Natalie Clifford Barney

Natalie Clifford Barney is a personality Paris ienne and American woman of letters born with Dayton (Ohio) the October 31st 1876 and dead the February 2nd 1972 in Paris.

She wrote poetries, memories and epigram S, but believed that it was its life which was its true work of Article Ouvertement Lesbienne, she worked to make revive a literary history of the women. Particularly interested by poetries of Sappho, it tried to recreate a school of woman-poets as that which Sappho had held with Mytilène. One also knows it for his many conquests in love, including the poetess Renee Vivien, the dancer Liane of Pougy and the woman-painter Romaine Brooks. By its independence of mind, its freedom of morals, allied an exceptional charm, much of spirit and intelligence, Natalie Barney played a big role in Paris of the Belle Time. During more than sixty years, its literary living room of the Rue Jacob accommodated the writers and artists who counted on the two sides of the Atlantic.

Home environment

The mother of Natalie Barney, Alice Pike, had been promised in marriage to the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, but while this last had left for a forwarding two years, she married in her place Albert Clifford Barney, tycoon American of the railroads to Dayton, Ohio. A conversation with Oscar Wilde which it had had the occasion to meet while it made a round of reading in America inspired him the idea to be interested in art more seriously, against the wishes of her husband. Alice Pike studied under the direction of Carolus-Duran and James McNeill Whistler, and held of the exposures in solo in prestigious galleries of which the Corcoran Gallery off Art. In the following years, she invented and made patent mechanical processes, wrote and made play several parts and an opera, and she worked to support arts with Washington, D.C. Several of its paintings appear now in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Natalie was born in 1876 and was the elder one of two girls. When it was ten years old, its family left Ohio for Washington, D.C, spending the summers with Bar Harbor in the Maine.

It is a préceptrice which aloud woke up its interest for the French language by reading to him stories of Jules Verne, so that it had to quickly learn how in order to include/understand them. Thereafter, it and her Laura sister settled very young people with Paris with their mother Alice Pike Barney; they were then sent to the School of the Hives, a boarding school founded by the Féministe Marie Souvestre. Become adult, Natalie usually spoke French and without accent; she decided to remain in Paris, and almost all its works published were written in French.

A woman who loved the women

To the 12 years age, it realized that it liked the women and it solved then of “living at the great day, without hiding no matter what it was”. In 1899, after having seen the courtesan Liana of Pougy to a spectacle of dance in Paris, it was presented at it in a costume of page by announcing that it was a “page of the love” sent by Sappho. Although Pougy was one of the most famous women of France, with whom them the richest men and most titrated made the court, it was charmed temerity of Barney.

Liana of Pougy then conceives a very sharp passion for the American young person, whom it calls “moonbeam” (moonbeam) because of the silver plated color of her hair. During one season, the two women live an impassioned love but Natalie, not very inclined with fidelity, is not long in misleading Liane of Pougy, as well with several of the female models of his/her mother as with the poetess Renee Vivien. She evokes these loves in a collection of poems illustrated of drawings of her mother and published on account of author in 1900, Some portraits, sonnets of women , while Liane of Pougy tells its experiment in a transparent novel, Idylle saphic . Published in 1901, the book became the subject for conversation of the All-Paris and it had to be reprinted 70 times in the first year. At this time, however, both amantes had already broken after being disputed on several occasions, because Barney wanted “to save” Pougy of its existence of courtesan.

A profusion of adventures

The great success of the book is also a success of scandal and Natalie Barney is returned at once to the United States, where his/her father makes burn all the specimens of his collection of poems which it finds and seeks to marry it. But the young girl states that it will accept one party: Lord Alfred Douglas, the former lover of Oscar Wilde. In front of his stubbornness, his/her father must be solved to let it go back to Paris where it collects the adventures: Renee Vivien, Eva Micrometer caliper, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, English poetess Olive Custance (which will become Douglas lady), Colette, the professional singer Emma Calvé, the actress Henriette Roggers…

In 1902, with died of his/her father, it inherits a large fortune and can rent a house with Neuilly-sur-Seine where it gives pagan festivals which défraient the chronicle and where are found the majority of its conquests - except for Renee Vivien, disgusted by what it judges of the “Orgies” - but also Pierre Louÿs, Isadora Duncan and its brother Raymond, Mata Hari…

This house will be, during nearly sixty years, the framework of its famous “Fridays”, one of the last influential literary living rooms. One will see regularly there Auguste Rodin, Rainer Maria Rilke, Colette, James Joyce, Paul Valéry, Pierre Louÿs, Anatole France, Robert de Montesquiou, Edna St Vincent Millay, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Somerset Maugham, Radclyffe Hall, T.S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, Isadora Duncan, Ezra Pound, Virgil Thomson, Jean Cocteau, max Jacob, André Gide, William Carlos Williams, Djuna Barnes, George Antheil, Janet To stroll, Nancy Cunard, Peggy Guggenheim, Undermined Loy, Caresse and Harry Crosby, Marie Laurencin, Oscar Milosz, Paul Claudel, Adrienne Monnier, Sylvia Beach, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Emma Calvé, Sherwood Anderson, Hart Cranium, Alan Seeger, Mary McCarthy, Truman Capote, Francoise Sagan, Marguerite Yourcenar…

At the end of April 1909, it meets at Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Elisabeth de Gramont, which it initiates with the Saphisme and with which it ties impassioned relations. In April 1910, its collection of aphorisms, Scatterings , ensures its literary reputation. Remy de Gourmont, curious to know the author of this book, falls in love with Natalie Barney to which it addresses impassioned letters, which will be joined together later in volume under the title of Lettres in the Amazon . It is him which gives to Natalie this nickname, “the Amazon”, which it was to keep until the end of its life. A rather paradoxical nickname for this impassioned horsemanship, which did the One of the American newspapers, at the beginning of the Années 1920, while gallopping through Bar Harbor while leading a second horse to the support in front of it, and while going up with - califourchon instead of being wisely in the Amazon…

The longest known connection of Natalie Barney is that which it maintained with the painter American Romaine Brooks, which it met about 1914, and that it will mislead a time with Dolly Wilde, the niece Oscar Wilde, as from 1937. Its attitude during the Second world war remains discussed, certain historians suspecting it of kindness with regard to the Fascisme and of Hitler, and to show Antisémitisme. Exiled some time in Italy, it goes back after the war to Paris, where it reopens its literary living room which receives authors like Truman Capote and Marguerite Yourcenar. In the years 1950, Natalie Barney starts a connection with Janine Lahovary, the wife of a Rumanian ambassador, without to give up its friendship with Romaine Brooks, whom it helps regularly. She publishes Indiscreet Souvenirs in 1960 then Traits and Portraits in 1963. She dies on February 2nd, 1972.

His/her Laura sister was also woman of letters and wife of the French writer Hippolyte Dreyfus, specialist in the Baha' ism.

Works

Natalie Barney wrote the majority of its French books.

Some portraits, sonnets of women , poems (1900)
Five Small Greek dialogs (under the pseudonym of Tryphê) (1902)
Acts and between acts (1910)
Éparpillements (1910)
I remember , novel (1910)
Pensées of the Amazon; Unfavourable sexes, the war and feminism; Things of the love; Pages taken with the novel which I will not write (1920)
Poems and poems, other alliances (1920)
Aventures of the spirit (1929)
Nouvelles thoughts of the Amazon (1939)
indiscreet Souvenirs (1960)
a Basket of raspberries (1979)
Traits and portraits. Follow-up of the Love defended (1963)

Quotations

I am not explained, I not obeyed. - Scatterings
I judge according to their acts only those for which I have antipathy. - Scatterings
I like too the beginnings to know to like another thing. - Scatterings

References

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