No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  He wanted her undivided attention, but the two women, out of habit and need, went at weekends to Adrienne’s parents’ home at Rocfoin in Eure-et-Loir, not far from Chartres. Sylvia said you could see the cathedral across the wheat fields. They escaped to rural tranquillity. The house, three miles from a station, had a thatched roof, no bathroom, an elm tree in the garden. Water was from an outside pump, there was an orchard of pear and peach trees, flowers, hens, cats and Mousse the sheepdog. Joyce pursued Sylvia if he could, always wanting replies by return of post or by express. However great her efforts for him, he pushed for more. He seemed respectful of his wife’s dissatisfaction but not of Sylvia’s generosity.

  He behaved the same way over her summer holiday. Each August, she and Adrienne went to a little chalet in La Féclaz, a remote Alpine village, far from the concerns of modernism and cultural trend. In the summer’s heat, local farmers took their cattle to graze on the cool upland pastures there. Conversations with villagers were in patois. Sylvia and Adrienne led a primitive life, chopped wood, walked in the pine forests and ate simple food: soup, eggs and home-made cheese.

  When Sylvia was away, Joyce wheedled money from Myrsine: ‘As she well knew whether anything was left in his account or not, we had to look after the author of Ulysses,’ Sylvia wrote caustically in her memoir. Constant scavenging for money wore her down. Funds to keep the bookshop going became an insurmountable problem. Help from her family dried up. For years her mother’s cousin, Mary Morris, had sent fifty dollars a month, but in May 1923 the Reverend Beach retired as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Princeton, and ‘P.L.M.’, poor little mother, not wanting to be in the house with him, sailed for Italy. Sylvia transferred the monthly payment to her, thinking she needed it more. And she quarrelled with Cyprian who said she felt miserable in Sylvia’s company. Opportunities in French cinema ended for Cyprian and she left for Pasadena and a shared life with her girlfriend, Jerry – Helen Jerome Eddy, also an actress. She and Sylvia only met once after she left – in Pasadena in 1936, to celebrate their father’s eighty-fourth birthday.

  a question of rights

  Sylvia’s publishing enterprise, unprotected by a binding legal agreement, slipped irretrievably out of her control. Joyce showed her no loyalty. He had turned to her with Ulysses only because no bona fide publishing house would risk taking the book on. He would have much preferred any offer from Jonathan Cape or Random House. Sylvia’s pioneering effort was his last resort. She served a purpose.

  She and Joyce were dealing in illicit goods. They depended on honour among felons. Without legal protection, Sylvia took her chance like any self-respecting bootlegger. The book was banned in England and America. She, Harriet Weaver, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap were all in defiance of the law. Sylvia was generous and courageous but careless of self-protection. Marianne Moore said of her ‘she never allowed logic to persuade her to regret over-charity to a beneficiary’. Joyce did nothing to safeguard her interests. He was an extraordinary wordsmith but a self-serving man.

  In Paris, the Shakespeare and Company edition, under her direction, went through many small run-ons on a supply and demand basis: ‘We sent copies to India, China and Japan, had customers in the Straits settlements and, I daresay, among the headhunters of Sarawak,’ Sylvia wrote. In the shop, copies sold directly to customers were disguised in jackets offering ‘Shakespeare’s Works Complete in One Volume’ or ‘Merry Tales for Little Folks’. Other Paris bookshops sold copies for around 150 francs. Joyce received regular small payments.

  Keen for wider sales, Joyce, without discussion with Sylvia, asked Harriet Weaver to oversee an edition for sale in England. This was printed by Darantiere as a run-on of 2,000 copies from Sylvia’s edition, and identical except for a changed imprint: ‘Published by John Rodker for the Egoist Press.’ John Rodker was an English poet.

  These copies were then sold under the counter in English bookshops. One bookseller managed to ship 800 of them to America. Some turned up in Paris, where booksellers complained of the availability of a cheaper, seemingly identical version before they had shifted all copies of the first.

  Joyce then, again without consulting Sylvia, arranged with Harriet for a third edition of 500 copies and went independently to Darantiere to discuss corrections. All these copies were seized at Folkestone under Sections 207 and 208 of the 1876 Customs Consolidation Act. They were forfeit unless claimed. Harriet did not want adverse publicity and a battle with the ‘authorities’ she knew she would lose. The consignment was ‘burned in the King’s chimney’.

  Sylvia, anxious about her precarious hold over the book and its openness to piracy, wrote to John Quinn in America asking if, by sending copies to the Library of Congress, she might safeguard her copyright. He thought the bigger threat was from confiscation and he warned her about John Sumner and the Society for the Suppression of Vice. ‘This isn’t an easy game you are up against,’ he said.

  the pirates move in

  The pirates moved in, took their chance, printed a version however they chose and used the Shakespeare and Company imprint and Darantiere’s name as printer. Bootleggers hawked copies in London, Paris and New York, called on shopkeepers, asked how many copies of Ulysses, or Lady Chatterley’s Lover or The Well of Loneliness or Two Flappers in Paris or Five Smackings of Suzette were wanted – ten or more at $5 then to be sold at double or triple the price. ‘The driver dumped his books and was gone.’ Shakespeare and Company was the ostensible publisher of all these pirated editions of Ulysses, though Sylvia had no tally of what was printed and sold, where or by whom. Nor did she have legal claim to be the legitimate publisher of this illegitimate book.

  got any spicy books

  She developed an unwanted reputation as a publisher and vendor of pornography. An Irish priest who called at her shop to buy a copy asked if she had any other spicy books. Ulysses was listed in catalogues of erotica along with Fanny Hill, The Perfumed Garden and Raped on the Railway.

  Accomplished writers of books censored as obscene hoped she would publish their efforts too. Richard Aldington and Aldous Huxley tried to persuade her to publish D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Sylvia explained her reasons for refusal: it was enough for her to be a one-book publisher; she lacked capital, staff, space and time to do more; she did not want a reputation as a publisher of erotic books; she needed to concentrate on her bookshop. ‘You couldn’t persuade anyone that Shakespeare and Company hadn’t made a fortune,’ she said. It was not her way to complain of just how exhausting, problematic and draining of energy all aspects of publication had been.

  When Aldington and Huxley’s exhortations failed, Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, came to the shop to try to persuade her. She found him a man of great personal charm. He was ill with tuberculosis, feverish and coughing, and she hated having to explain her reasons for turning him away. She did not tell him that she did not like the book and found it the least interesting of his novels.

  Most days one writer or another called, hoping she would publish their racy writings. ‘They brought me their most erotic efforts,’ she said. Aleister Crowley, author of Diary of a Drug Fiend, asked her to publish his memoirs. She found him repulsive:

  His clay-coloured head was bald except for a single strand of black hair stretching from his forehead over the top of his head and down to the nape of his neck. The strand seemed glued to the skin so that it was not likely to blow up in the wind.

  The head waiter of Maxim’s promised his memoirs would out-raunch Ulysses. Frank Harris tried to entice her with My Life and Loves by reading aloud to her the sauciest bits. She did not like the book any more than she liked him. When leaving Paris to catch a train to Nice, he stopped by and asked her to recommend something hot for him to read on the journey. She sold him Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women in two volumes.

  Tallulah Bankhead’s agent asked if she would publish Tallulah’s memoirs. Sylvia doubted she would have turned that down, but no manuscript arrived. Tallulah’s
name, like Greta Garbo’s, was another link in the daisy-chain of famous lesbians.

  Henry Miller and that lovely Japanese-looking friend of his, Miss Anaïs Nin, came to see if I would publish an interesting novel he had been working on: Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn.

  Sylvia turned down both Tropics. She could have become a publisher like Virginia and Leonard Woolf with their Hogarth Press; she just did not want to. She did, though, meet with Havelock Ellis and agree to stock his censored book Studies in the Psychology of Sex. At lunch, ‘Dr Ellis said he would like vegetables, and no wine, thank you, just water.’ And Sylvia stocked Radclyffe Hall’s banned Well of Loneliness.

  Adrienne’s Silver Ship

  Influenced by Sylvia, Adrienne took modernist English writing to French readers. In June 1925 she started a literary magazine, Le Navire d’Argent – The Silver Ship, named after the ship in the Paris coat of arms: ‘Tossed by the waves but never sunk’, read the heraldic legend. ‘French in language but international in spirit’ was Adrienne’s creed. In the magazine, she was the first to publish Hemingway in translation. And T.S. Eliot, when she published his ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, wrote: ‘To Adrienne Monnier, with Navire d’Argent, I owe the introduction of my verse to French readers.’ In the October 1925 issue she included in English an excerpt from Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress’. Joyce had intended the piece for an English magazine but took it away when the editor asked him to cut a paragraph the printer thought obscene. In gratitude, he sent Adrienne a magnificently dressed gigantic cold salmon from Potel et Chabot, the most exclusive caterers in Paris.

  Le Navire d’Argent was one more of the innovative magazines in service to literature and freedom of thought that could not survive. Adrienne published it monthly until May 1926. After twelve issues, she was in financial straits. To pay debts, she sold her personal collection of 400 books, many inscribed to her from their authors.

  a petition of protest

  By the late 1920s, Shakespeare and Company had become one of the sights of Paris, written up in magazines, a must for book lovers, a place for pilgrimage. Sylvia was assumed to be rich from the notoriety of Ulysses but most of any money received went to Joyce. By 1927 the bulk of her time was taken up fighting pirates. Bryher sent a quantity of files to the shop to house the huge volume of paperwork this generated.

  In America, a peddler of raunchy prose and pornography, Samuel Roth, published instalments of Ulysses in his magazine Two Worlds Monthly without consultation, permission or payment. Sylvia and Joyce organized a petition of protest; 167 people signed it, among them Sherwood Anderson, Richard Aldington, E.M. Forster, Bryher, Mary Butts, H.D., Albert Einstein, T.S. Eliot, Havelock Ellis, Gaston Gallimard, André Gide, Ernest Hemingway, Bravig Imbs, Storm Jameson, D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Mina Loy, Maurice Maeterlinck, André Maurois, W. Somerset Maugham, Middleton Murry, Bertrand Russell, Virgil Thomson, Paul Valéry, Hugh Walpole, H.G. Wells, Rebecca West, Thornton Wilder, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats… Sylvia invited Gertrude to sign, but she did not do so. An injunction was obtained against Roth in December 1928. He became a pariah in literary circles but continued his pirating under a different name.

  P.L.M.

  Mother became an increasing problem throughout this publishing saga. Sylvia was alarmed at the quantity of prescription drugs she took, ostensibly for a heart condition. Eleanor Beach made regular visits to her chicks, as she called her three daughters, in whatever country they happened to be. In Paris, she bought clothes for Sylvia – and lamented her lack of interest in them. Then she moved on to Italy to stay with Holly. Sylvia tried to be dutiful and sometimes went with her, but told Holly she would go mad if she spent too long in her mother’s company.

  Eleanor wrote to Sylvia of the pain of her ‘terrible marriage’, and of how Sylvester’s temper was like ‘a spiked band into my head’ so she felt her ‘brain will give way’. She said she was nearly crazy and having a breakdown. Sylvia called it a ‘wretched business’ that their mother had to keep the pretence of a marriage and go back to America to the husband she feared and despised. As the years passed, Eleanor travelled with varying women friends and acquaintances to Paris, Rome, Florence, Algiers, Naples. She seemed lost.

  In 1924, in Paris, she was charged with shoplifting jewellery from the Galeries Lafayette department store in boulevard Haussmann in the 9th arrondissement – trinket items of no particular value. Maybe from fear and confusion, or because she was at her wits’ end, she told no one of the charge or the ensuing court summonses. In June 1927, the police arrested her. Sylvia hired a lawyer, who elicited a character reference from the pastor of the American Church in Paris, got a doctor’s report testifying to Eleanor’s mental strain and confusion brought on by her medication, and secured her release without charge.

  Eleanor, consumed with shame, wrote a long protestation of her innocence, drew up a will dividing her possessions among her three daughters and on 22 June, a Wednesday, overdosed on prescription drugs. An ambulance took her to the American Hospital at Neuilly-sur-Seine. She died at 5 p.m. She was sixty-three. Sylvia telegraphed her father and sisters, saying the death was from heart failure. She somehow averted an inquest, arranged her mother’s cremation and for her ashes to be buried at Père-Lachaise cemetery, settled her bills and, with her instinct to downplay drama, kept to herself the true circumstances of how her mother had died.

  Joyce’s eyes and family

  Joyce looked to Sylvia to sort out his unending problems of health, finances and family. He feared he was going blind. Sylvia found specialist help, but treatment for glaucoma was crude. Operations caused great pain and were of dubious success. Leeches were stuck round his eyes to drain them of blood.

  Money and its lack was the never-ending vexation. Any amount Sylvia scavenged for him was gone the next day. She asked Harriet Weaver to help get Joyce’s son, Georgio, a job: ‘that would be a relief to Joyce’, she wrote. ‘George is a fine big fellow, but he has nothing to do all the time but loaf (He teaches Italian one hour a week).’

  James Joyce, his partner and future wife, Nora Barnacle, and their children Lucia and Giorgio © Archive Photos / Stringer / Getty Images

  Joyce’s family seemed dysfunctional. Whatever genetic vulnerability his two children, Georgio and Lucia, had was made worse by their rackety upbringing: constant shifts of language, insecure abode in different countries, an obsessive artist for a father, a dissatisfied mother. Both children had talent: Giorgio as a classical singer, Lucia as a dancer, but they were overshadowed by their father. Giorgio became alcoholic, as indeed was Joyce. He married an American heiress and divorcee ten years his senior – Helen Fleischmann, a friend of the art collector Peggy Guggenheim. They had a son, Stephen. She had a breakdown and went back to the States without Giorgio.

  And as for Lucia… Joyce referred to her ‘King Lear scenes’: ‘Whatever spark or gift I possess has been transmitted to Lucia,’ he said, ‘and it has kindled a fire in her brain.’ This fire consumed her. Joyce’s gift with words and ideas expressed itself in Lucia as madness. In conversation they shared a make-believe language. Carl Jung diagnosed her as schizophrenic. He described them as ‘two people going to the bottom of the river, one diving and the other falling’.

  Nora favoured Giorgio and disliked Lucia. Tension between her and her daughter was intense. Lucia’s earliest memories were of her mother’s scoldings. Her anxiety and insecurity was exacerbated by never staying anywhere long enough to forge other relationships. By the age of thirteen she had lived at numerous different addresses in Trieste, Zurich and Paris. More than once the family was evicted from apartments for not paying the rent. Lucia learned Italian, German, French, but no language allowed her to understand or control what was wrong with her. Home life made her anxious and she became violent towards her mother. Joyce loved Lucia and believed she had some special insight, but he was unable to help her. ‘She behaves like a fool very often but her mind is as clear and as unsparing as the lightning,’ he wro
te to Harriet Weaver.

  Lucia wanted her own identity and success. She went to nine dance schools in seven years, but left every group she joined. Among her teachers was Raymond Duncan, Isadora’s brother, at the Dalcroze Institute in Paris.

  In 1927, when she was twenty-one, she became besotted with Samuel Beckett. He was twenty-three and had moved to Paris to work as Joyce’s secretary. Sylvia championed Beckett’s work and stocked his books. She particularly liked the title of ten interconnected stories set in Dublin, More Pricks Than Kicks.

  ‘My love was Samuel Beckett,’ Lucia wrote. ‘I wasn’t able to marry him.’ Other unsatisfactory affairs were with her drawing teacher, the sculptor Alexander Calder: ‘We were in love but I think he went away.’ Then there was the artist Albert Hubbell, who did cover illustrations for The New Yorker. Already married, he ended his involvement with Lucia by ‘just sliding out of her life’.

  In 1929 she was a finalist in the first international festival of dance in Paris, held at the Bal Bullier, a dance hall on boulevard Saint-Michel.7 Mortified at not winning, Lucia gave up dancing, a decision, Joyce wrote to a friend, that caused her ‘a month of tears’. Her life disintegrated. She had an unsuccessful operation to try to correct the cast in her left eye. She picked up men, said she was lesbian. Joyce encouraged her to take up book illustration. She drew lettrines – ornamental capitals – and he paid various publishers to pay her for this work. He called Lucia ‘that poor proud soul, whom the storm has so harshly assailed but not conquered’.