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

to the rest of the book or indeed what the book itself is about. I can discover no story. There is no introduction which gives a key to its purpose and the pages above mentioned, written as they are as if composed by a more or less illiterate vulgar woman, form an entirely detached part of the production. In my opinion there is more, and a great deal more than mere vulgarity or coarseness, there is a great deal of unmitigated filth and obscenity.

The book appears to have been printed as a limited edition in Paris where I notice the author, perhaps prudently, resides. Its price no doubt ensures a limited distribution. It is not only deplorable but at the same time astonishing that publications such as The Quarterly Review, the Observer and The Nation should have devoted any space to a critique upon Ulysses. It is in the pages mentioned above that the glaring obscenity and filth appears. In my opinion the book is obscene and indecent and on that ground the Customs authorities would be justified in refusing to part with it.

It is conceivable that there will be criticism of this attitude towards this publication of a well-known writer; the answer will be that it is filthy and filthy books are not allowed to be imported into this country. Let those who desire to possess or champion a book of this description do so.

This guardian of the nation’s morals did not have a clue what the book was about. He had skipped to the final soliloquy by Molly Bloom – who was a woman, and moreover an uneducated Irish woman. Another ardent moral crusader, the Home Secretary Sir William Joynson-Hicks – he raged a relentless war against the work of D.H. Lawrence – agreed with Sir Archibald, whom he knew from the Garrick Club:

Fortunately the book is too expensive to command a wide circle of readers. The fear is that other writers with the love of notoriety will attempt to write in the same vein.

Joynson-Hicks signed interception warrants instructing postal confiscation. Any chance of orderly sales of Ulysses ended. The grand old men of England were clear about what ‘their’ women should be allowed to hear, say, read or be. The lesbian publishers of Ulysses were equally clear in their resistance to male tyranny and stupidity.

In 1926, the critic F.R. Leavis asked that Galloway and Porter, a respected Cambridge bookshop in Sidney Street, founded in 1902, be allowed to import copies of Ulysses for his lectures and for the university library. Sir Archibald quashed the idea:

It was hardly credited that this book shall be proposed as the subject of lectures in any circumstances but above all that it should be the subject of discussion and be available for the use of a mixed body of students.

Silence was the way to preserve the status quo. Women must be kept in their place, protected by and answerable to men like Sir Archibald.

a copy stuffed down his trousers

For Sylvia, struggle and chaos defined the distribution of Ulysses from writer to reader. Getting subscribed copies to American readers was a problem. The United States Post Office confiscated and destroyed any sent through the mail. Ernest Hemingway helped devise a distribution plan, which involved a Canadian painter friend of his, Bernard Braverman. Ulysses was not banned in Canada. Sylvia shipped forty copies to Braverman at his Ontario address. Each day he then took the ferry to the States with a copy stuffed down his trousers. After a few weeks he got a friend to help until all subscribed copies were smuggled through. They were then sent to private addresses via American Express.

The whole procedure was fraught, slow and costly. Sylvia had edited and published what came to be judged a modernist masterpiece, a turning point in the history of the novel. She and her shop were at the centre of this evolution. Her efforts brought fame, infamy and financial loss. Looking after Joyce took up swathes of her time and energy. She seemed to capitulate to his every need. ‘He is such a terribly nervous, sensitive man’, she wrote to Harriet Weaver on 8 June 1922. To keep going, she depended increasingly on gifts of money – from John Quinn, Harriet Weaver, Bryher, Bryher’s mother, Holly, Cyprian, Mary Morris, who was her mother’s wealthy cousin, Mary Morris’s granddaughter Marguerite McCoy in Overbrook, Pennsylvania…

As recompense for all her efforts, production expenses and ‘several hundred francs postage’, Joyce gave her the manuscripts of Dubliners, Stephen Hero, which was part of the first draft of A Portrait of The Artist As a Young Man, and ‘A Sketch for a Portrait of the Artist’, written in his sister Mabel’s copybook, which Sylvia called the ‘most precious to me of all his manuscripts’.

getting away

Looking after Joyce distracted her from managing the shop and strained her relationship with Adrienne. She was, she said, prepared:

to do everything I could for Joyce, but I insisted on going away weekends and every Saturday there was a tussle with Joyce over my departure for the country. If it hadn’t been for Adrienne pulling on my side I could never have got loose. Joyce as Saturday approached always thought up so many extra chores for me…

He wanted her undivided attention, but the two women, out of habit and need, went at weekends to Adrienne’s parents’ home at Rocfoin in Eure-et-Loir, not far from Chartres. Sylvia said you could see the cathedral across the wheat fields. They escaped to rural tranquillity. The house, three miles from a station, had a thatched roof, no bathroom, an elm tree in the garden. Water was from an outside pump, there was an orchard of pear and peach trees, flowers, hens, cats and Mousse the sheepdog. Joyce pursued Sylvia if he could, always wanting replies by return of post or by express. However great her efforts for him, he pushed for more. He seemed respectful of his wife’s dissatisfaction but not of Sylvia’s generosity.

He behaved the same