Stranded in the Bay Area with Les Deux Magots out of sight, biographer Suzanne Rodriguez and I settled for the next best thing-a café crème at Berkeley's Café Fanny. Nestled between Kermit Lynch's wine shop and the Acme Bakery it offers crusty baguette swathed in butter and honey washed down by bowls of creamy coffee-close your eyes and you can hear footfalls of children and their parents swiftly descending the Rue Bonaparte to make it to school before the first bell. After a few warming sips we got acquainted and began our discussion of Natalie Barney, interrupted only by the autumn chill that sent us, chairs in hand out into the sun drenched parking lot where we continued in comfort.

TG: When did you begin to write?
SR: I always wrote. From the time I was a child. And I actually can remember the first time I thought about writing. My dad was an Air Force officer and we traveled back and forth across the country a couple of times. I remember a group of men in the Midwest on top of a giant silo and I thought that was fascinating and wanted to find out how they do that and what they do so that I could write a (book) report about it.

TG: When did you first go to Paris?
SR: In the early 70s. I was on a trip with a boyfriend who was a few years older than me. I was 20 and he was just out of law school and had a job that took him to Egypt. We went to Cairo for a week and then we went to Paris. It was a very magical trip-my first time out of the country. I was driving around in chauffer driven limousines in Cairo and it was so exotic to me. And then we flew to Paris and ate in a 3 star restaurant. There were so many glasses on the table and I felt very awkward- I just didn't know what to do with that kind of table setting. We stayed in L'Hotel. It had only been reopened for a year-to stay in the same hotel where Oscar Wilde had died! I just fell in love with Paris.

TG: How did you come to write Found Meals of the Lost Generation?
SR: I was living in Paris for a year on the Ile Saint Louis. I had a very nice studio in an ancient building… they're all ancient. I had long loved the Paris of the twenties, the expatriates and I was rereading The Sun Also Rises. There was a scene where Jake and his friend Bill go to a restaurant on the Ile Saint Louis and afterward they take a walk around the island. So I found out through a guidebook that that restaurant still existed under a new name. I went with a friend and had pretty much the same meal that Jake did: chicken and tarte tartin and we too then walked around the island and felt as if we were living the book. It put me with Hemingway in the 20s and I thought that if I could find a meal like that that actually occurred maybe there were others to find and I could spiritually dine people of the 20s. And I did, as you know from reading the book.

TG: Was that your introduction to Natalie Barney?
SR: Not really. I had originally come to Paris in the 20s through Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast that I read in High School. At first, all I cared about were the obvious people: Fitzgerald, Joyce, Stein and then as my knowledge grew I branched out and discovered other people like Kiki and one of my favorite people Nina Hamnett. She was an English painter and probably one of the wildest people in Paris in the 1920s… and she wrote a book: Laughing Torso. As I read more and more memoirs by people of the time I kept coming across Natalie's name. In the 60s and 70s they were very old and were finally writing their memoirs because they knew what a special time it was. And Natalie's name kept popping up, always in very hushed tones, like there was something scandalous about her so I got more and more curious. Finally I read two biographies.

TG: And that curiosity made you write the book?
SR: I really loved how wild Natalie was. Being a baby boomer, that generation that had the pill for the first time; all that wildness of the 60s and 70s I thought we invented wild and it was like a slap in the face when I first learned about Natalie. That a woman born in 1876 was so wild in her youth and so rebellious and daring to defy conventions and tradition at a time when that really mattered a whole hell of a lot more than it did in our day. I was so intrigued! I wanted to know what made her the way she was. I've always read biography and history and I'd never heard of someone so bold and the two earlier biographies didn't explain to me why she was the way she was. But neither of those gentlemen had access to her papers. I don't believe Jean Chalon ever intended to write a biography-his was a personal memoir. As years went by I found myself thinking about her more and more. As I matured and as I understood more about why people are the way they are I became more intrigued. She became a puzzle I couldn't solve. I found myself thinking about her in idle moments. Eventually I realized that if I were ever going to understand what made that woman who she was I would have to find out for myself-so I did!

TG: In the book you write about an encounter Natalie had with Oscar Wilde when she was six years old. Was he a significant figure in her life?
SR: I think only symbolically. She remembered very little of that experience even though she wrote about it later. She had to quiz her mother about the details. But I think he was significant for being a homosexual who suffered for being a homosexual.

TG: Do you think that attitudes towards homosexuality were dramatically different then from today? We live in an allegedly liberated society where all behaviors are permitted as long as no one is harmed yet when I read your book it would appear that the Lesbians of the Left Bank were able to live their lives free from condemnation and without developing hostility towards men that seems to be part of modern feminism. Their lesbianism was just another element of Bohemianism-you like white wine, I like red wine. Do you think that attitudes towards homosexuality were dramatically different then from today?
SR: That's a complex topic. First of all, I think you're right. In some ways they were more liberated than we are. Foreign women who were lesbians went to Paris because they felt they could do whatever they wanted there, in large part because the French didn't care. There was a tolerance of homosexuality as long as you kept it under wraps.

TG: Natalie ran her famous salon at 20 rue Jacob. Can you talk about the history of the salon and specifically Natalie's?
SR: Salons go back to antiquity, to the Greeks. The French salon started in the 1600's when Louise Labé began inviting men and women to talk about poetry and literature and it caught on over the next hundred years or so. It became the thing to do amongst people who had the money and the time to have people over for intellectual discussion. Women tended to run the salons for very good reasons-they were social beings, they were used to hosting and it was the only way for centuries that women could exercise some sort of control in areas for which they cared like literature.

Natalie's salon had its origins in the parties she began to give at Neuilly, just outside of Paris after her father died and she inherited millions. She had no one to control her, nothing to hide so she gave parties. There was one party where Colette acted in a play. She started the salon at rue Jacob in 1910 and it was incredibly influential-she is credited by many people with having made the poet Paul Valéry: the premier French poet of the 20th century. Many people came to prominence through Natalie's salon. Part of having a salon is to do what you can do for the people who influence you. Everybody who was anybody in French literature, American literature and British literature came to the salon. Even Hemingway-who detested her!

TG: Gertrude Stein also ran a very important salon at 27 rue de Fleurus on Sundays. How did it compare to Natalie's Friday night event?
SR: Some writers have said that Natalie and Gertrude were rivals in their salons but that was absolutely not the case. Those two would have laughed at the idea. They were doing completely different salons and people who really knew them, like Virgil Thompson were very clear about it in their memoirs. Gertrude's salon was about art. She primarily had English speakers, Brits and Americans and in the early years Picasso and Matisse. But she really cared about the art. She herself was a writer and many writers came but it was not a literary salon. Natalie concentrated on the literary. She did sometime have musicians perform, there were artists but it was mostly about literature. After many years of not wanting to meet each other, sometime in the mid twenties they met and formed a wary friendship that lasted until Gertrude's death in 1946.

Meet Suzanne Rodriguez when she joins Terrance Gelenter for a celebration of the Paris literary tradition on Wednesday 11/13 @7PM at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books-601 Van Ness Ave SF 415-441-6670 and on Tuesday 12/3 at Copperfield's 140 Kentucky St. Petaluma 707-762-0563.