No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  Miss Harriet Weaver fought and lost her battle of Ulysses

  Sylvia knew of Joyce’s discouraging endeavours to get Ulysses past the censors. Literary lesbian friends in London and New York – Harriet Weaver and Margaret Anderson – had already done their best, risked much, spent much, endured insult from critics and been thoroughly thwarted in their efforts to shepherd this ‘most dangerous book’ to publication.

  Political activist and magazine editor Harriet Shaw Weaver © Wikimedia Commons

  In London, Harriet Weaver and Dora Marsden tried to serialize it in 1919 in their literary magazine The Egoist, which they launched in 1914. The Egoist evolved from The New Freewoman. Both were radical feminist papers, funded by Harriet, who inherited a fortune from her mother.

  Harriet’s prim demeanour belied her progressive views. ‘I had a narrow upbringing in a small English provincial town,’ she said of herself. Her father, a doctor, was an evangelical Christian with ‘a deep sense of sin’. Her mother, when she found Harriet in her teens reading Adam Bede, a book by a woman who lived with a man who was not her husband, took the book from her and summoned the vicar. Such suppression fuelled Harriet’s passion for freedom, justice and women’s rights, qualities she found in Dora Marsden: ‘a remarkable person, a genius and also very beautiful to look upon’, she said of her.

  The Egoist, subtitled ‘an individualist review’, quickly became England’s most important modernist periodical. The poet Richard Aldington was assistant editor; Joyce, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Amy Lowell, H.D., Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Remy de Gourmont – all were contributors. Harriet’s declared aim was:

  to probe to the depths of human nature… to regard nothing in human nature as foreign to it, but to hold itself ready to bring to the surface what may be found…

  In her enthusiasm and support for James Joyce, Harriet moved far from narrow English provincialism. It was her ambition and intention to publish everything he wrote. She sent him money to enable him to keep writing and she supported him and his difficult family. The writer Rebecca West said that without Harriet Weaver, it was ‘doubtful whether Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom would have found their way into the world’s mind’. Before Ulysses, from February 1914 to September 1915 Harriet had tried to serialize Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. When her printer, Ballantyne Hanson and Co., baulked in one instalment at printing fart and ballocks,5 she sacked them. The next printer, without consulting her, excised from chapter 5 a description of a girl standing by the sea’s edge:

  Her thighs, fuller and soft hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips where the white fringes of her drawers were like featherings of soft white down.

  Harriet sacked them too. ‘I can but apologise to you’, she wrote to Joyce on 28 July 1915, ‘for this stupid censoring of your novel… I hope you will not have this annoyance when the novel comes to be printed in book form.’

  the Egoist Press

  To achieve book form, she funded her own publishing company, the Egoist Press. Thirteen printers refused to set the Portrait unexpurgated, so she had the sheets sent over from Joyce’s New York publisher, Benjamin Huebsch, then issued the book in February 1917 under the Egoist imprint. H.G. Wells, in The Nation, called the Portrait ‘memorable’ and ‘great writing’; Everyman said it was ‘garbage’ and John Quinn, legal defender of freedom of expression, in a review in Vanity Fair in New York praised Harriet for her publishing initiative and enterprise.

  As for serializing Ulysses in The Egoist, she got as far as five instalments. Readers cancelled subscriptions and complained of its unsuitability for family reading. So Harriet again abandoned serialization attempts and tried to bring Ulysses too out in book form. No printer would touch it. She even approached Virginia and Leonard Woolf, at T.S. Eliot’s suggestion, in the hope they would set it on their Hogarth press. She went to tea on Sunday 14 April 1918 but got short shrift. Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary:

  I did my best to make her reveal herself in spite of her appearance, all that the editress of the Egoist ought to be, but she remained unalterably modest, judicious and decorous. Her neat mauve suit fitted both soul and body; her grey gloves laid straight by her plate symbolized domestic rectitude; her table manners were those of a well bred hen. We could get no talk to go. Possibly the poor woman was impeded by her sense that what she had in the brown paper parcel was quite out of keeping with her own contents. But then how did she ever come in contact with Joyce and the rest? Why did their filth exit from her mouth? Heaven knows. She is incompetent from the business point of view and was uncertain what arrangements to make… And so she went.

  It was a high-handed dismissal of a courageous woman who bucked the establishment in defence of women’s rights and freedom of speech. The ‘poor woman’ had travelled far from domestic rectitude. She challenged the prudery of the Establishment and the censorship of the judiciary and did much to ‘bring to the surface what may be found’.

  Ulysses wandered overseas… and was again in trouble

  In New York in 1918, Margaret Anderson, with her partner Jane Heap, wanted to serialize Ulysses in their magazine The Little Review. Born in 1886 in Indianapolis, one of three daughters with a mother from hell, Margaret’s principles for living were: first, not to do what you don’t want to do, and, second, to do what you do want to do. She started the Review in 1914, when she was twenty-eight. She intended it to be the most interesting magazine ever launched and her byline was ‘A Magazine of the Arts making no compromise with the public taste’.

  Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap © Collection Centre Pompidou

  In the March 1915 issue, she declared her lesbian identity and her championing of homosexual rights. ‘With us’, she wrote, ‘love is just as punishable as murder or robbery…’ She voiced outrage at those ‘tortured and crucified every day for their love – because it is not expressed according to conventional morality’. People went up to her in the street to congratulate her.

  Like Harriet Weaver, Margaret Anderson saw patriarchal government as coercive and violent. ‘Applied Anarchism’ was The Little Review’s credo. She went to lectures by the anarchist Emma Goldman, smoked cigarettes, wore trousers and was quoted in the Washington Post for saying:

  Why shouldn’t women do anything they want to do? […] We are all in bondage to social convention and only by rebellion may we break those bonds. I have been in revolt since I was eight.

  She met Jane Heap in 1916, described her as ‘the world’s best talker’ and thought her ideas more interesting than anyone else’s. ‘We formed a consolidation that was to make us much loved and even more loathed.’

  They lived together, spoke out through their magazine and published contributions from Sherwood Anderson, Mina Loy, Dorothy Richardson, Ernest Hemingway, Hope Mirrlees, Gertrude Stein, W.B. Yeats, Djuna Barnes. None of their contributors got paid.

  I don’t remember ever having explained to anyone that the Little Review couldn’t pay for contributions. It was quite taken for granted that since there was no money there would be no talk of remuneration.

  The September 1916 issue had thirteen blank pages. Margaret Anderson said there was not enough good stuff to fill them. She called these empty pages a ‘Want Ad’. Jane Heap filled some of the other pages with drawings of Margaret playing the piano, and the two of them horse-riding and attending anarchist meetings.

  Mustir

  Only two unsolicited pieces were ever accepted for The Little Review. One, a poem called ‘Mustir’, was from Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. She dedicated it to Marcel Duchamp and his painting Nude Descending a Staircase. A bit of it read:

  The sweet corners of thine tired mouth Mustir

  So world-old tired tired to nobility

  To more to shame to hatred of thineself

  So noble soul so weak a body

  Thine body is the prey of mice.

  It went on like that. The baroness lived in two rooms in New York with three dogs, and made art out of tinfoil, g
arbage and beads. Her husband had shot himself in Germany at the beginning of the war, which she said was the bravest act of his life. She wore a kilt and white spats and

  hanging from her bust were two tea-balls from which the nickel had worn away. On her head was a black velvet tam o’shanter with a feather and several spoons – long ice-cream soda spoons. She had enormous earrings of tarnished silver and on her hands were many rings, on the little finger were rings filled with shot which rang like bells when she waved her hands. Her hair was the colour of a bay horse. She clanked when she walked because of all her bracelets.

  Ezra Pound became the magazine’s foreign editor in May 1917. He had co-founded the short-lived journal BLAST in June 1914, just before the First World War, at the same time as The Little Review was launched. One passage in the first issue read: ‘Blast France, Blast England, Blast Humour, Blast the years 1837 to 1900.’ Pound sent Margaret and Jane writings for the Review by T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, W.B. Yeats, Ford Madox Ford and above all himself: ‘I must have a steady place for my best stuff,’ he told them.

  Then in February 1918, with his high recommendation, he sent them the first chapter of a manuscript, which he said he had no idea if they would publish because it would probably get them into difficulties with the censors. Margaret began reading Ulysses and said to Jane it was the most beautiful thing they would ever get. ‘We’ll print it if it’s the last effort of our lives.’

  the literary masterpiece of our generation

  Margaret Anderson called Ulysses ‘the literary masterpiece of our generation’. She and Jane Heap serialized the first episode in March and from then to 1920 published twenty-three instalments. They kept the text intact as written and persuaded the printer, paper suppliers and binders to push ahead without guarantee of payment. Four times, issues containing ‘Episodes’ were burned by order of the United States Post Office because of alleged obscenity. Few seemed to like this ‘most beautiful thing’. The New York Times called Margaret and Jane ‘purveyors of lascivious literature’.

  The road to serialization was steeper than uphill. Neologisms like ‘the scrotumtighteningsea’ and irreverent reference to the British royal family and Roman Catholic Church were seen as gauntlets thrown for combat with the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Margaret’s Serbo-Croatian printer was perhaps oblivious to what was deemed obscene, but raids and seizures of the magazine by the United States Post Office became commonplace.

  episodes 4, 8, 9 and 12

  Episode 4 was seized in June 1918. Ezra Pound had told Joyce, ‘I suppose we’ll be damn well suppressed if we print the text as it stands. BUT it is damn well worth it.’ He went some way to editing out what might be perceived as obscenities, profanities and offensivenesses, but the vice squad had only to see the name James Joyce to want to seize and censor, ban and burn.

  Ezra had made an editorial effort to sanitize the account of Leopold Bloom reading his newspaper on the lavatory:

  he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read … that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it’s not too big bring on piles again. No, just right…

  And he changed Joyce’s allusion to ‘the grey sunken cunt of the world’ to ‘the grey sunken belly of the world’ out of concession to mentionable body parts. Nonetheless, the magazine was confiscated by the Post Office.

  So too was episode 8, ‘Lestrygonians’, in the January 1919 issue, in which Bloom recalled an early sexual experience with his wife, Molly:

  High on Ben Howth rhododendrons a nannygoat walking surefooted, dropping currants. Screened under ferns she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her; eyes, her lips, her stretched neck, beating, woman’s breasts full in her blouse of nun’s veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me.

  Off that went to the bonfire, as did the May 1919 issue, which included the second half of episode 9, ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, and the January 1920 issue containing the third instalment of episode 12, ‘Cyclops’.

  episode 13 ‘Nausicaa’

  Worse than confiscation came with episode 13, ‘Nausicaa’, where Leopold Bloom surreptitiously masturbates at the sight of Gerty MacDowell’s leg, while inside the church the choir sings Laudate Dominum omnes gentes and in the distance is a firework display:

  And she saw a long Roman candle going up over the trees up, up, and, in the tense hush, they were all breathless with excitement as it went higher and higher and she had to lean back more and more to look up after it, high, high, almost out of sight, and her face was suffused with a divine, an entrancing blush from straining back and he could see her other things too, nainsook knickers, the fabric that caresses the skin, better than those other pettiwidth, the green, four and eleven, on account of being white and she let him and she saw that he saw and then it went so high it went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in every limb from being bent so far back he had a full view high up above her knee no-one ever not even on the swing or wading and she wasn’t ashamed and he wasn’t either to look in that immodest way like that because he couldn’t resist the sight of the wondrous revealment half offered like those skirt-dancers behaving so immodest before gentlemen looking and he kept on looking, looking. She would fain have cried to him chokingly, held out her snowy slender arms to him to come, to feel his lips laid on her white brow the cry of a young girl’s love, a little strangled cry, wrung from her, that cry that has rung through the ages. And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lively! O so soft, sweet, soft!

  the lesbian business

  John Sumner, Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, was a conscientious suppressor. He ordered proprietors to remove indecent window displays, he arrested cross-dressers, watched plays and movies deemed dubious, sought out questionable books and magazines and personally supervised the burning of those labelled obscene by the courts. In the Washington Square Book Shop, he bought his ‘Nausicaa’ edition of The Little Review. Two weeks later, Josephine Bell, the shop’s proprietor, was arrested and charged for selling it to him. She had previously been indicted for writing a poem in praise of Emma Goldman and anarchism.

  John Quinn was a lawyer, friend and patron to Ezra Pound and a supporter of Joyce’s work. He fought key legal battles to defend modernist writers and artists against censorship laws. A big burly man, an Irish American loyal to his roots, his grandfather, a blacksmith, had emigrated to Ohio from Limerick. Quinn was also an art collector and in 1913 in New York he staged the first large-scale exhibition of modern art in America.

  He gave financial backing to The Little Review, arranged the transfer of court charges from the Washington Square Book Shop to Margaret and Jane and took on their legal defence pro bono. But he castigated them for getting into this fix: ‘You’re damn fools trying to get away with such a thing as Ulysses in this puritan-ridden country,’ he told them. He said it was their job to exercise editorial judgement.

  An artist might paint a picture of two women doing the Lesbian business, but the owner of a gallery would be an idiot if he hung it.

  But Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap were unapologetic. They wanted a picture of two women ‘doing the Lesbian business’ judged on artistic merit, not by prejudice against its content. They wanted publication of Ulysses and for the Society for the Suppression of Vice to be demolished. They were fed up with the antics of men like John Sumner.

  The trial for the publication of obscenity was held in October 1920 before the Court of Special Sessions. Sumner knew all about Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap. They were radical feminists, who supported anarchism and homosexual rights. They were lesbians. They wore trousers. They lived together. Margaret personally confronted him in Eighth Street an
d

  engaged in such a passionate exchange of ideas that we had to go into the Washington Square Bookshop to finish. He was full of quotations from Victor Hugo and other second rate minds…

  eat the stars

  There was a judge and two prosecutors. Quinn told Margaret and Jane to behave themselves and stand up when these elderly men entered. ‘Why must I stand up as a tribute to three men who wouldn’t understand my simplest remark?’ was Margaret’s response. She said two of the men slept through most of the proceedings. Which did not go well. Joyce was an artist on a par with Shakespeare, Dante and Blake, Quinn told the court. As a witness he called Philip Moeller, co-founder of the New York Theatre Guild. Moeller tried to explain the Freudian subconscious mind so as to help the court realize the intellectual underpinning of Ulysses. The judge asked him to speak in a language the court could understand. One of the prosecutors wanted the obscene bits read out. The judge said that should not happen in Margaret Anderson’s hearing. Quinn explained she was the publisher. The judge replied: