No Modernism Without Lesbians, Diana Souhami [love books to read txt] 📗

AN APOLLO BOOK

www.headofzeus.com

This is an Apollo book, first published in the UK in 2020 by Head of Zeus Ltd

Copyright © Diana Souhami, 2020

The moral right of Diana Souhami to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (HB): 9781786694867

ISBN (E): 9781786694850

Design: Anna Morrison

Author photograph: Vera Jacquet

Head of Zeus Ltd

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London EC1R 4RG

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To LGBTQIAPD, QUILTBAG+,

or whatever gets you to the light

‘I think… if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.’

LEO TOLSTOY

‘As women we derive our power from ourselves not from men.’

ADRIENNE RICH

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

THROW OVER YOUR MAN

SYLVIA BEACH

BRYHER

NATALIE BARNEY

GERTRUDE STEIN

Citations and Books

Text Credits

Acknowledgements

About the Author

An Invitation from the Publisher

THROW OVER YOUR MAN

‘The world has always had lovers. And yet as near as I can observe, for thousands of years the concentrated aim of society has been to cut down on kissing. With that same amount of energy […] society could have stopped war, established liberty, given everybody a free education, free bathtubs, free music, free pianos and changed the human mind to boot.’

JANET FLANNER

In the decades before the Second World War, many creative women who loved women fled the repressions and expectations of their home towns, such as Washington and London, and formed a like-minded community in Paris. They wrote and published what they wanted, lived as they chose and were at the vanguard of modernism, the shift into twentieth-century ways of seeing and saying.

I focus on the lives and contribution of Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein – three were American, one was English. All rebelled against outworn art and attitudes. Sylvia Beach started the bookshop Shakespeare and Company and published James Joyce’s Ulysses when no commercial publisher could or would. Bryher, born Winifred Ellerman, daughter of the richest man in England, used her inheritance to fund new writing and film. Natalie Barney aspired to live her life as a work of art and make Paris the sapphic centre of the Western world. Gertrude Stein furthered the careers of modernist painters and writers and broke the mould of English prose. All had women lovers whom they kissed, and they changed the human mind to boot.

Within each of their stories, other women figure large: where would Sylvia Beach be without Adrienne Monnier, Bryher without the imagist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Natalie Barney without all her lovers, too many to list, or Gertrude Stein without Alice B. Toklas (‘little Alice B. is the wife for me’). And then there were the women friends of the women friends, and the women they kissed too…

They gravitated to Paris and each other, turned their backs on patriarchy and created their own society. Rather than staying where they were born and struggling against censorship and outrageous denials and inequalities enforced by male legislators, they took their own power and authority and defied the stigma that conservative society tried to impose on them. Individually, each made a contribution; collectively, they were a revolutionary force in the breakaway movement of modernism, the shock of the new, the innovations in art, writing, film and lifestyle and the fracture from nineteenth-century orthodoxies.

In 1947 the novelist Truman Capote went to Romaine Brooks’s studio in Paris with Natalie Barney. Natalie’s relationship with Romaine lasted fifty-four years, until Romaine’s death in 1970. Romaine painted many of the lesbians in their set; the portraits were large scale and lined the walls of her studio. Capote called the collection ‘the all-time ultimate gallery of famous dykes’. They formed, he said, ‘an international daisy-chain’.

I call them all lesbians, but the words lesbian, dyke and daisy were not much used by them. ‘Friend’ was the usual catch-all, though Natalie Barney nailed her colours: ‘I am a lesbian. One need not hide it nor boast of it, though being other than normal is a perilous advantage.’ She drew up and signed a bespoke marriage contract with one of her partners, Lily de Gramont, duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre. Its terms would not have been countenanced in her home town of Washington or by the French aristocracy. Gertrude Stein freely called Alice her wife, and Bryher, who chose her own gender-neutral name, viewed herself from an early age as a boy trapped in the body of a girl.

I duck the initialism of the present age: the LGBTQIA, the QUILTBAG (queer or questioning, undecided, intersex, lesbian, trans, bisexual, asexual or allied, gay or genderqueer) plus the +. Added recently are P and K: P for pansexual or polygamous and K for kink. And now there is prescriptive use of the pronoun ‘they’ for a person resistant to he or she. I favour H.D.’s revision: ‘When is a woman not a woman? When obviously she is sleet and hail and a stuffed sea-gull.’ But in French, sleet is masculine and seagull feminine, so where to draw a line?

There are but twenty-six letters in the Roman alphabet and life is short. Gertrude Stein said of her large white poodle, Basket, that of his ABCs he knew only the Bs – Basket, Bread and Ball. With canine simplicity, of my LGBs I use only the Ls – Lesbians and Love. This is not to disrespect all efforts of inclusiveness and search for identity and self-expression. I want a place in the rainbow. But I am a tyro in this language class and when writing of past times, today’s language seems incongruous. I cannot talk about cisgender for Virginia Woolf,