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

with contemporary English writing, on the Left Bank, close to her – the English equivalent of Maison des Amis des Livres. She was optimistic such a project would succeed. There was nothing like it in Paris. Wealthy Anglo-American Paris residents, who neither lived in nor particularly frequented the Latin quarter, were served by Brentano’s, the American booksellers at 37 avenue de l’Opéra, and by Galignani and W.H. Smith in rue de Rivoli, but those sellers did not specialize in books by new writers or sell the experimental literary journals.

Adrienne had kept her own bookshop going throughout the war; she would help at every stage, and guide Sylvia through the bureaucratic difficulties of not being a French citizen. She knew of prospective customers and was certain others would follow.

Buoyed by such assurances, Sylvia began the project that shaped her life and became central to the modernist revolution. Adrienne’s support and experience was a key incentive. Their mutual love and trust parented the project. Paris was affordable. That was important. Sylvia’s savings and her mother’s capital would go much further than in either New York or London.

Making money was not a prime consideration. Neither of them was much good at that. Both loved books and their authors. Books were essential to civilized living. Both saw their work as contribution rather than commerce. They were agents between writers and readers, guardians and disseminators of ideas that suggested how lessons might be learned and a better world come about, how human nature might be understood more deeply and language taken to the edges of meaning.

Adrienne earned enough to pay the bills, buy stock and live simply and freely. Sylvia hoped to do the same. Neither foresaw quite how famous and enduring their ‘book plan’ would turn out to be.

boutique à louer

Adrienne found premises for Sylvia at 8 rue Dupuytren, a street away from her own shop in rue de l’Odéon. One day she saw what had been a laundry, with the shutters closed and a sign outside advertising ‘Boutique à Louer’. The concierge, an elderly woman in a black lace cap, ‘la mère Garrouste’ everyone called her, showed them round. Sylvia knew at once the space would work for her: two rooms divided by a glass door, a fireplace in the front room, a kitchenette with a gas stove out the back.

setting up shop

‘It was great fun getting my little shop ready for the book business,’ she said. In late August her mother wired her 3,000 dollars without expectation of reimbursement. Poor Little Mother briefly became Dear Little Mother. ‘O mother dear, you never never have failed your undeserving children at a critical moment!!!’ Sylvia wrote, ‘and how can I tell you in a letter what a D.L.M. you are but there are hugs and kisses…’

Adrienne suggested Sylvia paint the walls of the new shop the same battleship grey as in her place. ‘Never a-bit, say I!’ was Sylvia’s response. She chose beige and yellow and what she considered a sunny look. An upholsterer, whom she described as ‘humpbacked’, covered the damp laundry walls with hessian. A carpenter made shelves, magazine racks and display cases for the windows. Sylvia and Adrienne picked up furniture in the Paris flea market – ‘you really found bargains in those days’: one table for displaying books, another for tea and conversation, comfortable chairs, library steps and ladders, a desk, brass scales, lamps, vases for flowers. Sylvia put down two black and white woollen rugs she had bought cheaply in Serbia. In time, on every available bit of wall, she hung photographs and portraits of writers past and present, the faces of the voices that inhabited the shelves.

Her intention was to specialize in modern innovative writing. But such books in English were expensive to buy and ship from abroad. Their purchase had to be in pounds and dollars. When that price was converted into francs, with a margin of profit added, they became luxuries few Left Bankers could afford.

Sylvia gave Cyprian a list of titles to send from the States. To stock her shelves despite limited funds, and to create a lending library, she scoured the second-hand Paris bookshops. In one frequently visited treasure house near the Bourse, the owner, Monsieur Chevillet, led her by candlelight down to the cellar and left her to rummage. She took the train and ferry to London and talked to booksellers whom she admired and hoped to emulate.

London shops and their owners

Harold Monro, with his Poetry Bookshop at 35 Devonshire Street in Bloomsbury, was a mentor and inspiration. In 1913 he had turned an eighteenth-century house into a shop, publishing house and meeting place for poets and readers. At his own expense he published poetry and edited The Poetry Review. The shop was on the ground floor. The poet Amy Lowell called it a room rather than a shop. There was a coal fire, comfortable chairs, a cat and a couple of dogs. Offices were on the first floor, poetry readings were held on the second, and at the top were two attic rooms for poets and artists who needed cheap lodgings. Weekly terms were 3s 6d for rent and 3s 6d for breakfasts. The sculptor Jacob Epstein stayed some months, as did the poets Robert Frost and Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. There was no space for Wilfred Owen so he rented rooms above the coffee shop opposite.

Sylvia observed the welcoming atmosphere, how visitors were made to feel at home, how ambience created identity. She gleaned information about the English language poetry publications in circulation, many of them of fleeting life span, ‘the little presses that died to make verse free’ as Gertrude Stein put it. Such magazines survived for a while on a shoestring, for the most part went unnoticed by the censors and were the preferred outlet for writers who took risks. ‘If a manuscript was sold to an established publisher its author was regarded as a black sheep,’ Bryher wrote. ‘We were permitted to appear without loss of