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

eluded Nancy but much of her personality stayed true to her Presbyterian roots: ‘Sylvia had inherited morality’, Janet Flanner said of her,

and you could feel it in her and actually enjoy it too in her bookshop, which she dominated with her cheerfulness, her trust in other human beings and her own trustworthiness for good things, like generosity, sympathy, integrity, humor, kind acts, and an invariably polite démodé vocabulary.

Sylvia Beach’s principles were Christian – no indulgence, concern more for others than herself, work as contribution rather than for personal profit – yet she became a champion of outspokenness and unorthodoxy in others. She actively resisted political oppression, and was at the cutting edge of what was new in writing.

She had no inherited wealth. Usually she was broke and had to appeal to relatives and wealthy friends for money. She was no businesswoman – too generous and idealistic ever to earn much.

She did not call her deep and lasting love for Adrienne Monnier lesbian, although that is what it was. Reticent about sexual reference to herself, she referred to Adrienne as her ‘friend’ and to the love between other lesbian couples, like Bryher and Hilda Doolittle or Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, as ‘companionship’. Only about Natalie Barney was she outspoken, perhaps because Natalie was unabashed in using direct language for her own desires. Of Natalie’s famed Friday afternoon salons, Sylvia wrote: ‘At Miss Barney’s one met lesbians; Paris ones and those only passing through town, ladies with high collars and monocles, though Miss Barney herself was so feminine.’ Her words appeared to distance herself from such company, though Natalie’s salon attendees were part of her social circle too.

She was always a lesbian, a feminist and a suffragist, even though she chose not to talk about her sexuality. When racism and sexism reached a zenith of viciousness with Hitler and his Third Reich, she remained in Paris as the German army marched in. She was interned in a concentration camp for having employed and protected a Jewish assistant, for being American and for stocking James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in her bookshop, but not for being lesbian.

the living Paris

Paris always held magic for Sylvia Beach. She was there in 1903 with her parents and sisters, Holly and Cyprian, the same year Gertrude Stein arrived to join her brother Leo. (Cyprian, who became an actor in silent films, also chose her own name. Her birth name was Eleanor, after their mother.) Their father, the Reverend Sylvester Woodbridge Beach, was on a three-year assignment from Princeton, New Jersey, with the American Church in Paris. His vain hope was for this Paris post to placate his wife, who was always unhappy when with him but less so if in Europe, and in particular in Paris. ‘Paris was paradise to Mother; an Impressionist painting’, Sylvia wrote. She described her parents as Francophiles, as was she, though the Paris she experienced with them was not the vibrant city of modernist innovation she knew existed:

I was not interested in what I could see of Paris through the bars of my family cage. I never seemed to get anywhere near the living Paris. This was not my life but Father’s.

The Reverend Beach’s Paris life was insulated from cultural shake-up and lesbian visibility, from the salon d’automne held at the Grand Palais, where innovative artists showed groundbreaking work, and from Gertrude Stein’s ‘cubico futuristic’ prose. He held weekly devotional meetings ‘not largely attended’ at the American Church at 21 rue de Berri, close to the Champs Elysées. The Church’s Ladies’ Benevolent Association made garments – 600 in one year – for the Christmas fêtes. The Reverend Beach gave pastoral help to American students in the city. ‘Last night father had to get out of his bed at 2 and go to see a young architect who was dying,’ Sylvia wrote to a friend. Her father laboured at learning grammatical French, which he spoke with an execrable accent. Her mother produced entertainments by the students. Sylvia escaped with Carlotta Welles, whose father had a château in Touraine, near the little town of Bourré. She stayed with her for weeks at a time. There was a walled garden by the river Cher, a private island reached by a punt. They read poetry, bird-watched, walked; ‘that was the way our long, long friendship began’.

Church protocol could not conceal the horror of Sylvia’s parents’ relationship or ameliorate its effect on her and her sisters. The Reverend and Mrs Beach were loving towards their daughters, assiduous in helping them and encouraging of their freedom, but their own marriage was ghastly.

poor little mother

Sylvia’s mother seemed like a lost soul, stifled by the church and her marriage. Her daughters referred to her as ‘P.L.M.’, ‘Poor Little Mother’. She was born Eleanor Orbison in 1864 in the colonial city of Rawalpindi,1 the fourth child of Presbyterian missionaries. Her father became ill when she was four and the family moved back to America, to Bellefonte, a small town in Pennsylvania. Eleanor’s father died and her mother, anxious about bringing up four children alone and without money, sent her, the youngest, to live with wealthy relatives at Greenhill Farms in Overbrook, 200 miles away. Eleanor remembered that as a glorious time. Her cousin Holly was the same age, there were ponies to ride, woodland picnics, painting and music lessons.

Pastoral joy ended when her mother abruptly took her back home, to a regime of Christian piety. ‘Granny taught us to knit’, Sylvia later wrote of her mother’s mother, ‘and taught herself Greek so as to be able to read the Greek Testament at 6 a.m. before rising. Granny planned to go to Heaven when she died, and was determined to get all her relatives and friends past the gate of it.’

Eleanor was sent to Bellefonte Academy, a church school. Aged sixteen, she became engaged to the Latin teacher, Sylvester Woodbridge Beach. He was twenty-eight, a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary. What precipitated this engagement is not on record, but