JACKI LYDEN, HOST:
It's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Jacki Lyden.
The scene: Paris in the '20s. There are three women: Esther Murphy, a product of New York high society who wrote madly but could never finish a book; Mercedes de Acosta, an insatiable collector and writer infatuated with Greta Garbo; and Madge Garland, a self-made Australian fashion editor at British Vogue. All are lesbians.
Their history burst onto the literary scene this summer in Wesleyan University professor Lisa Cohen's biography. It's called "All We Know: Three Lives," and has just been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Cohen's biography inverts the usual raison d'etre. Though between the three, they knew virtually everybody who was anybody from the 1920s to the '50s, they're not famous. We spoke to Lisa Cohen from - where else - Paris. She tells us how she came upon these three extraordinary lives.
LISA COHEN: I first read about Madge Garland in Virginia Woolf's diaries, and I thought: What an extraordinary life. She intersected with so many people. She was involved with the magazine - with British Vogue magazine in the 1920s when it became a kind of center for art, literature. But somewhere along the way, early on, I realized I encountered these other two women.
Mercedes de Acosta I had already heard of. She has a certain notoriety. But Esther Murphy, I'd only known her name but not really taken in the - her brilliance, her tragedy.
LYDEN: She is the sister of Gerald Murphy, the painter and patron of Leger and Picasso, but she's not like her brother.
COHEN: Not at all. She's awkward, inelegant, anxious and absolutely, rivetingly brilliant to everyone who meets her. She was intensely voluble and deeply interested in the history of the world and in contemporary politics. She was very close friends with Edmund Wilson when he was young, with the young and just-starting-out F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos - every interesting American writer, just about - and it seemed to all of them that Esther would go far.
LYDEN: Did people know that she hadn't actually finished a book?
COHEN: Everyone knew, everyone worried, and she went on worrying about herself - that was the idea I had about Esther, that she became a kind of repository of others' anxieties about what it meant to fail and what it meant to succeed.
LYDEN: Let's get to Madge Garland since she is the self-made one of this group. I mean, she doesn't come from money. And in some ways, I found her the most fascinating. Tell me about her.
COHEN: She came from a little bit of money. Her father was a successful businessman in the textile business in Australia, and he moved his family to London. But she lost that family connection, she lost that family money, when she decided that she wanted to work. She wanted to be a journalist. She was not going to submit to the constraints of her family. She was not going to get married. She was going to go out into the world and learn how to write.
And she took what she knew, as the daughter of someone who was in the business of selling clothes and accessories and fabrics, and she made that into her - into a career. She became a quite brilliant writer on the history of fashion and on contemporary fashion, on contemporary haute couture.
LYDEN: Mercedes de Acosta - I wanted to know why did you include her? One of the reviews mentions that she was so beautiful, loved Greta Garbo, was a lover of Greta Garbo's and slept with every famous girl on the bus between 1900 and 1980.
COHEN: I included her because she was also a very passionate collector, and I felt that part of what I was doing with this book was thinking about different kinds of archives, the kinds of material that we call evidence, that we call biographical evidence. What is a fact? What is the kind of fact that goes into telling someone's life story? And Mercedes de Acosta's - and her collection, her very rich collection, which is held at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, gave me access to a kind of world of passionate collecting and raised very interesting questions about how you tell a life and how these women, in each case, told their own stories, made themselves entirely visible, collected their own documentation about their lives and yet also rendered themselves invisible in all kinds of ways.
LYDEN: All these women marry briefly because that's what you do. But I want to ask how does their lesbianism factor into this entire collection? Why does it matter?
COHEN: I was interested in showing this world of women that I learned about. It was a world of women who acknowledged their debts to one another. They were intellectual debts and emotional debts and material debts also, and they really depended on one another. And they loved other women. They also sometimes loved other men.
But they were committed to these kinds of communities of women. They were committed to supporting other women. Each of these three women knew one another. And I wanted to try to write a book that wasn't just about one great person but about a kind of collectivity and about these interdependencies.
LYDEN: Conversely, why do you think they became rather overlooked?
COHEN: There's a kind of historical amnesia. Feminism didn't start in the 1970s. It started, at least, in the teens and '20s. I think that your question is also a question about the genre of biography. And putting these three lives together also forced me to reflect on the genre, on its kind of constraints and its possibilities, and there was a way that each of their loves, as I say about Esther Murphy, both call for biography and suggest the futility of that genre. And I really like that paradox. I like trying to write about what's hard to pin down, what's just out of my reach.
LYDEN: Lisa Cohen, we spoke to her in Paris. She's the author of the new biography "All We Know." You have given us - and rescued - three remarkable lives. And I'm so very glad that you did. Thank you so much.
COHEN: Thank you, Jacki, for having me.