A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney
Page 1
A Perilous Advantage
The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney
Edited and Translated by Anna Livia
With an Introduction by Karla Jay
“Being other than normal is a perilous advantage.”
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Foreward to Souvenirs Indiscrets
New Victoria Publishers
Copyright © 1992 Anna Livia
Epub Edition 2015
An rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a web site without the prior written permission of the publisher, New Victoria Publishers, 7011 S. Pintek Lane, Hereford, AZ 85615.
Cover design Ginger Brown
ISBN 978-0934678384
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barney, Natalie Clifford.
A perilous advantage : the best of Natalie Clifford Barney /
edited and translated by Anne Livia ; with an introduction by Karla Jay.
p . cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-934678-45-6 (hard cover : $19.95. -- ISBN 0-934678-38-3
(paper) : $10.95
1. Barney, Natalie Clifford--Translations into English.
2. Authors. French--20th century--Biography. 3. Americans—France—Paris--
biography. 4. Lesbians--France--Paris--Biography.
1. Title.
PQ3939.B3P45 1992
848' .91409--dc20
[B]
92-1S831
CIP
Acknowledgments
I would like to take this opportunity to thank all those who helped in the production of this edited translation. I am particularly indebted to François Chapon of the Bibliothèque littéraire; Jacques Doucet in Paris for allowing me access to Natalie Barney's unpublished manuscripts and permission to publish the two extracts which appear here for the first time, as well as the quotations used in my article The Trouble with Heroines; Berthe Cleyrergue for providing the photographs which illustrate the text and for allowing me to interview her; Idit Bires for photographic assistance; Agnès Thèveniault for a wealth of information and for allowing me to see her collection of first editions; and, finally, Karla Jay for her help, advice, enthusiasm and support.
Contents
Introduction, by Karla Jay
Apology
Dedication
Part One: Natalie and Renée Vivien
Renée Vivien
The Woman Who Lives With Me
Part Two: A Lesbian Point of View
Confidences
Brute!
Courtesan
The Unknown Woman
Breasts
The Climbing Rose
The Sitting Room
Part Three: Natalie on Gay Life Styles
Misunderstanding
Gide and the Others
Illicit Love Defended
Predestined for Free Choice
Part Four: A Fine Spray of Salon Wit
Scatterings
Little Mistresses
Their Lovers
Epigrams
Indiscretions
Alcohol
The Gods
Old Age
Theatre
Literature
Critical Sallies
Part Five: Friends From the Left Bank
The Colette I Knew
Rémy de Gourmont
Gertrude Stein
When Poets Meet
Part Six: Natalie and Anti Semitism
The Trouble with Heroines
An Afterword by Anna Livia
Selected Bibliography
Introduction
by Karla Jay
“If I had one ambition it was to make my life itself into a poem.”
- Natalie Clifford Barney
Natalie Barney's entire life seems to have been carved of some more dramatic material than most of us have or would choose to have. Barney came from the wealthiest circle of American industrialist families and eventually inherited over four million dollars. (Today, this would equal about a billion dollars.) After her birth on October 31, 1876 in Dayton, Ohio, she grew up in Cincinnati and then in Washington, D.C. and Bar Harbor in select social circles.
Her father, Albert Clifford Barney, lived off the proceeds of a railroad fortune, and her mother, Alice Pike Barney, was also an heiress. Her father was far less devoted to the family than Barney suggests in "Renée Vivien." He seems to have been a self-centered man who had no great interest in either his work or his family. He retired on the fortune made by his ancestors and tended to ignore his wife and two daughters unless they did something that offended his rigid social sensibilities, such as Natalie's lesbian love poems (Some Portraits and Sonnets of Women), which his wife had either naively or defiantly illustrated with portraits of some of Natalie's lovers. Then Albert would intervene and assert his patriarchal authority, but generally he was more interested in enjoying himself in London while the rest of his family chose Paris.
Natalie greatly preferred her mother. Alice was an accomplished portrait painter who had studied with Whistler, and she shaped her daughter's devotion to the arts. Though Barney suggests in her memoirs that she was almost obsessively in love with her mother, the images and almost the words for this emotion are borrowed from Proust. Here, for example, is how Barney remembers waiting up for her mother:
Such was the feeling I had for my mother, and when she bent over my bed before she went out to a party, she seemed more beautiful than anything in my dreams; so, instead of going to sleep, I would stay awake, anxiously waiting for her return, for whenever she went away I was afraid something terrible might happen to her. (text p. 4)
In Swann's Way, Marcel's memories of his childhood goodnight kiss seem remarkably similar:
My sole consolation when I went upstairs for the night was that Mamma would come in and kiss me after I was in bed.... I reached the point of hoping that this good night which I loved so much would come as late as possible, so as to prolong the time of respite during which Mamma would not yet have appeared. (Proust 13-14)
Perhaps, Oedipal/Electra devotion to one's mother was a proper sentiment at the turn of the century, but certainly, in a book written for the French public, quite familiar with Proust’s famous remembrance of childhood, Natalie's (re)construction of her own earlier years would strike a resonant chord. It might also make her forthcoming confession of lesbianism easier to understand for a public well-versed in Freud (even though, as we shall see, Barney considered herself to be "naturally unnatural"). By evoking a cultural icon of Oedipal obsession, she attempts to make even a hostile reader accept the fact that she "learned to love our neighbor" in ways the Bible doesn't address, and the reader is not surprised when young Natalie's adoration of her mother is transformed into crushes on her mother's models during Natalie's adolescence in Washington and Paris.
The only oddity that emerges in retrospect about Natalie's childhood is that her adoring mother, who had both daughters educated by a French governess and then sent Natalie to a select boarding school, Les Ruches, never seems to have encouraged Natalie to go to college at a time when higher education was becoming popular for the daughters of the rich. Nor did it occur to Natalie to go, even though her best friend, Evalina Palmer, attended Bryn Mawr. We might assume that both mother and daughter shared a disdain for rigid and traditional academic endea
vors, and both preferred to remain in Paris to pursue an artistic and romantic life.
Natalie was not altogether without educational aspirations. While living in Paris, she hired Charles Brun (called "B.C." in "Renée Vivien") to teach her Classical Greek and to tutor her in some of the finer points of French poetics. Later, Renée joined her in her studies. Few women knew Greek, and decades later, Virginia Woolf would call it the "secret language" of men, one from which women were generally excluded because they were not taught it. By choosing to study Greek, Natalie and Renée rejected traditional subjects reserved for women and entered immediately and directly into the private domain of men. Renée proved the more apt pupil of the two and by the end of her life, she had managed to translate Sappho's fragments and expand upon them several times.
Generally, Natalie seemed more interested in living lovers than dead languages. After some adolescent crushes, experimentation, and early relationships, she was smitten by Liane de Pougy, the most famous courtesan of the Belle Epoque. Natalie's determination to "rescue" Liane from the demimonde, even if Natalie had to marry a suitor, William Morrow (called "Freddy" in her memoir) in order to raise the capital to do so, shows an early inclination to play the knight in her relationships with other women. This proclivity helps explain why she was drawn to Renée Vivien, whom she felt she had to save from her obsession with death, and later to Romaine Brooks, whose unfortunate childhood left her with little love of social commerce. From an early age, Natalie seems to have been drawn to unsuitable lovers, each of whom was incompatible in a different way, each of whom was impossible for her to live with, each of whom would leave her longing for (and feeling free to pursue) other women.
Because Natalie saw herself as a page (a knight in training) rescuing damsels in distress, the women in question had to appear to be rather more innocent and helpless than they were in reality. Renée Vivien is depicted by her and also by her biographers as having had no physical relationships with women prior to her liaison with Natalie. despite her deep emotional attachment to Violet Shilleto. It is unclear whether or not there was any physical relationship between Renée and Violet. Natalie does omit Renée's involvement with Olive Custance ("Opale") as well as Renée's correspondence with a Turkish noblewoman in a harem. Barney was well aware of both affairs, particularly the latter since she and Renée stopped to visit this woman in Constantinople on their way to Lesbos in 1904. That Natalie was well aware of Renée's other relationships is revealed in the remark she makes to Renée after the latter has discovered the infidelity of Hélène, the Baroness von Zuylen de Nyevelt: "Really, Renée, do you have the right to be so indignant?" Well, Renée would have that right had she been faithful herself!
To admit that Renée Vivien was perfectly capable of having multiple affairs herself would ruin the tale of how Natalie tried but failed to rescue her from the grip of the ruthless and unattractive Baroness. Natalie tends to emphasize the Baroness's power and tries to turn the reader against her by alluding to her Semitic origins (the Baroness was one of the Rothchilds). Renée is depicted as a helpless pigeon in the grasp of a vulture, but Natalie fails to point out that Renée was the heiress to a dry goods fortune. Thus, she had no need of the Baroness's money and was just as capable of fleeing the Baroness as she was of suddenly ending her relationship with Natalie. By emphasizing the power of Hélène de Nyevelt, aided and abetted by a greedy governess, Natalie presents Renée as the helpless victim of irresistible forces—someone without the will or the strength to leave despite her clear preference for Natalie. In a revealing comment, Natalie confesses, "I was obsessed by her flight from me...." Natalie, as the page, saw herself as the one who loved and then moved on to other adventures. By breaking with Natalie, Renée had turned the tables on her in a painful way.
In death, Renée found the ultimate way to reject Natalie, who had remained in contact with her after the final breakup of their relationship. The cold finality of this end is emphasized by the rudeness of an unknown butler informing Natalie at the door, "Mademoiselle has just died." It seems highly improbable that a butler would make such a statement to a person of quality such as Natalie. He would be more likely to admit her to the house and let the priest or another person of her own social class break the tragic news. Here again, I think Barney borrows a bit from Proust, where little Marcel's written request for a kiss from his mother is completely and irreparably crushed by the unfeeling announcement of the servant Françoise, "There is no answer." (Swann's Way, 34).
While ostensibly and loudly mourning the loss of Renée, Natalie went ahead with plans to open her salon at 20 rue Jacob where she had moved shortly before Renée's death. There, she entertained the literary, artistic, and musical luminaries of the Western world for over fifty years, and her Friday "at home" conveniently brought the most talented and lovely women to her door; many of them, including Colette, Djuna Barnes, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Dolly Wilde (Oscar Wilde's niece), Nadine Wong, and probably Elisabeth de Gramont stayed in her bed as well. Men and women alike fell in love with her charm, charisma, and beauty (her white blond hair and piercing blue eyes struck all who met her).
Romaine Brooks lived nearby, and though she was involved with Natalie from before World War I, she remained somewhat socially aloof and watched the parade of Natalie's other lovers from a discreet distance. She, too, has been depicted by Natalie and her housekeeper, Berthe Cleyrergue, as amazingly faithful to Natalie, but Radclyffe Hall's letters, for example, indicate that Romaine was quite smitten with the author of The Well of Loneliness, though the latter found Romaine a bit too aggressive and masculine for her own tastes. Again, the forlorn, long-suffering Romaine may not have been as passive a victim of Natalie's infidelities as Natalie would lead us to believe. It is true, however, that Barney's relationship with Janine Lahovary which began when Natalie was in her late seventies was the coup de grâce in their relationship, not so much because of Barney's infidelity but rather because of the intensity Romaine detected in Natalie's feelings for Janine. Romaine probably hadn't felt so threatened since Natalie had had a decade-long affair with Dolly Wilde. Romaine was not being paranoid, for Barney remained with Janine Lahovary until Natalie died in 1972.
Although Barney was drawn to Paris and remained there because of the intellectual climate of the city, she paradoxically adopted an anti-literary and anti-intellectual stance, an attitude which may have had as much to do with her American roots as with anything else. Although decrying the philistinism of her compatriots, Barney brought with her to Paris her native American pragmatism, which tends to view with suspicion any idea which is not immediately practicable.
As is evident in many of the selections, Barney viewed her literary output in an ironic light. One of her oft-repeated lines is: "My only books/Were women's looks." She frequently remarked that one should not write about romance, but live it. Elsewhere, she quipped that her favorite book was her checkbook.
Remarks such as these shed some light on her anti-academic stance. Barney obviously felt that ideas should be lived, not merely entertained. It was more important to be a humanitarian than a bibliophile. The attempt by Barney, along with Renée Vivien, to establish a neo-Sapphic creative community on Lesbos in 1904 and Barney's establishment of a literary salon for women in 1927 are examples of the urge they shared to convert theory into practice. (It is not far-fetched to suggest that Renée Vivien, darkly attracted to the idea of death, actualized the concept in her own quasi-suicidal end.)
Barney's writings contain many derogatory remarks about intellectuals who refuse to partake of the mundane or sensual aspects of life around them. In The One Who Is Legion, intellectuals are berated as "fraudulent usurpers of fame, mind-pickers and culture snobs." In Critical Sallies, she writes of "the English who pronounce the word art with a capital T" (125) and complains, "I do not understand those who spend hours at the theater watching scenes between people whom they would not listen to for five minutes in real life (125)." So strong a condemnation was also a reaction to
the cultural snobbery of Europeans, as repugnant to Barney as the importance Americans placed on financial success.
This anti-intellectual stance was also part of a general rebellion against the literary and cultural situation Barney found herself in as a woman writer. Because she rejected the traditional male-dominated, Judaeo-Christian ethic in regard to religion and heterosexuality, she also rejected male definitions of literature as part of the culture she repudiated. In Renée Vivien's thinly disguised autobiographical novel about her affair with Natalie Barney, A Woman Appeared to Me, Vally (Barney's counterpart in the novel) remarks that the best way to write naturally is to make spelling mistakes. Vally goes on to note that there are so few women authors because they are forced to write like and about men. What Barney means here in part is that any writer who claimed serious critical attention had to remain well within the traditions and standards of style and context which male literary critics found congenial.
Barney clearly did not remain within those confines, and one of the results of her rupture with the male dictates of literary creation may have caused her to receive less acclaim from the literary establishment she so beautifully entertained in her home than she might otherwise have had. By refusing to conform, what Barney is attempting to do here is to (re)define the natural in literature, much as she re(de)fined so-called natural sexuality in her life and works. In a way that is perhaps unconscious, she unravels the patriarchal dictum that good writers should think and write like men. Instead of developing clear paragraphs and crafting well-developed plots and characters, Barney throws her ideas at the reader in a somewhat militantly non-linear, pseudo-random order. She replaces paragraphs with sentences that parade past one by one and stand so alone that they dare you to focus on one particular idea rather than on the others or the work as a whole, or even more rebelliously, to skip around in a way that would have driven your elementary school teacher into a tantrum.