Renee vivien turns 139
June 11 is the birthday of France’s best dressed Symbolist poet, Renée Vivien. Never mind that she was Anglo-American. Never mind that her real name was Pauline Tarn. She was all the rage on both sides of the Atlantic.
Her fictions of Sappho fired up le tout Paris where she settled with her inheritance in 1898. She was such a big deal at the turn of the 20th century that they named an era after her: Sapho 1900.
To avoid the swooning frenzies that accompanied her poetry readings, the retiring Vivien hired a male stand-in. Would you have taken her for a girl?
She was as shy and awkward in conversation as she was confident in her written expression. It was, apparently, a heady mixture. If you asked for one of her books, she always gave it to you hidden in a nosegay. [Note to self!]
You can learn a bit more about two of Pauline’s many illustrious lovers, music patron Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac (1865-1943) and painter Romaine Brooks (1874-1970), at the first exhibition of Brooks’s work in many years. It opens June 17th at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The symposium program, running 4-7:00 pm, includes talks by Singer’s biographer Sylvia Kahan (Music’s Modern Muse) and Brooks’s biographer Cassandra Langer (Romaine Brooks: A Life, interviewed here by James Conway in Strange Flowers). See you there!
Many happy returns of your 139th, Mademoiselle. Do tell what you did with the pretty blonde I Fedexed to your Parnassian heights in that coffin packed with lilies…