Natalie Clifford Barney

The Fridays at 20 rue Jacob

Barney moved into the pavilion at 20 rue Jacob in 1909 and stayed for nearly sixty years. The house sits behind a courtyard off a narrow street in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, with a large overgrown garden at the back. In one corner of that garden stands a small Doric temple, four columns under a pediment inscribed A l'Amitié. The French heritage register classes it as a fabrique de jardin, a nineteenth-century garden folly that was there long before she was, and it was listed as a historic monument on 16 January 1947, while she was living beside it. It stands on private ground and cannot be visited.

The salon met on Fridays. Barney received in a tea gown, fed her guests properly, and made introductions the point of the afternoon. There were readings, recitations, concerts, and theatricals staged for friends. Attendance was by invitation, and guests were expected to bring people worth meeting.

What she wanted from it was traffic across the Channel and the Atlantic. She believed that American, British, and French writers should know one another and translate one another, and she ran the Fridays accordingly. Colette performed in the theatricals. Ezra Pound, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, and Paul Valéry all came, along with publishers, critics, diplomats, and scholars. Barney translated Valéry for American readers and Stein for French ones.

Two salons dominate the accounts of literary Paris between the wars. Gertrude Stein's Saturdays at 27 rue de Fleurus were built around a picture wall and a theory of modern writing. Barney's Fridays were built around introductions, and around women. Many guests went to both.

Where the name Amazon comes from

Barney met the critic Remy de Gourmont in 1910. He was one of the most influential men of letters in France, attached to the Mercure de France, and by then a recluse, disfigured by lupus and rarely seen. She courted him as a friend: visits, flowers, drives, boat trips, and eventually appearances at her masked ball and her salon.

Out of their conversations he wrote a series of open letters, published fortnightly in the Mercure de France through 1912 and 1913 and collected as Lettres à l'Amazone in 1914. He called her the Amazon after the riding habit she wore on her morning rides in the Bois de Boulogne, which in French is riding en amazone, side-saddle. The letters made her a public literary figure rather than a private hostess. Gourmont died in 1915. The name outlived them both: her headstone at Passy identifies her as the Amazon of Remy de Gourmont.

The books, which were in French

Barney published around fourteen books over sixty-three years, nearly all of them in French, a language she had spoken without an accent since childhood. The first, Quelques portraits-sonnets de femmes, appeared in 1900 with portraits by her mother, the painter Alice Pike Barney. Its subject was love between women, and when her father Albert Clifford Barney found out he bought up the publisher's remaining stock and destroyed the printing plates. Until his death in 1902 she published anonymously or as Tryphé.

After that the forms multiplied. Cinq petits dialogues grecs (1901) reworked Sappho. Actes et entr'actes (1910) collected plays and poems. Poems & poèmes: autres alliances (1920) gathered her verse in both her languages. The One Who Is Legion (1930), her only novel, was written in English, privately printed in London, and made with Romaine Brooks on the theme of androgyny. Aventures de l'esprit (1929) and Souvenirs indiscrets (1960) are memoirs of the salon and the people who passed through it. Traits et portraits (1963) was the last book she published.

The work she is most worth reading for is the pensées: three volumes of epigrams, published as Éparpillements (1910), Pensées d'une Amazone (1920), and Nouvelles pensées de l'Amazone (1939). Her biographer George Wickes rated them, with the memoirs, as her best writing, and praised what he called the accuracy of her aim. Pensées d'une Amazone opens with a long section against the First World War and on feminism, then moves through love, a novel she says she will not write, and a scattering of notes on literature and old age.

To judge a man, take him out of his world; to judge a woman, give her one.

Pour juger d'un homme, sortez-le de son milieu; pour juger d'une femme, donnez-lui le sien.

The register is dry and very short. Most entries run to a single line, and the effect depends on compression rather than argument. Her guests described her talk the same way, which is one reason the pensées read like a person rather than a programme.

The Académie des Femmes

The Académie française had been electing men since 1635 and would not elect a woman until Marguerite Yourcenar in 1980. In 1927 Barney set up her own version. The Académie des Femmes was not an institution with statutes and seats. It was a run of salon evenings, each given over to one woman writer, held in the same room as the ordinary Fridays.

The point was to introduce French women writers to their English-speaking counterparts and to put money and an audience behind work that was not getting either. Those honoured included:

• Colette, Rachilde, Élisabeth de Gramont, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus and Aurel, from the French side
• Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Anna Wickham, from the American, English and Australian side
• Renée Vivien, honoured after her death
• Romaine Brooks, included for the memoirs she was then writing

Gertrude Stein's evening was the most elaborate. Virgil Thomson set her writing to music, there were readings, and Barney supplied a French translation of passages from The Making of Americans. The Académie also raised the money to print Djuna Barnes's Ladies Almanack in 1928. Barney kept up with Mina Loy, who had joined the circle in 1923, long after Loy left Paris in 1936, and she wrote a foreword to a posthumous Stein volume, As Fine as Melanctha, for Yale in 1954.

How she lived, and said she lived

Barney was a lesbian, said so, and wrote about it under her own name from her first book onwards. She did not use codes, did not marry for cover, and did not present her private life as anybody's tragedy. In 1928, the year Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness was tried and banned as obscene in Britain, Barney had already been publishing love poetry addressed to women for twenty-eight years and had been receiving women writers at 20 rue Jacob for nineteen.

She also refused monogamy, and refused it as a position rather than as a habit she failed to break. She argued against jealousy in print as early as 1901 and kept several attachments running at once for most of her life. This was harder on the women who loved her than on her. Romaine Brooks wanted one person and got a household; the only lover who is said to have shared Barney's view of the arrangement without strain was Dolly Wilde.

The first of the public affairs was with the courtesan Liane de Pougy in 1899, and de Pougy turned it into a bestselling novel, Idylle saphique, in 1901. The long attachments came after it, and several of them overlapped:

• Renée Vivien, the poet, from 1900. The two studied Greek together, translated Sappho, and travelled to Lesbos with a plan for a school of women poets that came to nothing. Vivien broke with her, and died in 1909 at thirty-two.
• Élisabeth de Gramont, Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre, from around 1910. In 1918 the two wrote themselves a marriage contract. It lasted until Gramont's death in 1954.
• Romaine Brooks, the painter, from before the First World War and for more than fifty years. They built a house on the Riviera with two wings joined by a dining room, so that Brooks could have silence when she wanted it.
• Dolly Wilde, Oscar Wilde's niece, from 1927 until her death in 1941. Barney edited a memorial volume for her ten years later.
• Janine Lahovary, the wife of a retired Romanian ambassador, from 1958. They met by chance in Nice when Barney was in her eighties; the relationship ran fourteen years and was kept secret for seven.

It was the Lahovary years that ended the friendship with Romaine Brooks.

Dame Evangeline Musset

In 1928 the American writer Djuna Barnes published Ladies Almanack, a short comic book in mock-archaic English, privately printed in Paris with money the Académie des Femmes raised. It is a roman à clef about Barney's circle, laid out as an almanac with a chapter for each month.

Barney is its heroine, Dame Evangeline Musset, who begins as a scandal, arrives at what the book calls a witty and learned fifty, spends her time rescuing women in distress and dispensing advice, and is canonised at the end. The other women of the salon appear under names of the same sort. Barney was delighted by it and reread it for the rest of her life.

The war years in Italy

Barney was a pacifist through the First World War. She stayed in Paris rather than go home to America, held antiwar gatherings at the Temple à l'Amitié, and did not join the Red Cross work that occupied most of her friends. The first and longest section of Pensées d'une Amazone, written in those years, is titled Les sexes adverses, la guerre et le féminisme, and it treats war as a male enterprise.

In 1939 she and Romaine Brooks left France for Italy and spent the Second World War at a villa outside Florence. The salon closed. During those years Barney wrote a book of wartime reminiscence and commentary, Memoirs of a European-American, which has never been published.

Anna Livia, who edited and translated a selection of Barney's writing in 1992 and read the manuscript, describes it as loyal to Mussolini and the Axis, and records that Barney wrote lightly of wars of extermination at a time when friends of hers were interned in camps. Livia reads the loyalty as running through Barney's conviction that tradition, art, and personal freedom had to prevail over communism. Her biographers treat the passages about Jewish people as the most troubling thing she left behind, and note the contradiction with her own family: her mother's father, Samuel Pike, was of Dutch-Jewish descent, and Barney had written about that background with pride in her early books.

The same years hold facts that run the other way. She gave up her cabin on a New York-bound ship so that Jewish musicians could get out of Italy. Interviewed after the Allied victory there, she said that she and Brooks had been artists who knew too little about politics to take any part in them. The manuscript itself changes position before it ends: Livia dates the turn to the two of them watching the retreating German army blow up the bridges of Florence, and by the last pages Barney is writing as a pro-American pacifist.

She returned to Paris in 1946 and reopened the salon, which ran another twenty-two years.

Last years

In 1968 Barney lost 20 rue Jacob. Her landlord went to court over the state of the building, and at ninety-one she moved to the Hôtel Meurice, on the rue de Rivoli. The Fridays stopped. She and Romaine Brooks had by then broken over Janine Lahovary; Barney's last letter to Brooks came back unopened.

She died in Paris on 2 February 1972, aged ninety-five, after a heart attack and pneumonia. Her maid of many years, Berthe Cleyrergue, called the Friday funeral Mademoiselle's last Friday. She is buried at the Passy cemetery, above the Trocadéro, under a stone naming her as Remy de Gourmont's Amazon.

She left more than forty thousand letters, along with manuscripts and papers, to the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet in Paris. That collection is where most of what is now known about the salon comes from.