money
Virginia Woolf said a woman must have 500 guineas a year and a room of her own if she were to write fiction, plus the habit of freedom ‘and the courage to write exactly what we think’. It was hard for most women to come by one of those things, let alone all. The large bank accounts of Bryher and Natalie Barney came from wealth inherited from their fathers. Both subsidized and financed friends and fellow artists; Bryher in particular was a lifelong and unstinting patron of what was new in the arts. Gertrude Stein was comfortably off, her income managed by her savvy elder brother Michael, who invested in American railroads. Her true fortune was made by indulging her passion for buying paintings to hang on the walls of her rented home. She bought works by Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne while they were still young and unknown. Her collection was soon beyond price; she could not afford insurance cover. Sylvia Beach had no private income – her father was a vicar – and her constant problem was how to glean enough to keep her projects going. Bryher gave her money and so did Natalie Barney. More than the privilege of having wealth was how those with it used it. None of the moneyed modernist lesbians looked for profit. They used money made by men to further the modernist cause.
escape from patriarchy
Same-sex relationships have always been there, have always been diverse, complex and individual. It was always far past time for the world to recognize that truth. ‘You can’t censor human nature’, was Sylvia Beach’s view. It was always senseless to close the door on benign relationships of the heart, which will express themselves, however brutal, damaging and disheartening any penalties imposed.
The Paris lesbians had to free themselves from male authority, the controlling hand, the forbidding edict. They escaped the disapproval of fathers and the repression of censors and lawmakers, defined their own terms and shaped their own lives. They did not reject all men – they were intrinsic to furthering the careers of writers, film-makers and artists whose work and ideas they admired. What shifted was the power base, the chain of command.
A community of women who called the shots was no bad idea 100 years ago, nor is it a bad idea now. Why are there still so few works by women in the art galleries, why are their symphonies and songs not filling the concert halls or their statutes defining the laws of the land?
‘It is true that I only want to show off to women. Women alone stir my imagination’, Virginia Woolf wrote in 1930 to the composer and suffragist Ethel Smyth, who had declared love to her. Women needed their 500 guineas, a room of their own and ‘the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think’. Three years earlier, Woolf had written to Vita Sackville-West, with whom she was, in her way, in love: ‘Look here Vita – throw over your man and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head… They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come.’
‘Throw over your man’ was quite a call. It might have been a way forward before the cataclysm of two world wars. War tore apart the lesbian web woven by the women in these pages. It might be a way forward now, in the dark, tipsy and in love, in the beautiful garden the world might be, before the moonlight disappears and all the things in women’s heads are lost forever.
‘Throw over your man, I say, and come.’
SYLVIA BEACH
‘they couldn’t get Ulysses and
they couldn’t get a drink’
Sylvia Beach © Pictorial Parade / Getty Images
‘My loves were Adrienne Monnier, James Joyce and Shakespeare and Company,’ Sylvia Beach wrote in her memoirs of the woman who was her lifelong partner, of the author whose novel Ulysses she single-handedly published when the custodians of morality (all men) censored it as obscene in England and America, and of the bookshop she founded in 1919 in Paris, which was so much more than a bookshop and which honours her to this day.
Her appearance was sprightly but unremarkable. She was five foot two, thin, with a brisk walk, a determined chin, bobbed hair, and brown eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses. She liked comfortable clothes – mannish jackets, neckties, loose skirts and sensible shoes, and energetic outdoor pursuits like mountain hiking and horse riding. She smoked non-stop. Her conversation was humorous and open, often acerbic, but not aggressive. She spoke idiomatic French with an American accent and was fluent enough in several other languages. When she spent time in a country, she always learned something of its language.
Her determination and courage were exceptional. Born in 1887 in Princeton, New Jersey, the daughter and granddaughter of Presbyterian ministers, she gave up on church but found sanctity in books, bookshops and libraries. Books, she said, were the friends of her childhood. Books opened doors to freedom, shaped her thinking and feelings and gave her courage to rebel.
The second of three daughters, as an early assertion she dropped her birth name, Nancy, and renamed herself Sylvia. Many lesbians who contributed to the modernist revolution chose their own names: Gluck, Radclyffe Hall, Bryher, Genêt, H.D., Colette, Renée Vivien… it was an aspect of creating their own image, of breaking from patriarchy and from being the property of men.
Life as Sylvia Beach lived it might have
