A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney

by Natalie Clifford Barney

  from her personal experience!

  ...The author of Cendres et Poussières [Dust and Ashes]

  looks set to outstrip her best models by the starkness of her

  lament and revolt.

  ...Her motto should be: 'Modern feeling, Parnassian purity.'

  As for her knowledge of Greek and her translation of Sappho:

  ...Her intentions are mixed. She does not efface herself in

  her author. But neither does she efface the author.

  ...If we take a look inside the peplum, drop the chlamyde, a

  modern woman appears, fully clothed, complete with ideas

  about Life, ideas about the World imparted to her by the old

  romantics. She is at her best when she leaves Lesbos and

  Sappho behind and translates herself.

  My young poetess was beginning to be asked for interviews and appointments and, fearing the invasion of her privacy, she paid a governess to stand in for her, the most unpoetic looking woman imaginable. This woman passed herself off as Renée Vivien, discouraging further enthusiasm or pursuit.

  Just after this first success she took me home with her to London where, in the famous Bodley Head bookshop, I found a copy of Sappho's fragments translated by Wharton. (No relation to my compatriot. Edith Wharton who would have shuddered with horror at the idea that there might be any confusion). This precious collection provided Renée with a basis for comparison with her French translation. She had it always by her bedside and it was the source of pagan inspiration of many of her future works. Desire alone does not a pagan make: I already perceived in her a christian soul ignorant of its own nature. While I was browsing through books at John Lane's bookshop-cum-publishing house, he recommended that I read Opale, a first poetry collection by a young poetess in Norfolk whose second collection he was about to publish.

  I was taken by a number of these poems, so much so that I wrote an admiring letter to the author, sending her copies of Etudes et Preludes and Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de femmes. Opale responded with fervour:

  ...For I would dance to make you smile, and sing

  Of those who with some sweet mad sin have played,

  And how Love walks with delicate feet afraid

  Twixt maid and maid.

  "Why don't we gather a group of poetesses around us, deriving inspiration from each other, as Sappho did on Mytilene?" I said to Renée.

  She was so enthusiastic about the idea that we put it in motion right away by suggesting that Opale come back with us to Paris where we would be staying in a little hotel in the Rue Alphonse-de-Neuville, next door to the Rostands. My parents reluctantly let me do what I wished, but only after hiring as my chaperone a woman who had already filled that role before, in a pension where I'd stayed when passing through Paris. It was she, in fact, who had appeared as Renée Vivien to discourage the curious.

  Kindly Professor B.C. was also sent to us to teach Renée Greek because she wanted to translate Sappho's fragments into French verse. After her lesson, he would correct a new book I was working on: Cinq petits dialogues grecs [Five Short Greek Dialogues]. I also used his learned, difficult calligraphy for a transcription of my Lettres à une Connue [Letters to a Woman Known] in which I recounted my affair with Liane. When I had finished this book, I took off the ring she had had made for me at Lalique's which was engraved round the inside:

  "It pleases me greatly that you suffer in order to love and understand me."

  This couple, in charge of our studies and our virtue, became lovers almost before our eyes. This had its funny side, for they were quite grotesque: he long and thin in a dusty frock-coat with a pince-nez which would never stay on his nose, and boney, ink-stained hands; she a hefty mare with the profile of an Aztec, wearing an enormous, and enormously ugly, beauty spot high up on her big hooked nose. These representatives of normality were unlikely to convert us.

  Opale, enthralled by our plan, replied that nothing would suit her better than to join our group of poetesses. She told us that she would be coming to Paris in the spring with her mother and a neighbor from Norwich and that, in anticipation of the joy of meeting us, she had been inspired by the reproduction of my portrait as a page by Carolus Duran—which formed the front-piece of my Sonnets-Portraits de femmes. She sent me this poem written in her large, cursive script:

  Her face is like the faces the Dreamer sometimes meets

  A face that Leonardo would have followed through

  the streets...

  Renée spurred to join in. wrote me a sonnet in a similar vein:

  Your royal youth has the melancholy

  of the North where the fog washes out all colour;

  Discord, desire and tears intermingle in you,

  Grave as Hamlet, pale as Ophelia.

  You pass by, swept up in some beautiful folly:

  Strewing your path with songs and flowers, like Her,

  Hiding your pain behind your pride, like Him,

  But your ever-open eyes miss nothing.

  Smile, blonde beloved, and dream, sombre lover,

  Your double nature draws me like a double magnet

  And your flesh burns with the cold flame of a candle.

  My troubled heart falters when I see

  Your pensive princely brow and your blue maiden eye

  Now one. then the other, then both at once.

  I found this version more flattering than the role of frozen idol stuck upon some pedestal—later she would celebrate me, under the name of Atthis, in poems inspired by Sappho's fragments. Renée covered me in flowers and Lalique jewelry, composed more often of precious settings than of precious stones, in which crystal, ivory and enamel predominated. She made me wear them round my neck, my arms, my fingers and my ankles. There was also a strange comb on which a golden dragon vomited a spray of opals across my hair.

  She wrote two versions of our real-life novel. Une femme m 'apparut [A Woman Appeared to Me], influenced by the bad taste of our "belle époque," in which she seemed to me to have given in to the worst excesses of "art nouveau."

  Being a poet, she has little of the art of the novelist, is unable to breathe life into either of her heroines.

  The first version, Vally, was written while we were not speaking; the second when she had restored to me the name of "Lorely."

  Vally and Lorely have the same "undulating" body and eyes like "iced water under hair of moonlight." The author clearly wanted to create a magical impression, but magic turned down the invitation and was replaced by the absurd. To exemplify this sad assertion, I submit the following detail, from the description of a decor she must have found bewitching: "A dried snake wrapped itself round a vase of fading black irises." While, "dressed in a white gown which both veiled and revealed me, I pulled the leaves off an orchid and unthreaded a chain of opals..."

  I had to scold Renée for the first of these forced "femmes fatales" who resembled me for, in her second novel, she has me say, in the guise of her unlikely heroine: "In truth, each person comes to resemble the picture we stubbornly make of them: be careful lest you render me incomprehensible because you do not understand me." In one of her books she declares me "incapable of loving”— I, who have been capable of nothing else! Contrasting my love of love with her love of death, Renée believes I suffered from 19th century "spleen" in sudden fits only, whereas she made it the leitmotif of her life and art.

  That she wanted to lose herself so entirely in suffering tells me how necessary it must have been to her poetic inspiration.

  Despite the false mysticism which seemed to haunt her, in a sudden moment of lucidity, she recognized my restful pagan soul. In Une femme m 'apparut she relates how I asked her a few days before Christmas: "What is this Christmas celebration? Does it commemorate the birth or the death of Christ?" If exaggeration there must be, I prefer that to other distortions.

  When I re-read those two novels, I get the unpleasant feeling of having posed for a bad portrait artist.

  I still
wonder how such a poet could have written such prose. On the other hand, I cannot help but admire certain passages which sincerely express Renée Vivien's ruling sentiments. Here is how she describes our first meeting:

  I recall the now distant moment when I saw her for the first time, and the thrill which went through me when my eyes met hers of mortal steel, those eyes sharp and blue as a blade. I had the strange feeling that this woman was telling me my destiny, that her face was the formidable face of my future.

  On winter evenings we set off together for the Bois. My eyes were dazzled by the snow. All that brilliance seemed like the flowering of an imaginary wedding. Around and inside us was a nuptial chastity, a pure and sensual pleasure.

  I spoke to her very softly, in a voice made faint by the fears of first love: "You are not like Her whom I have dreamed about and yet I find in you the incarnation of my deepest desires. You are less beautiful and more strange than my dream. I love you and I know already that you will never love me. You are the suffering which makes one scornful of joy. I saw you today for the first time and I am the shadow of your shadow."

  Vally murmured, "I am afraid to understand you and I fear to draw you irreparably toward me... I would so much like to love you," she repeated.

  "My love is strong enough to stand alone," I replied. "I love you, and that is sufficient for my rapture and my tears. You will never love me, Vally, for you have within you such a passion for life and sensation that all the love in the world would not satisfy you."

  But Vally's ardour was infinitely pure, her desire infinitely chaste. "I do not know how to put limits on my body or my soul," she said, "since my body has a soul, and my soul a body."

  I saw everything filtered through the smoke of incense and aromatic herbs. My strange happiness filled my soul with mystic wonder. Later on I realized that these were the Unforgettable Hours of memory and regret.

  Though I regretted throwing such a soul into disarray, and being the unwitting cause of a despair which was distilled in her poetry into "pure sobs," I did not feel responsible for it. I did not want it to be like that, rather that she should love me "just enough to bring the sunshine into her life."

  Despite all her fantasies and perversity, did not my presence often bring a ray of warmth and sympathy, rather than the baleful, lunar influence she described? The most surprising thing about me is, perhaps, how natural I am.

  It is difficult for complicated creatures to get on well with those who are at one with themselves. We must, however, accept the evidence of other people's impressions.

  Pierre Benoit described the unreal atmosphere which surrounds me. If my house seems as mysterious as Psyche's, that is because we discuss neither national events nor domestic problems.

  This is how it appeared to that well known novelist:

  I know a garden, Eriphile, with rotundas

  Dimly lit by pallid domes...

  The shadowy domain of mystery lovers,

  Pale phantoms, youthful, charming...

  (One might be excused for mistaking it for some bad Renée Vivien!)

  I am told that after he visited me at the Rue Jacob with one of his friends, his healthy reaction was to regain his self-composure "by downing a glass of house red at the counter of a neighborhood bar."

  Renée had, meanwhile, found her true voice, her strength, the right note for real poetry, having moved toward a greater simplicity, guided by the resistance of the verses themselves.

  Free from the old extravagance, I would now only wear the flowers she sent me—from Parisian florists who were an integral part of our lives: all our notes to each other were accompanied by flowers. We also sent a precious bouquet of orchids in an iridescent Lalique vase to the Pierre Loüys, to thank them for their kindness, and for two deluxe volumes of the Chansons de Bilitis [Songs of Bilitis] which the author had sent us, dedicated in violet ink, in his beautiful handwriting which looked like a bunch of irises: "For Renée Vivien, this line of Keats: 'Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!' For N.C.B. young woman of the future, her admirer, Pierre Loüys." In his thank you note for the orchids he told us how much Louise de Heredia-Loüys liked these flowers, adding that they had escaped a flower's usual destiny by being eaten by their cat, a ravenous gourmet.

  After our next dinner at their apartment on the Boulevard Malesherbes, Madame Pierre Loüys took me aside and begged me to persuade Pierre Loüys to stop writing under a chandelier as the light was ruining his eyes. I decided to send him an excellent desk lamp made in America next time I was back in the States, which would be fairly soon as I had promised my parents to spend the summer with them in Bar Harbour. While I was there I learned to my surprise and regret that this woman, so concerned for her husband's welfare, had left Pierre Loüys for their best friend, Gilbert de Voisins. Since my Cinq petits dialogues grecs had appeared in La Plume [The Quill] thanks to Pierre Loüys, I dedicated them to him, with this echo, "To Pierre Loüys from a young woman of the future." We remained firm friends till the end of his life, which closed into total darkness under a sky deprived of light by the war.

  But to return to the luminous Paris of peace time—Opale announced that she would be staying for a month in a residential hotel in the Rue de Chateaubriand which her mother had rented. Her first social visit was to us and I was enchanted, for when I clasped this fresh young woman, with her dazzling complexion, vibrating with poetry, I felt like I was embracing the English countryside. Although Renée spoke admiringly of her poetry, she remained reserved. After Opale left, having invited us to tea a few days later, Renée declared, "I'm not going." I asked her why. She explained that since she hated the world and especially her compatriots, she would not make an exception for Opale whose appearance and gay demeanor she considered unworthy of her poetry. Would she have changed her mind? Probably, for, sensing deeper motives for antagonism beneath her admiration and refusal, I reminded her that we must pass over the little defects and infelicities of the poetesses who were to be part of our group. To combat more effectively what I deemed to be the cause of her resentment, I pointed out that Sappho was more welcoming toward the women who came from far away to join her and, to avoid upsetting the harmony of their union, she tolerated even those of whom she was jealous, deriving inspiration from them. As an example I quoted, "You hate the thought of me, Atthis, you flee toward Andromeda." And didn't she remain attached to the unfaithful Atthis when she herself fell for someone else, declaring: "My feelings remain unchanged toward you, my beauties." Had I not convinced Renée by this subterfuge that nothing and no one could separate us? I do not know, for that very evening she received a telegram from Violette who was unable to leave Nice having fallen into a strange decline and was calling for Renée at her bedside. Renée went immediately to be with her, leaving me alone and grieving.

  I went reluctantly to take tea with Opale as promised, trying to take my mind off my worries. She introduced me to her mother, who was nothing like her, and her neighbor from Norwich whom she called Freddy: a pale young man who would shortly inherit the handsome title of Viscount of Canterbury.

  Secretly I admired his dark, brilliant eyes across which a touching expression would flicker from time to time. The lower part of his face, resolute and well-formed, was a great contrast to his hesitant voice in which he endeavored to express original ideas. Just as I was getting up to go, having arranged to see her again, the young Englishman, timid and eager all at once, accompanied me to my carriage, begging me not to exclude him from our next rendezvous in the Rue Alphonse-de-Neuville. Thinking that the problem was one of jealousy, I gently explained that we were going to talk poetry and that he could perhaps come over afterwards to take Opale home. When she came to my house she informed me during the course of the conversation that her friend Freddy had fallen head over heels in love with me and that nothing could be done to discourage him.

  "Tell him that I love you."

  She replied, "That wouldn't make the slightest difference. All he asks is that you agree to s
ee him from time to time."

  "And meanwhile, when will I see you again? Shall we have dinner together, just the two of us?"

  "Yes," she said.

  Then thinking better of it, "No, I'll come after dinner so as not to leave my mother and Freddy for too long."

  She came as arranged and we spent the evening in my studio bathed in moonlight and poetry. Sometimes the four of us would go out together. Freddy was happy just to look at me, speaking in that hesitant voice which was not devoid of charm but got irritating in the end.

  I wanted to spend time with Opale alone, and for a longer period, so I suggested that she come with me to Venice. As soon as her mother and Freddy left for England, we landed in the city of the Doges with a romantic enthusiasm more desired than felt—and moderated by the presence of our governess who was seated opposite us in the gondola. Wearing one of those brightly-colored elasticated bonnets, Neapolitan in origin, which, worn tipped backward, accentuated her Aztec features, she greeted this new country with glee. All that was missing from this beautiful setting was romantic adventure. She sought it in the person of a captain in the merchant marine who invited her on board and greeted her with open arms. Far from following her passionate example, by which she was unfaithful to Professor B.C., Opale and I shivered with fever—not the kind we hoped to find, but from malaria, leaving us weak for the whole duration of our stay, so weak in fact that we were unable to leave our twin beds. Opale hung a photograph of Antinous above her bedstead, making her dream of Lord Alfred Douglas. This Lord had captured her heart, but she could not marry him as she was already engaged to another whose career promised to be as brilliant as Alfred's was scandalous.2

  However, as she did not want to lose her poet, she hatched a plot to send Lord Alfred to me in the United States hoping that a marriage of convenience between him and me would enable her to arrange everything.