Archival Darlings: Vivia and Renee

February 15, 2020

I recently got involved with Medieval Leavings, a new, experimental journal trying to give a new lease on scholarly life to shelved projects. It primarily publishes articles that were previously submitted elsewhere and capsized by the vagaries of peer review and editing. The journal is also pioneering an editorial model that is both inclusive of medievalists who do not have tenure-track jobs and humane for everyone involved. I am most excited about *Medieval Leavings*’ notes section, where researchers can report interesting finds that the author will never be able to use in their own research. We’re calling them Archival Darlings, a gentle variation on “dead darlings”—after all, the journal’s goal is to save writing from oblivion. I have encountered a few of my own archival darlings (please ask me about the Nazi ephemera among William Randolph Hearst’s Christmas cards¹), one of which I’m sharing here. The personal and presidential papers of Swarthmore College President Frank Aydelotte (r. 1921-1940) contain many glimpses into the lives of two women who made a home together in Connecticut in the 1940s and 50s, and the peculiar logistics that their situation demanded. One was Aydelotte’s “niece” (I remain unclear on the exact nature of their relationship) Vivia Barnard, and the other the (now-obscure) artist Renée Prahar. Finding two women who lived together was, of course, a delight, but Aydelotte’s letters also provide a surprising amount of detail about how their relationship was incorporate into Barnard family life.

For reasons no longer entirely clear to me, I have visited almost every archive even tangentially related to the sculptor and medieval art dealer George Grey Barnard. I will write more about that Barnard later, but it’s through him that I came to the papers of his brother-in-law, Aydelotte. When George Grey Barnard died in 1938, he left a deeply irritating estate for his children, lawyers, and other relatives to deal with. Barnard’s son Monroe was the executor of the will, and Aydelotte had been providing him with advice. The potentially greatest asset was a large assemblage of medieval architecture, much of it now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I wanted to know what happened to the rest of the medieval architecture, and, having exhausted most other avenues, decided the low chance that there would be anything particularly illuminating was an excellent excuse for a day trip to Philadelphia.

As expected, I didn’t end up unearthing any forgotten medieval treasures in Swarthmore, but the papers were at least good reads, for a variety of reasons. Nobody thought very highly of Monroe Barnard; the bulk of Aydelotte’s letters about the medieval collection took the form of thinly veiled threats about all of the legal trouble the Barnard son could end up in if he didn’t relinquish his position as executor to his sister, Vivia Barnard, whom Aydelotte referred to with very great affection as “Colette.” (The nickname was a childhood one, though one wonders now if it took on a different meaning in adulthood, or had merely been quite prescient.) Rereading my notes from the trip, it appears that I realized that there was another interesting story here while going through the contents of Box 18, Personal Correspondence: July to Dec 1943. I wrote, “I am pretty sure Vivia lived with the artist Renée Prahar.”

Sadly, I came to this story late in both my day at the archive and in my project. All I managed to save was a few scribbled notes and a couple of transcribed letters. But, even from what I can reconstruct from my mediocre notes, it’s clear that Prahar was deeply enmeshed in the Barnard family. Vivia Barnard’s mother, Edna Monroe Barnard, lived with Vivia Barnard and Prahar in Connecticut, and they took care of her until her death. When Edna Barnard died, it was Prahar who was the executor of her estate.² Aydelotte’s affection for both Vivia Barnard and Prahar often took the form of financial guidance. When he and his wife were preparing to take a long trip to Europe, he worried that the two would not have enough money while they were gone. He sent a check for $1,000-”made out to Renee but… intended for both of [them],” he explained to Barnard, and not to be spent on the horses.³ Their relationship—whatever it might have been—appears to have been mundane enough to the rest of their family.

Except, that is, for the occasions when it did not fit neatly into any legal box. Six months after preparing his own will, Aydelotte urged Vivia Barnard and Prahar to consider what would happen when they died. They could not simply leave it to the state, he warned, suggesting a very specific work-around based on his experience trying to divide property with his own wife: “You may have some theory of a joint ownership of property with Renee, but I am afraid that would not work. You will be interested to know that the engagement which we have on Monday, the 22nd, is to open a safe deposit box which Aunt Marie and I had in joint ownership but which the state of New Jersey has ruled belonged half to her and half to me and could not be touched with some representative of the tax authorities present.”⁴

Lest this depiction be too rosy, other kinds of same-sex desire fare less well in the letters. George Grey Barnard’s friend, Dan Williams, seems to have been more fond of him than was strictly appropriate. He apparently called Vivia Barnard as she was writing a letter to Aydelotte, prompting her to insert the following parenthetical: “(Phone just rang it was father’s friend Dan Williams who wrote a biography on father based on sex. A horrid book, he wanted to see mother but I wouldn’t have him here he is too peculiar.)”⁵ I haven’t read it, but I was reminded when reading this letter that someone once told me they thought Dan Williams was “a little bit in love” with George Grey Barnard. While doing some due diligence for this post, I also discovered that, since my own research, Dan Williams’ research files have been cataloged as the “Daniel Williams Biographical Collection of George Grey Barnard,” including drafts A through O of the biography mentioned here, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

That would be a somewhat sour note to end on, so I will conclude instead with the only real glimpse of their daily lives that I seem to have captured in my notes. Before she was interrupted by the phone call from Williams, Vivia Barnard had been describing a recent storm. “The hurricane was bad enough, but preparing for it was infinitely worse. Renee went wild boarding and nailing up all the windows in both houses, and she took down all the awnings alone.” (The letter goes on, but for some reason I stopped recording at “While I got all the”—I would like now to know what that left for Vivia Barnard to contribute!) She continues: “What a mess to clean up. It will take the two of us a couple of weeks, although Renee has already chopped up and stacked most of the big wood.”

I am being a little cagey about what I think the nature of their relationship was, and, of course, I do not know. But a romantic entanglement would certainly have been one way that two women could relate to one another in their world, that is, the world of a “Colette” on the one hand and, on the other, a suit-wearing sculptor-actor who had lived on East 4th Street; spent time in Paris in the 20s; and had sculpted twice the actress Alla Nazimova, known, among other things, for her many affairs with women. There is, I suspect, much more to be excavated about Vivia Barnard and Renée Prahar’s life together. There are two slim boxes of Prahar’s papers in the Archives of American Art. The George Grey Barnard and Barnard-adjacent archives in New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere might be more fruitful, however. Prahar’s name had come up in other correspondence I had read, but Vivia Barnard is much more present in the Aydelotte papers than in any of the others. While I regret not to be able to give Barnard and Prahar’s lives in more detail, I have at least learned a powerful lesson about not letting a myopic focus on the medieval art trade blind me to maybe-queer ancestors.