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

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 was 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,