February 14, 2024 • 41 mins
Part two of Natalie Clifford Barney week covers her life as a wealthy adult. She moved to France permanently, and established the salon which ran for 50 years and has become one of her most well-known efforts.
Research:
- Barney, Natalie Clifford. “POEMS & POÈMES: autres alliances.” Paris and New York. 1920. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/49942/49942-h/49942-h.htm
- Conliffe, Ciaran. “Natalie Clifford Barney, Queen Of The Paris Lesbians.” HeadStuff. 9/25/2017. https://headstuff.org/culture/history/natalie-clifford-barney-queen-of-the-paris-lesbians/
- Craddock, James. “Barney, Natalie.” Encyclopedia of World Biography (Vol. 33. 2nd ed.). 2013.
- Engelking, Tama Lea. “The Literary Friendships of Natalie Clifford Barney: The Case of Lucie Delarue-Mardrus.” Women in French Studies, Volume 7, 1999, pp. 100-116. https://doi.org/10.1353/wfs.1999.0007
- “Natalie Clifford Barney.” Encyclopedia of World Biography Online. 2023.
- Goodman, Lanie. “Wealthy, Scandalous and Powerful.” France Today. February/March 2020.
- O’Neil, Shannon Leigh. “A Steamy Novel From ‘the Amazon.’” The Gay & Lesbian Review. March-April 2017.
- Rapazzini, Francesco. “Elisabeth de Gramont, Natalie Barney's ‘Eternal Mate.’” South Central Review , Fall, 2005, Vol. 22, No. 3, Natalie Barney and Her Circle (Fall, 2005). https://www.jstor.org/stable/40039992
- Ray, Chelsea. “Natalie Barney (1876-1972): Writer, salon hostess, and eternal friend. Interview with Jean Chalon.” Women in French Studies, Volume 30, 2022, pp. 154-169. https://doi.org/10.1353/wfs.2022.0012
- Robertson, Kieran. “Amazon, Empress, and Friend: The Life of Natalie Clifford Barney.” Ohio History Connection. https://www.ohiohistory.org/amazon-empress-and-friend-the-life-of-natalie-clifford-barney/
- Rodriguez, Suzanne. “Wild Heart: Natalie Clifford Barney and the Decadence of Literary Paris.” Harper Collins. 2003.
- Washington Post. “This Was Love Indeed!” 5/7/1911. https://www.newspapers.com/image/19409771/
- Wickes, George. “A Natalie Barney Garland.” The Paris Review. Issue 61, Spring 1975. https://www.theparisreview.org/letters-essays/3870/a-natalie-barney-garland-george-wickes
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
This is part two of an episode on Natalie Clifford
Barney that was not planned to be two parts, but
boy did she get up to a lot. In part one,
we talked about her early life up to the death
of her father, Albert, and then today we are going
to talk about the rest.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
So as we said at the end of part one,
Natalie Clifford Barney's father died in nineteen oh two, and
under the terms of his will, Natalie, her mother Alice,
and her sister Laura all became very wealthy. Alice started
construction on a new home she called Studio House in Washington,
d c. In the words of biographer Suzanne Rodriguez, author
(00:58):
of Wild Heart Clifford Barney in the Decadents of Literary Paris, quote,
compared to other wealthy homes, Studio House was small. It
had two basements. The sentence doesn't end there, but that
is enough to give a sense that even if it
was smaller than other rich people houses, it was still
pretty big. It was a combined residence and studio space,
(01:20):
and it had five bedrooms, three baths, a library, a
room with a built in stage, and two story studio
room for exhibition and entertainment. Today Studio House is home
to the Latvian embassy.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Yeh, when I read that sentence, and it was just
like studio house, a small it had two basements, Hi
started laughing, just the two. Laura had become a Behi
sometime around nineteen hundred, and her mother had joined the
High Faith not long afterward. After Albert's death, Laura spent
some time with her mother, and then afterwards she traveled,
(01:56):
including to the Middle East to work with Abdul Baha,
son of bahaula founder of the Bahai Faith, and Natalie
moved to France. She had spent much of her time
there since starting boarding school at the age of eleven,
and from this point her permanent home for the rest
of her life was in or near Paris. She started
out in the suburb of Noiee, where she turned her
(02:17):
home into a gathering place for artists and writers. She
hosted all kinds of gatherings and parties and arranged outdoor
theatrical events and concerts in her gardens. She staged plays
by Collette, who we covered in a previous two parter,
and Pierre Luis, whose eighteen ninety four book Chanson de
Bilitis came up in our episode on the Poet's sappho.
(02:38):
She was friends with both of those people. At one
of these events, Barney hired the dancer Mada Haari to
appear on horseback as Lady Godiva. Of course, this was
well before mada Haari became notorious for being accused of spying.
At this point, homosexuality was somewhat more socially acceptable in
(03:00):
France than it was in the United States. Homosexual acts
were illegal in the US, but had been decriminalized in
France in seventeen ninety one. Although cross dressing was still outlawed.
There was still a lot of stigma around same sex
relationships though, and a lot of people still considered homosexuality
(03:21):
to be immoral or a perversion, and one of the
things that Natalie Clifford Barney did as she established her
adult life in France was to live in a way
that was publicly, unabashedly and enthusiastically lesbian.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
To be clear, her wealth gave her some protection here,
people who were not rich enough to just do whatever
they wanted had very different experiences when it came to
things like homophobia and harassment. But she wanted to live
by example and to show other people like herself that
they did not have to live their lives with the
shame and self doubt that society tried to imp on them.
(04:01):
She also continued pursuing relationships with other women. One was
poet Lucie de la rue Mardus, who was married, who
Barney had met for the first time before her father's death.
It is not totally clear whether they started their affair
before or after the death of Albert Barney, but it
followed the same basic trajectory as a number of Natalie's
(04:24):
other relationships. Natalie pursued and eventually seduced Lucy, and then
their relationship became very intense and very passionate, but eventually
Lucy started to become unhappy. In Lucy's case, this was
both because of her feelings about Natalie's other relationships and
about her own part in it. Lucy had been raised
(04:46):
as a conservative Catholic, and so she felt a lot
of guilt and shame around the breaking of her marriage.
Vows then eventually their sexual relationship ended, but the two
women eventually built a close friend that continued for the
rest of Lucy's life. Natalie had also been friends with
sid Niguabriel Collette, known just as Collette for years by
(05:09):
the time she moved to France for good. When they met,
Collette was married to Henri Gautier Villard aka Willie, who
was publishing her writing under his name, as we talked
about in our previous episodes on Collette. By nineteen oh five,
they had started the process of legally separating their assets,
although they were still married. In nineteen oh six, Collette
(05:31):
came to stay with Natalie for a time after leaving Willie.
They had a brief affair and then they resumed their friendship,
which again continued for the rest of Collette's life.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Yea, Collette's relationship with Willy wasn't over yet at that point,
but should stay with with Natalie for a while. In
the interim, Natalie had continued to be close to her
first girlfriend, Eva Palmer, who we talked about in Part one,
but in nineteen oh seven the two women had a
bitter fallen out. Eva decided to marry Greek poet and
(06:03):
playwright Angelos Cyclicianos. They had met through Isadora Duncan. Angelo's
sister Penelope, was married to Duncan's brother Raymond. As we
talked about in her two parter on Isidora Duncan, she
was inspired by the aesthetics of ancient Greece, and the
whole Duncan family had started doing things like wearing robes
(06:24):
and sandals in an approximation of ancient Greek dress. Angelos
also wanted to revive the literature and values of classical Greece.
Eva had fallen in love with all of this, and
had fallen in love with Greece while traveling there. She
wasn't really in love with Angelos, but she admired his
(06:45):
work and his aspirations, and she liked the idea of
the life that they could build together. Natalie, on the
other hand, found it all ridiculous, and she did not
even try to be nice about it. She criticized that
whole robe and sandal situation, and Angelo's writing and his
hopes for a Greek revival, and even told Eva that
she needed to send him away. It really seems like
(07:09):
Eva decided to marry Angelos because it was a way
for her to have a life that sounded really appealing
to her, one that was very very Greek, complete with
robes made of fabric she had woven herself, and also
very focused on literature and the arts. She didn't really
have an emotional connection with Angelos that would have threatened
(07:31):
her bond with Natalie, which at that point they had
been nurturing for almost fifteen years. She did try to
assuage Angelos's fears about Natalie by telling him that she
loved him more than Natalie, while also telling Natalie that
her relationship with Angelos could never replace the one that
the two women had with each other. This all sounds
(07:54):
like a tangle. Natalie's response to all of this was
just so petty, including intentionally trying to do stuff to
make Eva really jealous, and eventually Eva was just done.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Eva and Angelos got married in Bar Harbor later that year,
and they pursued the life that they had been talking
about when they decided to marry. In nineteen twenty seven,
they held the first of two Delphic festivals, modeled after
ancient Greek festivals that had combined athletic games with literature, theater,
and the arts. Although they had an impact on Greek
(08:27):
culture together, Eva's admiration for Angelos and his ideals doesn't
seem to have been enough to build a happy marriage on. Reportedly,
she eventually ended their physical relationship, and the marriage was
annulled in nineteen thirty four, possibly in the wake of
her traveling to the US to try to raise money
to sustain the Delphic Festival. Each of them later remarried
(08:49):
other people, and at some point during all of this,
Eva and Natalie made amends to.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Return to the timeline. In nineteen oh nine, Natalie moved
to a house on Rujakob. It's possible that one of
her reasons for wanting to move to a new place
was that her landlord in Nuill was increasingly critical of
all these sapphig plays that she was staging out in
her garden and the kinds of people that she was
(09:17):
continually bringing together at her home. It is also possible, though,
that she just wanted some kind of a fresh start.
She had started looking for a new place to live
in nineteen oh eight, so that was not long after
the end of her relationship with Pauline Tarn and her
falling out with Eva. This move also put her into
(09:37):
Paris proper, and in her words quote Paris has always
seemed to me the only city where you can live
and express yourself as you please. We will have more
after a break. Natalie Clifford Barney's new home at Jakob
(10:01):
was on the left bank south of the Senne, a
neighborhood that was known for its community of writers and artists,
which later had a reputation for its really bohemian atmosphere.
It hadn't quite gotten there yet when she moved in,
but later it did. The house had been built in
the seventeenth century, and it had a Doric temple out
(10:21):
in the garden, which had Temple Alamati, or Temple of Friendship,
carved into its lentil. She had some restoration work done
on this temple, and the garden and the house and
the temple became home to her very famous weekly salon,
which she called her Fridays.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
The salon is the thing Natalie Clifford Barney is most
well known for, except maybe for her romantic relationships, which
sometimes overshadow everything else. She held this alone every week,
starting in nineteen oh nine and continuing for more than
fifty years. Except what she was traveling or otherwise out
of the city, and sometimes there were more than one
hundred people in attendance.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
This is often described as being inspired by the poet's Sappho,
which includes the museum signage we read at the beginning
of the episode in part one, but this was open
to anybody regardless of their gender. Guests included writers like
Colette and Gertrude Stein, but also Ezra Pound, James Joyce,
Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, all same ex patriot writers
(11:25):
who Gertrude Stein also knew. This was about literature and
the arts, but at the same time there was a
definite focus on encouraging and nurturing the creative work of women. Specifically,
men were allowed, but women were celebrated.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
As we discussed earlier, Barney had also made herself into
a living example of how someone could live a publicly
lesbian life without shame or self doubt. She continued this
after moving to Rujakob, and she intentionally focused her salon
on al allowing other women to do the same. Historian
Lilian Faderman framed this as quote a support group for
(12:06):
lesbians to permit them to create a self image, which
literature and society denied them, and she also helped women
writers and artists in more direct ways. At first, this
was usually more about her time and her attention than
it was about money, like she would help connect people
to publishers, or promote their work or find teachers. She
(12:29):
did that a lot more often than doing something like
directly funding somebody else's creative endeavors.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
This shifted a little bit later on, but early in
the twentieth century, her encouragement of other writers and artists
was more about helping people get attention and resources than
it was about like becoming somebody's financial patron.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
Also in nineteen oh nine, Natalie met Antoinette Correcine Elizabette,
Duchess of Clermentrurmire, known as Lily, who was married to
Philibert de Clare. They met through Lucy de la Rue Mordieux,
who we mentioned earlier. This would be one of Barney's
longest relationships. We read from the marriage contract that they
would go on to write together in part one of
(13:12):
this episode, and they celebrated their anniversary on May first
every year until Lily's death, with the exception of the
years that they were separated due to war.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Lily was a.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Poet and a translator, and had published the first French
translations of the works of John Keats.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
In nineteen ten, Barney was connected to a scandal that,
for once, did not have to do with her love life.
Her sister Laura had made a plaster copy of a
sculpture and sent it to her mother's home of studio
house in Washington, D C. With instructions to keep it
outside and covered and to have it sprinkled with water
every day to allow this plaster to cure and harden.
(13:52):
There are slightly different details of exactly what happened in
various news reports and whatever, but like the point is,
there was a statue, it was covered up. This all
seemed to go fine until one day the cover blew
off of it and it turned out this sculpture was
of a reclining nude woman. It probably would not raise
(14:13):
many eyebrows today, but for this nude woman statue to
be out in front of a home in Washington, D C.
In nineteen ten just caused a lot of outrage. It
was also rumored that Natalie had been the model for
the sculpture, not really clear whether that's the case.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
She does seem to have denied that, though scandal. Barney
published three books that year, At Parpiamond, Jemousuvien and Acte
enract et Parpiamon or Scatterings, was essentially a collection of epigrams.
Barney was known for having an epigrammatic wit. She would
(14:53):
basically sit at the salon listening to what was going
on around her, and then toss off a very clever
sentence or two. Barney's most popular published works were her
epigram collections. Jemousouvian was a prose poem about Pauline tarn
also known as renaevy Vienne, which she had written years before,
but she didn't publish it until after Tarne's death, and
(15:16):
At Dampraqte was a collection of short dramatic works and poetry.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
That same year, Barney also made friends with poet Remy
du Gourmont, who helped popularize at Parpillmont after she gave
him a copy. Remy du Gourmont is who nicknamed Barney
the Amazon thanks to both her skill with horses and
her reputation as a lover. He went on to publish
two books that were pretty much fictionalized letters to her.
(15:43):
They were Lettra Lamizon in nineteen fourteen and Lettra INtime Lamizon,
which was published posthumously in nineteen twenty seven.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
In nineteen eleven, Natalie's mother, Alice, married Christian Hemick and
her sister Laura married Ippoly Dreyfus in a double wedding.
Drefus was the first French Bahai, and he and Laura
each took the surname Dreyfus. Barney Hemick was much younger
than Alice. She was sixty one and he was twenty six,
so he was also younger than both her daughters. Neither
(16:15):
daughter was happy about this, but it did seem like
Christian made their mother happy. At the same time, this
marriage was widely written about in tabloids and gossip columns,
many of them implying that he was after Alice's money.
After she put that money into an irrevocable trust that
would eventually go to her daughters, the headlines started focusing
(16:36):
on how much money she'd been willing to cut herself
off from in order to marry this very young man.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
Alice's marriage fell apart during World War One. In part
one of this episode, we talked about how she had
been planning to stay with Natalie while dealing with some
drama of her own, but had at least temporarily changed
her mind because of her complicated feelings about her daughter's sexuality.
That drama was the end of her marriage to Christian Hemmick.
(17:02):
Hemick claimed that the marriage had fallen apart because Alice
did not approve of his involvement in the theater, but
the last straw was apparently his affair with a young actor,
specifically a young male actor.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Also, during World War One, the focus of Barney's Friday
salons shifted. She was vehemently opposed to the war. While
many of her friends started working as nurses or ambulance
drivers or journalists, Barney felt like working toward the war
effort would essentially be condoning it, so she stayed home
and she turned the salon into a meeting for pacifists
(17:40):
and anti war activists and hosted a women's conference for peace.
The closest thing she did to becoming directly involved in
the war effort was hosting a movie night for wounded soldiers.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
During the early months of the war, Natalie also met
one of the other great loves of her life, painter
Romayne Brooks. Brooke had wanted to volunteer as an ambulance
driver during the war, but could not because of a
back problem. Instead, she had established a fund to help
artists who had been injured in battle. Her relationship with
(18:13):
Natalie Clifford Barney lasted for more than fifty years. In
nineteen twenty, Natalie Clifford Barney started a collaboration with American
poet Ezra Pound on a project called Bells Free. Their
plan was that they would choose two writers, one working
in English and one in French, and they would fund
their work. This plan never came to fruition, though.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
They chose T. S. Eliot for the English language writer
and Paul Verrie for French, but neither of them accepted
their financial help. This doesn't seem to have been connected
to their feelings about Barney or Pound. Both writers were
coming into other sources of funding, so they just didn't
really need this kind of patronage.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
Yeah, if I'm remembering correctly, this is like right after T. S.
Eliott published The Wasteland and then suddenly had other opportunities.
I don't remember what exactly had happened with Paul Valerie,
but to just move ahead a little bit. It's likely
that Barney met Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas for
(19:15):
the first time in nineteen twenty six. Stein and Toklas
had been living at twenty seven Rue Defderuru, which was
maybe a twenty minute walk away from where Barney lived.
At least according to Google Maps, he'd been living there
since nineteen oh three. But even though Stein and Toklas
were also Americans, and they also hosted a famous literary salon,
(19:36):
and they knew and were friends with just so many
of these same people, they also led very different lives
from Natalie Clifford Barney. Stein and Toklas had met in
nineteen oh seven, and they had been in a committed
relationship with each other and only each other for almost
twenty years. This was just not how Natalie Clifford Barney
(19:57):
approached her relationships at all. There does not seem to
be any clear documentation about why it took so long
for these women to make one another's acquaintance. But it
does not seem like it was just happenstance that it
took more than fifteen years, Like you would need to
be kind of going out of your way to avoid
(20:18):
each other at that point.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
In nineteen twenty seven, Barney established Lacademie de Fame, or
Women's Academy. This was in response to the refusal of
the Academy Flances to admit women into its ruling council
of forty immortals. Lacademie de Femme's first honorees included Collette
and Gertrude Stein. Although this effort doesn't seem to have
(20:41):
lasted for very long, it was notable and that it
brought additional attention to the work of women writers in
France who were not being taken seriously by the French
literary establishment.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
Also in nineteen twenty seven, Barney met Dolly Wilde, niece
of Oscar Wilde. She's often described as an another of
Barney's great loves, although their relationship, as many of them were,
was definitely tumultuous, and she and Romain Brooks did not
get along.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
In nineteen twenty eight, Radcliffe Hall published The Well of Loneliness,
a highly autobiographical novel that tells the story of Stephen Gordon,
who is of course patterned after Hall. Another character, Valerie Semour,
is a lightly fictionalized version of Natalie Clifford Barney. These
two characters are dramatically different from one another. Stephen is
(21:32):
plagued with shame and self doubt, while Valerie is the
exact opposite. This novel was both groundbreaking and controversial, and
it was immediately banned in the UK. The year after
it made its debut, Radcliffe Hall was a guest of
honor at Barney's salon, along with longtime partner Una Trubridge.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
To pause for just a moment. At this point, the
way most people talked about in conceptualized sexuality and gender
was generally much different from how it is today. Many psychologists, sociologists,
and the like lumped gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people
all together under the label of sexual invert. One prevailing
(22:15):
theory was that lesbians were men trapped in women's bodies
and gay men were women trapped in men's bodies, and
the vast majority of psychologists and other researchers saw all
of this as deviant and pathological. There were some exceptions,
including Magnus Hirschfeld, who we talked about on the show
in twenty eighteen, but for the most part, sexuality and
(22:39):
gender were conflated in a lot of ways. That they
really aren't today.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Natalie Clifford Barney did not agree with the idea that
she was a man trapped in a woman's body, and
this fed into a dislike of what she perceived as
cross dressing. We talked in Part one about how she
dressed as a page to visit and a pougee for
the first time, but that was different. That was a costume.
She didn't consider that her mode of dress right. That
(23:08):
was not her everyday wear at all. Radcliffe Hall and
Una Truebridge, on the other hand, were the kinds of
suits that would have been more commonly worn by men.
There are some scholars today who interpret Radcliffe Hall, who
identified as an invert, as a trans man. But Barney
and some of her friends made fun of Hall and
Truebridge for what they chose to wear and how they
(23:29):
carried themselves.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
We will get to Barney's life during the Great Depression
and World War Two after a sponsor break. After the
Great Depression started in nineteen twenty nine, many but definitely
not all, of the American writers and artists who had
(23:53):
been frequenting Barney's salon returned home, so her fridays were
somewhat smaller, both in terms of their attendance and their
extravagance until the economy started to improve. Overall, though, the
Barney family's finances just weren't too terribly affected by it.
Like Natalie and her mother and sister, they all had
(24:15):
a lot of money. Alice had less money to access
than her daughters did, so it does seem like she
felt it a lot more, But there are times when
Natalie seemed oblivious to the fact that there was a
depression going on. Natalie and Romayne Brooks also took a
trip to North America in late nineteen twenty nine, spending
(24:36):
some time in New York before Natalie spent six weeks
traveling with her mother. This was the last visit they
had together. They were preparing for another when Alice died
on October twelfth, nineteen thirty one. That same year, Romayne
Brooks gave Natalie an ultimatum that either she and her
relationship with Dolly Wilde or Romayne would leave. As we
(24:59):
said earlier, remain did not like Dolly. Among other things,
she found Dolly to be immature and shallow. She did
not like Dolly's heavy drug and alcohol use. After kind
of agonizing about what to do, for a while. Natalie
eventually chose to remain, although Romayne did eventually allow her
to see Dolly again.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
In the early months of World War II in Europe,
Natalie made arrangements for Dolly Wilde to go to London.
Natalie's sister Laura returned to the United States. Her husband,
Ippolyte Dreyfus Barney had died in nineteen twenty eight, and
while he was a Bahai at the time of his death,
he was also Jewish by birth. The Nazis had also
banned the Bahai faith in Germany, and Bahai's face persecution,
(25:41):
mass arrest, and death under the Nazi regime. So as
the widow of a Jewish man and a Bahai herself,
Laura was at risk.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
Yeah, not really relevant whether he considered himself Jewish at
that point, and I could not say, like how I
did not read any of his own writing on this,
but like to the Nazis, he was Jewish. Natalie initially
decided to join Romayne Brooks in Florence, where Romayne had
been living. She made this decision before Italy formally entered
(26:13):
the war. Apparently they expected Italy to remain neutral. Of course,
that neutrality perceived did not last long at all, and
then by the time she and Remain decided that they
should try to get out of Europe, they could not
get a travel permit to do so, so they were
stuck in fascist Italy for the duration.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
Although Barney had been vocally opposed to World War One,
her beliefs during World War II are a bit more complicated,
as was the case with Gertrude Stein's working as a
propagandist for the Vishy government during the Nazi occupation of France.
It's not clear how much of this was her attempt
to survive and how much reflected her actual beliefs. One
(26:56):
of Barney's great grandparents was Jewish, and she had pre
written about her Jewish ancestry with pride, but under the
Nuremberg race laws, one Jewish great grandparent meant that she
was mixed race. Her landlords at twenty Ru Jacob were
also Jewish, and at one point during the German occupation
of Paris, Nazis tried to seize everything from her home.
(27:20):
Bert Clerue, Bernie's housekeeper for about fifty years, somehow convinced
them that they'd confused Natalie with her sister Laura and
that Laura was now in the United States.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Yeah, I don't fully understand how she managed to like
get the Nazis to mostly leave Barney's home in Paris alone.
Had Barney stayed in Paris, she certainly would have been arrested.
After Hitler came to power in Germany, Barney had stopped
(27:51):
talking about her Jewish ancestry, and at the beginning of
the war she also published another book of epigrams called
Nouvelle ponseide Lamazon, and some of these were kind of
anti Semitic. Barney and Brooks also seemed to have genuinely
believed a lot of the fascist propaganda that they were
exposed to while living in Italy, which framed the United
(28:13):
States as the aggressors in the war. Some of Barney's
wartime writing expressed support for Italy's fascist government. It is
not possible to simply write all of this off as
her just trying to stay under the radar during the war,
though some of Barney's earlier epigrams had also played into
negative stereotypes of Jewish people, and while she had always
(28:35):
been really ahead of her time in terms of things
like same sex relationships, her overall politics tended to be
more conservative when she was aware of what was going
on politically at all. She was close friends and collaborators
with Ezra Pound, who was deeply anti Semitic. At the
same time, Barney also used her wealth and connections to
(28:57):
try to get Jewish friends out of Europe and to
support other people who had to flee. According to some sources,
when Collette's husband, Maurice Gudaquet was arrested by the Gestapo,
Barney was one of the people who tried to get
him released. During the war, she lost a lot of people.
On April tenth, nineteen forty one, Dolly Wilde died. Her
(29:19):
official cause of death was undetermined. Some sources cited breast cancer,
and others said that she had taken her own life.
Lucie Delarue Mardieux also died in nineteen forty five, and
Barney had other friends and former partners who died during
the war. These were mostly unrelated to things that actually
had to do with the fighting or the effects of
(29:39):
the fighting. In addition to her grief over these deaths,
she just found it upsetting that she couldn't be there
for any of these people, and in a lot of cases.
She did not even hear about any of their deaths
until much much later. While World War Two ended in
Europe in nineteen forty five, Barney couldn't return to Paris
until nineteen forty s Romayne Brooks remained in Florence. At first,
(30:04):
Natalie had to move into her sister's old apartment because
the house on ru Jakub had fallen into so much
disrepair while she was away during the war. She could
not start hosting her Fridays again until nineteen forty nine,
and then she could no longer use the doric temple
in the garden because the floor had collapsed. Food had
always been a big part of these gatherings, and that
(30:25):
was even more true in the post war years. There
was still so much deprivation, and many of the writers
and artists who attended were not getting enough to eat.
Barney was impressed at how Bert Clare Gou managed to
pull it off every week. Gertrude Stein died in nineteen
forty six, and after this Barney became closer friends with
Alice B. Telkliss. Eva Palmer died in nineteen fifty two.
(30:49):
Collette died in nineteen fifty four, so did Elizabeth de
Gramma known as Lily, at the age of seventy nine.
Her relationship with Barney had continued until the end of
her life. Then Marie lawn Sand died in nineteen fifty seven.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
Barney outlived a lot of her friends and former partners,
like Stein and Toklas. Her salon had brought together some
of the early twentieth centuries foremost writers and artists, and
had influenced the development of modernism, but through the nineteen sixties,
attendance at her salons gradually got smaller, and both Barney
and her fridays were seen as less groundbreaking and less relevant.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
She and Laura started making plans for what would happen
after their deaths, and they decided that rather than being
buried by her husband in molmart that Laura would be
buried next to Natalie in Passey's cemetery, and a plot
that had been given to Natalie by a friend several
years before.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
In nineteen sixty two, Barney had two heart attacks, and
by nineteen sixty five she needed help just with her
day to day living. This came from her housekeeper, Bert,
and also from Janine La Hoovery, whose relationship with Barney
had started in the nineteen fifties. Then in nineteen sixty six,
Barney was served noticed that she would have to move
(32:07):
out of the house on Ru Jacob in nineteen seventy.
This four year notice was legally required, and the fact
that it was given at all led to outrage, especially
among the people who recognized the importance of the salals
she had hosted there for so many years. The landlord
started construction work on the property, which also raised people's ire,
(32:28):
and used that as a way to make living there
unpleasant enough that maybe Barney would just move out early. Yeah,
the landlord seems to have sort of been like, maybe
if I just turned the kitchen into a construction zone,
you'll get fed up with this and I won't have
to wait for whole years. Toward the end of the
nineteen sixties, as all of this was going on, Barney's
(32:49):
relationship with Romayne Brooks fell apart, and Brooks stopped answering
her letters. So Barney this was really devastating, and then
Romayne Brooks died in nineteen seventy. Natalie Clifford Barney died
in Paris on February second, nineteen seventy two. At the
age of ninety five in the arms of Jeanine Lehovery.
During her lifetime, she had published twelve books and written
(33:13):
tons of other unpublished material, including at least forty thousand letters.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
Barney's tombstone at Pessi's cemetery described her as Ekrevan or writer,
followed by Elfuis Lamazon de Remy de Gourmont at her request.
The tombstone also bore the inscription Jesus adetre legendaire ou Gereville.
I probably said that very badly, but it roughly translates
(33:40):
as I am this legendary being in which I will
live again. She was fictionalized in a number of novels
about Paris in the early twentieth century, including, as you
mentioned earlier, Radcliffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. The Well
of Loneliness entered the public domain in the US this year,
so let's read some of its description of Barney's counterpart,
(34:01):
Valerie Seymour. Quote Valerie placid and self assured, created an
atmosphere of courage. Everyone felt very normal and brave when
they gathered at Valerie Seymour's. There she was this charming
and cultured woman, a kind of lighthouse in a storm
swept ocean. The waves had lashed round her feet in
(34:22):
vain winds had howled, clouds had spewed forth their hail
and their lightning. Torrents had deluged, but had not destroyed her.
The storm's gathering force broke and drifted away, leaving behind
them the shipwrecked the drowning. But when they looked up,
the poor spluttering victims, why what should they see but
(34:42):
Valerie Seymour. Then a few would strike boldly out for
the shore. At the sight of this indestructible creature. She
did nothing, and at all times said very little, feeling
no urge towards philanthropy. But this much she gave to
her brethren, the freedom of her salon, the protection of
her friendship.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
That book also includes the quote her love affairs would
fill quite three volumes, even after they had been expurgated.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
Uh. I don't think poetry was really Natalie Clifford Barney's
greatest genre of writing. Like she didn't publish that much
of it in English, But what she did publish in
English I would not rank among the great poets. However,
some of that English poetry is in the public domain.
Now so we can include one. This is the Phantom Guest.
(35:32):
We lay in shade diaphanous and spoke the light that
burns in us, says in the gloomings Net, I caught her.
She shimmered like reflected water. Romantic and emphatic moods are
not for her, whom life eludes is vulgar tinsel round
her fold. She'd rather shudder with the cold attends just
this elusive hour, a shadow in a shadow bower, a
(35:56):
moving imagery so fine it must have been her soul,
your mine. And so we blended and possessed each in
each the phantom guest, in separate we scarcely met, yet
other love nights we forget. And then we'll just end
with one final epigram by Natalie Clifford Barney. This one
was actually quoted in the biography. We have mentioned a
(36:18):
couple of times, which was Wildheart a Life Natalie Clifford
Barney and the Decadence of Literary Paris quote. When it
comes to friendship, I am very lazy. Once I confer friendship,
I never take it back. It's just easier. That's Natalie
Clifford Barney. She's a lot.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
Do you have a listener mail that's maybe less dramatic.
Speaker 2 (36:42):
I do have listener mail. It is from Elizabeth and
Elizabeth's title of the email is Wooly Dogs and the
Sandal in the Well, Dear Holly and Tracy. Last week,
I was on my way to give blood when the
portion of Unearthed about the Salish wooly dog came in.
I had to sit in the park lad and listen
to it, even though I could have just hit pause.
(37:02):
I'm a middle school science teacher and I have just
read an article with my students about genetic research done
to find native dogs of the Americas. The article talks
about how researchers were looking at mitochondrial DNA to determine
which dog breeds pre day Europeans and the Americas. They
found that the Mexican and Peruvian hairless dogs, the Chihuahua,
(37:24):
and the Carolina dog all pre day Europeans, and the
Chihuahua had DNA not founded dogs anywhere else in the world.
The article also talked about some of the lost breeds,
including the wily dog. The article shared the old ideas
that the Saless had allowed the dogs to be lost
to ender reading because of the availability of other wool sources.
(37:45):
Next year, when we read this, I will be sharing
the new understanding from this research. I love when I
can bring new research into my science classes to show
that our understanding of the world changes over time. Also,
I appreciate your highlighting of the involvement of the tribal
peoples in this work. Here in Idaho, we have many
active and vibrant tribes, but it feels like my students
(38:05):
are often presented with native peoples as if they are
just history and not part of our modern state and country.
And then last night I listened to the behind the
Scenes and your discussion of the sandal in the well
made me think of an exhibit I saw in France
in the early nineties that featured the shoe that Marie
Antoinette lost on her way to the guillotine. It was
(38:26):
in an empty white room with blank white walls. The
only thing in the room was the shoe on a pedestal.
Elizabeth says, dust off your French, and it had a
link to a video about this. I feel like I
would have followed the video pretty well if it had
had captioning, but just trying to listen to the French
(38:48):
was a little too fast for med keep up with.
As you talked, I could see something similar happening with
the sandal, with long discussions of where it came from
and how it ended up in the well. I particularly
like your idea of a sibling prank. I know it
is something my brother would have done. It just seemed
like such an odd little bit of history. I thought
you might enjoy it. Thank you for the many hours
(39:10):
of entertainment and education. Elizabeth pet Tax Below so we
have Ziggi, a thirteen year old shelter mutt, and Goose,
a four year old cat found as a kitten under
some hay bales, had to be bottle fed for a
few weeks. I sure have bottle fed some abandoned kitty
casts before, something that simultaneously I enjoyed doing, but also
(39:30):
it was so much because I feel like this litter
was like six kittens. It's so much work that needed
to We're just continually bottle feeding. And then we have Taya,
who was taken in about eighteen months ago when Taya's
owner died. So sweet. This is a dog who is
deaf and vision apparent and anxious, but such a sweet look,
cute dog. I can tell from this this dog has
(39:53):
a very anxious face. I will say, I feel like
I can tell that this is a little uh high
strung baby. There's Friday, a six year old Ossi, and
Hank the classroom turtle. Because you Sew and Staid send
other pictures. I'm really happy how this long jacket turned out,
especially the pocket's made from a thrift store curtain and
(40:15):
lined with the cotton curtain lining. This is like a
long jacket with a design of sort of floury leaf,
you find. I like it very much. Thank you so much,
Elizabeth for all of this, one hundred percent of it.
I love the animal pictures. I love the jacket picture.
I love the turtle picture. I love the story of
(40:36):
your experience with this episode and the behind the scenes.
If you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast, word history podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
You can kind of find us on social media. We
mostly just post the episodes being live, and you can
subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and wherever
(40:57):
else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed
in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
This is part two of an episode on Natalie Clifford
Barney that was not planned to be two parts, but
boy did she get up to a lot. In part one,
we talked about her early life up to the death
of her father, Albert, and then today we are going
to talk about the rest.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
So as we said at the end of part one,
Natalie Clifford Barney's father died in nineteen oh two, and
under the terms of his will, Natalie, her mother Alice,
and her sister Laura all became very wealthy. Alice started
construction on a new home she called Studio House in Washington,
d c. In the words of biographer Suzanne Rodriguez, author
(00:58):
of Wild Heart Clifford Barney in the Decadents of Literary Paris, quote,
compared to other wealthy homes, Studio House was small. It
had two basements. The sentence doesn't end there, but that
is enough to give a sense that even if it
was smaller than other rich people houses, it was still
pretty big. It was a combined residence and studio space,
(01:20):
and it had five bedrooms, three baths, a library, a
room with a built in stage, and two story studio
room for exhibition and entertainment. Today Studio House is home
to the Latvian embassy.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Yeh, when I read that sentence, and it was just
like studio house, a small it had two basements, Hi
started laughing, just the two. Laura had become a Behi
sometime around nineteen hundred, and her mother had joined the
High Faith not long afterward. After Albert's death, Laura spent
some time with her mother, and then afterwards she traveled,
(01:56):
including to the Middle East to work with Abdul Baha,
son of bahaula founder of the Bahai Faith, and Natalie
moved to France. She had spent much of her time
there since starting boarding school at the age of eleven,
and from this point her permanent home for the rest
of her life was in or near Paris. She started
out in the suburb of Noiee, where she turned her
(02:17):
home into a gathering place for artists and writers. She
hosted all kinds of gatherings and parties and arranged outdoor
theatrical events and concerts in her gardens. She staged plays
by Collette, who we covered in a previous two parter,
and Pierre Luis, whose eighteen ninety four book Chanson de
Bilitis came up in our episode on the Poet's sappho.
(02:38):
She was friends with both of those people. At one
of these events, Barney hired the dancer Mada Haari to
appear on horseback as Lady Godiva. Of course, this was
well before mada Haari became notorious for being accused of spying.
At this point, homosexuality was somewhat more socially acceptable in
(03:00):
France than it was in the United States. Homosexual acts
were illegal in the US, but had been decriminalized in
France in seventeen ninety one. Although cross dressing was still outlawed.
There was still a lot of stigma around same sex
relationships though, and a lot of people still considered homosexuality
(03:21):
to be immoral or a perversion, and one of the
things that Natalie Clifford Barney did as she established her
adult life in France was to live in a way
that was publicly, unabashedly and enthusiastically lesbian.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
To be clear, her wealth gave her some protection here,
people who were not rich enough to just do whatever
they wanted had very different experiences when it came to
things like homophobia and harassment. But she wanted to live
by example and to show other people like herself that
they did not have to live their lives with the
shame and self doubt that society tried to imp on them.
(04:01):
She also continued pursuing relationships with other women. One was
poet Lucie de la rue Mardus, who was married, who
Barney had met for the first time before her father's death.
It is not totally clear whether they started their affair
before or after the death of Albert Barney, but it
followed the same basic trajectory as a number of Natalie's
(04:24):
other relationships. Natalie pursued and eventually seduced Lucy, and then
their relationship became very intense and very passionate, but eventually
Lucy started to become unhappy. In Lucy's case, this was
both because of her feelings about Natalie's other relationships and
about her own part in it. Lucy had been raised
(04:46):
as a conservative Catholic, and so she felt a lot
of guilt and shame around the breaking of her marriage.
Vows then eventually their sexual relationship ended, but the two
women eventually built a close friend that continued for the
rest of Lucy's life. Natalie had also been friends with
sid Niguabriel Collette, known just as Collette for years by
(05:09):
the time she moved to France for good. When they met,
Collette was married to Henri Gautier Villard aka Willie, who
was publishing her writing under his name, as we talked
about in our previous episodes on Collette. By nineteen oh five,
they had started the process of legally separating their assets,
although they were still married. In nineteen oh six, Collette
(05:31):
came to stay with Natalie for a time after leaving Willie.
They had a brief affair and then they resumed their friendship,
which again continued for the rest of Collette's life.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Yea, Collette's relationship with Willy wasn't over yet at that point,
but should stay with with Natalie for a while. In
the interim, Natalie had continued to be close to her
first girlfriend, Eva Palmer, who we talked about in Part one,
but in nineteen oh seven the two women had a
bitter fallen out. Eva decided to marry Greek poet and
(06:03):
playwright Angelos Cyclicianos. They had met through Isadora Duncan. Angelo's
sister Penelope, was married to Duncan's brother Raymond. As we
talked about in her two parter on Isidora Duncan, she
was inspired by the aesthetics of ancient Greece, and the
whole Duncan family had started doing things like wearing robes
(06:24):
and sandals in an approximation of ancient Greek dress. Angelos
also wanted to revive the literature and values of classical Greece.
Eva had fallen in love with all of this, and
had fallen in love with Greece while traveling there. She
wasn't really in love with Angelos, but she admired his
(06:45):
work and his aspirations, and she liked the idea of
the life that they could build together. Natalie, on the
other hand, found it all ridiculous, and she did not
even try to be nice about it. She criticized that
whole robe and sandal situation, and Angelo's writing and his
hopes for a Greek revival, and even told Eva that
she needed to send him away. It really seems like
(07:09):
Eva decided to marry Angelos because it was a way
for her to have a life that sounded really appealing
to her, one that was very very Greek, complete with
robes made of fabric she had woven herself, and also
very focused on literature and the arts. She didn't really
have an emotional connection with Angelos that would have threatened
(07:31):
her bond with Natalie, which at that point they had
been nurturing for almost fifteen years. She did try to
assuage Angelos's fears about Natalie by telling him that she
loved him more than Natalie, while also telling Natalie that
her relationship with Angelos could never replace the one that
the two women had with each other. This all sounds
(07:54):
like a tangle. Natalie's response to all of this was
just so petty, including intentionally trying to do stuff to
make Eva really jealous, and eventually Eva was just done.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Eva and Angelos got married in Bar Harbor later that year,
and they pursued the life that they had been talking
about when they decided to marry. In nineteen twenty seven,
they held the first of two Delphic festivals, modeled after
ancient Greek festivals that had combined athletic games with literature, theater,
and the arts. Although they had an impact on Greek
(08:27):
culture together, Eva's admiration for Angelos and his ideals doesn't
seem to have been enough to build a happy marriage on. Reportedly,
she eventually ended their physical relationship, and the marriage was
annulled in nineteen thirty four, possibly in the wake of
her traveling to the US to try to raise money
to sustain the Delphic Festival. Each of them later remarried
(08:49):
other people, and at some point during all of this,
Eva and Natalie made amends to.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Return to the timeline. In nineteen oh nine, Natalie moved
to a house on Rujakob. It's possible that one of
her reasons for wanting to move to a new place
was that her landlord in Nuill was increasingly critical of
all these sapphig plays that she was staging out in
her garden and the kinds of people that she was
(09:17):
continually bringing together at her home. It is also possible, though,
that she just wanted some kind of a fresh start.
She had started looking for a new place to live
in nineteen oh eight, so that was not long after
the end of her relationship with Pauline Tarn and her
falling out with Eva. This move also put her into
(09:37):
Paris proper, and in her words quote Paris has always
seemed to me the only city where you can live
and express yourself as you please. We will have more
after a break. Natalie Clifford Barney's new home at Jakob
(10:01):
was on the left bank south of the Senne, a
neighborhood that was known for its community of writers and artists,
which later had a reputation for its really bohemian atmosphere.
It hadn't quite gotten there yet when she moved in,
but later it did. The house had been built in
the seventeenth century, and it had a Doric temple out
(10:21):
in the garden, which had Temple Alamati, or Temple of Friendship,
carved into its lentil. She had some restoration work done
on this temple, and the garden and the house and
the temple became home to her very famous weekly salon,
which she called her Fridays.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
The salon is the thing Natalie Clifford Barney is most
well known for, except maybe for her romantic relationships, which
sometimes overshadow everything else. She held this alone every week,
starting in nineteen oh nine and continuing for more than
fifty years. Except what she was traveling or otherwise out
of the city, and sometimes there were more than one
hundred people in attendance.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
This is often described as being inspired by the poet's Sappho,
which includes the museum signage we read at the beginning
of the episode in part one, but this was open
to anybody regardless of their gender. Guests included writers like
Colette and Gertrude Stein, but also Ezra Pound, James Joyce,
Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, all same ex patriot writers
(11:25):
who Gertrude Stein also knew. This was about literature and
the arts, but at the same time there was a
definite focus on encouraging and nurturing the creative work of women. Specifically,
men were allowed, but women were celebrated.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
As we discussed earlier, Barney had also made herself into
a living example of how someone could live a publicly
lesbian life without shame or self doubt. She continued this
after moving to Rujakob, and she intentionally focused her salon
on al allowing other women to do the same. Historian
Lilian Faderman framed this as quote a support group for
(12:06):
lesbians to permit them to create a self image, which
literature and society denied them, and she also helped women
writers and artists in more direct ways. At first, this
was usually more about her time and her attention than
it was about money, like she would help connect people
to publishers, or promote their work or find teachers. She
(12:29):
did that a lot more often than doing something like
directly funding somebody else's creative endeavors.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
This shifted a little bit later on, but early in
the twentieth century, her encouragement of other writers and artists
was more about helping people get attention and resources than
it was about like becoming somebody's financial patron.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
Also in nineteen oh nine, Natalie met Antoinette Correcine Elizabette,
Duchess of Clermentrurmire, known as Lily, who was married to
Philibert de Clare. They met through Lucy de la Rue Mordieux,
who we mentioned earlier. This would be one of Barney's
longest relationships. We read from the marriage contract that they
would go on to write together in part one of
(13:12):
this episode, and they celebrated their anniversary on May first
every year until Lily's death, with the exception of the
years that they were separated due to war.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Lily was a.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Poet and a translator, and had published the first French
translations of the works of John Keats.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
In nineteen ten, Barney was connected to a scandal that,
for once, did not have to do with her love life.
Her sister Laura had made a plaster copy of a
sculpture and sent it to her mother's home of studio
house in Washington, D C. With instructions to keep it
outside and covered and to have it sprinkled with water
every day to allow this plaster to cure and harden.
(13:52):
There are slightly different details of exactly what happened in
various news reports and whatever, but like the point is,
there was a statue, it was covered up. This all
seemed to go fine until one day the cover blew
off of it and it turned out this sculpture was
of a reclining nude woman. It probably would not raise
(14:13):
many eyebrows today, but for this nude woman statue to
be out in front of a home in Washington, D C.
In nineteen ten just caused a lot of outrage. It
was also rumored that Natalie had been the model for
the sculpture, not really clear whether that's the case.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
She does seem to have denied that, though scandal. Barney
published three books that year, At Parpiamond, Jemousuvien and Acte
enract et Parpiamon or Scatterings, was essentially a collection of epigrams.
Barney was known for having an epigrammatic wit. She would
(14:53):
basically sit at the salon listening to what was going
on around her, and then toss off a very clever
sentence or two. Barney's most popular published works were her
epigram collections. Jemousouvian was a prose poem about Pauline tarn
also known as renaevy Vienne, which she had written years before,
but she didn't publish it until after Tarne's death, and
(15:16):
At Dampraqte was a collection of short dramatic works and poetry.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
That same year, Barney also made friends with poet Remy
du Gourmont, who helped popularize at Parpillmont after she gave
him a copy. Remy du Gourmont is who nicknamed Barney
the Amazon thanks to both her skill with horses and
her reputation as a lover. He went on to publish
two books that were pretty much fictionalized letters to her.
(15:43):
They were Lettra Lamizon in nineteen fourteen and Lettra INtime Lamizon,
which was published posthumously in nineteen twenty seven.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
In nineteen eleven, Natalie's mother, Alice, married Christian Hemick and
her sister Laura married Ippoly Dreyfus in a double wedding.
Drefus was the first French Bahai, and he and Laura
each took the surname Dreyfus. Barney Hemick was much younger
than Alice. She was sixty one and he was twenty six,
so he was also younger than both her daughters. Neither
(16:15):
daughter was happy about this, but it did seem like
Christian made their mother happy. At the same time, this
marriage was widely written about in tabloids and gossip columns,
many of them implying that he was after Alice's money.
After she put that money into an irrevocable trust that
would eventually go to her daughters, the headlines started focusing
(16:36):
on how much money she'd been willing to cut herself
off from in order to marry this very young man.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
Alice's marriage fell apart during World War One. In part
one of this episode, we talked about how she had
been planning to stay with Natalie while dealing with some
drama of her own, but had at least temporarily changed
her mind because of her complicated feelings about her daughter's sexuality.
That drama was the end of her marriage to Christian Hemmick.
(17:02):
Hemick claimed that the marriage had fallen apart because Alice
did not approve of his involvement in the theater, but
the last straw was apparently his affair with a young actor,
specifically a young male actor.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Also, during World War One, the focus of Barney's Friday
salons shifted. She was vehemently opposed to the war. While
many of her friends started working as nurses or ambulance
drivers or journalists, Barney felt like working toward the war
effort would essentially be condoning it, so she stayed home
and she turned the salon into a meeting for pacifists
(17:40):
and anti war activists and hosted a women's conference for peace.
The closest thing she did to becoming directly involved in
the war effort was hosting a movie night for wounded soldiers.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
During the early months of the war, Natalie also met
one of the other great loves of her life, painter
Romayne Brooks. Brooke had wanted to volunteer as an ambulance
driver during the war, but could not because of a
back problem. Instead, she had established a fund to help
artists who had been injured in battle. Her relationship with
(18:13):
Natalie Clifford Barney lasted for more than fifty years. In
nineteen twenty, Natalie Clifford Barney started a collaboration with American
poet Ezra Pound on a project called Bells Free. Their
plan was that they would choose two writers, one working
in English and one in French, and they would fund
their work. This plan never came to fruition, though.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
They chose T. S. Eliot for the English language writer
and Paul Verrie for French, but neither of them accepted
their financial help. This doesn't seem to have been connected
to their feelings about Barney or Pound. Both writers were
coming into other sources of funding, so they just didn't
really need this kind of patronage.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
Yeah, if I'm remembering correctly, this is like right after T. S.
Eliott published The Wasteland and then suddenly had other opportunities.
I don't remember what exactly had happened with Paul Valerie,
but to just move ahead a little bit. It's likely
that Barney met Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas for
(19:15):
the first time in nineteen twenty six. Stein and Toklas
had been living at twenty seven Rue Defderuru, which was
maybe a twenty minute walk away from where Barney lived.
At least according to Google Maps, he'd been living there
since nineteen oh three. But even though Stein and Toklas
were also Americans, and they also hosted a famous literary salon,
(19:36):
and they knew and were friends with just so many
of these same people, they also led very different lives
from Natalie Clifford Barney. Stein and Toklas had met in
nineteen oh seven, and they had been in a committed
relationship with each other and only each other for almost
twenty years. This was just not how Natalie Clifford Barney
(19:57):
approached her relationships at all. There does not seem to
be any clear documentation about why it took so long
for these women to make one another's acquaintance. But it
does not seem like it was just happenstance that it
took more than fifteen years, Like you would need to
be kind of going out of your way to avoid
(20:18):
each other at that point.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
In nineteen twenty seven, Barney established Lacademie de Fame, or
Women's Academy. This was in response to the refusal of
the Academy Flances to admit women into its ruling council
of forty immortals. Lacademie de Femme's first honorees included Collette
and Gertrude Stein. Although this effort doesn't seem to have
(20:41):
lasted for very long, it was notable and that it
brought additional attention to the work of women writers in
France who were not being taken seriously by the French
literary establishment.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
Also in nineteen twenty seven, Barney met Dolly Wilde, niece
of Oscar Wilde. She's often described as an another of
Barney's great loves, although their relationship, as many of them were,
was definitely tumultuous, and she and Romain Brooks did not
get along.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
In nineteen twenty eight, Radcliffe Hall published The Well of Loneliness,
a highly autobiographical novel that tells the story of Stephen Gordon,
who is of course patterned after Hall. Another character, Valerie Semour,
is a lightly fictionalized version of Natalie Clifford Barney. These
two characters are dramatically different from one another. Stephen is
(21:32):
plagued with shame and self doubt, while Valerie is the
exact opposite. This novel was both groundbreaking and controversial, and
it was immediately banned in the UK. The year after
it made its debut, Radcliffe Hall was a guest of
honor at Barney's salon, along with longtime partner Una Trubridge.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
To pause for just a moment. At this point, the
way most people talked about in conceptualized sexuality and gender
was generally much different from how it is today. Many psychologists, sociologists,
and the like lumped gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people
all together under the label of sexual invert. One prevailing
(22:15):
theory was that lesbians were men trapped in women's bodies
and gay men were women trapped in men's bodies, and
the vast majority of psychologists and other researchers saw all
of this as deviant and pathological. There were some exceptions,
including Magnus Hirschfeld, who we talked about on the show
in twenty eighteen, but for the most part, sexuality and
(22:39):
gender were conflated in a lot of ways. That they
really aren't today.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Natalie Clifford Barney did not agree with the idea that
she was a man trapped in a woman's body, and
this fed into a dislike of what she perceived as
cross dressing. We talked in Part one about how she
dressed as a page to visit and a pougee for
the first time, but that was different. That was a costume.
She didn't consider that her mode of dress right. That
(23:08):
was not her everyday wear at all. Radcliffe Hall and
Una Truebridge, on the other hand, were the kinds of
suits that would have been more commonly worn by men.
There are some scholars today who interpret Radcliffe Hall, who
identified as an invert, as a trans man. But Barney
and some of her friends made fun of Hall and
Truebridge for what they chose to wear and how they
(23:29):
carried themselves.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
We will get to Barney's life during the Great Depression
and World War Two after a sponsor break. After the
Great Depression started in nineteen twenty nine, many but definitely
not all, of the American writers and artists who had
(23:53):
been frequenting Barney's salon returned home, so her fridays were
somewhat smaller, both in terms of their attendance and their
extravagance until the economy started to improve. Overall, though, the
Barney family's finances just weren't too terribly affected by it.
Like Natalie and her mother and sister, they all had
(24:15):
a lot of money. Alice had less money to access
than her daughters did, so it does seem like she
felt it a lot more, But there are times when
Natalie seemed oblivious to the fact that there was a
depression going on. Natalie and Romayne Brooks also took a
trip to North America in late nineteen twenty nine, spending
(24:36):
some time in New York before Natalie spent six weeks
traveling with her mother. This was the last visit they
had together. They were preparing for another when Alice died
on October twelfth, nineteen thirty one. That same year, Romayne
Brooks gave Natalie an ultimatum that either she and her
relationship with Dolly Wilde or Romayne would leave. As we
(24:59):
said earlier, remain did not like Dolly. Among other things,
she found Dolly to be immature and shallow. She did
not like Dolly's heavy drug and alcohol use. After kind
of agonizing about what to do, for a while. Natalie
eventually chose to remain, although Romayne did eventually allow her
to see Dolly again.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
In the early months of World War II in Europe,
Natalie made arrangements for Dolly Wilde to go to London.
Natalie's sister Laura returned to the United States. Her husband,
Ippolyte Dreyfus Barney had died in nineteen twenty eight, and
while he was a Bahai at the time of his death,
he was also Jewish by birth. The Nazis had also
banned the Bahai faith in Germany, and Bahai's face persecution,
(25:41):
mass arrest, and death under the Nazi regime. So as
the widow of a Jewish man and a Bahai herself,
Laura was at risk.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
Yeah, not really relevant whether he considered himself Jewish at
that point, and I could not say, like how I
did not read any of his own writing on this,
but like to the Nazis, he was Jewish. Natalie initially
decided to join Romayne Brooks in Florence, where Romayne had
been living. She made this decision before Italy formally entered
(26:13):
the war. Apparently they expected Italy to remain neutral. Of course,
that neutrality perceived did not last long at all, and
then by the time she and Remain decided that they
should try to get out of Europe, they could not
get a travel permit to do so, so they were
stuck in fascist Italy for the duration.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
Although Barney had been vocally opposed to World War One,
her beliefs during World War II are a bit more complicated,
as was the case with Gertrude Stein's working as a
propagandist for the Vishy government during the Nazi occupation of France.
It's not clear how much of this was her attempt
to survive and how much reflected her actual beliefs. One
(26:56):
of Barney's great grandparents was Jewish, and she had pre
written about her Jewish ancestry with pride, but under the
Nuremberg race laws, one Jewish great grandparent meant that she
was mixed race. Her landlords at twenty Ru Jacob were
also Jewish, and at one point during the German occupation
of Paris, Nazis tried to seize everything from her home.
(27:20):
Bert Clerue, Bernie's housekeeper for about fifty years, somehow convinced
them that they'd confused Natalie with her sister Laura and
that Laura was now in the United States.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Yeah, I don't fully understand how she managed to like
get the Nazis to mostly leave Barney's home in Paris alone.
Had Barney stayed in Paris, she certainly would have been arrested.
After Hitler came to power in Germany, Barney had stopped
(27:51):
talking about her Jewish ancestry, and at the beginning of
the war she also published another book of epigrams called
Nouvelle ponseide Lamazon, and some of these were kind of
anti Semitic. Barney and Brooks also seemed to have genuinely
believed a lot of the fascist propaganda that they were
exposed to while living in Italy, which framed the United
(28:13):
States as the aggressors in the war. Some of Barney's
wartime writing expressed support for Italy's fascist government. It is
not possible to simply write all of this off as
her just trying to stay under the radar during the war,
though some of Barney's earlier epigrams had also played into
negative stereotypes of Jewish people, and while she had always
(28:35):
been really ahead of her time in terms of things
like same sex relationships, her overall politics tended to be
more conservative when she was aware of what was going
on politically at all. She was close friends and collaborators
with Ezra Pound, who was deeply anti Semitic. At the
same time, Barney also used her wealth and connections to
(28:57):
try to get Jewish friends out of Europe and to
support other people who had to flee. According to some sources,
when Collette's husband, Maurice Gudaquet was arrested by the Gestapo,
Barney was one of the people who tried to get
him released. During the war, she lost a lot of people.
On April tenth, nineteen forty one, Dolly Wilde died. Her
(29:19):
official cause of death was undetermined. Some sources cited breast cancer,
and others said that she had taken her own life.
Lucie Delarue Mardieux also died in nineteen forty five, and
Barney had other friends and former partners who died during
the war. These were mostly unrelated to things that actually
had to do with the fighting or the effects of
(29:39):
the fighting. In addition to her grief over these deaths,
she just found it upsetting that she couldn't be there
for any of these people, and in a lot of cases.
She did not even hear about any of their deaths
until much much later. While World War Two ended in
Europe in nineteen forty five, Barney couldn't return to Paris
until nineteen forty s Romayne Brooks remained in Florence. At first,
(30:04):
Natalie had to move into her sister's old apartment because
the house on ru Jakub had fallen into so much
disrepair while she was away during the war. She could
not start hosting her Fridays again until nineteen forty nine,
and then she could no longer use the doric temple
in the garden because the floor had collapsed. Food had
always been a big part of these gatherings, and that
(30:25):
was even more true in the post war years. There
was still so much deprivation, and many of the writers
and artists who attended were not getting enough to eat.
Barney was impressed at how Bert Clare Gou managed to
pull it off every week. Gertrude Stein died in nineteen
forty six, and after this Barney became closer friends with
Alice B. Telkliss. Eva Palmer died in nineteen fifty two.
(30:49):
Collette died in nineteen fifty four, so did Elizabeth de
Gramma known as Lily, at the age of seventy nine.
Her relationship with Barney had continued until the end of
her life. Then Marie lawn Sand died in nineteen fifty seven.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
Barney outlived a lot of her friends and former partners,
like Stein and Toklas. Her salon had brought together some
of the early twentieth centuries foremost writers and artists, and
had influenced the development of modernism, but through the nineteen sixties,
attendance at her salons gradually got smaller, and both Barney
and her fridays were seen as less groundbreaking and less relevant.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
She and Laura started making plans for what would happen
after their deaths, and they decided that rather than being
buried by her husband in molmart that Laura would be
buried next to Natalie in Passey's cemetery, and a plot
that had been given to Natalie by a friend several
years before.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
In nineteen sixty two, Barney had two heart attacks, and
by nineteen sixty five she needed help just with her
day to day living. This came from her housekeeper, Bert,
and also from Janine La Hoovery, whose relationship with Barney
had started in the nineteen fifties. Then in nineteen sixty six,
Barney was served noticed that she would have to move
(32:07):
out of the house on Ru Jacob in nineteen seventy.
This four year notice was legally required, and the fact
that it was given at all led to outrage, especially
among the people who recognized the importance of the salals
she had hosted there for so many years. The landlord
started construction work on the property, which also raised people's ire,
(32:28):
and used that as a way to make living there
unpleasant enough that maybe Barney would just move out early. Yeah,
the landlord seems to have sort of been like, maybe
if I just turned the kitchen into a construction zone,
you'll get fed up with this and I won't have
to wait for whole years. Toward the end of the
nineteen sixties, as all of this was going on, Barney's
(32:49):
relationship with Romayne Brooks fell apart, and Brooks stopped answering
her letters. So Barney this was really devastating, and then
Romayne Brooks died in nineteen seventy. Natalie Clifford Barney died
in Paris on February second, nineteen seventy two. At the
age of ninety five in the arms of Jeanine Lehovery.
During her lifetime, she had published twelve books and written
(33:13):
tons of other unpublished material, including at least forty thousand letters.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
Barney's tombstone at Pessi's cemetery described her as Ekrevan or writer,
followed by Elfuis Lamazon de Remy de Gourmont at her request.
The tombstone also bore the inscription Jesus adetre legendaire ou Gereville.
I probably said that very badly, but it roughly translates
(33:40):
as I am this legendary being in which I will
live again. She was fictionalized in a number of novels
about Paris in the early twentieth century, including, as you
mentioned earlier, Radcliffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. The Well
of Loneliness entered the public domain in the US this year,
so let's read some of its description of Barney's counterpart,
(34:01):
Valerie Seymour. Quote Valerie placid and self assured, created an
atmosphere of courage. Everyone felt very normal and brave when
they gathered at Valerie Seymour's. There she was this charming
and cultured woman, a kind of lighthouse in a storm
swept ocean. The waves had lashed round her feet in
(34:22):
vain winds had howled, clouds had spewed forth their hail
and their lightning. Torrents had deluged, but had not destroyed her.
The storm's gathering force broke and drifted away, leaving behind
them the shipwrecked the drowning. But when they looked up,
the poor spluttering victims, why what should they see but
(34:42):
Valerie Seymour. Then a few would strike boldly out for
the shore. At the sight of this indestructible creature. She
did nothing, and at all times said very little, feeling
no urge towards philanthropy. But this much she gave to
her brethren, the freedom of her salon, the protection of
her friendship.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
That book also includes the quote her love affairs would
fill quite three volumes, even after they had been expurgated.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
Uh. I don't think poetry was really Natalie Clifford Barney's
greatest genre of writing. Like she didn't publish that much
of it in English, But what she did publish in
English I would not rank among the great poets. However,
some of that English poetry is in the public domain.
Now so we can include one. This is the Phantom Guest.
(35:32):
We lay in shade diaphanous and spoke the light that
burns in us, says in the gloomings Net, I caught her.
She shimmered like reflected water. Romantic and emphatic moods are
not for her, whom life eludes is vulgar tinsel round
her fold. She'd rather shudder with the cold attends just
this elusive hour, a shadow in a shadow bower, a
(35:56):
moving imagery so fine it must have been her soul,
your mine. And so we blended and possessed each in
each the phantom guest, in separate we scarcely met, yet
other love nights we forget. And then we'll just end
with one final epigram by Natalie Clifford Barney. This one
was actually quoted in the biography. We have mentioned a
(36:18):
couple of times, which was Wildheart a Life Natalie Clifford
Barney and the Decadence of Literary Paris quote. When it
comes to friendship, I am very lazy. Once I confer friendship,
I never take it back. It's just easier. That's Natalie
Clifford Barney. She's a lot.
Speaker 1 (36:39):
Do you have a listener mail that's maybe less dramatic.
Speaker 2 (36:42):
I do have listener mail. It is from Elizabeth and
Elizabeth's title of the email is Wooly Dogs and the
Sandal in the Well, Dear Holly and Tracy. Last week,
I was on my way to give blood when the
portion of Unearthed about the Salish wooly dog came in.
I had to sit in the park lad and listen
to it, even though I could have just hit pause.
(37:02):
I'm a middle school science teacher and I have just
read an article with my students about genetic research done
to find native dogs of the Americas. The article talks
about how researchers were looking at mitochondrial DNA to determine
which dog breeds pre day Europeans and the Americas. They
found that the Mexican and Peruvian hairless dogs, the Chihuahua,
(37:24):
and the Carolina dog all pre day Europeans, and the
Chihuahua had DNA not founded dogs anywhere else in the world.
The article also talked about some of the lost breeds,
including the wily dog. The article shared the old ideas
that the Saless had allowed the dogs to be lost
to ender reading because of the availability of other wool sources.
(37:45):
Next year, when we read this, I will be sharing
the new understanding from this research. I love when I
can bring new research into my science classes to show
that our understanding of the world changes over time. Also,
I appreciate your highlighting of the involvement of the tribal
peoples in this work. Here in Idaho, we have many
active and vibrant tribes, but it feels like my students
(38:05):
are often presented with native peoples as if they are
just history and not part of our modern state and country.
And then last night I listened to the behind the
Scenes and your discussion of the sandal in the well
made me think of an exhibit I saw in France
in the early nineties that featured the shoe that Marie
Antoinette lost on her way to the guillotine. It was
(38:26):
in an empty white room with blank white walls. The
only thing in the room was the shoe on a pedestal.
Elizabeth says, dust off your French, and it had a
link to a video about this. I feel like I
would have followed the video pretty well if it had
had captioning, but just trying to listen to the French
(38:48):
was a little too fast for med keep up with.
As you talked, I could see something similar happening with
the sandal, with long discussions of where it came from
and how it ended up in the well. I particularly
like your idea of a sibling prank. I know it
is something my brother would have done. It just seemed
like such an odd little bit of history. I thought
you might enjoy it. Thank you for the many hours
(39:10):
of entertainment and education. Elizabeth pet Tax Below so we
have Ziggi, a thirteen year old shelter mutt, and Goose,
a four year old cat found as a kitten under
some hay bales, had to be bottle fed for a
few weeks. I sure have bottle fed some abandoned kitty
casts before, something that simultaneously I enjoyed doing, but also
(39:30):
it was so much because I feel like this litter
was like six kittens. It's so much work that needed
to We're just continually bottle feeding. And then we have Taya,
who was taken in about eighteen months ago when Taya's
owner died. So sweet. This is a dog who is
deaf and vision apparent and anxious, but such a sweet look,
cute dog. I can tell from this this dog has
(39:53):
a very anxious face. I will say, I feel like
I can tell that this is a little uh high
strung baby. There's Friday, a six year old Ossi, and
Hank the classroom turtle. Because you Sew and Staid send
other pictures. I'm really happy how this long jacket turned out,
especially the pocket's made from a thrift store curtain and
(40:15):
lined with the cotton curtain lining. This is like a
long jacket with a design of sort of floury leaf,
you find. I like it very much. Thank you so much,
Elizabeth for all of this, one hundred percent of it.
I love the animal pictures. I love the jacket picture.
I love the turtle picture. I love the story of
(40:36):
your experience with this episode and the behind the scenes.
If you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast, word history podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
You can kind of find us on social media. We
mostly just post the episodes being live, and you can
subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and wherever
(40:57):
else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed
in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
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