As a young girl growing up as part of one of Indianapolis’s
leading families, Janet Flanner had a path in life already set for her by her
mother, Mary, who wanted her daughter to be what she strived to be—an actress.
Janet balked at her mother’s plans, pointing to her prominent nose as a barrier
to any career on the stage. “I pointed out that with this nose I’d be playing
Juliet’s nurse or Juliet’s nurse’s nurse, and never Juliet,” she later told a
reporter from the International Herald
Tribune. Instead of a life in the theater, Janet aspired to a different
artistic endeavor, that of a writer.
Flanner achieved her ambition, becoming one of the stalwarts
of one of America’s finest magazines, TheNew Yorker. From 1925 until her retirement in 1975, she produced—under the
pen name Genêt—hundreds of thousands of words as the magazine’s Paris
correspondent. In her “Letter from Paris” she sketched profiles for her readers
of such notable figures as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Jean Cocteau, Albert
Camus, and Charles de Gaulle. Her later editor at The New Yorker, William Shawn, described Flanner as “a poet among
journalists.” Flanner, who died at the age of eighty-six in 1978, said of her
long career: “I love writing. I’m just nuts on writing. Just give me an inkpot
and a paper and a pen, and away I go.”
Born on March 13, 1892, Flanner was the second child of Mary
Hockett and Francis Flanner, one of the founders of Indianapolis’s Flanner and
Buchanan Mortuaries and a leader in the community regarding business and
philanthropic ventures. Although at first educated in public schools, Janet
later attended Tudor Hall School for Girls, a private college preparatory
institution. After graduation, she spent time with her family visiting Germany.
Financial pressures and personal problems drove Francis to
commit suicide in 1912. After her father’s death, Janet attended the University
of Chicago, taking several writing classes. “I went there two years,” she
noted. “I was requested to leave. Lawless. They [university officials] did
object to my coming in so often at 3 a.m. I was mad on dancing.” After leaving
the university, she worked for nine months at a reform school in Philadelphia.
In 1916 Flanner returned to her hometown to work on the Indianapolis Star. Under the tutelage of
the newspaper’s drama critic, Frank Tarkington Baker, she broke ground as one
of the country’s first movie critics. “It was an intelligent decision for Frank
Tarkington Baker to treat movies, though newcomers, as important,” Flanner
later told Star reporter Lawrence
“Bo” Connor. Baker assigned her to review the first movie for the paper—Charlie
Chaplin’s The Kid. She wrote three-quarters of a column on the film and was later
delighted when her review was used to promote the movie, a common practice
today. Flanner also turned her writing skills to covering numerous burlesque
shows, but was not allowed to stay by management for the program’s second act.
“That’s where you saw the Jewish and Irish comedians,” Flanner recalled.
“Behind the chorus girls. That’s really the kind of theater I took to innately,
much to my mother’s shock.”
Flanner left Indianapolis shortly after her marriage to
William Rehm, a New York City artist she had known at the University of
Chicago. The marriage lasted only a few years, however, and Flanner later met
Solita Solano, drama editor for the New
York Tribune, in Greenwich Village. The two women became partners, staying
together for approximately fifty years. While in New York Flanner tried to
produce freelance articles for magazines and met and became friends with the
writers and critics that made up the Algonquin Round Table. One of them was
Jane Grant, a strong feminist and the wife of Harold Ross, later one of the
founders of the sophisticated weekly magazine The New Yorker. When Solano went to Greece for an assignment in
1921, Flanner traveled with her and the two eventually settled in Paris. She
quickly made connections with the expatriate literary community of the Left
Bank that included such figures as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra
Pound, and Gertrude Stein.
Flanner’s fascinating life with the members of the Lost
Generation and the culture and people of France were regular features of
letters she wrote to Grant. Impressed by her friend’s writing, Grant urged Ross
to include them as a regular department in his struggling magazine. He agreed;
Flanner’s first “Letter from Paris” appeared in The New Yorker’s October 10, 1925 issue.
For her work, Flanner received, at first, $35 a column, a
“great sum,” she noted, at that time. Ross helped to shape the style of
Flanner’s writing, cautioning her: “I’m not paying you to tell me what you
think. I want to know what the French are thinking.” Every two weeks, Flanner
produced 2,500 words of copy in a conversational style about significant
happenings in French politics and culture under the pseudonym Genêt, a name
selected by Ross that puzzled Flanner for years. “I looked up the French
meanings and found three, none of which mattered,” she said. “Ross never told
me what it meant. Frankly, I think he thought it was a nice French way of
spelling Janet.”
Living most of the time in a room at the Hotel Continental
on the Rue Castigilione, Flanner took her writing seriously, often preparing by
reading eight different newspapers a day and pounding out her copy on an small
Olivetti typewriter. “I work with a conscientious kind of discipline,” she
said. “I work like a beaver, I go over each Letter for clarification, for
mining, for a spot of gold.” Flanner noted she reviewed her work again and
again, going over a sentence several times. “I nag it, gnaw it, pat and flatter
it,” she said. Flanner became a familiar sight on Parisian streets in her
tailored suits, bobbed gray hair, and monocle. “I look rather like an 18th
century judge off the bench,” she observed.
Driven from Paris by the Nazi invasion during World War II,
Flanner returned to the United States, living in New York. She returned to
Paris in 1944, following the advancing U.S. Army as it liberated France. In
addition to continuing to produce her “Letter from Paris,” she also did several
weekly fifteen-minute radio broadcasts for the NBC Blue Network. The work took
its toll on Flanner. “I was down to 99 pounds after those 11 months,” she
noted, but added that she “liked every minute of it.”
Before her death on November 7, 1978, Flanner received
numerous honors for her work. In 1948 the French government made her a knight
of the Légion d’honneur.
She also received an honorary doctorate by Smith College and in 1966 won a
National Book Award for her work Paris Journal: 1944–1965. Asked by a
reporter late in her life how she accomplished all she had done through the
years, Flanner noted that she was not “one of those journalists with a staff. I
don’t even have a secretary. I act as a sponge. I soak it up and squeeze it out
in ink every two weeks.”
1 comment:
Great to read this back issues ...thank you
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