Fembio Special: Famous Lesbians
Renée Vivien
(Pauline Mary Tarn [real name])
born on June 11, 1877 in London, Great Britain
died on November 18, 1909 in Paris, France
French-British poet
115th anniversary of her death on November 18, 2024
Biography
Pauline Mary Tarn, born in 1877 to an American mother and an British father in a wealthy, middle-class family in London, hated her country of origin (“English Sundays are prayers and roast beef, two ... equally indigestible things“) and her relatives (”I wish you could divorce your parents!”). She was only happy in the years she spent in elegant Parisian boarding schools for girls, surrounded by the French language and French poetry.
She came of age at 21 and - equipped with a considerable inheritance - chose to settle in Paris. Her childhood friend, Violette Shillito, soon introduced her to another heiress who was equally enthusiastic about France and literature: the American Natalie Barney. The two young women entered into a brief, intense love affair that had a deeply unsettling effect on the introverted, romantic Pauline and gave her poetic talent both a theme and a direction. Merely a year later, in 1901, Pauline Tarn published her first volume of poetry under the abbreviated pseudonym “R. Vivien.” Her poems celebrated the irresistible beauty of her “blonde siren”; they also divulged the fears, jealousy, and feelings of guilt of the poet (“The sweetness and horror of your first kiss trembled on my silent lips”).
Vivien could not bear to share her lover with other women. She experienced love as an ineluctable “abyss” into which she threw herself, knowing full well that it would swallow her up, while Barney, self-confident and unconcerned, saw her relationships with women as a source of happiness and lived them out in public. The differences in character and outlook on life led to quarrels and separations. Yet until Vivien's untimely death, the two women were never completely free of each other; what united them was above all the dream of reviving the Sapphic ideal, a community of women based on beauty, eroticism and art.
Vivien had become acquainted with Sappho's poems through an English translation. She took lessons in ancient Greek and devoted herself to the study of the great poet of Mytilene. In 1903, she published a volume of literal translations and free adaptations of Sappho's texts. In 1904, she and Barney made a pilgrimage to Mytilene, and Vivien introduced eight other little-known Greek women poets of antiquity in Les Kitharèdes. From then on, she published under the full name “Renée Vivien,” revealing herself as a woman and giving her verses a clear lesbian meaning for the unsuspecting public. In her novel A Woman Appeared to me and the collection The Woman of the Wolf and Other Stories (both 1904, published in 1995 and 1981 respectively), she became even more radical: with biting irony she declared heterosexuality an “unnatural aberration” and lamented the devastating toll that “repulsive motherhood” took on women’s delicate bodies.
Her classical verses, written in polished alexandrines, had been praised as very promising work by a great young talent (“a new Baudelaire”). But now there was scathing criticism, and she was derided as “hysterical” and “neurotic.”
Deeply affected by the public attacks, she felt misunderstood and pilloried. Nevertheless, she continued to write obsessively, revising her own texts time and again. During her lifetime she published a total of 25 volumes of poetry and prose, but she would typically only allow a small circle of friends access to her works. Neither her relationship with Hélène de Zuylen de Nyevelt, a wealthy Belgian baroness from the House of Rothschild, who devoted herself to the fragile poet with loyal but also overwhelming love, nor the exchange of passionate letters with Kérimé Turkhan-Pacha, the wife of a Turkish diplomat, could free her from her ever-increasing longing for death.
During periods of depression, she would withdraw to the darkened Paris apartment she had adorned with numerous Buddha figures and oriental décor. She would drink, refuse to eat, and twice she even tried to end her own life with pills. Then, as if on the run, she would begin to travel again - through numerous European countries, to Constantinople, China, Japan and Hawaii.
She died in 1909, aged just 32, as a result of anorexia and alcoholism.
For a long time, Renée Vivien was completely forgotten. It was only in the 1980s that her texts were reissued and serious biographical and literary studies were published about the poet who, 2500 years after Sappho, was the first to make love between women the main theme of her poetry and who explicitly addressed a female audience: “Oh women! I have sung in the hope of pleasing you!”
(Text from 2008; translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2024. Please consult the German version for additional information, pictures, sources, videos, and bibliography.)
Quotes
Le Pilori
Pendant longtemps, je fus clouée au pilori,
Et des femmes, voyant que je souffrais, ont ri.
Puis, des hommes ont pris dans leurs mains une boue
Qui vint éclabousser mes tempes et ma joue.
Les pleurs montaient en moi, houleux comme les flots,
Mais mon orgueil me fit refouler mes sanglots.
Je les voyais ainsi, comme à travers un songe
Affreux et dont l’horreur se prolonge.
La place était publique et tous étaient venus,
Et les femmes jetaient des rires ingénus.
Ils se lançaient des fruits avec des chansons folles,
Et le vent m’apportait le bruit de leurs paroles.
J’ai senti la colère et l’horreur m’envahir.
Silencieusement, j’ai appris à les haïr.
Les insultes cinglaient, comme des fouets d’ortie.
Lorsqu’ils m’ont détachée enfin, je suis partie.
Je suis partie au gré des vents. Et depuis lors
Mon visage est pareil à la face des morts.
The Pillory
For a long time, I was nailed to the pillory,
And women, seeing my pain, laughed.
Then some men took mud in their hands
And splashed it on my temples and cheek.
Tears rose in me, stormy as the waves,
But my pride made me suppress my sobs.
I saw them thus, as through a dreadful
Dream and whose horror is prolonged.
The square was public and everyone had come,
And the women giggled ingenuously.
They threw fruit at each other with wild songs,
And the wind brought me the sound of their words.
I felt anger and horror wash over me.
Silently, I learned to hate them.
The insults stung, like nettle whips.
When they finally untied me, I left.
I went with the wind. And ever since
My face is like the face of the dead.
(Translated with DeepL.com)
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