What’s in a Name?: Renée Vivien
If you’re born as Pauline Mary Tarn in London in 1877, even to wealthy parents, evidently life wouldn’t hold much promise in the way of avant-garde excitement. But if, around age 21, you decide your name is Renée Vivien and you take that name with you to Paris, well, life holds the promise of excitement, indeed.
René Vivien née Tarn’s taste for French life began when she was quite young. As a child she attended school in Paris. In 1886, when Pauline was age nine, her father died and she returned to London, where her father’s will stipulated that his considerable fortune be left entirely to his daughter.
Her mother, an American from Michigan, was clearly a greedy sort and tried to have her heiress offspring declared legally insane so that momma would inherit her deceased husband’s entire fortune. The ploy failed, the Tarn fortune was placed in trust for Pauline, and at her maturity she claimed her inheritance.
With this vast sum of cash at her disposal, the heiress Pauline Mary Tarn, who now called herself Renée Vivien, hightailed it back to Paris…and into the arms of glamorous, high-living lesbian Natalie Clifford Barney.
We’ll return to that breathtaking relationship in a moment, because Barney wasn’t the first of Vivien’s female attachments. After her return to London upon her father’s death, the little girl Pauline Tarn formed a deep and lasting friendship, indeed a loving though later an unconsummated friendship, with a neighborhood little girl, Violet Shillito. This emotional attachment for each other, even after Tarn became Renée Vivien, remained at Vivien’s emotional core.
But back to Paris and the high life with Natalie Barney. Barney, a wealthy American, was a central figure in the swirl of Parisian lesbian and cultural life. Her affairs were many, her salons attracted the cream of the Paris artistic and theatrical life, and her poetry, stories, and plays were often the talk of the town.
The young, beautiful, and free-spirited Renée Vivien fit right into Barney’s bohemian milieu, often adopting styles and manners as much male as female. Her relationship with Barney was a wild one—tempestuous, full of passion and extremes of emotion. Their one-year affair fell apart in 1901 when Vivien could no longer handle Barney’s ongoing infidelities. Vivien chose to remain in Paris when Barney made a trip to America. The affair was officially over. For the next few years, though, even after Barney’s return to Paris and until Vivien’s untimely death in 1909, Barney made ongoing attempts to win Vivien back, all to no avail.
Vivien’s next important and long-term relationship, beginning in 1902 and lasting five years, was another spectacular affair, this time with Baroness Hélène de Zuylen. Hélène was not only a baroness, but a Rothschild. The amount of wealth at her disposal was incalculable, and together with Vivien’s less impressive but still substantial fortune, the couple were able to indulge their love…but discreetly.
As a noblewoman and a member of one of Europe’s most important families, the baroness was not at liberty to flaunt her affairs. Though she was married with two children, she was able to travel widely and often with Vivien, as was sometimes a custom for women, lesbian or not. As long as they were discreet in public, their affair was tolerated, and indeed even unnoticed. The relationship ended in 1907 when the baroness took up with another woman.
While all this romance was going on (there was Vivien’s extraordinary affair with Kérimé Turkhan Pasha, the wife of a Turkish diplomat, for example, while still involved with the baroness), Vivien developed into a poet of considerable talent. She began in the style of the Parnassiens, a literary movement in reaction to the moodiness of the Romantic poets of the middle and late nineteenth century. She eventually found her sensually Sapphic voice in the philosophy and poetry of the Symbolists, who rejected realism and naturalism in favor of metaphor and symbolic language to expose what they saw as the truth of existence.
It was through her Symbolist poetry that Vivien was able to express what several literary scholars believe was her deep and ongoing pain over leaving her first love, Violet Shillito, for the lure of Paris, and then Violet’s all-too-soon death from typhoid fever in 1901, the same year that Vivien’s affair with Natalie Barney came to a crashing end. In various poems, Vivien references flowers, or even the word violet, either in the title or as reference to the color or to the flowers. Perhaps her most famous poem in this vein is 1903’s “A Crown of Violets,” in which she wrote:
And I had the terrible audacity to yearn
For sister-love, of bright white, pure light,
The gentle voice uniting with the night,
The furtive step that doesn’t break the fern.
Vivien’s body of poetry is saturated with Sapphic desire, a desire she allowed herself to experience in all its forms and fashions. Her free spirit, though, did not shield her from the tragedies of life. Her final years were spent in a chaos of emotional turmoil, exacerbated by alcohol and drugs. Fetishes came and went, days-long sexual adventures rendered her sleepless and erratic, and eventually a deep depression manifested itself as a refusal to eat enough to maintain physical health. All of this finally led to her death in 1909 at the heartbreakingly young age of 32.
Renée Vivien is buried in Passy Cemetery in Paris. ▼
Ann Aptaker is the author of short stories and the Lambda & Goldie award winning Cantor Gold series. Her latest book, A Crime of Secrets, was released July 4, 2023.