No Modernism Without Lesbians

1920, he brought in the copy of The Little Review with episode 13, ‘Nausicaa’. He lamented the charges against the editors and the court verdict in New York. ‘My book will never come out now’, he said, and sat with his head in his hands. Sylvia found it intolerable to see him so abject and to hear how his masterpiece was pilloried by heathens. ‘Would you like me to publish Ulysses?’ she asked. Joyce said: ‘I would.’
James Joyce and his publisher Sylvia Beach in Shakespeare & Company © Bettmann / Getty Images
She thought he seemed relieved, though it concerned her that he was putting a book it had taken him seven years to write, and which in her view ought to have been the crown of a great publishing house, into the hands of someone young, inexperienced, and not a publisher. But there was no hope of an established publisher taking it on in the English-speaking countries.
the diligent editor and the exigent author
‘Undeterred by lack of capital, experience and all the requisites of a publisher I went right ahead with Ulysses,’ Sylvia wrote. She called Shakespeare and Company ‘my literary welfare work’ and publishing Ulysses ‘my missionary endeavour’. Adrienne approved the plan and was her adviser.
Joyce took over Sylvia’s life. He arrived at the bookshop at noon each day and returned again in the early evenings. Sylvia attended to his correspondence and became his banker, agent and publicist. She rivalled Alice B. Toklas’s dedication to Gertrude Stein. Joyce worked all hours on Ulysses, reworking the same passages, but it was not a book he would ever declare finished.
Sylvia unwaveringly thought Ulysses a masterpiece. She saw its integrity as a work of art. Transparency was allied to mentioning what some might deem unmentionable. Joyce, prudish in person as in many ways was she, dismissed the idea that in literature there were words or thoughts that were off limits. Sylvia agreed. She deplored censorship and the entrenchment into law of what could or could not be said. ‘You cannot legislate against human nature’ was her view of laws that criminalized free expression.
By offering to publish the book, she took on far more than she could reasonably manage. Joyce was obsessively painstaking and worse than demanding. He could not get on with fountain pens or typewriters, wrote with black pencils bought from W.H. Smith, and his handwriting and directions were hard to read. He created a complicated schema of different passages, marked in coloured pencils and peppered with annotations. He put all sorts of cross references on a card index, then pieced passages together. Typists went haywire. Cyprian Beach and Robert McAlmon helped – both were reasonably good at deciphering illegible handwriting. McAlmon was cavalier and made stuff up when manuscript marks were too complicated. Joyce noticed.
He haunted the bookshop in gloom about his book’s prospects. Sylvia and Adrienne called him Melancholy Jesus. He thought if a dozen copies were printed, there would be some left over.
one man’s day and life
Joyce explained his book as the epic story of two races – Israel and Ireland – as well as an account of both one man’s day and life, and of the cycle of the human body. His reader was not invited to distinguish between an external and internal voice. Joyce said Job, not he, invented the interior monologue. Gertrude Stein thought it was neither Job nor Joyce but herself with her magnum opus, The Making of Americans. The ‘continuous present’, she called her efforts. She viewed Sylvia’s proposed publishing of Ulysses as betrayal, cancelled her subscription to Shakespeare and Company and joined the American Library in Paris. Joyce was her rival and undeserving of accolade. She was the genius, the architect of modernism. She created twentieth-century style.
Sylvia, who took a grown-up view of such rivalry, described her and Gertrude’s relationship as ‘friendly protagonists’. Nor, of course, did she think Joyce a lone modernist. Dorothy Richardson was another woman writer who changed the landscape of fiction. She published episodes of her long semi-autobiographical work Pilgrimage from 1915 up until her death in 1957. Pilgrimage was about a Londoner, Miriam Henderson, who rejects nineteenth-century ideas of femininity and evolves a new gender identity somewhere between masculine and feminine. With publication of the first episode, ‘Pointed Roofs’, Virginia Woolf said Dorothy Richardson had:
invented, or, if she has not invented, developed and applied to her own uses, a sentence which we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender.
May Sinclair, in a review of ‘Pointed Roofs’, used the term ‘stream of consciousness’. Dorothy Richardson disliked the term and did not think she was writing a novel. She told Sylvia that Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and herself were all simultaneously using the ‘new method’ in writing style, though very differently. Proust’s first volume of À la Recherche du temps perdu was published in 1913 while she was finishing ‘Pointed Roofs’. James Joyce had begun Ulysses and Virginia Woolf had written her first novel, The Voyage Out.
he spends money like a drunken sailor
Money, or lack of it, was from the start a big problem with Sylvia’s publishing enterprise. Bryher helped by shifting money into Sylvia’s account. Sylvia regularly gave small amounts of this to Joyce. At first he repaid her, but then he did not. Harriet Weaver then made Joyce a bequest to provide him with sufficient monthly income for life. ‘Saint Harriet’, Sylvia called her.
It was a tremendous relief to feel that I could now go ahead and publish Ulysses, and also that Shakespeare and Company was free of encumbrance, so to speak.
The allowance was sufficient for a reasonable person to live on, but not Joyce. He was a spendthrift.
It wasn’t long before he was again hard up and Miss Weaver came again to his help. Adrienne and I just managed to make ends meet by living in the simplest style, but Joyce liked to live among the well-to-do.
That was Sylvia’s polite way of reproaching him. Joyce liked to travel first