Renée Vivien, born as Pauline Tarn (1877-November 10, 1909) was an American poet who wrote in the French language. She took to heart all the mannerisms of Symbolism, and was one of the last poets to claim allegiance to the school. She wrote verse and prose poetry.

She was born in London, England to a Scottish father and an American mother from Jackson, MI. She and grew up on Long Island, New York, in Paris and in London; she emigrated to France at an early age. Her dress and lifestyle were as notorious among the bohemian set as her verse was; she lived lavishly, was openly lesbian, and carried on a well known affair with heiress, actress and writer Natalie Clifford Barney. She also carried on a lifelong obsession for her close childhood friend and neighbor Violet Shillito – a relationship that remained unconsummated.

Vivien was cultivated, and well traveled. She had wintered in Egypt, visited China and explored Europe and America. Her contemporaries considered her to be beautiful and elegant, with blonde hair, and brown eyes flecked with gold. Self-Starvation, a factor which contributed to her death, had also made her relatively thin.

She lived lavishly in Paris in a luxurious first floor apartment that opened onto a Japanese garden. Her home was filled with furniture and artworks from the Far East. She also had a love of fresh flowers.

Renee Vivien romanticized death and while visiting London in 1908, deeply despondent and ruinously in debt, she attempted to kill herself by drinking an excess of Laudanum. She stretched out on her divan with a bouquet of violets held over her heart. The suicide failed, but while in England, she contracted pleurisy, and upon her return to Paris, she was considerably weakened and walked with a cane.

She died on November 10, 1909 at the age of 31, of pleurisy, and a body weakened from self-starvation; her death was reported at the time as a suicide, but was possibly the result of anorexia nervosa complicated by pleurisy and alcoholism. Curiously, the poet Arthur Rimbaud died on this same date in 1891.

During her brief life, Renee Vivien was a prolific poet known also as the “Muse of Violets”. The name is derived for her love of the flower, they being a reminder of her childhood love Violet Shillito.

Much of her verse is veiled autobiography written in the French language, and most of it has never been translated into English. Her principal published books of verse are Cendres et Poussières (1902), La Vénus des aveugles (1903), A l'heure des mains jointes (1906), Flambeaux éteints (1907), Sillages (1908), Poèmes en Prose (1909), Dans un coin de violettes (1909), and Haillons (1910).

Her poetry gained a greater acceptance, as did the works of Natalie Clifford Barney due to the contemporary rediscovery of the works of Sappho, the ancient Greek poetess; also a lesbian.

Quotation

Voici la nuit: je vais ensevelir mes morts,

Mes songes, mes désirs, mes douleurs, mes remords,

Tout le passé... Je vais ensevelir mes morts.

---Let the Dead Bury Their Dead

You for whom I wrote, O beautiful young women!

You alone whom I loved, will you reread my verse...?

Will you say, 'This woman had the ardor which eludes me ..

Why is she not alive? She would have loved me ....'

Everywhere I go I repeat: I do no belong here.

Who will bring me hemlock in their own hands?

Words To My Friend

Understand me: I am a mediocre being,

Not good, not very bad, peaceful, a bit cunning.

I detest heavy perfume and shrill voices,

And gray is more dear to me than scarlet or ocher.

I love this dying day which grows dim by degrees,

A fire, the cloistered intimacy of a room

Where the lamps, veiling their amber transparencies,

Redden the antique bronze and turn the gray stoneware blue.

My eyes drop to the carpet smoother than sand,

Indolently, I evoke rivers flecked with gold

Where the clarity of the beautiful past still floats...

And nevertheless, I am quite guilty.

You see: I am at the age when a maiden gives her hand

To the man whom her weakness searches and dreads,

And I have not chosen a companion for the road,

Because you appeared at that turn in the road.

The hyacinth was bleeding on the red hills,

You were dreaming and Eros walked at your side...

I am woman, I have no right to beauty.

I had been condemned to masculine ugliness.

And I had the inexcusable audacity of wanting

Sisterly love fashioned with soft whiteness,

The furtive step that didn't trample the fern

And the sweet voice that comes to ally itself with evening.

They have forbidden me your hair, the look in your eyes,

It seems that your hair is long and full of odors

And it seems your eyes reveal strange longings

And grow agitated like rebellious waves.

They have pointed at me with irritated gestures,

Because my eyes searched out your tender look...

And seeing us go by, no one wanted to understand

That I had simply chosen you.

Consider the vile law that I transgress

And judge my love that knows nothing of evil,

As candid, as necessary and fatal

As the desire that joins lover to mistress.

They didn't read in my eyes how clearly I saw

The road where my destiny leads me,

And they have said, "Who is this damned woman

Who gnaws blindly at the flames of hell?"

Leave them to the concern of their impure morality,

And let us imagine that dawn has the blondness of honey,

That days without spite and nights without malice

Come, such as lovers whose goodness reassures...

We will go to see the clear stars on the mountains...

What matters to us, the judgment of men?

And what have we to doubt, since we are

Pure before life and since we love one another?...

from At The Sweet Hour of Hand In Hand, trans. Sandia Belgrade, 1979

Sources

Renee Vivien, The Muse of the Violets: Poems by Renee Vivien, translated by Margaret Porter and Catherine Kroger (Tallahassee, Florida: Naiad Press, 1982) <p>

Renee Vivien, A Woman Appeared to me, translated by Jeannette Foster (1904, Reno, Nevada: Naiad Press, 1974) <p>

Vivien, Renee. At the Sweet Hour of Hand in Hand: translated from the French with an introd. by Sandia Belgrade ; foreword by editor and collaborator Bonnie Poucel, The Naiad Press, 1979 <p>

Vivien, Renee. Woman of the Wolf and Other Stories. Translated by Karla Jay and Yvonne M. Klien. Introduction by Jay. Gay Press of New York; December 1983. <p>

Natalie Clifford Barney, Adventures of the Mind (New York: New York University Press, 1992) <p>

Colette, The Pure and the Impure (New York: Farrar Straus, 1967) <p>

Jean-Paul Goujon, Tes Blessures sont plus douces queleurs Caresses: Vie de Renee Vivien (Paris: Cres, 1917) <p>

Andre Germain, Renee Vivien (Paris: Regine Desforges, 1986) <p>

Karla Jay, The Amazon and the Page: Natalie Clifford Barney and Renee Vivien (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988) <p>

Paul Lorenz, Sapho, 1900: Renee Vivien (Paris: Julliard, 1977) <p>

Vivien, Renee, Irina Ionesco "Femmes Sans Tain " Paris: Bernard et Tu et Secile, 1975. Collection of gothic poetry and portraits, introduction by Renee Vivien, all text in French.

External link

• Poems by Renée Vivien (in French): http://poesie.webnet.fr/auteurs/vivien.html

• Renee Vivien ou le drame de l'absolu (in French): http://perso.wanadoo.fr/laureline/renee_vivienl.htm

• Renee Vivien web page (in French): http://Vivien1900.com

• Renee Vivien web page (in English translation) at Sappho.com: http://www.sappho.com/poetry/r_vivien.html

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Categories: 1877 births | 1909 deaths | French-language poets | Lesbian writers