Her heart was gay but never young
Gabriele Annan
DARLINGHISSIMA by Janet Flanner
Unwin Hyman, £9.95, pp.508
Janet Flanner was a Paris American of the Twenties generation that hung out in Les Dewc Magots. From 1925 until 1975 she wrote a fortnightly 'Letter from Paris' for the New Yorker, and sometimes letters from London, Rome, Bonn, and other European capitals. She also wrote profiles. A lot of these pieces have been collected in book form. Signed Genet, they are splen- did examples of higher journalism. They were a great trouble to write: the Darling- hissima correspondence resounds with groans about the effort of getting them together.
The effort was worthwhile. Flanner took a commonsense stand on most issues; she had a good eye (`Stravinsky himself did almost a dance, a ,sort of easy-toed, bear- like gallop off stage'); and her public writing is dashing, expressive, witty, and neat. These private letters are only occa- sionally so. Often frazzled and weary, they disclose a loving nature together with a melancholy sense of having 'been born old . . , an old grey bird'; and a most appealing professional diffidence: 'I haven't the wis- dom to know the real truth about anything, and my half-minded, half-hearted sorties into facts, and then my insolently sure- sounding reports on them are beginning to terrify me.' Diffidence did not stop her from minding terribly about editorial cuts, changes, and mistakes. She wouldn't have liked the present editors making het mix up Louis XIV and XV — a thing that could never have happened to her.
You feel she was a good woman, high- minded if sometimes a bit cantankerous. She wrote from a moral position and promoted the values she believed in. 'I am in love with democracy', she trumpets to Darlinghissima. She resented class distinc- tion: 'the snobbery of the uterus [meaning: pushing people out into one class or another] is so cruel', she wrote, though she wasn't (who is?) completely immune to snobbery, in her case about the Paris beau monde. But she was also perspicacious about the peculiar lack of rapport between the classes in France, and its effect on politics. After democracy came rationalism (she was a lapsed Quaker from Indianapolis). Her other values were mainly antagonisms: she was anti-war, anti-clerical, anti-royal, anti-communist, anti-McCarthyite. At the end of the war she was vindictively anti- German. 'Germany is like a big male that has been finally knocked down, his ugly face bleeding until he whines', she wrote from Wiesbaden in April 1945 — perhaps inadvertently springing the trap on another bete noire: men. She did not care for them much, holding their bloodlust and ruthless ambition responsible for war and other evils. If only women could hold them in check, the world would be a better place.
Darlinghissima is, among other things, a coming out book. Not for Flanner; she is dead: but for Darlinghissima herself. It is Natalia Danesi Murray's declaration that she was Flanner's lover from 1940 until her death in 1978, although they lived under one roof only for the last three years. Mrs Murray's career kept her either in Rome (she was Italian by birth) or in New York. Had they not been apart, there could have been no letters. Mrs Murray has edited them and prefaced each chronological sec- tion with a commentary that tells one rather more than one needs about herself and not enough about the names that crop up.
The one that does most frequently is de Gaulle's. Flanner's changing attitudes to the General constitute a mini-drama of reluctance overcome, resumed, overcome once more – a political Pride and Pre- judice. In 1946, Flanner wrote that by departing de Gaulle 'really abandoned la belle France the way a man leaves a woman and with damned little in the house to eat and no money either'; by 1965 he had become 'the obelisk of Paris on the Concorde, a city that has only one, not dozens as yours in Rome'. When he resigned in 1969 she was stunned: 'Well, he saved France once or twice, but chose not to save himself.' In 1972 she wrote with disgust of the souvenir shops in Colombey- les-deux–Eglises: 'just what de Gaulle did NOT want to happen here. In his wisdom and cynicism he seemed to have feared it in advance.' Wisdom and cynicism would be words of high praise from the 80-year-old Flanner.
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