Aghast onlookers gazed in horror as the notorious, lesbian, scandal-maker rode her horse astride through the streets of a Paris her poetry dazzled and shocked in equal measure. This towering figure of the Parisian literary scene revelled in decadent drama, her infamous salons a hotbed of as many novels as gossip columns. Known as ‘The Amazon’, a nod to her horrifying method of riding a horse, she was a woman like no other. In a time of great repression, Natalie Clifford Barney told her truth through her effortlessly beautiful verses celebrating everything from merry life to lustful lesbian liaisons. She never shied away from who she was. This is the story of one woman’s poetical punk rebellion against the old world her words brought tumbling down…
A New Species of Dreams Found in Liberal France
She was a rebellious and intelligent child, her interest in art and writing flourishing at a French boarding school. Not that unusual? Perhaps. Although she was born on Hallowe’en, 1876 in Dayton, Ohio. Her family oozed wealth as Natalie oozed charm.
The family made their fortune on the railways.
With wealth came a good education, not just for Natalie but for her younger sister, Laura. Perhaps Natalie’s rebellion came from the traditional values she was exposed to. Her own mother, Alice, a great painter, was ordered to surrender her craft when she married Natalie’s father, Albert.
Here Natalie saw her own mother forced to become a dutiful housewife in loyalty to one man. It’s safe to say Natalie inherited her mother’s talents but other than that, Natalie was an independent soul hellbent on going her own way in life…
A chance meeting with Oscar Wilde imbued in Natalie a great sense of purpose:
‘Wilde scooped me up as I ran past him fleeing a group of small boys, and held me out of their reach before sitting me down on his knee to tell me a story… a wonderful tale.’
They met at a hotel in Long Beach, where Wilde also encouraged Alice to take up painting once more, something her husband was less than pleased about. Here Natalie saw her mother’s rebellion. Alice became one of America’s pioneering female artists, fostering a creative, liberated environment for both of her daughters.
Natalie was inspired. At boarding school in France, her mind exploded with creativity. New ideas and experiences formed inside her, while new people in her life helped her understand who she really was. At just 12, she realised she was a lesbian. You have to remember, homosexuality was decriminalised in France in 1791. Natalie’s home state of Ohio didn’t fully decriminalise homosexuality until 2003.
You can see why she loved being in a liberal country such as France, where she was free to express herself mostly without fear of recrimination, and you can also see why she loved being in an all-girls boarding school. Her words, not mine…
France is where Natalie found her loves. Her love of French literature. Her love of the French language. And her love of scandal. Not many people cared a great deal about her relationships with women, but she did ride a horse astride, causing huge controversy. In those days, women were forbidden from doing this. It kinda shows you where France’s priorities were.
Her ‘outlandish’ behaviour even made the newspapers…
Natalie often felt like no one understood her. Well, no one except Evelina Palmer. The two shared a love of poetry and reading. Natalie was astounded by Evelina’s beauty, describing her as looking like a ‘medieval virgin’. The two began a relationship when Natalie was 17.
Natalie wrote of her homosexuality in her diaries. In one entry, as a young teenager, she wrote that she would not spend ‘one day of her life hiding it [her homosexuality] or apologising for it’. She once said:
“My queerness is not a vice, not deliberate, and harms no one.”
Natalie would walk down the streets of early 1900s France holding Evelina’s hand, kissing openly in public, sometimes in the heart of Paris. It may have been legal, but among certain people, it certainly caused a scandal. She became a ‘well-known lesbian’, which she described as ‘great for getting rid of nuisances’.
She was referring to young men…
She published her first series of poems in 1900. The racy lesbian subtext shocked society. But there was nothing particularly ‘racy’ about what she wrote. She was being honest. This is who I am. I’m not hiding anything. Is there a problem?
Women Lovers or the Third Woman
Tonight Sappho sleeps in dreams with Cyprus…
I give myself to your shadow, and in your name arrives,
My body’s extraordinary pleasure, untouched by men,
You are the only one who took my own body from me!
I will take away my joy from these mouths,
Though they barely know how to entertain my sensuality.
I refuse to give myself over,
Even to my most beautiful slave…
And I violated the contours of your sleeping body,
Laid out in the subconscious, a reflection of reality,
And out of the strange union of our completed being,
I create a new species of dreams, in your image.
– Natalie Barney (translated by Chelsea Ray in 2016) [excerpt].
Natalie’s mother may have been oblivious to her sexuality, but her father was furious. What happened next was awful. He was about to give his daughter an impossible ultimatum that threatened to derail her fledgling career as a stunningly honest poet.
Controversy was guaranteed…
An Inheritance that Changed the World
Natalie’s father raged against his daughter’s poetry. He barely tolerated his daughter’s sexuality at the best of times, but her poetry was a step too far. And so he packed his bags and headed to France to deliver his daughter a frightful ultimatum.
He bought as many copies of Natalie’s books as possible, his own daughter remember, and burnt them. He wanted his daughter to stop. But she had already made quite a splash in the high society of France. She would not stop for anyone, not even her overbearing father.
Still, she feared him. And he feared his daughter’s ‘wanton ways’ would ruin his reputation. Until his death, she published under a pen name, but everyone knew it was her…
Natalie only had to put up with her father for two years because, in 1902, he died. She never expected to get anything from him. To be honest, some days she wondered if her father loved her at all. What she was not expecting was for her father to leave 26-year-old Natalie and her sister $2.5 million. Each. EACH.
Or, to put it another way, about $850 million each in today’s money.
Oh, Natalie knew her father wanted her to marry a handsome man and have lots of children, the kind of dutiful housewife he lamented that his own wife was not. Natalie, on the other hand, decided to use the money to buy an apartment in Paris with her girlfriend, Eveline.
I’m not sure her father would have been happy to learn his money was being used so his daughter could start a life with her girlfriend. And I suspect that is one of the reasons she did it…
They bought an apartment at 20 Rue Jacob in Paris’s Latin Quarter. The couple set to work working their way into the city’s art scene. Her network of friends rapidly expanded. Natalie was in heaven. Paris was so accepting of her sexuality she could walk the streets with Eveline holding her hand and hardly anyone batted an eyelid.
This wouldn’t happen in Natalie’s native Ohio for another 100 years.
Natalie and Eveline’s relationship didn’t last very long, however. Natalie soon realised that her enormous wealth in a city of tremendous liberation enabled her to revel in what she did best:
Scandale.
In Each Friday the Phantom Guest
Natalie started her ‘Fridays’ in her home, a salon or a gathering of intellectuals for the exchange and discussion of ideas. Over the next 60 years, it held lively debates with the likes of Auguste Rodin, Colette, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Peggy Guggenheim and T.S. Eliot, among other artists and writers.
Natalie held musical concerts, plays, dance performances and literary readings, made a hell of a lot easier thanks to dad’s money. The important exchange of ideas at the salon, however, only scratched the surface of Natalie’s time in Paris.
Not long after arriving here, she began a public relationship with a famous courtesan and Parisian party girl named Liane de Pougy. It was one of many public affairs with Parisian high society women that cemented Natalie’s name among the most scandalous of Paris’s artistic elite…
And I haven’t even mentioned the horse she rode astride.
Most importantly of all, Natalie was a prolific writer. During her lifetime, she published five volumes of poetry, three epigrams, two books of essays, one novel and three memoirs. She scandalised the world with her brutally honest words.
She wrote of pacifism in a time of war, homosexuality in a time when so many countries criminalised it, and feminism in a time when the New Woman was emerging. She gained acclaim, not just for her words but for her bravery to be who she was.
The Phantom Guest
We lay in shade diaphanous,
And spoke the light that burns in us.
As in the glooming’s net I caught her,
She shimmered like reflected water!
Romantic and emphatic moods,
Are not for her whom life eludes…
Its vulgar tinsel round her fold?
She’d rather shudder with the cold.
Attend just this elusive hour,
A shadow in a shadow bower,
A moving imagery so fine,
It must have been her soul near mine.
And so we blended and possessed,
Each in each the phantom guest.
Inseparate, we scarcely met;
Yet other love-nights we forget!
– Natalie Barney (translated).
The Peaceful War-Path toward Free Expression
In 1927, Natalie formed the Women’s Academy, a response to the French Academy, which only admitted men. This academy was the official authority on the French language, making decisions about spelling, usage and literary matters. The 40 council members named themselves:
‘The Immortals’.
Ooh, get you. But none of these ‘Immortals’ were women. So Natalie made her own academy, one that didn’t admit men. She wanted to honour female writers. Natalie had the power to command a room. She was capable of summing up complicated, artistic ideas in short, witty sentences. She was more than a poet. She was a phenomenon. One of her most famous quotes is:
“If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.”
Natalie paused the salon during the Second World War but restarted it as soon as she could. Some people are quick to criticise things she said throughout the Second World War, but she was Jewish. She said what she had to say to survive. History appears to have forgotten that. I think anyone would say anything to stay alive.
You have to remember, Natalie was crucial for female writers and female expression. She donated vast sums of money to support women writers and, after the war, started a poetry prize in the name of Reneé Vivien, one of Natalie’s many former lovers.
However, by 1949, the Golden Age of the salon was winding down. Natalie hosted a few of the Lost Generation of Paris’s Golden Age literary scene, but the world was moving on. However, a few new, emerging talents still showed up at Natalie’s door, including Truman Capote.
Just six years after he visited Natalie, he wrote ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’, and, not long after, ‘In Cold Blood’. The world may have moved on, but it had not forgotten Natalie.
A Parisian Roof Garden in 1918
As I must mount to feed those doves of ours,
Perhaps you too will spend nocturnal hours,
Upon your roof,
So high aloof.
That from its terraced bowers,
We catch at clouds and draw a bath from showers.
Before the Moon has made all pale the night.
With senses tuned alike perchance,
Reclining love will make the heavens dance;
And if the enemy from aerial cars,
Drops death, we’ll share it vibrant with the stars!
– Natalie Barney (translated) [excerpt].
She released her final book, ‘Traits et Portraits’, in 1963. The salon was gone. Natalie moved away from what she did best to write her memoirs of her days matching wits with the Lost Generation of artists and writers of Paris’ Golden Age.
Memories were all she had now.
She devoted her life to writing and supporting literature and art, a scandalous one-woman rebellion against the values of moral decency her father tried to force upon her. In the end, she used his money to embrace the life he never wanted for her.
And in doing so, she left behind an enduring legacy of art, culture and writers that came to define Paris.
She died on February 2nd, 1972 at the age of 96. She was buried in the famous Cimetière de Passy, alongside other creatives such as Claude Debussy, Édouard Manet and Tristan Bernard.
Life
Life,
The unloosening of hands,
The unloosening of little hands,
About the heart.
The welling up of tears:
Old habits, old deaths, goodbye!
I shall tread so lightly that you will not feel my leave-taking?
Yet the breath of a new world – the ever promised-land,
Exalts my nostrils.
I am on the war-path towards peace.
The peace of single choice.
O, psyche, loved in darkness, see the day!
– Natalie Barney (translated) [excerpt].
The Scandalous Poet at the Centre of Parisian Society
Today, Natalie has been forgotten, but the literary scene of Paris could not have flourished without her. Natalie was a truly remarkable individual. A notorious, lesbian, scandal-maker who rode her horse astride through the streets of Paris, whose poetry dazzled and shocked in equal measure.
She was inspirational. She lived openly as a lesbian and proudly defied those who criticised her, including her father, once saying, “My queerness is not a vice, not deliberate, and harms no one.” It wasn’t that she didn’t care what people thought of her, it was that she didn’t want to live in fear, using her poetry to express her innermost thoughts and her actions to make those words manifest.
Her poetry is beautifully honest, and while not racy by today’s standards, at the time it drew some of the biggest names in literature to Natalie’s salon where she inspired them to be themselves. Just look at Truman Capote, writer of ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’. He was openly gay and you wonder how much of an influence Natalie was on him.
She built a network not just of creativity but of support and pride. So it is incredibly frustrating she is not better known. She was a towering figure of the Parisian literary scene, revelling in decadent drama. She was polyamorous and spoke openly of her many lovers, many of which she had at the same time.
In a time of great repression, she became the stuff of gossip columns and novels. The Amazon was a woman like no other. She told her truth through her effortlessly beautiful verses celebrating every facet of life. She never shied away from who she was.
Her words were a poetical punk rebellion against the old world, a world those very words brought tumbling down…
Natalie Clifford Barney wrote the following, her own epitaph, words that, at her request, appear on her gravestone:
‘I am this legendary being in which I will live again.’
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https://books.google.fr/books?id=eq9VDAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false , https://www.factinate.com/people/natalie-clifford-barney-facts/, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Poems_%26_poèmes, https://bookriot.com/natalie-clifford-barney/, https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/place_settings/natalie_barney, https://guides.loc.gov/feminism-french-women-history/famous/natalie-clifford-barney , https://headstuff.org/culture/history/natalie-clifford-barney-queen-of-the-paris-lesbians/, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalie_Clifford_Barney, https://www.nataliecliffordbarney.com/, https://www.literaryladiesguide.com/author-biography/natalie-clifford-barney/
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