At first, French writers went to Sylvia out of respect and affection for Adrienne, but they soon became part of the wider enterprise both women created. Of Paul Valéry, Sylvia wrote, ‘As a young student under the spell of La Jeune Parque I would never have believed that one day Valéry himself would be inscribing my copy and that he would be coming to bring me each of his books as they appeared.’ Léon-Paul Fargue did a drawing for her of her stove, left over from when the shop was a laundry.
suppressions across the sea
As for her English-speaking compatriots, Sylvia said she could not have foreseen, when she opened her bookshop in 1919, the extent to which her fortunes would be shaped by what she called ‘suppressions across the sea’. The Director of Public Prosecutions in England and the Society for the Suppression of Vice in America were the moral arbiters of what could or could not be published in their countries. They kept vigilant watch for sexually explicit prose, expletives and all they considered indecent, heretical or injurious to the mind of a maiden. These lawmakers and guardians had fixed ideas of what women were and where they belonged, and a horror of lesbians, anarchists and freethinkers. They viewed homosexuality as a wilful aberration, a corrosive perversion, and kept a long list of words deemed dirty enough, whatever their context, to contaminate society. They held inordinate allegiance to an unreconstructed government of patriarchs, the story of the Christian Trinity, and the national flag.
they couldn’t get Ulysses and they couldn’t get a drink
In America, frustration at censorship of free expression was compounded by Prohibition. The Temperance Movement succeeded in getting the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution ratified in 1919 and from 1920 to 1933 the drinking, sale or importing of alcohol was banned. Sylvia said the reasons for the exodus from America of almost every freethinking writer after the First World War were that they couldn’t get Ulysses and couldn’t get a drink.
Fear of censorship in Britain and America made both printers and publishers of books and journals averse to risk. Held equally responsible if a publication was deemed obscene, they faced proofs, plates and finished copies being seized and destroyed, court costs, fines, adverse publicity and even prison. In Britain, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce and Radclyffe Hall were among those whose work was censored. All moved abroad, as did any aspiring writer who wanted to speak out about unconventional desire. The Bloomsbury Group played safe. Whatever their sexual orientation, their references were too oblique, their allegiance too strong to the rose garden and croquet on the lawn for them to threaten the fabric of English society. E.M. Forster burned most of what he called his ‘indecent writings’. He kept his novel Maurice, his fantasy of a fulfilled homosexual relationship written in 1914, locked in a drawer; it was published posthumously in 1971. Vita Sackville-West kept her account of her passionate affair with Violet Trefusis locked in a Gladstone bag. Not until after Violet’s death in 1973 did Vita’s son, Nigel Nicolson, publish it as Portrait of a Marriage, not the portrait of a lesbian affair, which was how Vita had written it. Nigel Nicolson portrayed his father, Harold, Vita’s husband, as the hero of the saga, the man whose love and tolerance saved the marriage from Violet, the evil temptress. No mention was made that Harold Nicolson was himself homosexual or that Vita was dedicated to lesbian love.
Both Harold and Vita were delighted for Virginia Woolf’s Orlando to be published in 1928, the same year Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness was censored and destroyed, and to acknowledge Vita as its androgynous hero. Virginia Woolf’s sapphism was oblique, touched with genius, and bleached of scandal. Hers was the acceptable voice of gender diversity: discreet, nuanced and literary. Only Vita’s mother, Lady Sackville, dissented, called Virginia ‘that Virgin Woolf’, pasted a photograph of her in her copy of Orlando and captioned it:
The awful face of a mad woman whose successful mad desire is to separate people who care for each other. I loathe this woman for having changed my Vita and taken her away from me.
two customers from rue de Fleurus
Gertrude Stein, already ensconced in Paris and hailed as one of its monuments, was the first American writer to visit Shakespeare and Company. Alice B. Toklas was with her:
Not long after I had opened my bookshop two women came walking down the rue Dupuytren. One of them with a very fine face was stout, wore a long robe and on her head a most becoming top of a basket. She was accompanied by a slim dark whimsical woman: she reminded me of a gypsy. They were Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas…
Her remarks and those of Alice who rounded them off were inseparable. Obviously they saw things from the same point of view as people do when they are perfectly congenial. Their two characters however seemed to me quite independent of each other. Alice had a great deal more finesse than Gertrude. And she was grown up. Gertrude was a child, something of an infant prodigy.
Gertrude subscribed to Sylvia’s lending library but complained that there were no amusing books in it. Despite her often unfathomable prose, she liked to read popular fiction. Where, she wanted to know, was that American masterpiece The Trail of the Lonesome Pine by John Fox Junior? That was a bestselling 1908 western romance set in the Appalachian Mountains, about two feuding families, a beautiful country girl and a handsome foreigner… In 1913 it inspired a song – Gertrude’s favourite – with the same title. Where too, Gertrude asked, was A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter, a sequel to her earlier novel Freckles? Sylvia apologized but wondered if Gertrude could mention another library in Paris with two copies of Tender Buttons circulating. Tender Buttons was one of Gertrude’s exceedingly modernist prose pieces, which few could manage to read.
Gertrude donated her own books to the shop. She gave Sylvia a first edition of ‘Melanctha’, the first story in her tripartite novel Three Lives (someone then stole it from the bookshop). She also gave her a copy of what Sylvia called ‘that thing with the terrifying title’, Have They Attacked Mary. He giggled: A Political Caricature, and her Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia, in which a random paragraph read:
It is a gnarled division that which is not any obstruction and the forgotten swelling is certainly attracting, it is attracting the whiter division, it is not sinking to be growing, it is not darkening to be disappearing, it is not aged to be annoying. There can not be sighing. This is this bliss.
And she donated the August 1912 issue of Camera Work, published by Alfred Stieglitz, with pieces by her on Picasso and Matisse. Stieglitz brought out fifty issues of Camera Work between 1903 and 1917 in rebellion against ‘the philistines, the exhibition authorities and institutions that clung to Victorian conventional style’. Camera Work championed modernism and modern art, with writings by Friedrich Nietzsche, Maurice Maeterlinck and, most importantly to Gertrude, Gertrude Stein. Sylvia called Gertrude’s subscription a friendly gesture. She said she took scant interest in any books but her own:
But she did write a poem about my bookshop which she brought to me one day in 1920. It was entitled ‘Rich and Poor in English’ and bore the subtitle ‘to subscribe in French and other Latin Tongues’. You can find it in Painted Lace volume V of the Yale edition of her work.
Gertrude offered the poem as a publicity incentive for subscribers to the Shakespeare and Company library. It read:
A curry comb
Or
A matter of dogs
It is this I please
Please
Seals go a long way
Or better.
Alice said it persuaded many readers to subscribe.
Gertrude tolerated Sylvia’s equivocation about her writing, until Sylvia championed James Joyce’s Ulysses as a modernist masterpiece above her own work. Up until then, she and Alice did not pass the shop without calling in. And Sylvia visited 27 rue de Fleurus, admired the paintings by Picasso and Matisse, ate Alice’s cakes, went on jaunts in their model T Ford, Godiva, or Gody for short. She marvelled at the ‘latest technological acquisitions’: headlights that could be turned off an
d on inside the car, an electric cigarette lighter. Gertrude drove, Alice map-read.
Adrienne avoided Gertrude. She found her rude. On a visit with Sylvia to rue de Fleurus, Gertrude told her:
You French have no Alps in literature, no Shakespeare; all your genius is in those speeches of the generals: fanfare. Such as ‘On ne passera pas!’
Adrienne chose not to visit again. Sylvia thought Gertrude lived in Paris unaware of the French. She never heard French spoken at 27 rue de Fleurus.
new voices
Sylvia had a leaflet printed with a map on the back so literary Americans in Paris could find their way to her. Ernest Hemingway, Robert McAlmon, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Paul Bowles – a roll call of modernists headed for the bookshop. She called herself ‘the mother hen of the ’20s’. ‘Fitting people with books is about as difficult as fitting them with shoes,’ she said with pride. Often it was hard for her to get any work done because visitors congregated in her shop, not spending money, but reading reviews, talking and making friends. Adrienne’s shop was peaceful, she said; hers was boisterous. Eugène Jolas, publisher of the literary magazine transition, called her ‘probably the best known woman in Paris’. Her fame lasted for the whole tenure of Shakespeare and Company, right up until Hitler’s Nazi army closed it down and interned her in 1942.
It became a pattern for hopeful young American writers to arrive at the quayside, go to a cheap hotel, unpack their suitcases, go to Le Dôme, known as the Anglo-American café, at 108 Montparnasse, move on at closing time to The Dingo at 10 rue Delambre, because it stayed open all night, then next afternoon cross the Luxembourg gardens to meet the legendary Sylvia Beach, browse the magazines and book titles in her shop and talk to the ‘brilliant new people’ who wrote them.
Ernest Hemingway
‘These young writers seemed to come to me about everything,’ Sylvia said. Hemingway was a favourite. ‘I have found a wonderful place’, he wrote to his new wife, Hadley, on 28 December 1921.
It’s full of all the good books and it is warm and cheerful and Miss Beach is a fine person. She trusted me to take these books and bring the money later.
Ernest Hemingway © Mondadori Portfolio / Getty Images
The books were by Turgenev, D.H. Lawrence, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.
Hemingway was twenty-two and had married Hadley, who was thirty, three months earlier. He wanted to prove himself in Paris as a novelist. Meantime, for money he was sports correspondent for the Toronto Star. His French was fluent. He and Hadley moved into the Hôtel d’Angleterre at 44 rue Jacob. It was clean and cheap, he told Sylvia, and they could get a high grade dinner with wine for twelve francs at the restaurant on the corner.
He sat by the fire in Shakespeare and Company and talked to Sylvia about his life. He spoke ‘rather bitterly’, she thought, about his childhood. He showed her his war wounds, caused by Austrian mortar fire in June 1918 when he worked as an ambulance driver with the American Red Cross in Italy: ‘there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red’, he wrote in a letter home. Self-effacing about his bravery and pain, despite his injuries and though still under attack, he had dragged a wounded Italian soldier to safety. Scott Fitzgerald heard from a man in the same unit that Hemingway ‘crawled some hellish distance’, pulling the wounded man with him, and doctors wondered why he was still alive ‘with so many perforations’. He was awarded a silver medal by the Italian government.
Hemingway said of Sylvia in his memoirs, ‘No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.’ He thought her ignorant about sport and suggested taking her and Adrienne to boxing matches and cycling events.
In gatherings at both Sylvia’s and Adrienne’s, Hemingway read his first short stories. Jonathan Cape, visiting Sylvia in Paris in 1926, asked her what new American writers he should publish: ‘Here, read Hemingway,’ she said. ‘And that is how Mr Cape became Hemingway’s English publisher.’ Jonathan Cape, one of the courageous mainstream publishers of the twenties, was thwarted and punished in London by the censors for trying to publish Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness in 1928.
the crowd…
Ezra Pound was an early visitor to Shakespeare and Company. Sylvia admired his defiance of censorship, his championing of James Joyce’s work, and attempts to serialize Ulysses in little magazines in London and New York. ‘I found the acknowledged leader of the modernist movement not bumptious,’ she wrote of him. He was a fair carpenter and did handy jobs for her in the shop; he mended a cigarette box and a chair. She used to visit him for tea at his studio at 70 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs.
Contact Editions
Robert McAlmon, American, impoverished and openly homosexual, became an innovative publisher by marrying Bryher, the daughter of Sir John and Lady Ellerman. By the marriage, Bryher secured her inheritance and secretly from her parents continued her relationship with the poet H.D., Hilda Doolittle. With his share of her money, McAlmon started up Contact Editions and published, often for the first time, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, H.D., James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Bryher and himself.
He called at Sylvia’s shop most days after his arrival in Paris in 1921. Sylvia was enamoured of him. Like her, he was the child of a pastor. He had bright blue eyes, a nasal drawl, was irredeemably social and searched out customers for her in his drinking haunts in Montparnasse. In an unpublished draft of her memoir, Sylvia said she once felt attracted to him and told him so but her ‘thirteen generations of clergymen meant, to his relief, they talked only of the weather’.
McAlmon was always meaning to write the definitive book of the 1920s, and always looking for a quiet place away from people to achieve this, but when he found such places he went straight to the bars. ‘The drinks were always on him’, Sylvia said, ‘and, alas! often in him.’ Abstemious herself, she said she shared him with the Dome and the Dingo. After a while, he was permanently in his cups.
In May 1929 he wrote to her from Théoule, a resort on the Côte d’Azur, telling her he had found the perfect place, marvellous and wild, and was writing ‘My Susceptible Friend, Adrian’, a shocking novel, the best thing he had ever done. But then he got distracted by the sun, the wine, the ‘siesta phase that comes on me unconquerably every afternoon’ and the way the pension keeper could almost compete with Adrienne with her roast chicken.
Bryher called Sylvia ‘an ambassador of the arts’ who always knew the exact book a person needed. Bryher’s main home was in Vaud in Switzerland, but she stayed with Sylvia on visits to Paris. Sylvia always gave up her bedroom to her. Sylvia disliked Switzerland, perhaps because of her unhappy time at boarding school there, so only occasionally did she visit Bryher.
The star of the ‘crowd’, as Sylvia called these writers whose works were on her shelves and whose friendships were in her heart, was James Joyce. Her service to him was extraordinary.
Ulysses in Paris
Sylvia first met Joyce in July 1920 at a lunch given by the poet André Spire. Ezra Pound took Joyce and his partner, Nora, to the lunch. He called him ‘a damn fine writer’ and wanted to help him get Ulysses published. He had enticed Joyce to Paris from Trieste, where he and his family were living. Joyce agreed to visit for a few days. He stayed twenty years. He completed Sylvia’s triumvirate of loves. She thought him a genius and though she did not, as when Alice B. Toklas first set eyes on Gertrude Stein, hear bells in her head at such a significant encounter, she wrote about their meeting with the same sense of thrall.
James Joyce © Culture Club / Getty Images
Joyce had been working on Ulysses for seven years. In it, with Aristotelian unity, he compressed into twenty-four hours the whole existence of one man, Leopold Bloom. The chosen day, 16 June 1904, the day Joyce met his wife, Nora Barnacle, became the canvas for Ulysses. On that day, no thought, act, or happening was too intimate, visceral or secret to record. For societies embarrassed to mention bodily functions and where much that was thought and done must not be said, here was a b
ook doomed to be condemned and denied by the guardians of propriety.
Joyce divided Ulysses into eighteen ‘Episodes’. He took the theme of Homer’s Odyssey about Odysseus’s journey home from the Trojan War to his wife, Penelope, in Ithaca. Joyce thought the Odyssey ‘all-embracing… greater and more human, than Hamlet, Don Quixote, Dante, Faust’. In his version, Ulysses – Odysseus in Latin – became Leopold Bloom, an anti-hero, a pacifist, father, traveller and artist. His voyage home was from in and around Dublin. The wine-dark sea of Homer’s day was the snot-green Irish sea, the monster Cyclops was a bigoted drunk who goaded and bullied Bloom; the winds that blew Odysseus and his men off course were the ‘hot air’ of the newspaper men. Once home, rather than slaying his rival suitors, Bloom mournfully observed the impression his wife Molly’s lover had left in their bed, told her of his day, kissed her bottom and fell asleep with his head the wrong way down the bed.
James Joyce looked to Homer for inspiration for his modernist masterpiece. Lesbian modernist poets looked to Sappho and the sixth century BC.
Adamant that all his book must be printed or none of it, Joyce would not accede to censors or accept publication of a bowdlerized version. Readers in search of obscenity, profanity or accessible dirt had to dig for it. ‘There’s less than ten per cent of that in my book’, he maintained. Nonetheless, there was enough to startle and offend those programmed to take offence. Buried not so deep were the words fuck, cunt, gleet (a discharge caused by gonorrhoea), figging (inserting a piece of ginger into the anus or vagina to produce a burning sensation); there was Bloom masturbating while listening to a Catholic choir and watching an Irish virgin show her legs; or sitting contentedly on the lavatory above his own rising smell; there was Molly Bloom’s menstruation and sexual appetite… But such happenings were embedded in page on page of classical reference, enigma, puzzle, stream of consciousness, foreign phrase and obscure tangent. Ulysses never was or could be an easy pornographic read.
No Modernism Without Lesbians Page 4