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

prestige in Contact, Broom, transition, the Transatlantic and This Quarter.’ Most of all, Sylvia saw in Monro’s bookshop another individual enterprise like Adrienne’s, a place for the expression and dissemination of ideas, hope for civilization, hope for imagination and sensibility beyond the scourge of war.

On her way back to the boat train, she stopped in Cork Street at the premises of the publisher and bookseller Charles Elkin Mathews, co-founder of The Bodley Head. She found him ‘sitting in a sort of gallery with books surging around and creeping up almost to his feet’. She gleaned from him more contacts and ideas about rule breaking and experiment. From 1894 to 1897, in partnership with John Lane, Mathews published the periodical The Yellow Book. Aubrey Beardsley was its art editor and it was associated in people’s minds with banned and illicit fiction and alternative lifestyles: the decadence of J.K. Huysman’s À rebours, translated into English as Against Nature, and the homosexuality of Oscar Wilde.

W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and the poet laureate Robert Bridges were all published by Mathews. Sylvia ordered their titles. As she was leaving, she admired some framed drawings on the walls by William Blake. Mathews got out two ‘beautiful original drawings’ by him and sold them to her for what she thought an ‘absurdly small sum’. She went home to Paris with two trunks full of treasures.

lending library and book-hop

The shop’s name came to her one morning as she lay in bed. A specialist signwriter did the lettering SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY over the door. Down one side column by the window he painted ‘Lending Library’ and down the other ‘Book-hop’. Sylvia left it like that for a while, then had ‘hop’ painted over with ‘Sellers’. Charles Winzer, a half-Polish, half-English artist friend of Adrienne’s, painted a signboard of an egg-headed Shakespeare, wearing a gold medallion chain, to hang outside above the entrance door. On a night when Sylvia forgot to take this sign in, someone stole it. Winzer painted another and that was stolen too. Adrienne’s younger sister Marie, an embroiderer and illustrator, painted the third, ‘a rather French-looking Shakespeare’ Sylvia thought, which no one stole.

The setting was personal and welcoming: a place to visit even for those with little money, the sort of shop that creates the identity of a city. The erstwhile laundry at rue Dupuytren became Shakespeare and Company’s location for two years.

Sylvia moved in with Adrienne in her fourth-floor apartment in rue de l’Odéon. Adrienne was the homemaker and cook. Bryher thought her the best cook she knew and wrote about her roast chicken dinners, the smell of beeswax and herbs, the murmur of civilized conversation.

By 1919, two of Sylvia’s three declared great loves had elided: Adrienne Monnier and Shakespeare and Company. Her destiny was sealed by a visit on a windy day to the proprietor of the House of the Friends of Books. She and Adrienne saw life from the same point of view. Their imaginations and open minds shaped their enthusiasm for the modernist voices that so shocked those with conservative views: the patriarchs and censors, the architects and implementers of repressive rules and laws.

Shakespeare and Company opens its doors

Shakespeare and Company opened on Tuesday 19 November 1919. Preparing for the day had taken Sylvia four months. Displayed in the window were works by Shakespeare, Chaucer, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Adrienne’s favourite English-language book, Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat. Inside, the stock was eclectic, with the contemporary and experimental shelved alongside the literary canon. There was Tagore, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Henry James and Gertrude Stein. On review racks were copies of Atlantic Monthly, The Dial, Chapbook, The Egoist, Broom, New English Review, Little Review.

Sylvia Beach in the doorway of her Paris bookshop, Shakespeare & Company © Hulton Archive / Getty Images

Framed on the walls, and declaring allegiance to civil and sexual liberty, were two photographs of Oscar Wilde in velvet breeches and cloak, and letters of his to Bosie – Lord Alfred Douglas. Also displayed were the Blake drawings sold so cheaply to Sylvia by Elkin Mathews, and manuscript writings and scribblings of Walt Whitman, which Agnes Orbison, Sylvia’s maternal aunt, had retrieved from his wastepaper basket when, as a student at Bryn Mawr,3 she had gone with a friend to visit him.4 Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass poetry collection, with his message of integrity to self and resistance to suppression, inspired and gave courage to Sylvia, Bryher and Natalie Barney. Mostly the photographs and books that lined the walls and shelves were of and by men. Sylvia was a feminist but not a zealous promoter of women’s writing. She was a navigator, steering away from the old order and into the new.

The shutters were hardly off the windows before the shop filled with people, Sylvia said. And so it stayed. ‘From that moment on, for over twenty years, they never gave me time to meditate.’ Customers did not want only to buy books – she might have made some money if they had. Shakespeare and Company quickly evolved into a bookshop, library, book club, bank, post office, hotel, referral agency and a place to meet and talk about books and life and to have tea. Sylvia was soon effecting introductions and suggesting contacts for young American writers, finding them places to live, finding them paid work, advising on any and every subject.

Many, or probably most, of her clients were short of cash. For students from the University of Paris, borrowing books was affordable, buying them was not. So her shop, like Adrienne’s, became a subscription library too.

early bunnies

Sylvia was not a strict librarian. She called her subscribers ‘bunnies’, from the French abonné. Each bunny had a card with her or his name and address, date of initial subscription and record of payments made and due. The idea was to produce this card when books were borrowed, ‘or when he or she was broke’. Sylvia recorded the title and date of the book