Natalie Clifford Barney facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Natalie Clifford Barney
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Barney in 1898, photograph by Alice Hughes
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| Born | October 31, 1876 Dayton, Ohio, US
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| Died | February 2, 1972 (aged 95) Paris, France
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| Burial place | Passy Cemetery |
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Natalie Clifford Barney (October 31, 1876 – February 2, 1972) was an American writer who hosted a literary salon at her home in Paris that brought together French and international writers. She influenced other authors through her salon and also with her poetry, plays, and epigrams, often thematically tied to her lesbianism and feminism.
Barney was born into a wealthy family. She was partly educated in France, and expressed a desire from a young age to live openly as a lesbian. She moved to France with her first romantic partner, Eva Palmer. Inspired by the work of Sappho, Barney began publishing love poems to women under her own name as early as 1900. Writing in both French and English, she supported feminism and pacifism. She opposed monogamy and had many overlapping long and short-term relationships.
Barney hosted a salon at her home in Paris for more than 60 years, bringing together writers and artists from around the world, including many leading figures in French, American, and British literature. Attendees expressed themselves and mingled comfortably at the weekly gatherings. She worked to promote writing by women and hosted a "Women's Academy" (L'Académie des Femmes) in her salon as a response to the all-male French Academy. The salon closed for the duration of World War II while Barney lived in Italy with Brooks. She initially espoused some pro-fascist views, but supported the Allies by the end of the war. After the war, she returned to Paris, resumed the salon, and continued influencing or inspiring writers such as Truman Capote.
Barney had a wide literary influence. Remy de Gourmont addressed public letters to her using the nickname l'Amazon (the Amazon), and Barney's association with both de Gourmont and the nickname lasted until her death. Her life and love affairs served as inspiration for many novels written by others.
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Early life
Barney was born in 1876 in Dayton, Ohio, to Albert Clifford Barney and Alice Pike Barney. Alice learned to love the arts from her father, who owned Pike's Opera House in Cincinnati, Ohio. Albert Barney partially inherited his family's railroad car manufacturing company, Barney & Smith Car Works.
When Barney was five years old, she encountered Oscar Wilde at a New York hotel. Wilde scooped her up as she ran past him fleeing a group of small boys and held her out of their reach. Then he sat her down on his knee and told her a story. The next day he joined Barney and her mother on the beach, and Wilde inspired Alice to pursue art seriously, which she did despite her husband's disapproval.
Like many girls of her time, Barney had a haphazard education. Her interest in the French language began with a governess who read Jules Verne stories aloud to her, so she would have to learn quickly to understand them. She and her younger sister Laura attended Les Ruches, a French boarding school in Fontainebleau, France, founded by feminist Marie Souvestre. As an adult, she spoke and wrote French fluently.
When she was ten, her family moved from Ohio to the Sheridan Circle area of Washington D.C., spending summers at their large cottage in Bar Harbor, Maine. As the rebellious and unconventional daughter of one of the wealthiest families in town, she was often mentioned in Washington newspapers. In her early twenties she made headlines by galloping through Bar Harbor while driving a second horse on a lead ahead of her, riding astride instead of sidesaddle.
Barney later said she knew she was a lesbian by age twelve, and she was determined to "live openly, without hiding anything".
Early relationships
Eva Palmer
Barney's earliest intimate relationship was with Eva Palmer. They became acquainted during summer vacations in Bar Harbor, Maine, and began a relationship during one such trip in 1893. The two remained close for several years. As young adults in Paris they shared an apartment at 4 rue Chalgrin and eventually took their own residences in Neuilly. Barney frequently solicited Palmer's help in her romantic pursuits of other women, including Pauline Tarn. Palmer ultimately left Barney's side for Greece and eventually married Angelos Sikelianos. Their relationship did not survive this turn of events: Barney took a dim view of Angelos and heated letters were exchanged. Later in their lives the friendship was repaired through correspondence and reunions in New York.
Liane de Pougy
In 1899, after seeing Liane de Pougy at a dance hall in Paris, Barney presented herself at de Pougy's residence in a page costume and announced she was a "page of love" sent by Sappho. Although de Pougy was one of the most famous women in France, constantly sought after by wealthy and titled men, Barney's audacity charmed her.
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Barney stood to inherit some family wealth held in trust if she either married or waited for her father's death. While courting de Pougy, Barney was engaged to Robert Cassat, a member of another wealthy railroad family. Barney was open with Cassat about her love of women and relationship with de Pougy. In the hopes of securing the Barney trust money, the three briefly considered a rushed wedding between Barney and Cassat and an adoption of de Pougy. When Cassat ended the engagement, Barney attempted unsuccessfully to persuade her father to give her the money anyway.
By the end of 1899, the two had broken up. Despite the breakup, the two continued their relationship for decades.
Their on-and-off affair became the subject of de Pougy's tell-all roman à clef, Idylle Saphique (Sapphic Idyll). Published in 1901, the book and its scenes became the talk of Paris, reprinted more than 70 times in its first year. Barney was soon well known as the model for one of the characters.
Barney herself contributed a chapter to Idylle Saphique in which she described reclining at de Pougy's feet in a screened box at the theater, watching Sarah Bernhardt's play Hamlet. During intermission, Barney (as "Flossie") compares Hamlet's plight with that of women: "What is there for women who feel the passion for action when pitiless Destiny holds them in chains? Destiny made us women at a time when the law of men is the only law that is recognized." She also wrote Lettres à une Connue (Letters to a Woman I Have Known), her own epistolary novel about the affair. Although Barney failed to find a publisher for the book and later called it naïve and clumsy, it is notable for its discussion of homosexuality, which Barney regarded as natural and compared to albinism. "My queerness," she said, "is not a vice, is not deliberate, and harms no one."
Renée Vivien
In November 1899, Barney met the poet Pauline Tarn, better known by her pen name Renée Vivien. For Vivien it was love at first sight, while Barney became fascinated with Vivien after hearing her recite one of her poems, which Barney described as "haunted by the desire for death". Their romantic relationship was also a creative exchange that inspired both of them to write. Barney provided a feminist theoretical framework which Vivien explored in her poetry. They adapted the imagery of the Symbolist poets along with the conventions of courtly love to describe love between women, also finding examples of heroic women in history and myth. Sappho was an especially important influence and they studied Greek so as to read the surviving fragments of her poetry in the original. Both wrote plays about her life.
Vivien saw Barney as a muse and as Barney put it, "she had found new inspiration through me, almost without knowing me". Barney felt Vivien had cast her as a femme fatale and that she wanted "to lose herself ... entirely in suffering" for the sake of her art. Vivien also believed in monogamy, which Barney was unwilling to agree to. While Barney was visiting her family in Washington, D.C. in 1901, Vivien stopped answering her letters. Barney tried to get her back for years, at one point persuading a friend, operatic mezzo-soprano Emma Calvé, to sing under Vivien's window so she could throw a poem (wrapped around a bouquet of flowers) up to Vivien on her balcony. Both flowers and poem were intercepted and returned by a governess.
In 1904 she wrote Je Me Souviens (I Remember), an intensely personal prose poem about their relationship which was presented as a single handwritten copy to Vivien in an attempt to win her back. They reconciled and traveled together to Lesbos, where they lived happily together for a short time and discussed starting a school of poetry for women like the one which Sappho, according to tradition, had founded on Lesbos some 2,500 years before. However, Vivien soon got a letter from her lover Baroness Hélène van Zuylen and went to Constantinople thinking she would break up with her in person. Vivien planned to meet Barney in Paris afterward, but instead stayed with the Baroness. This time, the breakup was permanent.
Vivien's health declined rapidly after this. The author Colette was Vivien's friend and neighbor. Vivien died in 1909.
In 1949, two years after the death of Hélène van Zuylen, Barney restored the Renée Vivien Prize with a financial grant under the authority of the Société des gens de lettres and took on the chairmanship of the jury in 1950.
Olive Custance
Barney purchased and read Opals in 1900, a debut collection of poems by Olive Custance. Responding to the lesbian themes in the poetry, Barney began corresponding with Custance and exchanging poems. The two met in 1901 at Barney and Vivien's home in Paris, and they soon began a short romantic relationship. Custance was also pursuing a relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, who she would later marry.
Poetry and plays
In 1900, Barney published her first book, a collection of poems called Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes (Some Portrait-Sonnets of Women). The poems were written in traditional French verse and a formal, old-fashioned style since Barney did not care for free verse. Quelques Portraits has been described as "apprentice work", a classifier which betrays its historical significance. According to biographer Suzanne Rodriguez, the collection's publication meant that Barney became the first woman poet to openly write about the love of women since Sappho. Her mother contributed pastel illustrations of the poems' subjects, wholly unaware three of the four women who modelled for her were her daughter's lovers.
Reviews were generally positive and glossed over the lesbian theme of the poems, some even misrepresenting it. The Washington Mirror said Barney "writes odes to men's lips and eyes; not like a novice, either". However, a headline in a society gossip paper cried out "Sappho Sings in Washington" and this alerted her father, who bought and destroyed the publisher's remaining stock and printing plates.
To escape her father's sway Barney published her next book, Cinq Petits Dialogues Grecs (Five Short Greek Dialogues, 1901), under the pseudonym Tryphé. The name came from the works of Pierre Louÿs, who helped edit and revise the manuscript. Barney also dedicated the book to him. The first of the dialogues is set in ancient Greece and contains a long description of Sappho, who is "more faithful in her inconstancy than others in their fidelity". Another argues for paganism over Christianity. After the death of Barney's father in 1902, his approximately $9 million fortune ($304 million in 2018 ) was left in trust with annual income to be split equally between Barney, her mother, and her sister. His death and the money freed her from any need to conceal the authorship of her books; she never used a pseudonym again. She considered scandal "the best way of getting rid of nuisances" (meaning heterosexual attention from young men).
Je Me Souviens was published in 1910, after Vivien's death. That same year, Barney published Actes et Entr'actes (Acts and Interludes), a collection of short plays and poems. One of the plays was Équivoque (Ambiguity), a revisionist version of the legend of Sappho's death: instead of throwing herself off a cliff for the love of Phaon the sailor, she does so out of grief that Phaon is marrying the woman she loves. The play incorporates quotations from Sappho's fragments, with Barney's own footnotes in Greek, and was performed with ancient Greek-inspired music and dance.
Barney did not take her poetry as seriously as Vivien did, saying "if I had one ambition it was to make my life itself into a poem". Her plays were only performed through amateur productions in her garden. According to Karla Jay, most of them lacked coherent plots and "would probably baffle even the most sympathetic audience". After 1910 she mostly wrote the epigrams and memoirs, for which she is better known. Her last book of poetry was called Poems & Poemes: Autres Alliances and came out in 1920, bringing together romantic poetry in both French and English. Barney asked Ezra Pound to edit the poems, but ignored his detailed recommendations.
Salon
For over 60 years, Barney hosted a literary salon, first in Neuilly but mostly at her home at 20, Rue Jacob, in Paris. Her salon was a weekly, Friday gathering at which people met to socialize and discuss literature, art, music and any other topic of interest. Though she hosted some of the most prominent male writers of her time, Barney strove to shed light on female writers and their work.
In addition to its focus on women, Barney's salon was distinguished by its deliberately international character. She brought together expatriate Modernists with members of the French Academy.
In the 1900s Barney held early gatherings of the salon at her house in Neuilly. The entertainment included poetry readings and theatricals (in which Colette sometimes performed). Mata Hari performed a dance once, riding into the garden as Lady Godiva on a white horse harnessed with turquoise cloisonné. The play Equivoque may have led Barney to leave Neuilly in 1909. According to a contemporary newspaper article, her landlord objected to her holding an outdoor performance of a play about Sappho, which he felt "followed nature too closely". She canceled her lease and rented the pavilion on Rue Jacob in Paris's Latin Quarter, and her salon was held there until the late 1960s. This was a small two-story house, separated on three sides from the main building on the street. Next to the pavilion was a large, overgrown garden with a Doric "Temple of Friendship" tucked into one corner. In this new location, the salon grew a more prim outward face, with poetry readings and conversation, perhaps because Barney had been told the pavilion's floors would not hold up to large dancing parties. Frequent guests during this period included poets Pierre Louÿs and Paul Claudel, diplomat Philippe Berthelot and translator J. C. Mardrus.
During World War I, the salon became a haven for those opposed to the war. Henri Barbusse gave a reading from his anti-war novel Under Fire and Barney hosted a Women's Congress for Peace. Other visitors to the salon during the war included Oscar Milosz, Auguste Rodin and poet Alan Seeger, who came while on leave from the French Foreign Legion.
Ezra Pound was a close friend of Barney's and often visited. The two schemed together to subsidize Paul Valéry and T. S. Eliot so they could leave their jobs and focus on writing, but Valéry found other patrons and Eliot refused the grant. Pound introduced Barney to avant-garde composer George Antheil, and, while her own taste in music leaned towards the traditional, she hosted premieres of Antheil's Symphony for Five Instruments and First String Quartet. It was also at Barney's salon that Pound met his longtime mistress, the violinist Olga Rudge.
In 1927 Barney started an Académie des Femmes (Women's Academy) to honor women writers. This was a response to the influential Académie Française (French Academy) which had been founded in the 17th century by Louis XIII and whose 40 members included no women at the time. Unlike the French Academy, Barney's was not a formal organization but rather a series of readings held as part of the regular Friday salons. Honorees included Colette, Gertrude Stein, Anna Wickham, Rachilde, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes and posthumously, Renée Vivien. The academy's activities wound down after 1927.
Other visitors to the salon during the 1920s included French writers Jeanne Galzy, André Gide, Anatole France, Max Jacob, Louis Aragon and Jean Cocteau. English-language writers also visited, including Ford Madox Ford, W. Somerset Maugham, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Thornton Wilder, T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams. Barney also hosted German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (the first Nobel laureate from Asia), Romanian aesthetician and diplomat Matila Ghyka, journalist Janet Flanner (also known as Genêt, who set the New Yorker style), journalist, activist and publisher Nancy Cunard, publishers Caresse and Harry Crosby, publisher Blanche Knopf, art collector and patron Peggy Guggenheim, Sylvia Beach (the bookstore owner who published James Joyce's Ulysses), painters Tamara de Lempicka and Marie Laurencin and dancer Isadora Duncan.
For her 1929 book Aventures de l'Esprit (Adventures of the Mind) Barney drew a social diagram which crowded the names of over a hundred people who had attended the salon into a rough map of the house, garden and Temple of Friendship. The first half of the book had reminiscences of 13 male writers she had known or met over the years and the second half had a chapter for each member of her Académie des Femmes.
In the late 1920s Radclyffe Hall drew a crowd reading her novel The Well of Loneliness, recently banned in the UK. A reading by poet Edna St. Vincent Millay packed the salon in 1932. At another Friday salon in the 1930s Virgil Thomson sang from Four Saints in Three Acts, an opera based on a libretto by Stein.
Of the famous Modernist writers who spent time in Paris, Ernest Hemingway never made an appearance at the salon. James Joyce came once or twice but did not care for it. Marcel Proust never attended a Friday but did come once to talk with Barney about lesbian culture whilst doing research for In Search of Lost Time, though he ended up too nervous to bring up the subject.
Epigrams and novel
Éparpillements (Scatterings, 1910) was Barney's first collection of pensées—literally, thoughts. This literary form had been associated with salon culture in France since the 17th century, when the genre was perfected at the salon of Madame de Sablé. Barney's pensées, like de Sablé's own Maximes, were short, often one-line epigrams or bon mots such as "There are more evil ears than bad mouths" and "To be married is to be neither alone nor together."
Her literary career got a boost after she sent a copy of Éparpillements to Remy de Gourmont, a French poet, literary critic, and philosopher who had become a recluse after contracting the disfiguring disease lupus vulgaris in his thirties. He was impressed enough to invite her to one of the Sunday gatherings at his home, at which he usually received only a small group of old friends. She was a rejuvenating influence in his life, coaxing him out for evening car rides, dinners at the Rue Jacob, a masked ball, even a short cruise on the Seine. He turned some of their wide-ranging conversations into a series of letters that he published in the Mercure de France, addressing her as l'Amazone, a French word that can mean either horsewoman or Amazon; the letters were later collected in book form. He died in 1915, but the nickname he gave her would stay with her all her life—even her tombstone identifies her as "the Amazon of Remy de Gourmont"—and his Letters to the Amazon left readers wanting to know more about the woman who had inspired them.
Barney obliged in 1920 with Pensées d'une Amazone (Thoughts of an Amazon), her most overtly political work. The One Who is Legion, or A.D.'s After-Life (1930) was Barney's only book written entirely in English, as well as her only novel.
World War II and after
Barney's attitudes during World War II have been controversial. In 1937, Una, Lady Troubridge, complained that Barney "talked a lot of half-baked nonsense about the tyranny of fascism". Barney herself had Jewish heritage, and since she spent the war in Florence with Brooks, was investigated by Italian authorities because of this; she was able to escape their attention after her sister Laura arranged for a notarized document attesting to her confirmation.
Nevertheless, she believed Axis propaganda that portrayed the Allies as the aggressors. Therefore, pro-Fascism seemed to her to be a logical consequence of her pacifism. An unpublished memoir she wrote during the war years is pro-Fascist and anti-Semitic, quoting speeches by Hitler, apparently with approval.
It is possible that the anti-Semitic passages in her memoir were intended to be used as evidence that she was not Jewish; alternatively, she may have been influenced by Ezra Pound's anti-Semitic radio broadcasts. Whatever the case, she did help a Jewish couple escape Italy, providing passage on a ship to the United States. By the end of the war her sympathies had again changed, and she saw the Allies as liberators.
Villa Trait d'Union was destroyed by bombing. After the war, Brooks declined to live with Barney in Paris; she remained in Italy, and they visited each other frequently. Their relationship remained mostly monogamous until the mid-1950s, when Barney met her last new love, Janine Lahovary, the wife of a retired Romanian ambassador. Lahovary made a point of winning Brooks's friendship, Barney reassured Brooks that their relationship still came first, and the triangle appeared to be stable.
The salon resumed in 1949 and continued to attract young writers for whom it was as much a piece of history as a place where literary reputations were made. Truman Capote was an intermittent guest for almost ten years; he described the decor as "totally turn-of-the-century" and remembered that Barney introduced him to the models for several characters in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
Alice B. Toklas became a regular after her partner Stein's death in 1946. Fridays in the 1960s honored Mary McCarthy and Marguerite Yourcenar, who in 1980—eight years after Barney's death—became the first female member of the French Academy.
Barney did not return to writing epigrams, but did publish two volumes of memoirs about other writers she had known, Souvenirs Indiscrets (Indiscreet Memories, 1960) and Traits et Portraits (Traits and Portraits, 1963). She also worked to find a publisher for Brooks's memoirs and to place her paintings in galleries.
In the late 1960s Brooks became increasingly reclusive and paranoid; she sank into a depression and refused to see the doctors Barney sent. Bitter at Lahovary's presence during their last years, which she had hoped they would spend exclusively together, she finally broke off contact with Barney. Barney continued to write to her, but received no replies. Brooks died in December 1970, and Barney on February 2, 1972, aged 95, from heart failure. She is buried at Passy Cemetery, Paris, Île-de-France, France. She left some of her writing, including more than 40,000 letters, to the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques-Doucet in Paris.
Legacy
By the end of Natalie Barney's life her work had been largely forgotten. In 1979, Barney was honored with a place setting in Judy Chicago's feminist work of art The Dinner Party. In the 1980s Barney began to be recognized for what Karla Jay calls an "almost uncanny anticipation" of the concerns of later feminist writers. English translations of some of her memoirs, essays, and epigrams appeared in 1992, but most of her plays and poetry are untranslated.
Works
In French
- Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes (Paris: Ollendorf, 1900)
- Cinq Petits Dialogues Grecs (Paris: La Plume, 1901; as "Tryphé")
- Actes et entr'actes (Paris: Sansot, 1910)
- Je me souviens (Paris: Sansot, 1910)
- Eparpillements (Paris: Sansot, 1910)
- Pensées d'une Amazone (Paris: Emile Paul, 1920)
- Aventures de l'Esprit (Paris: Emile Paul, 1929)
- Nouvelles Pensées de l'Amazone (Paris: Mercure de France, 1939)
- Souvenirs Indiscrets (Paris: Flammarion, 1960)
- Traits et Portraits (Paris: Mercure de France, 1963)
- Amants féminins ou la troisième (Paris: ErosOnyx, 2013)
In English
- Poems & Poèmes: Autres Alliances (Paris: Emile Paul, New York: Doran, 1920) – bilingual collection of poetry
- The One Who Is Legion (London: Eric Partridge, Ltd., 1930; Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1987) facsimile reprint with an afterword by Edward Lorusso
English translations
- A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney (New Victoria Publishers, 1992); edited and translated by Anna Livia
- Adventures of the Mind (New York University Press, 1992); translated by John Spalding Gatton
- Women Lovers, or The Third Woman (University of Wisconsin Press, 2016); edited and translated by Chelsea Ray
See also
In Spanish: Natalie Clifford Barney para niños
- LGBT culture in Paris
- Renée Vivien Prize
