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

Ulysses but, with understatement, admitted ‘this was not a commercial venture’.

I handed over most of the thirty copies to Joyce for distribution among his family and friends, and sold none until, years later when I was hard up, I did sell and get a stiff price for one or two I had left.

She published a little volume, Pomes Penyeach, of thirteen of his poems, each decorated with Lucia’s lettrines, but again shifted few copies.

Joyce wanted her to arrange production of Exiles, an early play of his about a husband and wife relationship. Sylvia was not a theatre producer and lack of money, contacts or commercial viability were obstacles. Nor was she eager to be the publisher of his next literary masterpiece, Finnegans Wake, which he called ‘Work in Progress’ until it was finished.

Sylvia’s last publishing effort for Joyce in 1929 was of twelve essays by twelve of his friends, including McAlmon and Beckett, about Finnegans Wake. It was called Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. Sylvia designed the cover, but it was not a ‘can’t wait to read it’ affair. An explanatory sentence read:

Imagine the twelve deaferended dumbbawls of the whowl abovebeugled to be the contonuation through regeneration of the urutteration of the word in pregross.

Sales were thin.

Sylvia was exhausted by her ‘Joycean-Shakespeare and Company labours… It was a great relief to think that Miss Weaver and Mr Eliot were going to take care of Finnegans Wake.’ But Harriet Weaver’s interest in Finnegans Wake was also lukewarm. On 4 February 1927 she wrote to Joyce:

I do not care much for the darknesses and unintelligibilities of your deliberately-entangled language system. It seems to me you are wasting your genius.

Joyce was so upset he took to his bed. Nora asked him why he did not write ordinary books people could understand.

betrayal

Sylvia and her shop were badly affected by the Depression. The devalued dollar slashed the spending power of expatriate Americans, and tourists stopped coming to the city. Hemingway and writers living on fixed or erratic incomes went home. In 1930 Sylvia gave Joyce 13,000 francs in overdraft from Shakespeare and Company, became ill with migraines and pneumonia, and learned that yet another pirated edition of Ulysses was being distributed in Cleveland, Ohio.

By the end of 1931 both she and Joyce agreed the only way to stop this ungovernable piracy was to sell Ulysses to a mainstream American publisher large enough to negotiate its legality, control distribution and own the rights to all sales.

This Joyce then did with total disregard for Sylvia. The book, in his view, was his property. In February 1932, Random House New York offered him an advance of $2,500 for world rights to Ulysses with a 15 per cent royalty on sales – Bodley Head was their London imprint. They agreed to take on all risks of the court battle and then to publish the book unexpurgated. Joyce accepted the offer and signed the rights of Ulysses over to them. He did not tell Sylvia of the deal. He treated her as his representative in Paris, not his publisher. Sylvia, entirely excluded from the arrangement, learned of it on 2 April from Joyce’s lawyer, Paul Léon, a friend of Giorgio’s wife, Helen. Léon showed Sylvia a letter Joyce had written to his Random House editor, which he used in the preface to the legitimized edition:

My friend Mr Ezra Pound and good luck brought me into contact with a very clever and energetic person Miss Sylvia Beach… This brave woman risked what professional publishers did not wish to, she took the manuscript and handed it to the printers.

Joyce was a man whose trade was words. Miss Sylvia Beach had taken his manuscript and handed it to the printers. She was a clever and energetic messenger who had delivered a parcel.

By 1932, Ezra Pound was condemning Jews as usurers and supporting fascism. He supported Mussolini, whom he met in Italy on 30 January 1933. Sylvia wrote to Holly that Joyce:

has written a preface to the new edition connecting me up with Ezra Pound in the first publishing of Ulysses. So as you might say he has not only robbed me but taken away my character.

She lost all trust in him. She wrote to Holly, ‘He thinks, like Napoleon, that his fellow beings are only made to serve his ends. He’d grind their bones to make his bread.’

Only when offended to the core would Sylvia criticize her hero so roundly. Adrienne wrote to Joyce, telling him he asked too much of Sylvia and of herself and they could do no more for him. Sylvia transferred taxi-loads of paperwork about him to Paul Léon, who managed Joyce’s affairs thereafter. No longer able to afford to pay for an assistant, she parted with Myrsine, who went to the Joyces to help care for Lucia – they briefly became lovers. Sylvia painted the shop, bought additional shelving and tried to regenerate her ‘book plan’ and look to the future despite this massive betrayal and a backdrop of darkness from encroaching war. She had done all she could and more for James Joyce. When he had an opportunity to repay her, he did not do so.

hard times

For Joyce, there was a terrible nemesis. Positive news about Ulysses was pushed into the shadows by Lucia’s troubles. At his fiftieth birthday party, on 2 February 1932, she had a psychotic breakdown. Beckett’s presence at the party contributed to her distress. She threw a chair at her mother and Giorgio had her committed to hospital. Crude and terrifying treatments were sprung on her. She was kept in bed in solitary confinement for seven weeks and injected with ‘bovine serum’. She threw things out of the window of her locked room. She was put in a straitjacket. Her return home was unmanageable.

In 1933, Hitler and his National Socialist party in Germany began setting up extermination camps for Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and all people they viewed as tainted. In America, Prohibition ended and Judge