An Indiana Optimist in Paris

On October 10, 1925, a few months after The New Yorker was founded, a woman from Indianapolis signed her first Paris Letter for the magazine with a single word: Genet.¹¹

Her last Paris Letter was dated September 29, 1975. In the fifty years between, the magazine’s editor, William Shawn, wrote after her death, Janet Flanner produced “more than seven hundred letters—hundreds of thousands of words—as our Paris correspondent: a journalistic effort without parallel.”¹¹

Shawn ended his tribute with a picture of her that went back to where she started. “She was an Indiana optimist perched in a small, cluttered room on the top floor of the Hotel Continental in Paris,” he wrote, “and when she looked down over her adored city she saw, even at the most unlikely moments, reason to hope.”¹¹

This story is built from the Indiana Historical Bureau’s marker for her, the Library of Congress record of her papers, newspapers of her time, and the tributes published when she died.^1,2 Where they disagree, both versions are given.^1,2,20

Tudor Hall and the Woman’s Franchise League

Janet Flanner was born in Indianapolis on March 13, 1892, according to the Library of Congress biographical note for the Janet Flanner and Solita Solano Papers.²

The state historical marker for her stands at 4061 North Illinois Street in Indianapolis. It was installed in 2023 by the Indiana Historical Bureau and Flanner Buchanan Funeral Centers. “Writer Janet Flanner lived in this neighborhood and graduated from Tudor Hall School for Girls in 1909,” it reads.¹

She attended the University of Chicago in 1912 and 1913, the Library of Congress record says.² Shawn, who knew her for decades, described her as having had a “Quaker upbringing.”¹¹

Indianapolis newspapers of the period record her in the city’s social and civic life. In May 1915, The Freeman, the Indianapolis newspaper, reported that “arrangements have been made for Miss Janet Flanner to take charge of the Camp Fire Girls of the Flanner Settlement House during the absence of the guardian, Miss Majors.”³

The marker records that in 1917 she led the local branch of the Woman’s Franchise League.¹

“Photoplay Editor Star”

The marker credits her with something else from those years: she “wrote an arts column for the Indianapolis Star, becoming a pioneer movie critic.”¹

Her movie reviews were quoted in theater advertisements across Indiana. In July 1918, an advertisement in the Richmond Palladium for the war film “The Unbeliever” quoted her and credited her as “Janet Flanner, Photoplay Editor Star.”⁴ That spring, an advertisement in The Lake County Times in Hammond for another film quoted a “tribute” from her review “in the Indianapolis Star.”⁵

On April 22, 1918, according to a 1926 news report, she married Lane Rehm in Indianapolis.⁸ (The digitized text of the report prints the year as “1018”; the context makes clear that 1918 is meant.)

A byline from Chicago

By 1920 her name was going out on syndicated feature stories. On June 6, 1920, The Bisbee Daily Review in Arizona carried a story datelined Chicago, June 5, “By Janet Flanner,” about the women organizing for Gov. Lowden in the run-up to the Republican nomination for president. It was illustrated by the artist Neysa McMein.⁶

Flanner’s subject was Mrs. Fletcher Dobyns, who headed the Woman’s National committee for Lowden. “The hat,” Mrs. Dobyns told her, “is in politics.” Flanner described “a few axioms, a potent personality, fine melancholy brown eyes” and a hat that was an “affair of scalloped silk.”⁶

A year later, on June 26, 1921, a New-York Tribune columnist listed “Janet Flanner” among a party of New York writers and artists, including McMein, on their way to a summer outing.⁷

Paris, 1922

The Library of Congress biographical note records that in 1921 and 1922 she toured southern Europe and the Middle East, and that in 1922 she settled in Paris. Its entry for the writer Solita Solano records the same tour and the same move.² The Library’s catalog record describes Solano as Flanner’s “companion.”¹⁶ Solano had been drama editor of the New York Tribune in 1917 and 1918, according to the same note.²

The historical marker’s second side puts it this way: “In Paris, Flanner was part of an expatriate community that included other notable lesbian writers as well as internationally recognized artists and intellectuals.”¹

On March 31, 1926, a short item datelined Paris appeared in The Washington Times. “A divorce was granted today to Mrs. Janet Flanner Rehm from her husband, Lane Rehm, on grounds of abandonment,” it said. “Rehm was described as a journalist.”⁸

The same year she published a novel, “The Cubical City,” with G. P. Putnam’s Sons.²

Genêt

The marker says she launched her column “Letter from Paris” for The New Yorker “under the penname Genêt in 1925.”¹ The Library of Congress gives her years as the magazine’s foreign correspondent and author of the letter as 1925 to 1975.²

The pen name puzzled readers. In 1944 the book columnist John Selby explained the joke in his syndicated “Literary Guidepost”: “written without the circonflex over the last ‘E’ it means a barnyard animal usually known in America as a ‘jenny.’ With the marking, it means the plant we call ‘broom.’” It seemed, he wrote, “one of the least sensible signatures it would have been possible for a girl from Indianapolis to have hit upon.”⁹

But Selby added that “Miss Flanner was never a wholehearted subscriber to the expatriate doctrine” of the young Americans of the Left Bank. “She was pretty sensible, in the main,” he wrote. “And Miss Flanner did get about.”⁹

She translated as well as reported. In December 1929 The Indianapolis Times, surveying the year’s work of Indianapolis writers, noted that “Janet Flanner has translated the French novel, ‘Cheri,’ by Colette,” and that the translation was said to keep “the very ‘article de Paris’ tone of the original.”¹⁰ In 1932 The Springfield Weekly Republican in Massachusetts reviewed “Souvenirs; My Life With Maeterlinck,” by the singer Georgette Leblanc, and praised its “controled beauty of style which the translator, Janet Flanner, has been able to produce anew in English.”²²

By the 1930s, the marker says, “she was lauded for her sharp, refined, and witty New Yorker profiles.”¹ Shawn described her method as anything but methodical. “Her reporting methods were eccentric—seemingly haphazard,” he wrote. “Facts came to her out of the air, and turned out to be the facts that she needed and that counted. As if by inadvertence, she wrote political, social, and cultural history of the first order.”¹¹

He listed some of the people she sketched over the years: Cocteau, Gide, Colette, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Sylvia Beach, Picasso, Matisse, Stravinsky, Ravel, Piaf, Josephine Baker, Pétain, Laval, Blum and, “on the largest scale, the dominant figure of the era, de Gaulle.”¹¹

A bicycle back to Paris

In 1940 she published “An American in Paris: Profile of an Interlude Between Two Wars,” with Simon and Schuster.² The Springfield Weekly Republican told its readers that the book gave them “a ringside seat” on Paris between the wars, when the city, “or at least one part of it—was concerned more about Picasso, Proust, James Joyce and Mainbocher than about politicians.”²⁶ The reviewer quoted her own theory of the city’s people: “Apparently men’s minds are of two sorts—those which attract interest, and those which supply it.”²⁶ That April, a New York gossip column carried in The Waterbury Democrat reported that The New Yorker and “their Paris reporter” were “having a mild feud over whether she or the mag should pay for the bike she is taking back to Paris because she can’t get gas for her car there.”¹²

Selby, writing four years later, described what she did when the war reached France: “Then she got out. She came to America again, since America was preferable to France under the Germans.”⁹

Back in the United States, she spoke in public. In November 1941 The Tacoma Times printed a line from a speech she gave to the New Jersey Education Association: “The downfall of democracy is money-worship, because democracy was founded on spiritual things. If you don’t feed them, they die.”¹³

In May 1942 Le Messager, a French-language newspaper in Lewiston, Maine, reported that she had been one of the two speakers at a Joan of Arc celebration held in Boston by the local chapter of France Forever. The other was Lt. Col. Brunschwig, whom the paper described as General de Gaulle’s representative, and who spoke on the aims of Free France. The paper identified her as the American woman of letters “qui signait du nom de Genet les ‘lettres de Paris’” in The New Yorker.²³

In 1944 she published “Pétain, the Old Man of France,” which grew out of a four-part New Yorker profile of the Vichy leader.^2,9 When Flanner was finished with the Marshal, Selby wrote, “he was no longer either great or an enigma.”⁹ He was, in Selby’s summary of the profile, “just a vicious old man in his terrible dotage.”⁹

“Report From Paris”

She went back. On October 22, 1944, the Evening Star in Washington reported that the Blue Network “has appointed Janet Flanner as Parisian reporter to broadcast weekly a program dealing with news, food and fashions in the newly liberated French capital.”¹⁴

In February 1945 The Waterbury Democrat explained the network’s new schedule. The Tuesday broadcasts, “titled ‘Report From Paris,’ will feature the latest news from the French capital recorded by Janet Flanner, Blue correspondent there.”¹⁵ That summer, radio listings in papers as far away as Ypsilanti, Michigan, carried a late-evening slot on ABC: “Janet Flanner from Paris.”²⁷

In 1947, according to the Library of Congress, France awarded her the Legion of Honor for “Letter From Paris.”²

She also carried help. In May 1951, Le Messager reported that sixty CARE packages had been delivered by Janet Flanner to the Maison des Enfants, a children’s home in France. Its director, the paper reported, used pottery, weaving and carpentry workshops, a small print shop, a puppet theater and music lessons to bring children back to normal life, among them a girl who had spoken only the language she learned in a concentration camp.²⁴

Men and Monuments

She published “Men and Monuments” in 1957, and Smith College gave her an honorary doctorate in 1958.² When she came home from Paris for the publication of “Men and Monuments,” the Evening Star’s book columnist noted the visit, and described her as having “that intense, super-intelligent slightly drawn look that distinguishes the Gaul from other men.”¹⁷

A week later the Star ran her photograph. “Since 1921 Janet Flanner, author of ‘Men and Monuments,’ has lived in Europe,” the caption said. “She began writing the ‘Letter from Paris’ for The New Yorker in 1925, the year of the magazine’s founding, and it continues to be one of the magazine’s regular features. Miss Flanner lives in Paris, where her windows overlook the Tuileries.”¹⁸ (The caption’s 1921 differs from the Library of Congress date of 1922 for her settling in Paris.)^2,18

She was a source of anecdotes, too. In 1959 the Evening Star passed along a story about James Thurber meeting her in Paris. She told him she knew French professors translating his stories, and “your stories are even better in French.” “Oh, I can understand that,” Thurber replied. “They tend to lose something in the original.”²⁵

On television in 1960, on CBS’s “Paris in the Twenties,” she told how she and other young Americans had flocked to Paris after World War I. A Star critic quoted her description of a city “so full of writing and literature it seemed as if every stone had a literary style of its own.”¹⁹

In 1966 she won the National Book Award for “Paris Journal: 1944-1965,” the first of two volumes edited by William Shawn.^1,2 She wrote her last “Letter from Paris” in 1975, the marker says.¹ The Library of Congress lists two more collections edited by Irving Drutman, “Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939” in 1972 and “London Was Yesterday, 1934-1939” in 1975.²

Shawn saw no conflict between her two countries. “She loved the people of France among whom she lived so much of her life, and she loved no less the American people for whom she wrote,” he wrote. “She was doubly, and openly, a patriot.” And, he added, “True to her Quaker upbringing, whatever she wrote she imbued with moral concern.”¹¹

His final judgment was that “she was a poet among journalists.”¹¹

The Library of Congress records that Solita Solano died in Orgeval, France, on November 22, 1975.² The two women gave their papers to the Library between 1967 and 1977.¹⁶

How Janet Flanner died

Janet Flanner died in New York City in November 1978, at the age of 86.^2,11,20

The Washington Post reported that she died at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City “following an apparent heart attack.”²⁰ No other published source used for this story gives a more specific cause. A paid death notice in The New York Times asked that “in lieu of flowers contributions to the American Heart Assoc.” be made in her memory.²¹

The date is reported in two ways. The Library of Congress biographical note and the New York Times death notice give November 7, 1978.^2,21 The Washington Post story says she died “Monday,” which in that week was November 6.²⁰

Shawn described her last day. “At the end of a gentle, sunny day spent in characteristically witty, reflective talk with close friends and in an idyllic walk in Central Park during which she took in the autumn foliage with the eyes of a child and expressed astonishment and gratitude that it could be as beautiful as it was, Janet Flanner, at the age of eighty-six, died,” he wrote.¹¹

The Times notice announced a memorial service for November 15 at Frank E. Campbell, at 81st Street and Madison Avenue in New York.²¹ None of the official records used for this story gives a burial place, so this page does not include one.^2,21