No Modernism Without Lesbians by Diana Souhami (latest books to read txt) 📕

B. Toklas first set eyes on Gertrude Stein, hear bells in her head at such a significant encounter, she wrote about their meeting with the same sense of thrall.

James Joyce © Culture Club / Getty Images

Joyce had been working on Ulysses for seven years. In it, with Aristotelian unity, he compressed into twenty-four hours the whole existence of one man, Leopold Bloom. The chosen day, 16 June 1904, the day Joyce met his wife, Nora Barnacle, became the canvas for Ulysses. On that day, no thought, act, or happening was too intimate, visceral or secret to record. For societies embarrassed to mention bodily functions and where much that was thought and done must not be said, here was a book doomed to be condemned and denied by the guardians of propriety.

Joyce divided Ulysses into eighteen ‘Episodes’. He took the theme of Homer’s Odyssey about Odysseus’s journey home from the Trojan War to his wife, Penelope, in Ithaca. Joyce thought the Odyssey ‘all-embracing… greater and more human, than Hamlet, Don Quixote, Dante, Faust’. In his version, Ulysses – Odysseus in Latin – became Leopold Bloom, an anti-hero, a pacifist, father, traveller and artist. His voyage home was from in and around Dublin. The wine-dark sea of Homer’s day was the snot-green Irish sea, the monster Cyclops was a bigoted drunk who goaded and bullied Bloom; the winds that blew Odysseus and his men off course were the ‘hot air’ of the newspaper men. Once home, rather than slaying his rival suitors, Bloom mournfully observed the impression his wife Molly’s lover had left in their bed, told her of his day, kissed her bottom and fell asleep with his head the wrong way down the bed.

James Joyce looked to Homer for inspiration for his modernist masterpiece. Lesbian modernist poets looked to Sappho and the sixth century BC.

Adamant that all his book must be printed or none of it, Joyce would not accede to censors or accept publication of a bowdlerized version. Readers in search of obscenity, profanity or accessible dirt had to dig for it. ‘There’s less than ten per cent of that in my book’, he maintained. Nonetheless, there was enough to startle and offend those programmed to take offence. Buried not so deep were the words fuck, cunt, gleet (a discharge caused by gonorrhoea), figging (inserting a piece of ginger into the anus or vagina to produce a burning sensation); there was Bloom masturbating while listening to a Catholic choir and watching an Irish virgin show her legs; or sitting contentedly on the lavatory above his own rising smell; there was Molly Bloom’s menstruation and sexual appetite… But such happenings were embedded in page on page of classical reference, enigma, puzzle, stream of consciousness, foreign phrase and obscure tangent. Ulysses never was or could be an easy pornographic read.

Miss Harriet Weaver fought and lost her battle of Ulysses

Sylvia knew of Joyce’s discouraging endeavours to get Ulysses past the censors. Literary lesbian friends in London and New York – Harriet Weaver and Margaret Anderson – had already done their best, risked much, spent much, endured insult from critics and been thoroughly thwarted in their efforts to shepherd this ‘most dangerous book’ to publication.

Political activist and magazine editor Harriet Shaw Weaver © Wikimedia Commons

In London, Harriet Weaver and Dora Marsden tried to serialize it in 1919 in their literary magazine The Egoist, which they launched in 1914. The Egoist evolved from The New Freewoman. Both were radical feminist papers, funded by Harriet, who inherited a fortune from her mother.

Harriet’s prim demeanour belied her progressive views. ‘I had a narrow upbringing in a small English provincial town,’ she said of herself. Her father, a doctor, was an evangelical Christian with ‘a deep sense of sin’. Her mother, when she found Harriet in her teens reading Adam Bede, a book by a woman who lived with a man who was not her husband, took the book from her and summoned the vicar. Such suppression fuelled Harriet’s passion for freedom, justice and women’s rights, qualities she found in Dora Marsden: ‘a remarkable person, a genius and also very beautiful to look upon’, she said of her.

The Egoist, subtitled ‘an individualist review’, quickly became England’s most important modernist periodical. The poet Richard Aldington was assistant editor; Joyce, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Amy Lowell, H.D., Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Remy de Gourmont – all were contributors. Harriet’s declared aim was:

to probe to the depths of human nature… to regard nothing in human nature as foreign to it, but to hold itself ready to bring to the surface what may be found…

In her enthusiasm and support for James Joyce, Harriet moved far from narrow English provincialism. It was her ambition and intention to publish everything he wrote. She sent him money to enable him to keep writing and she supported him and his difficult family. The writer Rebecca West said that without Harriet Weaver, it was ‘doubtful whether Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom would have found their way into the world’s mind’. Before Ulysses, from February 1914 to September 1915 Harriet had tried to serialize Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. When her printer, Ballantyne Hanson and Co., baulked in one instalment at printing fart and ballocks,5 she sacked them. The next printer, without consulting her, excised from chapter 5 a description of a girl standing by the sea’s edge:

Her thighs, fuller and soft hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips where the white fringes of her drawers were like featherings of soft white down.

Harriet sacked them too. ‘I can but apologise to you’, she wrote to Joyce on 28 July 1915, ‘for this stupid censoring of your novel… I hope you will not have this annoyance when the novel comes to be printed in book form.’

the Egoist Press

To achieve book form, she funded her own publishing company, the Egoist Press. Thirteen printers refused to set the Portrait unexpurgated, so she had the sheets sent over from Joyce’s New