What would a spoiler be. This is long. She has to use circumlocution, especially I guess when talking about love, and that weakens it I think. She refers a lot to people I don't know about & who have been largely forgotten, I think. She is a little something, not smug exactly, not self-righteous exactly, but something. I feel like I slogged through it. I think I can use it for the special project (I forget what I'm calling it) even though this isn't a novel. She did write novels. She defines herself as a historian in her talk about her as a child, like she did all these things, or was all these things, because she was a historian, but then she didn't actually become a historian. Maybe a little essentialist. And there is one horrible place where she quotes & agrees with somebody who blamed the Nazis on over-education. I have the 2nd book, it might be more interesting because I've probably heard of those people. She is pretty mean about William Carlos Williams.

They say that the writing life is a lonely one. The writer sits with only the pen and the blank page for company, attempt to drown himself entirely in a world of his own creation. It is an image so familiar it is almost iconic. But while a writing life may be a solitary existence, the literary life often is not. Writers, like sports fans, like teenage rock groupies, like schools of fish, flocks of birds and even snowflakes tend to seek one and other out, allow themselves to become caught up in the gravitational pull of their kind, drawn closer and closer together until they coalesce into an entity that is somehow greater than the sum of its parts. In England there was the Bloomsbury group—a loose connection of writers, artists, thinkers (and gardeners) who spurred each other on to create what might still be considered as unsurpassed the greatest modern literature of the era.

In France there was another such group that congregated along the Left Bank in Paris. Writers such as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes found themselves pulled into each other’s orbit. Artists and photographers like Berenice Abbott were drawn to Paris’s air of radical experimentation and frenetic creativity. And while it is useless to ask the inevitable “What if?” (What if James Joyce had never met Sylvia Beach? Would Ulysses have ever been written?), there is no question that this happy congregation of talent along rue de l’Odéon somehow drove each member of this literary set to greater achievements than might have occurred had they (a feckless and lazy lot) been left to themselves in their own little rooms with only their own pens and paper for inspiration.

One of the lesser-known members (at least, to modern readers) of the Left Bank literary scene was Bryher, a tall, intelligent and charismatic woman who wrote poetry, was better known as a historical novelist, and perhaps best-known for being the lover of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). Now Paris Press has given modern readers a chance to rediscover this engaging and alluring woman by republishing several of her novels (Visa for Avalon, The Player’s Boy) and her critically acclaimed memoir, The Heart to Artemis ($19.95). . .read full review