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Natalie Barney (1876
- 1972)
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Almanack : Showing Their Signs and Their Tides; Their Moons and
Their Changes; The Seasons As It Is With Them; Their Eclipses and
Equinoxes by
Djuna
Barnes
Djuna Barnes must have had great fun writing and
illustrating this book. It's a lively lampoon of her lesbian chums
of Left Bank Paris in the 1920s. The main character, Dame
Evangeline Musset, is based on the notorious dyke Natalie Barney.
Structured as a month-by-month almanac in a style that owes as
much to Shakespeare's comedies as to any literature of the
intervening centuries, Barnes's book follows the Dame's amorous,
often naughty, adventures. --This text refers to the Paperback
edition.
"As an 'Almanack,' the book celebrates the
uniqueness of women . . . extolling their society with separatist
sentiment not violent or radical so much as mirthful and
delightful." -- The Daily Helmsman
"[I]f you are able to contain your cackling
long enough to consider the truth underlying the jest, you will
come away with an understanding of the dilemmas facing lesbians at
the opening of the century. You'll find that they are not much
different from the questions we grapple with today." --
Lambda Book Report
"Now this be a Tale of as fine a Wench as
ever wet Bed. . . . Thus begins this Almanack, which all Ladies
should carry about with them, as the Priest his Breviary, as the
Cook his Recipes, as the Doctor his Physic, as the Bride her
Fears, and as the Lion his Roar!"
Barnes's affectionate lampoon of the expatriate
lesbian community in Paris was privately printed in 1928. Arranged
by month, it records the life and loves of Dame Evangeline Musset
(modeled after salon hostess Natalie Barney) in a robust style
taken from Shakespeare and Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy,
and is illustrated throughout with Barnes's own drawings.
This new edition is a facsimile of the 1928
edition with the addition of an afterward providing details on the
book's origins and a key to its real-life models.
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Barney, Natalie (1876-1972)
Born in Dayton, Ohio, the eldest daughter of
painter Alice Pike and railway-coach heir Albert Clifford Barney,
Natalie Barney was known as much, if not more, for her love
affairs as her writing. The book Idylle Saphique written by
French writer Liane de Pougy was based on Pougy's affair with the
young American. Barney would often be the inspiration for
characters in other writers' work.
Barney's second major affair was with Renée
Vivien with whom she dreamed of founding a colony of women poets
on the isle of Lesbos. Although this never came to be, Barney did
create a lavish salon in Paris which, over five decades, was
visited by such literary luminaries as Djuna
Barnes, Truman Capote, Ernest
Hemingway and Marcel Proust. James Joyce personally delivered the
first copies of Ulysses
there in 1922. Non-literary figures including Mata Hari
and Greta Garbo were also guests.
Barney was known for her generosity but also her
small-mindedness. She was given to voicing anti-Semitic sentiment
and was an admirer of Mussolini's facism.
Barney wrote nearly two dozen books but only a
small portion of her work is available in English; most of her
body of work was written in French.
Related Resources:
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This is the gateway to the Natalie Clifford Barney Pages,
a web site devoted to Natlie Barney, her life and times. She dared to be
scandalous--and every modern woman owes her a debt of gratitude.
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From Found
Meals of the Lost Generation
by Suzie
Rodriguez
 Even
by today's standards, Natalie Barney stands out as a brilliantly
unconventional figure. For almost one hundred years she shattered
tradition and defied societal icons. Her uninhibited and
emancipated life made her the thinly-disguised heroine of at least
six novels, the subject of two biographies, and a major entrant in
scores of memoirs from the belle époque to the present day. To
say she lived fully seems somehow inadequate, as she herself
admitted: "Having got more out of life, oh having got out of
it perhaps more than it contained!"
Barney was born in 1876 to a wealthy Ohio family
descended from railroad tycoons, naval heroes, judges, and bank
presidents. Her father was highly conventional, but her mother, an
accomplished painter who had studied in Paris with Whistler,
bordered on the bohemian. The family moved to Washington, D.C.,
when Natalie was ten, thereafter summering in Bar Harbor and
taking frequent jaunts to Europe. Natalie fell in love with Paris
and, by her late teens, visited the city often.
By this time Natalie was a beautiful young woman
with long, billowing masses of blonde hair, a willowy figure, and
amused blue eyes. She loved fashion, favoring white gowns by
Poiret. She spoke fluent, beautifully-accented French, as well as
German and Italian. She was a proficient violinist, a superb
horsewoman (accounting for her lifelong nickname, the Amazon), and
a budding poet with a reputation for witty repartee. Needless to
say, she was heavily courted by eligible young men.
Natalie, however, preferred to do the courting,
and, as her interest in men was only "from the neck up,"
it was women who received her favors. Attracted to women since
childhood, Natalie was quite open about her lesbianism...
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Names Index:
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