A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney

by Natalie Clifford Barney

  Despite its harsh beginnings on earth, the family, which forms the basis of our society, remains an irreplaceable institution, even though it often produces parents and siblings who are each other's enemies. Nevertheless, it survives for better or worse—worse in the case of many poor couples overwhelmed by misery and innumerable children.

  If the exhortation to fertility persists, having outlived its usefulness, this is partly due to the prejudices which still blind many worthy people. Reforms and moral injunctions are rarely entirely disinterested. Take those virtuous militants for example who, looking for good works to occupy themselves, rarely tolerant or understanding of anything beyond their own needs, surpassed themselves by wedding social causes (no men being available). If they have failed to wipe out certain practices (despite a recent prison case reminiscent of the days of Oscar Wilde) and, if, despite having the law on their side, they encounter so many discouraging obstacles in shepherding the perverted back onto the "right road," perhaps it is because the laws they are defending are out of date.

  It is often not fully appreciated that for most of the sexually abnormal, perversion would consist of adopting a normal sexual practice! People should pay more attention to those authors who have made a special study of the matter: Havelock Ellis, Kraft Ebbing, Freud, Jung, etc.... Thanks to them the hypocrisy surrounding the issue is beginning to dissipate.

  But will the most advanced countries, anxious about their rising birth rates, dare to advocate what they already tacitly accept: homosexuality, that safety valve practiced throughout time, which many young people turn to instinctively even though they believe they are committing a mortal sin?

  That homosexuality continues to flourish is a sign of neither privilege nor of decadence, but a simple fact which needs to be recognized. What's more, childless unions counterbalance those which are only too prolific, re-establishing an appropriate equilibrium. And the range of such unions is vast, from the limp-wristed sodomite to the closeted, self-deceiving or unaware!

  As I said before in The Trial of Sappho, "We are nearly all composed of such a complex mixture of human qualities that in each one of us reside both masculine and feminine principles: what man is without any female attribute and what woman never demonstrates any masculine characteristics?" We are reminded of the primeval order preceding the "division of the sexes". We should not forget that Eve was made from Adam's rib, and that man, born of woman, cannot be entirely masculine. The normal man (if he exists), even if he boasts of being exclusively masculine, has been cut off from femininity and will "dream continually of the warmth of the breast". This might explain some of his tendencies, no doubt caused by the long months spent in his mother's womb.

  There are, of course, some extreme cases, as far apart as the albino and the negro. No one should consider themselves safe from change, even without having one of those operations you read about in the papers, of which there are a couple of examples living amongst us. For nature bides its time before playing one of its tricks: it may masculinize the bodies of some women causing them to lose their physical charms, which they appear to have passed on to certain men who shamelessly flaunt their sumptuous breasts and bellies at the beach.

  Though usually more discreet in terms of external changes, this sexual "turnabout" nonetheless has a profound impact on behavior and tastes. What about the married woman who adopted those of a gentleman of her class, fell for her lady love and lived out her days as her close companion? Should her husband, denied his conjugal rights, finding the divorce laws no protection, mourn this separation so much that he can never recover, or seize the opportunity to pay court to another such as he?... Until the formerly united couple lie side by side again at last, two sexless skeletons in the family vault!

  Amid this sexual confusion, alongside those who were unaware of their double nature, there have been others who were quite conscious of this duality, who could go either way at will: like Julius Caesar who, according to his contemporaries, was not only the wives' lover, but also their husbands' mistress.

  Mlle. de Maupin, that female gallant, was quite unrepressed about expressing her true self. Queen Christina of Sweden behaved similarly, though with more mystery attached.

  Male couples have a much harder time than normal couples, judging by Verlaine and Rimbaud and their Season in Hell. Verlaine's family, however, worried about their reputation, made a ridiculous attempt to prove that the relationship was platonic.

  "You don't hide away alone together to practice chastity, but perhaps the relationship can become chaste if you love each other, because your loved one's body gains a significance which cannot be described in terms of lechery. For Verlaine, sex becomes chaste when it is dictated by love, and he never confuses love with physical need. Love is chaste, whatever its expression."✻

  Another, un-exemplary, example is that of Oscar Wilde and Alfred Douglas. Each had suffered because of the other but instead of living apart after their trials, they were happy to be back together. Their rows and their life of debauchery started again immediately....

  Do female couples, usually more exclusive, establish better households? Like the Ladies of Langollen who, after one had abducted the other, "settled down" and were visited by the most intelligent members of the society they had scandalized.

  And the great Sappho, did she not live in harmony with not one but several women friends? As one succeeded another they succumbed to that sweet rivalry which is more a source of inspiration than of discord, judging by the fragments that Sappho, the "tenth Muse", has left us...

  Let us therefore respect these variants of the species who offer us their gifts: those singular beings who created works of genius instead of more dubious offspring, for it is known that the genius excels in production rather than reproduction. May those "blossoming peaks" of our race, whose only fruit are their works of art, console us for the multiplying mediocrity of humanity. And let us rejoice if some, outside the norm, bring a certain diversity to the species if only because they keep at bay the system of robots we are bent on creating—with that doctrine of equality without liberty, or fraternity, which would generate a society composed of people without personality.

  As one biologist sensibly concludes, "It would be a waste of time for Nature to make each individual a unique human being only to have Society reduce humanity to a collection of people all alike."

  In this state of general servitude, more to everyone's detriment than for the good of all since quality has been lost in favour of quantity, may love, source of individual rapture, lift us out of this civilization in which no one is civilized, or away from these civilized people who have no civilization!

  For what does the so-called "modern world" have to offer us in exchange for our ever more besieged private lives? Collective emotions, stirred if not by H bombs then, in the meantime at least, by "boxing rings" where crowds are moved to transports of joy and enthusiasm, more than by any other spectacle, even a theatrical masterpiece, as they watch a pair of boxers fight until the "knockout."

  May each enjoy the public, or private, pleasures they merit. But why does France, at the apex of civilized accomplishment, allow itself to be influenced by other nations who are still forming, or deforming, for who if not She can teach them how to live? Fortunately, while the Frenchman has succumbed to the alcoholic excesses typical across the Channel, and across the Atlantic, he is resisting the taboos of Puritanism as far as love is concerned—of which he is a greater connoisseur and practitioner than anyone.

  But "illicit love" should not be confused with the depravity of those for whom sexual vice has become an obsession, a form of madness which degrades, tortures or ridicules a human being. A vice in which there is no trace of real feeling, love or passion.

  What's more, passion has no need of the tricks practiced by those whose speciality is impotence.

  The moral:

  If pleasure is so hard to attain, You might do better to abstain!

  On the rare occasions when Colette waxe
d philosophical about "these pleasures," she defined vice as, "The evil we do in which we take no pleasure." Even our Anglican poet, T. S. Eliot recognized that there are "vices fathered by our heroism." Does it not take more courage to dare to be oneself than to conform to contemporary morality?…

  * Rémy de Gourmont

  Predestined for Free Choice

  One does not always recognize oneself in one's acts, any more than one recognizes oneself in one's parents. My ancestors covered the range from Celts to Latins, Jews to Puritans—and doubtless more besides. But these contrasts, instead of creating a civil war inside me, bequeathed me an excellent sense of balance.

  My great grand-parents, seeking refuge in America from France, Holland and England, participated in the formation of the United States and our War of Independence.*

  Interpreting this spirit of independence in my own way, I returned to my maternal origins, and France has become my country of choice.

  Paris has always seemed to me to be the only city in which one can live as one sees fit. Despite the baleful progress inflicted from the outside, she continues to respect, and even encourage, personality. In France, thought, food and love have remained a matter of individual choice where each person follows their own inclination, instead of that of their neighbors. Which is probably why the country is so difficult to govern, and so easy to live in.

  I was predestined for free choice, for, contrary to the warnings given back home in the United States of "what is and is not done," I have always done as I pleased. What's more, does it not require deep concentration to catch hold of the messages of our interior being, and thus experience the mysteries of self-initiation?

  One cannot, after all, judge an existence except in terms of what it has made of us, and what we have made of it. If life is to be the expression, and not the suppression, of self, have I not roundly fulfilled and succeeded in mine?

  I love my life. Principally because I have been able to keep it free, in order freely to give it. Guided by love—the kind which forces us to surpass ourselves—I have loved my fellow man, and particularly my fellow woman, with passion. That such feelings and dispositions may be seen as blameworthy or too intense, has never bothered me. That was the direction in which I developed.

  That right-thinking people, making light of our precious relationships here below, have had other affinities, other predilections than mine, seems to me as strange as my singular life and attachments must appear to them. Is it natural, though, to despise love in favour of heavenly, or earthly, ambition? Love is certainly a great expense of self.

  Which is doubtless why so many people find it so hard to accept or practice! Whether they scheme for honor and fame, get into cut-throat rivalry with their colleagues over career promotion (for one needs to make a living—living off others), whether they amass great fortunes or contract profitable marriages, all these attempts at "making it" have the same result: one loses oneself on the way. Consequently, almost no one lives their own true life, almost no one pays attention to the one thing which, to my mind, is essential: love. Love, the perfect median between heaven and earth—for it spiritualizes the material and materializes the spiritual in the form of our own being, blessed with both body and soul which only love can reunite.

  Do not let us imagine, however, that the lover's calling is an unmixed delight: it is, rather, a continual tension in which one tries to guide and guard the one we love, exercising all one's perspicacity and charm to ensure her continued happiness. For it to last, love should be composed of all our other loves. I am, perhaps, love's mystic, though this has never deterred me from the thrill of its practice. But should we not abandon the trappings of love before they abandon us?

  Being other than normal is a perilous advantage. And does one not need a more tempered courage to live one's life than to sacrifice oneself to some duty or other?

  Living in the eye of love is an adventure for which few are suited. It's a very trying environment; most of those who attempt it are in danger of burning up with fever or starvation. Few constitutions survive. As for me, the striving, the pain and the mystery are more than just my native land. It is only there that I feel I am in my element...

  My life is truly my own, without pretense, and so, consequently, is my work: my writing is simply the result, the accompaniment. I offer them as such.

  If too little of the love I am claiming is found in this book, it is because I have spent it more profitably elsewhere. There remain only fragments here. And when I leave my natural element, I go armed as an amazon.

  How can I complete this moral, or immoral, portrait?

  Born to young, good-looking, healthy parents, I have never had a serious illness.

  My childhood? "Extraordinary," like everyone else's but unlike everyone else, I am not set on recounting it in detail.

  I am more conscious of my adolescence as a "sad, sweet little page."

  If my education was nil, it is because:

  "My only books were women's looks..."

  My love affairs? Many.

  My friendships? Loyal and faithful.

  My youth? It continues, like for the elderly Goethe: how many first loves meet up with our last loves! How many chosen affinities find each other again then!

  I have examined many hearts, comparing them with my own.

  "How many beauties, how much candor

  have aroused my feeble heart which, till it beat its last,

  will remain the heart of a lover."

  My last heart beat, which I neither long for nor fear.

  Without hatred for those who are different from me, nor for those who would be my enemy, my sensibility is such that I cannot witness suffering without suffering myself.

  Naturally intuitive, I am able to interpret even the silence of children. I believe I have never approached another being without doing them some good.

  My joys are quite unselfish, for I experience them only through the one I love.

  To love like that is to play only for the other, stirring up wonder, demanding from life more than it gives, for it is a raw, intractable material which must be continually reworked if it is to yield more than our paradise lost.

  It seems that all my journeys have been with, or toward, someone who was dear to me, and that all my letters and poems were inspired by love, or by loving friendship.

  Would Renée Vivien have found her way without me?

  Would Rémy de Gourmont's life have been renewed without his Amazon?

  As for the portraits which follow, those who would condemn them as indiscreet, should bear in mind that all art, all artistic expression, is an indiscretion we commit against ourselves.

  Discretion about the past, which is really passed, is no better than oblivion. Silence too can be indiscreet. And would it not be the height of cowardice to allow our dead to die?

  If, in the course of these confessions, which are open to the heavens, I have pushed certain memories to the extremes of confidence, I hope I have never overstepped the line where indiscretion is the privilege of tact.

  *Some of their deeds and exploits are featured in the preface to my Adventures of the Mind.

  Part Four: A Fine Spray of Salon Wit

  Scatterings

  There are more evil ears than bad mouths.

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  Glory: to be known to those we would not wish to know.

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  You can tell a person's breeding by their temper.

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  I have known temptation, but no temptress.

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  You are so much more beautiful than the things that will befall you.

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  Forever is far too long.

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  To be married is to be neither alone nor together.

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  Knowing how to please, what a sign of age!

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  To have or have not, which is worse?

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  I never explain myself, I do my bidding.

&
nbsp; ⚜

  Only I can make myself blush.

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  How frightened they must be of losing their youth who gain nothing with age.

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  To grow old is to show oneself.

  One should only dare to criticize that which one admires.

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  Those who are bored by life are still richer than those who amuse themselves outside it.

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  I am most curious about myself.

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  That laughter, all on the surface, which seems not to keep any amusement for itself.

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  Sometimes we get what we want, and it is not what we wanted.

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  I do not care what you do, but who you are.

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  I only judge by their acts those I dislike. We are wearied by the work we do not do.

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  I judge people's charm by the ease with which I express myself in their presence.

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  What inner resources one must have to live a life of idleness without tiring.

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  Delicacy: that aristocracy of strength... How little they must have who call it impotence!

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  Every loss enriches me.

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  Some people make it hard for me to believe in universal evolution.

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  When joy befalls me, I am less inclined than ever to believe in chance.

  Little Mistresses

  Do we not only love in them what we lend them of ourselves?

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  To be sufficiently distracted no longer to think of everything.

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  Who will console me for my gaiety?

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  How much strength we need to yield to what we want the most.