“Are We Having That Birthday Cake, Or Not?”

A Conversation with Francesco Rapazzini

Suzanne Stroh : Today is the birthday of Natalie Barney. All Hallow’s Eve. You chose tonight in 1926, on Barney’s 50^th birthday, as the setting for your historical farce, Un soir chez l’Amazone. It’s so funny. One of my favorite comic novels of all time. I’m looking forward to translating it with Jean-Loup Combemale, who grew up just down the street from Natalie at 12, rue Jacob. Describe the setting for readers.

Francesco Rapazzini: That’s right, it was a special night at Natalie Barney’s on her fiftieth birthday. The novel tells the story of that party. For one of Natalie’s salons, which were generally semi-public gatherings, this was a bit out of the ordinary. All the guests were either good friends (we meet Gertrude Stein with Alice Toklas, Colette and Djuna Barnes), or else they were Natalie’s current, past or future lovers. It’s a farce, and like all farce it’s also a tragedy. The great human tragedy.

I don’t want to give away the story. It’s so outrageous. All the bodily fluids are amply represented, along with the full repertory of sexual experience. But nobody could make this stuff up: you drew everything, down to the dialog, from historical sources. How did you settle on your plot?

It was easy. I read everything I could about my characters. Novels, biographies, interviews, private notebooks. I started keeping track of their ongoing rows or disputes. Bit by bit, I started piecing together their conversations. Then it just all came together. I would often take a nap before writing and imagine my characters taking shape, growing, evolving. I gave my imagination free rein, and then wrote down what I had, in effect, already dreamed.

Did you have fun writing it? Were you haunted by the spirits of all those uppity lesbians and Modernists from Paris in the Twenties?

I have to admit, I caught myself laughing out loud writing several scenes. Every night I would read what I’d written to my boyfriend. If he laughed, I knew I’d gotten it right. Haunted by lesbians? No, we got along incredibly well.

Have I told you Natalie’s meant to turn up here tonight? Let’s not remind her that she’s 137. Then again, she fell in love on a park bench at 79, so maybe 137 is the new 50. So, what were Natalie’s best qualities? Her worst?

Her best quality was making everybody around her feel so clever, so intelligent. Her worst… hmm. Better not to answer, or else she will haunt us on Halloween.

She’s a force to be reckoned with, as Suzie Rodriguez reminds us. Natalie gave great parties. What was her secret?

I think it was that quality I just remarked on, the sense that one was worthy of being in her company of talented and beautiful people. After all, nobody but geniuses were invited to her parties! And it’s always pleasant to take oneself for a genius, don’t you think?

Your book begins with Natalie gazing at herself in the mirror, getting ready for her birthday party under the watchful eye of that slain polar bear on the floor of her blue bedroom. Berthe, her loyal housekeeper, has just started work this morning and has no idea that Miss Barney is the Pope of Lesbos. The full compliment of Natalie’s former lovers is on the way over: Colette, Liane de Pougy, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Djuna Barnes, Janet Flanner, Élisabeth de Gramont. It’s a group not known for playing well with others. The cook is drunk, the butler hasn’t washed. But none of this is news to Natalie’s famous friends, all born on or around October 31, who have been celebrating their birthdays together for years. Tell me about them.

It’s important to understand that Natalie was proud to be born under the sign of the Scorpion. And so every year she celebrated her birthday amongst fellow Scorpios—not necessarily those born on October 31. It wasn’t really about her particular fondness for them; she just liked that they were members of her tribe. Who were they? Marie Laurencin, the painter, also born October 31, only in 1883 not in 1876 like Natalie; Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, born November 3, 1874, a writer who was one of Natalie’s former mistresses; and finally, André Germain, the gay inheritor of a banking fortune founded by his father. He was a bit on edge, wild about Renée Vivien.

She had died like twenty years ago, back in 1909!

As I say, Germain turned into the clown. He has his eye on two handsome young men who have been brought to the party, and then snooping around, he walks in on them making love in Miss Barney’s bathroom! Scandal!

And that’s just the beginning! There are 35 historical characters in your book, each more famous than the next in their own day, some all but forgotten today. Tell us about some of the more fascinating but little-known stars of your novel.

How can I mention one without making the others jealous? I’ll have horrible nightmares tonight if I do. They’ll loose their vengeance. We also have to think about Americans reading this, compared to a French audience. So for instance, does the name René Crevel mean anything to Americans? He was a gorgeous Surrealist writer who died young at 36. Very well known here in France, but in the U.S.? On the other hand, the name Thelma Wood has all but been forgotten on both sides of the Atlantic, even though she was a very good sculptor. And of course the lover of Djuna Barnes. Another character I’m fond of is Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, a really good writer who committed the sin of publishing too many novels. And of being a fantastic poet.

God, that hot poem about Natalie she recites in your novel! Fantastic!

But who reads poetry today, Suzanne?

Tell me about it. It’s depressing. Not just for me, but for my friends who are really gifted published poets. I just reread Lucie’s novel about Natalie, The Angel and the Perverse, but I admit I haven’t hunted down her collected poems. Note to self: “infuse more poetry into daily life.”

And then there was Eugene McCown, Élisabeth de Gramont, Myriam Harry…But let’s let our readers discover them for themselves.

Good idea. You portray them all with incredible accuracy, down to their gestures, their clothes, their speech patterns, even their thoughts. Authors, poets, mystics, composers, sculptors, philosophers, roués and cads, a banker and a lawyer: they discuss art, politics, sex and love with equal fervor. Some even speak in epigrams. The atmosphere you create is so intimate that I can almost feel them breathing beside me in the room. You are also an accomplished biographer. Your novel makes me wonder: What’s truer: biography or fiction?

Your new book, Indomptables, which I would title Unbowed or Untamed in translation, resurrects six more little-known Modern masters. What can these nearly forgotten belle-époque-to-mid-century lives teach us today?

Wow, how much time do you have? The short answer is that they show us two things, above all. First, the incredibly free spirit of the age they lived in, which has disappeared beneath all our political correctness. And how we refuse to offend anybody or step on any toes. And the second thing is the amazing social network of women that existed in that era, where each woman reached out to every other woman with help, if she could. And not just in the arts, but in every sphere. And think about how artists cross-pollinated back then, more than they do today, instead of writers only hanging out with writers, painters with painters, stand-up comics with other comedians, etc. A hundred years ago, writers sought out one another, of course they did. But they found themselves among painters and actors. The networks were wider. And that made them more interesting.

Turning to the important things in life, have you ever met anybody who can remember what Berthe’s famous chocolate cake tasted like? What other details did you learn about firsthand? From whom?

The sole surviving salon-going cake-eater from Berthe’s era at Natalie Barney’s is my friend, the writer Jean Chalon. He was very young when he met Natalie and they became great friends. She told him everything about her life, her loves, her writing…. He portrayed her in Portrait of a Seductress. His book was primary source material for my novel.

You wrote this novel before your biography of Élisabeth de Gramont. The dramatis personae lists Romaine Brooks as Natalie’s current girlfriend in 1926. Élisabeth and Romaine are forced into an uneasy truce in Un soir chez l’Amazone.

We now know that Natalie and Élisabeth had secretly married in 1918. They promised to remain faithful, but not sexually exclusive, for life. And they did. Natalie’s love affair with Romaine, which had begun in 1916, proved just as durable. By 1926, Natalie and Romaine had built a house in Bauvallon, where Élisabeth came every summer to visit. When Élisabeth was grieving the death of her daughter, she decided to visit Romaine in Italy, a country she detested. Now that Natalie’s secret novel Amants féminins ou la troisième has been published in French, we can appreciate how the household that Natalie kept with Romaine and Élisabeth was a stable base, contrasted sharply with the unstable love triangle she dissects in the novel between herself, Mimi Franchetti and Liane de Pougy.

At the time, when you were writing the novel, what did you make of the relationship between Élisabeth and Romaine? Has that impression changed?

Yes, it had to change. As Lily’s biographer I had to adjust my perspective to fit the facts, but it still works fictionally. In this novel, I brought one single night to life, and on that particular evening, it’s possible that Natalie loved Romaine more, that she was feeling closer to Romaine. But we’re in a novel, not in a biography. Remember: it’s so not true, it seems totally real.

What’s the strangest thing that happened to you when researching and writing this book?

It sounds idiotic, but when I had to paint the portrait of Djuna Barnes, I had her wear violet lipstick. I don’t know why, but that’s how I saw it. Several years later, I read an interview about her where it was mentioned that her lipstick color was… violet.

Are you planning a new novel? Will it make me laugh or cry?

Yes, I’ll be starting a new novel soon. I think you’ll laugh. Maybe, from time to time, you’ll feel a tear in your eye. From sadness, or from laughing too hard?

Yes, please. (I mean, both sorrow and laughter please.) Francesco, thanks so much for popping by this afternoon. And thank you for signing five of your books, which I’ll be giving away to visitors before midnight.

My pleasure. Till next time.

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Based in Paris, journalist Francesco Rapazzini grew up in Venice and Milan. Trained as an actor and a lawyer, he is the author of two novels and several biographies including Élisabeth de Gramont: avant-gardiste (Paris, 2004, Fayard), being translated into English by Suzanne Stroh; Damia: une diva française (Paris, 2010, Perrin), about the Beryl Markham of French torch singers; and Indomptables: à l’avant garde du XXe siècle (Paris, 2013, E-dite), a study of six gender-bending Modern masters of arts and letters. He is currently working on a biography of the Moulin Rouge and its century-long influence on artists and the arts.