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

scattering of people knew how important a part Sylvia and Adrienne played in the artistic and intellectual life of those interwar years.

Holly arranged with Princeton University for their associate librarian for special collections, Howard C. Rice, to sort all the books, business papers, correspondence, photographs, paintings and memorabilia still in Sylvia’s apartment. Thirty-one shipping cases were sent to Princeton filled with more than two thousand books, hundreds of photographs, thousands of papers, as well as artefacts. Some four thousand other books, the core lending library of Shakespeare and Company – not the avant-garde Company, but Shakespeare, the Elizabethan poets, eighteenth-century novelists, Romantics and Victorians – went to the University of Paris English department.

‘I was not interested in what I could see of Paris through the bars of my family cage,’ Sylvia had said as early as 1903. Her Paris was created by her fearless, bright and open mind, her courage and passion for new writing. Publishing Ulysses, a book that changed the concept of fiction, was her great act of generosity and defiance. Her ‘book plan’, Shakespeare and Company, ‘so much more than a bookshop’, was for twenty-two years the hub for the dissemination of new ways of seeing and saying. Books were civilizing objects, of that she was sure. She was ‘the avenging angel’ of the small bookstore, the lover of authors and ideas, of the challenging magazines that lasted only a few issues, the poems that earned no money, and of a raw unpublished manuscript no commercial publisher dared touch.

1 Taken from the Sikhs by the British in 1849 and now in Pakistan.

2 ‘They are not men, they are not women, they are Americans.’

3 A women’s college in Pennsylvania.

4 Using these manuscripts as a base, Sylvia arranged a Walt Whitman exhibition in the late 1920s.

5 A variation on bollocks.

6 Equivalent to about £500,000 in 2020.

7 Sonia Delaunay, a pioneer of the Orphism movement in art, did a painting of the Bal Bullier in 1913.

BRYHER

‘When is a woman not a woman?

When obviously she is sleet and

hail and a stuffed sea-gull.’

H.D.

Passport photograph of Annie Winifred Ellerman, aka Bryher, Bryher Papers General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

Bryher felt trapped in the wrong body. Even as a child she viewed her birth gender as a trick, a mistake. She saw herself as a boy who needed to escape from the physical cage of a girl. She was tormented by pressure to have curls, wear frocks, be called by her birth names, Annie Winifred, or her nickname, Dolly.

Adrienne Monnier said it was impossible to speak about Bryher’s style of dress: ‘it is distinguished by absolutely nothing; everything about it is neutral to an extreme. When I see her I simply want to brush her beret…’

Bryher did not want the patronymic of her father, the matronymic of her mother, or the name of any husband of convenience. Bryher is one of the Isles of Scilly off the Cornish coast, a part of the world she came particularly to love. She chose to be defined by the sea, the cliffs and by a landscape beyond gender. Nothing pleased her more, she said, than getting her hair cut short. Short hair and her chosen name distanced Bryher from the daughter she could not and would not be.

Barbered hair and a changed name declared resistance. Radclyffe Hall was Dear John to her partner Una Troubridge, and she had the curls painted out from a portrait of her made when she was a child named Marguerite. The society painter Gluck, whose birth name was Hannah Gluckstein, insisted on ‘Gluck, no prefix, no suffix, no quotes’ in the art world, and had her hair cut at Truefitt gentlemen’s hairdresser in Bond Street; Alice B. Toklas cropped Gertrude Stein’s hair with the kitchen scissors.

Money shaped Bryher’s life and work – she was born into a vault of it. Access to great wealth meant the power to do good as she saw it. ‘I have rushed to the penniless young, not with bowls of soup but with typewriters,’ she wrote. She became a patron of modernism. She was the rock and saviour of her partner, the poet H.D. – Hilda Doolittle. She funded the Contact Publishing Company in Paris, supported James Joyce and his family with a monthly allowance, gave money to Sylvia Beach and subsidized Margaret Anderson’s Little Review in New York. She started the film company POOL Productions in Switzerland, financed its experimental films, and founded Close Up, the first film magazine in English. She built a Bauhaus-style home in Switzerland. She supported the emerging psychoanalytical movement in Vienna, and funded Freud and other Jewish intellectuals hounded by the Nazis to help them get out of Germany and Austria.

Bryher’s allegiance was to new ways of saying and seeing, civil liberties, gender equality. ‘I was completely a child of my age,’ she said, by which she meant the age of modernism, of new ways of seeing and saying.

Bryher’s life was long, her interests wide. Subversive in the causes she supported and in her revisionist ideas of gender and relationship, she made two lavender marriages with gay men, one to secure her inheritance and pacify her parents, the other to secure adoption rights for H.D.’s child. She accepted the open sexual relationships of those with whom she was involved and was vocal and dedicated in her opposition to fascism. And yet there was something neutral ‘to the extreme’ about Bryher’s demeanour. She did not drink, smoke or party. She liked unfussy food (toast and Yorkshire pudding), seemed humourless, stayed quiet when others were talking and was overlooked in a group. No one fell in love with her, though numerous people were hugely grateful for her help and the way she realized their dreams. Among her writings were a number of novels in which the hero was a twelve-year-old boy and it was