Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho, and Art: The Lives and Loves of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks [Hardcover]

Diana Souhami (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0312343248 | ISBN-13: 978-0312343248 | Publication Date: October 13, 2005 | Edition: 1st

Natalie and Romaine met in London during World War I and their partnership lasted until Natalie died 52 years later. They were both American expatriates: unconventional, energetic, flamboyant and rich. Natalie was known as 'the wild girl of Cincinnatti'. She had numerous affairs with other women: Renee Vivien who nailed shut the windows of her apartment, wrote about the loveliness of death, drank eau de cologne and died of anorexia aged 30; and Dolly Wilde niece of Oscar, who ran up terrible phone bills and died of a drugs overdose. She wrote books of aphorism, memoirs and poems and her Friday afternoon salons in the cobbled garden of her Parisian house were for 'introductions and culture'. They were frequented by Gertrude Stein, Colette, Radclyffe Hall and Edith Sitwell. Romaine achieved fame in her own lifetime and after as an artist. She painted her lovers including Gabriele d'Annunzio with whom she had a terrible and tortured relationship, and the ballerina Ida Rubinstein. However her relationship with Natalie was constant and in their eventful years together they threw up a liberating spirit of culture, style and candour. Diana Souhami has written a moving portrait of these two enigmatic figures, as well as a fascinating recreation of a forgotten time.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Though poet Natalie Barney and artist Romaine Brooks rubbed (usually more than) elbows with the artistic elites of Bohemian Paris, neither achieved fame nor acclaim. So it is that Souhami (Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter) focuses on their relationships with one another and their many lovers, producing a book that reads more like a lesbian soap opera than a biography. The author describes people each of the two American women encountered, but concentrates less on their interactions with one another than on Barney's affairs with, among many others, Liane de Pougy, Renee Vivien and Lily de Gramont. Barney "liked lots of sex, lavish display and theatricality, and wanted not to bind love to rules, particularly to the rule of exclusivity," Souhami explains. "She divided her amours into liaisons, demi-liaisons, and adventures, and called her nature fidele/infidele." By the time the discussion turns to Barney and Brooks-well past the book's halfway point-readers have been inundated with so many of Barney's flings that it is difficult to keep things straight. Souhami writes in short, declarative sentences ("Alice was seventeen. Her bereaved mother took her on a grand tour of Europe. Alice sketched impressions of Paris, Milan and Rome."), a style at odds with her libertine subjects that gives the impression she shortchanged texture and detail in favor of creating a tally of Barney's multitudinous rendezvous. Photos.
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Review

"Diana Souhami describes the whole complex relationship well, particularly the poignancy of the final years in the lives of her two Wild Girls... Pages are crammed with descriptions of exotic characters, their extravagances and eccentricities, the lillies, the pearls, the velvet-lined rooms... " -- SELINA HASTINGS SUNDAY TELEGRAPH "Far more intriguing is something that lies outside this story altogether. At the start of each chapter is placed a short passage in itallics, never more than a paragraph or two. Here the author seems to be narrating some of her personal lesbian experiences... These are fascinating and I sincerely hope Ms Souhami will expand them and produce her own memoir of life as a wild girl." -- SELINA HASTINGS SUNDAY TELEGRAPH "Diana Souhami's cunning insertion of occasional vignettes from her own, rather less opulent existence as a modern gay woman enhances our awareness that this book is as much a tribute to lesbian fulfilment as a straightforward chronicle of its subjects' lives. Her skill, not just in garnering detail, but in finding the perfect place for, is unrivalled... " -- Jonathan Keates LITERARY REVIEW "Natalie's salon and Romaine's paintings may be no more than cultural footnotes, but their love, in all its tortured resistless grandeur, deserves a kind of immortality." -- Jonathan Keates LITERARY REVIEW "Diana Souhami, in writing about a book about them and the significant others in each of their lives has produced a series of miniatures that add up to a group portrait of a singular society that flourished in Paris (and as Souhami points out, would have been impossible anywhere else) during the first third of the 20th century... an exceptionally witty and original biographer." SUNDAY TIMES "Diana Souhami tells the story of those years with her usual wit and detail... what Souhami makes clear is that we are not only talking about sexual difference but about a completely different way of living." -- JEANETTE WINTERSON THE TIMES "Wild Girls is a wonderful evocation of an era and of a relationship frightening in both its intensity and its bleakness. It is interspersed with tales of Souhami's own life in London bars or cafes... This gives fuel to the contention that all biography is covert autobiography: we seize and dwell on those elements of our subject's life that illuminate our own." -- JAD ADAMS GUARDIAN --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (October 13, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312343248
• ISBN-13: 978-0312343248
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,970,613 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A life still left in shadow, May 10, 2005

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International Acclaim "Reviews" (New York City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wild Girls (Hardcover)

Gray is a difficult colour to master. It is enigmatic, aloof. It can be warm, with tints of peach and pink, or cold, with tints of sapphire and indigo. But no one could ever doubt that American artist Romaine Brooks was a master of gray. From her mysterious, icy portraits of members of the belle époque and the jazz age, to her preference for colorless fashions and décor, to the melancholy of her own day to day existence, Brooks was almost the personification of the colour gray itself. It would take great skill to write a biography of such a woman. Therefore I was ecstatic to discover that Diana Souhami had taken on the task of writing a book on the entwined lives of Romaine Brooks and her long-time companion, Paris saloneuse Natalie Clifford Barney. Both American, both wealthy, both artistic, Barney and Brooks still made an odd pair. Barney was the ever-social butterfly, flitting from flower to flower, beautiful and flamboyant. Brooks was her exact opposite, a withdrawn, flighty creature from a background of insanity, who preferred to live in the shadows, alone. This sounds like perfect material for the talents of Souhami, who has already tackled the lives of such challenging individuals as Radclyffe Hall, Gertrude Stein and Greta Garbo. Souhami also wrote the award-winning "Selkirk's Island", untangling the threads of the life of Alexander Selkirk, the inspiration for Defoe's classic, "Robinson Crusoe". Yes, Brooks and Barney seemed in good hands.
I cannot express, then, the disappointment that this anticipated book brought. Distressingly short not only for a biography of two distinct souls, but also an examination of the times in which they lived, the book is riddled with factual errors and blunders. Souhami begins her race by stumbling. In her Foreword she states plainly, one would say almost flippantly, of her use of the Internet as a main source of research-and it shows. The author appears to think that everything you find on the Web is factual, not realizing that the information to be found there is only as accurate as the knowledge of those posting it. This is a fatal error. Souhami seems almost dismissive of her own research, telling us about how much she enjoyed reading the pop-up advertisements she encountered while on the Net for such things as sexy chat, and even giving us a footnote detailing a pill that can help men lengthen the size of their endowment. Souhami further mars the book with the constant insertion of bits and pieces of her own past that, although well written, are disturbingly incongruous and intrusive and give the impression that she would much rather be talking about herself.
Next, Souhami falters in her facts, tripping too many times to enumerate, but here are a few major potholes: Lady Mary "Minnie" Anglesey is said on page 40 to be "about to divorce her transvestite husband." Souhami then footnotes that Mary was married to Henry Cyril Paget, the 4th Marquess of Anglesey. This is a gross mistake. Mary Anglesey was indeed married to the 4th Marquess of Anglesey, but she was married to Henry Paget, not Henry Cyril Paget, the 5th Marquess of Anglesey, who was not only infamous for his flashy dressing-up and obsession for jewelry, but was also Mary's own son (and, for the record, Henry Cyril Paget's wife's name was Lilian). Next we are told that the Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio's nickname for Brooks was "Cinerana". This is incorrect; his nickname for her was "Cinerina", meaning, "little gray one". Also, the Baroness Madeleine Deslandes was known as "Elsie", not "Ilsie". On page 141 we are told that Brooks described in a letter the "house" on Capri of the eccentric Marchesa Casati as "simply beautiful", but the author fails to point out that Casati's "house" was, in fact, the famous Villa San Michele, rented from Dr. Axel Munthe.
Beguiling anecdotes also slip through the fingers of an author so proud of her diligent international research. No mention is made of the mystery revolving around Brooks' painting "The White Bird" and how some historians believe it is a portrait of Barney's lover, the renowned grand horizontal, Liane de Pougy. Nor are we told that the face of the cat in Brooks' portrait of Baroness Catherine D'Erlanger was deliberately painted to resemble that of her husband's. Nor do we hear of the intriguing story that, after becoming a virtual hermit in Nice, living in a room devoid of everything but a bed and table, and having given away all of her paintings, drawings and writings, beneath Romaine Brooks' death bed was found the only canvas she kept, her portrait of Luisa Casati. Also, there is no mention of the small book, written by Elizabeth de Gramont, another of Barney's paramours, on Brooks' work that was published in 1952. Nor that the normally pathologically reclusive Brooks granted a long interview with French writer Michel Desbrueres that appeared in the Parisian periodical "Bizarre" in 1968, just two years before her death. Souhami also claims that Brooks painted a portrait of artist Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux, but, oddly, there is no reference to this painting in any prior biography of Brooks or in any catalogue of her oeuvre. Has Souhami discovered a hitherto unknown painting? We are given no clue. Perhaps another fifteen minutes of research on the Internet would have cleared up all of this-or better yet some good old-fashioned investigatory legwork and elbow grease that Souhami's research sorely lacks.
Next is the matter of Souhami's innumerable and annoying footnotes. She footnotes everyone and sundry with what she must have felt were charming and witty caricatures-Noel Coward is summed up as being "friendly with the lesbian haut monde", composer Prince Edmond de Polignac's only reference says "he died after eight years of marriage" and Luisa Casati is dubbed "the patron saint of exhibitionists". Such sketches are neither charming nor witty, and consistently get in the way of reading the text. As a reader, I also do not need to know such minutiae as how many seats there are in the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris, that Gluck's "Orfeo ed Euridice" was first performed in 1762, or the lyrics to "Auld Lang Syne". It is most interesting to note that even though the author strives to introduce us to every person in the book that some celebrated individuals such as Madame Eugenia Errazuris, a bright grand dame of the beau monde, are left floundering and unannotated, while poet Anna de Noailles, writer Paul Morand, and interior designer, Elsie de Wolfe, each a distinguished sitter for Brooks, are not mentioned at all (nor is the fact that Brooks' portrait of de Wolfe was often sarcastically called "The White Goat", because of the small ceramic goat that sits beside the designer and mimics her simpering expression perfectly). And worst of all, these intrusive footnotes shine a glaring light on the fact that Souhami never footnotes any of her relevant and/or fascinating facts. How do we know that Liane de Pougy's asparagus soup congealed and her risotto went cold while she, at lunch, waited for writer Max Jacob to arrive, or that after being pelted by preserved cherries by boys at the Long Beach Hotel in New York, a young Natalie Barney ran into the arms of Oscar Wilde for comfort. Where does this information come from? Such charming tidbits require references for future researchers.
And here is where Souhami's book fails the most-as a research tool and reference book for the future. Subsequent authors and students cannot use a book rife with easily correctable errors without perpetuating those same mistakes ad infinitum. As a highly respected writer, shame on you, Ms. Souhami. You should have known better.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, But..., May 8, 2006

By 

Charlus "charlus" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho, and Art: The Lives and Loves of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks (Hardcover)

A fascinating story of two extraordinary lives soaked in the demi-monde at the fin-de-siecle with the world of the rich and artistic as its background. Unfortunately, this telling comes with some irritating costs. The book is studded with bizarrely extraneous footnotes: does any reader of this story really need to be told who Dante, Proust, Cocteau, Sappho, Gertrude Stein, Sarah Bernhardt (among many others) were? Also, the author interpolates little autobiographical asides that have nothing to do with the dual biography at hand and merely comes across as an egotistical affectation.

When Souhami actually gets to the story at hand (which in fairness is most of the time), historical errors aside, she tells a wonderful tale of the sapphic world in turn-of-the-century Europe.

Very well written when not marred by the author's idiosyncrasies.

4.0 out of 5 stars good for faux travel., January 31, 2010

By 

Savannah Brooks "The girl with the most cake" (Wausau) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho, and Art: The Lives and Loves of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks (Paperback)

i'm not able to travel as often as i'd like, so i often pick up books i call "travel" or "time travel" books. they usually focus a lot on the setting and atmosphere and are set in wonderful, romantic places that are filled with people i'd like to meet. wild girls isn't a good choice if you want a very scholarly biography, but the style was more engaging and descriptive than many biographies i have read. i'm sorry to hear that some of the facts were incorrect and some interesting facts about romaine brooks' paintings were not included, but overall, i really enjoyed this book.

i'll admit that i didn't know anything about barney or brooks when i started, but now i'm curious to learn more. i can understand the frustration people who were hoping for a longer story had, because this is a very, very short book. it probably would have been better if it were longer, but it's still an interesting read. it's main flaw is that it focuses on the cast just a bit too much. while the author makes sure to devote at least a chapter to the mother of each woman and each of their long-term lovers, less care is given to devoting enough time to the women the book is supposed to be about, and every person is so quickly introduced that you feel as if you've met the person once, had a wonderful and facinating conversation, and then later followed the gossip about them to find out whatever happened to them. i would have enjoyed a longer book with more details and more stories. the theme of telling the story of the people through their love affairs is interesting, but not well executed here.

the book also would have been much better if it included more of romaine's art, and more details on the pictures. many of them are mentioned in the book but not shown, and i found myself wanting to stop reading and run image searches for the art a lot.