No Modernism Without Lesbians

rue Casimir Périer in Paris, Georgette said to her: ‘Look at this curious little swelling. I wonder what it is.’ Margaret then felt she faced two wars: Hitler and Georgette’s inoperable breast cancer.
the greatest writer of my times
When Sylvia Beach first met James Joyce at André Spire’s lunch in July 1920, she had read in both The Egoist and The Little Review such episodes of Ulysses as had escaped the bonfires of puritanism. She was thrilled to meet him in person. Neither of them had been invited to the lunch. Sylvia went with Adrienne, Joyce was taken there by Ezra Pound. Spire, a Zionist activist as well as a poet, was founder in 1912 of the Association des Jeunes Juifs, and at the time of the Dreyfus affair (in which a Jewish artillery captain in the French army was falsely convicted of passing military secrets to the Germans), he had been shot in the arm while fighting a duel with an anti-Semitic columnist for La Libre Parole.
Sylvia talked first to Joyce’s partner, Nora. Tall, with Celtic golden hair and bright eyes, Nora was grateful for conversation in English. She told Sylvia she could not understand a word of what the others were talking about in French but would have been fine were the conversation in Italian. She said she never read what Joyce wrote and wished she had married a farmer, a banker, a ragpicker… anyone but a writer. She complained that he never stopped scribbling, reached for paper and pencil first thing in the morning then went out when lunch was on the table. None the less, Sylvia thought the relationship worked:
What a good thing for Joyce, I thought, that she had chosen him. What would he have done without Nora? And what would his work have done without her?
She thought Nora kept Joyce sane. At Spire’s lunch, Joyce turned his wine glasses upside down to show he was not drinking alcohol. Ezra kept trying to persuade him. Joyce insisted he never drank until the evening – then he usually got through a couple of bottles of Vouvray. At the end of the lunch, he went into Spire’s small library. Sylvia found him there, ‘drooping’, as she put it. ‘We shook hands; that is, he put his limp, boneless hand in my tough little paw.’ She described him as of medium height, thin, slightly stooped, his eyes deep blue. His right eye looked wonky, with the lens of his spectacles thicker than the left. (He had glaucoma and constant and progressive trouble with his sight.) His hair was thick and sandy coloured, his skin fair, his beard ‘a sort of goatee’, his voice ‘pitched like a tenor’s’. He wore bejewelled chunky rings on the middle and third fingers of his left hand. He asked Sylvia what she did for a living, seemed amused by her name, and that of her shop, wrote them down in a little notebook and said he would come the next day to visit her.
Sylvia Beach had found her third great love.
She felt at ease in this initial encounter, ‘overcome though I was in the presence of the greatest writer of my times’. Outside in the street, a dog barked. Joyce went pale, trembled and asked: ‘Is it coming in? Is it fierce?’ Sylvia assured him it was only chasing a ball. He told her he had been afraid of dogs since one bit him on the chin when he was five. His beard was to hide the scar. He was afraid of many things: thunder, heights, the sea, infections. Two nuns in the street would bring bad luck, so would walking under a ladder, a hat left on a bed, an umbrella opened indoors. Black cats were lucky.
He had quaint ideas of propriety and of what could or could not be said in front of women. Formal and prudish in conversation, he never swore and was overly courteous. At home, he liked playing the piano and making up songs – musical hall numbers about a Mr Dooley. His son, Georgio, trained as an opera singer and his daughter, Lucia, as a professional dancer.
Shakespeare and Company to the rescue
Joyce called at Shakespeare and Company the day after the lunch. He sat twirling an ash-plant cane. Sylvia shooed her friendly little dog, Teddy, ‘an intellectual’, into the back room. Lucky, the black cat, stayed. (Lucky chewed customers’ gloves and Hemingway’s hat.) Joyce joined the library and Sylvia wrote out a card: ‘James Joyce: 5 rue de l’Assomption, Paris; subscription for one month; seven francs.’ He borrowed a copy of the Irish play Riders to the Sea by John Millington Synge, which he had once translated into German. Set on the Aran Islands in Ireland, it was about a woman whose husband and five sons drown.
Joyce lamented his problems in getting his work published. Obscenity had been the cry, censorship the reality, from as far back as 1905 when he first tried to get Dubliners published. Twenty-two publishers and printers turned that down. Then it took a decade before A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published. And now Ulysses… He had used up his entire savings getting to Paris. He had come here in an effort to finish his book. He had been working on it for seven years. He had to write at night, which was straining his eyes. He needed to find somewhere to live for himself, his wife and children. He would have to work as a language teacher to provide for them all. Could Sylvia help him find students? He could teach five languages: Italian, French, German, Greek, English; six perhaps – he had learned Norwegian in order to read Ibsen; seven maybe – he spoke Yiddish, knew Hebrew…
Joyce began to frequent Shakespeare and Company like other young writers, though Sylvia put him in a class of his own: ‘I didn’t imagine a James Joyce going in and out the door.’ One day in the winter of