FREE SPIRIT
Author pieces together the life and loves of her great-aunt, Jazz Age rebel Henrietta Bingham.
Born in 1901, Henrietta Bingham grew up in a staid, wealthy Kentucky family, a rebellious young woman who embraced the Jazz Age and embarrassed her relatives with her theatrical lifestyle. Bisexual and hedonistic, she led an impetuous life on both sides of the Atlantic until her father died and her money ran out. She fell into alcoholism and died in 1968, a lonely, troubled woman. All that remained was a trunk in the attic of the family home in Louisville. It wasn’t until her great-niece Emily opened the trunk and began to research Henrietta’s life that she was rediscovered as the entrancing figure she once had been. Emily Bingham’s findings are offered in her book Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham. Our conversation has been edited for length.
Your father didn’t seem pleased when you told him you were going to name your baby daughter after your great aunt Henrietta.
My husband and I thought it was an interesting old name. All I knew about the real Henrietta is that she had interesting friends and spent time in London around the Bloomsbury Group. My father’s reaction in the hospital room, after I gave birth, was strong and I was surprised. He said, “How could you burden someone with a name like that when she had such an unhappy life?”
Later, he shared with me some of his own experiences of Henrietta. In my own upbringing, she had been reduced to a photograph of a barn she owned outside of Louisville. It hung in our back hall. My father did tell me she was a $3 bill, which was harsh; she didn’t fit, she was weird. She was embarrassing. She was an outlier.
Your great-aunt died three years before you were born. She wasn’t part of family lore. What piqued your curiosity?
After I named my daughter Henrietta, people started approaching me with stories about my great-aunt. They brought me things: cigarette cases, photos, a beautiful bronze head of Henrietta and linen sheets with her monogram. Even more important were stories I heard.
An older woman said her mother told her about Henrietta at a debutante party. A deb came rushing out of the powder room and shouted to the assembled crowd that Henrietta had just kissed her on the lips.
Most of the stories you gleaned about Henrietta were because you named your child after her.
The book would never have happened without that random decision to call our child Henrietta. But I wasn’t able to recreate this character fully, with her voice at the centre. It was like piecing together a broken mirror. There were pieces in California, some at Smith College (in Massachusetts, which Henrietta attended), some in London, some in Kentucky.
I was able to find enough pieces that I was able to see her reflection in the heart of some people who were drawn by her magnetism.
She didn’t achieve great things in her life. She didn’t write great novels; she didn’t run a business; she didn’t make movies, yet the impact she had on people she met was extraordinary. Everyone from John Houseman (Oscar-winning actor) to Helen Hull Jacobs (tennis champion) never overcame their besottedness with her. It was almost an obsession she awakened in people. With those shards I was able to show flashes of a person who was so alive.
Your family found her embarrassing.
So did others. It was because of the time. Think how homophobic things became in the 1950s and 1960s. Here is a woman, born in 1901, who came of age in the Roaring ’20s, then moved into a world where there was no tolerance for people of a different sexual nature. It became deeply shameful and dangerous. Most of her lovers kept few of her letters.
Where did your research lead you?
I knew about Bloomsbury, so I began reading books and went into the archives at the British Library. King’s College at Cambridge University had a huge collection of correspondence from people who knew Henrietta, like Duncan Grant and Dora Carrington. I went to Los Angeles to look at John Houseman’s collections and there I found parts of memoirs he cut, pages and pages of Henrietta introducing him to the Harlem Renaissance and taking him into a cornfield where she produced a jug band concert for him.
I did oral histories as much as I could — figures in the gay community in Kentucky, family members, the daughter of (British writer) David Garnett, who was also named Henrietta. I was lucky that there had been a couple of books written about my family.
My father told me about the trunk in the attic. I went all the way to England and California before I really looked at it. I found old clothes and tarnished pet trophies. They didn’t seem they were going to reveal great things about Henrietta, but they were waiting for a day when I could set aside time. It was a miserable January day when I went through the house, spending hours in this attic and trying hats and shawls and other clothing that allowed me to figure out the shape of her body. There was a second trunk with packets of letters she had kept from John Houseman and Stephen Tomlin (the Bloomsbury artist). The monogrammed tennis clothes of Helen Jacobs that I saw in the trunk led me to another archival trove of Jacobs (who was Henrietta’s long-term lover). Until I saw those clothes and explored more, I didn’t know the extent of their relationship. It was a huge moment.
Henrietta had a lot of psychological problems: her mother died when she was a child; her father had a disturbing dependence on her and she struggled with her bisexuality. She entered into psychoanalysis with one of Freud’s acolytes, London-based Ernest Jones. What did you learn about this?
I learned how nascent this movement was. In Henrietta’s time it was considered risqué. In many people’s minds it was dirty and Freud’s work was controversial.
Readers are taken aback when they learn Henrietta’s analyst was corresponding a great deal with Henrietta’s lover, who was also his patient, and he later corresponded with another lover. He told Freud he had three homosexual women who were all intertwined and they became a feature of an essay on female homosexuality.
Jones, the psychoanalyst, was a go-getter. He wanted rich patients like Henrietta who could pay the fees he charged. People like Jones genuinely thought they were helping, even though they weren’t always listening well. Jones didn’t always think it was OK for her to be homosexual. He bought into the line that it was a hysterical symptom, that you were neurotic if you were homosexual.
Henrietta, a charming beauty, was also extraordinarily self-destructive.
There were circumstances that contributed. There was a shutting down of greater tolerance and an insistence on conformity in the 1950s and early 1960s. It is also worth weighing the role her father played in her life. Before he died he was demanding, as well as someone who was clearly beloved and to whom she felt obligated. The financial and emotional support she derived from him did not continue after his death. Having lived on no budget all through her 20s and 30s, and then to be put on a very strict budget, she was not prepared for what happened.
Henrietta was trying to support a thoroughbred horse operation; she was going through the Depression, then the war, and now there was a limit on her funds.
Alcohol had always been a part of her life; it was part of her coping mechanism. We know a lot more today about alcohol and pharmaceuticals than she did. She was treated with heavy sedatives, uppers and downers. That was a time when the U.S. was really infatuated with the potential of pharmaceuticals to cure mental states.
One of the items Henrietta left was a shopping list. Beyond milk, sugar and barley there was gin, Aspirin, Phano-dorm, Soneryl and Amytal. She was living on gin and downers and sleeping medications and cigarettes.
Did you learn something about yourself as you investigated Henrietta’s life?
I don’t share Henrietta’s allure and charisma, and I was a little bit envious of the kind of love letters I found in the trunk and the attic. That anyone could evoke that kind of passion was a little intimidating. I also came to feel grateful. That sort of charisma and allure come from very deep-seated internal hurts. I don’t have those kind of hurts, but I wasn’t carrying the same kind of burden she was.
Her story does speak to some of the concerns of our time. I was trying to understand mental health, sexuality, and to bring compassion to my family story. We all have outsiders on our family trees. I used to think the Binghams were a male-dominated family. To learn that Henrietta had been the favoured child and the family business hadn’t gone automatically through my grandfather underscores how we can’t make assumptions . . . Life does really move in jagged ways.