Pierre Louys & ‘Bilitis’- pseudo-classical scandal

When I encountered the work of the poet Pierre Louys and his leading work, Les Chansons de Bilitis, I already knew something vaguely about Bilitis (because it was a soft porn film from the 1970s) and I was aware that Pierre Louys was a French author of the nineteenth century.  I hadn’t previously connected the two, however.

Louys wrote a number of erotic and exotic novels, using ancient and oriental settings to provide  a cover of historical authenticity as well as cultural and temporal distance between himself and the sexual scenarios he created.  His novel, Aphrodite, for example, dealt with the authentic Levantine tradition of temple prostitutes.

The Songs of Bilitis (Les Chansons de Bilitis) is a collection of erotic, lesbian poetry- written by Pierre Louÿs- that he published in Paris in 1894. He claimed that he had translated the material from a collection of Ancient Greek verses that had been composed by a woman called Bilitis and had been found on the walls of a tomb in Cyprus.  She was allegedly a contemporary of Sappho and the verses tell of her love life.

The actual background to the work is highly revealing about its author.  In 1894 Louys was travelling in Italy with his friend Ferdinand Hérold.  There they met André Gide, who described how he had just lost his virginity to a Berber dancing girl named Meriem in the oasis resort-town of Biskra in Algeria; Gide urged his friends to go to Biskra and follow his example. The Chansons de Bilitis are partially the result of Louys and Hérold sharing an encounter with Meriem and the work was dedicated to Gide with a special mention to “M.b.A”, Meriem ben Atala.  The reputation of North Africa and the Levant for a freer and more natural sexuality was a fundamental element in Orientalist art and literature of nineteenth century Europe- as I have discussed elsewhere.

It seems that Louÿs did such a good job that, at first, the book deceived even classical experts. Although the poems were actually clever fakes (partly by Louys and partly created out of poems by Sappho herself and other classical Greek texts), they are still considered to be important works of literature in their own right.  The importance of the book at the time is indicated by the fact that, in 1897, Louÿs wrote triumphantly to his brother recording the fact that a major impact of the Chansons had been their unique representation of lesbian characters who were not (as in the work of Balzac or Zola) vicious femmes fatales, but were the subject of an idyll.  Louÿs had offered a harmonious past in which a woman could openly express her passions and loves through her life and through her poetry.  Such positive representations were new,  but they encouraged modern women to be creative.  In Paris, the American heiress and writer Natalie Barney was inspired by Bilitis.  She organised a group of writers that would later be known as ‘Sapho 1900’ and a literary salon, called the Salon de l’Amazone, which was held in the neoclassical Temple of Friendship at her home.  Barney dedicated her first book, Cinq petits dialogues grecs, to Louÿs and began hosting women-only pagan rituals at her home. “Thus by ventriloquising a fictional woman from antiquity named Bilitis, Louÿs enabled the voices of writes such as Barney or Renée Vivien to express female-female desire. [The artist Marie] Laurencin became a part of this extended family [being] one of the many artists drawn to Barney’s orbit, just as, according to Louÿs’s version of the story, Bilitis had become part of the circle of Sappho” (Elizabeth Otto, Memories of Bilitis: Marie Laurencin beyond the Cubist Context, University of Colorado, 2002).  Louÿs’ open and sympathetic celebration of lesbian sexuality earned him both sensation at the time and historic and artistic significance since.  As Otto wrote: “The playful recreation of the Songs inspired artists, writers and even composers; Claude Debussy set three of the songs to music in 1898.”  This interplay and unity of word and image, sight and sound, is a theme to which I shall return many times.

To give you a feel for the book and its artistic impact, I’m providing an illustration by Paul-Emile Becat from the 1938 edition of the book as well as a translation of one of the poems, Les Seins de Mnasidika (Mnasidika’s Breasts).

Avec soin, elle ouvrit d’une main sa tunique
et me tendit ses seins tièdes et doux,
ainsi qu’on offre à la déesse
une paire de tourterelles vivantes.

‘Aime-les bien’, me dit-elle; ‘je les aime tant!
Ce sont des chéris, des petits enfants.
Je m’occupe d’eux quand je suis seule.
Je joue avec eux; je leur fais plaisir.

Je les lave avec du lait. Je les poudre
avec des fleurs. Mes cheveux fins qui les
essuient sont chers à leurs petits bouts.
Je les caresse en frissonnant.
Je les couche dans de la laine.

Puisque je n’aurai jamais d’enfants,
sois leur nourrisson, mon amour; et,
puisqu’ils sont si loin de ma bouche,
donne-leur des baisers de ma part.

Carefully, she opened her tunic with one hand
and handed me her warm, soft breasts,
as we offer the goddess a pair
of living doves.

“Love them,” she said to me; I love them so much!
They are darlings, little children.
I take care of them when I am alone.
I play with them; I make them happy.

I wash them with milk. I powder them
with flowers. My fine hair, with which I wipe them,
is dear to the little ones. I caress them
trembling. I cushion them with wool.

“Since I will never have children,
be their infant, my love; and, since they are
so far from my mouth, give them kisses from me.”

Needless to say, a variety of visual artists have been inspired by Louys’ work; there have been at least forty different illustrated editions, by artists such as Mariette Lydis and Louis Icart.  An early edition, from 1895, featured five watercolours by J. Robaglia: they were very much of their period, transposing contemporary women to ancient Greece and rather tamely suggesting that the height of a Dionysian orgy might be eating grapes straight off the bunch (a charming notion perpetuated by the BBC version of Robert Graves’ I Claudius in 1976).

The wonderfully delicate line drawings shown here are by Willy Pogany, an illustrator previously best known to me for his 1920s drawings of Alice in Wonderland.  Several French artists have produced wonderful plates to go with editions of the book.  First, Georges Barbier (1882-1932) who illustrated a 1922 reprinting.  His Art Deco vision is both stylish and gorgeously coloured- as the examples below demonstrate- and faithful to the text.

Secondly, the painter, engraver and illustrator Alméry Lobel-Riche (1877-1950) was asked to provide plates for a 1937 edition of the book.  Whilst Barbier’s figures seemed exotically oriental, Lobel-Riche (even though he drew many North African scenes in the orientalist style) managed to make his Cypriot women look just like 1930s’ Parisians.  One of his specialisms was scenes of Parisian night life and brothels (as well as a macabre eroticism, such as Salome and St John the Baptist and an edition of Baudelaire) and this doubtless led to the commission to work on Louys.

A further edition in 1938 was illustrated by Paul-Emile Becat, whose page accompanying Les Seins has already been reproduced.

As well as artists, musicians and film-makers have been inspired as well.  Louÿs’ friend Claude Debussy in 1897 set three of the poems (La Flûte de Pan, La Chevelure and Le Tombeau des Naïades) to music as songs for female voice and piano. Then, in 1900,  he wrote Musique de scène pour les chansons de Bilitis, a score devised to accompany the recitation of twelve of Louÿs’ poems.   An operetta was written in 1954.

Film-makers, almost inevitably, have shown an interest.  Michael and Roberta Findlay made a sexploitation film version called Take Me Naked in 1966.  Glamour photographer Dr David Hamilton in 1977 made the rather better known Bilitis about a girl and her sexual awakening.   The film is set in the modern era; a teenage schoolgirl spends the summer with a couple whose marriage is on the rocks, and develops a crush on the wife. At the same time, though, she also pursues a local teenage boy as well as trying to find a new male lover for the wife.  At the end of the film, Bilitis returns to school, realising that she is not yet ready for adulthood.  Hamilton accompanied this release with a glossy coffee-table style book of his characteristic soft-focus, dreamy pictures.

Amongst Louys’ other erotic works was the wonderfully rude Pybrac, quatrains érotiques of 1933.  This was illustrated by Louis Berthomme Saint-Andre in an explicit manner that was perfectly faithful to the text.  Salacious as Saint-Andre’s prints are, they lack the tenderness and bliss of the lovers depicted in the work of Barbier and Becat, for example.  Instead, his couples can seem quite emotionless.

It may be worth adding that, although David Hamilton was often criticised for his preference for photographing adolescent girls, or younger, this theme is found in several of the works- just as in the 1977 film, an older woman falls for a partner much younger than herself.  The images develop certain elements present in Louys’ text, such as the relationship between her and the young dancers Glottis and Kyse.

Many of the verses in Louys’ collection Pybrac underline the extent to which the lesbianism found in Bilitis suffused so much of the subsequent work of Pierre Louys.  They also demonstrate how Paris, during the interwar period, became a centre for the erotic book trade, with leading artists actively involved in designing etched and coloured plates novels and collections of verse, and almost any sexuality or preference being a potential subject for illustration.  These editions, which were often published in very limited, high quality volumes, are now rare and highly sought after, with dealers such as Sotheby’s and Christies selling them for very high sums.  For more detail of the writing of Pierre Louys, see my Bibliography for him.