Twentieth Century Paris by Marie-José Gransard

Author:Marie-José Gransard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780755601776
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

PHOTO 15 Natalie Barney’s salon was at 20 rue Jacob

Her first collection of poems, Éparpillements (Scatterings), was published in 1910. A copy was sent to Remy de Gourmont (1858–1915) who at the time was leading a lonely life and became besotted with her. His Lettres intimes à l’Amazone (Letters to the Amazon, 1912) was dedicated to her:

For you are the Amazon

You will remain the Amazon

So long as it does not bore you

And perhaps beyond that

In the embers of my heart

A keen rider in the Bois de Boulogne, Natalie Barney was widely considered an emancipated, intrepid and free spirit, an Amazon in a more general sense, which impressed the Italian poet Gabriele d’Annunzio:

Nothing will tame, neither sword nor flame,

The secret diamond of your youthful heart

The new house had a glorious but slightly unkempt garden which boasted a three-columned Doric temple, called by Barney the ‘Temple of Friendship’. This unusual establishment was a magnet for French writers like André Gide, Paul Valéry, Paul Claudel and Max Jacob, as well as for foreign exiles like the Polish poet Milosz, and naturally for Gertrude Stein and Colette. The American expatriates Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes were visitors, as recorded in Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). There was the inevitable meeting with Hemingway, brought to the Friday salon by Ezra Pound, but Barney was not impressed: ‘Comme Hemingway était mal élevé!’ ‘What terrible manners Hemingway had!’ Marcel Proust did not attend her salon, but did pay her a visit when, in the process of writing À la recherche du temps perdu he came to quiz her on lesbian culture. She was the perfect choice, since her guest list read like an inventory of lesbian literary Paris. A dedicated feminist, she supported women’s writing and founded in 1927 the ‘Academy of Women’, a response to the conservative, all-male Académie française. One guest was the biographer Marguerite Yourcenar, who later became the first woman to be elected to the Académie.

‘If I had one ambition it was to make my life itself into a poem,’ asserted Barney, as her larger-than-life personality overshadowed her writing, which was prolific but rather careless. Pensées d’une amazone (Thoughts of an Amazon, 1920) was written as a response to Pascal’s Pensées (1670). In her novel The One Who is Legion (1930), partly autobiographical, the poet A.D. who commits suicide has much in common with Renée Vivien, one of her greatest loves, whose self-destructive behaviour, anorexia, drug and alcohol abuse caused her early death in 1909, aged only thirty-two. Barney was very proud of the contemporary writers in her circle, and described them in further books with wit and irony. In Aventures de l’esprit (Adventures of the Mind, 1929) she explores her family tree, enumerates her friendships and associations, uses letters and recreates conversations to evoke the golden age of her cherished salon in a series of literary portraits. Souvenirs indiscrets (Indiscreet Memories, 1960) and Traits et portraits (1963) offer an extraordinary testimony to the Parisian literary world she knew so well.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.