Andrea Weiss - Paris Was a Woman: Portraits from the Left Bank

Weiss, Andrea

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PAKl:S WA^A WOMAN

PORTRAITS FROM THE LEFT BANK

ANDREA WEI ^5

Digitized by the Internet Archivein 2014

https://archive.org/details/pariswaswomanporOOandr

CONTENTS

DRAMATIS PERSONAE 7PREFACE 11INTRODUCTION:

PARIS WAS A WOMAN i6

1: ODEONIA: THE COUNTRYOF BOOKS 26

^: THE WRITER ANDHER MUSE 6o

3: AMAZONES ET SIRENES 100

4: CITY OF DARK NICHTS

5: LETTERS FROM PARIS m

EPILOCUE ne

NOTES 242

SELECTED BIBLIOCRAPHY 250PHOTO AND TEXT CREDITS 251INDEX 252

To my niecesJennifer Levy-Lunt,une femme de la rive gaucheand Isabella Jane Schiller,une femme de I'avenir

Berenice Abbott - American photographer, she began her career by takingportraits of her friends in Man Ray's studio during her lunch hour.

Margaret Anderson - Founder and editor of The Little Review, one of themost important avant-garde literary magazines between the wars.

Djuna Barnes - Novelist, journalist, satirist and visual artist, her bestknown work is the 'underground classic', Nightwood.

Natalie Clifford Barney - Immensely wealthy, and notoriously lesbian,American writer and salon hostess who lived in Paris for 70 years.

Sylvia Beach - A Presbyterian minister's daughter, she established thebookshop, Shakespeare and Company, and was the first publisher of JamesJoyce's Ulysses.

Germaine Beaumont - The protegee and intimate friend of Colette, shewas a French journalist and novelist who was awarded the prestigious PrixTheophraste Renaudot for literature.

Romaine Brooks - American painter of intense portraits in muted colours,she was the lifelong friend of Natalie Barney.

Bryher (Winifred Ellerman) - English heiress, publisher, writer, patron ofthe arts, and anti-fascist resistance worker, she was the lifelong friend ofpoet H.D.

Lily de Clermont-Tonnerre - A close friend of Natalie Barney's andGertrude Stein's, she was a controversial writer of extreme political views,first on the left and in later years on the right.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Colette - One of France's most highly regarded authors, Colette wrotehundreds of short stories, novels and essays.

Nancy Cunard - English scion of the Cunard steamship family, she dis-missed her parents' upper-class values to become a poet, wide-eyed radi-cal, and founder of the avant-garde Hours Press.

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) - Poet and novelist based primarily in London, withforays into Paris, she was muse to Ezra Pound, analysand of SigmundFreud, and a proponent of 'Imagism'.

Janet Planner - American journalist who commented in The New Yorkeron life in Paris for 40 years.

Gisele Freund - German-Jewish refugee photographer who photographedall the famous and soon-to-be famous writers in France.

Eileen Gray - Irish designer and architect who evolved her own sparse,elegant Modernist style, and who lived on the Left Bank of Paris for 75years.

Radclyffe Hall - English author of the controversial novel The Well ofLoneliness (1928) which pleaded sympathy for lesbians and was banned inBritain until 1 948.

Jane Heap - Co-editor, with Margaret Anderson, of The Little Review, andunofficial literary agent for Gertrude Stein.

Marie Laurencin - French painter who frequented the salons of NatalieBarney and Gertrude Stein.

Georgette LeBlanc - French opera singer who lived for twenty years witheditor Margaret Anderson.

Mina Loy - English-born Modernist poet and designer, her work was pub-lished in many of the small literary magazines.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Adrienne Monnier - French writer and editor, she ran the leading book-shop for French avant-garde literature, La Maison des Amis des Livres.

Noel Murphy - American singer whose home in Orgeval, outside Paris,was a weekend gathering-place for many of the expatriate women.

Solita Solano - Editor, novelist, poet and journalist, she compromised herown writing career to provide emotional and practical support to JanetFlanner for 50 years.

Gertrude Stein - The best known and most prolific of the femaleModernist writers in Paris, she was also an art collector and ran a weeklysalon.

Alice B. Toklas - Lifelong companion, secretary, publisher, and muse toGertrude Stein.

Renee Vivien - A gifted poet, neighbour of Colette and lover of NatalieBarney, she died in Paris at the age of 31.

Dolly Wilde - An English writer who strongly resembled and admired heruncle Oscar; she abused drugs and alcohol to the point of self-destruction.

Thelma Wood - Silverpoint artist and sculptor, she had a tortured romancewith Djuna Barnes in Paris in the twenties.

PREFACE

ften films start out as books, but in my case this bookgrew out of a film project. My partner Greta Schillerand I felt that time was overdue for a comprehensivedocumentary film on the women of the Left Bank. We

began the enormous research and fundraising work, never dreaming thatfour years would pass before we saw its completion.

I have had many wonderful experiences in the process. Visiting theFonds Litteraire Jacques Doucet in Paris, for instance, Greta and I weretaken in to a small closet off the main reading room. We wondered what onearth would be revealed by the head archivist, Francjois Chapon; he hadalready shown us Natalie Barney's furniture, paintings, and chest of privatelove letters. We were completely surprised by what came next - FrancoisChapon, who had known Natalie Barney when he was a young man,opened a beautiful inlay box to reveal a plait of her hair.

From Paris Greta and I hired a car and drove down to Bilignin, thevillage in the Rhone region where Gertrude and Alice had their countryhome. Using The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook as our travel guide, we stoppedin some of the best hidden-away country restaurants in all of France. Welaughed about how fortunate we were that this trip ostensibly was our'work'. We loved coming upon, at long last, the signs indicating Bilignin,placed on each end of a little country lane. Between the two village signswere fewer than a dozen farmhouses, many cows, a beautiful double rowof old, sturdy oak trees and a big gate - behind which stood Gertrude andAlice's big grey house. We could have been in the 1930s when Gertrudeand Alice lived there; we almost could have been in the 1830s as well, for