Janet Flanner

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Janet Flanner (March 13, 1892 – November 7, 1978) was an American writer and pioneering narrative journalist^[4] who served as the Paris correspondent of The New Yorker magazine from 1925 until she retired in 1975.^[5] She wrote under the pen name "Genêt".^[6][7] She also published a single novel, The Cubical City, set in New York City.

She was a prominent member of America's expatriate community living in Paris before WWII. Along with her longtime partner Solita Solano, Flanner was called "a defining force in the creative expat scene in Paris".^[8] She returned to New York during the war. Flanner split her time between there and Paris until her death in 1978.

Early life

Janet Flanner was born in

Expatriate in Paris

While in New York, Flanner moved in the circle of the Algonquin Round Table,^[11] but was not a member. She also met the couple Jane Grant and Harold Ross, through painter Neysa McMein. It was based on this connection that Harold Ross offered Flanner the position of French Correspondent to The New Yorker.^[5]

After these early years spent in Pennsylvania and New York in her mid twenties, Flanner left the United States for Paris.

In September 1925 Flanner published her first "Letter from Paris" in The New Yorker, which had been launched the previous February. She would be professionally linked with the magazine for the next five decades. Her columns covered a wide range of topics, including artists, performances, and crime, including a lengthy feature on murderesses

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. This organization fought for women to preserve their maiden names after marriage, in the manner of Lucy Stone. Flanner joined the group in 1921. Ross famously thought Flanner's pen name "Genêt" was French for "Janet".^[14]

Flanner wrote one novel, The Cubical City (1926), which achieved little success.^[6]

Flanner was a prominent member of the American

Her prose style has since come to epitomise the "New Yorker style"—its influence can be seen decades later in the prose of Bruce Chatwin.^[16] 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."

War correspondent

Her New Yorker work during World War II included not only her famous "Letter from Paris" columns, but also included a seminal 3-part series in 1936 profiling

After Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Flanner moved back to New York City,[7] where she lived with Natalia Danesi Murray and her son William Murray. She still wrote for The New Yorker, analyzing radio broadcasts and print reports about life in wartime Paris. She returned to Paris in 1944, contributing a series of weekly radio broadcasts entitled Listen: the Women for the Blue Network during the months following the liberation of Paris in late August 1944.

Flanner covered the Nuremberg trials (1945) for The New Yorker.^[18]

Post-war

She covered the

In 1958, Flanner was awarded an honorary doctorate by Smith College.

In 1966 she won the U.S. National Book Award in the Arts and Letters category for her Paris Journal, 1944–1965.^[19] Extracts of her Paris Journal were adapted as a piece for chorus and orchestra by composer Ned Rorem.

In 1971, she was the third guest during the infamous verbal scuffle between Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer on The Dick Cavett Show. She got between the two men after a drunken Mailer started insulting his fellow guests and their host.^[20][21]

In 2019, Park Tudor School — the coed successor to the Tudor Hall for Girls (Flanner's alma mater) — posthumously awarded her their prestigious "distinguished alumni award".^[22] The school's fine arts department created a speaker series in her name, titled the Janet Flanner Visiting Artist Series.^[23]

Marriage and personal life

In 1918, Flanner married William "Lane" Rehm, a friend she had met while at the University of Chicago. He was working as 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. Rehm was supportive of Flanner's career until his death.

In 1918, the same year she married her husband, she met Solita Solano in Greenwich Village. The two women became lifelong lovers, although both also became involved with other lovers throughout their relationship. Solano was drama editor for the New-York Tribune, and also wrote for National Geographic.

In 1932 Flanner fell in love with

Flanner lived in Paris with Solano, who put away her own literary aspirations to be Flanner's personal secretary. Although their relationship was not monogamous, they lived together for more than 50 years.

Flanner frequently visited Los Angeles, where her mother Mary Flanner lived at 530 East Marigold St. in

In 1975, she returned to New York City permanently to be cared for by Natalia Danesi Murray. Flanner died on November 7, 1978. She was cremated. Her ashes were scattered along with Murray's over Cherry Grove in Fire Island^[28] where the two women had met in 1940, according to William Murray, Danesi Murray's son, in his book Janet, My Mother, and Me (2000).^[29]

In popular culture

• Solita Solano and Flanner are portrayed as "Nip" and "Tuck" in the 1928 novel Ladies Almanack, by Djuna Barnes, a roman à clef about the amorous intrigues of the lesbian network centered in Natalie Clifford Barney's salon in Paris.^[30]
• Flanner is among the journalists cited as inspirations for the 2021 Wes Anderson film The French Dispatch.^[31]
• Flanner is briefly mentioned in Season 1 Episode 4 of Fran Lebowitz' Netflix series Pretend It's a City.
• Flanner was part of the infamous Dick Cavett Show in which writers Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal clashed. She intervened, asking whether they were having a private conversation amongst themselves, while ignoring that there were other people at the show.^[32]

Bibliography

Books

• The Cubical City: A Novel (1926)
• Paris Was Yesterday, 1925–1939, edited by Irving Drutman (1972)
• An American in Paris: Profile of an Interlude Between Two Wars (1940)
• Pétain: The Old Man of France (1944)
• London Was Yesterday, 1939–1945, edited by Irving Drutman (1975)
• Men & Monuments: Profiles of Picasso, Matisse, Braque, & Malraux (1957)
• Paris Journal, 1944–1965, edited by William Shawn (1965)
  • Later published separately as Paris Journal, 1944–1955 and Paris Journal, 1956–1964
• Paris Journal, 1965–1970, edited by William Shawn (1971)
• Janet Flanner's World: New and Uncollected Pieces, 1932–1975, edited by Irving Drutman (1979)
• Darlinghissima: Letters to a Friend, edited by Natalia Danesi Murray (1986)
• Conversation Pieces, an autobiographical book by illustrator Constantin Alajalov with text and commentary by Flanner (1942)
• Paris est une guerre : 1940-1945, translated from English by Hélène Cohen, foreword by Michèle Fitoussi Editions du sous-sol, 2020. (New Yorker columns, in French)^[33][7]

'Letter from ...' in The New Yorker

References