No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  carrying on for Joyce

  Sylvia continued to serve Joyce. His hope was for her to publish all his work at prices readers could afford. She did her best, but she had had enough. She financed a recording of him reading Ulysses but, with understatement, admitted ‘this was not a commercial venture’.

  I handed over most of the thirty copies to Joyce for distribution among his family and friends, and sold none until, years later when I was hard up, I did sell and get a stiff price for one or two I had left.

  She published a little volume, Pomes Penyeach, of thirteen of his poems, each decorated with Lucia’s lettrines, but again shifted few copies.

  Joyce wanted her to arrange production of Exiles, an early play of his about a husband and wife relationship. Sylvia was not a theatre producer and lack of money, contacts or commercial viability were obstacles. Nor was she eager to be the publisher of his next literary masterpiece, Finnegans Wake, which he called ‘Work in Progress’ until it was finished.

  Sylvia’s last publishing effort for Joyce in 1929 was of twelve essays by twelve of his friends, including McAlmon and Beckett, about Finnegans Wake. It was called Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. Sylvia designed the cover, but it was not a ‘can’t wait to read it’ affair. An explanatory sentence read:

  Imagine the twelve deaferended dumbbawls of the whowl abovebeugled to be the contonuation through regeneration of the urutteration of the word in pregross.

  Sales were thin.

  Sylvia was exhausted by her ‘Joycean-Shakespeare and Company labours… It was a great relief to think that Miss Weaver and Mr Eliot were going to take care of Finnegans Wake.’ But Harriet Weaver’s interest in Finnegans Wake was also lukewarm. On 4 February 1927 she wrote to Joyce:

  I do not care much for the darknesses and unintelligibilities of your deliberately-entangled language system. It seems to me you are wasting your genius.

  Joyce was so upset he took to his bed. Nora asked him why he did not write ordinary books people could understand.

  betrayal

  Sylvia and her shop were badly affected by the Depression. The devalued dollar slashed the spending power of expatriate Americans, and tourists stopped coming to the city. Hemingway and writers living on fixed or erratic incomes went home. In 1930 Sylvia gave Joyce 13,000 francs in overdraft from Shakespeare and Company, became ill with migraines and pneumonia, and learned that yet another pirated edition of Ulysses was being distributed in Cleveland, Ohio.

  By the end of 1931 both she and Joyce agreed the only way to stop this ungovernable piracy was to sell Ulysses to a mainstream American publisher large enough to negotiate its legality, control distribution and own the rights to all sales.

  This Joyce then did with total disregard for Sylvia. The book, in his view, was his property. In February 1932, Random House New York offered him an advance of $2,500 for world rights to Ulysses with a 15 per cent royalty on sales – Bodley Head was their London imprint. They agreed to take on all risks of the court battle and then to publish the book unexpurgated. Joyce accepted the offer and signed the rights of Ulysses over to them. He did not tell Sylvia of the deal. He treated her as his representative in Paris, not his publisher. Sylvia, entirely excluded from the arrangement, learned of it on 2 April from Joyce’s lawyer, Paul Léon, a friend of Giorgio’s wife, Helen. Léon showed Sylvia a letter Joyce had written to his Random House editor, which he used in the preface to the legitimized edition:

  My friend Mr Ezra Pound and good luck brought me into contact with a very clever and energetic person Miss Sylvia Beach… This brave woman risked what professional publishers did not wish to, she took the manuscript and handed it to the printers.

  Joyce was a man whose trade was words. Miss Sylvia Beach had taken his manuscript and handed it to the printers. She was a clever and energetic messenger who had delivered a parcel.

  By 1932, Ezra Pound was condemning Jews as usurers and supporting fascism. He supported Mussolini, whom he met in Italy on 30 January 1933. Sylvia wrote to Holly that Joyce:

  has written a preface to the new edition connecting me up with Ezra Pound in the first publishing of Ulysses. So as you might say he has not only robbed me but taken away my character.

  She lost all trust in him. She wrote to Holly, ‘He thinks, like Napoleon, that his fellow beings are only made to serve his ends. He’d grind their bones to make his bread.’

  Only when offended to the core would Sylvia criticize her hero so roundly. Adrienne wrote to Joyce, telling him he asked too much of Sylvia and of herself and they could do no more for him. Sylvia transferred taxi-loads of paperwork about him to Paul Léon, who managed Joyce’s affairs thereafter. No longer able to afford to pay for an assistant, she parted with Myrsine, who went to the Joyces to help care for Lucia – they briefly became lovers. Sylvia painted the shop, bought additional shelving and tried to regenerate her ‘book plan’ and look to the future despite this massive betrayal and a backdrop of darkness from encroaching war. She had done all she could and more for James Joyce. When he had an opportunity to repay her, he did not do so.

  hard times

  For Joyce, there was a terrible nemesis. Positive news about Ulysses was pushed into the shadows by Lucia’s troubles. At his fiftieth birthday party, on 2 February 1932, she had a psychotic breakdown. Beckett’s presence at the party contributed to her distress. She threw a chair at her mother and Giorgio had her committed to hospital. Crude and terrifying treatments were sprung on her. She was kept in bed in solitary confinement for seven weeks and injected with ‘bovine serum’. She threw things out of the window of her locked room. She was put in a straitjacket. Her return home was unmanageable.

  In 1933, Hitler and his National Socialist party in Germany began setting up extermination camps for Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and all people they viewed as tainted. In America, Prohibition ended and Judge John Woolsey of the United States District Court in New York revoked censorship of Ulysses. Random House’s defence case for publication was successful. Their lawyer, Morris Ernst, who had successfully protected Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness in America in 1929, spoke out convincingly for the book. He gathered support from writers, educators, clergymen, librarians. The judge, who had actually read Ulysses, in his verdict in December 1933 called the book sincere, honest and a ‘tragic but very powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women… Ulysses may therefore be admitted into the United States.’

  In Paris, Joyce’s phone rang non-stop with congratulatory calls. Lucia said ‘I’m the artist’ and cut the wires. They were mended and she cut them again. Random House New York and Bodley Head in London rushed into production. With huge advance free publicity, they sold 35,000 copies of Ulysses in the first three months. Joyce received 45,000 dollars in royalties. Sylvia got nothing. ‘As for my personal feelings well, one is not at all proud of them,’ she said.

  what to do with Lucia

  Doctors thought Lucia would benefit if separated from her parents. In spring 1935 she was sent to stay with cousins in Bray, a seaside town near Dublin. She made a peat fire on the living room carpet, turned on the gas tap in the middle of the night, tried to unbutton the trousers of her cousin’s boyfriend, then left without saying where she was going. She went to Dublin, gave away her clothes and possessions and slept rough. ‘She lived like a gypsy in squalor,’ Joyce said. When found, she herself asked to be admitted to hospital. Harriet Weaver paid for her to be treated at St Andrew’s hospital in Northampton, where a Dr Macdonald gave her ‘glandular injections’. She then convalesced in a cottage in Tadworth in Surrey with Harriet, who hired a trained nurse to look after her.

  When she returned home, the Joyces had her admitted to an asylum in Ivry, 5 kilometres south of Paris. She was twenty-eight. She never again lived outside of an institution. For forty-seven years, until her death, she stayed incarcerated in sanatoria in France, Switzerland and England. Joyce wanted to bring her home but Nora could not accept this.<
br />
  something must be done

  By 1935, Sylvia was fearful of bankruptcy and the closing down of Shakespeare and Company. To raise money, she sold her rare books and some of Joyce’s manuscripts. Friends donated and took out additional subscriptions. Bryher gave her $1,400 and bought one of the Blake drawings acquired by Sylvia in 1919 from Charles Elkin Mathews but insisted it stay in the shop. Anxiety made Sylvia ill. ‘Attacks of migraine stopped her in her tracks’, her friend, the writer Katherine Anne Porter said.

  ‘Something must be done’ was André Gide’s view. He had been the first customer at Shakespeare and Company and he could not contemplate the shop closing. Writers could not do without it or Sylvia. With André Malraux, under the banner of the International Association of Writers for the Defence of Culture, he organized a rally and presented a petition to the government appealing for help. This request was declined because Sylvia was not a French citizen. With Paul Valéry and Jules Romains, Gide then created The Friends of Shakespeare and Company. Two hundred members paid a subscription of 200 francs a year or more to support the shop and attend readings there by French and American writers. Simone de Beauvoir joined on 4 September 1935 and borrowed scores of titles. The largest donations came from Sylvia’s childhood friend, Carlotta Welles, and, as ever, from Bryher.

  Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in the summer of 1936. The tone of the little magazines grew dark, concerned more with the evil of fascism and the conflagration of war than with innovations of style. Shakespeare and Company stocked New Masses, New Statesman and Die Rote Front (‘The Red Front’) alongside the literary journals.

  a visit to America

  For Sylvia, the joy of her book plan was ended. Nor was she well. In August 1936 she made her first visit back to America in twenty-two years to meet with her father and sisters in Altadena, California, to celebrate his eighty-fourth birthday. He paid for her flight. She also wanted medical treatment in New York. She closed the shop for two months, leaving a temporary assistant, Margaret Newitt, to act as a casual caretaker. Adrienne took a holiday in Venice with the photographer Gisèle Freund.

  In California, Sylvia stayed with Cyprian, whom she had not seen for thirteen years, and her partner, Jerry. Holly was with her husband, Frederic Dennis, and their three-year-old son. After the family reunion, Sylvia moved on to New York. She had a hysterectomy and radium treatment but did not record details of what was wrong. While in the city she met with the publisher Alfred Knopf, who voiced interest in her memoirs. Ten years went by before she wrote her slim classic Shakespeare and Company. At Bryher’s insistence she also met up with the poet Marianne Moore, with whom she had corresponded for years. Sylvia said of her: ‘She looks like a little old maid school marm but only at first. When you take a good look at her and hear her talk she is unique and fascinating.’ Marianne Moore gave Sylvia a photograph of herself inscribed: ‘To courageous generous unselfish wilful Sylvia Beach.’ She was working on an article for The Nation on Gertrude Stein, and she took Sylvia to a performance of Macbeth in Brooklyn with an all-black cast.

  After two months away, and weakened by hospital treatment, Sylvia returned to Paris in October 1936, to what she called her ‘problematic little business’. The franc was devalued, Hemingway was fighting in the Spanish civil war, Bryher was using her money to finance the escape of Jewish psychiatrists and intellectuals from Austria and Germany, the talk was of a European war and Gisèle had moved in with Adrienne.

  Gisèle Freund

  Sylvia found her relationship of fifteen years downgraded. She moved out immediately from Adrienne’s apartment to the rooms above Shakespeare and Company. It was not her way to make a display of hurt, or a fuss about jealousy or betrayal, but she could not live under the same roof as Adrienne and her new lover. She ate dinner with them most days and maintained a loving friendship and work partnership with Adrienne but the physical intimacy and commitment of being all in all to each other was broken.

  Photographer Gisèle Freund © akg-images

  Sylvia was nearing fifty and Adrienne was forty-four. Gisèle, who was twenty-eight, was a refugee, a German Jew. As a member of a student socialist group in Frankfurt, one of her first pieces of photojournalism in May 1932 had been of a march of anti-fascist students attacked by Nazi groups. Among the marchers were her friends Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht. She saw photography as evidence, a revelatory way to shape ideas, influence behaviour and define society. ‘When you do not like human beings you cannot make good portraits,’ she said.

  She knew of the lesbian network in Paris and, when Hitler became Chancellor, she fled there, with her negatives strapped to her body to get past the border guards. Adrienne became her protector and arranged a cover-up marriage for her with Pierre Blum, a French national, to get her a visa to stay. (They divorced some years later.) She enrolled at the Sorbonne and wrote a doctoral thesis on photography in France in the nineteenth century. Adrienne published this under the Maison des Amis des Livres imprint, and in 1939 mounted an exhibition of her photographs.

  Gisèle – a Jew, a German, a lesbian, a socialist, a spokesperson for Free France, a subversive – did not have a safe country. She documented social issues and took portraits of writers and artists, among them colour photographs of Virginia Woolf and of Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst.

  For Sylvia, Adrienne’s love affair with Gisèle followed Joyce’s betrayal with Ulysses. She was not, like Natalie Barney, outspoken about desire or jealousy. Candid expression in Ulysses was one thing, her own feelings another. She responded to humiliation with a headache rather than confrontation. Hurt, she walked away without fuss.

  ‘Adrienne used to call me Fleur de Presbytère – “Flower of the Parsonage”’, she wrote.

  Whether from my puritan ancestry or puritanical upbringing – once when I was in my early teens my mother told me ‘never to let a man touch me’ – I was always physically afraid of men. That is probably why I lived happily so many years with Adrienne.

  It was a disconcerting comment on her parents’ relationship and her own sexual identity. It called for a scrutiny it did not receive. To the world she declared her love for Adrienne, who was more earthy and appetitive, more at ease than was she. But the devotion between them went beyond Sylvia’s puritanical reserve or other lovers. It was a lifelong lien.

  hunkering down

  Sylvia was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 1937 by the French government for her contribution to literature. She was characteristically self-effacing about her ‘little ribbon gibbon given me by the French’. All around her, honour was under threat. Enterprises like hers could not rise above the engulfing spectre of war. She increased the cost of library subscriptions and continued to host readings, but there were fewer people in Paris and even fewer who still bought books.

  In July she hosted the launch of Bryher’s Paris 1900. Adrienne gave a reading of Bryher’s description of her visit, aged five, to the 1900 Exposition and after the launch Bryher hosted a dinner for Sylvia, Adrienne and friends at the Tour d’Argent, one of Paris’s finest restaurants. But the glory days of Shakespeare and Company were done. Its demise marked the end of the exuberance and freedom of modernist innovation. Old-style masculine domination steamrollered in with murder, repression, punishment and with winning defined by who best killed and destroyed. Sylvia talked of the ‘insanity’ of war. Samuel Beckett said she had a permanent worried look. ‘Everyone in Paris wants to flee to America away from wars and dictators,’ Sylvia wrote to her father. Bryher assured her that whatever happened to Shakespeare and Company, she would look after her. ‘I tried always to do what I could for the real artists and especially for the woman artist,’ she said. These women artists were lesbian. She set up a fund of monthly payments to cover Sylvia’s living expenses through the next seven years. And Carlotta Welles, who had married a banker, James Briggs, paid $120 a month so Sylvia could at least employ another assistant. But it was not possible to see a way forward. In the summer of 1937 she closed the
shop and went to Jersey for six weeks. She seemed uprooted. Uncertain.

  the occupying force

  In May 1940, Germany declared war on Belgium, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Winston Churchill vowed to ‘wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime’.

  Days before the German army invaded Paris, citizens left or tried to leave. Sylvia enquired at the American embassy but then decided to stay. Neither she nor Adrienne capitulated to intimidation. By June, when France surrendered to the Nazis, only about 25,000 people remained in the city. In boulevard de Sébastopol, Sylvia and Adrienne watched the stream of refugees trudge through the city from the north and north-east and from Belgium:

  cattle drawn carts piled with household goods; on top of them children, old people and sick people, pregnant women and women with babies, poultry in coups and dogs and cats. Sometimes they stopped at the Luxembourg Gardens to let the cows graze there.

  The refugees did not know where they could go. Abandoned dogs roamed the streets. On 14 June, Sylvia and Adrienne watched in tears as the German army marched in. ‘It was an awful experience. Horrible.’ German forces seized parliament buildings: the Chamber of Deputies, the Senate, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Naval Ministry. Signs in German declared these buildings under the ‘protection’ of the German army. Cannon and machine guns were set up at the Arc de Triomphe. Swastikas replaced French flags on government buildings, monuments, shopping arcades, the main hotels. At the Place de l’Étoile, helmeted Wehrmacht troops marched to a Nazi band while Parisians wept. ‘In the evening, great depression,’ Adrienne wrote in her diary.