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

anyone that Shakespeare and Company hadn’t made a fortune,’ she said. It was not her way to complain of just how exhausting, problematic and draining of energy all aspects of publication had been.

When Aldington and Huxley’s exhortations failed, Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, came to the shop to try to persuade her. She found him a man of great personal charm. He was ill with tuberculosis, feverish and coughing, and she hated having to explain her reasons for turning him away. She did not tell him that she did not like the book and found it the least interesting of his novels.

Most days one writer or another called, hoping she would publish their racy writings. ‘They brought me their most erotic efforts,’ she said. Aleister Crowley, author of Diary of a Drug Fiend, asked her to publish his memoirs. She found him repulsive:

His clay-coloured head was bald except for a single strand of black hair stretching from his forehead over the top of his head and down to the nape of his neck. The strand seemed glued to the skin so that it was not likely to blow up in the wind.

The head waiter of Maxim’s promised his memoirs would out-raunch Ulysses. Frank Harris tried to entice her with My Life and Loves by reading aloud to her the sauciest bits. She did not like the book any more than she liked him. When leaving Paris to catch a train to Nice, he stopped by and asked her to recommend something hot for him to read on the journey. She sold him Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women in two volumes.

Tallulah Bankhead’s agent asked if she would publish Tallulah’s memoirs. Sylvia doubted she would have turned that down, but no manuscript arrived. Tallulah’s name, like Greta Garbo’s, was another link in the daisy-chain of famous lesbians.

Henry Miller and that lovely Japanese-looking friend of his, Miss Anaïs Nin, came to see if I would publish an interesting novel he had been working on: Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn.

Sylvia turned down both Tropics. She could have become a publisher like Virginia and Leonard Woolf with their Hogarth Press; she just did not want to. She did, though, meet with Havelock Ellis and agree to stock his censored book Studies in the Psychology of Sex. At lunch, ‘Dr Ellis said he would like vegetables, and no wine, thank you, just water.’ And Sylvia stocked Radclyffe Hall’s banned Well of Loneliness.

Adrienne’s Silver Ship

Influenced by Sylvia, Adrienne took modernist English writing to French readers. In June 1925 she started a literary magazine, Le Navire d’Argent – The Silver Ship, named after the ship in the Paris coat of arms: ‘Tossed by the waves but never sunk’, read the heraldic legend. ‘French in language but international in spirit’ was Adrienne’s creed. In the magazine, she was the first to publish Hemingway in translation. And T.S. Eliot, when she published his ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, wrote: ‘To Adrienne Monnier, with Navire d’Argent, I owe the introduction of my verse to French readers.’ In the October 1925 issue she included in English an excerpt from Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress’. Joyce had intended the piece for an English magazine but took it away when the editor asked him to cut a paragraph the printer thought obscene. In gratitude, he sent Adrienne a magnificently dressed gigantic cold salmon from Potel et Chabot, the most exclusive caterers in Paris.

Le Navire d’Argent was one more of the innovative magazines in service to literature and freedom of thought that could not survive. Adrienne published it monthly until May 1926. After twelve issues, she was in financial straits. To pay debts, she sold her personal collection of 400 books, many inscribed to her from their authors.

a petition of protest

By the late 1920s, Shakespeare and Company had become one of the sights of Paris, written up in magazines, a must for book lovers, a place for pilgrimage. Sylvia was assumed to be rich from the notoriety of Ulysses but most of any money received went to Joyce. By 1927 the bulk of her time was taken up fighting pirates. Bryher sent a quantity of files to the shop to house the huge volume of paperwork this generated.

In America, a peddler of raunchy prose and pornography, Samuel Roth, published instalments of Ulysses in his magazine Two Worlds Monthly without consultation, permission or payment. Sylvia and Joyce organized a petition of protest; 167 people signed it, among them Sherwood Anderson, Richard Aldington, E.M. Forster, Bryher, Mary Butts, H.D., Albert Einstein, T.S. Eliot, Havelock Ellis, Gaston Gallimard, André Gide, Ernest Hemingway, Bravig Imbs, Storm Jameson, D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Mina Loy, Maurice Maeterlinck, André Maurois, W. Somerset Maugham, Middleton Murry, Bertrand Russell, Virgil Thomson, Paul Valéry, Hugh Walpole, H.G. Wells, Rebecca West, Thornton Wilder, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats… Sylvia invited Gertrude to sign, but she did not do so. An injunction was obtained against Roth in December 1928. He became a pariah in literary circles but continued his pirating under a different name.

P.L.M.

Mother became an increasing problem throughout this publishing saga. Sylvia was alarmed at the quantity of prescription drugs she took, ostensibly for a heart condition. Eleanor Beach made regular visits to her chicks, as she called her three daughters, in whatever country they happened to be. In Paris, she bought clothes for Sylvia – and lamented her lack of interest in them. Then she moved on to Italy to stay with Holly. Sylvia tried to be dutiful and sometimes went with her, but told Holly she would go mad if she spent too long in her mother’s company.

Eleanor wrote to Sylvia of the pain of her ‘terrible marriage’, and of how Sylvester’s temper was like ‘a spiked band into my head’ so she felt her ‘brain will give way’. She said she was nearly crazy and having a breakdown. Sylvia called it a ‘wretched business’ that their mother had to keep the pretence of a marriage and go back to