Introduction

The story of Elsa the Dada Baroness transpired in a milieu of literary queer feminist icons circa World War I. This story was best told in 1930, in the book My Thirty Years’ War by Margaret Anderson. Anderson was the radical publisher (with Jane Heap) of the Little Review, the international modernist-Dadaist-anarchist magazine that punched above its weight and first serialized Joyce’s Ulysses. I bought my copy of My Thirty Years’ War hoping for a great first-person account of the landmark obscenity trial that ensued over Ulysses, but Anderson barely mentions it. However she does say a lot about the Baroness. Anderson got to know the Baroness by publishing her poems; every history of the Baroness goes through Margaret Anderson.

My Thirty Years’ War is in the public domain and, as evidence of that, my copy has a typo in the title on the front cover, and a couple pages are in the wrong order. But it has the goods. I also read Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity — A Cultural Biography by Irene Gammel. My copy of that has no typos and a hundred pages of footnotes, and it’s where I found accounts of the Baroness by another writer Anderson was publishing: Djuna Barnes. Like Anderson, Barnes became a supporting character in the Baroness’ story.

Poet Claude McKay and Baroness Elsa

The Baroness is considered one of the New York Dadaists, i.e. a late Dadaist, but an authentic one, truly committed to the art movement’s outrageous provocations. Her mental health was clearly an issue, but her devotion to art was total. She was doing Dada stuff before the movement even formed or had a name, so some credit her as the first Dadaist. As well as being a writer-artist, her particular innovation was to live her life as a work of art to the greatest extent possible.

As well as the Dadaists, any modernist-adjacent biography from around the New York City scene is likely to contain lively appearances by the Baroness. (In this regard, I will be quoting from Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy by Carolyn Burke.)

Anderson and Barnes on the Baroness

Baroness Elsa’s real name was Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. She married a penniless Baron, which is how she got her title, but he took her savings with him when he went back to Germany to enlist. She was a German stranded in New York.

Anderson:

We always called her the Baroness. Her history had been dramatic. She had come to New York to the Ritz with the late Baron von Loringhoven, who hurried back to Germany at the outbreak of the war and then, not liking war, shot himself — an act which his wife characterized as the bravest of his life. After the Ritz the Baroness drifted from one adventure to another. Tired of conventional living, she became an artist’s model. Tired of conventional dressing, she began creating costumes which resulted in her arrest whenever she appeared on the streets [women could get arrested for wearing outrageous things like pants]. Tired of official restraint, she leaped from patrol wagons with such agility that policemen let her go in admiration. […] During these later years she lived in a tenement of two rooms with three dogs. She wrote or painted all day and night, produced art objects out of tin foil, bits of rubbish found in the streets, beads stolen from the ten-cent store. She considered that she was at the summit of her art period. (My Thirty Years’ War pp. 179-180)

Gammel:

Djuna Barnes recalled that Walter Shaw, a delivery driver, made a special detour to deliver pastries for [the Baroness’] animals, for the Baroness was feeding not only her cats and dogs: she was also feeding the rats, refusing to discriminate against social definitions of lower life forms. Unfortunately, Shaw was fired after his detours were discovered. One day, the Baroness was attacked on the streets, a band of thugs assaulting her and stealing her Woolworth rubies. Another day, when she opened the door of her flat, she was physically assaulted by a man. [Photographer] Berenice Abbott found her bruised and called a doctor, nursing her back to health. Yet against all adversity, as Barnes recalled, the Baroness “always lived up to what she promised herself.” In the late evenings, she would adorn herself in her “eccentric poverty wardrobe” and repair to Jods, “a chop house” on West Fortieth Street, where she performed her dance, as Barnes recalled: “Naturally she was ‘insulted’ & taken for one deranged — & never achieved her aim — in a state of collapse — at the wretchedness of the reception.” Yet for all that, she remained “determined to carry her project through.” Every day was dedicated to art. (Baroness Elsa, p. 283)

Djuna Barnes

The poet of the Harlem Renaissance, Claude McKay, was also associate editor of the Liberator and published the Baroness’ poems. McKay appeared in a photo shoot with the Baroness and said this about her in his 1937 memoir, A Long Way from Home:

The delirious verses of the Baroness Von Freytag Loringhoven titillated me even as did her crazy personality. She was a constant visitor to see me, always gaudily accoutred in rainbow raiment … toting along her inevitable poodle in gilded harness. She had such a precious way of petting the poodle with a slap and ejaculating, “Hund-bitch!” She was a model, and in marvellous German-English she said: “Mein features not same, schön, but mein back, gut. The artists love to paint it.”

Duchamp and William Carlos Williams

Gammel argues that the Baroness may be the true artist behind fellow New York Dadaist Marcel Duchamp’s infamous found-urinal-submitted-to-an-art-exhibit, “Fountain.” Apparently the provenance of the piece is unclear, and there’s circumstantial evidence that the Baroness was the brains behind it. That urinal is Duchamp’s best work and it might be hers.

The Baroness was friends with Duchamp and obsessed over him. Becoming Modern describes the Baroness’ Duchamp thing:

Elsa … pursued him with the full force of her extraordinary energy. Insisting that Duchamp loved her but could not cope with her passion, she addressed their relationship in a series of dislocated poems on the war between the sexes. … Despite her fine figure, many New Yorkers were put off by her dress: at times the Baroness was seen wearing a bustle equipped with a taillight, a brassiere made of tin cans and string, and a birdcage necklace (complete with canary), or, in a gesture toward current events, a French soldier’s helmet over her vermillion crewcut. She could often be heard muttering in her thick German accent, “Marcel, Marcel, I love you like hell, Marcel.” (Becoming Modern, p. 216)

As told by Gammel, sexual frustration plays a large part in the Baroness’ biography. Abjectly poor, her apartment had limited water use and many sources mention her strong body odor — some used words like “filthy.” And she behaved in emotionally abusive ways that drove away people who would otherwise have been allies. So her life was a struggle. Her behavior bordered on violence. According to Becoming Modern, after William Carlos Williams bailed the Baroness out of jail, the Baroness “tracked him to New Jersey shrieking ‘Villiam Carlos Villiams, I vant you,’ [and] their farcical courtship concluded with her return to jail” (Becoming Modern, p. 287). She had tried to kiss him, and it devolved into a physical altercation where she struck him in the neck and he literally feared for his life. He immediately began boxing training to be able to defend himself the next time he saw her. A few months later they ran into each other and he punched her in the nose, for which he was excoriated in his progressive literary circles.

She also had a cigarette factory job for a minute. But that devolved into a physical confrontation when a fellow factory woman punched her in the mouth. The Baroness lost a tooth and a half in the fracas, the chipped one behaving like a fang and nearly piercing the lip of someone she tried kissing afterward. Margaret Anderson wrote that the Baroness lost “two of her side teeth” in the factory fight, but “oddly enough this did not detract from her distinction” (My Thirty Years’ War, p. 179).

Margaret Anderson

Anderson on Barnes and the Baroness

As one of her publishers, Anderson exhausted herself on the Baroness’ behalf. Anderson found Djuna Barnes challenging as well. My Thirty Years’ War compares the Baroness and Djuna in this spectacular passage, dishing the tea on this power trio:

Djuna and the Little Review [Anderson and Jane Heap] began a friendship which might have been great had it not been that Djuna always felt some fundamental distrust of our life — of our talk. Her intense maternity covered the resentment for the first year or so.

You two poor things, she would say in her warm laughing voice. You’re both crazy of course, God help you. I suppose I can stand it if you can, but someone ought to look out for you.

She looked out for us by bringing in the first strawberries of spring and the last oysters of winter, but to the more important luxuries of the soul she turned an unhearing ear. Djuna would never talk, she would never allow herself to be talked to. She said it was because she was reserved about herself. She wasn’t, in fact, reserved — she was unenlightened. This led her to the construction of self-myths which she had never taken the pains to revise. Only this year she said to me in Paris:

Well, I like my inside much better than my outside, don’t you?

Certainly not. I think your outside is often stunning and I think you don’t know anything about your inside.

I may know nothing but it’s very nice.

How can you know it’s nice when you don’t know what it’s like?

There you go again. There’s no talking to you.

For her there was always no talking with us. For us there was no way of establishing a communication with her. It embarrassed her to approach impersonal talk about the personal element. It embarrassed us to attempt a relationship with anyone who was not on speaking terms with her own psyche. Her mind has no abstract facets. She is impatient of such facets, suspicious of them. The Baroness’ mind was of the opposite mold. She would adhere abstractly, to any subject for three days without exhausting it. When we were exhausted — having other things to do, such as publishing a magazine — she would revenge herself against our locked doors by strewing tin cans down the stairs, hurling terrible and guttural curses over her shoulder for three flights.

The Baroness didn’t appreciate Djuna’s work.

I cannot read your stories, Djuna Barnes, she said. I don’t know where your characters come from. You make them fly on magic carpets — what is worse, you try to make pigs fly.

Djuna didn’t appreciate the Baroness at first. Later she accepted it as perhaps the best of any woman’s of our time. In the Baroness’ last tragic period — when everyone else, worn out with her, felt resourceless before the havoc her mere existence caused, Djuna’s maternity came to the rescue and sustained the Baroness for two years in Paris. It was to Djuna that Elsa von Loringhoven wrote the letters from Germany published last year in the L.R. [Little Review] and in Transition and described by that periodical as “the saddest and most beautiful letters in English literature.” (My Thirty Years’ War, pp. 180-182)

“I am I, and no other person”

Anderson provides the following excerpt from those sad and beautiful letters, the Baroness’ last communiques:

“I will probably — yes, yes, yes, probably have to die. When life is not, one has to die … I cannot any more conceive of the idea of a decent artist existence for me, and another is not possible … I have come into this situation and all entangles itself in this indescribable way to my discredit and destruction at last — only because I am I, and no other person, another person wouldn’t have come into it … My terror is so genuine, so must my end be. Life goes out of life … and I marvel that I have been in it — and I see myself treading again this earth with an ardent heart … I feel my mind becoming shaded, as I live in dark shade! I cast around, and to my utter consternation — that torpor that enthralls me — there is nothing but icy stare — out of all my rich life … At this time of my life I should be covered with garlands — and I stand denuded for shame. How shall I go through? … Dark fear is on me, I am not brave enough to bear it all alone … Even for suicide one has to arrange, to go up, to lie down forever. Why must I learn wisdom and perish for it … ornaments of my imperishable beauty that is there as long as I am, smothered by ague [malaria] now! … Let me do art — a little, a little — joyfully with clean conscience of my right. Why not? Why am I condemned and I did nothing but beauty. Goodbye – I am quibbling. Goodbye, though I am afraid. Forgive me my troubled being … I am not truly deranged even, but scattered … Tragedy is written on me — stigmatizing me — people, dull as they are, perceive it — they are never too dull to disapprove of something different from themselves — also to fear it … I almost despise myself for the trouble I make and the trouble that troubles me. But what shall I do? I am stunned nearly to exhaustion. Forgive me, but I am mourning destruction of high quality — as I know myself to be … That is the tragedy — I still feel deep in me glittering wealth …” (My Thirty Years’ War, pp. 182-183)

The whole time she’d lived in the United States she complained about it, then when she moved back to Germany, she only wanted to go back to the USA. But she couldn’t. Just after World War I, Germany was not the best place to be, but she hadn’t considered that when she got the chance to move back there. She was now a German trapped in Germany. She knew she screwed up. It’s possible she wouldn’t have been happy anywhere, but her fellow Germans considered her a traitor for living in America during the war. She was more alienated in her home country than she had been in New York feeding the rats. Managing to escape Germany for Paris, she found it more tolerable, but she was under stress working illegally. Finally, in 1927, she died in an accident where the gas was left on and she asphyxiated in her sleep — a common hazard in those days, the same fate would befall Zurich Dadaist Sophie Taueber in 1943.

The Avant Garde Women series (women of the Dada-Situationist axis): Eliane Brau: The Invisible Icon. The Shakespearean Tragedy of Peggy and Pegeen Guggenheim. Michele Bernstein: Queen of the Situationists. Sophie Taeuber: Founding Dadaist. The Hundred-Jointed Dancer and the Laban Ladies. Emmy Hennings: “Shining Star of the Voltaire”. Review of the Novel “Branded” by Founding Dadaist Emmy Hennings. Gertrude Stein Makes No Sense.

An index of all Jim Richardson’s essays may be found here.