Do you have heroines? Lee Miller might be one of mine.

It’s VE day today - 75 years since the end of the War and in our everyday lives, especially in the midst of a pandemic, perhaps it is a moment to reflect on what happened all those years ago and I thought I would take a moment to send a few thoughts out into cyberspace about one of those all but forgotten people who did something rather brave during the WW2 and who seemed to fall into my meandering bookish sphere almost by accident a few weeks ago, Lee Miller

But first, a question. Do you have heroines? I certainly do…. not many, but a few interesting characters that I have stumbled upon over the years, perhaps through a movie, a book or an article in a newspaper or magazine. I think my first real heroine is undoubtedly Karen Blixen (aka Issac Dinesen) of Out of Africa fame. I remember going to see the movie in Leicester Square with my friend Fliss when we had just both started work in London. I was enraptured. Of course it is a glorious, romantic adventure, bathed in beautiful landscapes and wrapped in wonderful evocative early 20th century fashion. Meryl Streep and Robert Redford play out the story in splendid cinematic style and it makes for easy watching, but from the moment I left the cinema, I wondered who the real characters were and was the story true. I got the book ‘Out of Africa’ and then some…..her books of short stories and any kind of biography I could find. Many years later, I had the opportunity to go to Rungstedland, her home in Denmark - it was a sort of pilgrimage really. The thing about her for me, is not just her sense of adventure, but her resolve in the face of difficulty. I still often go to my little book collection about her and browse - she is definitely the first heroine.

However there are a few more and for a while we joked about the ‘holy trinity’. Dagmar, empress of Russia and mother of the last Czar and also a Dane by birth and Abigail Adams (you can read about that here). I am fairly picky about whom my hero worship might be bestowed upon but this new potential heroine is a little more modern… Lee Miller (1907- 1977). I came across her in reading about Paris in the 1920’s and 30’s. The city was overflowing the interesting characters…Hemmingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and a whole host of artists, philosophers and photographers. Here I found an american women who took herself to Paris in 1930 to learn about photography, after already having been a protege and model for Conde Nast and graced the covers of american vogue. She effortlessly slipped into the surrealist circle of experimental artists and became the student and lover of the famous and influential photographer Man Ray. She was careless with life though, as only the very beautiful and confident can be and soon moved on, swept along by the fast set she married a wealthy egyptian who took her to Cairo. Soon bored with that too, she returned to Paris, met Roland Penrose, a ‘loaded’ english aristocrat who was to remain a permanent fixture (of sorts) in her life. At this point (in Carolyn Burke’s wonderful biography) I didn’t particularly like Miss Miller. She seemed a hard women, very self centred and insensitive. The advent of war changed all that. She picked her camera and became a photo journalist for her friends at Vogue, firstly in London and towards the end of the war, attached herself to the liberating forces and reported from the front line, adding words to her pictures. She was a natural. In this instance, her single mindedness was just what was needed. Lee Miller seemed fearless, being one of the only women to photograph the liberation of europe in all it’s grimness and including the shocking concentration camp, where she documented the carnage that they found with remarkable courage. I find it interesting that Vogue magazine would publish such articles as these days on the odd occasions when I have seen a copy, I find it catalogue of endless adverts and celebrity gossip. Lee Miller’s articles seem more Vanity Fair, I suppose.

Along with Dave Scherman (an american wartime photographer for Life Magazine and her lover) they scampered around europe snapping the moments that made history. They even took a bath in Hitler’s Munich apartment and were among the first to reach his mountain retreat the Berghof. Her words and pictures are incredibly evocative and the scale of what she saw was vast and incomprehensible to us today. She had that practical brusqueness of that war time generation. She showed it and told it as it was. I admired her courage and her talent and her adaptability.

After the war, life was not so good. She returned to her english aristocrat, married him and had a son, but nothing replaced the excitement and constant movement of the war. She struggled to be a peacetime ‘anything’. The horrors of the war, which she had witnessed, buried themselves deep down in her soul and never left her. The drinking, which was always on her agenda, became an addiction and she was a lost person in so many ways. Her husband’s constant infidelities undermined her sense of self and as she grew older and lost her looks, and she seemed to have a sort of numbness about her in later life, where she all but hibernated on their farm in Sussex and turned to cooking as a way to express herself. Her wartime and pre wartime exploits were put up in the attic, stashed in boxes (where they remained until after her death) and forgotten to the world, showing themselves as nervous demons that haunted her often late at night. Perhaps nobody understood post traumatic stress disorder in those days but she clearly had this. It was disguised, as was the norm, by not talking about it - my parents lived through the war and my father was in the army but he never talked about it. It seemed like a collective decision…move on…look to the future and probably there is no other way to try to leave such overwhelming experiences behind. When I had finished reading the whole story, I felt an emormous amount of sympathy for her - she was a product of her times in every way, from her upbringing in Ploughkeepsie, to the glittering society of Paris and the recklessness of so called ‘lost generation’ to expatriate life in Egypt, to war and then to peace and cooking, but really no peace at all.

Having been wrapped up in her life for a week or two, I feel a quilt coming on - perhaps I shall call it ‘The foreign Correspondent quilt’ and am collecting fabrics for this project. Hope you will check back to see what develops - I really have no idea at the moment, except that it will have all my favourite ingredients in…retro typewriters, text prints, books, cameras, maps and a maybe few ditsy 30’s prints in the mix.

I find that I can’t really explain the fascination with her, I am not at all sure I would have wanted to meet her and there is no common ground that we share, except perhaps a love of travel and an interest in different cultures. She did live an exceptional life through some exceptional times and despite her wayward inclinations, she is worth remembering. She wasn’t a romantic in any sense of the word but she was brave and determined and understood the power of images and stories and I love that. I am not sure she is true heroine material for me…. enough to disrupt the holy trinity anyways… but definitely deserving of a quilt.

Her grand daughter Ami Bouhasanne has put together a fabulous, award winning book that includes biographical details, glorious photographs and recipes. I love how Lee’s cooking was about the unusual - a flavour or a dish remembered from someplace far away, recreated for a long lazy luncheon. I plan to try out quite of a few of her ideas. By pure coincidence there was a lovely BBC documentary last Saturday (2nd May 2020), so if you should be interested, you might be able to catch it. Lee Miller famously claimed to her friends that she ‘didn’t waste a minute of her life’ and that is a lesson for us all in our own ways.