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

Ernest Hemingway

‘These young writers seemed to come to me about everything,’ Sylvia said. Hemingway was a favourite. ‘I have found a wonderful place’, he wrote to his new wife, Hadley, on 28 December 1921.

It’s full of all the good books and it is warm and cheerful and Miss Beach is a fine person. She trusted me to take these books and bring the money later.

Ernest Hemingway © Mondadori Portfolio / Getty Images

The books were by Turgenev, D.H. Lawrence, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.

Hemingway was twenty-two and had married Hadley, who was thirty, three months earlier. He wanted to prove himself in Paris as a novelist. Meantime, for money he was sports correspondent for the Toronto Star. His French was fluent. He and Hadley moved into the Hôtel d’Angleterre at 44 rue Jacob. It was clean and cheap, he told Sylvia, and they could get a high grade dinner with wine for twelve francs at the restaurant on the corner.

He sat by the fire in Shakespeare and Company and talked to Sylvia about his life. He spoke ‘rather bitterly’, she thought, about his childhood. He showed her his war wounds, caused by Austrian mortar fire in June 1918 when he worked as an ambulance driver with the American Red Cross in Italy: ‘there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red’, he wrote in a letter home. Self-effacing about his bravery and pain, despite his injuries and though still under attack, he had dragged a wounded Italian soldier to safety. Scott Fitzgerald heard from a man in the same unit that Hemingway ‘crawled some hellish distance’, pulling the wounded man with him, and doctors wondered why he was still alive ‘with so many perforations’. He was awarded a silver medal by the Italian government.

Hemingway said of Sylvia in his memoirs, ‘No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.’ He thought her ignorant about sport and suggested taking her and Adrienne to boxing matches and cycling events.

In gatherings at both Sylvia’s and Adrienne’s, Hemingway read his first short stories. Jonathan Cape, visiting Sylvia in Paris in 1926, asked her what new American writers he should publish: ‘Here, read Hemingway,’ she said. ‘And that is how Mr Cape became Hemingway’s English publisher.’ Jonathan Cape, one of the courageous mainstream publishers of the twenties, was thwarted and punished in London by the censors for trying to publish Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness in 1928.

the crowd…

Ezra Pound was an early visitor to Shakespeare and Company. Sylvia admired his defiance of censorship, his championing of James Joyce’s work, and attempts to serialize Ulysses in little magazines in London and New York. ‘I found the acknowledged leader of the modernist movement not bumptious,’ she wrote of him. He was a fair carpenter and did handy jobs for her in the shop; he mended a cigarette box and a chair. She used to visit him for tea at his studio at 70 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs.

Contact Editions

Robert McAlmon, American, impoverished and openly homosexual, became an innovative publisher by marrying Bryher, the daughter of Sir John and Lady Ellerman. By the marriage, Bryher secured her inheritance and secretly from her parents continued her relationship with the poet H.D., Hilda Doolittle. With his share of her money, McAlmon started up Contact Editions and published, often for the first time, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, H.D., James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Bryher and himself.

He called at Sylvia’s shop most days after his arrival in Paris in 1921. Sylvia was enamoured of him. Like her, he was the child of a pastor. He had bright blue eyes, a nasal drawl, was irredeemably social and searched out customers for her in his drinking haunts in Montparnasse. In an unpublished draft of her memoir, Sylvia said she once felt attracted to him and told him so but her ‘thirteen generations of clergymen meant, to his relief, they talked only of the weather’.

McAlmon was always meaning to write the definitive book of the 1920s, and always looking for a quiet place away from people to achieve this, but when he found such places he went straight to the bars. ‘The drinks were always on him’, Sylvia said, ‘and, alas! often in him.’ Abstemious herself, she said she shared him with the Dome and the Dingo. After a while, he was permanently in his cups.

In May 1929 he wrote to her from Théoule, a resort on the Côte d’Azur, telling her he had found the perfect place, marvellous and wild, and was writing ‘My Susceptible Friend, Adrian’, a shocking novel, the best thing he had ever done. But then he got distracted by the sun, the wine, the ‘siesta phase that comes on me unconquerably every afternoon’ and the way the pension keeper could almost compete with Adrienne with her roast chicken.

Bryher called Sylvia ‘an ambassador of the arts’ who always knew the exact book a person needed. Bryher’s main home was in Vaud in Switzerland, but she stayed with Sylvia on visits to Paris. Sylvia always gave up her bedroom to her. Sylvia disliked Switzerland, perhaps because of her unhappy time at boarding school there, so only occasionally did she visit Bryher.

The star of the ‘crowd’, as Sylvia called these writers whose works were on her shelves and whose friendships were in her heart, was James Joyce. Her service to him was extraordinary.

Ulysses in Paris

Sylvia first met Joyce in July 1920 at a lunch given by the poet André Spire. Ezra Pound took Joyce and his partner, Nora, to the lunch. He called him ‘a damn fine writer’ and wanted to help him get Ulysses published. He had enticed Joyce to Paris from Trieste, where he and his family were living. Joyce agreed to visit for a few days. He stayed twenty years. He completed Sylvia’s triumvirate of loves. She thought him a genius and though she did not, as when Alice