natalie's lovers, an entangled reader
Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972) was an American expatriate writer who hosted a high-profile literary salon at her Paris residence, 20-22 rue Jacob.
Extremely proficient at networking, and personable, Natalie's salon would become a gathering place for both high-profile intellectual and artistic elites and lesser-known prospects, her expatriate identity allowing her to fluidly navigate the Modernist milieu of Ezra Pound and Hemingway as well as the French Academy milieu of Symbolists and Decadents.
A notoriously strong-willed lesbian and womanizer, Natalie was also famous for her various romantic and sexual conquests of high-profile women. In 1899, according to biographer Suzanne Rodriguez, she became the "first woman writer since Sappho" to openly embrace lesbian longing in verse when she published her freshman work, a collection of 31 sonnet-portraits, each dedicated to a lover or ex-lover.
Alongside the poet Renée Vivien (who became the first woman to translate Sappho in 1903) and the classicist Eva Palmer, to whom she introduced Sappho, Natalie considered herself a neo-Sapphist in her early career, hosting decadent and spiritual gatherings of Sapphic women at the rue Jacob. The efforts of this circle contributed to the reclamation of the poetic and historical identity of Sappho by the lesbian community as we observe today.
Shari Benstock, who authored Women of the Left Bank, the seminal study on the role of women in the fostering of the modernist tradition, wrote contemporaneous scholarship concerning Natalie in 1986:
"[Scholarship has often called Natalie] a 'latter-day Sappho,' but a Sappho known for her sexual appetites rather than the excellence of her literary work or her very significant efforts to bring women writers together in an artistic community. To date, Natalie Barney's life has been rendered as gossip – lesbian gossip rather than literary gossip. Her work remains unread, most of it untranslated, and her autobiography has not yet been published."
Owing to Benstock's own efforts, scholarship and translation of Natalie and her circle's influence in literary history has increased more than tenfold since the publication of her study. However, it is ultimately true that much of the work of Natalie and her various lesbian contemporaries with whom she were intimately entangled remain untranslated and unpublished.
At the same time, however, it's important that when it comes to these literary figures, 'lesbian gossip' about their sexual and romantic encounters and 'literary gossip' about their work must at certain points invariably be one and the same. If we are to understand their writing beyond their contribution to the veneer of the literary era, we must understand that Lesbian writers were writing impassionedly for and about each other, in collections of poetry, in novels and memoirs, in their correspondences.
Scholarship, archival, and translation in this space is not necessarily thin, but while active it is also not in any sense of the word comprehensive.(For example, as of the 2020s, the most-cited monographic study of Renée Vivien's poetry as attributed to specific lovers was a Master's Thesis by Catherine Boyd, a scholar who has since left Academia. Renée's complete collections of poetry are only now, as of 2023, beginning to be translated into English.)
The aim of this small, living archive, is to catalogue and place these writers' literary output in the immediate context of their intimate histories.
This archive is by no means intended to be comprehensive or self-sufficient. Rather, it is intended to be a well-cited and accessible digital encyclopaedia and/or reading companion for scholars and students navigating the literary space.
what's in here + how to navigate
This website is a hypertextual digital garden, and can be navigated through three different points of entry:
The easiest access point is the Natalie timeline, which contains a chronological overview of every figure documented in the archive, their publication events concerning each other, and their physical liaisons.
The graph view on the top right can be expanded to directly see an entangled node-graph of all the texts, persons, and correspondences in the archive.
You can navigate to each archive entry by clicking through on the nodes, and view a given node's connections to other nodes (for example, a poem's connections to its writer, its muse, and its collection) by hovering over them.
You may, of course, navigate between the pages through the sidebar.
notes
The archive is currently a demo/proof-of-concept, and is not yet intended for academic use.
As this archive is incomplete, it currently only includes text and ephemera from a limited roster of historical figures, some of whose articles are stubs. Notably absent at present are Colette and Djuna Barnes (as well as her lover, Thelma Wood.)
This demo archive is part of an ongoing project by the author(s) to create accessible digital archives for notable and understudied intersections of literature. The methodology has been documented in Studies in Modern British and American Poetry) and presented at ELLAK.
The whole thing was researched, written, and created in the span of two weeks! I would be surprised if these documents were not riddled with inconsistencies. For corrections and/or contributions, please contact belo@belo.gl.