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Lady in the dark
Iris Barry (1895–1969) was a pivotal modern figure and one of the first intellectuals to treat film as an art form, appreciating its far-reaching, transformative power. Although she had the bearing of an aristocrat, she was the self-educated daughter of a brass founder and a palm-reader from the Isle of Man. An aspiring poet, Barry attracted the attention of Ezra Pound and joined a demimonde of Bloomsbury figures, including Ford Maddox Ford, T. S. Eliot, Arthur Waley, Edith Sitwell, and William Butler Yeats. She fell in love with Pound's eccentric fellow Vorticist, Wyndham Lewis, and had two children by him. In London, Barry pursued a career as a novelist, biographer, and critic of motion pictures. In America, she joined the modernist Askew Salon, where she met Alfred Barr, director of the new Museum of Modern Art. There she founded the museum's film department and became its first curator, assuring film's critical legitimacy. She convinced powerful Hollywood figures to submit their work for exhibition, creating a new respect for film and prompting the founding of the International Federation of Film Archives. Barry continued to augment MoMA's film library until World War II, when she joined the Office of Strategic Services to develop pro-American films with Orson Welles, Walt Disney, John Huston, and Frank Capra. Yet despite her patriotic efforts, Barry's \"foreignness\" and association with such filmmakers as Luis Buñuel made her the target of an anticommunist witch hunt. She eventually left for France and died in obscurity. Drawing on letters, memorabilia, and other documentary sources, Robert Sitton reconstructs Barry's phenomenal life and work while recasting the political involvement of artistic institutions in the twentieth century.
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CINEMA PARAGONS, HOLLYWOOD, AND LADY MARY
While filing her reports for theDaily Mail, Iris continued contributing more in-depth articles to theSpectator. There she had the latitude to work out her responses to some of the achievements of early film. In her writings we see an astute mind at work, free from the assumptions that would later color standard assessments of great figures in film history. Iris saw things afresh. It was only later, in part due to the recognition she accorded them, that the pantheon figures of filmdom took on their preternatural glow.
Coincident with the founding of the Film Society in September of
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ALAN PORTER
In 1923, as Iris recalled in interviews conducted by her novelist friend Edmund Schiddel in 1942–43, “suddenly Oxford was spewing forth a vast congregation of young men.”¹ On the eighth of October 1923, she married one of them, Alan Porter, a 24-year-old American poet just out of Oxford who was writing for theSpectator.² Through her association with Porter, Iris published a poem, “A City Song,” in the July 14, 1923, issue of the magazine. Also during their courtship theSpectatorpublished one of the few favorable reviews of Iris’s book,Splashing into Society.³ As Iris told her friend
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REMARRIAGE
For one so unenthusiastic about matrimony, Iris moved with surprising alacrity from her first to second husband. She decried “love stuff” in the movies, and although agreeing inLet’s Go to the Picturesthat love-interest is “useful and necessary in seven-eights of all films,” she rejected what she called “this cheap business of just getting oneself married ... this insistence on the feminine power of attracting a man till he finds her bed and board till the end of her days without her making one effort to deserve it.”¹ She noted also that “we have all liked Jane Austen for
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THINGS PAST
It seems that no matter how far from her old environments Iris traveled, recollections of the past seemed to follow her. She was in Fayence when Dick Abbott died in a hotel in New York on the morning of February 5, 1952. He was buried in the Odd Fellows Cemetery in Milford, Delaware on February 9, 1952, his forty-fourth birthday.¹ Iris was notified of Abbott’s death via cable from his brother Charles. The notice came at the same time she heard from her son about her mother’s death. The line of support between Abbott and her mother ended with both
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LA BONNE FONT
Drawn again to her rural beginnings, Iris settled on a farm, but not one as well-appointed as Temora had been in Pennsylvania. “Try to imagine” she wrote Edmund Schiddel shortly after she bought La Bonne Font,¹ “living in a semi-ruined farmhouse with no light, no plumbing and almost no nothing (you’ve done it!) in a sudden snap of cold and rain. All the time goes in fetching water from the brook and dragging in wood to try to cook and wash, and hauling out pails. I said no plumbing and I meant it, there is a handy pigsty but when
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PREVIEWS
On the first of August 1935, Iris Barry addressed a glittering crowd assembled at Pickfair, the Hollywood mansion of cinema megastars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, inviting their involvement in establishing a film library at the Museum of Modern Art. Pickford had been a movie star even before her name appeared in credits, when the plucky, curltopped character she portrayed was known simply as “Little Mary.” Fairbanks was the handsome, kinetic star of the originalRobin HoodandThief of Baghdadmovies. They accepted an offer to host a dinner party on behalf of John Hay Whitney, board chairman of
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HOSPITAL
The end of the 1940s also brought a major health crisis for Iris. It is unclear exactly what brought her to the hospital in February of 1949. Perhaps, since she alludes to having had a curettage, it was a polyp removal or possibly an abortion, although the latter was unlikely at her age. She was 54. Iris later wrote Charles Abbott that she had had a hysterectomy.¹ Nonetheless, by her account,
a routine check-up at Doctor’s Hospital seemed in order at the moment, so off I went with an armload of books and magazines, much looking forward to two or
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