![]() ![]() ![]() As it turned out, Natalie Barney did not take this view at all. At the time I took it as a warning that this enchanting person wanted to be left in peace. But what impressed me more was the remark made by Janet Flanner in declining to contribute to Adam: “Miss Barney is a perfect example of an enchanting person not to write about.” I am still puzzling over that remark, wondering if I may have taken it in the wrong sense. At that time the magazine Adam devoted an issue to Natalie Barney containing selections from her work and commentaries by me members of her circle. I had first heard about Natalie Barney when I was writing a book about the Americans in Paris. She herself was a writer, but her notoriety stems even more from her being unquestionably the leading lesbian of her time. For over sixty years her house in Paris provided the setting for an international salon frequented by many of the leading writers, artists, diplomats and intellectuals of the century, including Gertrude Stein, Sacha Guitry, Paul Valéry, Baron de Rothschild, Harold Acton, Janet Flanner, Bernard Berenson, Romaine Brooks, Colette, Gide, Cocteau, Eugène Jolas and Ezra Pound. She is the Amazone to whom Remy de Gourmont addressed his Lettres à l’Amazone, she appears as a character in half a dozen works of fiction, and her name turns up in scores of memoirs. ![]() Natalie Clifford Barney, who was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1876 and who died in Paris in 1972 at the age of 95, was a legendary figure in France but almost unknown in her native land. ![]()
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