Lost Modernist Women: Viola Paradise

by Ryan Elston

[For an audio version of this article read by Ryan Elston click here.]

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Who knew a rainstorm would unearth a kindred spirit from a century ago?

It’s been raining nearly every day this week in Skopje. Torrential downpour. At one point the roof was leaking, and we were madly scrambling to protect our electronics while strategically placing pots and pans across the floor! So when it came time to choose a perfect R&R playlist for the week’s Mid-Week Libation, the first that came to mind was Covered in Rain, a playlist we made back in Belgrade during a similar Balkan bout of stormy weather in April 2020.

But then I needed a poem to post, and while looking at public domain poetry anthologies from one of my favorite sites, Bartleby.com, I noticed there were a number of poems with “rain” in the title. How fitting! That’s when my eyes landed on a lovely Imagist poem entitled “Midnight Rain,” by an author with the intriguing name of Viola I. Paradise. Oooh! Who was she? *checks Wikipedia* Wait. She doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page? What the hell? What other poems did she write? *back to Bartleby* There are six poems by Viola I. Paradise in the anthology Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (1912–1922) compiled by the editor, publisher and stalwart champion of modern poetry – Harriet Monroe. After reading the poems, I detect a flair for language and image in the modernist style I so enjoy in poets like my beloved H.D.¹ Here for example:

Thoughts
by Viola I. Paradise
 
Quicksilver thoughts	
Flirt with me these spring days;	
Flit through my head,	
Slip through my fingers;	
Teasing, vanish	        
Before I have touched them.	
 
But if I were a poet	
I’d know a trick to catch them!	
I’d catch them with a spirit noose….	
 
And then I’d let the wild things go.

Quicksilver thoughts! The playful consonance (“flirt,” “flit,” “slip”) . . . the sly persona (“But if I were a poet”) . . . the emphatic closing: “And then I’d let the wild things go.” Yes! I love that line. Her other poems had similar dashes of brilliance:

My soul swells with thoughts	        
Impalpable,	
Melancholy, exalted,	
Blurring me. 
(from “Early Spring Night”)

Or her rage at being awoken by the “frantic iron claws” and “frenzied panicked paws” of the wind beating against her windows beneath an indifferent, “monstrous,” “insolent” and “shameless” moon (“Is there no limit to indecency?”) in “Wind and Moonlight.” The terse, Dorothy Parker-esque wit of “Clothes.” And an exquisite meditation on mortality in “Death.” Whoever Viola Paradise² was, she was my kind of modernist poet. But who was she?

Who was Viola Paradise? This name was completely new to me. And my feminist spider-sense was tingling. So I began to scour the web . . .

The lack of a Wikipedia entry was a setback, but soon I found her name mentioned on a blog about mystery novels from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. The blog, The Passing Tramp: Wandering through the mystery genre, book by book, is written by “The Passing Tramp” aka crime fiction historian Curtis Evans, the author and editor of numerous volumes (including Murder in the Closet: Essays on Queer Clues in Crime Fiction Before Stonewall, which I will definitely have to check out).

The blog post, “From Laughter to Tears: A Girl Died Laughing (1934), by Viola Paradise,” not only revealed that Paradise was a “Jewish writer who contributed to the mystery field in the 1930s,” but also helpfully gave her middle name and dates: “Viola Isabel Paradise (1887-1980), social worker, novelist and playwright.” She was a “vocal advocate of immigrant rights,” a member of the New York Jewish Social Service Association, a graduate of the University of Chicago, and had worked at Hull House with the legendary lesbian activist and social reformer Jane Addams (the second woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize)!

Her single detective novel “was quite well-received in its day . . . but it is quite forgotten today.” Check out The Passing Tramp for a full review of the novel and an interesting story about the author’s full-page inscription on his specific copy of the book. (And if you love reading mysteries, as I know many of our readers do, please check out the rest of his excellent blog for book reviews and crime fiction history!)  

But back to the quest to learn more about Viola Paradise. My internet sleuthing had finally found some solid information to run with . . . I’d solved the mystery of her middle name (“I” is for Isabel), uncovered the years of her birth and death (she lived to the age of 92 or 93!), and tracked down some initial data on her activist interests, her writing output, and some of the places she had lived and worked. The game was afoot! But I was just getting started . . . Time to enhance those Google searches and take a deep dive into the wonders of Archive.org . . .

The first writings I found by Viola Paradise were all concerned with her activism, social work and field work on behalf of immigrants’ rights, women’s rights, children’s rights and workers’ rights. In the early 1900s, her work for the Children’s Bureau took her to rural Montana and the Gulf Coast, where she wrote sociological studies with titles like “Maternity Care and the Welfare of Young Children in a Homesteading County in Montana” and “Child Labor and the Work of Mothers in Oyster and Shrimp Canning Communities on the Gulf Coast.”

In Montana, she documented how rural women’s lack of access to health care and prenatal care led to extremely high infant mortality rates and even higher maternal mortality rates. On the Gulf Coast, she interviewed immigrant women working alongside their young children in canneries under abominable conditions, with the children receiving almost no formal education whatsoever. Paradise was actively committed to ending the shameful practice of child labor in the United States, and many of her later published essays and short fiction also explore this theme.

But it was her work at Hull House in Chicago that led me to even more insights about her career, her personality and (later) her personal life. Hull House was an extraordinary accomplishment, a center for women’s social work and activism, a shining example of how (relatively) privileged women could use their power to organize and help others. It was a place where many groundbreaking women activists lived, worked, and ultimately found their calling. What’s also interesting is how many of these women were proudly independent and unmarried, including both single women and a significant number of lesbian couples and lifelong female partnerships. It was a very queer circle of women trailblazers, and Viola Paradise befriended and worked closely with many of these women.

Which leads to the final part of the story, and the realization that Viola Paradise was a true kindred spirit. After further searching, I found The UNZ Review: An Alternative Media Selection, a website which contains an abundance of archival material from old magazines, helpfully arranged by author. It was here that I found the name of Viola Paradise paired with another woman writer, Helen Campbell.

Helen Campbell also worked at Hull House, which is where the two women most likely met. In fact, according to the records of the Immigrants' Protective League, Campbell took over a leadership position from Paradise when she went to New York for a year to study at a school for philanthropy. However, by 1919 or 1920, Viola Paradise and Helen Campbell were partners and traveling companions. They’d moved to Europe and were writing about their travels. My detective work led me to a note in Scribner’s magazine (November 1922) where Viola Paradise had written a letter about her journeys:

“With headquarters at Prague, VIOLA PARADISE and her friend HELEN CAMPBELL have made extended trips into Albania to study the social and political conditions and to learn at first hand the intimate details of peasant life in regions difficult of access. She writes from Vienna early in September—and after the article was on the press: ‘I learn that the United States has recently recognized Albania. A foot-note ought to go into the article at the place where mention is made of the mountain men singing about the desire for recognition by the United States. . . . We go back to Czechoslovakia in a few days. We have been taking a vacation on the Dalmatian coast, chiefly, the last few weeks. We shall presently be deep in remote districts of Slovakia and ‘Podkarpatsk a Russ,’ as Ruthenia³ is there called.’ ”

Full article here.

My mind was blown! Exactly 100 years ago in the early 1920s, Viola and Helen (we’re on a first-name basis now) were two American writers, writing partners and traveling companions (who shared both a bed and a life together), visiting unusual places in Central and Eastern Europe and writing about their experiences, as well as writing poetry, short fiction, book reviews and essays! Just. Like. Us!

My research shows they spent extensive time in Albania, specifically Tirana, where they wrote at least two articles on the subject. They also wrote a series of articles entitled “Joggings Through Jugo-Slavia” (I found Part One and Part Two), where they described their travels in Serbia (Belgrade), Croatia (Zagreb and Dubrovnik), Bosnia (Sarajevo), Kosovo (Pristina) and Macedonia (Skopje). These are literally the exact same places where Ryan and I have been living for the past six years! And some of their experiences are eerily similar to our own. For example, she describes a harrowing border crossing from Albania to Serbia:

“The path ran so gently along that the brusk challenge of the Serbian guard seemed grotesque. So this pleasant place was the border; through it ran the deep stubborn furrow of hate between neighbor nations. Serbia's guard scowlingly unfolded our passports, turned them over and about, and stared at them long, upside down. Then because some action seemed pertinent, he waved for us to proceed. Our Albanian guide, however, despite proper papers, might not put his toe over the line. We left him looking wistfully after his more privileged horse, to whom our baggage gave informal passport.”

A century later, upon crossing from Albania into Croatia (via Montenegro), essentially the same thing happened to us. The brutish border guards refused to let our Albanian driver, Vaid, cross the border (despite having the proper papers). So we had to wistfully wave goodbye to the kindly Vaid (whose company we’d been enjoying for the past several hours of the journey), to cross the border on foot with all of our luggage and wait for another driver to pick us up and drive us to Dubrovnik. Sadly, it appears some things never change . . .

Viola and Helen appear to have been based mainly out of Prague, but their travels took them around the entire Balkan region. They described the generous hospitality (besa) and linguistic fluency of the Albanians they encountered. (Ryan Wildstar also wrote about Albanian besa!⁴) They described precarious accommodations in dodgy hotel rooms and long journeys by train, horse or cart. They wrote about the bustling marketplaces in cities like Tirana, Zagreb and Belgrade:

“Or go at noon into the market place, which translates you back into the ageless past where history lies deeper than the scars of war, where South-Slavic peasants carry coarse homespun woolen bags from one stand to another and buy or sell or barter eggs for stuffs, where cheeses or cabbages not infrequently pass for currency, where the townswomen go from a purple wealth of heaped up grapes to a green heap, and then to a stand where heaped scarlet peppers promise a stinging tongue with the stew. And, nearby, gleaming foamy milk is strained through a white cloth into a housewife's bucket.”

They also wrote about their conversations with locals about topics such as women’s rights (see above for their photo of the Korcha women’s club), sometimes finding themselves surprised by the answers. Based on the articles I could find, Viola and Helen must have spent at least five years in the Balkans. During that time, Viola also managed to write and publish two novels, numerous short stories and poems, book reviews (including a glowing review of Dorothy Parker’s Enough Rope, one of my grandmother’s favorites) as well as occasional essays on topics ranging from international politics to the technical foibles of using an old typewriter.

After that, the trail starts to grow cold. I know Viola Paradise would continue to write novels and to visit and correspond with women from the Hull House circle, including Jeannette Rankin and Katharine Anthony. During the 1950s, she donated one of her books to the library of an organization that helped expatriate European writers who were exiled due to their activities resisting fascist regimes. And I know she lived until 1980. That’s about it. And I could find almost nothing else about her partner Helen Campbell.

But I had learned enough. In my view, Viola Paradise was a modernist hero. Her lifelong activism, her commitment to fighting for the rights of the marginalized, is laudable in and of itself. I likewise admire her prolific and diverse literary output: poetry, short stories, essays, plays, several novels (including a detective novel and a work of historical fiction), book reviews, sociological studies and travel writing. And of course I applaud her refusal to conform and marry a man (she boasted proudly of her “spinster” status in a book review), and her sheer boldness at venturing into the heart of the Balkans with her partner and companion, Helen!

Exactly one hundred years ago, these two brave women shared both a life and a bed – as travel companions, as activists, as writing partners and trailblazers. As far as my husband and I are concerned, Viola Paradise and Helen Campbell were not merely two lost modernists. They were kindred spirits, fellow travelers, a nomadic queer literary couple like us. They are our ancestors – our chosen ancestors. What is remembered, lives. May they both be remembered. Viola Paradise and Helen Campbell – we honor you.

1. H.D. (aka Hilda Doolittle) is my favorite poet. For more about her, check out my essay or listen to the audio version.

2. She published under the names “Viola I. Paradise” and “Viola Paradise.” Since the majority of her writing drops the “I” (including most of her later writing), I chose to simply refer to her as “Viola Paradise” for the title and the rest of this article.

3. Check out the Wikipedia article on Ruthenia for a brief history of this fascinating region and how it relates to the current war in Ukraine. (The official motto of Ruthenia was “Ukraine has not yet perished!”)

4. Check out Ryan Wildstar’s article about Albanian cuisine (which also discusses the concept of besa) here!