The One Who Is Legion

by Natalie Clifford Barney

The story centers on a suicide known as A.D., who comes back to life as an intersex person to read the journals of their past life, written in the epigrammatic poetic style of Barney's earlier work in French. Envisioning an ideal existence unlimited by the restrictions of gender, this utopian vision of quasi-lesbian existence was a central inspiration for one-time lover and friend, Djuna Barnes, in the writing of Nightwood. The work was praised by her coterie, but publisher Eric Partidge found the book so bewildering that he convinced Barney to write a short afterward with a plot summary and descriptive list of characters. Illustrated by two black and white plates by American artist Romaine Brooks, Barney's lifelong partner.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Queer, Literature, Lesbian

178 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1930

About the author

Natalie Clifford Barney (31 October 1876 – 2 February 1972) was an American expatriate who lived, wrote and hosted a literary salon in Paris. She was a noted poet, memoirist and epigrammatist.

Barney's salon was held at her home on Paris's Left Bank for more than 60 years and brought together writers and artists from around the world, including many leading figures in French literature along with American and British Modernists of the Lost Generation. She worked to promote writing by women and formed a "Women's Academy" in response to the all-male French Academy while also giving support and inspiration to male writers from Remy de Gourmont to Truman Capote.

She was openly lesbian and began publishing love poems to women under her own name as early as 1900, considering scandal as "the best way of getting rid of nuisances". In her writings she supported feminism, paganism and pacifism. She opposed monogamy and had many overlapping, long and short-term relationships, including an on-and-off romance with poet Renée Vivien and a 50-year relationship with painter Romaine Brooks. Her life and love affairs served as inspiration for many novels, ranging from the salacious French bestseller Sapphic Idyll to The Well of Loneliness, arguably the most famous lesbian novel of the 20th century.[3]

Reviews

[BJ Lillis · Rating 5 out of 5]

The One Who is Legion begins with an epigraph from Paradise Lost: “For Spirits when they please / Can either sex assume, or both; so soft / And uncompounded is their essence pure...” It ends with a dramatis personae:

A.D. Self-destructive. A lover.
The One. A.D.’s angel come to live in A.D.’s stead
The Glow-woman. A Beauty of the flesh that we have only met in the flesh.
Stella. A beauty of the spirit that we have met in many ways, and loved and lost, and loved and found again in loving.
Duthiers. A third person in all situations.
The Boy-husband who only exists through others.
A Shadow without a Master.
A.D.’s Horse.
The Legion. Low characters, spirits—a hierarchy of selves.
Time. Beyond time.

Between sits an absolutely ridiculous, miraculous, possibly quite bad or maybe quite good book.

Natalie Clifford Barney—poet, heiress, expat, lesbian icon—was the guiding light (and infamous heartbreaker) of a flourishing lesbian literary-sexual subculture in early-20th-century Paris. Poly before poly (ethical non-monogamist with a big fat question mark next to the “ethical”), she appears—fictionalized to various degrees—in a truly extraordinary number of early lesbian novels: the scorned-worshiped heroine of Renée Vivien’s A Woman Appeared to Me (1904); wise gay mentor—sort of, anyway—in The Well of Loneliness (1928), subject-lover-center of Liane de Pougy’s Idylle saphique (1901) and Lucie Delarue-Mardrus’s The Angel and the Perverts (1930). Spectacularly out, for Barney (as wikipedia wonderfully quotes), “scandal was the best way of getting rid of nuisances” (i.e., straight men).

The One Who Is Legion would be interesting enough just for having been written by Natalie Clifford Barney circa 1930; fortunately, it is fascinating on its own merits, too. I underlined countless lines:

“Experience is a loan by which we are revealed” (29).
“Some flesh may be predestined to scars, as the best of fruit to a silver knife” (41).
“Tea at best is a scent we may drink. / Toast-eating—a rumbling over cobble-stones” (45).
“Though all are born, few are living” (47).
“In love, as in other governments, the great unemployed make for revolution” (53).
“She was so obviously beautiful and to the general taste that we felt ashamed of sharing in so collective a choice” (66).
“She seemed so glowing, so on fire, that we were surprised not to hear her body singe and sizzle as it met the water” (76).
“What a limited intimacy not to know how she is with other lovers” (88).
“What books produced you? might be asked as conclusively as—Who are your parents?” (94).
“I make you promises more alarming than any betrayal” (112).
“There is a love that would lead us out of all limits, as surely as there is a love that would destroy us in them” (155).

Beyond these small brilliances—or buried within them—a rather quotidian plot—a love-pentacle of three women and two men—a series of shallow dalliances—the faint but unmistakable scent of misogyny, not internalized, but simply felt or adopted—a discomfiting half-expressed scorn for the actual separate existence of the beautiful woman as object-of-desire.

[Ada · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Natalie so much, and after literally relearning French to read more of her books I discovered, 6 months ago or so, that a novel originally written in English by her existed. The only problem was that said novel seemed impossible to find. No copies available online, no one had ever heard of it in real life… thankfully I study in London, so I registered at the British Library where they have a 1930 copy.
IT WAS SO WORTH IT. This book is incredible, from the plot to the way its written… even the literary devices Natalie used (like the first parts being narrated instead of with the singular “I” with a “we”) are just amazing.
I had to write down half of it because so many sentences were just beautiful.
I wish I could own a copy of this book… I would keep it on my bedside table, just to have some more of Natalie close to me.
I love her so much, and after having read Women Lovers, correspondance amoureuse, éparpillements, her biography by Suzanne Rodriguez and now this I can’t help but be fascinated with her personality.
I don’t even care if I seem exaggerated right now. I am so glad that I eventually managed to find this book, it will forever hold a special place in my heart!

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Objects, women, skin, et cetera are constantly being described as shimmering and that seems like the most apt way to describe the novel itself. I’m very glad that there’s finally (finally!) a more accessible printing of this.

[Edward Lorusso · Rating 5 out of 5]

Only 300 copies of this novel were privately printed in 1930. When I was studying at Oxford University, I discovered a copy in the Bodleian Library and had it copied. When I returned to the US, I showed the copied text to Carroll F. Terrell at the University of Maine and we went ahead and published it in 1987 thru his National Poetry Foundation (NPF). The original text contained two illustrations by Romaine Brooks, one of which was used for the cover design. To my knowledge this NPF edition has long been out of print.