Midwives to Modernism: Three Women's Contributions to The
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Elke Mettinger Midwives to Modernism: Three Women’s Contributions to the Making of the Avant-Garde Modernism is a movement that is usually associated with masterpieces by male artists such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, André Breton, Louis Aragon or Pablo Picasso, to name but a few. In order to understand the genesis of the Parisian avant-garde in the 1920s it is important, however, to note that it was to a great extent women – more or less forgotten or undervalued today – who had a key influence on the shaping of the modernist face of the Left Bank. This paper will analyze the crucial contributions of three American women to the birth of high mod- ernism at the Montparnasse. They were more or less talented writers them- selves but the focus here is on their achievements in terms of promoting, bringing forth, and publishing modernism via different platforms: a literary salon, a bookshop and publishing house and a little magazine, respectively. Natalie Barney (1876-1972) A woman who did much for the modernist movement and is now almost forgotten is Natalie Barney. She is definitely remembered less for being a dedicated writer than for her eccentric and openly lesbian or bisexual lifestyle and for her famous salon. In order to escape from her puritanical American upbringing, Barney de- liberately chose Paris: “Paris has always seemed to me the only city where you can live and express yourself as you please” (qtd. in Benstock 271). Her financial background – she inherited a huge fortune from her father after whose death she settled in Paris in the early 1900s – guaranteed her freedom in every sense of the word. Barney was familiar with Sappho’s poetry and appreciated Greek culture as an alternative to the heterosexual Christian code. Paris seems to have been an ideal place for the recovery of Sappho since “the notion of lesbian eroticism had, by the 1890s, permeated the Pari- sian imagination” (Benstock 281). Natalie surrounded herself with women who practised pagan rituals similar to Sappho’s in her Temple à l’amitié, a small Doric temple in the garden behind her house at 20, rue Jacob. It was only in the twenties that the extravagant outsider and her salon reached their heyday. “Just as the salon reached its apotheosis of greatness in the 1920s, so too did Natalie’s relationships with women. [...] Never again 42 Elke Mettinger would this intricate web of female associations be as consistently rewarding” (Rodriguez 262). Barney also encouraged the participation of heterosexual women and of men, as Truman Capote would later confirm that Miss Barney’s circle wasn’t limited to lesbians, for she received tout Paris (Weiss 107). For decades the Friday afternoon salons would follow a similar pattern and attract the famous and eccentric. In the early twenties a Chinese butler received the guests; as of 1927 this duty was performed by Natalie’s house- keeper Berthe Cleyrergue. Established French authors like André Gide, Paul Valéry, Paul Claudel or Colette mixed with avant-garde writers like Louis Aragon or Jean Cocteau. Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, Djuna Barnes, Janet Flanner or Isadora Duncan met with less regular atten- dants like Sherwood Anderson, the Fitzgeralds, Thornton Wilder, Edith Sit- well, Sylvia Beach, Nancy Cunard, Caresse and Harry Crosby, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Marie Laurencin, Tamara de Lempicka, Edna St. Vincent Mil- lay or Rainer Maria Rilke (Fiala 162, Weiss 101). Natalie was an important patron of music and acquainted with many composers, such as Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Armande de Polignac or Florent Schmitt. Virgil Thomson’s opera “Four Saints in Three Acts”, based on a libretto by Gertrude Stein, was performed in her salon. On New Year’s Day 1926 George Antheil’s First String Quartet – sponsored by Barney – was premiered there and resulted in a commission to write his Second Sym- phony. Antheil’s most notorious work Ballet Mécanique premiered as a cur- tain raiser for the opening night of the Ballets Suédois with Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie, James Joyce and sponsor Natalie Barney being present. Outraged spectators made Antheil famous as the sauvage overnight. The work’s title was a clever bit of Dada combining the fantastic with the banal, suggesting not only the dance of the machines, but also the carpet sweeper, the balai mécanique. “Antheil was all that Paris loved, the last word in fash- ion, a brilliant, iconoclastic youth who seemed destined to revolutionize music” (Wickes 208). He had come from Berlin to Paris when he was only 22 and taken a one-room apartment above Sylvia Beach’s bookshop, who in her memoirs proudly proclaims: “Adrienne and I were in on the Ballet Mé- canique from the beginning” (123). Pound had introduced Antheil to Barney who allowed him to practise on her piano. Antheil’s first performance at Barney’s salon took place in January 1924 with his “Symphony for Five Instruments” (Fiala 165). Antheil’s promising career suddenly turned into anticlimax on which he later reflected in the following way: “Paris, although more sympathetic to new art than any other city, was a difficult one in which to hold one’s artistic integrity” (qtd. in Wickes 212). Antheil was well known to readers of the little magazines through his own and Pound’s contributions. .