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

Such good-natured, such sloppy people… They press wine on me, fine old vintages of all soils and are disappointed that I can’t use but a glass a meal.

She said the inside of their big house was like a barnyard. She wore a khaki blouson and plus fours and delighted in the sense of liberation these mannish clothes brought her and the curiosity they provoked: ‘My Khaki suit is gaped at something awful,’ she wrote in August to Cyprian. She had her hair cut short, felt liberated at not having to ride side-saddle in a skirt, liked the twelve-hour days of hard physical work and, though she missed urban culture, enjoyed defying assumptions of how women should dress. Local land-working women wore skirts and had long hair and put her appearance down to the eccentricity of Americans rather than an expression of sexual identity. Picasso, too, interpreted lesbian dress code as an American phenomenon. ‘Ils sont pas des hommes, ils sont pas des femmes, ils sont des Américains,’2 he said. But it was not just because Sylvia was American and working on the land that she felt freed. Many women, and lesbians in particular, described the liberation of short hair, comfortable shoes and escape from constraining clothes and the behaviour they dictated.

It was a relief, Sylvia said, to ‘have escaped the expectation of proper young ladies’. When Vita Sackville-West put on ‘land girl’ dungarees in 1918, she felt an emotional key turn. ‘In the unaccustomed freedom of breeches and gaiters I went into wild spirits’, she wrote. Spurred with courage, she then seduced Violet Trefusis.

In letters home, Sylvia reported that her migraine attacks had abated and her health had never been better.

the little gray bookshop of Adrienne Monnier

In October 1917, when the season for farm work ended, Sylvia rejoined Cyprian in Paris, resumed her literary studies at the Bibliothèque nationale and again gave English lessons for money. She was thirty, fluent in the French language, versed in its literature and assimilated into European culture. She had distanced herself from the theological constraints and emotional anxieties of home. But she had not decided what to do with her life.

One day in the library she noted that a journal she wanted to see, Vers et Prose, which published work by Paul Valéry, Guillaume Apollinaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, could be found at the bookshop of Adrienne Monnier, 7 rue de l’Odéon, Paris VI. She was unfamiliar with the area. Wearing a wide Spanish hat and a dark cloak, she crossed the Seine at the pont des Arts and found the street. It ran from the back of the Théâtre de l’Odéon down to boulevard Saint-Germain. Its architecture reminded her of the colonial houses in Princeton. She passed an antique shop, a carpet shop, a music store, a printer. Halfway down she found the little bookshop with A. Monnier painted above the door. She peered through the window at shelves of books, portraits of authors, and a stoutish woman with fair hair sitting at a table, dressed in a grey ankle-length skirt and a velvet waistcoat over a white silk blouse. ‘She seemed gray and white like her bookshop.’ Seeing Sylvia’s interest and hesitation, Adrienne Monnier came to the door to welcome her. A gust of wind blew off Sylvia’s hat, which bowled down the road. Adrienne rushed after it, pounced on it, brushed it off and returned it to her.

This mise en scène etched itself into Sylvia’s memory. It was the event that marked the separation of her old life from the new, the moment her heart found its wings. For Gertrude Stein, the epiphany came when she hung Cézanne’s portrait of his wife, Hortense, above her work table. For Bryher, it was when H.D., Hilda Doolittle, opened the door of a cottage in Cornwall to greet her. For Natalie Barney, it was when she defied her father and published her Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes.

Sylvia followed Adrienne into the shop. They sat and talked about books. ‘That was the beginning of much laughter and love. And of a lifetime together.’ To this love they brought the elision of their cultures, the elision of their lands: ‘Sylvia, so American and so French at the same time,’ Adrienne said of her.

American by her nature ‘young, friendly, fresh, heroic… electric’ (I borrow the adjectives from Whitman speaking of his fellow citizens). French through her passionate attachment to our country, through her desire to embrace its slightest nuances.

In a love poem to her, published in her collection La Figure, Adrienne wrote: Je te salue, ma Sœur née par-delà les mers / Voici que mon étoile a retrouvé la tienne. ‘I greet you my sister, born from across the seas / See how my star has found yours.’

Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier in Monnier’s Paris bookshop, La Maison des Amis des Livres © Culture Club / Getty Images

Sylvia felt on visiting Adrienne that she had been drawn ‘irresistibly’ to the spot where important things in her life were going to happen. She entered The House of the Friends of Books and departed The House of her Father’s God and Mother’s Grief. She began to dream of a bookshop of her own. Here was evidence of where and how such a dream might find fulfilment.

Adrienne became her mentor, lover and life partner. She was twenty-five, five years younger than Sylvia. Adrienne, too, scraped together such funds as she could. In 1915, her father, Clovis Monnier, had given her the money to open La Maison des Amies des Livres. He was a postier ambulant – a postal worker on night trains; he sorted mail in transit for delivery and had been paid ten thousand francs’ compensation after a train crash left him with a permanent limp. He loved and was proud of his daughter. Paris rents were low, because of the war, and his insurance money was enough to set up her bookshop, which quickly became a special place. All who loved books were welcome. France’s finest poets and