What are you reading this spring? I’ve always got a few books going at any given time, including this one. Poetry by Garrison Keillor, one of America’s more underrated literary talents.
Check out my currents, my flames and my favorites on Goodreads.
And as my friend Piers taught me, never leave home without a book.
Til tomorrow,
Suzanne
Business and pleasure rarely mix, except in the company of Élisabeth de Gramont.
Or so I discovered today, when my translation crossed paths with the research on the rise and fall of wealth I’m doing for Professor John Davis of the Harvard Business School and the Cambridge Institute, where I work.
Join me 119 years ago in the Paris ballroom of the Duke and Duchess de Gramont, Agénor and his second wife, born Marguerite de Rothschild. It’s just this side of midnight on a warm spring night like tonight’s: May above the Seine, with silvery gardens stretching down to the river. I’m dressed as a man. As Francesco Rapazzini, in fact, the handsome young Italian who loaned me this tailcoat. And who apparently has better things to do with his evening than go to another boring bal blanc.
Don’t worry, he said to me when tying my cravat. She will nod from across the room, and that means, ‘Now you may write about me.’
What about Proust? I’ll never hold up, I said, itching under my collar. With Proust (I coached myself once again), reply with an allusion that refers to an irony over a double entendre.
Francesco ran his finger under the collar, saying only, We haven’t met him yet. This is 1894.
I have no Italian, I whined.
So much the better, he murmured, flicking lint and turning me, pleased with his work. Men don’t need language anyway. Keep your mouth shut. He stood back. You’ll do. Prettiest girl at the ball. All the boys will think so.
Don’t you think we’re messing a bit with history here? What if the sight of me sets her down her merry way too soon? It’s fifteen years yet before she meets the lusty gaze of Natalie Barney.
Just don’t look her in the eye, then. He handed me a pair of sunglasses with my gloves and pushed me into the moving carriage.
And now here she is.
Dressed in the loveliest pink ball gown money can buy, eighteen year-old Élisabeth is not very keen on finding a husband. She’d much rather be having a left-leaning political discussion with her war-hero-turned-pacifist uncle Horace de Choiseul-Praslin. She regards the ubiquitous, bachelor museum specimens swirling around her with disdain. Where is that arty biographer person she just waltzed with? Granted: a mute; even so… She’s intrigued. But it is not permitted to dance twice with the same man. How does anybody find out anything at a May Ball?
Were she the sulking type, Lily would sulk. And I would catch her at it from across the room and make her laugh. We’d slip outside and go for a walk. That’s if I wasn’t “Francesco.” And if her stepmother Marguerite, guarding Lily like a prize, wasn’t trying so hard to “make tonight a success.” Lily does her duty, remains seated, inclines her head and forces a docile expression. When she finds me lurking against the wall, she nods slightly.
Now you may write about me.
There; across the room; so expensively decked out and dressed in a brand new creation by Worth.
Lily removes her lorgnette; she compensates for myopia with superb intuition and even better hearing. She tunes in on the girl’s bizarre accent. Is she American?
Can she be anything but? I tease silently.
They’re an invading force.
Never look the gift force in the mouth.
Lily looks down just in time to avoid bursting into laughter, since she does not blush. Well, let her have her four marriage proposals. Who is that awful woman? The girl’s mother?
“Mrs. Willie Vanderbilt,” whispers Marguerite. “And that’s Consuelo.”
Stop staring! Élizabeth shoots a glance at me.
You stare.
She’s not as pretty as the dressmaker made her out to be.
And I wasn’t staring. I was gawking. Her grandfather died the richest man in the world.
Well please never go to those lengths to please me, Monsieur.
Certainly not. Her mother will piss away sixty-five million before she’s finished.
Sixty-five million! That’s more than my richest cousin is worth. Or so they tell me, anyway. Elisabeth shoots a glance, first at her stepmother, and then at the American heiress. And it’s at that moment that she gets a new idea about how to please Marguerite. I press for details, but she dismisses me. Later, Monsieur, she says, trying to hide the ironic twinkle in her eyes. I am very bored of writing now.
I wonder. What does Élisabeth really think of the tall, gawky American her age whose mother, Alva Vanderbilt, will bill this as Consuelo’s “social début”? That’s before marrying her off and being the first one in their set to divorce a Vanderbilt. The pioneer strain, indeed.
The other side of midnight, I made my report. And as Francesco would write, a hundred years later:
Many years afterwards, looking back on these parties, Élisabeth de Gramont would describe them in acidic tones. The rooms became “foul-smelling furnaces,” the men pinned to the scene like ornithological specimens, the girls being “herded like sheep.”
Élisabeth never really trusted girls her own age with nothing on their minds but landing a husband. She was already beginning to wonder, at eighteen, whether a husband could be anything but a jailer. More or less cruel, perhaps, but a jailer nonetheless. It was unthinkable that the happiness of one being could depend solely on the actions of somebody else. The knowledge that these lovely girls would spend their whole lives brooding, staying up nights waiting for their unfaithful husbands to return home, seemed like a blot on the whole female sex.
© 2004 by Francesco Rapazzini, Élisabeth de Gramont
Trans. © 2013 by Suzanne Stroh
Later that June, as I learned from Fortune’s Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt by Arthur T. Vanderbilt II, “Alva informed her daughter that five men had asked her for Consuelo’s hand, all of whom Alva had refused ‘since she considered none of them sufficiently exalted.’”
“Thank God,” Élisabeth wrote to me. “I was bracing myself but I was prepared to do my duty, even if it meant a lesbian marriage.”
“Oh, you needn’t go to those lengths to please me, Mademoiselle,” was my reply.
April is said to be the cruelest month. And so it was for Renée Vivien in 1909, when, towards the end of the month, the poet Lucie Delarue-Mardrus gave a supper party for Natalie Barney that would change Vivien’s life forever.
And not for the better.
The biography I’m translating, Élisabeth de Gramont by Francesco Rapazzini, has upended everything I thought I knew about that fateful April in Paris 1909. Shortly after Lucie introduced Barney to her childhood friend Lily de Gramont, the (very married) Marquise de Clermont-Tonnerre, they became lovers like two flames leaping together, “free as fire.” Sexual awakening with a soulmate served up an intensity Lily had never known, one Natalie hadn’t tasted herself…since her starcrossed affair with Vivien.
All through that spring and summer, it was a season of wonder and sensuous delight for Lily. For Renée Vivien, not so much. By July, she would be penniless and hanging on to life by a thread, relying on the sole support of Lily’s cousin, Hélène de Rothschild. In November, she would be dead. Of suicide.
Until now, and for more than 50 years since Élisabeth’s own death, key dates of 1909 and their portentious events were unknown to some of the world’s best belles-lettres biographers.
Rewriting the history of the grandes dames by translating French to English: exciting stuff.
My adventures in translating have also led me to one of Vivien’s more sympathetic and sensitive interpreters, the filmmaker Jane Clark, who wrote and directed a sexy short film about Vivien.
For those of you who don’t know the radical poetry or the tragic legend of Renée Vivien, she was born Pauline Tarn in London in 1876. Her mother was an American from my home state of Michigan. Her father inherited a Scottish merchant legacy and died when Renée was a little girl.
Having spent the happiest years of her childhood in France, she endured a traumatic adolescence–some of it under lock and key–dominated by her abusive mother until, at 21, Renée finally inherited the fortune that allowed her to return to Paris and dedicate her life to poetry. She wrote exclusively in French. If that wasn’t radical enough, she dressed like Hamlet. Taking it to the limit, she rejected male-dominated institutions and did her best to retire from society that would never accept her uncompromising feminism. This didn’t do much to discourage her fans, so Vivien resorted to hiring impersonators to stand in at her own poetry readings. She translated Sappho from the famous Greek fragments that had only recently been discovered among the rubbish heaps excavated at Oxyrynchus.
In America, her poetry is as unknown today as Sappho’s was then. In France, she’s a big deal.
In 1899, the virginal Vivien met the worldly Natalie Barney at the theatre. It was a coup de foudre. Vivien knew right away her life would never be the same.
It wasn’t. The lively Barney, already a master of the seductive arts and sciences at 24, was reeling from a scandalous grande passion with the Angelina Jolie of her era, the courtesan Liane de Pougy. Basically, Barney had just been dumped by the world’s most desirable woman. Turns out, Pougy had not wanted to be saved from prostitution after all. Barney wasn’t just heartbroken. She was humiliated.
But where does a young Don Juan go after Angelina Jolie? Such were Barney’s thoughts, clutching the “Dear John” letter while riding through the Bois de Boulogne in her coach, when Renée began to recite one of her poems. Beauty in all its forms would always get Barney’s complete attention. And so it did that day in 1899.
Now she put heart and soul into redirecting what biographer Diana Souhami calls Vivien’s “longing to be dead.” The two young women began their mismatched love affair in dizzying purity with poetry on their lips, kneeling before one another in a room stuffed with blazing candles and overblown lilies. But Barney’s faithless passion had awakened more than puppy love in Vivien, who was already a chloral hydrate addict by that time. I have never seen the edgy, impetuous, dangerous side of Viven’s character portrayed so well as how it is channeled, rather than merely acted, by Traci Dinwiddie in THE TOUCH. Necar Zadegan does a good job with Kérimé Turkhan Pasha, too. Their chemistry is incredible. You can rent the eight-minute film here for a nominal fee on Filmbinder.
Los Angeles-based writer/director Jane Clark is also the producer behind the longest screen kiss in film history. While making gritty, topical films like that one (ELENA UNDONE, dir. Nicole Conn 2010) and METH HEAD, now touring the festival circuit, she seeks out character-driven stories in all genres, including romance. One of my favorite genres, too. Clark predicts it will soon undergo a major resurgence, with possibilities opening up in all directions as younger audiences bring their broadened minds to the movies along with their buying power. Will that mean more (and better!?) period dramas and romances about The Lost Generation and their forebears? I hope so.
I’ll publish my conversation with Jane Clark in the days to come. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy THE TOUCH. It’s a slice of life gone by: a furtive meeting in Paris, a moment of stolen passion that took place between a besotted poet and a beautiful Turkish Vizier’s wife living in seclusion in 1906. (Kérimé’s husband, Turkhan Pasha, formerly Foreign Minister of the Ottoman Empire, had come to Paris in 1899 as head of the Turkish delegation to the Peace Conference that followed the Treaty of Paris.) Jane Clark bases her film on this gorgeous, sexy poem. It out-Beaus Beaudelaire, don’t you think?
The Touch
The trees have kept some lingering sun in their branches,
Veiled like a woman, evoking another time.
The twilight passes, weeping. My fingers climb,
Trembling, provocative, the line of your haunches.
My ingenious fingers wait when they have found
The petal flesh beneath the robe they part.
How curious, complex, the touch, this subtle art—
As the dream of fragrance, the miracle of sound.
I follow slowly the graceful contours of your hips,
The curve of your shoulders, your neck, your unappeased breasts.
In your white voluptuousness my desire rests,
Swooning, refusing itself the kisses of your lips.Renée Vivien
The trees are budding here in Virginia. It’s poetry season for me. Here’s an old one.
In Season
Redbud and cherry blossom.
I feel my sap rising.
In a trance, I’m aware you want me.
In a trice, you put me at arm’s length.
Both are the real you:
flesh and blood,
made of iron.
Enfold me now, for
every blossom fades and falls.