A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney
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Barney calls these one-sentence or one-fragment ideas her 'scatterings" (the title of Eparpillements) or simply her pensées ("thoughts" or maxims)—a word that appears in the titles of two of her books. It is the latter term that was intended to provoke the male literary establishment, for the word pensées is typically associated with the seventeenth century writings of Blaise Pascal. Pascal, a French Jansenist scholar and writer, used the pensée to develop philosophical ideas about the nature of life, death, and an afterlife. Barney explodes the philosophical intent of the pensée by using the term for witty epigrams, bons mots, and perverse adages as well as for miniature tales and character sketches that are only a paragraph or two long. One source for these portraits is La Bruyère, whose witty character sketches livened the salons of the seventeenth century, but her most direct mentor in these endeavors is the witty, ebullient and irreverent Oscar Wilde, on whose lap she once sat and to whose lover (Lord Alfred Douglas), she was once engaged. She felt bound to these two men by a shared love of perverse witticisms that turn commonly accepted ideas, and by extension morality, on their heads. In a quip about lacemaking, Barney focuses the attention on the hole instead of on the beautiful object. If we associate Barney's pensées with the dour Pascal, we too have been eyeing empty space instead of the fabric.
Her fragmentary style and her nonchalant approach to diction are the strength of Barney's "scatterings." The quick sharp wit of her plays and pensées is often based on the art of misquotation. The wit devolves from the unexpected twist she gives to what appears to begin as a familiar remark. Her observation on the sources of originality is a good example: "To mis-quote is the very foundation of original style. The success of most writers is almost entirely due to continuous and courageous abuse of familiar mis-quotation.” There is a kind of Wildean perversity in her designation of misquotation as at once courageous and original. Like Wilde, she claimed for the epigram a significance belied by its apparent lightness: 'The epigrams of today are the truths of tomorrow. The epigram mist has replaced the Oracle."
Her epigrams are characterized by style, wit, and a flair for the unexpected. Liane de Pougy praised Barney's epigrams as "exquisite, witty, and profound.... On each page she almost carelessly tosses a little masterpiece, written with humor and irony as fine as a dart..." (Mes Cahiers bleus 108, quote translated by Karla Jay). The description is a just one, and Barney's barbs make one laugh at the wound just inflicted.
Conventional grammar is often replaced with dashes and ellipses, for it is especially the latter, those three little clitoral dots, that typically omit the unspoken/unspeakable words of women's desire. The ellipsis, favored by Barney, Vivien, and Woolf, among others, was an often-used subversive tool of lesbian writers at the turn of the century, for it stresses that which is left out and unsaid in a world of legalistic male minds that want everything spelled out (and correctly, too). The ellipsis... yes, it may be the primary signifier of female desire that dare not speak its name, and Barney, one of its primary devotees.
But bold as her challenge to literary conventionality may have been, there was a side to Barney which was deeply conservative. Paradoxically, despite her denigration of intellectualism and her championship of spontaneity, she confined herself to a style and idiom more appropriate to an earlier era than her own, in a way which can only be termed "academic." In part, this choice was created by her worship of the French Symbolists (Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé) as primary literary influences. Since all of them had stopped writing by the time she began, it made her style seem conservative and rather outmoded. Therefore, one must ask why indeed Barney wrote in French, while most of her contemporary fellow expatriates for the most part wrote in their mother tongue.
As she recounts in "Renée Vivien," Barney had a French governess, who read aloud to her from Jules Verne and the Bibliothèque rose. Later, she attended Les Ruches in Fontainebleau. Obviously, one factor in Barney's choice of French as a language of expression was her bilingual education, a factor Barney liked to make light of: "Being bilingual," she remarked, "is like having a wife and a mistress. One can never be sure of either" (quoted in Grindea, 22).
Education in itself does not ultimately answer the question of choice of language. Barney had a deep love not only for French authors but also for the French language. She explained, half in jest, in her preface to Some Portraits and Sonnets of Women that the French language is more poetic than English, in part because English was more familiar and therefore seemed more pedestrian to her than her adopted language. She felt that she could have no poetic illusions about the words she had used since birth. As a further explanation, she offered the theory that her soul was inhabited by several departed French poets (one can only wonder which ones), and that was the reason her passion for the French language and for France was so strong. She hoped that one day the French would look upon her as one of their own authors (in the way that Joseph Conrad is viewed as an English rather than a Polish author, for example), but Barney remained a linguistic as well as a sexual outsider in the end.
Barney's audience has principally been French. Her first book of poems, Some Portraits and Sonnets of Women, though published in France, was soundly denounced by critics in the United States who saw in its Sapphic message a frightening visage of the libertine attitude they had always suspected the French of having. Barney tried writing under a masculine Greek pseudonym, "Tryphé," in imitation of one of her mentors, Pierre Loüys, who had pretended to be Bilitis, one of Sappho's followers. However, in Barney's case it concealed the vibrant lesbian message of her writing whereas for Loüys it simulated one.
As a result, her early writing alternated between French and English. She wrote poetry in both languages. Interestingly enough, her most personal work—especially her unpublished and privately published work—such as The Woman Who Lives With Me (the prose poem that she used to woo back Renée Vivien after their first rupture) was written in English. But the form she wrote in called for a French audience, for the French were used to reading epigrams and portraits whereas the genre had never succeeded in England beyond dinner party repartee or part of a play's dialogue. In addition, novels with lesbian content had a long history in France, and Barney was familiar with Thoéphile de Gautier's Mlle de Maupin as well as the lesbian characters in the work of such distinguished writers as Balzac and Zola whereas in the United States almost another century would pass before Dickinson was read as a lesbian!
The final factor in Barney's choice of French was her friendship with Rémy de Gourmont. Gourmont was a literary critic for the Mercure de France (a leading newspaper), and in a country in which people rarely agree on anything, Gourmont's writing was almost universally acclaimed, the Renaissance scope of his knowledge winning wide respect. When he became a recluse after being hideously disfigured by lupus, Barney was the only woman he would let in his home, and she alone could persuade him to venture out beyond his immediate neighborhood. Gourmont wrote two books—Letters to the Amazon (1914) and Intimate Letters to the Amazon (1927), in which he praised her as his muse and delight. By the time Barney published her own Thoughts of an Amazon, the French public was more than eager to hear from the lips of Gourmont's goddess. Americans, on the other hand, were mostly ignorant of Gourmont's work; therefore, his muse Barney was not translated into her native language.
Thus, it may be the case that the French people chose Barney as much as she embraced the French language. Yet the choice of French was fraught with literary danger which Barney herself was able to admit. She voiced her nontraditional themes in academic formalistic poems and plays in verse when most contemporary French writers considered these forms outmoded. Barney tended to imitate poetic forms that had been fashionable at a much earlier date. Colette noted about Vivien (but this was also true of Barney) that anachronisms in their writing came from having studied French literature relatively late in life. Like most people who have been transplanted into a culture not theirs by birth, French masterpieces struck Barney with a no
velty that would be unlike the reaction of those familiar with them from childhood.
Barney's revolution, therefore, was not one of form but of content. First and foremost, she was blatantly gleeful about her lesbianism at least twenty years before Radclyffe Hall wrote the apologetic Well of Loneliness (1928). As early as 1901, she told her mother that she was "naturally unnatural," and later she came to view lesbianism as "a perilous advantage" rather than something to be ashamed of or contrite about. Certainly, by the time she wrote her "Illicit Love," she was well aware of the work of Havelock Ellis, of the early German homosexual rights movements, and perhaps of U.S. homophile organizations like One, Inc., the Mattachine Society, and the Daughters of Bilitis. But her defense of lesbianism goes well beyond the typical homophile plea for acceptance. As Amelia Lanier had done in Eve's Apology in Defense of Women, Barney rewrites Genesis to further her cause. She shows that God cursed heterosexuals as well as homosexuals in the Old Testament (actually, the O.T. Patriarch found He had made very few acceptable humans); after all, Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, were thrown out of the Garden of Eden.
In light of modern life and technology, it seemed prudent to Barney to review all of so-called ancient wisdom. The world, as she saw it, was overpopulated and paradoxically threatened at the same time with extinction due to the technology of the H-bomb that had so devastated Japan during World War II. In contrast, the non-reproductive love of lesbians (before turkey baster babies) seemed to her a safe and sane alternative to overpopulation, and her essay almost presages the reproductive freedom that women first experienced in the 1960s when the birth control pill was developed: When sexuality was finally severed from reproduction, it liberated gay people as well as non-gay women. Lesboerotic love was totally harmless when compared to the destructive elements man had thought up. And as her scatterings clearly indicate, she associated war exclusively with men and felt that women had little to gain from either war or nationalism.2
I use the word lesbian advisedly here, for Barney felt no common cause with gay men, as her essay on Gide points out. Although she had a modicum of sympathy for the sad lot of Oscar Wilde as well as for her gay male friends and acquaintances, which included Cocteau, Gide, and Proust, she felt that their promiscuous, lustful ways were destructive sexual behavior whereas her own sexual adventures constituted a charming plan to make dozens of friends.
She also saw women as another oppressed group she was part of and needed to defend. In her unpublished memoirs, she declared that she had become a feminist after taking a childhood trip through Europe and seeing how poorly women were treated there. Like Zora Neale Hurston, she noted that women were the mules of the world. She saw that even women in power who are "the mistresses of slaves... [are] the slaves of the masters." And she knew that the financial power of men made a woman's relations with men an act of commerce, whether or not one was technically a prostitute. The best-developed example of her feminism in this collection is Barney's defense of breasts in the essay by the same name. It is superficially a reply to an attack on female anatomy by Ramon Gomez de la Serna. Barney, however, goes well beyond that by somewhat agreeing with misogynists that anatomy equals destiny, an ideal she subscribes to only in order to place primary erotic importance on women's breasts so that orgasm and pleasure are (re)centered in an organ denied to men. In a typical Barney twist, man is again God's poor first attempt of which woman is the perfected second try.
Barney's mockery of heterosexuals in general and men in particular is part of a broader attack on and dismissal of traditional values like marriage and religion, two of her favorite targets in her epigrams. She thought that original sin was not very original after all and hoped that all those " right-thinking" Christians could be replaced by people who think, presumably for themselves (115). She derided marriage as "a double defeat" because "it works on the lowest common denominator: neither of the ill-assorted pair gets what they want (110)."
Though Barney derided legal arrangements, she valued love and friendship quite highly. The portraits in this collection of Renée Vivien, Colette, Gertrude Stein, and Rémy de Gourmont attest to the warmth of her affection. Like La Bruyère, she believed that portraiture was a literary art form, again one that was not appreciated by her American compatriots. Still, she loved the form, and like many accomplished painters, she created several portraits of each model. Those found in Adventures of the Mind (1929) are quite formal and stylized images that highlight the intellectual accomplishments of each friend. The ones in this collection are from Indiscreet Memoirs (1960). By the time she had written it, all of these friends were dead, and she felt she could expand upon their private qualities in a way that would have been obtrusive had they still been alive. She believed that once someone was dead silence was the worst indiscretion: She had learned this all too well after Salomon Reinach had had the private papers of Renée Vivien sealed in the National Library in Paris in order to "protect" her reputation. Instead, his action helped push Vivien's poetry into obscurity. Barney sensed that the best way to keep these friends in the public eye was to celebrate their existence.
Not until twenty years after Natalie Barney's death has her work finally begun to appear in her native language. Now at last, we have Anna Livia's lively, accurate, and colloquial translation of Barney's version of her tempestuous affair with Renée Vivien, of Barney's witty sayings, portraits of her friends, and lesbian view of the world. Now at last, the women of the future for whom Barney wrote can become her newest friends.
Notes
1. I would like to thank the Scholarly Research Committee and the Summer Research Grant Program of Pace University as well as the Feminist Research Group for helping to make this work possible.
2. I have written at length about Barney's pacifism during World War I and Fascism during World War II in "The Amazon Was a Pacifist" in Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and Nonviolence, edited by Pam McAlister (New Society Publishers).
Bibliography
Grindea, Miron. "Combat with the Amazon of Letters." Adam: International Review. 29 No. 299 (1962), 5-24.
Jay, Karla. The Amazon and the Page: Natalie Clifford Barney and Renée Vivien. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1988.
Pougy, Liane de. Mes cahiers bleus. Paris: Pion, 1977.
Proust, Marcel. Swann's Way. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. 1913: rpt. New York: Vintage, 1989.
Apology:
May I be forgiven my coldness on account if its sincerity.
Ardour too can be cold.
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Why should I bother to explain myself to you who do not understand
—or to you who do?
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Quintessence? Mere leftovers... thoughts half thought.
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You only learn what you already know.
Readers May Choose Their Own Dedication:
At the beginning of this book I write your name in invisible ink
—your little name, which blooms.
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Despite myself I write for you; despite myself I erase you.
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For those who find their own thoughts here, before or after they thought them.
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...Because you appear in it, and so does she, and she.
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For my beloved stranger, quickly lest I no longer dare.
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...So that certain pages may serve her as a corrective lens.
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Testament of abiding, though instant friendship.
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Do not try too hard to read between the lines, nor even between the pages
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...Whose eyes I love, and whose vision of the world.
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For my lady, whose lucidity is so much the rarer in that it is not
invariably, entirely vicious.
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...whose every word is an epigram.
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I venture to disturb you in t
he hope that I will please you.
...so that your long, myopic lashes will flutter against these pages.
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... whom I have loved too well to be in love with still?
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For he who became a priest, perhaps for time and peace to read.
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For she who calls me "chaser of glow-worms."
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Not for those who call me "Miss."
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For those who call me "Natly."
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For so many profiles, as they turn their backs.
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For a mind high-brow with prudence.
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For that more than upright citizen, bent backwards by his own importance.
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For that other, bent so far forward toward others that he has never discovered his own balance.
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And for she whose cautious little feet never risk a step for fear of falling.
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For M... who views the world through her own vanity. For her we are no more than pocket mirrors.
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I wrote this little book of epigrams for you, but others will read it more often.
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For A, B, C..., all dead—alas how small the world is getting.
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And for D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z,
—whom I would have forgotten.
Part One: Natalie and Renée Vivien,
a tempestuous romance
Renée Vivien