FLANNER, Janet

Born 13 March 1892, Indianapolis, Indiana; died 7 November 1978, New York, New York

Also wrote under: Genêt

Daughter of Francis and Mary-Ellen Hockett Flanner

Born to Quaker parents, Janet Flanner attended preparatory school in Tudor Hall, Indianapolis, spent a year in Germany with her parents, then entered the University of Chicago in 1912. After being expelled from the university as a "rebellious influence" in the dormitory, she returned to Indianapolis and began writing for the Indianapolis Star, becoming, in her own words, "the first cinema critic ever invented."

A trip to Greece, Crete, Constantinople, and Vienna ended with her settling down in Paris in 1922. Harold Ross, a former New York acquaintance, asked her to write a small "Paris Letter" for a newly conceived magazine called the New Yorker. For 14 years Flanner wrote all of the New Yorker's Paris letters, and in the 1930s, all of its London letters, under the pseudonym of "Genêt."

When Flanner returned to the U.S. in 1939, she continued writing her profiles and sketches for the New Yorker. After the fall of France, her articles became more overtly political; she also began speaking and writing extensively on France and French culture and politics. She then wrote for the New Yorker a more ambitious series (under her own name) on conditions in unoccupied France, on the "bitter civil war of words" between the generations of the two world wars, and on the revival of the Church in the wake of the poverty and deprivation suffered by postwar France. In February 1941 she broadcast a hortatory speech to the French by shortwave radio, and in a radio address for Columbia's Lecture Hall that same year, told an audience of American women: "There isn't a woman in France today who wouldn't work herself to the bone to earn the rights which every American woman enjoys, yet which so many of them let go to waste."

Flanner's books include a novel, The Cubical City (1926), which she describes as "really a character sketch and not a novel at all." Three volumes—An American in Paris (1940), Paris Journal, 1944-65 (1966, reissued 1988), Paris Journal, 1965-71 (1971, reissued with former volume in 1988)—comprise the collected New Yorker "Paris Letters" and represent, in many ways, the best of Flanner's achievement. She invented the formula for her Paris letters: a mixture of incisive epigram, personal and political profiles, and news, mixed with critical reviews of cinema, theater, opera, and gallery openings. Flanner wrote of this form: "Because I was easily intimidated by and distrustful of French officialdom and because, as at first a fortnightly correspondent, I was in no condition to compete with daily cable New York newspapers, in my helplessness I invented for my New Yorker letters a formula which dealt not with political news itself but with the effect public political news had on private lives."

Always it is the characteristic blend of the personal and the political, the temper of the times and the mood of the streets, that marks her writing. The ripening of the mushrooms called les trompettes de la mort is detailed no less meticulously than the rise and decline of General de Gaulle's political fortunes. Details become significant in a way that mere reportage is not. Current fashions in the streets and shops, vegetables in the market, holiday celebrations, and even a run of good weather signal, as stock-market reports could not do, France's economic recovery from the war. And the death of Colette, a nationally loved figure, is in Flanner's hands more than the occasion for reporting the funeral of a noted author; it is, quite literally, the end of an era in literary and social history. Paris Journal exemplifies, at its best, the blend of memoir and reportage, as well as the keen sense of irony, that Flanner had by then perfected.

Flanner's honors included the French Legion of Honor in 1947 for the "Letter From Paris" columns as well as a Litt. D. from Smith College (1958) and a National Book Award (1966) for Paris Journal: 1944-1965. She died in 1978.

Other Works:

Chéri by Collete (translated by Flanner, 1929). Maeterlinck and I by G. Leblanc (translated by Flanner, 1932). Souvenirs; My Life with Maeterlinck by G. Leblanc (translated by Flanner, 1932). Petain: The Old Man of France (1944). Men and Monuments (1957, 1990). Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939 (edited by I. Drutman, 1972, translated into French, 1981, original reprint, 1990). London Was Yesterday, 1934-1939 (edited by I. Drutman, 1975). Janet Flanner's World: Uncollected Writings,1932-1975 (edited by I. Drutman, 1979, 1981). Darlinghissima: Letters to a Friend (1985, reissued 1988).

Bibliography:

Ames, K. B., "American Voices in Paris: Kay Boyle, Djuna Barnes, and Janet Flanner" (thesis, 1985). Colette, Cheri (1983). McWilliams, M. E.D., "Janet Flanner's 1945 Blue Radio Broadcasts from Paris: This is the Time for Speaking More Than for Writing" (thesis, 1994). Morath, I., Photographer Inge Morath Comments on Her Subjects: Janet Flanner, Alexander Calder, Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe, William Styron, Jayne Mansfield, Lola Picasso, Eleanor Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson in a Double Portrait, Isaac Stern and Vladimir Horowitz Together (recording, 1987). Wineapple, B., Genêt, A Biography of Janet Flanner (reissue, 1994). Wineapple, B., Janet Flanner & the New Yorker (1991). Wright, C. M., "Novel Women: Literary Expatriates of the 1920s" (thesis, 1988).

Reference works:

Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia (1987). CB (May 1943). Indiana Authors and Their Books, 1816-1916 (1949). Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995). WA.

Other references:

Chanteusen: Stimmen der Grossstadt (1997). Lost Generation Journal (Winter 1976). New York Post (3 Oct. 1941). New York World Telegram (21 Jan. 1941). Time (22 April 1940, 9 Nov. 1942). Women Come to the Front: Journalists, Photographers, and Broadcasters (1985).

—VALERIE CARNES,

UPDATED BY SYDONIE BENET