The Talk of the Town
When did Pauline learn the truth about Natalie and Eva? Whatever the case, it escalated into a full-blown crisis. The evidence we have found suggests that it played out in scenes as dramatic as those between Natalie and Liane the year before. The gossip would cast a shadow over The Three Sapphos.
We are still searching for details as to how the crisis was resolved. We do know that Natalie and Pauline recommitted to their relationship and made plans to move in together as soon as they could find a suitable place in Paris. They would travel via London to Paris. They had convinced their parents to rent them a house in Neuilly and cover their living expenses. They begrudgingly accepted the insistence on a chaperone in the form of a governess. They would live together, study together, and write together as a couple. Eva was separately assessing her prospects on the London stage. With Christmas approaching, Olga Nethersole’s Sapho was still in the news.
Back in June, Barney’s first book, A Few Sonnet-Portraits of Women, had been a first in lesbian literary history. Never before had a book of lesbian poetry, written by a lesbian for lesbians, appeared under the author’s real name.
Natalie seems not to have planned any publicity in Paris before leaving for Bar Harbor. We have found no evidence of an organized launch. She may have hoped to promote her book in tandem with the publication of Liane de Pougy’s Sapphic Idyll, expecting it to come out any day. After her breakup with Liane, she focused on what she could control: bringing copies of the book to America. But others had the same idea. At least one copy was for sale at Brentano’s in New York.[1] It was likely left there by Bessy Marbury.[2]
Meanwhile, Olga Nethersole continued making a splash in Sapho. More than a splash; she was making waves. Despite the obscenity trial and a police inspector who “thought it his duty to take a closer look at the dancers and their skirts,” the show went on.[3] On Christmas, the Atlanta Constitution ran a report from its D.C. correspondent: “Sappho Seen in Washington.”[4]
Only a month later, a damning review of Natalie’s book appeared in Town Topics, a New York gossip rag, under a similar headline: “Sapho Sings in Washington.”[5] This was not just any gossip rag. The editor, William D’Alton Mann, was a well-known blackmailer. Six years later, he would be tried and convicted for one of his schemes, putting an end to his criminal career. His victims included William K. Vanderbilt, Pierpont Morgan, William C. Whitney, and (another railroad magnate) Collis P. Huntington.[6] When it came to Natalie Barney, his article was a heady mix of epithets and insinuations. In the first paragraph alone, the word “dangerous” appeared twice, along with “danger” and “terror.” The threat was barely veiled. Mann clearly identified Natalie as a daughter of the Washington branch of the nationally prominent Barney family. He presented Natalie as a marriageable heiress, not as a writer. When he accused Natalie of “lift[ing] aloud a voice that has in it something of Sapho, something of a Lesbian freshness, and, again, something of a Marchioness de Sade,” he was threatening to ruin her prospects in the marriage market.[7] When he quoted Natalie’s poems in English translation, he was threatening to out her, in English. Did he have a full translation of Natalie’s book waiting in the wings?
Mann was signaling that he possessed up-to-the-minute intelligence about all the Barneys. Mann timed the piece to run just after Alice and Albert Barney arrived back in New York after dropping Natalie and Pauline off in London. Albert and Alice were installed in their suite at the Waldorf Hotel when they read the Town Topics article. They must have been horrified.[8]
This was not the first time that Mann had gone on the attack. He had had it in for the Barneys and the Palmers for years now.[9] But the Barneys instantly saw that this was not Mann’s usual modus operandi. This was a full-page spread. It also signaled to Alice and Albert that Mann possessed a trove of compromising information about their daughter. The most likely informant was Elsie de Wolfe, lesbian life-partner of Bessy Marbury and acquaintance of Natalie.[10] And not only that. Many other informants must have observed the ongoing melodrama of Natalie’s love triangle with Pauline and Eva in New York that winter. Mann bankrolled an extensive string of spies. He had his sources in every five star hotel in New York, in London and in the capital cities and swanky watering holes on the continent. He was also known to pay off servants and service providers.
Alice and Albert must have felt equally threatened. They were equally rich, and both sides of the family were now potential blackmail targets. Revelations of lesbianism could destroy not just Natalie’s prospects but the reputation of all her female cousins. For the first time, Albert blurted out to his wife what he had known for years: the raw details of their daughter’s sex life, most recently with Liane de Pougy, which was common knowledge at the hotels in Paris. The Barneys took Mann’s threats so seriously that Albert sailed immediately for France, vowing to stop the presses in Paris. Did he telegraph a cease and desist order to Paul Ollendorff (Natalie’s publisher)? Ollendorff’s business records have not survived. Did Albert telegraph his daughter?
On February 27, a brief, anonymous review of Natalie’s book appeared in a Parisian newspaper.[11] It praised Natalie and her poetry in glowing terms. Did this notice appear before Albert arrived at Ollendorff’s door? If so, it was clearly aimed to sell as many copies as fast as possible. Or was the review an act of literary resistance? Under French law, even though Natalie had paid for the printing of her work with her own money (which may even have come from her mother’s side of the family), her father had the right to financial control.[12]
It was bad enough that Albert had the money to buy up every copy of Natalie’s book if he chose to do so. It was a literary atrocity that he had the right to demand that the printing plates be destroyed. For the rest of her life, Natalie would tell her friends that her father had burned her books.[13] Did she actually watch him throw copies into the fire? This would have been traumatic for any poet. But Natalie, only just beginning her new life with Pauline, now faced an existential crisis. She had received a letter from her mother accusing her of ruining the family through her poetry. Alice doubted she could ever forgive Natalie. Natalie had always been close to her mother. They were both free spirits. Losing Alice’s love and respect was unthinkable. It is hard to underestimate the emotional turmoil Natalie must have been experiencing.
Albert returned to New York. While the threat of blackmail eventually receded, the stress of the episode likely contributed to his early death in 1902 from a series of heart attacks.[14]
Meanwhile, Natalie, Pauline, and Eva were left to reckon with the fact that they had been spied on in New York—possibly even by friends, by people they trusted. During their most intimate moments, someone had been listening at the door. Someone had been peering through the keyhole.[15]
Eva Palmer, who never spoke against her friends, who protected Lucy from Natalie, who kept a respectful distance from Pauline when it was right to do so, would likely never have named a lesbian lover in print. Even so, love letters, scores of them sexually explicit, between her and the women she loved still survive. After the Town Topics episode, Eva remained loyal to Natalie, even though Eva never wished to live conspicuously out of the closet. Later, in 1905, Eva would walk away from star billing on the London stage when the producer demanded that she cut ties with Barney. Eva’s letters reveal a writer as talented, if not more so, than Pauline and Natalie. But the Town Topics episode may have convinced her that publication was dangerous.
Natalie was devastated. She would not publish again under her own name until 1910.[16]
Meanwhile, in the spring of 1901, Pauline was preparing her own book for publication with Alphonse Lemerre. Was it due to the Barney scandal that Pauline chose to publish under the pen name R. Vivien? Albert Barney made it very clear to Natalie that Mann was a danger to them all. Antoinette Tarn’s marriage prospects hinged on the Tarn family’s sterling reputation. Anything that might harm Antoinette was unimaginable for Pauline.
Previous biographers have not reckoned with the impact the stress during this period had on Pauline or her work. On the one hand, Pauline was overjoyed at bringing out her own first book. On the other hand, her lover (Natalie) had never needed her more—at a time when Pauline, focused on her book and working with her publisher, was unavailable. Natalie coped by starting an affair with an English poet, Olive Custance. When Violet Shillito (who had introduced them back in 1899) died only a week before the publication of Etudes and Preludes, it was the breaking point for Pauline. Natalie had lost her childhood friend; Pauline, her first love. Their relationship, already fragile, could not last. By the end of 1902, Pauline had left Natalie for Hélène van Zuylen.
But Pauline and Natalie apparently never stopped loving each other. After their break-up, Pauline wrote and published a novel, A Woman Appeared to Me (Une Femme m’apparut) (1904, revised 1905), about Natalie. Natalie responded by writing a book-length prose poem, I Remember Her (Je me souviens…), which she showed to Pauline in the summer of 1904, hoping to win her back. Pauline was so taken with the poem that she traveled with Natalie to Mytilene, where they spent an idyllic few weeks. Eventually, however, Pauline returned to Hélène. Natalie refused to publish the poem until after Pauline’s death. Natalie also memorialized Pauline in verse and, in 1948, reestablished and endowed the Prix Renée Vivien (founded by Hélène).
The Town Topics incident profoundly affected Pauline as a poet. She had lost a fellow classicist in Eva, and she had lost her muse in Natalie. From then on, her poetry was less about desire than despair. The title of her first book, Etudes and Preludes, implies that it is merely a warm-up exercise. It signals (in musical terms) that the brilliant career, the masterworks, are coming soon. And yet her next book, Ashes and Dust, announces the end of her career as a poet when it has barely begun. So much of her poetry is about looking back—toward her literary heroes, toward the glamor of the medieval or the ancient world, toward a happier time in her life. Earlier scholarship has perhaps over-emphasized the significance of Violet Shillito’s death.[17] Granted, the violet appears as an emblem of grief and memory throughout Pauline’s work. But we suspect that in grieving the loss of Violet, Pauline was also grieving the loss of Natalie.
For Pauline, Natalie remained eternal, ideal, unattainable. Though Pauline dedicated all of her poetry books to Hélène from 1902 to 1908, most of those books include at least one or two poems about a woman who bears a suspicious resemblance to Natalie.[18] The paradox is that the real-life Natalie spared no effort, no expense, in her attempts to regain Pauline. Why did Pauline refuse her so many times over? In her 1960 memoir, Natalie claimed that Pauline was afraid of Hélène, whose vast wealth gave her “unlimited” power.[19] If we take Natalie at her word, could this mean that Pauline refused Natalie only in order to protect Natalie from Hélène? Or by choosing Hélène, with her wealth and power, was Pauline merely protecting her own stability as a poet? Or had the Town Topics incident triggered Pauline’s survival instincts? Was it the trauma of having been stalked by Mann’s informants that kept Pauline from saying yes to the woman she loved?
Notes
[1] Today, this copy is held by the Beinecke Library. Rodriguez, Wild Heart, 120.
[2] Alfred Allan Lewis, Ladies and Not-So-Gentle Women (New York: Penguin, 2001), 138.
[3] The trial was covered by newspapers around the country. See, for example, “Immorality of ‘Sappho’: Trial of Stage Folk Begun at New York,” Los Angeles Times, 28 Feb. 1900, 14. The incident of the police inspector can be found in “ ‘Sappho’ Skirts Measured,” The Sun (Baltimore), 1 Mar. 1900, 2.
[4] “Sappho Seen in Washington,” Atlanta Constitution, 25 Dec. 1900, 6.
[5] The Gallicist, “Sappho Sings in Washington,” Town Topics: The Journal of Society 45, no. 1 (24 Jan. 1901): 16. A copy of the first page is found among Natalie Barney’s papers, in one of several uncatalogued boxes, at the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet.
[6] Jean Strouse, Morgan: American Financier (New York: Random House, 1999), 325–26.
[7] “Sappho Sings in Washington,” 16. Mann’s analogies were pornographic. He was not comparing Natalie to the poet Sappho or to the the wife of the Marquis de Sade. He was appealing to the voyeurism in pornographic fictions of lesbianism and casting Natalie as a female version of a man widely considered in America to be a pervert. This was not bawdy—it was slander. See: Joan DeJean, Fictions of Sappho, 1546–1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Lillian Faderman, ed., Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (New York: Viking, 1994).
[8] Jean L. Kling, Alice Pike Barney (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1994), 149.
[9] See, for example: a negative review of Hubert Vos’s portrait of Alice Pike Barney, in Town Topics: The Journal of Society 32, no. 20 (15 Nov. 1894): 12; an announcement of Alice Pike Barney’s Jewish ancestry, in Town Topics: The Journal of Society 36, no. 1 (2 July 1896): 8; a dig at Alice Pike Barney for not being American enough in Town Topics: The Journal of Society 36, no. 13 (24 Sept. 1896): 7; scathing coverage of Natalie Barney’s sham engagement, Town Topics: The Journal of Society 41, no. 9 (2 Mar. 1899): 7–8; the revelation that Albert Barney had attended a bachelor party, Town Topics: The Journal of Society 43, no. 3 (18 Jan. 1900): 9.
[10] Alfred Allan Lewis, Ladies and Not-So-Gentle Women, 83. Elsie had been one of Mann’s informants since 1885. Natalie was a regular visitor to the property where Elsie lived. See our earlier section “Natalie Barney’s Sonnet.”
[11] “Médaillons: Miss Natalie Clifford Barney,” Le Journal (Paris), 27 Feb. 1901, 1, Gallica, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k7628727z.
[12] Code Napoleon; or, The French Civil Code, Literally Translated from the Original and Official Edition, Published at Paris, in 1804 (London: William Benning, 1827), Title V, Chapter VI, Article 217, and Title IX, Articles 372, 373, 384, 385.
[13] See, for example, Rapazzini, afterword to Quelques portraits-sonnets de femmes, n.p.: “He buys up every copy and the plates and consigns them to a fine auto-da-fé” (our translation).
[14] It’s possible that Albert paid Mann off, although we have found no evidence of that. Albert Barney’s name was not mentioned in Mann’s 1906 trial, but that is not surprising. Albert could not give witness testimony from the grave. It is equally possible that Albert’s decisive action in destroying the printing plates showed strength enough to forestall Mann’s extortion attempts.
[15] Mann may even have gotten his hands on semi-nude photographs of Natalie and her friends. Alice Barney had her secretary type out an article that appeared in Town Topics 43, no. 1 (4 Jan. 1900), 8, accusing the well-known American lesbian photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864–1952) of “permitting a much-prized proof to pass out of her hands to the wrong party, and then it was obtained under false pretenses.” According to Mann, Johnston was photographing “the young woman who had posed as a lightly clad Venus” (Natalie?). Box 3, folder “1900,” Alice Pike Barney Papers, Smithsonian Archives.
[16] Natalie Barney’s second book, Cinq petits dialogues grecs (Antithèses et parallèles) (Five Little Greek Dialogues [Antitheses and Parallels]) (Paris: La Plume, 1902), appeared under the Greek-inspired pen name Tryphé.
[17] See, for example, Jean-Paul Goujon, Tes blessures sont plus douces que leurs caresses: Vie de Renée Vivien (Paris: Régine Deforges, 1986), 164–69.
[18] See, for example: in Cendres et poussières (Ashes and Dust) (1902, revised 1903), “Prophétie” (“Prophecy”) and “Fleurs de Séléné” (“Selene’s Flowers”); in Evocations (Evocations) (1903, revised 1905), “Sonnet à l’Androgyne” (“Sonnet to the Androgyne”) and “Atthis” (“Atthis”); in La Vénus des aveugles (The Venus of the Blind) (1904), “La Madone aux Lys” (“Madonna of the Lilies”); in A l’heure des mains jointes (1906), “Confidence devant le Soir” (“Confidence toward Evening”), “Mensonge du Soir…” (“Twilight Lie”), and “Les Souvenirs sont des Grappes” (“Memories Are Grapevines”); in Sillages (Wakes) (1908), “Pour l’une, en songeant à l’autre” (“For the One, while Dreaming of the Other”). Pauline Tarn (as Renée Vivien), Poèmes 1901–1910, ed. Nicole Albert (Paris: ErosOnyx, 2009).
[19] Barney, Souvenirs indiscrets, 82.