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

Signs in German declared these buildings under the ‘protection’ of the German army. Cannon and machine guns were set up at the Arc de Triomphe. Swastikas replaced French flags on government buildings, monuments, shopping arcades, the main hotels. At the Place de l’Étoile, helmeted Wehrmacht troops marched to a Nazi band while Parisians wept. ‘In the evening, great depression,’ Adrienne wrote in her diary.

Paris was violated. The only people with cars were the invaders. Sylvia told friends and family she could manage on Bryher’s allowance. ‘You know I can take care of myself and am a prudent person.’ Each day she and Adrienne foraged for food – fruit, meat and butter. She still had fifty-nine library members. She welcomed students and refugees at the bookshop and took on a Jewish assistant, Françoise Bernheim, who was obliged by the Nazis to wear a large yellow star and was forbidden to enter theatres, cinemas, cafés, concert halls, or to sit on park benches or even those in the street.

Sylvia and Adrienne came under Nazi scrutiny. Sylvia was warned of the imminent confiscation of her books. Adrienne was suspect for having written a condemnation of Nazism and anti-Semitism. She helped Gisèle Freund get to Buenos Aires as the guest of Victoria Ocampo, the feminist Argentine writer who founded the literary journal Sur, and in May 1940 she hid Walter Benjamin and Arthur Koestler in her apartment. Koestler, who had been imprisoned in Spain for airing anti-fascist views, was writing Darkness at Noon.

the death of Joyce

James Joyce, Nora and Giorgio fled to Vaud in Switzerland. Lucia was left in a clinic in Pornichet run by a Dr Delmas. Joyce found a sanatorium prepared to take her in Switzerland but he could not get a resident’s permit for her. He was devastated at leaving her in occupied France – and at the lukewarm reception of his Finnegans Wake.

Sylvia’s father died in November 1940 in Princeton at the age of eighty-eight, unaware of the engulfing war. Two months later, Joyce died in Switzerland on 13 January 1941 of peritonitis from a duodenal ulcer. Giorgio wrote to Maria Jolas, co-editor with her husband, Eugène, of transition, ‘I hope Dr Delmas has not put Lucia in the street as needless to say I cannot pay him nor can I communicate with him.’ After that, neither he nor Nora wrote to or visited Lucia or paid for her care. Joyce had appointed Harriet Weaver his literary executor. She paid Lucia’s medical fees and living expenses, visited her and was her contact with the outside world. The Delmas clinic was bombed during the war, which left it run down and ill-equipped. Lucia remained there as a patient until 1951.

the enemy alien

America formally joined the Allies in the war against Germany after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. Sylvia was then officially declared an enemy alien. ‘My nationality, added to my Jewish affiliations, finished Shakespeare and Company in Nazi eyes,’ she wrote.

We Americans had to declare ourselves at the Kommandatur and register once a week at the Commissary in the section of Paris where we lived. (Jews had to sign every day.) There were so few Americans that our names were in a sort of scrapbook that was always getting mislaid. I used to find it for the Commissaire. Opposite my name and antecedents was the notation ‘has no horse’. I could never find out why.

Shakespeare and Company was watched by the Nazis. It housed an American, a Jew and subversive literature. One day in December 1941 a uniformed SS officer called, ostensibly wanting to buy Finnegans Wake. Sylvia, sensing a trap, told him apologetically she could not help him. He called again. At the end of the month she was informed her books were to be confiscated and her shop closed. The concierge of 12 rue l’Odéon offered her the unoccupied top floor apartment in the building free of charge. Within hours Sylvia, Adrienne, the concierge and Françoise moved everything up there: books, photographs, furniture, memorabilia, letters and magazines, the freedom and daring, the fun and the hopes. A handyman took down the shelves, painted out the name Shakespeare and Company and put up the outside shutters.

Twenty-two years of magical thought, imagination, new voices and history were boxed into hiding, away from the jackboots and swastikas. For fascists, burning of books was an item of agenda. So was the imprisonment and murder of ‘enemies of the people’, of whom Sylvia was now one. She was American, she was lesbian, she befriended Jews, published Ulysses, traded in ‘Noxious and Unwanted Literature’ and opposed and derided this army of men.

internment

Late in August 1942, at nine in the morning, they came for her. Sylvia hastily packed woollens and a copy of the Bible and Shakespeare and was herded on to a truck. Adrienne saw her off. The concierge cried. On the truck with her was a friend, Katherine Dudley, ‘dressed as though for a vernissage’, and other American and British women. The German soldiers stopped at addresses where American or ‘alien’ women might be. If they came out without anyone, the other prisoners cheered.

They were put in a former zoo in the Bois de Boulogne: ‘the monkey house as we called it.’ German soldiers counted them repeatedly but never agreed on the same number. After ten days they were taken to a remote railway station and, in sealed cattle trucks, transported to an internment camp at Vittel in the Vosges mountains near the German border.

Vittel, a ‘showcase’ concentration camp, had been a spa resort of hotels grouped around parkland before being commandeered by the Nazis. Barbed-wire fencing, patrolling guards and Nazi flags signalled its transformation from resort to prison. It was populated mainly with British and American women who had been residing in France. Most of the hotels had heating and running water; prisoners did their own cooking, had monthly visitors and received mail and Red Cross food parcels. There was no killing or beating of inmates,