Janet Flanner
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Janet Flanner (March 13, 1892 - November 7, 1978) was an American writer and journalist who served as the Paris correspondent of The New Yorker magazine from 1925 until she retired in 1975 [1]. She also published a single novel, The Cubical City, set in New York City.
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[edit] Early life
Flanner was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, daughter of Frank and Mary Flanner. After a period spent traveling abroad with her family, she enrolled in the University of Chicago in 1912, graduating in 1914. Two years later, she returned to her native city to take up a post as the first cinema critic on the local paper, the Indianapolis Star.
In 1918 she married William Lane Rehm, a friend that she had made while at the University of Chicago. He was an artist in New York City, and she later admitted that she married him to get out of Indianapolis. The marriage lasted for only a few years and they divorced amicably in 1926.
Flanner was a lifelong bisexual. In 1918, the same year she married her husband, Flanner met Solita Solano (Sarah Wilkinson). They met in Greenwich Village, and the two became lifelong lovers, although both became involved with other lovers throughout their relationship. Solita Solano was drama editor for the New York Tribune and also wrote for the National Geographic magazine. The two women are portrayed as "Nip" and "Tuck" in the 1928 novel Ladies Almanack, by Djuna Barnes, who was a friend of Flanner's. While in New York, Janet Flanner moved in the circle of the Algonquin Round Table, but was not a member. She also met the couple Jane Grant and Harold Ross through painter Neysa McMein. [2]
After periods in Pennsylvania and New York, in her mid twenties, Flanner left the United States for Paris, quickly becoming part of the group of American writers and artists who lived in the city between World War I and World War II.
[edit] Paris
As Paris correspondent for the New Yorker during the 1920s and 1930s, under the pen-name "Genêt", she was a prominent member of the American expatriate community which included Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, Hart Crane, Djuna Barnes, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein - the world of the Lost Generation and Les Deux Magots. While in Paris she became very close friends with Gertrude Stein and her lesbian lover Alice B. Toklas. In 1932 she fell in love with Noel Haskins Murphy who was a singer from a village just outside Paris, and had a short-lived romance. This did not affect her relationship with Solano. [3]
She played a crucial role in introducing her contempories - or at least those who read the New Yorker - to contemporary developments in Paris, including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, André Gide, Jean Cocteau, and the Ballets Russes, as well as crime passionel and vernissage, the triumphant crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by Charles Lindbergh and the depravities of the Stavisky Affair.
In September 1925 Flanner published her first "Letter from Paris" in The New Yorker, launched the previous February, launching a professional association destined to last for five decades. Flanner had first come to the attention of editor Harold Ross through his first wife, Jane Grant, who was a friend of Flanner's from the Lucy Stone League. Flanner was among the first to join the group in 1921. The Lucy Stone League was an organization that fought for women to preserve their maiden names after marriage. Ross famously thought "Genêt" was French for "Janet".[4]
Her prose style was as influential as her insights, a combination of wit, grace, and fluency which has since come to epitomise the "New Yorker style" - its influence can be seen decades later in the prose of Bruce Chatwin. An example: "The late Jean De Koven was an average American tourist in Paris but for two exceptions: she never set foot in the Opéra, and she was murdered."
She was a frequent visitor to Los Angeles because her mother, Mary, lived at 530 E. Marigold St. in Altadena with her sister, poet Hildegarde Flanner, and brother-in-law, Frederick Monhoff.
[edit] Later life
She lived in New York City during war years of World War II with Natalia Danesi Murray and her son William B. Murray; still writing for The New Yorker. She went back to Paris in 1944 and continued her "Letters" until finally returning to New York City in 1975 when her failing health needed extra care. In 1948 she was made a knight of Legion d'Honneur.
Her work during World War II included not only her famous "Letter from Paris" (disrupted for a period) and seminal pieces on Hitler's rise (1936) and the Nuremberg trials (1945), but a series of little-known weekly radio broadcasts for the NBC Blue Network during the months following the liberation of Paris in late 1944.
In 1958 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by Smith College. She covered the Suez crisis, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and the strife in Algeria which led to the rise of Charles de Gaulle. She was a leading member of the influential coterie of mostly lesbian women that included Natalie Clifford Barney and Djuna Barnes. She was friends with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas as well as Ernest Hemingway. She lived in Paris with her longtime companion Solita Solano who put away her own literary aspirations to be Janet's personal secretary. Even though the relationship was not monogamous, they lived together for over 50 years.
Extracts of her Paris Journal were turned into a piece for chorus and orchestra by the composer Ned Rorem. In 1975 she returned to New York City to be cared for by Natalia Danesi Murray. Solita Solano died in 1975, aged 87, and Janet died in 1978.
Flanner was cremated and her ashes were scattered with Murphy's over Cherry Grove in Fire Island where they met in 1940 according to Murphy's son in his book entitled Janet, My Mother, and Me. Flanner maintained three relationships with women including Solano in Paris, Murphy in Orgeval, France where she and Solano spent many weekends. At first, Murphy and Solano did not get along but somehow Solano died in Orgeval only one month after Flanner left Paris for New York. Both Murphy and Solano were too ill themselves to care for Flanner so Murray was younger and willing to take care of her. The tragic part of Flanner's life was that there was always three women battling for her affections.
[edit] References
- ^ Yagoda, Ben About Town: The New Yorker and the World it Made, Scribner (New York): 2000, pg. 76
- ^ Yagoda, Ben About Town: The New Yorker and the World it Made, Scribner (New York): 2000, pg. 76
- ^ http://myweb.lsbu.ac.uk/~stafflag/janetflanner.html
- ^ Yagoda, Ben About Town: The New Yorker and the World it Made, Scribner (New York): 2000, pg. 77
