A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney
Page 19
Edith Sitwell sat well and majestically remote above her audience. Her long Elizabethan hands, bearing no papers, met in their virginal loveliness, sufficient unto themselves. Her voice also had a rare quality of detachment, as it rose on the capricious wings of thought to nameless heights. And we wondered if this singular prelude was meant to prepare us for even rarer revelations. Although the actual name of Gertrude Stein was not yet mentioned we felt nevertheless initiated, even by so round-about an approach, which would surely soon emerge into a striking view of the rival summit. But no such view appeared, as Edith Sitwell, seemingly forgetful of its co-existence, opened a book, amongst those on the table before her, and rose to read.
Ah yes, of course, we were first to be given a chosen page of Gertrude Stein's writing. But what were those strange sounding, un-Steinean rhythms now scanned by this unique poetess's lips? Were they not some of Miss Sitwell's very own? So she proceeded, resembling Mallarmé's "Hérodiade": "Oui, c'est pour moi que je fleuris déserte”—for was she not also caught in the magic circle of self—and apparently quite oblivious of the object of our reunion. However, did we not detect a faint gleam of suppressed mirth filtering down to us through her blond eyelashes, as she turned the page to read on? Here again we were forced to recognize a strongly accentuated melody, somehow dedicated, rather than to Miss Stein, to the Negro race.
We dared not communicate a smile of surprise; and indeed Gertrude Stein's expression was forbidding. For this was not fair play to her, nor destined to cover the ground agreed upon. Yet she sat bolt upright, meditating, in spite of a twitch of her hands, a more gentlemanly reprisal than immediate exposure. And she preserved this ominous attitude throughout the rest of the lecture. Although it would have seemed a relief if, then and there, she had cleared the atmosphere by an almighty exit. But no—she remained on, intent, and we all listened to this singular monologue devoted exclusively to Miss Sitwell's self. And when it was ended, boastfully or faintly applauding, we forthwith united in an intimate petit souper in Sylvia Beach's apartment upstairs—where I proceeded to offer "orangeade" or "sherry" while our hostess, aided by her neighbor, Adrienne Monnier, from the precious bookshop opposite, passed sandwiches and cakes.
The glass of sherry I proffered Edith Sitwell made her question: "Won't it go to my head?" I smilingly reassured her and refrained from murmuring, "No spirits but Miss Sitwell's own could accomplish that!" For our tacit consigne had simultaneously been to act as though nothing unusual had happened—nor indeed had it!
Turning around to serve Gertrude Stein, I perceived with awe that she had gone home. So no “toasts” followed, nor indeed were any de circonstance, lest they come from embittered cups! Yet on retiring, I promised myself that should I ever again face Miss Sitwell, I would recall this lecture and ask her why she had allowed it to so miscarry. To which she would doubtless, and perhaps even with a maidenly blush, charmingly answer: "Ah yes, I did mean to speak about dear Gertrude Stein, but became otherwise inspired."
Part Six: Natalie and Anti-Semitism
An Afterword by Anna Livia
The Trouble with Heroines:
Natalie Clifford Barney and Anti-Semitism
The trouble with heroines is that as soon as we discover their feet of clay, they become the scapegoat of our common failings as surely as, in their prelapsarian state, they embodied our common ideals. That Natalie Clifford Barney has been a kind of heroine there can be little doubt. Hailed by Bertha Harris [Vida 1978: 257] as the first known lesbian since Sappho (twenty-four centuries down the line), her retreat to Lesbos with Renée Vivien to recreate a Sapphic poetry community, her literary salon in Paris, her outspoken declaration of "the perilous advantage" of "being other than normal" [Barney 1960: 23], the long and exuberant list of her love affairs—the last of which began on a park bench in 1954 when she was seventy-eight years old—have made her something of a latter day lesbian star.
As she wrote almost entirely in French and had not, until today, been translated she was known to anglophones by her deeds rather than her words. So I began the weighty task of reading through her collected works, the various biographies and the special editions of magazines dedicated to her, in order to produce the collection you now hold in your hands. I would be asked at dinner parties what I was working on and, replying, "Natalie Clifford Barney," I expected the usual post Jean Chalon response, "What? The lesbian Don Juan?” generated by his biography, Portrait of a Seductress. Instead my hosts said, "You? I wouldn't have thought... I mean, wasn't she... She was a fascist, an anti-semite, didn't I read that somewhere?" They probably did read that somewhere, for feminist scholars, Karla Jay and Shari Benstock, have both commented on this unsavory side of Barney's life in their respective texts, The Amazon and the Page and Women of the Left Bank. Someone referred me to pages 412-418 of Benstock's book which quote the following paragraph from Barney's Memoirs of a European American, her unpublished war notebooks of 1940-44:
The trade of usury has proved the most lucrative and far reaching: practiced openly in well-defined quarters, it was long tolerated and even found useful. But since these usurers have dissimulated themselves, that they might more easily mix with and "fix" the Gentiles, they very much resent having their maneuvers divulged, as recently distinguished by the obligatory wearing of a yellow star. Yet other nations and trades are proud of their insignia. Should they not rather imitate that German Jewess who had her star made up of yellow diamonds and wore it as proudly as a German his swastika? (144-145)
Since it seemed the bulk of the evidence pointing to Barney's anti-semitism came from her unpublished memoirs, I felt a moral obligation to go and read the manuscript for myself before completing A Perilous Advantage and presenting "the best of Natalie Clifford Barney".
But, was it fair to judge Barney on one unpublished manuscript which, had it not been for modern researchers, might never have seen the light of day? Are there also signs of anti-semitism in Barney's published works? Sadly, yes, there are. It can be seen in a scattering of aphorisms:
What nation will love the Jews so well that they may stop
being Jewish? [Barney 1910: 66]
Those dispossessed Jews who seem to have accepted their
burden of guilt and their inheritance, the crown of thorns,
still pale to think of a god's agony—but perhaps all crowns are
crowns of thorns! [Barney 1918: 27]
A straightened Jewish nose: surgery, paraffin or mixed
ancestry? [Barney 1918; 129]
These are the usual slings and arrows of anti-semitism: blaming the Jews for the death of Christ, mocking Semitic physical features, suggesting that if only Jews would assimilate they would no longer have a problem. (I say 'they' since I am not Jewish but an Anglo-Irish Protestant—ethnically speaking). Other aphorisms suggest a more ambiguous, even contradictory attitude. Among the series of dedications which open the Pensées d'une amazone one finds:
To those who force me to remain Israfel [Barney 1918:VI]
(A play on words indicating an intermingling of Israel and the
Angel Raphael: Barney's cultural heritage.)
More than the American, the Jew talks through his nose:
but also with his eyes and spirit. [Barney 1918: 129]
Usually when Barney speaks of 'the Jews' she speaks from a distance, producing nicely worded social witticisms to please her salon public. Yet her mother's father, Samuel Pike, was Jewish. Barney recalls that the Lithuanian poet, Milosz, used to say that one needed to be part Jewish, as both he and she were, in order to understand the world. Barney evidently agreed. Later, at dinner at her house Milosz exploded into vicious, rather unexpected invective against "the chosen cursed people, that race unworthy of its kings and prophets who failed in their sacred mission and became merchants, thrown out of the temple in times gone by." [Barney 1960: 214-215]. Samuel Pike had been a merchant and had devoted a large part of his wealth to building the first opera house the good citizens of Cincinnati h
ad ever known. When it burned down, uninsured, he built another one.
Was Barney aware of the contradictions of her position? It's unclear. In one of her collections of literary portraits, Souvenirs indiscrets, she repeats a tale told her by Elisabeth de Gramont, Duchess de Clermont-Tonnerre, allegedly one of her lovers:
During the occupation, obliged to come in person to get her ration card and seeing two queues in front of her, she went and stood at the end of the shortest. Then, holding her lorgnette to her eye, she noticed that the people in front of her were wearing the gold star. She slipped over to the other queue—but not without attracting the attention of the German officer who, suspecting some illegality, demanded: "Since when have you had the right to stand on this side?"
"Since Henry the Fourth," she replied. [Barney 1960:130-131]
An amusing anecdote of the triumph of the French aristocracy over grubby German bureaucrats. But what about the people in the other queue? How long did they wait? Were their ration cards different from the others? Did they get the same food ration? What happened to those people? We are not told: these questions are irrelevant compared to the demands of salon wit. With a similar flippancy Barney relates, in her unpublished memoir, a funny story someone had told her of a woman in occupied Paris who received a phone call from someone asking, "Is this Mrs. Levy?" To which the woman replied, "No, Madame, certainly not, I have quite enough worries as it is." [Barney MS: 185]
But the portrait of Elisabeth de Gramont continues, and the situation becomes more complex. In 1934 she had received the Légion d'Honneur, yet ten years later her title, her honors, her talent got her nowhere; she even found it hard to get paid for her work (she was a writer and historian). Barney comments:
Perhaps people thought she was rich because of her half-
brothers and half-sister whose mother was a Rothschild.
[Barney 1960: 131-132]
So Gramont's siblings were Jewish. Had this endangered her life during the war? Barney does not say, though friends of hers were interned and deported: Barney comments in her memoirs that Colette's husband, Maurice Goudeket, was interned, released and spent the rest of the war in hiding.
Despite the experience of her friends, Barney writes slightingly, even appreciatively of 'the wars of extermination.' In two separate passages where she abhors the way men condemn women to the agony of childbirth and exults in the fact that homosexuals do, at least, not breed, which have strong feminist and homophile overtones. she writes:
Since nature invented a horrific and almost unavoidable
method of giving birth and surviving, doubtless civilization
wanted to lend a hand by offering its apparatus for
extermination. [Barney 1918: 18]
Since neither wars of extermination nor birth control have
been sufficient to limit the population, why does it not occur to
the Lord of Lords to change his slogan to "Stay home and
stop multiplying?" [Barney 1963: 166J
More witty Barneyisms, typically ignoring the full import of those "wars of extermination." Did she ignore it, or was she ignorant?
Barney expressed strong support for feminism; she recounts how she and her sister became feminists as children, when they saw a woman and a dog pulling a milk cart while the man strolled alongside smoking his pipe. Yet one comes across aphorisms of hers which are profoundly misogynist:
Sentimentality is lady's work.
Rape is perhaps not the least desirable way of pleasing.
[Barney 1918: 94J
The flighty female:
The child who has been raped walks away sucking happily
on a stick of barley sugar. [Ibid.]
These seem randomly unpleasant, infrequent echoes of the jokes men of her class might make about women, oddly out of keeping with Barney's life and attitudes. Can one put her antisemitic 'sallies' into the same box labelled "random unpleasantness due to class position and prevailing social attitudes"? Had Barney grown more conservative with age, or rather, more conservative with the age, for 1930s Europe was a far cry from the Naughty Nineties and the Belle Epoque? Was she incapable of understanding social formations more complex than those involving a tête-à-tête? Had she fallen into bad company?—the splenetic separatist Renée Vivien replaced by a morose misanthropic Romaine Brooks, passionate admirer of Gabriele D'Annunzio, the Italian poet who gave Mussolini the title 'Il Duce': their good friend Ezra Pound, making his passionate pro-fascist radio broadcasts throughout the war, passionately listened to by Romaine and Natalie. For Natalie always sided with passion.
I went to Paris to try and answer these questions and read my way through the Memoirs of a European American, all three hundred and something pages of it. I studied other unpublished manuscripts and private notebooks. The Memoirs are a mixture of war commentary, political theory and daily life in fascist Italy, from Mussolini through the arrival of first German, then British and finally American troops, interspersed with reminiscences, and speeches by Hitler and Mussolini.
Exactly what Barney chose to quote is telling. Until three quarters of the way through she strongly disagreed with the Allies, seeing them as war loving destroyers of life and, more importantly, art. This was, no doubt, the local Italian version of events and it would be hard to blame Barney for believing it without at the same time condemning recent American support for the destruction of Iraq. Many Americans, reading only U.S. coverage of the Gulf War, knew little of the suffering of the Iraqis and the terrible devastation of their country. It is surely a truism that war reporting is biased in favor of the "home team." Barney makes continual reference to Hitler and Mussolini's offer of peace, copying out Hitler's Last Appeal to Reason [Barney MS: 53] and his Munich speech of 8th November 1940, concluding that Hitler's outstretched hand had been refused whereupon he had gracefully turned the gesture into a fascist salute [Barney MS: 13]. Barney takes seriously the German suggestion that the French send their unemployed workers to Germany to relieve French POWs, and criticizes the French government for refusing [Barney MS: 150]. She blames the English for bombing open towns and sinking unarmed ships, meanwhile praising Mussolini for gathering together the free spirits of Italy and binding them together into a "fascio."
Many of Barney's comments on the events of the war are such ridiculous trivializations that one must seriously ask how much she understood. She suggests that "our boys," (the American GIs), be served mint tea in place of alcohol [Barney MS: 157], is charmed that the Italian soldiers are as keen on gelati as the GIs are on beer, and listens with amusement as the military band drops into popular operatic arias once their drill is over [p. 208]. She complains, after the bombing has begun, that her new maid entered her service "merely for the purpose of eating." She recalls how her French chauffeur was seized while cherry-picking and taken to what she terms a "concentration camp," a nice little mountain chalet where four gentlemen were being kept. After doing the housework (which he enjoys), the chauffeur is free to bathe under a waterfall and spend his tips in the village [p, 33].
At many points in the manuscript she states that she is not, and never has been, interested in politics.
Whatever my passions had been they were no-wise political. [p. 179]
If this is so, why copy out Hitler's speeches? As she notes earlier:
Possessed of few convictions, I felt an urgent need to pick some up. [p. 72-73]
If you seek refuge in a fascist country, the easiest ideas to pick up will undoubtedly be fascist. Toward the end of the war, after the Allied victory in Italy, Barney and Brooks learn they are to be interviewed about their war loyalties. Barney expects an upperclass Englishman and is completely at a loss when a scruffy young Italian turns up. She leaves all the talking to Romaine, saying that the man is clearly incapable of understanding anything. Romaine told him that they were "artists, who knew too little about politics to take any part in them." [p. 295].
In her apparent determination to remain frivolous in the fa
ce of war, ("To be wounded or killed on the way to or from a cup of tea would be too ridiculous" [Barney MS: 252]) Barney resembled many of her contemporaries. Gertrude Stein remarked that the Germans at Aix-les-Bains were really very nice [p.43]; Paul Poiret, the theatrical director, declared:
I've invented an ambulance uniform with interior padding and pockets, and a helmet-like gas-mask that will ennoble the wearer's appearance instead of making it like an animal with a snout. Everything should be beautifully thought out—whether to go to a ball or to death. [p. 41]
Although during the war years Barney's loyalties were with Hider and Mussolini, what she was loyal to was a confused sense that tradition, artistic expression and personal freedom must prevail over the communist threat. By the end of the Memoirs, what's more, she is proudly and enthusiastically pro-American, offering free Vermouth to wandering GIs. To understand this turnabout it must be remembered that Barney was a pacifist. Though Benstock and Jay see her fascist sympathies as contradicting this, I found no evidence of a change of heart. If the events of the war are considered from the, admittedly idiosyncratic, perspective of an upper-class villa in Northern Italy, it is not hard to understand how Barney came to the conclusion that the Allies were the aggressors and the Axe, defenders of freedom; Germany was, after all, not bombing them. She demands angrily why English women didn't use their newly won vote to stop the war [p. 66], and suggests cynically that the vote was only granted to Italian and French women so that they could be forced to share the blame for the war [p. 311]. Upon hearing of the looting of Sicilian art treasures, by what she terms "Judaeo Anglo American connoisseurs," she wrote a scathingly critical letter addressed, "Dear Barbarians" [p. 194].