Geniuses Together : American Writers in Paris in the 1920s (9780571309412) Page 5

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  By 1914, Gertrude had become a fixture of Parisian cultural life, a necessary port of call for visitors from England and the USA. She writes of her Saturday evening salons:

  Roger Fry … brought Clive Bell … Very soon there were throngs of Englishmen, Augustus John and Lamb … Wyndham Lewis … a great many young Oxford men … Lady Cunard brought her daughter Nancy, then a little girl, and very solemnly bade her never forget this visit … There was Lady Ottoline Morrell looking like a marvellous feminine version of Disraeli … And everybody came and nobody made any difference. Gertrude Stein sat peacefully in a chair.

  One American visitor from this period, Joseph Stella, has left a sardonic account of Saturday night in the rue de Fleurus:

  Somehow in a little side street in Montparnasse there was a family that had acquired some early work of Matisse and Picasso. The lady of the house was an immense woman carcass, austerely dressed in black. Enthroned on a sofa in the middle of the room where the pictures were hanging, with the forceful solemnity of a sibylla, she was examining pitiless all newcomers, assuming a high and distant pose.

  Yet she could be strikingly generous. An American architect-turned-painter, Manierre Dawson, was introduced to her one Saturday, and when she gathered he could not stay in Paris because his money was running out, she asked to see a painting he had with him, and offered 200 francs for it. It was his first ever sale.

  Leo, still in arms against Cubism, had once attempted to dismantle the Saturday evenings when Gertrude and Alice were away in London. He wrote to her: ‘A lot of Hungarians, Turks, Armenians & other Jews came here Saturday to celebrate your birthday but I told them it was the wrong day & beside there was no one at home.’ The Saturday salon was reinstated on Gertrude’s return, but a split appeared between brother and sister. Leo was irritated not just by her championship of Cubism (which he called ‘tommyrot’) and her word-portraits (‘damned nonsense’) but also by her all-too-apparent thirst for ‘gloire’. The only feature of her life to which he had no apparent objection was Alice; he said her presence had been a ‘godsend’ since it allowed him and Gertrude to differ without explosions. He kept away from the Saturday evenings (‘I would rather harbor three devils in my insides, than talk about art’) and hinted that he would soon leave Paris for the Mediterranean. Gertrude’s response was to write of the change in their relationship: ‘Slowly and in a way it was not astonishing but slowly I was knowing that I was a genius and it was happening and I did not say anything … This thing of being a genius, there is no reason for it, there is no reason that it should be you and should not have been him …’ Leo’s moving-out from the rue de Fleurus, when it finally happened, was much like a divorce, with acrimonious notes being exchanged about money and the ownership of particular pictures, and he and Gertrude often not on speaking terms; Gertrude sent Alice a note: ‘Your brother-in-law is still mad.’

  Despite Leo’s disclaimer, it seems likely that a deep-seated jealousy of Alice, and of Gertrude’s settled relationship with her, was what really drove him out; conceivably he became an opponent of Cubism because it was an emblem of Gertrude’s and Alice’s world. He went to live for a time in Florence, spent the First World War in the USA, and then returned to Paris, but he and Gertrude had no subsequent communication with each other. Soon after the Armistice, she and Alice were passing along the Boulevard St Germain when they noticed a man doffing his hat to them. Gertrude bowed solemnly in reply. It was Leo. They never met again.

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  Friends wondered at Alice’s impassivity; Mabel Dodge, asking her the source of her eternal calm, received the reply: ‘My feeling for Gertrude.’ Her facial expression became almost hangdog as the years passed, while Gertrude grew ever more self-confident. Yet Alice had a certain steely will with which she could successfully oppose Gertrude. When she sensed that Gertrude and Mabel Dodge were flirting with each other, she brought about a permanent rift between them; Mabel refers bitterly to Alice’s ‘successful effort in turning Gertrude from me’. In 1922 Ernest Hemingway and his wife found Alice far more forbidding than Gertrude: ‘We liked Miss Stein and her friend, although the friend was frightening.’ Robert McAlmon’s wife, the writer Bryher, observes that everyone called Gertrude by her first name from the outset, but only the most intimate were permitted to address Alice as anything other than Miss Toklas.

  Gertrude and Alice spent much of the First World War working for the American Fund for French Wounded, Gertrude learning to drive a Ford truck purchased with funds she had raised; in it they distributed supplies to hospitals. Her attempts to park the vehicle caused the only arguments ever publicly observed between her and Alice.

  In the truck, which they christened ‘Auntie’ after an aunt of Gertrude’s who ‘always behaved admirably in emergencies and behaved fairly well most times if she was properly flattered’, they toured much of France on official and semi-official missions, Gertrude readily cranking the heavy engine when it stalled (which was often). She greatly disliked maps, preferring to voyage into the unknown. ‘We had a few adventures,’ she writes (in the persona of Alice) in the Autobiography, ‘we were caught in the snow and I was sure that we were on the wrong road and wanted to turn back. Wrong or right, said Gertrude Stein, we are going on …’

  * Similarly, one can achieve something rather like the Stein effect by taking a passage of Henry James and removing the punctuation: ‘And it belongs to this reminiscence for the triviality of which I should apologize did I find myself at my present pitch capable of apologizing for anything that I had on the very spot there one of those hallucinations as to the precious effect dreadful to lose and yet impossible to render which interfused the aesthetic dream in presence of its subject with the mortal drop of despair as I should insist at least didn’t the despair itself seem to have acted here as the preservative.’ This is from The Middle Years.

  2

  The Amazon entertains

  Settling in Paris during the same period as Gertrude Stein was a woman whose biographer has called her ‘unquestionably the leading lesbian of her time’.

  Natalie Clifford Barney was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1876, into a family whose extensive fortune came from the Dayton Railroad Car Works. Her interest in things French derived partly from a French-born great-aunt who had lived in Baltimore most of her life but absolutely refused to speak English. Natalie’s mother, an amateur painter, took her to Paris for some years, where she attended a boarding school and learned perfect eighteenth-century French. The school was a little hotbed of feminine flirtation, and Natalie left it with an intense interest in her own sex.

  During a later visit to Paris, in her early twenties, she fell in love with a celebrated courtesan, ‘Liane de Pougy’ (Anne-Marie Chassaigne), on whom she paid a call dressed as a Renaissance page-boy. Liane afterwards described their affair in a novel, Idylle Sapphique (1901), which tells how their first embraces took place in her own Louis Quinze bathroom. During another love affair, with the writer Renée Vivien, Natalie had herself delivered to her beloved in her nightgown, with her long golden hair undone, concealed in an enormous box of lilies.

  She wrote poems in French and English about her affairs:

  How write the beat of love, the very throb

  The rhythm of our veins’ deep eloquence?

  How fix that darkness-rending final sob,

  That perfect swoon of each united sense?

  Her father caught her reading a love-letter from Liane, brought the affair to a close, and tried to marry Natalie off to various young men, including Lord Alfred Douglas, then fortune-hunting in the USA. When she published a book of verse-portraits of her inamorata in French, Quelques Portraits-Sonnets des femmes (1900), Mr Barney bought up the entire edition and destroyed it. But in 1902, when she was twenty-six, he died, leaving her $2½ million. She immediately set up home in Paris and began to live as she liked.*

  In 1928 a young member of Natalie’s circle, the American poet and novelist Djuna Barnes, wrote and
had printed privately a chapbook in mock-Elizabethan style, complete with woodcuts, entitled Ladies Almanack. It satirises Natalie’s love affairs and life-style, introducing her to the reader as ‘as fine a Wench as ever wet Bed, she who was called Evangeline Musset and who was in her Heart one Grand Red Cross for the Pursuance, the Relief and the Distraction of Girls’. Evangeline causes her father much anxiety by becoming associated with ‘the Duchess Clitoressa of Natescourt’ (an allusion to Natalie’s affair with Lily, Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre), and when he reproves her she

  answered him High enough, ‘Thou, good Governor, wast expecting a Son when you lay atop of your Choosing, why then be so mortal wounded when you perceive that you have your Wish? am I not doing after your very Desire, and is it not the more commendable, seeing that I do it without the Tools for the Trade, and yet nothing complain?

  By the time ‘Dame Musset’ becomes ‘a witty and learned Fifty’, she is

  wide famed for her Genius at bring up by Hand, and so noted and esteemed for her Slips of the Tongue that it finally brought her into the Hall of Fame, where she stood by a Statue of Venus as calm as you pleased, or leaned upon a lachrymal Urn with a small Sponge for such as Wept in her own Time and stood in Need of it.

  The book is full of private jokes about Natalie’s conquests, and gives some glimpses of her bedroom manner: ‘It’s a Hook, Girl, not a Button, you should know your Dress better.’ Eventually ‘Dame Musset’ is canonised a saint, and at her death her tongue miraculously escapes combustion on the funeral pyre.

  Natalie herself greatly enjoyed the joke; her own copy of Ladies Almanack is generously annotated.

  *

  She lived for a while near the Bois de Boulogne, in a little house with a garden. Colette describes an afternoon there, with the Barney ‘set’ staging a masque, during which Mata Hari appeared on a jewel-encrusted white horse. In 1909 Natalie moved to the Left Bank, taking up residence in an elegant pavilion in the garden of 20 rue Jacob, near the Boulevard St Germain. One Friday in October that year, she gave the first salon in her new house, and almost every Friday from that time onwards, for more than half a century, she was ‘at home’ from tea-time to friends and guests.

  The Friday salon may have been a little in imitation of Gertrude Stein’s Saturday nights – Natalie Barney knew Gertrude, though no real friendship sprang up until the late 1930s when they became near neighbours. More obviously, the salon was modelled on receptions given by the French aristocracy. Today an undistinguished shopping street, in 1909 the rue Jacob still retained some of the style it had possessed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when it was the main thoroughfare of the Faubourg St Germain, the fashionable quarter for the nobility. Not that Natalie attempted to imitate aristocratic style; she filled the interior of her pavilion with miscellaneous and mostly undistinguished furniture and bric-à-brac, and allowed what one visitor called an ‘eighteenth century patina of dust’ to accumulate. Another visitor said it was so damp that oysters grew under the dining-room chairs. Natalie’s friend Radclyffe Hall writes in The Well of Loneliness (in which Natalie appears as Valérie Seymour) of the ‘large and rather splendid disorder’ of the house:

  There was something blissfully unkempt about it, as though its mistress were too much engrossed in other affairs to control its behaviour. Nothing was quite where it ought to have been, and much was where it ought not to have been, while over the whole lay a faint layer of dust – even over the spacious salon. The odour of somebody’s Oriental scent was mingling with the odour of tuberoses in a sixteenth-century chalice. On a divan, whose truly regal proportions occupied the best part of a shadowy alcove, lay a box of Fuller’s peppermint creams and a lute, but the strings of the lute were broken.

  As for the exterior,

  The courtyard was sunny and surrounded by walls. On the right … some iron gates led into the spacious, untidy garden, and woefully neglected though this garden had been, the trees that it still possessed were fine ones. A marble fountain long since choked with weeds, stood in the centre of what had been a lawn. In the farthest corner of the garden some hand had erected a semicircular temple.

  This temple was said to have been a try sting place of the eighteenth-century actress Adrienne Lecouvreur, though in fact it only dated back to the early nineteenth century. An inscription on its pediment dedicated it à l’amitié, to friendship.

  Natalie’s Friday salon was held in the two drawing rooms on the ground floor of the pavilion. Tea was served, and what one habituée called ‘little cucumber sandwiches like damp handkerchiefs’. Radclyffe Hall describes Natalie receiving her guests ‘dressed all in white, and a large white fox skin was clasped round her slender and shapely shoulders. For the rest she had masses of thick fair hair, which was busily ridding itself of its hairpins’. Another guest writes that she ‘looked like a Mother Superior or an abbess’ but ‘laughed with great dignity’. By the end of the 1920s, says the same person, she had filled out ‘and began to look like Benjamin Franklin’.

  In warm weather, guests were encouraged to stroll in the garden. Natalie’s friend and one-time lover Dolly Wilde (Oscar’s niece) was once heard to say, on the subject of statuary, ‘Oh, Natalie, you forgot to put the hermaphrodite in the bushes.’

  The salon was frequented by French intellectuals as well as expatriates, and something of its atmosphere is caught by the pensées which Natalie began to write soon after moving to the rue Jacob:

  The Romantics appropriated all the big words, leaving us only the little ones.

  To those who ask, ‘Have you read my book?’, I reply, ‘I have not yet read Homer.’

  Twenty paces from me she was already preparing her face for a smile.

  Truman Capote, who attended the salon in its final years, describes it as ‘always very proper-talk about this concert or that concert, or so-and-so’s paintings, or “Alice has a fabulous new recipe for eggs”.’ The only shocking thing Capote remembered was when Carl Van Vechten, the elderly American novelist, who had made himself the leading authority on Gertrude Stein, ‘came to tea and peed on the sofa by mistake’.

  Capote says that ‘until you got into conversation with her’, Miss Barney ‘seemed like a very refined lady from Shaker Heights’. He notes that though the salon was ‘not limited to lesbians’, certainly ‘all the more presentable dykes in town were on hand … Many of them were friends of Proust who had been characters in Remembrances of Things Past … Miss Barney would say to me very specifically that she wanted me to meet somebody because that person was so-and-so in Proust.’ It is said that Proust himself had wished to meet her, to learn all about lesbianism. After many failures of nerve, he finally managed to get himself to 20 rue Jacob in the middle of the night (his invariable time for activity), but he lacked the courage to ask the right questions, and passed the visit in prattling about duchesses.

  Proust knew of Natalie because by that time Remy de Gourmont had immortalised her as l’Amazone. De Gourmont had been the leading critic of the Symbolist movement, a co-founder of the Mercure de France; his books included Physique de l’amour: essai sur l’instinct sexuel (1904), which praises promiscuity and mocks monogamy. However, de Gourmont himself lived as a recluse, largely because he suffered from lupus, a severely disfiguring skin disease. He occupied a sixth-floor attic not far from rue Jacob, and though he would usually only receive close friends, Natalie was introduced to him by a French literary acquaintance. She immediately decided to take de Gourmont out of himself. He found her enchanting, and they began a lively friendship, during which he wrote love letters to her. She responded affectionately though not romantically. By December 1911 he had begun work on his Lettres à l’Amazone, for publication in the Mercure, the title being inspired by a sight of Natalie in riding costume on her way home from the Bois de Boulogne.

  But it was a rather one-sided relationship, and after a while Natalie virtually dropped the old man. She was proud of the Amazone title, but she has little to say about him in her
autobiography, Souvenirs Indiscrete and her abandonment of him may have contributed to his death in 1915.

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  When war broke out in 1914, Natalie Barney stayed on in the rue Jacob, behaved as if the war did not exist, continued her love affairs, and went on holding her Friday salon. During the war she became involved with Romaine Brooks, an American portrait painter who had settled in Paris. Though uncompromisingly masculine in appearance – as opposed to Natalie’s feminine looks – Romaine was bisexual, and had had affairs with Lord Alfred Douglas, the Princesse de Polignac (née Singer), and Gabriele d’Annunzio. Djuna Barnes’s ‘Dame Musset’ says of her that she ‘dresses like a Coachman of the period of Pecksniff’, and in a self-portrait she is wearing what appears to be an eighteenth-century coachman’s hat and is carrying a whip. She and Natalie were lovers for a while, thereafter companions. Romaine’s splendid paintings of their circle include one of Radclyffe Hall’s lover, Una, Lady Troubridge, dressed in a wing collar and frock coat and wearing a monocle – a form of costume that became identified with 20 rue Jacob. (Truman Capote describes the Romaine Brooks paintings as ‘all the famous dykes from 1880 to 1935 or thereabouts … wonderful’.)