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

on I researched in the archives for my biographies Gluck, Gertrude and Alice, Greta and Cecil, Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall and Wild Girls. ‘Di’s Dykes’, I dub this oeuvre of my books about lesbians. In No Modernism Without Lesbians I aim for a wider picture – of what lesbians achieved and can achieve when, collectively, they dictate their own agenda.

I have drawn on and added to past research. Access to material has now been revolutionised with online availability.

Sources of quoted material are cited by page number and opening phrase.

ii

I think… if it is true

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

As women we derive

Adrienne Rich ‘It is the Lesbian in Us’ Sinister Wisdom

Throw over your man

1

The world has always

Janet Flanner, The Cubicle City, 1926

2

the all-time ultimate

Truman Capote, Answered Prayers, 1986

2

I am a lesbian

Natalie Barney, Éparpillements, 1910

3

When is a woman not

H.D., ‘Borderline: A Pool Film with Paul Robeson’, 1930

4

You are going to tell

Hansard, 15 Aug 1921, vol. 43

4

I am bold enough to say

Ibid.

5

England was consciously

Gertrude Stein, Paris France, 1940 and following

8

‘You can’t censor

Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company, 1956

8

It is true that I only

Virginia Woolf to Ethel Smyth, 19 August 1930, Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson, vol. 4, 1978

8

the habit of freedom

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 1929

9

Look here Vita

Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, undated 1927, Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol, 3, 1977

Sylvia Beach

Most of Sylvia Beach’s papers are housed in the Manuscripts Division of Princeton University Library. The library at the State University of New York at Buffalo has many of her James Joyce letters, postcards and telegrams; letters from John Quinn; and correspondence with the printer Darantiere and with Paul Léon about legal issues.

Her papers collected by the Monnier estate are at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas.

Janet Flanner’s papers are in the Flanner / Solano archive at the Library of Congress. The New Yorker magazine files are in the New York Public Library.

Harriet Weaver’s papers and correspondence are in the British Library manuscripts collections. Her letters to James Joyce are at Cornell University.

11

They couldn’t get Ulysses

Shakespeare and Company

13

My loves were

Ibid.

13

Sylvia had inherited

Sylvia Beach 1887–1962, Mercure de France

14

At Miss Barney’s one met

Shakespeare and Company

15

I was not interested

Quoted in Noel Riley Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation

17

Granny taught us to knit

Ibid.

18

his open attentions to a fair

Town Topics: The Journal of Society, New York, 1915

19

the new black cook

Sylvia to Marion Peter, 29 November, 1916, Princeton

20

I’m treated like

Sylvia to Cyprian, 16 September 1916, Princeton

20

My Khaki suit

Sylvia to Cyprian, 20 August 1917, Princeton

21

In the unaccustomed

Quoted in Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage

22

She seemed gray and white

Shakespeare and Company

22

That was the beginning

Ibid.

22

American by her nature

The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier

22

Je te salue

La Figure, 1923

24

Americans have democracy

The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier

25

Mlle Monnier, buxom as

Janet Flanner, Paris was Yesterday, 1972

26

distributed pyjamas

Shakespeare and Company

26

20 to 30 patients died every

Sylvia to Cyprian, 11 March 1919, Princeton

27

I really don’t know where

Sylvia to Cyprian, 11 July 1919, Princeton

28

It was great fun getting

Shakespeare and Company

28

O mother dear, you never

Sylvia to Eleanor Orbison Beach, 27 August 1919, Princeton

30

If a manuscript was sold

Bryher, The Heart to Artemis

30

sitting in a sort

Shakespeare and Company

33

From that moment on

The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier, Introduction

35

As a young student under

Shakespeare and Company

37

The awful face of a mad

Quoted in Diana Souhami, Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter

37

Not long after

Shakespeare and Company

38

the philistines, the exhibition

Ed. Whelan, Stieglitz on Photography

39

But she did write a poem

Shakespeare and Company

39

You French have no Alps

Ibid.

40

I have found a wonderful

Hemingway to Hadley, 28 December 1921

41

crawled some hellish

Scott Fitzgerald to Hemingway, 8 November 1940

41

No one that I ever knew was

Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

42

‘Here, read Hemingway

Shakespeare and Company

42

I found the acknowledged leader

Ibid.

43

thirteen generations of clergymen

Quoted in Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation

43

The drinks were always on him

Shakespeare and Company

46

I had a narrow upbringing

6 January 1960. Quoted in Dear Miss Weaver

46

a remarkable person, a genius

Dear Miss Weaver

47

to probe to the depths of human

Ibid.

47

I can but apologise to you

Weaver to Joyce, 28 July 1915

48

I did my best to make her

Virginia Woolf, Diary, 14 April 1918

49

With us, love is just as

Margaret Anderson, My Thirty Years War

50

Why shouldn’t women

Ibid.

50

We formed a consolidation

Ibid.

50

I don’t remember ever having

Ibid.

51

The sweet corners of thine tired

Ibid.

51

Hanging from her bust were two

Ibid.

52

We’ll print it

Ibid.

55

You’re damn fools trying to get

Quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce

56

engaged in such a passionate exchange

My Thirty Years’ War

56

I am sure she didn’t know the significance

Quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce

57

You can no more limit his expression

My Thirty Years’ War

58

I have never been too hungry

Ibid.

59

What a good thing for Joyce

Shakespeare and Company

59

overcome though I was

Ibid.

62

Undeterred by lack of capital

Ibid.

62

You cannot legislate against

Ibid.

64

invented, or, if she has not

Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3

64

It was a tremendous relief

Shakespeare and Company

65

It wasn’t