I arrive on time. The restaurant has a gilded ceiling and carved stucco putti. It is simmering with dimly-lit conversation and straight from the office stilettos. The waiter chaperones me to an unnecessarily circular table where I sit and wait anxiously for Claude to appear. 

It has been a long time since I have been somewhere so unapologetically ritzy. I feel like a villain in my harlequin check smoking suit, collar raised up to my eyes. I don’t know quite what to do with my hands. I settle on this: Summer, a pocket book of Camus’ essays. After a few moments, I excuse myself to my invisible companions and escape like a half-time cheerleader to give myself a pep talk in the bathroom. 

It is too late to rethink my outfit, which M. had described fondly as ‘confused, sexy circus performer’ before I left the apartment that evening. I could still hear him laughing as I walked down the street towards the station. On the metro, a pair of brown-eyed children had stared up at me in uncanny silence before they had run, screaming, to hide behind their father, who was texting on his phone and had ignored them entirely. I felt annoyed that M.’s evaluation was legitimised by the reaction of these random children on the metro. I hope Claude will not run away from me; she surely has seen much worse. 

When I return from the bathroom, the table is no longer empty. Claude Cahun is as intriguing in real life as she is in her photographs. Her scalp, freshly shaved and prickly, casts a martyr’s shadow. 

I sit in a flurry, forgetting to shake her hand or kiss her cheek. She doesn’t mind; she says with a grin that she has spent some time in England and knows we prefer some distance. From that moment on, all I want to do is touch her and be sure that she is real.   

I begin by explaining enthusiastically that I had doubted she would come at all. It was a rather unconventional, and scientifically dubious, proposition. A dinner party with a dead artist and an exiled art history graduate. Claude had agreed, to my disbelief. In fact, she had emailed me incessantly in the days leading up to our proposed meeting, sending me all kinds of links to recent articles in which she and her partner, Marcel Moore, are unearthed as the forgotten ‘Nazi-fighting Lesbians’ of the Second World War. 

She frowns somewhat bureaucratically and tells me that she does not care for such descriptions, though I can tell she is pleased. 

We order our starters and I become the Shakespearean messenger. Why Claude Cahun? What is in the name, why choose it, why change it? 

Claude was born in the autumn of 1894, not as Claude Cahun but instead as Lucy Schwob, to a family of financial and literary means. Her father sent her to Surrey to escape the anti-semitism they experienced in Nantes. She would return to France two years later and have her fateful meeting with Suzanne Malherbe, who later adopted the masculine name Marcel Moore. 

“Marcel was my closest collaborator. She was my first and only love. There is something almost religious in discovering a lover like that- a saviour, a salve. She was my best friend and I trusted her more than anyone because I trusted her with my ideas, and she trusted me with hers.” 

There it is again. The Ideas. So many ideas swirl around the body of Claude’s work. A writer, a photographer, a documenter of the Self. Identity is not an assertion but a question. It is never sure of itself, not because it it shy, but because it recognises that identity is something which shifts like sand. It can be contained and moulded, for a time. It may be analysed by science and christened by art, but this immutable force is soft like a baby. It may be swayed by words or actions or truth. It, too, wants to be moved. It is not immutable at all. 

Claude’s most established series of self-portraits, taken between the years 1927-29, display this desire to paradoxically capture the mutable nature of identity. She slips into a space between the defined states, stepping into countless genders with the fluidity and spirit reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. 

“Neuter is the only gender that suits me,” Claude tells me over her bowl of clams. 

Masculine. Feminine. Neuter. Before our eyes she metamorphosizes. One moment she is a heart-wearing body builder, a butch Narcissus warning the voyeur: ‘I AM IN TRAINING DON’T KISS ME.’ Now, we meet her in the toilets of a sketchy cabaret club at the butte de Montmartre. She meets our gaze firmly, but her reflection looks away. These auto portraits are simultaneously tender and standoffish. We never know where we stand with the artist because she is always the one holding the door only slightly ajar. 

I am enthralled by the possibilities her presence inspires. I explain that I first came across her work in a class I took about performance art at university. That my tutor, whom I adored, had also been named Lucy, that Lucy meant light and that even Kundera had chosen the name for the unfortunate heroine in his 1969 novel, The Joke. The link, once spoken, feels flimsy. I cannot wind them together in a satisfying, or even coherent, way. 

I feel that I am inadequately equipped to explain myself, to articulate this queer feeling I have that everything is connected. I am afraid to speak and for her to tell me that it has happened before and it will happen again, that it is still happening. I tell her about the flowers and hope she will understand. 

“I see,” Claude says noncommittally, though she does not try to impose her own meaning onto my suddenly limp sentiment. 

Instead, we move onto the main course. Smoked haddock and potatoes; an empathetic string bean salad. We eat in silence for a while as I imagine what her life must really have been like. 

There was, of course, not just the photographs. There was also the writing. In 1925, Heroines was published, a collection of monologues interweaving traditional fairytales with commentary on the contemporary woman. In 1932, she gained entry to the Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires. I do not ask her about André Breton or any of the other male surrealist artists. Aveux non avenus. These are no longer avenues I want to pursue. 

I am, however, curious about the 1936 Exhibition. There is an emblematic photograph of Sheila Legge standing in Trafalgar Square, looking like a floral alien in a Dalian wedding dress, arms hanging like Jesus and surrounded by pigeons. They called her the ‘Surrealist Phantom’. I never knew that it had been Claude who had taken that photograph. 

Claude interrupts my pathetically affected retelling. 

“It’s not true that she walked around the exhibition carrying a raw pork chop.” 

It isn’t? I say, covertly picking string beans out of my teeth.  

Claude’s eyes glitter darkly. 

“I believe it was mutton.” She laughs like a hound. “She hid it in Dali’s diving suit when it began to smell.” 

Sheila Legge was referred to often as a surrealist groupie, I say as the waiter comes to take our empty plates.  

Claude looks at me sharply, sensing a trick. Her gaze intimidates me, and so I direct my questions at the waiter to make it seem like I am fishing for a universal response and not hers specifically. Where do we draw the line between maker and muse? Why are some women artists in their own right, whereas others are simply ‘groupies’? Was it because Sheila Legge had long hair and relationships with other male surrealist artists, whereas Claude Cahun shaved her head, lived with a woman and defied gender all together? 

“Not everything should be opposed in such an impersonal way,” she tells me sternly. “especially when they are being disembowelled with the privileged knife of hindsight.” 

I recall her words, ‘Neuter is the only gender that suits me‘, and feel ashamed at my clumsy, half-formed questions. The waiter nods wisely, shaking his head at my ridiculous theories. 

Claude orders two tiramisus to show that she has forgiven me and we return to our amicable, if somewhat stilted, conversation. 

I consider telling her that a few years ago I happened to walk down the street in Paris that they named after her and Marcel. I took M. to see it and thought about someone else doing the same for us one day.  

It is, perhaps, the only gift we can give them. To say we are sorry, to ask that our delayed remembrance is enough to excuse the persecution, the hiding, the separation and imprisonment which brought the awful, final premonition. Not the end, not yet. 

La Rocquaise, Jersey, 1937. A house spilling over the bay. Claude poses in a velvet dress, shape shifting from gothic pageboy, to genuflecting nymph in tinfoil wings. 

“When it was happening, it was not a matter of fighting as they had, with guns and ammunition and hate and lies. We dressed ourselves up as women and planted seeds in cigarette packets which we slipped back into soldier’s pockets. These seeds soon sprouted and became words and worse: ideas.” 

Claude and Marcel become the village resistance, distributing sheets while disguised as old hags, grinding Nazi badges between their teeth and shaming Hitler with church banners. 

Were you scared? I ask tentatively, remembering that, in 1944, she and Marcel were sentenced to death for the treasonous distribution of these antifascist pamphlets. She looks down her hawkish nose at me and smiles at me with paternal affection. 

Claude dies in 1954. Marcel in 1972. They still walk together, along the Allée Claude Cahun- Marcel Moore, to Jersey, and to the sea, where they can finally be whichever versions of themselves they choose to be. 

Before the war, La Rocquaise was a sanctuary. I choose to see them there, in that soft womb of before, writing manifestos, dressing up as princes and telling each other about their dreams as their cat, Kid, purrs on Marcel’s lap. I read my pocketbook Camus and somehow become part of their domestic scene. I read them my favourite line: ‘All this noise… when peace would be to love and create in silence!’ We agree to turn our backs on nature and live in a world of play. We swear only to be contained lovingly and to allow ourselves in turn to be reconstructed by this contained love. 

“I’d like to carry on talking,” Claude says, staring at me meaningfully. 

I nod, sensing the door edging shut: my grasp on the situation is slowly being taken, replaced by an cruel analytical logic. Would it mean anything, to lean over and change the narrative of this encounter? Would I somehow become a more interesting character? I sense my own moral authority crumbling. Perhaps Claude is not a person, after all. Perhaps she is just a mirror. 

I let her shave my head, so that I, too, may become a lightweight champion, a decapitated memento floating in the fishbowl, a pair of arms growing out from the solitary rock, reaching beyond the frame for some distant, hopeful future. The one who mirrors; a partial self. I let Claude have the last word. I smile like a fool and read her own words back to her. 

“The invisible adventure. The lens tracks the eyes, the mouth, the wrinkles skin deep… the expression on the face is fierce, sometimes tragic. And then calm – a knowing calm, worked on, flashy. A professional smile – and voilà! The hand-held mirror reappears, and the rouge and the eye shadow. A beat-” 

She waves from across the street, cupping her artful hands around her mouth, yelling until it is over. For the sea, the hills, the evening descending already, all but vanish into a barely perceivable point on the horizon. 

“Full stop.” 

---

Briá Purdy is a writer and artist based in Paris, France. Her work has been published in Popshot Literary Magazine and The York Literary Review. Briá is a co-founder of Fairly Current, a multilingual arts and cultures blog where she regularly contributes fiction and nonfiction work.