No Modernism Without Lesbians by Diana Souhami (inspirational books for women TXT) 📗

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 Adrienne. 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’.

At first, French writers went to Sylvia out of respect and affection for Adrienne, but they soon became part of the wider enterprise both women created. Of Paul Valéry, Sylvia wrote, ‘As a young student under the spell of La Jeune Parque I would never have believed that one day Valéry himself would be inscribing my copy and that he would be coming to bring me each of his books as they appeared.’ Léon-Paul Fargue did a drawing for her of her stove, left over from when the shop was a laundry.

suppressions across the sea

As for her English-speaking compatriots, Sylvia said she could not have foreseen, when she opened her bookshop in 1919, the extent to which her fortunes would be shaped by what she called ‘suppressions across the sea’. The Director of Public Prosecutions in England and the Society for the Suppression of Vice in America were the moral arbiters of what could or could not be published in their countries. They kept vigilant watch for sexually explicit prose, expletives and all they considered indecent, heretical or injurious to the mind of a maiden. These lawmakers and guardians had fixed ideas of what women were and where they belonged, and a horror of lesbians, anarchists and freethinkers. They viewed homosexuality as a wilful aberration, a corrosive perversion, and kept a long list of words deemed dirty enough, whatever their context, to contaminate society. They held inordinate allegiance to an unreconstructed government of patriarchs, the story of the Christian Trinity, and the national flag.

they couldn’t get Ulysses and they couldn’t get a drink

In America, frustration at censorship of free expression was compounded by Prohibition. The Temperance Movement succeeded in getting the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution ratified in 1919 and from 1920 to 1933 the drinking, sale or importing of alcohol was banned. Sylvia said the reasons for the exodus from America of almost every freethinking writer after the First World War were that they couldn’t get Ulysses and couldn’t get a drink.

Fear of censorship in Britain and America made both printers and publishers of books and journals averse to risk. Held equally responsible if a publication was deemed obscene, they faced proofs, plates and finished copies being seized and destroyed, court costs, fines, adverse publicity and even prison. In Britain, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce and Radclyffe Hall were among those whose work was censored. All moved abroad, as did any aspiring writer who wanted to speak out about unconventional desire. The Bloomsbury Group played safe. Whatever their sexual orientation, their references were too oblique, their allegiance too strong to the rose garden and croquet on the lawn for them to threaten the fabric of English society. E.M. Forster burned most of what he called his ‘indecent writings’. He kept his novel Maurice, his fantasy of a fulfilled homosexual relationship written in 1914, locked in a drawer; it was published posthumously in 1971. Vita Sackville-West kept her account of her passionate affair with Violet Trefusis locked in a Gladstone bag. Not until after Violet’s death in 1973 did Vita’s son, Nigel Nicolson, publish it as Portrait of a Marriage, not the portrait of a lesbian affair, which was how Vita had written it. Nigel Nicolson portrayed his father, Harold, Vita’s husband, as the hero of the saga, the man whose love and tolerance saved the marriage from Violet, the evil temptress. No mention was made that Harold Nicolson was himself homosexual or that Vita was dedicated to lesbian love.

Both Harold and Vita were delighted for Virginia Woolf’s Orlando to be published in 1928, the same year Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness was censored and destroyed, and to acknowledge Vita as its androgynous hero. Virginia Woolf’s sapphism was oblique, touched with genius, and bleached of scandal. Hers was the acceptable voice of gender diversity: discreet, nuanced and literary. Only Vita’s mother, Lady Sackville, dissented, called Virginia ‘that Virgin Woolf’, pasted a photograph of her in her copy of Orlando and captioned it:

The awful face of a mad woman whose successful mad desire is to separate people who care for each