Natalie Clifford Barney
Natalie Clifford Barney 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, including on-and-off romances with poet Renée Vivien and courtesan Liane de Pougy and longer relationships with writer Élisabeth de Gramont and painter Romaine Brooks.
Barney hosted a salon at her home at 20-22 rue Jacob in the 6th arrondissement of 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 of various sexualities mingled comfortably at the weekly gatherings. She worked to promote writing by women and hosted a "Women's Academy" 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, 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, ranging from de Pougy's erotic French bestseller Idylle Saphique to Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, the most famous lesbian novel of the twentieth century.
Early life
Barney was born in 1876 in Dayton, Ohio, to Albert Clifford Barney and Alice Pike Barney. When Barney was a year old, she and her family moved to Cincinnati, staying in a suite of rooms in the Burnet House, a grand hotel. The Barneys were living here when Natalie's sister, Laura, was born in November 1879. They stayed at the Burnet House until eventually moving to a house in the elite Mount Auburn neighborhood in 1881.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 sexual relationship during one such trip in 1893. Barney likened Palmer's appearance to that of a medieval virgin. 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 the courtesan 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.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 after quarreling repeatedly over Barney's desire to "rescue" de Pougy from her life as a courtesan. Despite the breakup, the two continued having liaisons for decades.
Their on-and-off affair became the subject of de Pougy's tell-all roman à clef, Idylle Saphique. Published in 1901, the book and its sexually suggestive 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 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, 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.File:Natalie Barney and Renee Vivien.jpg|thumb|left|Renée Vivien and Barney; posing for a portrait in Directoire-era costume
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 up to Vivien on her balcony. Both flowers and poem were intercepted and returned by a governess.
In 1904 she wrote Je Me Souviens, 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, who herself had an affair with Barney in 1906, was Vivien's friend and neighbor. According to Colette, Vivien ate almost nothing and drank heavily, even rinsing her mouth with perfumed water to hide the smell. Colette's account has led some to call Vivien an anorexic, but this diagnosis did not yet exist at the time. Vivien was also addicted to the sedative chloral hydrate. In 1908 she attempted suicide by overdosing on laudanum and died the following year. In a memoir written fifty years later, Barney said, "She could not be saved. Her life was a long suicide. Everything turned to dust and ashes in her hands."
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.