Natalie Clifford Barney - Poetry and Plays

Poetry and Plays

In 1900, Barney published her first book, a collection of poems called Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes (Some Portrait-Sonnets of Women). The poems were written in traditional French verse and a formal, old-fashioned style since Barney did not care for free verse. These poems have been described as "apprentice work" but by publishing them, Barney became the first woman poet to openly write about the love of women since Sappho. Her mother contributed pastel illustrations of the poems' subjects, wholly unaware three of the four women who modeled for her were her daughter's lovers.

Reviews were generally positive and glossed over the lesbian theme of the poems, some even misrepresenting it. The Washington Mirror said Barney "writes odes to men's lips and eyes; not like a novice, either." However, a headline in a society gossip paper cried out "Sappho Sings in Washington" and this alerted her father, who bought and destroyed the publisher's remaining stock and printing plates.

To escape her father's sway Barney published her next book, Cinq Petits Dialogues Grecs (Five Short Greek Dialogues, 1901), under the pseudonym Tryphé. The name came from the works of Pierre Louÿs, who helped to edit and revise the manuscript. Barney also dedicated the book to him. The first of the dialogues is set in ancient Greece and contains a long description of Sappho, who is "more faithful in her inconstancy than others in their fidelity." Another argues for paganism over Christianity. Barney's father's death in 1902 left her with a substantial fortune, freeing her from any need to conceal the authorship of her books; she never used a pseudonym again.

Je Me Souviens was published in 1910, after Vivien's death. That same year, Barney published Actes et Entr'actes (Acts and Interludes), a collection of short plays and poems. One of the plays was Equivoque (Ambiguity), a revisionist version on the legend of Sappho's death: Instead of throwing herself off a cliff for the love of Phaon the sailor, she does so out of grief that Phaon is marrying the woman she loves. The play incorporates quotations from Sappho's fragments, with Barney's own footnotes in Greek.

Barney did not take her poetry as seriously as Vivien did, saying, "if I had one ambition it was to make my life itself into a poem." Her plays were only performed through amateur productions in her garden. According to Karla Jay, most of them lacked coherent plots and "would probably baffle even the most sympathetic audience." After 1910 she mostly wrote the epigrams and memoirs for which she is better known. Her last book of poetry was called Poems & Poemes: Autres Alliances and came out in 1920, bringing together romantic poetry in both French and English. Barney asked Ezra Pound to edit the poems but then ignored the detailed recommendations he made.