Adventures, Renee Vivien
from Adventures of the Mind, Natalie Barney
Salomon Reinach presided over this retrospective no doubt to prevent some rival from taking his place. As a posthumous lover of the poetess – "who perhaps might not have approved of these compliments nor of his jealous cares," as Anatole France remarked – he had a revelation to make to us: Renée Vivien had never loved anything except glory. He supported his thesis and convinced Professor Seignobos, proof in hand, not mentioning the contrary evidence, out of his hands and contained in a dozen other volumes. The convincing documents were there: "Vaincues" [sic], "Mes Victoires," etc., no more were needed.
A scholar's heart is a dark well in which are buried many aborted feelings that rise to the surface as arguments. These concepts that he believes he is reaching by reasoning testify to instincts, awakened through the same mind that intended to condemn them to oblivion. And certainly, I have not resisted all faiths to believe in the infallibility of the human mind, however learned it be.
Berenson has well said of him that his almost ecclesiastical resistance to women leads to so obvious a susceptibility to them that he is more tried by their slightest movements than the most sentient rake. He hides his ardor as badly as he satisfies it through the peccadillo of kissing women's hands. And isn't it with a lover's jealousy that he attempts to amass relics and defend them with so much ferocity, until the moment when he is sure that he will no longer suffer from their exploitation, until the year "2000"?
Sir or Madame,
(Nothing in your letter enlightens me on this subject.)
I have, indeed, assembled some documents on Renée Vivien, but they are for the Bibliothèque Nationale and the year 2000. I have a horror of anything that can resemble a biography of Renée Vivien. We have her divine verses, that is enough; we have André Germain's book, it is already too much. The study of her style and of what people can call her philosophy of life is quite legitimate and requires neither indiscreet glances at her correspondence nor knowledge of her numerous wanderings. People already know more about her than about Racine; and if they must know more in the next century, it adds nothing to the beauty of her poetry.
Yours faithfully.
S. R.
And it is also to the year 2000 that he bequeaths the love letters that her female contemporaries will want to entrust to her secret museum. If I now felt able to write my own book about Renée Vivien, would he only lend me the notes and documents that he has collected on her? Certain letters that Renée Vivien wrote me and which I allowed Salomon Reinach to take were returned to me, but on their front engraved with a garland of violets he had written, in small letters it is true, but discernible, in the corner of each page, "copied." Nothing leaves the hands of science unscathed! And if I tease my friend Salomon a bit in public, he whom I love and esteem, it is in the hope of chastising him for such sacrileges and cruelties.
He protects in this manner a memory which in my opinion he ought less to defend than spread. Because if Renée Vivien loved glory so much, he runs the risk of serving her poorly by letting all this time intervene... It is possible that some invading oriental or other race will value her less than the enthusiasts whom he discourages. Certainly Renée Vivien sought glory (but because she despaired of love), as well as religion, in the doubt of surviving otherwise. Weak, she allowed herself to go to the assurances of the highest bidder, and to all those long-term "investments" from which she anticipated profits and bliss. But what matters is the quality of her writing, not what, seeming to inspire her, was only its pretext. Renée Vivien sought love and suffering, as the Christian woman who is unaware of herself; she had everything of a future believer, beginning with renunciation:
If the Lord bent over my death,
I would tell him: "O Christ, I do not know you.
Lord, your strict law was never mine.
And I lived just as a simple heathen."
Heathen, not at all. I see throughout her poems our former misunderstandings and the comprehension that a direct fervor gave me: the evolution of a mystic.
Doesn't life give certain beings a need for suffering? Aren't these souls incurably the souls of Christian women who seek in every emotion an excuse for their sorrow?
The cross seems to have covered the entire world with its large shadow. Happy are those who have escaped the heredity of this creed! Renée Vivien, even into her first love, felt its inevitable obsession creeping, undefined, unrecognizable, but already present. For, more than other men, poets seem to collect the influence of past centuries. They are, as it were, depositories, through a sensitivity more refined and fickle, of all that issues from races and that exalts or subjugates men. We are experiencing a drab epoch. Our cities, our houses, our clothes, our ambitions, and even our hearts are impregnated with it.
...Our spiritual ancestors, in offering us a heavenly life in compensation for the present one they taught us to scorn, have evidently destroyed in us the faculty of embellishing it. By promising an eternal heaven, they have likewise spoiled the simple joys of the moment. And it is thus that we come to think, without anyone even dreaming of pointing out the morbidity of the thought, with this poetess who exclaims in complete joy and full youth:
But the vision of years tears me,
And, prophetically, I mourn your beauty!
Since this is the law lamentable and stupid,
You will one day wilt, ah! my Lily!
And the hideous shame of the wrinkle
Will mark your brow with this word: Formerly!
We would have wanted just to forget this "law lamentable and stupid," but since we have been reminded of it so beautifully, we can only admire this poet of decline, in whose works love of beauty, that intentional paganism, contrasts constantly with that unconscious sadism of enemies scornful of the flesh.
...More than any other woman, she was the priestess of death, and death was her last masterpiece, because this loving virgin died in harmony with herself, she was punctual for her appointment, and on an autumn night welcomed "her who knows how to give nights without morrow."
This was not a suicide: those who love life kill themselves, those who love death let themselves die, they savor the past of each thing, they look for its shadow in each thing.
Paganism is no more than a remote name. Late, but in time, the Christian shadow reclaims its own when they are weakened by disillusion, remorse, and sickness. Their reason, even their pride, abdicate before this spiritual atavism which, at "the black hour," gathers their poor souls, capsized and suffering, but still hoping, even from death, for some miraculous gift. And isn't Christ there to welcome with all his pity these carnal people, returned from disappointing materialities? No one brought more mysticism to her sensuality, more sensuality to her mystic transports, than Renée Vivien. Born a Protestant (one is not converted to Protestantism, but from Protestantism), she became a Catholic, and the priest who had converted her childhood friend gave her "the consolation that the priest comes to give."
...But one must not say of Renée Vivien that she "converted"; all her life had instead been an evolution toward this final and undeniable hope. There is nothing mysterious or contradictory in the fact that almost all great sensualists finally come to the foot of a cross whose pressure and obsession they had already experienced. Natural enemy of abstraction, of stoicism, of pure reason, and of metaphysics (with Nietzsche, is it not better "to shiver from cold than to adore false idols"?), by an imperious innate necessity, the cross invites faith.
Disappointed in her earthly adorations, Renée Vivien, because of her two primordial tendencies, inevitably had to come to the religion that was the most capable of satisfying her being that was always eager for ceremonies and images, and her heart long since exhausted before the altar of carnal idols.
And I believe that it is thus that one more poet, worn out by suffering and fatigue, accepted, in view of a possible eternity, that last aspect of sensuality: Catholicism.
The soul searches for God, but like a lover who is too passionate, it takes a wrong turn and winces at every step that thwarts its expectation. It is thus, by dint of mistakes, that love becomes a sickness of the soul.
The love duet is an invention of opera; in real love, one only sings alone or one after the other.
If one is sad in passion, it is because the largest part of oneself is excluded from it.
St. Teresa and certain other great women lovers are to be found entirely in it. Passion is therefore the best use of themselves.
Jesus Christ has seduced more women than Don Juan.
The white path of these other nuns testifying to their ignorance of all that which they renounce, the childishness of that to which they aspire...
O. V. de Milosz seems to me to be the only successful mystic I know; he searches for God, even through "Science, that sterile woman," to overtake Einstein at the exit from his equations, with poems like his "Épître à Storgé" (Letter to Storge), which had a presentiment of the system of relativity and of movement. In Ars Magna (Great Art), "Cantique de la connaissance" ("Canticle of Knowledge"), the poet of old is seen transforming himself into a prophet and his visions lighting up an entire metaphysical heaven. I grant credence to Milosz (I who am neither a metaphysician nor a mystic). Even where I am not able to follow him, the correctness and the depth of his spirit help me rejoin him.
And in these lines from Nihumim, he speaks thus of women:
Forty years.
To learn to speak of woman without scorn. O love!
Forty years I have looked for you among women,
But it is not among women that I found you.
O woman! The compassion of stones seizes me!
Mother! mother, you no longer know, you do not yet know who you are.
You, white, lying on your back among the flowers! for so long
You have slept in the darkest, most silent part of the beautiful abandoned garden!
And here you are standing in this season of laughing ugliness,
In the midst of these sons who have lost their god and have not found nature.
O mother! mother! and this beautiful drooping shoulder of a carrier of fresh water.
And this hollow mien of a maidservant awakened early.
What wisdom and what knowledge, o woman, are in the palm of your hands!
Let me not be able to contemplate them without a dove flying off from them!
And your holy whiteness tames the swan!
When the husband dies, you will follow, you will die:
Not from the sorrow of the flesh, but from the
Deep joy of the spirit!
To speak to you and to be understood, o mother, I must once more become a child.
For, what can you understand about this world of change,
O beautiful, solemn, and pure pillar of the hearth!
Mother! the veiled sources of change are in a place dark and forbidden
Whose name is Valley of separation. There
Worlds and hearts yearn for one another in vain.
And all that one touches is the distance and the duration
Of separation.
He who searches ineffectively finds nothing anywhere,
He who finds something here, bumps elsewhere against closed doors.
For there is a country where the single being is alone
Facing himself.
There, he loves himself
And marries himself
And creates himself.
There, he glorifies himself.
And the place is named, by those who resemble you, place
Of joining,
Of eternal femininity and of
life.
Source: Natalie Clifford Barney, Adventures of the Mind. Trans. John Spalding Gatton. NYU Press, 1992.