Dada queen—Irene Gammel's Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity - Essays

Literary Review, Spring, 2003 by Linda Lappin

This debacle with Williams is emblematic of the Baroness's tragic inability to find true acceptance within the community of artists and writers in New York. She was admired, esteemed, idealized, but ultimately rejected. Her behavior was too uninhibited, her dedication to art as a total way of life, too extreme.

By 1922, Elsa had begun to doubt she could survive for long in America where her life had become an "unskilled, fierce battle" against poverty. "I alone do not belong here.... I cannot fight a whole continent," she wrote to Jane Heap. Heap collected money from friends to send her back to Germany, but Elsa couldn't have chosen a worse time to return to war-ravaged Berlin. When her application for a war widow's pension was denied, she was forced to sell newspapers on the street. Lacking funds, she unsuccessfully tried extortion and blackmail of former lovers. Berlin, scene of her adolescent freedom was now a deathtrap. "I am at the mercy of street riffraff," she wrote in fall 1923. "I have no heating, bed, furniture, clothing, and winter is coming."

Concerned for the Baroness's plight, Djuna Barnes, then in Paris, began corresponding with Elsa and offered to collaborate with her on a biography of Elsa's life. Barnes also assumed the role as agent, attempting to interest editors in Elsa's poetry. To Barnes, the Baroness was "a citizen of terror, a contemporary without a country," and a woman "strange with beauty." Still stuck in Berlin, denied a visa for France, Elsa struggled with deep depression, fearing she might go mad. In 1925 she was interned in a shelter for homeless women where she exacerbated her caretakers by violating house rules. Clinical records of this institution state that she was not "mentally insane in the full sense of the word." Judged merely abnormal, she was released a few months later.

Through Barnes' intervention, in 1926, Elsa escaped to Paris where Jane Heap and other old friends were now based. Faced once again with the problems of earning a living, Elsa planned to open a modeling studio for artists, and Peggy Guggenheim helped provide the funds. But this project was doomed from the outset, as Elsa's visa did not permit her to work. One evening in December 1927, the gas in her apartment was left on, asphyxiating the Baroness and her beloved dog, Pinky. It remains uncertain whether her death was accidental or intentional, as no suicide note was found. Barnes took charge, commissioning a death mask and arranging for her burial in a pauper's grave in Pere Lachaise, which is why Elsa's name is not listed in the cemetery records there. Friends in New York learned of her death through the obituary appearing in Janet Flanner's "Letter from Paris" in the New Yorker.

Barnes never made headway with Elsa's biography, but may have used some of the material in creating the character of Robin Vote in her novel Nightwood. Other acquaintances continued to purloin details of Elsa's life. Greve, resuscitated as the Canadian writer Frederick Philip Grove, wrote a successful novel based on her abused childhood. In 1979, three years before her death, Djuna Barnes instructed her estate to publish the Baroness' poetry, yet nothing ever came of this behest. Perhaps we should not be surprised that it has taken so long for the Baroness to achieve recognition, given the prejudices of her era. She was German, female, and outrageous. Yet the Baroness and her work deserve our attention, as Irene Gammel so cogently demonstrates in this biography of a controversial artist whose destiny illustrates in strident tones the conflicts, humiliation, and neglect women in the avant-garde endured in making art.