STROLLING AT NIGHT along Berlin’s famous promenade, Unter den Linden, in the fall of 1921, the American expatriate writer Robert McAlmon couldn’t be certain that the passers-by dressed as women were really women. Having spent most of 1920 in Greenwich Village and just arriving from a spring and summer in Paris, he was no innocent rube abroad, shocked by what he saw. Indeed, he was himself bisexual and decidedly amoral about sexual behavior. Still, these weren’t the professionals he had known in Paris, but young men and women from respectable families. Berlin in the 1920’s had become one of the world’s great sin cities, where prostitution and cross-dressing were practiced openly and cocaine was sold on the streets. But why Berlin?
Decadence on this scale requires both great wealth and great poverty. The rich who have everything can have anything they want, while the poor have nothing of value to sell except their bodies—not for industry but for sex work—which they hire out to the rich for the gratification of whims. As McAlmon learned in short order, not only writers and artists but also exiled aristocrats, dissolute tourists, and speculators flocked to Berlin to exploit a destitute city whose desperate residents were doing what desperate people do to survive. Socially fragmented, politically chaotic, and economically bankrupt from the war and the harsh reparations demanded by the British and French, Germany was prostrate, defenseless against the vultures who came to pick its bones. In Berlin, there were periodic street fights and gun battles between factions of the Left and the Right.
What lured Americans to Europe at this time was “valuta,” or the extremely favorable rate of exchange. During the summer and fall of 1921, for example, the French franc was worth about seven American cents. So while American bohemians could rail against philistinism and puritanism—symbolized by Prohibition—while stuck in Greenwich Village, others found it much more pleasant to drink aperitifs at Le Dôme or suck down oysters at Pruniers for a pittance. But if Paris was a great bargain, Berlin was an absolute steal. Dropping in value steadily from the end of the war in 1918, the Reichsmark was worth only a third of a cent by November 1921 (per Federal Reserve Bulletin, Dec. 1921). In his memoir Being Geniuses Together (1938), McAlmon reported that the homosexual Expressionist painter Marsden Hartley, a friend from their Greenwich Village days, was living in regal style in Berlin after an auction of his paintings in New York netted him $5,000. At cabarets, boys and girls hovered around his table telling their sad stories. Touched and flattered by the attention, Hartley would pass out marks worth only a few American cents but enough to keep the youths going for another day. A more sinister effect of the depressed mark, as McAlmon noted, was that “A deck of ‘snow,’ enough cocaine for quite too much excitement, cost the equal of ten cents.” Thus, for a dollar or two, one could satisfy any taste in sex and drugs.
McAlmon resourcefully found a room amid the severe housing shortage in Berlin. An intelligent, well-bred girl named Fritzi “stayed around with him” (as he put it) and steered him safely through the tourists traps despite her own cocaine addiction. It is likely that she was his bed companion as well. The bisexual writer Djuna Barnes, another Greenwich Village friend—whose gentle satire of Natalie Barney’s notorious sapphic circle in Paris, Ladies Almanack, he would publish in 1928—was living in an adjacent house. Also in Berlin at that time were the lesbian photographer Berenice Abbott, the bisexual silverpoint artist Thelma Wood, and the ill-fated dancer Isadora Duncan. As in Paris, the American expatriates clustered together.
Although Berlin’s hysteria dampened his spirits, McAlmon explored its lower depths within his own fairly fixed boundaries. He probably used cocaine a few times for a lift. Yet as he wrote in Being Geniuses Together in connection with Ezra Pound’s efforts to procure opium for an addicted poet, “I knew dives and cabarets and poules [whores], but never had I been interested in the dope-dives. Narcotics do not interest me, or rather have no desirable effect. Drink and reality are the best drugs so far as my feelings go.” After dosing himself with drink and reality on these forays, he would sometimes greet the dawn with his room crowded with people who had latched onto him along the way. As Sylvia Beach remarked in Shakespeare and Company (1959), “The drinks were always on him.” And, she lamented, “alas! often in him.” He suspected that they stole money from him but wasn’t unduly perturbed. For he reasoned that “An American in Berlin then had a right to expect this from virtually starving natives.” Drink and his natural ebullience, however, proved ineffective against the social calamity he confronted daily: “the innumerable beggars, paralytics, shell-shocked soldiers, and starving people of good families became at last too violent a depressant” (Being Geniuses Together). By November, he had seen enough degradation and despair and lit out for Munich.
In Munich, after encountering Bavarian xenophobia, McAlmon made tracks for Italy, only to be denied entry at the border because he had no Ausreise (exit visa). When the American Consulate in Munich couldn’t help, he obtained the pass by bribing a woman at the passport bureau and fled to Italy, “cursing bureaucracy and damning the Bavarians to deepest hells.” Had the gods heeded his maledictions, the world would have been spared untold suffering twenty years later.
While Berlin was a horror to McAlmon the man, it proved a mother lode of material for McAlmon the writer. Berlin would thus furnish the clay from which he fashioned three of his most original and stylistically coherent stories: “Distinguished Air,” “Miss Knight,” and “The Lodging House.” In the fall of 1925, he published them under the title Distinguished Air (Grim Fairy Tales). His friend William Bird printed the book by hand at his Three Mountains Press with a run of 115 copies. (It was republished in 1992 under the title Miss Knight and Others, with a foreword by Gore Vidal.) In these stories McAlmon sifted through, with precision and artistic detachment, the moral rubble he found in postwar Berlin. Always his credo was the dispassionate representation of direct experience, and the rawer the sensations, the better.
“Distinguished Air”
The book’s title story opens with the unnamed first-person narrator (McAlmon’s surrogate) running into Foster Graham (based in part on Marsden Hartley) on the street. Graham is an aging homosexual painter with a taste for “chichi” clothes. The narrator warns him that his clothes and brazen “camping” might get him “picked up in a way you don’t want, and jugged.” But Graham is unconcerned about the police, and comments ironically on his gay finery: “Tut, tut, this isn’t New York. It’s a shame to get off with anybody here, because they’re all on their heels to start things themselves.” To compete with the pretty boys, he had just had his hair waved and his eyebrows plucked. “I wouldn’t look this way in Paris,” he admits after noticing the narrator’s once-over, “but it goes down all right here.” Everything is acceptable here where everyone seems to be a pauper or a pimp, where nothing is forbidden, where money is the only value, and where one could act out one’s most extreme fantasies.
Leaving Graham, the narrator meets another gay aesthete admiring a “perfumery bottle display with a great air of connoisseur-ship.” As they walk along together, Carrol Timmons explains how weary of late he is: “I just feel as I would have to give up seeing people altogether. And with this after-war atmosphere, and poverty amongst the few really likable Germans one knows. It’s all too tragic, I suppose, but I just can’t feel any further about that sort of thing. People will starve to death; people will die; or kill themselves, or drink themselves to death. … And when there are such lovely window displays to see in the shops I can’t be bothered by people who bore me.” Having lost all sympathy for others, absorbed in his own ennui, and doting on trivia, Timmons embodies Berlin’s expatriate decadence. “Always taking, taking, taking. Never giving anything. They must live out their degenerate cycles,” he says of Foster Graham and a ruined woman named Ruth. At this the narrator suppresses an impulse to “suggest to Carrol that he wasn’t one of the world’s givers, either.”
That night, after dinner at the Adlon Hotel with Rudge Kepler, a virile, flamboyant cartoonist, the two men venture into Berlin’s seamy nightlife. They go first to a gay bar that’s protected by the police because the chief “is as queer as they make them himself.” Kepler consents to dance with Graham while male whores in drag poke and tickle him. Ruth enters and immediately makes a deal for cocaine. Back on the street, the narrator and Kepler take a few snorts themselves to wake up, and then head for a big dance hall with women. There, callow American college boys, playing at being debonair, are separated from their money by well-practiced German women. When the dance hall closes, they descend to a Nachtlokal in the Kurfürstendamm, where the narrator picks up a girl cokehead, who leads them at 4 a.m. to a house on the outskirts of the city featuring nude dancers. But bored by the listless gyrations, they decide to repair to the O-la-la, the restaurant “into which all nightlifers in Berlin drifted, as a roundup of their pastimes,” after a brief stop at a café for Flora to buy cocaine.
They bog down at the café, however, as the narrator, brought to nausea by cognac, dances stuporously with a Russian girl. Bleary-eyed, he observes two men pawing Kepler, then becomes aware that the coke dealer is groping him, and feebly pushes the offender away. They finally reach the O-la-la at 8 a.m., having collected in the process the two men, a Polish boy, and the coke pusher. While he is vomiting in the water closet, the narrator hears a commotion, and comes out to discover that the police had raided the place for being a congregating spot for unregistered prostitutes. They continue eating, drinking, and dancing even though most of the women are carted off. Foster Graham enters and notes the irony of Ruth, who “couldn’t get off with a man if she paid him,” being arrested in the raid. “And she’s as moral, sexually, as they come,” he adds, which prompts the narrator to reply, “I didn’t know you retained any conception of morality, Foster.” Graham explains: “I don’t. I haven’t even the conception of sex any longer. It’s just ‘how amusing a bed companion are you’ with me.” Yet the narrator, whose vomiting suggests that he still has enough moral sensibility not to digest every corruption, can derive no more amusement from “this hand-me-down, quick order, bargain variety, wholesale” sex in Berlin.
At noon, with Flora, Kepler, Kepler’s girl, the two men, the Polish boy, and the coke dealer still clinging to him, the narrator retreats to his room to sleep off his debauch. Awakening at three o’clock, after a nap “full of nightmares through which people and strange animals had proceeded, in a series of grotesque, disconnected dramas,” he is seized by “a panicky feeling of terror about life,” as if he had suddenly dropped out of time. After some argument he gets rid of the leeches by giving them money, in addition to what they stole from Kepler. At first the Polish boy, claiming to be of noble descent, refuses the handout, but the narrator persuades him to take it. Yet he doesn’t regard himself as a generous guy. Instead, he feels “confused and mean, as though I were in a way responsible for the economic condition of these people in the midst of whom I dissipated.” Alone at last, having been both a participant in and an observer of this hellish night journey, he vows “to have no more nights like this—at least until the next time. It was really too depressing to see so much of this kind of life that one had not consciously helped to cause, and could not do much to alter.” In the end, realizing that both his complicity and his impotence imperiled his humanity, that he could become like Foster Graham and Carrol Timmons, the narrator leaves demonic Berlin.
“Miss Night”
The second story in Distinguished Air, “Miss Knight,” was considered by James Joyce and Ezra Pound to be one of McAlmon’s best. Through Joyce it was translated into French and published in the 900, an international avant-garde magazine. In 1998, it was selected for The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature as a pioneering work about homosexuals in the first half of the 20th century. “Miss Knight” probes the marginal world of transvestites through the consciousness of a female impersonator named Charlie Knight. Knight is loosely based on Dan Mahoney, described by Phillip Herring in Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes (1995) as one of the most bizarre characters on the Left Bank expatriate scene. Mahoney regarded himself as a woman trapped in a man’s body and fantasized being a housewife. Physically grotesque, with huge hairy hands, he performed abortions, mainly on prostitutes (with one on Barnes), even though he wasn’t a doctor, albeit purporting to have been a Navy corpsman during the war. He figures prominently as Dr. O’Connor in Barnes’s Nightwood (1936), a novel exploring psycho-sexual identity.
Like Mahoney, Knight’s sexual identity is inverted, and he seeks relationships with straight as well as gay men. McAlmon evokes Knight’s androgyny by using interchangeably masculine and feminine pronouns and the he/she construction (decades before its usage by advocates of nonsexist language). The story unfolds primarily through Miss Knight’s rambling monologues, which combine hard-boiled and gay slang, to people of nondescript gender simply addressed as “Mary.” In the following passage, Knight reminisces about one of his/her brushes with the vice squad:
… another time Miss Brachman [a transvestite]—you know Miss Brachman, Carmen the second, sure you know her, a real grand bitch she is—you know her sure, that one that pencils her eyebrows so fine and uses a calcimine makeup—she was giving a real swell party at her apartment and all the rich bitches were there—a canvas out before her place like for a wedding or a funeral—and limousines and all sorts of private cars—and you shudda seen some of the drag costumes them bitches wore—cost five thousand dollars a costume some of them did, and honest to god jewelry. Well, the party was jest getting real gay when along comes a knock on the door, and Miss Brachman shrieked out, “the dicks,” and lifted up her skirts and ran down a sidestairs weepin’, and I ran around like blind and finally got into the bathroom and back of the bath tub, and there wuz one of them real ladylike bitches and he kept saying, “Oh if I’m caught I’ll take poison; I can’t stand the scandal,” and I sez to her, “Close up, do you want to call in them dicks on us,” and she whimpered and shut her gab, and I sneaked out and locked the door, and when someone knocked, “who’s in there?” I heard a voice saying, “that’s the bathroom, and no one’s in there,” and I don’t know why but the dicks didn’t say the door had to be opened. Oh Mary, I’m tellin’ you I’ve been in some raids.
In its language and tone, this is imaginative rendering of a high order.
With his looks gone Knight is reduced to plying the rough trade and cadging money for cocaine. Tiring of his now stale stories, his friends avoid him, and he haunts the queer bars alone. Once he sees a ray of hope when a supposed Austrian duke shows interest, but the “duke” turns out to be a male whore trying to soak a seemingly rich American homosexual. After this crusher, Knight laments: “I’m saying right now I ain’t paying to sleep with no man. I get paid myself if there’s any paying done. But I ain’t having no luck at all these days. Losing my figure, I guess or gettin’ old, or these German bitches are too thick around, and they can live on nothin’.” Ironically, the American expatriate blames the poor Germans for his financial woes.
Disconsolate, he almost takes an overdose of drugs, and after recovering leaves Berlin in despair. But the story ends happily, for six weeks later, one of Knight’s friends receives a letter from him from New York in which he enclosed $25 to repay a loan. Knight, despite his effeminacy, proves to be a tough guy who bounces back with the resilience of a Hemingway hero. With this ironic twist, McAlmon transformed “Miss Knight” from a case study of degeneracy into a droll comedy that satisfies the complex demands of art.
“The Lodging House”
The third story, “The Lodging House,” centers on an ephemeral heterosexual liaison between Harold Files (another McAlmon surrogate) and Hilda Gay (for whom Nancy Cunard is the model), two drifting expatriates who bump together in a sleazy Berlin rooming house. Before meeting her, however, Files encounters two women arguing with a German at the door of a nearby house. Seeing that the women are drunk, Files intervenes and, after learning the address they seek is where he lives, explains that they have been banging on the wrong door. From their short hair and mannish dress he judges them to be lesbians, which is confirmed when one of them, an American who calls herself Steve Rath, tells him, “When I was in America it was Stephanie, and I wasn’t wise, but that isn’t it. I’m no girl, but it took Berlin to teach me what the trouble with me was. I always knew something was wrong.” With her true sexual nature repressed in homophobic America, Steve discovers her gay sexual identity and comes out in a city where all moral barriers have been lowered. But while finding her sexual self she loses a sense of purpose, a direction to her life, and is tossed on the waves of fleeting infatuations. Files asks her if she does anything, and she replies:
I thought I was going to be a musician, or maybe a dancer, but I can’t get a studio, or I can’t get a piano, or I can’t get anybody who can play music the way I want it to be played if I decide that it’s a dancer I’m going to be. And now I have to go to Munich and get a girl I’m in love with. She’s married, and I thought there was no chance because she didn’t like women, but I’ve heard something that makes it different. She doesn’t like her husband, and isn’t with him, and she said she was attracted to me.
The experienced Files warns that “You’re choosing a rocky road if you’re going in for professional love,” and asks: “Do you find it worthwhile?” “I don’t know,” she says. “What the hell? Give me another whiskey will you.” Addicted to cocaine and alcohol, buffeted by emotions she can’t control, her will paralyzed, she is as helpless as a child. With “a lost dumbness and bewilderment of face and of attitude” marking her futility, Steve Rath is hopelessly bound for nowhere.
But heterosexual love here is no more emotionally and psychologically fulfilling. Just when Files begins to think that all his fellow roomers are “queer woman, or buggers, or fairies,” Hilda Gay arrives. After helping with her luggage, he invites her for a cocktail. At the bar he takes stock of her: “Miss Gay was vividly black-haired, pale, green-eyed, with cerise-colored lips, and a presence that was entirely metallic, and as efficiently ongoing as a well-regulated machine. … Hard-lined of body, thin, tall because of erectness, she had the shine of polished silver about her, and the electricity of magnetized steel.” Despite her name, she is uninterested in the lesbians, and Files senses that “she had spotted him as her immediate game.” Her voice, with “a trained softness of cooing machine wooing,” seems to him like talons “surely gripping its prey with professional tenderness of implied amour.” A sexual huntress, she is the straight counterpart to the lesbian Steve Rath, and her path leads to the same abyss.
Hilda Gay’s external sheen reflects the mechanization of her inner life. With machine-like regularity, she is driven to appease the “carnal and other desires groping through her subconscious.” Continually restless, she tears through Europe seeking “some place to satisfy her moving need for life,” but the outcome is always the same: frustration and boredom. While aware of her designs, Files allows himself to be her prey. In a taxi on the way to dine, she becomes seductive, and after he kisses her, says, “Yes, yes, it must be you. I do want you.” But he hears “a rasp of machinery in her voice” that he likens to a “voice of the insect horde—voice in despair against the wind.” Although Files tries to resist, wanting no complications in his life, no emotional involvements, she finally brings him to bed. Then he discovers that his fear of commitment was groundless, for “she was coolly matter of fact” and did not “indulge in sentimentalities.” He is relieved by her detachment, because “women who wished affectionate caresses when he was scarcely moved physically by them always made him ill at ease.” Here, Files reveals himself to be as emotionally empty as she is.
After they have sex, she asks him if he cares for her, then corrects herself: “People like us should never ask questions like that of each other. I know the moment-after, and the day-after aversion that can set in. Perhaps you dislike me now and perhaps it will pass tomorrow. Sex is everything. Everything.” “Yes,” Files thinks as he returns her kiss, “sex was too much everything; the hunger and demand for it; the ideal satisfaction for it that he was sure was never to be realized. Coldly his mind wanted him to have a feeling of sympathy, but it was not there for all that.” She wonders if they can have a lasting relationship, but Files, who detests “the possessive, combative tangle of mate relationships, and people who act as we, rather than as I,” recognizes that they are both too ridden by the importunate, grasping self to give themselves to love. For him, marriage means domination and submission, a condition where “one vamps on the other, or breaks the other in an attempt to possess completely.” Hence, though he will give his body for mutual sexual gratification, he will keep his mind and emotions—his real self—aloof. As he tells her, “It’s simply my appetite, and your appetite, and we’re ready to be makeshifts to each other in that way.” And that is what Hilda wants, too: “no demands on either side,” no “need to have scruples about each other.”
In the morning Hilda Gay’s voice regains the “insect-dry, wind-driven” quality. Having scratched her itch, she has no reason to stay in Berlin, and asks Files to go to Paris with her. Although he leaves the invitation open, at bottom he has no desire to continue the sterile affair, which has bared his own discontent. “Restlessness raged through him, so he too decided the following night would see him on his way out of Germany. There was still a day to decide where, but it would not be Paris. It must be somewhere quiet.” As in “Distinguished Air” and “Miss Knight,” “The Lodging House” ends with the main character fleeing Berlin on the verge of a crack-up. Thus, for the rootless expatriates in Robert McAlmon’s Distinguished Air, Berlin’s cheap drugs, booze, and sex of all varieties exact a grim toll indeed—the corrosion of the soul.
In 1932, McAlmon was in Munich when Hitler and his brown-shirted thugs were in full stride. Abhorring fascism, he left Germany in disgust and never went back. Instead, the Germans came to him in Paris. When France fell to the Wehrmacht in June 1940, he was interned along with other Americans. In December, his two brothers, who had political connections in Washington, provided the money to repatriate him via Portugal. He returned with tuberculosis caused by deprivation and years of heavy drinking. After convalescing in a sanitarium near El Paso, he worked for his brothers’ surgical supply company in Phoenix and El Paso until retiring to Desert Hot Springs, California, in 1951. Once considered the most promising young American writer in Paris, he died there in obscurity on February 2, 1956, a month short of his 61st birthday.
Author’s Note: This essay originated as a lecture I delivered to the Literary Society of St. Paul’s School on May 12, 1994. I have revised it for publication in light of recent scholarship on Robert McAlmon and his contemporaries.
Sanford J. Smoller is the author of Adrift Among Geniuses: Robert McAlmon. Writer and Publisher of the Twenties (1975) and the editor of McAlmon’s The Nightinghouls of Paris (2007), a fictionalized memoir of expatriate life in Paris and on the Riviera in the late 1920’s.
