Renée Vivien

Pauline Mary Tarn

She was born in London on 11 June 1877 to John Tarn, a wealthy Englishman, and an American mother, Mary Gillett Bennett. Her father died in 1886, when she was nine, and she spent the happiest part of her childhood at school in Paris, where she learned the language she would write in. Her relationship with her mother did not survive the inheritance fight that followed her father's death.

At twenty-one the money came to her and she left England for good. She said what she thought of the country she had come from in one line about English Sundays, which she summed up as prayers and roast beef. From 1899 she lived in Paris and published as R. Vivien, then as Renée Vivien.

The name was a decision as much as a disguise. Vivien is close to the French for living, and she used the initial alone on her first book, in 1901, so that nothing on the cover said whether the poet was a man or a woman. The first reviews were written on that assumption. When it became clear that the love poems addressed to women had been written by one, the tone of the reviewing changed, and the words that came back at her were hysterical and neurotic.

Natalie Clifford Barney

Her schoolfriend Violet Shillito introduced her to Natalie Clifford Barney in Paris in 1899. Barney was an American heiress of the same age who was living openly as a lesbian in a decade when almost no woman did, and who had the same appetite for French poetry. They were lovers, students of Greek together, and collaborators, and Barney is the woman the first book is addressed to.

It lasted about a year. Barney was constitutionally unfaithful and argued in print that jealousy was a failure of nerve. Vivien wanted one person. In the spring of 1901 Violet Shillito died of typhoid, and Vivien, who had let the friendship go while she was absorbed in Barney, took the death as her own fault. She broke with Barney that summer and attempted suicide.

Barney spent years trying to get her back. The best-known attempt has the opera singer Emma Calvé standing under Vivien's window singing, so that Barney could throw up a poem wrapped round a bouquet. A governess intercepted the bouquet and sent it back down. In 1904 the two of them did travel to Mytilene on Lesbos together with a plan to found a school of women poets there. Nothing came of the school and nothing lasting came of the reconciliation.

Vivien never saw 20 rue Jacob, the house whose Friday salon made Barney famous. Barney took the lease in April 1909 and Vivien was dead by November. In 1927 Barney's Académie des Femmes, a run of salon evenings each given to one woman writer, honoured her there posthumously.

Sappho, and what she did with her

She learned ancient Greek privately in order to read Sappho without an intermediary, and in 1903 Lemerre published her Sapho: traduction nouvelle avec le texte grec, with the surviving fragments printed in Greek on the facing pages. Where the papyrus breaks off she went on writing, filling the gaps in her own verse and marking what she had done. Les Kitharèdes followed in 1904, the same treatment applied to the other women poets of antiquity, whom almost nobody was reading.

Two and a half thousand years separate the two of them, and in that gap no poet had made love between women the plain subject of her work under her own name. That is the reason to read her, and it is a larger claim than the one the legend usually makes, which is mostly about the way she died.

The books came out fast, most of them from Lemerre:

• Études et Préludes (1901), the first collection, published as R. Vivien.
• Cendres et Poussières (1902) and Évocations (1903), the formal metrical work.
• Sapho (1903) and Les Kitharèdes (1904), the translations, both with the Greek alongside.
• Une Femme m'apparut (1904), a novel about the Barney affair, rewritten and reissued in 1905 with the portrait of Barney softened.
• La Dame à la louve (1904), short stories in which heterosexual love is treated as the aberration.
• À l'heure des mains jointes (1906), generally taken as the best of the poetry.
• Sillages (1908) and Poèmes (1909), the last books she saw printed; Haillons followed her death in 1910.

I hate you and I love you abominably.

Je te hais et je t'aime abominablement.

Hélène de Zuylen, and the master nobody named

From about 1902 the central relationship of her life was with Hélène de Zuylen de Nyevelt, a baroness by marriage and a Rothschild by birth, married, wealthy and entirely unwilling to be seen. Vivien considered herself married to her. They wrote together under the shared pseudonym Paule Riversdale, and scholars still argue about how much of that work is Zuylen's and how much is Vivien's alone.

Colette, who knew her, called Zuylen only the master, and noted that nobody in Vivien's rooms ever said the woman's name aloud. What arrived instead were the gifts: lacquer, jade, enamels, a collection of ancient Persian gold coins that appeared, shone and vanished, cases of exotic butterflies, a colossal Buddha. In 1907 Zuylen left her for someone else. Vivien went to Japan and Hawaii with her mother and did not recover.

Running alongside it was a correspondence with Kérimé Turkhan-Pacha, the wife of a Turkish diplomat, who lived in Constantinople under conditions that allowed the two of them to meet only rarely and in secret. The letters were passionate and the meetings were few. In 1908 Kérimé moved to Saint Petersburg and it ended.

The flat on the avenue du Bois

From 1901 she lived on the ground floor of 23 avenue du Bois de Boulogne, now avenue Foch. Colette rented an apartment at 44 rue de Villejust after leaving her first husband and discovered that the two buildings' courtyard gardens met at a gate, and that the concierge who held the key could be persuaded. The chapter Colette wrote about her in Le Pur et l'Impur in 1932 is the closest thing to an eyewitness record of Vivien's last years.

What she describes is a permanent artificial night: stained glass across the windows, thick curtains, incense, brown wax candles that did not light the room, giant Buddhas, furniture that appeared and disappeared. Colette once tried to open a window and found it nailed shut. Another evening she brought her own oil lamp to dinner and set it lit beside her plate, and Vivien wept like a child and then, just as quickly, stopped.

The food at those dinners was raw fish on glass sticks, foie gras, crayfish, salads sugared and peppered, good champagne and cocktails that Colette, who tasted one, could not swallow. Vivien drank hers straight down without blinking. Colette worked out only later that her hostess was living on a spoonful of rice, a piece of fruit and alcohol.

Renée, are you happy?

Renée, est-ce que vous êtes heureuse ?

Vivien blushed, smiled, stiffened, and said of course she was.

How she died

In 1908, in London, badly in debt and with both of her attachments gone, Renée Vivien tried to kill herself. She drank a large dose of laudanum, lay down on a divan and arranged a bunch of violets over her heart. She survived. While she was still in England she caught pleurisy, and she came back to Paris weaker than she had left it.

The decline after that had several causes at once and the record does not let any of them stand alone. She had been drinking heavily for years and taking chloral hydrate to sleep, and her biographer Jean-Paul Goujon records the chronic gastritis that came of the combination. She had stopped eating, in a way her friends could see and could not stop. She was thirty-one, and by the summer of 1909 she was walking with a stick.

Colette dates her own understanding of it to a fitting at the costumier's ten days before a fancy-dress ball at the Théâtre des Arts, where Vivien was to appear as Lady Jane Grey at the block. Vivien put on Colette's coat by mistake, was told it almost fitted her, and took it as catastrophic news: she wrote to her friends that she had gained ten pounds by inadvertence and would not on any account go above fifty-two kilos. She spent the ten days at the Pavillon Henri-IV at Saint-Germain drinking tea, walking in the forest until her legs gave out, drinking tea with spirits in it, lying down half-fainting and starting again the next morning. Her companion later estimated they were covering twenty kilometres a day. She got through the tableau at the ball and collapsed behind the backdrop.

The drinking itself was managed with a method that only came out when she was dying. Her maid sat sewing in the linen room next to the bathroom with full tumblers hidden under her chair. Every time Vivien came through on some small errand, a hook to be sewn, a shoe ribbon, a label to be cut off a new pair of gloves, the glass was handed over without a word, emptied at one go, and followed by a rinse of scented water in the bathroom next door. People who saw the scented glass concluded that she drank toilet water. What was in the tumblers was worse.

She died at home on the morning of 18 November 1909, aged thirty-two. The cause entered at the time was congestion of the lungs. The reference accounts read it as pneumonia on top of alcoholism, drug dependence and starvation. She was received into the Catholic Church on her deathbed. She is buried at Passy cemetery, in the thirteenth division, in a small Gothic chapel that carries Pauline M. Tarn on the gable and Renée Vivien on the plaque.

Having, for love of Death, / forgiven that crime: Life.

Ayant, pour l'amour de la Mort, / Pardonné ce crime : la Vie.

Afterwards

She published around twenty-five volumes in eight years and restricted access to most of them, and after her death the work went out of general sight for seventy years. What kept the name alive in the meantime was the legend rather than the poems: the violets, the Buddhas, the nailed window, the starvation. Almost every popular account of her since has been written from that material, and much of it is unreliable.

Serious biography began with Paul Lorenz in 1977 and Jean-Paul Goujon's Tes blessures sont plus douces que leurs caresses in 1986, and the scholarship on her and Barney with Karla Jay's The Amazon and the Page in 1988. The books have been reissued in French and translated into English since. Paris named a square for her in the third arrondissement, the place Renée-Vivien.

The poems are formal, metrically strict, and steeped in the Baudelaire that French poetry had already moved past by the time she got to it. Colette, who liked her and did not overrate her, said as much. They are also the only body of work of their period that says what it says, and they were written by a woman who had been told from her first review onwards exactly what saying it would cost.