(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Souhami has investigated parts of it LesbianThe lesbian community in interwar Paris and links it to early modernism in the first half of the 1900th century. So vital, resourceful and dominant was the lesbian community that women formed a core for this development. Without lesbians, no modernism, the author claims.
Souhami shows how four lesbian women (three Americans and one British) in different ways established, socialized, and continued the development of modernism in France before, during, and between the two world wars.
Four women
The book is divided into four chapters, one for each of the women mentioned: the founder of the legendary bookstore Shakespeare & Company Sylvia Beach, the boundless poet and saloon hostess Barney, the poet and magazine editor Bryher and the pioneering author Gertrude Stein.
Sylvia Beach had spent a year learning French and discovered the unconventional poetry of Apollinaire from 1917-1918. In 1919, she established the bookstore at 12 rue de l'Odéon that would become central to the development of modernism, writes Souham. Beach helped James Joyce with publications in Paris when his books had been banned in both England and the United States. The bookstore became a gathering place for Anglo-American writers such as Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson and Ezra Pound. Joyce and Hemingway are considered the fathers of modernism in British-American literary history.
The poet and the magazine editor Annie Winifred Ellerman (1894–1983), or Bryher, as she called herself, came from an English shipping family and lived at the heart of Parisian society in the 1920s. She introduced the Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein for the British film community through the magazine Close Up. She also supported both Joyce and Sylvia Beach by financing their bookshops. During the war, she helped refugees from the Nazis with hiding places.
The English writer natalie barney (1876–1972) was inspired by Sappho's love poems to women. In Paris, she ran her own salon for 60 years, as L'Académie des Femmes, since women could not study at the university. Barney was opposed to monogamy. She herself was the inspiration for many lesbian novels, including Radclyffe Hall's censored The Well of Lonliness (1928) and his mistress Liane de Pougy's novel Sapphic Idyll (1901)
Held every Saturday G salon in the apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus, where Pablo Picasso, Henry Matisse and Georges Braque, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound and Guillaume Apollinaire were frequent guests. She developed a distinctive writing style early on that was copied, and is considered Hemingway's mentor. Stein's novel QED (1901) is on the syllabus of gender and feminist studies all over the world. Stein introduces the word 'gay' (possibly used for the first time for same-sex relationships, according to Corinne Blackmer (1995)) and uses it over 100 times in the book. Tender Buttons (1914) is described as a triumph of verbal cubism. Her main work is The Making of Americans (1925)
Souhami's point is that lesbian women in the early 1900th century were interested in developing, contributing to, and supporting literary modernism in an attempt to break with patriarchy. Several of the women had experiences of a restrictive, controlling, often brutal father and stepfather, who may also have committed abuse against them. As women fleeing a father's moral expectations, they sought Paris to break with the morals and structure of the old world. They sought out an environment and a culture where being "anything other than normal is a risky advantage."
First and foremost, they are lesbian, non-Jewish, American or upper-class women, says Souhami. The women were wealthy heiresses who used patriarchys money in a rebellion against the patriarchy. Except for the priest's daughter Beach, who received money from the industrialist daughters Bryher and Natalie Barney. None of the women ran for-profit businesses.
"Come as you are"
Although the city does not have its own chapter in the book, it is still interwar Paris that is the setting for the novel. The backdrop is as follows: Homosexuality was decriminalized in France in 1791. Paris quickly became known as the bohemian and erotic capital, where Montmartre and Les Halles, the garden at the Carrousel du Louvre and the Champs-Élysées were meeting places for homosexuals. Special city guides were published for gay tourism from the late 1800th century. Paris was like an asylum for sexuality refugeesThe "roaring twenties" were a sexual revolution.
The revitalized belief in French materialism became a celebration. Paris was transparency, free expression and rule-breaking, the author writes. All structures were to be dissolved, all norms broken, here one saw fluid identity and open sexual relationships. What is true appearance? And Elsa Maxwell For example, they picked up their guests with their own bus to private parties where the theme was “come as you are.” The guests prepared carefully and arrived with their zippers open, half their faces covered in makeup, a towel around their necks and shaving cream on their faces, and were greeted by the hostess, who was naked.
The case of England
In England, sex between men was a criminal act. Following an amendment to the Criminal Code in 1885, Oscar was charged with Savage, and he was imprisoned from 1895 to 97. Wilde left England and moved to the city of gay poets; he found a soulmate in the surrealist André Gide, the symbolist Paul Verlaine loved the pre-surrealist Arthur Rimbaud, the avant-garde Jean Cocteau loved all his lovers. Marcel Proust was understood to be gay because his books often dealt with gay people, but he denied that he was gay.
“England knowingly and willfully rejected the twentieth century,” wrote Gertrude Stein. The United States enforced prohibition and censored literature and art. “Paris,” Stein said, “was where the twentieth century was.” Paris was modern. Lesbian tour guides, bisexual restaurants and cafes, and revues and cabarets challenged censorship on lesbian theater stages in the Paris cabarets where Colette and her lover Mathilde de Morny had caused scandal. There were brothels for lesbians.
Sex between women was not illegal in England, but it was seen as indecent and was hushed up in the wake of spectacular events such as Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis fleeing to Paris after Violet had been exiled from England and pursued by her respective husbands in private jets. In 1921, a new English criminal law clause attempted to limit this development by punishing "gross fornication between persons of the female sex". This affected Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness, where the boldest sentences were: "She kissed her – tenderly and hotly" and "that night they did not part". But the novel was nevertheless "burned in the king's furnace" and led to Hall and her partner leaving England. Sylvia Beach sold pirated copies of Hall's novel from the window of her bookshop on the rue de l'Odéon. Virginia Woolf's "infatuation" with Vita Sackville-West ended in the novel Orlando (1928), a book that escaped censorship possibly due to the historical twist of the dramaturgy.
To live openly
From the late 1800th century, lesbians in Paris could live openly with their mistresses, like Barney, or with their 'wife', like Gertrude Stein. Bryher saw himself as a boy trapped in a girl's body and had a lifelong relationship with the American poet HD (Hilda Doolittle). Sylvia Beach lived with the bookseller across the street, Adrienne Monnier.
The author is therefore not faithful to the letter. LHGBTmovement and rejects all gender-congruent spelling and initials (to avoid antagonisms, she writes). She simply uses the letter L as a collective term "for lesbian and love."
The Mother of Modernism
The women who established themselves in Paris defined their own communities and shaped their own lives. This played an important role in the development of modernism. What changed was the power base and the chain of command, writes Souham.
Souhami has written several biographies of famous lesbians, including one about Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas. Although Souhami highlights Stein's The Making of Americans as a significant work, the British-American perspective on the heroes of literary history is not challenged well enough. In Stein's Alice B. Tokla's autobiography Hemingway was called "yellow", which he did not like. A classic realist-literature conflict arose, in which Stein broke with the environment around Shakespeare & Company after the promotion of Joyce as the father of modernism – she was not keen on that. After she had helped Hemingway get published in the US and been his mentor, he, and the rest of the Shakespearean community, broke with her.
Souhami's nuanced project raises new questions about French early modernism – a call for further investigation.
All Pictures Are From The Book, And We Recommend
The Reader Himself Finds Out Who Is Who 🙂 …
