No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  Adrienne said Americans appreciated in Europe in general, and in France in particular, what they did not have at home, ‘what is calm, old, graceful and made by hand’. At the same time they brought, she said, ‘without spoiling the decor’, new ways of seeing, and the technology and innovations of the twentieth century. As a French woman she was drawn, through Sylvia, to read contemporary American writers not then known in France. Americans ‘have democracy in their blood’, she said, ‘it is their tradition, their reason for being’. In literature, this love of democracy allowed strictures and boundaries to break and new ideas and thinking to come in.

  In appearance, they were opposites: Adrienne wore full ankle-length skirts that made her look stouter than she was – and she was stout, ‘all curves and placidity’. Sylvia was thin and nervous. Both were strong, independent, intelligent and imaginative. Both effused the same warm humanity. They were open-minded and neither was answerable to a man or to men.

  Janet Flanner, who moved to Paris in 1922 with her lover, Solita Solano, and as Genêt began her fortnightly ‘Letter from Paris’ for The New Yorker three years later, viewed them as a couple. She wrote with affection and admiration of ‘these two extraordinary women—

  Mlle. Monnier, buxom as an abbess, placidly picturesque in the costume she had permanently adopted, consisting of a long, full gray skirt, a bright velveteen waistcoat, and a white blouse, and slim, jacketed Sylvia, with her schoolgirl white collar and big colored bowknot, in the style of Colette’s Claudine à l’École.’

  among the valiant Serbs

  The war festered on and put Sylvia’s ‘book plan’ on hold. Only when Germany surrendered in November 1918 could she consider how to earn, save, and forward the project. She had no capital, knew nothing about business and all she knew about books was that she loved them. She and Adrienne discussed possibilities. Initial thinking was for Sylvia to open a branch of La Maison des Amies in London or Greenwich Village. Adrienne favoured New York. ‘She doesn’t like English things,’ Sylvia said. Sylvia’s mother, too, encouraged the New York idea and was willing to put her savings into it, but her capital was insufficient to make it viable.

  From January to July 1919, to earn money and help with post-war reconstruction, Sylvia and Holly worked for the American Red Cross in Belgrade. Ten million fighting men had died in the war. Eight million horses. Nor did the dying end with the cessation of fighting. The influenza pandemic after the war killed more than thirty million people worldwide. Sylvia’s unit ‘distributed pyjamas and bath towels among the valiant Serbs’. She scorned the male hierarchy of the Red Cross: men getting the managerial jobs and higher wages, women taking orders and doing the menial work.

  In Serbia, at the military hospital where she worked at Palanka, sixty miles from Belgrade, she saw the reality of war: ‘destruction, deprivation, skeletons of horses by the roadside, I don’t know if the war killed them or just hunger.’ In an epidemic of typhoid,

  20 to 30 patients died every day – the bodies piled in a room and left till someone had a spare moment to put them away for ever in the ground. They were mostly Bulgarian prisoners so no one bothered much about it.

  The water supply came from a well containing a German prisoner who had fallen in some time ago and had not as yet been removed. There were 30 beds for 250 men and the patients were crowded together in layers on the floor, absolutely no nursing provided for them, their uniforms rotting on them. The dying men had their pockets looted by the prisoner attendants, who never attended to them except to perform this last little service for them.

  London was not the town to start my shop in

  The Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919, marked the official end to the killing. Sylvia wrote to Cyprian that she had more or less decided to open her bookshop in London:

  I really don’t know where I shall find the capital, and they say the town is crammed at present – no rooms whatsoever.

  She crossed the Channel to look for premises to rent and voiced hope that Cyprian, Holly and their mother would all meet with her in September to help get the venture launched.

  Within weeks she was back in Paris. ‘One look was enough to show me that London was not the town to start my shop in.’ Adrienne thought a better idea would be a little American bookshop stocked 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 p
rofit 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 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 or books taken out. The allowance for each bunny was two volumes for a fortnight. But she had no catalogue of books in circulation, nor was she assiduous at updating cards, recalling overdue books or imposing fines. Some members, such as James Joyce, took out multiple volumes, kept them for years and paid no fees or fines.

  Her early customers were French and came via Adrie
nne. André Gide’s was the first subscription. Adrienne brought him round from rue de l’Odéon on the opening morning. Sylvia said he was tall, handsome and wearing a broad-brimmed Stetson and a cape. ‘Rather overwhelmed by the honor’, she wrote out his card: ‘André Gide: 1 Villa Montmorency, Paris XIV; 1 year, 1 volume.’ Gide was 47. His, friendship with Oscar Wilde, defence of homosexuality, failed marriage and sexual relationship with his teenage student Marc Allégret made the uncensorious friendship of Adrienne and Sylvia important to him. He went to Adrienne’s on Thursdays and to Sylvia’s on Mondays to read the latest issues of the French, American and British literary journals.

  The poets Jules Romains – he was a proponent of ‘Unanimism’, collective consciousness, as opposed to individualism – and Valery Larbaud, who wrote poems about love and desire, were subscribers. Larbaud gave Sylvia a little cracked china ornament of Shakespeare’s birthplace which he had had since he was a child. Sylvia called him the godfather of her shop. The symbolist poet Léon-Paul Fargue, the biographer and novelist André Maurois, the poet Paul Valéry – all were customers too. Louis Aragon used come and recite his surrealist poems. Sylvia said one called ‘La Table’ had nothing in it but la table: ‘the table the table the table the table…’ Another poem, ‘Suicide’, just had all the letters of the alphabet: ‘a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z’.