No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  ‘I’ll do him in, so help me fucking Christ! I’ll wring the bastard fucker’s bleeding blasted fucking windpipe!’

  (The Reverend Mr Love raises high behind the celebrant’s petticoats revealing his grey bare hairy buttocks between which a carrot is stuck.)

  Mr Harrison raged, threw the manuscript pages on the fire and chased his wife into the street. John Quinn in America had the only other manuscript copy. Sylvia, Joyce and Darantiere had to wait for him to send photographed copies of the destroyed pages.

  Sylvia’s father was a minister, Harriet Weaver’s a doctor and an evangelical Christian. Both Sylvia and Harriet seemed prim in aspect. Virginia Woolf had said Harriet symbolized ‘domestic rectitude’. Carrots up clergymen’s bottoms were not the customary narrative for daughters of the pious.

  By allowing Joyce to go into proof after proof, the cost to Sylvia in time and expense was huge. His alterations alone added 4,000 francs to the quoted printing price. She took on an assistant to help with all the extra administration: a Greek subscriber, Myrsine Moschos, who was with her for nine years.

  Joyce was delighted to hear of my Greek assistant. He thought it a good omen for his Ulysses. Omen or no omen, I was delighted to have someone to help me now, and someone who was a wonderful helper.

  Stratford on Odéon

  In the middle of this fraught publication process, Sylvia moved shop. Adrienne, as ever, was the enabler. The antique dealer opposite her in rue de l’Odéon wanted someone to take over her lease. Though the timing was inconvenient for Sylvia, it was an opportunity too good to miss: she and Adrienne could be closer and their events cross-cultural. Adrienne’s customers were interested in the young American and English writers flocking to Paris. Adrienne was working to publish a French translation of Ulysses. At the end of the street in boulevard Saint-Germain were the literary cafés – the Flore, the Deux Magots. There was more floor space in the new premises, there was a room at the back with a fireplace, and two small upstairs rooms that Sylvia could rent out, as Harold Monro did in London. The composer George Antheil was to live up there for several years. His Ballet Mécanique, first performed in 1926, was played with pianos, drums, xylophones, aeroplane propellers, pieces of tin and amplifiers. Sylvia described him as a ‘fellow with bangs, a squished nose and a big mouth with a grin in it. A regular high school boy.’

  In the summer of 1921, Sylvia, Holly, Myrsine and Myrsine’s sister Hélène carted everything to the new shop: baskets of unanswered correspondence marked Urgent, furniture, books, magazines, the portraits, Whitman manuscripts, Blake drawings and Lucky the black cat and Teddy the dog. Adrienne called their new set-up ‘Odéonia’ because the glass windows of their shops reflected each other. Joyce called it Stratford on Odéon. The two bookshops defined the street.

  Moving and adapting the new premises involved more expense. On 22 September 1921, Sylvia asked Holly to lend her 1,000 francs:

  My carpentry bill will be handed in any day now, and mother, who was going to lend me all the money for my moving expenses, had to stop off in the midst having… had a great deal of expense getting Cyprian equipped as a rising star. My business is going well and I could tackle the carpenter bill if I didn’t have to put every single centime aside to pay the printer of Ulysses five thousand francs on the 1st of December. He requires it and naturally the cheques from subscribers will not arrive in time for that first payment. I am making an average of 100 a day in the shop but I have to keep paying pounds to London publishers out of that and my living expenses which I try to make as low as possible. If you could lend me a thousand I would start to pay you back each month after January all the fortune I owe you. I shall be sure to take in about 4000 a month this winter. My business has increased since I moved and it was a good move in every way. But I’ve had to pay a good many of the moving expenses. Holly dear you must not hesitate to refuse if you can’t afford to loan me anything. You have a right to turn with the ‘poorest sort of worm’. ‘Hell’s Bells’ as Uncle Tom would explain.

  Holly sent the money: ‘Holly dear’, Sylvia wrote on 24 October,

  I shan’t forget you sending me all that money and some day you are going to get an awful shock when you see me un-lending it again to its owner. ha ha…

  Sylvia’s constant requests for money might seem like importuning, but the service she gave needed subsidy. Janet Flanner called her:

  the great amateur woman publisher… She exerted an enormous transatlantic influence without recognizing it… she had a vigorous clear mind, an excellent memory, a tremendous respect for books as civilizing objects and was a really remarkable librarian.

  In Janet Flanner’s view, no man would have given James Joyce a comparable publishing service: ‘The patience she gave to him was female’, she said, ‘was even quasi maternal in relation to his book.’ She called Sylvia ‘the intrepid, unselfish, totally inexperienced and little moneyed young lady publisher of Ulysses in Paris in 1922’.

  the first reading

  On 7 December 1921, two months before publication, Sylvia arranged for the first reading of Ulysses at Adrienne’s bookshop. Advanced warning was sent to Les Amis that the language was bold. The bookshop was packed; 250 people crowded in. The lights failed at one point but the event was a success. Readings at Shakespeare and Company followed and people began to view the place as a Joycean workshop. Joyce went on making corrections, alterations and additions to proofs, and then corrections, alterations and additions to the corrections, alterations and additions. And then corrections… At least a third of his novel was added at proof stage. No mainstream publisher would have countenanced such expense and madness. There was no way Joyce would ever, could ever, consider his book finished. It moved to final proof only when Sylvia and Darantiere in despair could take no more changes. Joyce’s prose blossomed and blossomed because Sylvia allowed and financed this, but the unceasing proofreading and changes were a nightmare. Her own eyesight worsened and so did her headaches.

  2 February 1922

  The autumn of 1921 came and went. No Ulysses. Sylvia and Darantiere vexed over production detail – like getting the right blue of the Greek flag for the binding. Darantiere’s search took him to Germany but the blue was on flimsy paper so he lithographed the colour on to white card.

  Sylvia had promised the book would be out for Joyce’s birthday on 2 February 1922. He did not send back final corrected proofs until 31 January. Darantiere worked through the night. On the morning of Joyce’s fortieth birthday, a Wednesday, Sylvia went to Gare de Lyons to collect two advance copies from the Dijon train. She took one to Joyce as his birthday present and put the other in the window of Shakespeare and Company. Within hours there was a queue of people wanting to order a copy. There was an average of one to six errors per page. Attempts to correct these mistakes in subsequent printings led to the creation of new errors. To stir the confusion, Joyce added deliberate mistakes to challenge his readers and delight his critics.

  Copies arrived at the shop through February and March. Joyce signed the deluxe editions and helped Sylvia and Myrsine send out others. The average selling price in Paris was 136 francs. In England and Ireland it was around £40. Though no publisher had risked their imprint for it, and bookshops were chary of stocking it, this was a notable literary event. Reviewers and critics responded. John Middleton Murry in The Nation and Athenaeum called it ‘a remarkable book of inspissated obscurities’ and Joyce ‘a half-demented man of genius who tore away inhibitions and limitations’. Arnold Bennett called Joyce an ‘astonishing phenomenon in letters’. The Observer’s reviewer said: ‘… the very obscenity of Ulysses is somehow beautiful and wrings the soul to pity.’ Virginia Woolf said it was the work of ‘a self-taught working man… egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating’. And George Bernard Shaw called the book obscene, foul-mouthed and foul-minded: ‘I am an elderly Irish gentleman and if you imagine that any Irishman much less an elderly one would pay 150 francs for such a book you know little of m
y countrymen.’ In fact, some Irishmen paid 350 francs for the deluxe edition.

  Whatever this book was or was not, it was a literary happening. More than the thousand copies were needed. Harriet Weaver compiled extracts of reviews for publicity. Fan mail and comment came from far-off parts of the globe. By the end of 1922, Ulysses was Shakespeare and Company’s bestselling book. That year also, in England, T.S. Eliot published The Waste Land and Virginia Woolf brought out Jacob’s Room; in New York, F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Beautiful and Damned and The Diamond as Big as the Ritz; in Paris, Marcel Proust published the Sodome et Gomorrhe sequence of his epic À la Recherche du temps perdu; and at the Gare de Lyon, a briefcase with the entire year of Ernest Hemingway’s writing was stolen and not retrieved.

  Nora wants to leave

  In March 1922, Harriet, responding to yet another request by Joyce for money, sent him £1,500. Which totalled £8,500 she had gifted him.6 Her original intention was to give him the means to write, but this stretched to help with living and medical expenses, Nora’s clothes, care for Lucia, the hotels where the family took holidays. Harriet agreed with Joyce that after his efforts with Ulysses he needed to take a holiday. Nora saw a different opportunity. She had had enough. Joyce had published his unreadable book, she was homesick for Ireland, she had not been back for ten years, she would take Harriet’s money and go home to her mother, Annie Barnacle, in Galway.

  It was not a realistic escape. There was no place for Nora with her mother. Nora was born in Galway workhouse on 21 March 1884. Her father, a baker, was illiterate and an alcoholic. She had been left with her maternal grandmother, Catherine Healy, when she was two. She worked as a laundress when she was twelve and was a chambermaid in a Dublin hotel when she met Joyce.

  Joyce begged her not to leave him. Ireland, he warned, was in turmoil, she would not be safe, he could not manage without her, the worry affected his eyes. Nora set off with Lucia and Giorgio at the end of March. Joyce collapsed in Shakespeare and Company, beseeched McAlmon to help him and in April wrote imploring letters to Nora:

  ‘My darling, my love, my queen: I jump out of bed to send you this. Your wire is postmarked 18 hours later than your letter which I have just received. A cheque for your fur will follow in a few hours and also money for yourself. If you wish to live there (as you ask me to send two pounds a week) I will send that amount (£8 and £4 rent) on the first of every month… Evidently it is impossible to describe to you the despair I have been in since you left. Yesterday I got a fainting fit in Miss Beach’s shop and she had to run and get me some kind of drug. Your image is always in my heart. How glad I am to hear you are looking younger! O my dearest, if you would only turn to me even now and read that terrible book which has now broken the heart in my breast and take me to yourself alone to do what you will! I have only 10 minutes to write this so forgive me. Will write again before noon and also wire. These few words for the moment and my undying unhappy love. Jim’

  Ireland was a war zone. Annie Barnacle’s house was small. Nora’s children were unhappy there and within weeks the family was reunited in Paris to continue their chaotic life.

  I have read pages 690 to 732

  James Douglas, editor of London’s Sunday Express, did his worst for Ulysses on 28 May 1922. ‘Beauty and the Beast’, he headlined his swipe. This, he said, was ‘the most infamously obscene book in ancient or modern literature’:

  All the secret sewers of vice are canalised in this book’s flood of unimaginable thoughts, images, and pornographic words. And its unclean lunacies are larded with appalling and revolting blasphemies directed against the Christian religion and against the holy name of Christ…

  The law enforcers got involved on 12 December. In accordance with an act of 1876, a customs officer at Croydon airport intercepted and confiscated a posted copy of Ulysses. The importer ‘protested the seizure’ and called the book ‘a noteworthy work of art by an author of considerable repute which is being seriously discussed in the highest literary circles’.

  The customs official sent the contentious noteworthy work of art to Sir Archibald Bodkin, Director of Public Prosecutions, with a request for his early opinion. Within days, Sir Archibald sent his report to the Home Office. He had not got on well with Ulysses:

  As might be supposed I have not had the time, nor may I add the inclination to read through this book. I have however read pages 690 to 732. I am entirely unable to appreciate how those pages are relevant to the rest of the book or indeed what the book itself is about. I can discover no story. There is no introduction which gives a key to its purpose and the pages above mentioned, written as they are as if composed by a more or less illiterate vulgar woman, form an entirely detached part of the production. In my opinion there is more, and a great deal more than mere vulgarity or coarseness, there is a great deal of unmitigated filth and obscenity.

  The book appears to have been printed as a limited edition in Paris where I notice the author, perhaps prudently, resides. Its price no doubt ensures a limited distribution. It is not only deplorable but at the same time astonishing that publications such as The Quarterly Review, the Observer and The Nation should have devoted any space to a critique upon Ulysses. It is in the pages mentioned above that the glaring obscenity and filth appears. In my opinion the book is obscene and indecent and on that ground the Customs authorities would be justified in refusing to part with it.

  It is conceivable that there will be criticism of this attitude towards this publication of a well-known writer; the answer will be that it is filthy and filthy books are not allowed to be imported into this country. Let those who desire to possess or champion a book of this description do so.

  This guardian of the nation’s morals did not have a clue what the book was about. He had skipped to the final soliloquy by Molly Bloom – who was a woman, and moreover an uneducated Irish woman. Another ardent moral crusader, the Home Secretary Sir William Joynson-Hicks – he raged a relentless war against the work of D.H. Lawrence – agreed with Sir Archibald, whom he knew from the Garrick Club:

  Fortunately the book is too expensive to command a wide circle of readers. The fear is that other writers with the love of notoriety will attempt to write in the same vein.

  Joynson-Hicks signed interception warrants instructing postal confiscation. Any chance of orderly sales of Ulysses ended. The grand old men of England were clear about what ‘their’ women should be allowed to hear, say, read or be. The lesbian publishers of Ulysses were equally clear in their resistance to male tyranny and stupidity.

  In 1926, the critic F.R. Leavis asked that Galloway and Porter, a respected Cambridge bookshop in Sidney Street, founded in 1902, be allowed to import copies of Ulysses for his lectures and for the university library. Sir Archibald quashed the idea:

  It was hardly credited that this book shall be proposed as the subject of lectures in any circumstances but above all that it should be the subject of discussion and be available for the use of a mixed body of students.

  Silence was the way to preserve the status quo. Women must be kept in their place, protected by and answerable to men like Sir Archibald.

  a copy stuffed down his trousers

  For Sylvia, struggle and chaos defined the distribution of Ulysses from writer to reader. Getting subscribed copies to American readers was a problem. The United States Post Office confiscated and destroyed any sent through the mail. Ernest Hemingway helped devise a distribution plan, which involved a Canadian painter friend of his, Bernard Braverman. Ulysses was not banned in Canada. Sylvia shipped forty copies to Braverman at his Ontario address. Each day he then took the ferry to the States with a copy stuffed down his trousers. After a few weeks he got a friend to help until all subscribed copies were smuggled through. They were then sent to private addresses via American Express.

  The whole procedure was fraught, slow and costly. Sylvia had edited and published what came to be judged a modernist masterpiece, a turning point in the history of the novel. She and h
er shop were at the centre of this evolution. Her efforts brought fame, infamy and financial loss. Looking after Joyce took up swathes of her time and energy. She seemed to capitulate to his every need. ‘He is such a terribly nervous, sensitive man’, she wrote to Harriet Weaver on 8 June 1922. To keep going, she depended increasingly on gifts of money – from John Quinn, Harriet Weaver, Bryher, Bryher’s mother, Holly, Cyprian, Mary Morris, who was her mother’s wealthy cousin, Mary Morris’s granddaughter Marguerite McCoy in Overbrook, Pennsylvania…

  As recompense for all her efforts, production expenses and ‘several hundred francs postage’, Joyce gave her the manuscripts of Dubliners, Stephen Hero, which was part of the first draft of A Portrait of The Artist As a Young Man, and ‘A Sketch for a Portrait of the Artist’, written in his sister Mabel’s copybook, which Sylvia called the ‘most precious to me of all his manuscripts’.

  getting away

  Looking after Joyce distracted her from managing the shop and strained her relationship with Adrienne. She was, she said, prepared:

  to do everything I could for Joyce, but I insisted on going away weekends and every Saturday there was a tussle with Joyce over my departure for the country. If it hadn’t been for Adrienne pulling on my side I could never have got loose. Joyce as Saturday approached always thought up so many extra chores for me…