a result of cancer by 1913, with Katherine Bradley passing away shortly after. It was not until after their deaths that Ras Byzance (1918), Deirdre (1918) and finally In The Name of Time (1919) were published.

Of course, in the midst of all this verse drama there were various love poems written to one another, journal entries written, scrapbooks created, familial upheaval, continental journeys, poetry collections published, reviews written and other projects undertaken. The lives of Bradley and Cooper were busy ones and their words span more than simply the volumes of verse we have touched on here. The verse they wrote was in some ways a chronicling and forging of individual milestones marking passages and transformations in their own lives.

Footnotes

[1] Ana Parejo Vadillo, “‘The hot-house of decadent chronicle’: Michael Field, Nietzsche and the Dance of Modern Poetic Drama,” in Women: A Cultural Review 26, No. 3, (2015): 1.

[2] Vadillo, “’The hot-house of decadent chronicle’: Michael Field, Nietzsche and the Dance of Modern Poetic Drama,” in Women: A Cultural Review 26, 2.

[3] Vadillo, “‘The hot-house of decadent chronicle’: Michael Field, Nietzsche and the Dance of Modern Poetic Drama,” in Women: A Cultural Review 26, page 2.

[4] Vadillo, “‘The hot-house of decadent chronicle’: Michael Field, Nietzsche and the Dance of Modern Poetic Drama,” in Women: A Cultural Review 26, page 8.

[5] Emma Donoghue, “Introduction,” in We are Michael Field, (Absolute Press: Bath, 1998), 7.