JANET FLANNER (1892-1978)
BY LISA FEATHERSON

Throughout a lifetime of writing for The New Yorker, gallivanting around Europe as an author and serving as a WW II correspondent, Janet Flanner lived with one part of herself in the public eye and the other hiding her true identity. Having spent all of her years in the closet (even though they were perhaps fabulous French closets), Flanner is now finally admired as an early lesbian figure.

Growing up in Indiana, Flanner had an early distaste for conservative morality and conventional living. As a means to escape her Midwestern boredom, Flanner, in 1918 at the age of 26, married William Lane Rehm, a New York artist she had met at the University of Chicago. By this time, after working as a drama and art critic for the Indianapolis Star, Flanner had carved out a great reputation as a journalist.

Flanner and Rehm moved to New York, settling in Greenwich Village. Flanner immediately began to associate almost exclusively with the bohemian crowd of the Village. According to Brenda Wineapple, in her Genêt: A Biography of Janet Flanner, it was in the Village where Flanner felt most like herself. It was there she got her inspiration; it was there she found her equals, and it was there she eventually found the love of her life, Solita Solano (née Sarah Wilkinson, Troy, NY, 1903).

Flanner’s years in the Village produced her only novel, The Cubical City (1926). It was during her schmoozing with the art crowd in New York City and her association with Jane Grant from the Lucy Stone League (an organization that fought for women to preserve their maiden names after marriage) that she met Harold Ross who eventually would offer her the writer’s dream—to mark her legacy on the pages of his new magazine,The New Yorker.

Despite her love for New York, the city became increasingly restrictive after she became involved with Solano. Wineapple notes that the conservatism still hovering over New York was the reason Flanner yet again felt shackled. Despite the conservative times, Flanner and Solano were portrayed as “Nip” and “Tuck”, a pair of plucky journalists in Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanac (1928). The opportunity to leave the city, however, arose when Solano, an actress and writer, was offered a job traveling and writing for National Geographic magazine.

The women eventually settled in Paris on the Left Bank, known as the home of free minded and spirited writers, painters, and musicians. Shan Benstock’s Women on the Left Bank depicts Flanner associating with Ernest Hemmingway, Pablo Picasso, and W.G. Rogers. Flanner and Solano were regulars at all the then prevalent salons, including the huge lesbian salon hosted by Natalie Clifford Barney and the Gertrude Stein salon. Gertrude Stein and her “wife” Alice B. Toklas became two of their closest friends. Indeed after Stein’s death, Flanner and Doda Conrad were the primary caretakers of Toklas in the last years of her life.

Flanner’s life in Paris produced “Letter from Paris” for The New Yorker. These letters, which grew out of her letters to Jane Grant, appeared regularly in The New Yorker for over 50 years under the pseudonym Genêt. Ross had slapped the pseudonym on the essays without Flanner’s knowledge. (He famously thought “Genêt” was French for “Janet.”) It stuck. Ross’s directive was that the writing should be “precisely accurate, highly personal, colorful, and ocularly descriptive.” Her style became the definitive New Yorker style. As Brendan Gill concludes in his book Here at The New Yorker, the “Genêt Letters” made France immediate to her American readers. She brought developments in Paris to the American public, including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, André Gide, Jean Cocteau, the Ballets Russes, Colette, Josephine Baker, and Edith Piaf. During her extensive travels in Europe, The New Yorker also published Flanner’s “Letter from London.”

WW II brought changes all over the world and also into the life of Flanner and Solano. With England and France joining the war, Flanner left France and returned to New York City. In his book Janet, My Mother and Me, William Murray relates the story of how Flanner met, fell in love, and subsequently lived with his mother, Natalia Danesi Murray. Throughout WW II, Flanner and Murray cohabited while raising Murray’s son, William. This affair had no effect on her lifelong affair with Solano.

Wartime (and Murray) also introduced Flanner to a new medium—a ten minute weekly radio show broadcast on NBC Blue Network became another outlet for Flanner’s story telling talent. However, as a writer known to mull over her
stories, the little known radio program ended up being too anxiety ridden for her.

Returning to Europe in 1944, she found it in ruins and related her findings in The New Yorker. Through the 40s and 50s, she covered the Nazi trials and the rebuilding of Europe. For her contributions to literary society, Flanner was made a knight of the Legion d’Honneur in 1948. She went on to cover the Suez crisis, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the strife in Algeria, and the rise of Charles de Gaulle.

Flanner continued to travel and write for The New Yorker: Her last “Letter from Paris” appeared in the magazine in 1975; Flanner was then 82 years old. Later that year she returned to New York City to be cared for by her WW II companion, Murray. Solano had died in the early part of 1975 at the age of 87. Flanner herself died in 1978.

Flanner was cremated and her ashes were scattered with Murphy’s over Cherry Grove in Fire Island where they had met in 1940. It seems that Flanner was able to maintain her relationships with her two women; she had a life with Murphy in New York and with Solano in Paris. Flanner, unfortunately, lived in a time, when, the two women she loved the most could neither legally or socially stand by her side.

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Lisa Featherson has a degree in journalism from the University of Georgia. Now lives in New York City and wants to continue Janet Flanner’s amazing legacy.