The canon of classic lesbian poets is slowly expanding, thanks to less-expurgated translations of Sappho and some scholars’ acknowledgement of the feelings Emily Dickinson hid behind elliptical syntax and false pronouns. But for some of us, these fragments and scraps from the past don’t sate our hunger.
It may be time to have another look at Renée Vivien, an English lesbian poet who’s been sidelined due to a language barrier (she wrote in French)—and even more because she fell on the wrong side of modernism. Vivien was a Symbolist, a Decadent; Lillian Faderman, the great historian of lesbian culture, relegates her to the ranks of “carnivorous flowers . . . exotic and evil lesbians.”
Renée Vivien was born Pauline Mary Tarn in 1877, to an American mother and a wealthy English father. The latter’s early demise left her an independent heiress. Educated to equal fluency in English and French, she moved at age 21 to Paris. There, she became romantically entangled with the American expatriate Natalie Clifford Barney. (Barney was the model for the lesbian salon hostess Valérie Seymour in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness.) With Barney, she planned to establish a sapphic academy on the isle of Lesbos, a lesbian-separatist literary utopia.
Their relationship was complex. Barney was dazzling and shallow; Vivien was brilliant and needy. These lines from Vivien’s poem “Moment of Clarity” provide a revealing snapshot of the relationship,
Where others love,
you play at loving, simulate a warmth,
while your ever-attentive eye
betrays a reptile’s cold immobile observation.
When you shift position, there’s always a hint
of a slither.
Vivien used Barney as the model for many a monster in her Symbolist menagerie: Valkyrie, undine, serpent-girl, Amazon. What makes her creatures so different from Baudelaire’s sphinxes and vampiresses is that Vivien’s paranormals seem like actual women. They have a physical and emotional reality that transcends straight men’s imaginings of “fatal women.” Keats’ “La Belle Dame sans Merci” has only these four lines of physical description.
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
For the traditional masculine imagination, women are merely symbols, so the long hair, big eyes, and dainty feet of a Barbie doll sufficed for Keats. Compare Vivien’s rendition of a similar figure in “A Modern Water Nymph.”
As you walk, your dress has the mirrory shimmer
of a wave, in your every movement
there’s a certain elusive fluidity,
a teasing, deceiving ebb and flow.
I lean in to see, with a pleasing fear,
as one does at the edge of a chasm,
or when boating over sea as clear as it is deep.
Your hands are graceful as riverbank reeds,
your hair cascades over your bosom
in wavy arabesques, like seaweed sluggishly
evolving its vegetable paisley in a wave.
Vivien’s life was a decadent fantasy. She furnished her apartment with the funereal extravagance of the House of Usher. According to Colette’s memoir The Pure and the Impure, Vivien was always clad head-to-toe in black, like an Edward Gorey mourner. Her apartment had dense drapes to defeat day in favor of a candlelit twilight, made yet more vague by clouds of incense and tobacco smoke. The rooms were decorated with bronze buddhas, Chinese masks, musical instruments from Central Asia—it was less a home than a cabinet of curiosities. Jade platters presented the peckish guest with unheard-of appetizers and dubious dainties, though Vivien seemed to nourish herself exclusively on alcohol.
Vivien’s first book, Tentative Melodies (published in French as Études et preludes), is her best, and in a sense her only one. This was always the case for the alcoholic decadents of this period, like the masochist Algernon Swinburne, and the gay French poet Jean Lorrain (who described himself as “Sodom’s Ambassador”). The devotees of a boozy muse expressed themselves poignantly and completely in their first book. Though all three were relentless in writing sequels, they had nothing new to say. How could they? Drug addiction puts emotional growth on hold.
Vivien went from her relationship with Barney to one with a Rothschild baroness, Hélène van Zuylen, who was 39 to Vivien’s 25. Five years later, van Zuylen left her for another woman. Two years after that, in 1909, Vivien drank herself to death. Vivien’s poem “Night,” also from her first book, describes her feelings for the older woman,
Now daylight, with a struggle, succumbs to night,
its last gleams lie at your feet
as if they begged something in vain
from your lengthening shadow.
Your expression, sweet, impassive,
doesn’t betray the sad,
the dispiriting weight of your years.
Deathly pale you are, but smiling at grief.
You approach. The long folds of your dress
waft a ghost of perfume, like the scent of a dried flower.
Come, without makeup, no paint upon your lips,
lips for which I still burn. Come, without rings;
rubies, opal, sapphire—those don’t deserve
to shine upon your moon-white milk-pale fingers.
You no longer check your reflection in the mirror.
You know what it tells. Sufficient, the evening hour,
the pure simple monochrome gray of shadow.
Now colors only trouble, richness would sicken.
I kiss your hands, kneel to kiss your bare feet.
Together we weep for how we misunderstood
each other’s hearts; we’ve tears for angry words,
mad acts. Now, while the city’s streets
are silent, and even crime
that thrives on darkness, has gone, in turn, to sleep,
you’ll join your white hands in the attitude of prayer
and I will worship you in the mystery of night.
As a woman utterly unashamed of her affectional preferences, Vivien was ideally placed to reimagine women—while it was still possible to do so with the autumnal tints of late romanticism. Her first, best book is a kaleidoscope of lesbian archetypes, garishly magical as a San Francisco psychedelic poster. Her candid expression of lesbian love has since been matched by many a modern, but she had the advantage of living before artistic beauty was viewed as a sign of inauthenticity.
The quotations from Justin Brumby’s translation of Vivien’s Tentative Melodies (96th of October Editions, 2024), used with permission, are by Justin Brumby.
NOTE: the translations from Vivien’s book, Tentative Melodies, used with permission, are by Justin Brumby. Please give his name with the citation at end.
Mildred Faintly is a transgender woman who writes book reviews for the SF/Fantasy literary magazine 96thofoctober.com, you can read more about her work here. She earned a doctorate in classics under another name in another life; this rendered her entirely unemployable and for some years not very good company. She finally found work as a high school math teacher, where she explained to parents the dispiriting facts of how numerical grades are averaged. In the classroom, her talents were more meaningfully brought into play deciding who really needed to use the bathroom, and inflating grades (those impromptu lessons in averages never really “took.”) Now retired she enjoys the life of a literary recluse in a bamboo grove somewhere in New Jersey.
