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

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 conveyed 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