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

She moved out immediately from Adrienne’s apartment to the rooms above Shakespeare and Company. It was not her way to make a display of hurt, or a fuss about jealousy or betrayal, but she could not live under the same roof as Adrienne and her new lover. She ate dinner with them most days and maintained a loving friendship and work partnership with Adrienne but the physical intimacy and commitment of being all in all to each other was broken.

Photographer Gisèle Freund © akg-images

Sylvia was nearing fifty and Adrienne was forty-four. Gisèle, who was twenty-eight, was a refugee, a German Jew. As a member of a student socialist group in Frankfurt, one of her first pieces of photojournalism in May 1932 had been of a march of anti-fascist students attacked by Nazi groups. Among the marchers were her friends Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht. She saw photography as evidence, a revelatory way to shape ideas, influence behaviour and define society. ‘When you do not like human beings you cannot make good portraits,’ she said.

She knew of the lesbian network in Paris and, when Hitler became Chancellor, she fled there, with her negatives strapped to her body to get past the border guards. Adrienne became her protector and arranged a cover-up marriage for her with Pierre Blum, a French national, to get her a visa to stay. (They divorced some years later.) She enrolled at the Sorbonne and wrote a doctoral thesis on photography in France in the nineteenth century. Adrienne published this under the Maison des Amis des Livres imprint, and in 1939 mounted an exhibition of her photographs.

Gisèle – a Jew, a German, a lesbian, a socialist, a spokesperson for Free France, a subversive – did not have a safe country. She documented social issues and took portraits of writers and artists, among them colour photographs of Virginia Woolf and of Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst.

For Sylvia, Adrienne’s love affair with Gisèle followed Joyce’s betrayal with Ulysses. She was not, like Natalie Barney, outspoken about desire or jealousy. Candid expression in Ulysses was one thing, her own feelings another. She responded to humiliation with a headache rather than confrontation. Hurt, she walked away without fuss.

‘Adrienne used to call me Fleur de Presbytère – “Flower of the Parsonage”’, she wrote.

Whether from my puritan ancestry or puritanical upbringing – once when I was in my early teens my mother told me ‘never to let a man touch me’ – I was always physically afraid of men. That is probably why I lived happily so many years with Adrienne.

It was a disconcerting comment on her parents’ relationship and her own sexual identity. It called for a scrutiny it did not receive. To the world she declared her love for Adrienne, who was more earthy and appetitive, more at ease than was she. But the devotion between them went beyond Sylvia’s puritanical reserve or other lovers. It was a lifelong lien.

hunkering down

Sylvia was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 1937 by the French government for her contribution to literature. She was characteristically self-effacing about her ‘little ribbon gibbon given me by the French’. All around her, honour was under threat. Enterprises like hers could not rise above the engulfing spectre of war. She increased the cost of library subscriptions and continued to host readings, but there were fewer people in Paris and even fewer who still bought books.

In July she hosted the launch of Bryher’s Paris 1900. Adrienne gave a reading of Bryher’s description of her visit, aged five, to the 1900 Exposition and after the launch Bryher hosted a dinner for Sylvia, Adrienne and friends at the Tour d’Argent, one of Paris’s finest restaurants. But the glory days of Shakespeare and Company were done. Its demise marked the end of the exuberance and freedom of modernist innovation. Old-style masculine domination steamrollered in with murder, repression, punishment and with winning defined by who best killed and destroyed. Sylvia talked of the ‘insanity’ of war. Samuel Beckett said she had a permanent worried look. ‘Everyone in Paris wants to flee to America away from wars and dictators,’ Sylvia wrote to her father. Bryher assured her that whatever happened to Shakespeare and Company, she would look after her. ‘I tried always to do what I could for the real artists and especially for the woman artist,’ she said. These women artists were lesbian. She set up a fund of monthly payments to cover Sylvia’s living expenses through the next seven years. And Carlotta Welles, who had married a banker, James Briggs, paid $120 a month so Sylvia could at least employ another assistant. But it was not possible to see a way forward. In the summer of 1937 she closed the shop and went to Jersey for six weeks. She seemed uprooted. Uncertain.

the occupying force

In May 1940, Germany declared war on Belgium, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Winston Churchill vowed to ‘wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime’.

Days before the German army invaded Paris, citizens left or tried to leave. Sylvia enquired at the American embassy but then decided to stay. Neither she nor Adrienne capitulated to intimidation. By June, when France surrendered to the Nazis, only about 25,000 people remained in the city. In boulevard de Sébastopol, Sylvia and Adrienne watched the stream of refugees trudge through the city from the north and north-east and from Belgium:

cattle drawn carts piled with household goods; on top of them children, old people and sick people, pregnant women and women with babies, poultry in coups and dogs and cats. Sometimes they stopped at the Luxembourg Gardens to let the cows graze there.

The refugees did not know where they could go. Abandoned dogs roamed the streets. On 14 June, Sylvia and Adrienne watched in tears as the German army marched in. ‘It was an awful experience. Horrible.’ German forces seized parliament buildings: the Chamber of Deputies, the Senate, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Naval Ministry.