No Modernism Without Lesbians

March 15, 2021
A study of the anti-patriarchal women who played essential roles in the development of 20th-century modernism. Souhami focuses on four women, and their Parisian community, who combined to create a "revolutionary force" in the fight to break away from 19th-century norms in the art world: Sylvia Beach, who founded Shakespeare and Company bookstore and published Ulysses in 1922; Bryher (born Annie Winifred Ellerman), a novelist and influential arts patron who funded modern writing and film; Natalie Barney, whose intimate circle became "the sapphic centre of the Western world"; and Gertrude Stein, who "furthered the careers of modernist painters and writers and broke the mould of English prose." Though not all identified as lesbian, all had women lovers. Life partners and many torrid affairs add up to quite a cast of characters, including portrait artist Romaine Brooks and author Djuna Barnes. Beach's support of modernist literature, most notably Joyce, was crucial. Bryher, who "felt trapped in the wrong body," was "a rock" for her partner, the poet H.D. Barney, who proudly declared herself a lesbian and was "transparent about same-sex desire in a repressed and repressive age." Ironically, Stein, whose achievements in modernism were the greatest of the four, was the most traditional in her domestic life with Alice B. Toklas, the "wife for me." Souhami effectively shows how "lesbians of the era, to flourish in their self-styled lives, needed to free themselves from domination by men," but too much of the book describes those very relations--e.g., Beach and Joyce. Still, the author keeps the life stories lively, and because everyone in avant-garde Paris knew each other (many through love affairs), the four narratives often intersect in interesting ways. Souhami presents these readable biographies in a series of bite-sized portions, each with its own catchy header, and the author displays a talent for choosing intriguing quotes from her subjects. For example, from the "energetically polyamorous" Barney: "I am a lesbian. One need not hide it nor boast of it, though being other than normal is a perilous advantage." A fresh perspective on modernism.

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April 19, 2021
Biographer Souhami (Gwendolen) argues in this vivid cultural history that modernism’s most notable artistic advances wouldn’t have happened without the efforts of an extraordinary community of lesbians in interwar Paris. Souhami narrates the lives of four women who fled the stultifying confines of their American and British upbringings and “painted, wrote, and published what they wanted.” Sylvia Beach opened the legendary English-language bookstore Shakespeare and Company and started her own business to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses after no one else dared to run afoul of anti-pornography laws. Bryher, who born Winifred Ellerman and was the daughter of the richest man in England, used her fortune to support legions of impoverished artists. Natalie Barney hosted infamous salons, gathering the era’s most daring artists while also pursuing a prodigious number of affairs that Souhami delights in recounting. Gertrude Stein championed up-and-coming artists such as Pablo Picasso, who, like herself, challenged the idea that art needed to be comprehensible in order to be great. Souhami never quite teases out precisely her subjects’ role in the creation of modernism, or whether, perhaps, they flocked to Paris to take part in an already developing movement. Nonetheless, this often gossipy, always smart romp trains a well-deserved spotlight on lesser-appreciated literary and artistic lives.