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

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 and 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