A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney

by Natalie Clifford Barney

  The Unknown Woman

  And then the unknown woman—persuasive and fearsome, sweet and terrible, turned to me and said, "If you love me you will forget your family and your husband and your country and your children and you will come and live with me. If you love me, you will leave everything you cherish, both the places you remember and the places you long to go; and your memories and your hopes will be nothing but desire for me. If you love me, you will look neither forward nor backward, you will know me only, and your destiny will carry my footprint alone. If you love me, infinity will be my lips, you will have no prison but my arms and all your desires will be for my body."

  And, sobbing, I replied, "I love you."

  Breasts

  (A considered response to Ramon Gomez de la Serna and what he

  says—and does not say—about breasts.)

  Dedicated to man, who is never fully weaned.

  Young Spaniard, in search of hemispheres new—like your ancestor before you—what have you discovered of the mystery of these New Worlds? You have situated them on the great female body, described some of their properties, offered a few personal, at times contradictory observations on their sensitivities, flavor and climate, but they remain as strangers to you.

  Why did you not ponder the attraction of breasts more deeply, young man who writes too much and too little? What are those "poultices," those insensitive "gourds" which fill your mind and trouble you so pointlessly? Those breasts out of keeping with the rest of the body? Those rapturous deceptions? Do we conclude from your exposé that only women of the north have amorous, vibrant, demanding, electric breasts, leaving southern women the animality of teats devoid of compensation? You, who have devoted yourself to breasts, and have obviously misconstrued their locality—extinguished globes, whose switch seems to have been removed! What are those dead batteries, those electric wires with no current, those bells which no longer sound?

  Do you not arouse them by your touch even to the dangers of joy?

  Let us leave in peace, or to their natural functions, the dead planets full of moon's milk, and turn our attention to those breasts which are attentive to the seduction they themselves have caused!

  "Her breasts rose, proud of their virginity," wrote Renée Vivien. It is to them we must pay court: they stand in judgement of their admirers, testing a lover more surely than ever Portia's caskets. (How Anglo-Saxon, that feminist trick of trying out one's suitors with treasures exterior to one's person.)

  Many women give themselves more willingly than they give their breasts—to avoid offering their breasts?

  Those peaks, difficult of ascent, reserved for the elect, determine the quality and breeding of a lover so much better than any fun and games down below! For aren't the breasts more delicately connected with the center of sensation than the short-circuit of sexual climax? Breasts: passion's accelerator, electric lead, guide to femininity wherein the first signs of arousal dwell.

  "Breasts erect as though full of milk eternally, pointing toward the sky."

  Flower of the senses, complex, dense, heavy with all your secrets, language, experience, throbbing, perfumes, sight, touch; all sharpen to a point till this pre-eminence abdicates in favour of that excess which will extinguish it.

  That head thrown back, those eyes which change colour and moisture, that mouth which reveals its secret source, that ardent malaise, that enticement to possession... Those breasts which sound the alarm, those cries of joy so like the cries of a newborn baby!

  Bend over, attentive to this joy before the joy where promise and desire go hand in hand and meet to plot their own defeat!

  This moment alone is yours.

  Now inhale with all your being that which distinguishes love and makes it divine.

  Blasphemous man who has compelled me to spell things out in this unworthy speech, may this rivalry honor and enlighten you.

  Defending the breast against your masculine errors and incomprehension, I feel as though I am in some way defending my native land!

  The Climbing Rose

  As she looks at the dates she realizes with surprise and dismay that, despite our careful calculations, her husband might already have returned from his long journey and she turns on me with hostility. I was wounded by her injustice, and to make plain to her the wrong she did us—or perhaps simply to put her to sleep—I told her a story resembling our own in which I compared her to a climbing rose with its roots in one garden but who blossoms in another.

  He whose garden is graced by this spray of flowers, forever fresh, forever new, becomes enchanted by them. Until the day he realizes full well that the wall separates him from the life of the rose bush—that it is planted in foreign soil, belongs to an owner, and that this owner, seeing his rose bush is growing over the wall and bearing its flowers abroad, can move it away, force it to climb in his garden only, for the glory of his beds so that his friends may see, admire and compliment him. For the owner is motivated only by vanity.

  But he who comes in the night to his rendezvous with the roses wants the bush for his own, even if he has to steal it. The bush is happy with him, loves him dearly. But the rose does nor belong to the one who loves it best; it belongs to the one who planted it.

  The Sitting Room

  We left Eastbourne on roads leading south, so green in winter and so clement that the summer seems to have come back in a rush, leaving its leaves behind.

  Toward evening we reach the beginning of the New Forest. An inn on the edge of the forest tempts us with its pleasing asymmetry, looking like a home from home. A blowsy landlady, merry and a bit vague (she's been drinking), shows us two rooms already occupied, apologizes to the absent guests and takes us to one with two little beds which, she tells us, is not booked till the following morning. I look questioningly at my friend, she likes the place but is not so taken with the small beds. The landlady opens the door of a room down a short flight of steps whose small size is compensated by the endless lawn which stretches away from the windows. The room seems merely to provide the frame for the big bed at its center.

  "This is fine for one of us, but where will the other sleep?"

  "You mean the two of you cannot manage to sleep together in a bed that's six foot wide?"

  "We prefer two beds and two bedrooms."

  "We must have two beds and two bedrooms," my friend insists. She finds the innocence of certain English customs unfathomable. The English see nothing ambiguous about putting two girls who are not related to sleep in the same alcove. Anxious to satisfy our absurd foreign demands, the landlady shows us a delicious sitting room full of naive knickknacks with a bow window looking onto the garden, and a folding sofa. To complete our sleeping arrangements we asked that this sitting room be included as our second bedroom. The landlady says she has no spare single bed to put in there but that one of us could sleep on the sofa, she would look out some sheets and blankets. Pleased to have saved appearances, my friend declares that she will be very comfortable sleeping there. The landlady, doubtless contemptuous of our fussiness, goes off to give instructions.

  We see her again later standing at the serving table, doing the carving herself, slicing the enormous joints of cold ham, beef and mutton so that we may take our pick. She tells us, in the same vague way, that she is awfully sorry but we cannot have the use of the sitting room until ten o' clock that evening as she has promised it to a gentleman. We have already agreed to this arrangement before we realize that the gentleman in question is the same individual who had driven down with a London flapper. He refills her glass with champagne and awaits the results with sly satisfaction. As she drinks his desire becomes more evident, more brutal, more assured, the gleam in his eye predatory and male.

  As we go back up to our sitting room we decide nor to allow it to be invaded even for an hour by this couple intoxicated to the point of lust. And since on this island the appearance of virtue is always triumphant, the chambermaid, left out on the landing, goes away, silently outraged by our indigna
tion, to tell the landlady who, perhaps fearful of our shrewdness, leads the couple away somewhere else, the enormous empty banqueting hall, maybe, which we glimpsed from the garden, or simply entrusts them to the balmy evening.

  "Why not let them have a bedroom?"

  That would have shocked everyone. For such a manifestly unmarried couple there remains only these sitting rooms with automatic sofas—once again to save appearances—the English version of your "sperm-stained divans." With one exception: there is no way to lock the door which is, in any case, safe from intrusion thanks to the hypocritical complicity of those who profit from the situation. "A door must be either open or closed" is a very French theory; over here either alternative is considered equally dangerous.

  As predicted, we spent a very comfortable night in the big hard bed having had the—very French—hypocrisy to muss up the sheets on the sofa. One can never say for sure what are the advantages and disadvantages of a bed until one has shared it with someone else. I now had occasion to observe that hard beds set the body off to greater effect since, unlike soft beds, they do not allow it to sink down into them. Laid out on this formidable buckler of horsehair and brass, my beloved seemed to have been offered up to me as the spoils of ceaseless victories. And what war drums rolled that night, my heart sounding the alarm perforce and beating with all its might. My heavy breathing was better suited to arouse her than any alarm bell, since I desired her all the more insatiably after such tremendous, satisfying resistance.

  And in the morning we drove back again.

  Part Three: Natalie on Gay Life Styles

  Misunderstanding

  If people condemn without thinking it is because they rarely

  tolerate anything beyond their own personal needs.

  ⚜

  Since God made Eve from Adam's rib, everything has been

  abnormal.

  ⚜

  Flaubert was criticized for writing: "He wept for his lover.”

  ⚜

  The Puritans who landed in America had an old law: "Ye dirty

  fellow that lieth with ye dirty fellow shall swing until he die."

  Gide and the Others

  Gide's life, a series of zigzags, is, like a flash of lightning, as illuminating as it is dangerous. His actions plot out his course in broad strokes; through the lives of others he discovers himself. He is dazzling, and disappointing, and his path is dogged by shadows. Approaching everything laterally, he finds meaning in nonsense. He embraces religion the better to distance himself from it. He makes the same use, and misuse, of marriage.

  He confesses in The Immoralist that ever since his honeymoon he has felt an irresistible attraction toward adolescent boys. If, after long years of unconsummated marriage, he turned to adultery, it was an act of caprice, or through pure contrariness. The experiment resulted in a daughter, looking just like her father.

  When his wife, driven to the edge by the accumulated disappointment and despair of her married life, burnt all the letters he sent her—as so many lies—he was inconsolable. Inconsolable, not because this gesture showed how wretched he had made her, but because he considered those letters to be the most interesting he had ever written. They must have been strange love letters indeed, empty of all desire, full of that strange love so common in Anglo-Saxon countries in which the high-thinking, little-acting lover does not deign to deflower his chosen idol with lust.

  Gide’s version of the medieval cult of the Madonna and the Lady, or the Lady and the Madonna, is characterized by his lack of attention to women in general and to his own wife in particular, for whom he felt an unbounded respect, so that he could indulge his innate taste for boys without hindrance. Given his "perverse" personality, he was perhaps never so fond of his wife as when he was cheating on her. Their kinship and Protestant ancestry should, however, have made him more restrained, or more discreet. Since his Puritan forebears had probably exhausted all the virtues, perhaps he felt that enough was enough?

  Only the gods may do as they please. Does one not need to be very certain of one's own moral code if one wants to do without any other morality?

  Nevertheless, the young Gide felt constrained, at first, to a certain amount of prudence. Thus, sitting in a cafe once with Oscar Wilde, he picked a table at the back hoping that no one would recognize him. Later, at the home of our friend, Pierre Loüys, when I suggested introducing Gide to Lord Alfred Douglas, the temptation gave him a long moment of exquisite, tortuous hesitation.

  Then gradually realizing that it was his hesitation in betraying social convention which betrayed him more than his actions, he was driven ineluctably beyond himself toward whatever could serve his art and singularity. Gifted with the keenest, craftiest intelligence he realized that if he put his subtle imagination—a direct product of his temperament—to work in the service of his vices, he could increase his reputation.

  When Claudel himself made the mistake of complaining to Maurice Rostand about the increasing number of homosexuals who should, according to him, be driven out, Maurice replied, "But your Excellency, in that case the salons would be empty!"

  Since nature has created so many different, indeed opposite types, let us praise her for offering compensation for our common wretchedness. What is more "unnatural" than the present attempt to herd us all toward one prototype, the "robot".Let us choose for ourselves amongst those who persist in having a personality and of whom there are, like rare books, but a few examples.

  Gide, while proclaiming the right to homosexuality, has done nothing to raise it above the level of heterosexuality, quite the reverse! People have told me that Gide is to be praised for playing an important role in destroying the sense of sin which has weighed on the consciences of innumerable young men with homosexual tendencies. Does this good deed offset the bad example Gide set them of promiscuity reduced to the level of erotic need? This example, which too many pederasts have followed, tends to degrade what it intended to elevate above contemporary morality and would be a good argument in favour of conformity.

  There is no clearer example of how to betray what one claims to love!

  If "the style is the man," how can we admire the former but not the latter? How can we not deplore the fact that such a writer could find nothing better to amuse himself in his old age than pursuing young men who spurned his advances, as in the scene in his last diary which he describes down to the smallest detail?

  Protestants have, doubtless, no other confessional. In any case, it was not absolution Gide had in mind bur a fresh opportunity to declare his independence. What a sordid example of freedom it gives, demonstrating the servility it imposes! If everyone is to do whatever they want, let them at least do something. Shakespeare wrote his Sonnets, Gide the most pedestrian of his novels. Perhaps he was unconsciously working in the name of virtue by making his vice look so ugly. Is there no one left who is good at being bad!

  To return to that unpleasant scene with Victor, as he is called, it is offset to some extent by another scene where Gide, in his declining years, is sitting in the shade on a terrace in the Midi. He is happy enough with a pile of clothes on his lap that a group of young boys have entrusted to him. That octogenarian must have watched their muscled young bodies with nostalgia as they competed with each other in innocent athletic contests while he had spent too much of his life devoted to erotic interludes instead of becoming, as Socrates in his wisdom advised, "the virtuous lover" and enlightened guide of those he had loved and raised to his level.

  Illicit Love Defended

  Countess G. used to say, "What do I care if they love men, women or canaries!"

  The great lady was surely right: only love is important, not the sex to whom it is directed. The rest is merely a question of rearing, selection and segregation of the species—our own faces a danger of quite another kind. Superstition and prejudice weigh love down. Let it be free of them—our only regret that there should be so little in the world.

  Since the experiment with earthly paradise di
dn't work out, and earth became the "vale of tears" we know today, can God have created this world of evil with its system of man eat man, or, as in the Manichean belief, did another Power? Whether our customs derive from the gods, from insects or some other origin, nature which accepts all ways of being, absorbs them and makes them hers. The expression "against nature" has naturally fallen out of use, but we should recognize that nothing could be more unnatural than the uniformity we seek to achieve.

  "Boredom was born one day from uniformity."

  We have already eliminated many animal species, including the bird of paradise! But what can we do about the high birth rate which threatens the human race? The biblical injunction to "Go forth and multiply" doubtless made sense at a time when there were too few human beings to populate the earth. And now? Since neither wars of extermination nor "birth control" have been sufficient to reduce the population, why does the Host of Hosts not take it upon himself to change his slogan to "Stay home and stop multiplying"? Wouldn't that be the action of a sensible host who is careful not to invite too many people to the banquet of life (a banquet at which the food is getting more and more tasteless!) whom he's unable to receive, feed and lodge properly?

  "You will earn your bread by the sweat of your brow."

  But what if there are more brows than bread? And if the Creator had his reasons for wanting to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, are those reasons still valid? And didn't he also curse the first couple by throwing them out of paradise and condemning them to reproduce in pain?