The Baroness.

In today's Newsday, I review the fascinating Holy Skirts, a novel by René Steinke about the turmoil, longing, aesthetic leaps, and no-goodnik husbands of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven—the best-dressed radical nude model ever.

A Singular Sensation

HOLY SKIRTS, by René Steinke. Morrow, 360 pp., $24.95.

Sophisticated readers like to think that nothing can shock them. But they also tend to forget about periods more shocking, artistically speaking, than their own. The 1910s and '20s were such times, when everything—from art to industry to politics—exploded into brilliant and unpredictable fireworks. At the center of one of those explosions, and the igniter of some of the blasts, was Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the German-born poet-model-sculptor-scene-maker whose life is the heart of René Steinke's new novel, "Holy Skirts."

Holiness is the topic here, but not the angelic kind. The Baroness (as she was known after her marriage to a shifty nobleman) and her friends worshipped novelty, inappropriateness, audacity, not piously but with ferocious abandon. They advanced those things, too; her friends and associates eventually included Man Ray, Peggy Guggenheim, Mina Loy, Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Carlos Williams and Marcel Duchamp.

Her loyal editor, Jane Heap, whose magazine risked publishing Elsa's agitated and impudent poems (not to mention a chapter of "Ulysses"), described Baroness Elsa as "the only one living anywhere who dresses Dada, loves Dada, lives Dada." Steinke has called her a "proto-punk rock female artist." A sexual radical, Elsa knew well how to barter her looks—or else mess with them by, say, shaving her head and painting it purple.

In the novel, Steinke retells a good deal of Elsa's story, from her dismal childhood to a wild Berlin life as a nude "living statue," which included training in both acting and quasi-prostitution and led to a serious stint as an artist's model. Then—after three marriages to scoundrels—her manic, radical glory in the streets, galleries, little magazines, bars, bedrooms and women's prison cells of New York City.

Still, in life and in "Holy Skirts," for every great fashion spectacle (teaspoon earrings, tomato-can bra, gilded porcupine-quill eyelashes, a birdcage hat with a live canary in it, postage stamps as beauty marks) and truly avant-garde act (regularly reciting surrealist poetry at the top of her lungs at a rough saloon), Elsa made a lot of bad decisions. Ridiculing potential patrons was just one of them; a penchant for unworthy men another.

Steinke, an American writer and literary magazine editor, spelunks the darkness of the writerly consciousness (and the state of a woman whose sanity is often in question) extremely well. It's perplexing, though, why she chose to write in a faux non-idiomatic English, even when Elsa is still in Germany or thinking, e.g. "She went man-crazy up to her ear tips."

In the book's final section, as Elsa enters a sort of trance state of poetic creation, romantic obsession and self-destruction, Steinke's prose crystallizes and floats, and every detail seems exact and urgent. All of Elsa's personae and mysterious half-truths fall away; the Baroness, all lust and gum-wrapper necklaces, becomes braver and more purposeful even as she crashes and burns.

Except for the distracting idiom and some overdone scene-setting, "Holy Skirts" is a mighty book, as grand and peculiar and off-kilter as the Baroness' found-object sculptures. After you read it, you're likely to find yourself not only wanting to do and make daring things, but actually doing it. Now that's a legacy, and a literary coup.

A Singlar Sensation [Newsday]
The Dada Baroness [Artnet]
A Short Biography of the Baroness Else von Freytag-Loringhoven, Including Some of Her Writings [Christopher Lane]

Categories: EG, Books, Design