about my education
Sylvia saw her parents’ unhappy marriage as a lesson in what to avoid. As a child she was at home a lot, ill with migraines and eczema, so she missed out on school. ‘About my education’, she wrote as an adult, with Gertrudian disregard for the conventions of grammar, ‘the less said the better: I ain’t had none: never went to school and wouldn’t have learned anything if I had went.’ She spent long hours in the back parlour on a divan beside a bookcase, which had a set of Shakespeare’s works ‘excepting the volume containing Hamlet in which Granny had come across a passage that “wasn’t nice” so she had burnt the book. What would Granny have thought of Ulysses?’
Sylvia’s only formal schooling was a stint in her teens at an academy in Lausanne for ‘a lot of weak maidens’. She spent hateful months as a boarder, was uninterested in the curriculum and was scolded if she talked or looked out of the window at Lake Geneva. Her migraines troubled her and she felt she learned nothing. ‘I was miserable and soon Mother brought me home.’ What she did learn was to resist authority, travel independently and think for herself. Many lesbian shapers of modernism had makeshift schooling. They learned in their own ways.
a very bad example
In 1906, the Reverend Beach’s Paris assignment ended and the family returned to Princeton, where he was minister of the First Presbyterian Church. Sylvia worked as a research assistant for a professor of English at the university, and campaigned for suffrage and women’s rights, but she wanted to be back in Europe, away from the claustration of home.
She travelled often to France – sometimes to meet with her friend Carlotta, sometimes with her sisters or mother. ‘We had a veritable passion for France,’ she wrote. She also spent time in Italy with the family of another girlfriend, Marion Mason, acquired another language, absorbed another European culture. But lack of money limited where she could study or stay. And in 1915, on an extended visit to Spain with her mother, gossip spread about the Beaches’ broken home life. A New York scandal sheet, Town Topics: The Journal of Society, ran a piece about the Reverend Beach’s neglect of his wife and family and how:
his open attentions to a fair fat and fifty member of his congregation is causing no little comment and setting a very bad example. The sudden departure of his wife and daughter to Europe a few months ago, despite the danger of sea voyaging under the present uncertain war conditions, together with the almost immediate ensconcement of himself at the woman’s Summer house in New Jersey, where he still remains, indulging in numerous gay automobile trips, sometimes with, more often without, a chaperon, has and is causing much comment in the exclusive little Summer colony, as well as New York and Princeton.
The Reverend Beach, summoned before the Church Board, said in defence that because he could not give his children money, he encouraged them to travel and seek experience to fit them for whatever careers they chose. He wrote to Sylvia that he wished people ‘would understand that and LET US ALONE’.
He could not say his wife hated being in the same country with him, let alone the same house. Divorce was not a possibility. To allay this damaging gossip and give a semblance of Christian respectability, Eleanor Beach went back to Princeton to her unsatisfactory husband and ‘the new black cook and white poodle’. Sylvia went to Paris to meet up with Cyprian.
I worked as a volontaire agricole
In August 1916, Sylvia’s passport stamp read journaliste littéraire. Perhaps to acquire student status, she had amended her date of birth from 1887 to 1896 to make herself seem nine years younger than she was. Cyprian, under her stage name Cyprian Gilles, was playing the heroine in a twelve-part silent movie serial, Judex, about ‘a masked fighter for justice’. She was ‘so beautiful she couldn’t walk down the street without being followed by hopeful men’, Sylvia said. She had rented a studio in rue de Beaujolais in the 1st arrondissement. Sylvia booked in at the Palais Royal hotel in the same ‘fairly respectable’ street. It was close to the Palais Royal theatre ‘where the naughtiest plays in Paris were put on’, and to bookshops ‘dealing in erotica’. A conjoining balcony ran around the hotel and her room looked out over gardens, a fountain, a statue by Rodin of Victor Hugo.
For a year she studied French literature, particularly poetry, in the nearby Bibliothèque nationale, and gave English lessons. But by 1917 the war and German attacks on Paris had intensified. By day, the streets were raked by ‘Big Bertha’ howitzers. At night, she and Cyprian watched bombing raids from the hotel balcony. That summer, to help in the war effort and escape the bombs, she joined the Volontaires Agricoles. All male farmhands were at the front. For two months, in the Loire Valley near Tours, she picked grapes, bundled wheat and pruned trees, alongside wounded French soldiers and German prisoners of war. She stayed first in a cheap hotel in Tours – ‘oh là-là, how moyen âge’, she wrote about the hole-in-the-ground toilet – and then on a farm owned by M and Mme Heurtault, with their seven-year-old son and their cows, chickens, geese and horses.
I’m treated like a member of the family. They are so nice.
