Women in Love

WILD GIRLS

Paris, Sappho and Art: The Lives and Loves of

Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks

By Diana Souhami

St. Martin's. 224 pp. $29.95

When she was 20, Natalie Clifford Barney had an affair with the principal model for James McNeill Whistler's course in oil painting at the Acadmie Carmen in Paris. "I have a lover," wrote the unblushing Miss Barney of her lesbian liaison. "There are women whose black eyes sparkle with energy. They make me feel irredeemably blonde." Irredeemably blonde she was -- also beautiful, rich, American, blithely uncloseted and heedless of polite convention. She rode bareback and astride in the Bois de Boulogne, rolled about on polar bear rugs with the courtesan Liane de Pougy, and got engaged to, and then unengaged from, the nephew of the painter Mary Cassatt -- behavior that earned the outrage of her stuffy father, Albert. Natalie cared not a fig: "You must understand how petty, how ugly our whole upbringing was. . . . Seeing all this made me lose faith in you -- respect for you. I no longer felt myself your daughter."

Fortunately the bonds of wealth proved more durable than those of affection; when Albert Barney died, he left his rebellious daughter a considerable fortune, with which she proceeded to live exactly as she pleased. This meant having a series of ravishing houses where friends such as the dancer Ida Rubenstein, Dolly Wilde (niece of Oscar), the writers Djuna Barnes, Colette and Gertrude Stein, the Italian poet and proto-fascist Gabriele d'Annunzio, the bookseller Sylvia Beach and others too modernist to mention could explore the newest ideas in literature, art and music. It also meant enjoying as many love affairs as she chose.

As Diana Souhami, the author of the Whitbread Award-winning Selkirk's Island , tells it in the aptly titled Wild Girls , love was Natalie Barney's raison d'etre. There were affairs with Liane de Pougy; with the anorexic Rene Vivien, who "subsisted on spoonfuls of rice, a little fruit, and quantities of alcohol and ether" and lived in a crepuscular, airless house with her pet frogs and a serpent she would twist around her wrist; with the memoirist Lily de Gramont, the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre, who was descended from Henri IV but whose left-wing views earned her the soubriquet "the Red Duchess"; with the chaotic and beautiful Dolly Wilde, "who snorted cocaine and kept a hypodermic in her bag to shoot up heroin intravenously"; and with numerous others ("her demi-liaisons and adventures were many," writes Souhami.)

Such escapades have a theatricality today's wild girls can only dream about: Barney dressing up as Oscar Wilde's Happy Prince in a pearl-encrusted costume to lay siege to de Pougy; Barney engaging an opera singer to masquerade as a busker and serenade Rene Vivien with an aria from Gluck's "Orfeo ed Euridice" -- "I have lost Euridice, there is no pain like mine"; Lily de Gramont's husband locking her in his 18th-century chateau, from which she escaped to Paris and Barney. And the air of gossipy baroquerie is only heightened by the delicious explanatory footnotes, like muttered asides, that Souhami has appended to her text. "Mary Livingstone King," reads one, "the third wife of Henry Cyril Paget, 4th Marquess of Anglesey. She lived at Versailles and had a large collection of porcelain." Or "Luisa Casati (1881-1957), dubbed the patron saint of exhibitionists. . . . She died in London and is buried with her stuffed Pekinese dog in Brompton Cemetery."

Despite the high-camp delight afforded by accounts of parties at which "Mata Hari emerged from the bushes naked, except for a tinsel crown" or the more poignant pleasures of cameos like that of the invalid journalist Rmy de Gourmont, who expressed his unconsummated passion for Barney in his fortnightly Lettres l'Amazone in the literary journal Le Mercure de France, Wild Girls might be no more substantial than a souffl if it weren't for the presence of the book's second subject, the gloomy portraitist Romaine Brooks, who enters the book about a third of the way through. Brooks became Barney's lover in 1915 and remained close to her heart, if not to her person (they lived together for only six months during World War II) until Brooks's death in 1970. The product of a hellish home life -- an absent father, an abusive, controlling mother (scion of a wealthy Main Line family, who abandoned her for a time to the care of an Irish washerwoman) and a schizophrenic brother who was the mother's darling -- Brooks escaped from this high-society Grand Guignol into painting. But the ordeal of her childhood had left her with a kind of free-floating depression that kept her solitary and aloof, even when she was with the perennially sunny and generous "Nat Nat," who called her Angel, looked after her comfort and ignored the barbs that the scornful Brooks hurled at Barney's constellation of Parisian culturati.

Brooks's own story comes perilously close to melodrama: the troubled childhood, a seduction by her brother's doctor, the birth and death of an illegitimate daughter, a miserable marriage to a homosexual translator who hoped to live on her money, a brief co-habitation with Gabriele d'Annunzio, "who fantasized about sex with lesbians and courted rejection," and ultimate self-immolation, blind and tottery, in a villa in the hills above Florence. The only real sunlight in her life came from Barney, who, despite her dalliances with others, always loved her and cared for her, giving up her beloved Paris during World War II to stand by her Angel in Italy, where during air raids the 64-year-old Amazone "crouched at night in the trench in the garden in her fur coat, covered with stones and mud." Barney's devotion to this unresponsive figure and Brooks's inability to return Barney's love in anything like the form it was vouchsafed to her give a dimension of real tenderness and pathos to this dual biography. Coupled with Souhami's narrative brio and her ability to paint miniature portraits with only a few telling details, it makes Wild Girls not only entertaining but affecting reading -- marred only by the author's unfortunate interpolations, in italicized passages, of vignettes from her own life that can only be characterized as Too Much Information. In an introductory note, Souhami compares them to the annoying pop-ups that bedevil anyone foraging for facts on the Internet. Does she not realize that most Web surfers prefer their browsers equipped with pop-up-blocking software? For my part, I could have done without her own final musings, so that Barney's valediction would be the book's last word: "What have you loved best? -- Loving. And what if you had many choices? I would choose love many times."

Amanda Vaill is the author of "Everybody Was So Young: Sara and Gerald Murphy -- A Lost Generation Love Story." She is completing a biography of the choreographer-director Jerome Robbins entitled "Somewhere."