No Modernism Without Lesbians

by Diana Souhami

  Paris was violated. The only people with cars were the invaders. Sylvia told friends and family she could manage on Bryher’s allowance. ‘You know I can take care of myself and am a prudent person.’ Each day she and Adrienne foraged for food – fruit, meat and butter. She still had fifty-nine library members. She welcomed students and refugees at the bookshop and took on a Jewish assistant, Françoise Bernheim, who was obliged by the Nazis to wear a large yellow star and was forbidden to enter theatres, cinemas, cafés, concert halls, or to sit on park benches or even those in the street.

  Sylvia and Adrienne came under Nazi scrutiny. Sylvia was warned of the imminent confiscation of her books. Adrienne was suspect for having written a condemnation of Nazism and anti-Semitism. She helped Gisèle Freund get to Buenos Aires as the guest of Victoria Ocampo, the feminist Argentine writer who founded the literary journal Sur, and in May 1940 she hid Walter Benjamin and Arthur Koestler in her apartment. Koestler, who had been imprisoned in Spain for airing anti-fascist views, was writing Darkness at Noon.

  the death of Joyce

  James Joyce, Nora and Giorgio fled to Vaud in Switzerland. Lucia was left in a clinic in Pornichet run by a Dr Delmas. Joyce found a sanatorium prepared to take her in Switzerland but he could not get a resident’s permit for her. He was devastated at leaving her in occupied France – and at the lukewarm reception of his Finnegans Wake.

  Sylvia’s father died in November 1940 in Princeton at the age of eighty-eight, unaware of the engulfing war. Two months later, Joyce died in Switzerland on 13 January 1941 of peritonitis from a duodenal ulcer. Giorgio wrote to Maria Jolas, co-editor with her husband, Eugène, of transition, ‘I hope Dr Delmas has not put Lucia in the street as needless to say I cannot pay him nor can I communicate with him.’ After that, neither he nor Nora wrote to or visited Lucia or paid for her care. Joyce had appointed Harriet Weaver his literary executor. She paid Lucia’s medical fees and living expenses, visited her and was her contact with the outside world. The Delmas clinic was bombed during the war, which left it run down and ill-equipped. Lucia remained there as a patient until 1951.

  the enemy alien

  America formally joined the Allies in the war against Germany after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. Sylvia was then officially declared an enemy alien. ‘My nationality, added to my Jewish affiliations, finished Shakespeare and Company in Nazi eyes,’ she wrote.

  We Americans had to declare ourselves at the Kommandatur and register once a week at the Commissary in the section of Paris where we lived. (Jews had to sign every day.) There were so few Americans that our names were in a sort of scrapbook that was always getting mislaid. I used to find it for the Commissaire. Opposite my name and antecedents was the notation ‘has no horse’. I could never find out why.

  Shakespeare and Company was watched by the Nazis. It housed an American, a Jew and subversive literature. One day in December 1941 a uniformed SS officer called, ostensibly wanting to buy Finnegans Wake. Sylvia, sensing a trap, told him apologetically she could not help him. He called again. At the end of the month she was informed her books were to be confiscated and her shop closed. The concierge of 12 rue l’Odéon offered her the unoccupied top floor apartment in the building free of charge. Within hours Sylvia, Adrienne, the concierge and Françoise moved everything up there: books, photographs, furniture, memorabilia, letters and magazines, the freedom and daring, the fun and the hopes. A handyman took down the shelves, painted out the name Shakespeare and Company and put up the outside shutters.

  Twenty-two years of magical thought, imagination, new voices and history were boxed into hiding, away from the jackboots and swastikas. For fascists, burning of books was an item of agenda. So was the imprisonment and murder of ‘enemies of the people’, of whom Sylvia was now one. She was American, she was lesbian, she befriended Jews, published Ulysses, traded in ‘Noxious and Unwanted Literature’ and opposed and derided this army of men.

  internment

  Late in August 1942, at nine in the morning, they came for her. Sylvia hastily packed woollens and a copy of the Bible and Shakespeare and was herded on to a truck. Adrienne saw her off. The concierge cried. On the truck with her was a friend, Katherine Dudley, ‘dressed as though for a vernissage’, and other American and British women. The German soldiers stopped at addresses where American or ‘alien’ women might be. If they came out without anyone, the other prisoners cheered.

  They were put in a former zoo in the Bois de Boulogne: ‘the monkey house as we called it.’ German soldiers counted them repeatedly but never agreed on the same number. After ten days they were taken to a remote railway station and, in sealed cattle trucks, transported to an internment camp at Vittel in the Vosges mountains near the German border.

  Vittel, a ‘showcase’ concentration camp, had been a spa resort of hotels grouped around parkland before being commandeered by the Nazis. Barbed-wire fencing, patrolling guards and Nazi flags signalled its transformation from resort to prison. It was populated mainly with British and American women who had been residing in France. Most of the hotels had heating and running water; prisoners did their own cooking, had monthly visitors and received mail and Red Cross food parcels. There was no killing or beating of inmates, no forced labour.

  Sylvia, because of her migraines, had a medical certificate from her doctor, Thérèse Bertrand-Fontaine. She was first treated at the makeshift hospital then interned in one of the hotels with American nuns, teachers, prostitutes, a poet or two, and a woman who had been living at the Paris Ritz and had brought all her jewels with her. Sylvia fastened her pearl necklace for her in the mornings. When Adrienne visited, Sylvia gave her some of the Red Cross luxuries: condensed milk, sugar, coffee, prunes, chocolate, cigarettes.

  She thought of little but release. After four months, on Christmas Eve 1942, she and some other American women were moved to a run-down hotel in the camp. She said she was put in the sort of room where you slit your wrists. There was a rat hole in it, the bath tub was coated with mud and there was no running water.

  Adrienne petitioned an American art collector, Tudor Wilkinson, who had secured the release of his cross-dressing wife by giving Hermann Göring a painting. Wilkinson gave Adrienne hope he could secure Sylvia’s release too. When this did not happen, she appealed to Jacques Benoist-Méchin, who had translated excerpts of Ulysses into French for the edition she published in 1929. He had welcomed the German occupation, was a collaborator, a fascist, an SS general and an ambassador in Paris for the enemy. Like Gertrude Stein, in perverse times Adrienne cosied up to the enemy for life-saving favours. Benoist-Méchin secured Sylvia’s release on health grounds.

  After six months’ internment, in March 1943 announcement of Sylvia’s sudden release from the Vittel camp was made over the loudspeaker. She stuffed clothing and food supplies saved from Red Cross parcels into her rucksack and borrowed money for her train fare back to Paris. The camp officials issued a document saying she could be reconvicted at any time. She suffered survivors’ guilt: ‘What if my dear dear friends left behind in the camp were not released? This thought spoiled all the pleasure of release for me.’

  Her experience was different from Jewish internees who could not appeal to collaborators in high places. After she left, Jews originally from Poland but with American passports were interned at Vittel. A poet, Yitzhak Katznelson, taken there two months after Sylvia was released, wrote in his diary: ‘There is not a single Jew here who believes that he will be allowed to remain alive.’ He buried a copy of a poem he had written, The Song of the Murdered Jewish People, in the camp’s gardens. He died in Auschwitz in 1944. Sylvia’s Paris assistant, Françoise Bernheim, was murdered in Auschwitz after a round-up of Paris Jews. Paul Léon, who took over Joyce’s affairs from Sylvia, was also murdered in a concentration camp in 1942. Katznelson’s poem was exhumed after the war and published in Paris in 1945.

  a twilit life

  ‘I came back to Paris and hid, for fear they’d think I wa
s well enough to go back,’ Sylvia said after her return to the city. She ‘disappeared’ from the streets; she kept the apartment above the shop at 12 rue l’Odéon as her legal address, but did not go there. She led a twilit existence, hidden by Sarah Watson and her partner, Marcelle Fournier, who ran the students’ hostel at 93 boulevard Saint-Michel. ‘I lived happily in the little kitchen at the top of their house’, Sylvia said. She visited Benoist-Méchin and thanked him for freeing her. He assured her that if she was again interned, he would again secure her release.

  She registered weekly with the police. In the evenings she ate with Adrienne and they worked to edit and circulate, secretly, from person to person, clandestine copies of Les Éditions de Minuit, an underground publishing enterprise of texts unacceptable to the Nazis. Friends in the Resistance wrote for the series under pen names. ‘François La Colère’ was Louis Aragon. ‘Forez’ was François Mauriac. ‘Mortagne’ was Claude Morgan, editor of the underground paper Libération. Gide and Paul Éluard contributed. Adrienne made the first French translation of John Steinbeck’s The Moon is Down. Each copy of the Éditions was inscribed in French: ‘This book, published with the aid of literary patriots, has been printed under the oppression in Paris.’ Penalties for them all, if detected, were more devastating than any inflicted by the Society for the Suppression of Vice or the Director of Public Prosecutions. If apprehended, they risked imprisonment and death.

  waved lavatory brushes

  The Occupation ended on 24 August 1944. Sylvia and Adrienne went to boulevard Saint-Michel to watch the Liberation of Paris. Hitler had given orders for the city to be reduced to rubble if it could not be held. French Resistance fighters attacked the departing army. Onlookers cheered and waved lavatory brushes as the Germans retreated. Enraged, Nazi soldiers set fire to buildings and shot indiscriminately at Parisians. Sylvia and Adrienne lay on their stomachs. They saw blood on the pavements and Red Cross stretchers picking up casualties when the shooting stopped.

  Two days later they again joined the crowds to cheer the triumphal march of General de Gaulle, leader of the Free French, down the Champs-Elysées. Jacques Benoist-Méchin was arrested with other collaborators. His death sentence was later commuted on appeal to life imprisonment. He was freed after ten years.

  Sylvia dismissed what others described as her courage in staying in occupied Paris. In her self-deprecating way, she said she did not have the energy to flee and that ‘nothing happened to us or the other monuments’.

  after the war

  Much had happened to Sylvia, to Adrienne, to the world and its monuments, to integrity, lightness of heart and freedom of spirit. Paris was a different place and Sylvia a different woman. War snuffed out the dreams, questioning and playful imaginations of the modernists. Friends urged Sylvia to reopen Shakespeare and Company but there was no going back. She was fifty-eight. The world could not again be as it once was. There was a reckoning to be had: two world wars of astonishing impiety, a hundred million deaths… Civilization had turned out to be a carapace and peace on Earth an illusion. Art was a luxury. The focus was on how to acquire food, how to survive.

  Bryher, as ever, gave Sylvia money and sent parcels. Janet Flanner sold her numbered uncut first edition of Ulysses to the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York and gave Sylvia the $100 she got for it. Sylvia gave 5,000 books and journals from Shakespeare and Company, stored in boxes in her flat above the shop, to the American Library, her former rival. She did charity work at a hospital, worked on translations, wrote her memoirs.

  Lucia

  Lucia stayed imprisoned by her own psyche. Dr Delmas died in 1951, his clinic at Pornichet closed and Harriet Weaver, staunch as ever, arranged Lucia’s move to St Andrew’s Hospital in Northampton, where she had been treated in 1935. Harriet made all payments. Lucia remained there until her death in December 1982, thirty years later. Treatment with phenothiazines subdued most of her symptoms except torpor. Nonetheless, she spoke of her longing to leave: to go to Paris, to Switzerland, to Galway, to London.

  Gisèle

  Gisèle Freund fell foul of the authorities in Argentina. In 1950 Life magazine ran photos by her of a bejewelled and pampered Eva Perón; images that showed up the hypocrisy of the party line of austerity. Their publication caused a rift between America and Argentina. Life was blacklisted in Argentina. Gisèle fled again with her negatives, this time to Mexico, where Frida Kahlo befriended her. She photographed her and Diego Rivera. Not until 1953 did she make Paris her permanent home. She was then the only woman to work for Magnum, the photo agency founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa. In 1954 she was refused entry to America because her name was on Senator Joseph McCarthy’s blacklist. Magnum then fired her, fearful her socialist views would damage the agency’s reputation. Gisèle continued as a photojournalist, alone and uncompromised – another courageous lesbian chronicler not silenced by men of power.

  the swooping down of death

  Cyprian died of cancer of the bladder in 1951. She was fifty-eight. Unbeknown to Sylvia, she had been seriously ill for a year. Jerry, Cyprian’s partner of twenty-four years, gave Sylvia the news. That year, too, Adrienne became ill with rheumatism and fainting spells. Unable to manage, she sold La Maison des Amis des Livres, her little grey bookshop that so inspired Sylvia and was at the spiritual heart of Paris for three decades. In autumn 1954 she was diagnosed with Ménière’s disease. The following May, she wrote:

  I am putting an end to my days. I am no longer able to tolerate the noises that have martyred me for eight months or the tiredness and suffering I have endured these recent years. I go to my death without fear. I found a mother on being born here. I shall likewise find a mother in the other life.

  On 18 June she left this note on top of her personal papers, then overdosed on sleeping pills. Sylvia found her in a coma the following morning. Adrienne died at 11 p.m. in hospital. ‘She died last night. I’m glad she hasn’t got to go on suffering any more,’ Sylvia told Bryher.

  Of her own suffering at such a loss, Sylvia wrote:

  Can see no remedy at all for the swooping down of death on someone you love… the realization that the person is gone for good… The feeling of incompleteness is one of death’s worst cruelties. Sometimes you wish you had left with her as she suggested, she knew what living without her was going to be like. She knew everything.

  Adrienne

  Katherine Anne Porter wrote to Sylvia of how she thought of her and Adrienne together as one ‘beautiful living being’, and of ‘that pathetic fallacy of thinking of us all as immortal… we could never hear of each other’s death!’ She recalled Adrienne:

  with her firmness and calmness and humorous wit, in her long grey beguine’s dress and her clear eyes that could undoubtedly see through millstones… a whole space of life comes back to me: that little pavilion and garden at 70 bis rue Notre-Dame des Champs, with you and Adrienne at dinner there and such good talk! And your flat above 12 rue de l’Odéon, the parties there, the sparkle of life in everybody present, which you two could always bring out. And your wonderful books that I loved to roam around among, the best place I knew in Paris…

  Sylvia carried on. Her circumspect, brief memoir, Shakespeare and Company, was published in 1959. That same year, sponsored by the Cultural Center of the American Embassy in Paris, she researched and staged a ten-week exhibition, ‘The Twenties: American Writers and Their Friends in Paris’. The age of post-war reconstruction looked back at the pre-war years. As a front of house exhibit, Sylvia and Gertrude Stein’s widow, Alice B. Toklas, sat at a café table in front of a mural photo of the Dingo bar while a pianola played George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique.

  Sylvia gave radio talks, lectures and interviews as asked. She sold what was left of her Joyce archive, her ‘Joyce collection’ as she called it, to the University of Buffalo for $55,510. The payment gave her financial ease, though too late in the day. The university awarded her an honorary doctorate. In June 1962, dressed in Irish tweeds and conveye
d there in a horse-drawn carriage, she opened the James Joyce Tower & Museum in Sandycove near Dublin – the setting of the first scenes in Ulysses.

  Sylvia’s death

  Four months later, on 5 October, she died of a heart attack alone in her Paris apartment at 12 rue de l’Odéon. A friend, the writer Maurice Saillet, who had worked with Adrienne at La Maison des Amis des Livres, found her two days later.

  In the homage that followed Sylvia’s death, Bryher wrote of her that ‘no citizen has ever done more to spread knowledge of America abroad’. T.S. Eliot said only a 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.