No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  Life as Sylvia Beach lived it might have eluded Nancy but much of her personality stayed true to her Presbyterian roots: ‘Sylvia had inherited morality’, Janet Flanner said of her,

  and you could feel it in her and actually enjoy it too in her bookshop, which she dominated with her cheerfulness, her trust in other human beings and her own trustworthiness for good things, like generosity, sympathy, integrity, humor, kind acts, and an invariably polite démodé vocabulary.

  Sylvia Beach’s principles were Christian – no indulgence, concern more for others than herself, work as contribution rather than for personal profit – yet she became a champion of outspokenness and unorthodoxy in others. She actively resisted political oppression, and was at the cutting edge of what was new in writing.

  She had no inherited wealth. Usually she was broke and had to appeal to relatives and wealthy friends for money. She was no businesswoman – too generous and idealistic ever to earn much.

  She did not call her deep and lasting love for Adrienne Monnier lesbian, although that is what it was. Reticent about sexual reference to herself, she referred to Adrienne as her ‘friend’ and to the love between other lesbian couples, like Bryher and Hilda Doolittle or Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, as ‘companionship’. Only about Natalie Barney was she outspoken, perhaps because Natalie was unabashed in using direct language for her own desires. Of Natalie’s famed Friday afternoon salons, Sylvia wrote: ‘At Miss Barney’s one met lesbians; Paris ones and those only passing through town, ladies with high collars and monocles, though Miss Barney herself was so feminine.’ Her words appeared to distance herself from such company, though Natalie’s salon attendees were part of her social circle too.

  She was always a lesbian, a feminist and a suffragist, even though she chose not to talk about her sexuality. When racism and sexism reached a zenith of viciousness with Hitler and his Third Reich, she remained in Paris as the German army marched in. She was interned in a concentration camp for having employed and protected a Jewish assistant, for being American and for stocking James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in her bookshop, but not for being lesbian.

  the living Paris

  Paris always held magic for Sylvia Beach. She was there in 1903 with her parents and sisters, Holly and Cyprian, the same year Gertrude Stein arrived to join her brother Leo. (Cyprian, who became an actor in silent films, also chose her own name. Her birth name was Eleanor, after their mother.) Their father, the Reverend Sylvester Woodbridge Beach, was on a three-year assignment from Princeton, New Jersey, with the American Church in Paris. His vain hope was for this Paris post to placate his wife, who was always unhappy when with him but less so if in Europe, and in particular in Paris. ‘Paris was paradise to Mother; an Impressionist painting’, Sylvia wrote. She described her parents as Francophiles, as was she, though the Paris she experienced with them was not the vibrant city of modernist innovation she knew existed:

  I was not interested in what I could see of Paris through the bars of my family cage. I never seemed to get anywhere near the living Paris. This was not my life but Father’s.

  The Reverend Beach’s Paris life was insulated from cultural shake-up and lesbian visibility, from the salon d’automne held at the Grand Palais, where innovative artists showed groundbreaking work, and from Gertrude Stein’s ‘cubico futuristic’ prose. He held weekly devotional meetings ‘not largely attended’ at the American Church at 21 rue de Berri, close to the Champs Elysées. The Church’s Ladies’ Benevolent Association made garments – 600 in one year – for the Christmas fêtes. The Reverend Beach gave pastoral help to American students in the city. ‘Last night father had to get out of his bed at 2 and go to see a young architect who was dying,’ Sylvia wrote to a friend. Her father laboured at learning grammatical French, which he spoke with an execrable accent. Her mother produced entertainments by the students. Sylvia escaped with Carlotta Welles, whose father had a château in Touraine, near the little town of Bourré. She stayed with her for weeks at a time. There was a walled garden by the river Cher, a private island reached by a punt. They read poetry, bird-watched, walked; ‘that was the way our long, long friendship began’.

  Church protocol could not conceal the horror of Sylvia’s parents’ relationship or ameliorate its effect on her and her sisters. The Reverend and Mrs Beach were loving towards their daughters, assiduous in helping them and encouraging of their freedom, but their own marriage was ghastly.

  poor little mother

  Sylvia’s mother seemed like a lost soul, stifled by the church and her marriage. Her daughters referred to her as ‘P.L.M.’, ‘Poor Little Mother’. She was born Eleanor Orbison in 1864 in the colonial city of Rawalpindi,1 the fourth child of Presbyterian missionaries. Her father became ill when she was four and the family moved back to America, to Bellefonte, a small town in Pennsylvania. Eleanor’s father died and her mother, anxious about bringing up four children alone and without money, sent her, the youngest, to live with wealthy relatives at Greenhill Farms in Overbrook, 200 miles away. Eleanor remembered that as a glorious time. Her cousin Holly was the same age, there were ponies to ride, woodland picnics, painting and music lessons.

  Pastoral joy ended when her mother abruptly took her back home, to a regime of Christian piety. ‘Granny taught us to knit’, Sylvia later wrote of her mother’s mother, ‘and taught herself Greek so as to be able to read the Greek Testament at 6 a.m. before rising. Granny planned to go to Heaven when she died, and was determined to get all her relatives and friends past the gate of it.’

  Eleanor was sent to Bellefonte Academy, a church school. Aged sixteen, she became engaged to the Latin teacher, Sylvester Woodbridge Beach. He was twenty-eight, a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary. What precipitated this engagement is not on record, but it was not, on her part, from love or desire. They married as soon as she was eighteen, and by the time she was in her twenties she had three daughters: Mary Hollingsworth – Holly, born June 1884; Nancy (Sylvia), born March 1887; then Eleanor (Cyprian), born April 1893. After that, Mrs Beach slept in a separate room from her husband and for months at a time travelled in Europe so as to be away from him. ‘Never let a man touch you’ was her advice when Sylvia was in her early teens.

  about my education

  Sylvia saw her parents’ unhappy marriage as a lesson in what to avoid. As a child she was at home a lot, ill with migraines and eczema, so she missed out on school. ‘About my education’, she wrote as an adult, with Gertrudian disregard for the conventions of grammar, ‘the less said the better: I ain’t had none: never went to school and wouldn’t have learned anything if I had went.’ She spent long hours in the back parlour on a divan beside a bookcase, which had a set of Shakespeare’s works ‘excepting the volume containing Hamlet in which Granny had come across a passage that “wasn’t nice” so she had burnt the book. What would Granny have thought of Ulysses?’

  Sylvia’s only formal schooling was a stint in her teens at an academy in Lausanne for ‘a lot of weak maidens’. She spent hateful months as a boarder, was uninterested in the curriculum and was scolded if she talked or looked out of the window at Lake Geneva. Her migraines troubled her and she felt she learned nothing. ‘I was miserable and soon Mother brought me home.’ What she did learn was to resist authority, travel independently and think for herself. Many lesbian shapers of modernism had makeshift schooling. They learned in their own ways.

  a very bad example

  In 1906, the Reverend Beach’s Paris assignment ended and the family returned to Princeton, where he was minister of the First Presbyterian Church. Sylvia worked as a research assistant for a professor of English at the university, and campaigned for suffrage and women’s rights, but she wanted to be back in Europe, away from the claustration of home.

  She travelled often to France – sometimes to meet with her friend Carlotta, sometimes with her sisters or mother. ‘We had a veritable passion for France,’ she wrote. She also spent time in Italy with the family of another girlfriend,
Marion Mason, acquired another language, absorbed another European culture. But lack of money limited where she could study or stay. And in 1915, on an extended visit to Spain with her mother, gossip spread about the Beaches’ broken home life. A New York scandal sheet, Town Topics: The Journal of Society, ran a piece about the Reverend Beach’s neglect of his wife and family and how:

  his open attentions to a fair fat and fifty member of his congregation is causing no little comment and setting a very bad example. The sudden departure of his wife and daughter to Europe a few months ago, despite the danger of sea voyaging under the present uncertain war conditions, together with the almost immediate ensconcement of himself at the woman’s Summer house in New Jersey, where he still remains, indulging in numerous gay automobile trips, sometimes with, more often without, a chaperon, has and is causing much comment in the exclusive little Summer colony, as well as New York and Princeton.

  The Reverend Beach, summoned before the Church Board, said in defence that because he could not give his children money, he encouraged them to travel and seek experience to fit them for whatever careers they chose. He wrote to Sylvia that he wished people ‘would understand that and LET US ALONE’.

  He could not say his wife hated being in the same country with him, let alone the same house. Divorce was not a possibility. To allay this damaging gossip and give a semblance of Christian respectability, Eleanor Beach went back to Princeton to her unsatisfactory husband and ‘the new black cook and white poodle’. Sylvia went to Paris to meet up with Cyprian.

  I worked as a volontaire agricole

  In August 1916, Sylvia’s passport stamp read journaliste littéraire. Perhaps to acquire student status, she had amended her date of birth from 1887 to 1896 to make herself seem nine years younger than she was. Cyprian, under her stage name Cyprian Gilles, was playing the heroine in a twelve-part silent movie serial, Judex, about ‘a masked fighter for justice’. She was ‘so beautiful she couldn’t walk down the street without being followed by hopeful men’, Sylvia said. She had rented a studio in rue de Beaujolais in the 1st arrondissement. Sylvia booked in at the Palais Royal hotel in the same ‘fairly respectable’ street. It was close to the Palais Royal theatre ‘where the naughtiest plays in Paris were put on’, and to bookshops ‘dealing in erotica’. A conjoining balcony ran around the hotel and her room looked out over gardens, a fountain, a statue by Rodin of Victor Hugo.

  For a year she studied French literature, particularly poetry, in the nearby Bibliothèque nationale, and gave English lessons. But by 1917 the war and German attacks on Paris had intensified. By day, the streets were raked by ‘Big Bertha’ howitzers. At night, she and Cyprian watched bombing raids from the hotel balcony. That summer, to help in the war effort and escape the bombs, she joined the Volontaires Agricoles. All male farmhands were at the front. For two months, in the Loire Valley near Tours, she picked grapes, bundled wheat and pruned trees, alongside wounded French soldiers and German prisoners of war. She stayed first in a cheap hotel in Tours – ‘oh là-là, how moyen âge’, she wrote about the hole-in-the-ground toilet – and then on a farm owned by M and Mme Heurtault, with their seven-year-old son and their cows, chickens, geese and horses.

  I’m treated like a member of the family. They are so nice. Such good-natured, such sloppy people… They press wine on me, fine old vintages of all soils and are disappointed that I can’t use but a glass a meal.

  She said the inside of their big house was like a barnyard. She wore a khaki blouson and plus fours and delighted in the sense of liberation these mannish clothes brought her and the curiosity they provoked: ‘My Khaki suit is gaped at something awful,’ she wrote in August to Cyprian. She had her hair cut short, felt liberated at not having to ride side-saddle in a skirt, liked the twelve-hour days of hard physical work and, though she missed urban culture, enjoyed defying assumptions of how women should dress. Local land-working women wore skirts and had long hair and put her appearance down to the eccentricity of Americans rather than an expression of sexual identity. Picasso, too, interpreted lesbian dress code as an American phenomenon. ‘Ils sont pas des hommes, ils sont pas des femmes, ils sont des Américains,’2 he said. But it was not just because Sylvia was American and working on the land that she felt freed. Many women, and lesbians in particular, described the liberation of short hair, comfortable shoes and escape from constraining clothes and the behaviour they dictated.

  It was a relief, Sylvia said, to ‘have escaped the expectation of proper young ladies’. When Vita Sackville-West put on ‘land girl’ dungarees in 1918, she felt an emotional key turn. ‘In the unaccustomed freedom of breeches and gaiters I went into wild spirits’, she wrote. Spurred with courage, she then seduced Violet Trefusis.

  In letters home, Sylvia reported that her migraine attacks had abated and her health had never been better.

  the little gray bookshop of Adrienne Monnier

  In October 1917, when the season for farm work ended, Sylvia rejoined Cyprian in Paris, resumed her literary studies at the Bibliothèque nationale and again gave English lessons for money. She was thirty, fluent in the French language, versed in its literature and assimilated into European culture. She had distanced herself from the theological constraints and emotional anxieties of home. But she had not decided what to do with her life.

  One day in the library she noted that a journal she wanted to see, Vers et Prose, which published work by Paul Valéry, Guillaume Apollinaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, could be found at the bookshop of Adrienne Monnier, 7 rue de l’Odéon, Paris VI. She was unfamiliar with the area. Wearing a wide Spanish hat and a dark cloak, she crossed the Seine at the pont des Arts and found the street. It ran from the back of the Théâtre de l’Odéon down to boulevard Saint-Germain. Its architecture reminded her of the colonial houses in Princeton. She passed an antique shop, a carpet shop, a music store, a printer. Halfway down she found the little bookshop with A. Monnier painted above the door. She peered through the window at shelves of books, portraits of authors, and a stoutish woman with fair hair sitting at a table, dressed in a grey ankle-length skirt and a velvet waistcoat over a white silk blouse. ‘She seemed gray and white like her bookshop.’ Seeing Sylvia’s interest and hesitation, Adrienne Monnier came to the door to welcome her. A gust of wind blew off Sylvia’s hat, which bowled down the road. Adrienne rushed after it, pounced on it, brushed it off and returned it to her.

  This mise en scène etched itself into Sylvia’s memory. It was the event that marked the separation of her old life from the new, the moment her heart found its wings. For Gertrude Stein, the epiphany came when she hung Cézanne’s portrait of his wife, Hortense, above her work table. For Bryher, it was when H.D., Hilda Doolittle, opened the door of a cottage in Cornwall to greet her. For Natalie Barney, it was when she defied her father and published her Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes.

  Sylvia followed Adrienne into the shop. They sat and talked about books. ‘That was the beginning of much laughter and love. And of a lifetime together.’ To this love they brought the elision of their cultures, the elision of their lands: ‘Sylvia, so American and so French at the same time,’ Adrienne said of her.

  American by her nature ‘young, friendly, fresh, heroic… electric’ (I borrow the adjectives from Whitman speaking of his fellow citizens). French through her passionate attachment to our country, through her desire to embrace its slightest nuances.

  In a love poem to her, published in her collection La Figure, Adrienne wrote: Je te salue, ma Sœur née par-delà les mers / Voici que mon étoile a retrouvé la tienne. ‘I greet you my sister, born from across the seas / See how my star has found yours.’

  Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier in Monnier’s Paris bookshop, La Maison des Amis des Livres © Culture Club / Getty Images

  Sylvia felt on visiting Adrienne that she had been drawn ‘irresistibly’ to the spot where important things in her life were going to happen. She entered The House of the Friends of Books and departed The House of her Fath
er’s God and Mother’s Grief. She began to dream of a bookshop of her own. Here was evidence of where and how such a dream might find fulfilment.

  Adrienne became her mentor, lover and life partner. She was twenty-five, five years younger than Sylvia. Adrienne, too, scraped together such funds as she could. In 1915, her father, Clovis Monnier, had given her the money to open La Maison des Amies des Livres. He was a postier ambulant – a postal worker on night trains; he sorted mail in transit for delivery and had been paid ten thousand francs’ compensation after a train crash left him with a permanent limp. He loved and was proud of his daughter. Paris rents were low, because of the war, and his insurance money was enough to set up her bookshop, which quickly became a special place. All who loved books were welcome. France’s finest poets and writers became Adrienne’s customers and friends – Paul Valéry and Guillaume Apollinaire, André Gide and Jules Romains… Her books were in French but she commissioned translations, stocked the avant-garde journals, championed women writers, loaned books, held discussions and authors’ readings.

  these two extraordinary women

  Sylvia said of herself that she was the only American to discover La Maison des Amies at that time. She described herself as ‘a beginner, but a good beginner’ in modern French writing. ‘While the guns of war boomed’ she joined Adrienne’s subscription library and spent many hours in ‘the little gray bookshop’, smoking and talking with Adrienne and the French authors who called in – some of them from the front and in uniform. At the Bibliothèque nationale, she had studied their work. At Adrienne’s, André Gide gave readings of Paul Valéry’s poems; Jules Romains, in uniform, read ‘Europe’, his poem about longing for peace in a continent that was being destroyed by war. At musical evenings at the shop, Sylvia heard new music by Erik Satie and Francis Poulenc. She absorbed the creative magic of being bookseller, librarian, impresario all under one roof and with the personal stamp of the owner. And she saw, what she had long felt, how here was the Paris not of her father, but the city of new ideas where she could be herself and nurture her aspirations and hopes both for love and a ‘book plan’ of her own.