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

way over her summer holiday. Each August, she and Adrienne went to a little chalet in La Féclaz, a remote Alpine village, far from the concerns of modernism and cultural trend. In the summer’s heat, local farmers took their cattle to graze on the cool upland pastures there. Conversations with villagers were in patois. Sylvia and Adrienne led a primitive life, chopped wood, walked in the pine forests and ate simple food: soup, eggs and home-made cheese.

When Sylvia was away, Joyce wheedled money from Myrsine: ‘As she well knew whether anything was left in his account or not, we had to look after the author of Ulysses,’ Sylvia wrote caustically in her memoir. Constant scavenging for money wore her down. Funds to keep the bookshop going became an insurmountable problem. Help from her family dried up. For years her mother’s cousin, Mary Morris, had sent fifty dollars a month, but in May 1923 the Reverend Beach retired as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Princeton, and ‘P.L.M.’, poor little mother, not wanting to be in the house with him, sailed for Italy. Sylvia transferred the monthly payment to her, thinking she needed it more. And she quarrelled with Cyprian who said she felt miserable in Sylvia’s company. Opportunities in French cinema ended for Cyprian and she left for Pasadena and a shared life with her girlfriend, Jerry – Helen Jerome Eddy, also an actress. She and Sylvia only met once after she left – in Pasadena in 1936, to celebrate their father’s eighty-fourth birthday.

a question of rights

Sylvia’s publishing enterprise, unprotected by a binding legal agreement, slipped irretrievably out of her control. Joyce showed her no loyalty. He had turned to her with Ulysses only because no bona fide publishing house would risk taking the book on. He would have much preferred any offer from Jonathan Cape or Random House. Sylvia’s pioneering effort was his last resort. She served a purpose.

She and Joyce were dealing in illicit goods. They depended on honour among felons. Without legal protection, Sylvia took her chance like any self-respecting bootlegger. The book was banned in England and America. She, Harriet Weaver, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap were all in defiance of the law. Sylvia was generous and courageous but careless of self-protection. Marianne Moore said of her ‘she never allowed logic to persuade her to regret over-charity to a beneficiary’. Joyce did nothing to safeguard her interests. He was an extraordinary wordsmith but a self-serving man.

In Paris, the Shakespeare and Company edition, under her direction, went through many small run-ons on a supply and demand basis: ‘We sent copies to India, China and Japan, had customers in the Straits settlements and, I daresay, among the headhunters of Sarawak,’ Sylvia wrote. In the shop, copies sold directly to customers were disguised in jackets offering ‘Shakespeare’s Works Complete in One Volume’ or ‘Merry Tales for Little Folks’. Other Paris bookshops sold copies for around 150 francs. Joyce received regular small payments.

Keen for wider sales, Joyce, without discussion with Sylvia, asked Harriet Weaver to oversee an edition for sale in England. This was printed by Darantiere as a run-on of 2,000 copies from Sylvia’s edition, and identical except for a changed imprint: ‘Published by John Rodker for the Egoist Press.’ John Rodker was an English poet.

These copies were then sold under the counter in English bookshops. One bookseller managed to ship 800 of them to America. Some turned up in Paris, where booksellers complained of the availability of a cheaper, seemingly identical version before they had shifted all copies of the first.

Joyce then, again without consulting Sylvia, arranged with Harriet for a third edition of 500 copies and went independently to Darantiere to discuss corrections. All these copies were seized at Folkestone under Sections 207 and 208 of the 1876 Customs Consolidation Act. They were forfeit unless claimed. Harriet did not want adverse publicity and a battle with the ‘authorities’ she knew she would lose. The consignment was ‘burned in the King’s chimney’.

Sylvia, anxious about her precarious hold over the book and its openness to piracy, wrote to John Quinn in America asking if, by sending copies to the Library of Congress, she might safeguard her copyright. He thought the bigger threat was from confiscation and he warned her about John Sumner and the Society for the Suppression of Vice. ‘This isn’t an easy game you are up against,’ he said.

the pirates move in

The pirates moved in, took their chance, printed a version however they chose and used the Shakespeare and Company imprint and Darantiere’s name as printer. Bootleggers hawked copies in London, Paris and New York, called on shopkeepers, asked how many copies of Ulysses, or Lady Chatterley’s Lover or The Well of Loneliness or Two Flappers in Paris or Five Smackings of Suzette were wanted – ten or more at $5 then to be sold at double or triple the price. ‘The driver dumped his books and was gone.’ Shakespeare and Company was the ostensible publisher of all these pirated editions of Ulysses, though Sylvia had no tally of what was printed and sold, where or by whom. Nor did she have legal claim to be the legitimate publisher of this illegitimate book.

got any spicy books

She developed an unwanted reputation as a publisher and vendor of pornography. An Irish priest who called at her shop to buy a copy asked if she had any other spicy books. Ulysses was listed in catalogues of erotica along with Fanny Hill, The Perfumed Garden and Raped on the Railway.

Accomplished writers of books censored as obscene hoped she would publish their efforts too. Richard Aldington and Aldous Huxley tried to persuade her to publish D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Sylvia explained her reasons for refusal: it was enough for her to be a one-book publisher; she lacked capital, staff, space and time to do more; she did not want a reputation as a publisher of erotic books; she needed to concentrate on her bookshop. ‘You couldn’t persuade