No Modernism Without (Rich, White) Lesbians:
Why Diana Souhami Thinks We Should Give People Money.
by Stephanie Ann Devito
When Diana Souhami’s No Modernism Without Lesbians finally went to print, I don’t think she considered herself the author of a socialist manifesto. But by taking a closer look at the lives of Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney, and Gertrude Stein, Diana Souhami makes an inadvertently compelling argument for giving people money.
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This novel read to me the way honey tastes: with pages pouring their words, slow and smooth along the margins. Every sticky, sweet syllable clung to the roof of my mouth and back of my throat so that the slow drip of its fantasy lingers a little while longer. I indulged in Diana Souhami’s dense but fluid biography, No Modernism Without Lesbians, the way I picture repressed homemakers lose themselves in romance novels about virginal but curious milkmaids.
Every nerve in my body ached as the novel teased a sense of satisfaction that wasn’t coming for me. Though it should be clear from the title, this book didn’t leave me craving some beefy stable boy named Thaddeus or Branston. Instead, Souhami’s biography about industrious, forward-thinking lesbians lit my body ablaze with an intense desire for money.
Reading each chapter, my chest filled and toes curled as I fantasize about having the type of wealth these women had. It was the amount of financial freedom you can buy genius with. Now, you might not believe genius can be bought, in the same way you’re probably also skeptical about a work of historical non-fiction being as seductive as a trashy romance novel, but those are conclusions you could only arrive at if you’ve never been broke and artistic at the same time.
Imagine an idea taking hold of you. Sensations of eureka pouring into spaces of yourself you have never occupied. Connections and revelations unfurling like rolls of silk down the back of your brain until your whole body is enveloped in the comforting caress of a brand-new perspective. But instead of spilling your thoughts out at will, you had to contain yourself at a dead-end job, while you labor in the name of needless consumption. By the time you’ve clocked out, driven home, fed yourself, and tidied up, your idea has dried up and disappeared and you’re left feeling empty but not relieved.
Without money, there is no time. Without time, you can’t chase the dragons of inspiration. It’s a condition in which no masterpiece has ever been made.
No Modernism Without Lesbians, allowed me to watch women in the sensational throes of release as they fleshed out their thoughts and made them real. It became a way for me to escape to a reality where I could afford to be an exceptional version of myself. One that went to prestigious schools, dashed off to Capri at the first hint of writer’s block and amassed experiences instead of student loans. In this life, I invest in my forward-thinking peers while we all explore our creativity together without the shackles of profitability.
In telling the stories of Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney, and Gertrude Stein, Diana Souhami wasn’t trying to create candied escapism for under-privileged intellectuals. Her aim was to share the blueprint of Modernism and reveal that its architects were actually some of society’s most marginalized people. But the narrative Souhami ended up with undermines the gravity of her own thesis.
Money is so abundant in her novel it might as well have gotten a chapter of its own.
That’s not to say the subjects of Souhami’s book aren’t revolutionary figures. On the contrary, they were openly gay at a time when it was criminalized, defied stifling social norms, and became formidable political activists. They were brilliant but trapped in a world that didn’t want anything from them. Still, they committed to their visions with such unshakeable verve that they became the vanguard of Western Culture’s proudest accomplishments.
In this, No Modernism Without Lesbians is a story at odds with itself. At once telling a tale of marginalized people winning their fight to be seen by society, all while reminding us that exceptionalism will be overlooked if you can’t use your privilege to get a step up. In the very first chapter, Souhami made it clear that these people had status. Trying to rid her thesis of its insidious dissonance, she says
“None of the moneyed modernist lesbians looked for profit. They used money made by men to further the modernist cause.”
But cash did more than just further the modernist cause; it was the engine, fuel, and ignition for every accomplishment detailed in this book. Skilled navigators as they might have been, these four people steered the wheel of a vehicle that was crucial to their journey.
Of the characters in Souhami’s book, two of them, Bryher and Natalie Barney, inherited an amount of wealth that should come with a waxed mustache and an orphanage to shut down on Christmas. Gertrud Stein, on the other hand, came from a tangibly well-off family. But being the daughter, all she had to do once her parents passed was invest her inheritance in paintings by the soon-to-be masters of the 20th century.
Only Sylvia Beach struggled with poverty, but hers is a story that proves how critical capital is to producing seminal art. As well as how cruel philanthropy can be, not only to those who don’t receive any but even to those who do. Her life, more than any of the four, reveals just how fundamentally flawed it is that we trust the development of art and culture to the marriage of serendipity and the benevolence of forward-thinking capitalists.
SYLVIA BEACH
Being well-read and on a one-woman mission to modernize English literature, Sylvia facilitated the careers of several literary giants. During her years as proprietor of The Shakespeare & Company Bookshop, she astutely matched her patrons to their financiers, including her favorite among them. Ernest Hemmingway was introduced to his publisher when Jonathan Cape sought Sylvia Beach out, hoping she might have come across the next great American novelist. Many don’t realize that entire English Literature curriculums were made by Beach’s editorial eye.
Sylvia transformed money into culture in more abstract ways than just arranging advances. The Shakespeare & Company itself was a hub of everything nouveau and avant-garde. Writers like Hemmingway, Robert McAlmon, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Paul Bowles all flocked to Sylvia’s shop to read the provocative selection of literary magazines, up-and-coming authors, and undisputed classics Sylvia personally curated. Growing in popularity, Beach’s shop became an iconic landmark where artists and intellectuals shared work and exchanged ideas. An entirely new century was born in that bookstore.
All that said, Sylvia’s shop didn’t make any money. Academics and artists require a lot of generosity. A lot of the books were lent out to students and writers who were down on their luck. At first, Sylvia’s mother helped fund the shop, then Bryher sent her checks to keep the books balanced. Harriet Weaver, another woman with a hefty trust fund also paid into the bookshop. Maintaining its growing notoriety, however, was a costly affair.
Every single soul who gained something from the Shakespeare & Company’s stimulating environment did so by adding to its debt. Especially James Joyce, although posterity has to be the judge of whether investing in Joyce was worth the hassle for Sylvia. Had she never advocated for Joyce in his expensive fight against censorship laws, Ulysses would have never been published.
When it comes to pricing out genius, James Joyce should be considered a luxury item. Tallying up his legacy starts with the constant funding he needed to keep up with his works getting perpetually banned. The second was (wo)man power to translate and transcribe his nonsequential and illegible manuscripts; a service others would have paid for if they didn’t have the goodwill of a bookkeep and ownership over a wife.
Speaking of, his wife Nora, and mentally-unstable daughter, Lucia, were also supported by direct payments, this time from Harriet Weaver. Perhaps Lucia, a bright, eccentric, and deeply disturbed young woman could have made a living as a writer herself as she had wanted. As the head of the household, though, James Joyce was in charge, and James denied her. History tells us she went mad, but wouldn’t you be?
Joyce accepted every check, even one to the tune of (what would now be) $500,000, for his gain alone. As well as whatever it had cost to commit Lucia. He drank and tipped his advances away while requesting opulent accommodations for his travels. The man we consider the voice of the Irish working poor lived a life of luxury as the ungrateful recipient of everyone else’s generosity.
While Joyce was off pretending to be a self-made man, Sylvia Beach published a small run of Ulysses in 1922, creating enough buzz to engage a commercial publisher in a legal battle for free production. Come 1933, Random House did just that, propelling James Joyce to infamy and to the bank with a $45,000 payout. None of which went to Sylvia, who ended up bankrupt as a result of showing the world his work.
James Joyce died without ever even mentioning Sylvia or Harriet. Sometimes the woman wins, but most times, the patriarchy does.
After a lifetime of exploiting wealth and connections for other people’s benefit, Sylvia Beach would need to have some strings pulled on her own behalf. Because she lived her life in proximity to aristocrats, their kinship became her path to freedom when she was detained by the Nazis during the occupation of France. Sylvia was sent to Vittel, which wasn’t a concentration camp, or a work camp, but a French detention center kept nominally humane so that it could be showcased to the Red Cross. Still, a hellish place for anyone to end up.
In an act that would haunt Sylvia until she died, her life partner, Adrienne Monnier appealed to a collaborator and SS General, Jacques Benois-Méchin, who had previously translated parts of Ulysses into French. Sylvia’s ability to participate in the literary world to begin with got her connected to the powers that be, ultimately resulting in a French traitor securing her a medical leave that got her released from Vittel.
That’s the thing about mercy in the form of money; being saved by it only makes you feel stuck in a more complicated trap. Sylvia wrote in her diary:
“What if my dear friends left behind in the camps were not released? This thought spoiled all pleasure of release for me.”
Wealthy whiteness did not protect any of her Jewish colleges, leaving her to wonder how she was supposed to enjoy freedom in a world where only the simulacrum of equality exists.
After reading Beach’s story, I had to wonder what any potential creative success means for me living in a country that sets so many up for failure. I’m aware that the time it takes me to write this is financed by my romantic relationship. Through my marriage, I have access to emotional and financial support that’s become pivotal to my pursuit of writing. With so much comfort and shelter, I worry if the very things I do to support my process is starving my work of relevancy.
It’s an insecurity I wonder if the imagist poet, H.D, shared. After all, without her affair with Bryher, the very same heiress that funded Shakespeare & Company, society would have cast Hilda Doolittle aside time and time again. Of course, H.D does not owe her complete career to Bryher. She was already a poet when they became taken with her through her book, Sea Garden. However, their coupling would solve countless issues H.D faced in her life and it’s all owed to the randomly assigned family Bryher was born to.
BRYHER
Conveniently for them, now para-socially enamored with H.D, Bryher’s father owned The Sphere. Enabling them to ask an editor of the journal for H.D ’s address. Upon receiving Bryher’s fan mail, H.D agreed to an encounter that would connect the two of them for the rest of their lives. Bryher loved her madly and having inherited the largest estate in Britain, some $2.5 billion dollars in today’s currency, they did anything and everything to ensure H.D could work.
That devotion would become consequential when H.D became pregnant for a second time. Having suffered a miscarriage before, she did not want to get an illegal abortion, despite the father of the child abandoning her. Alone, destitute, and ill, H.D was close to death when Bryher and her wealth came to save her. Nursing her back to vitality, Bryher saw to it that H.D’s daughter, Perdita, had everything she needed from the second she entered this world. As for H.D, she literally owed her life to Bryher, but this dependency came at a dramatic cost.
Being in no position to refuse Bryher, H.D lived according to them. So, when Bryher saw H. D’s psychotic episodes as beneficial to her work, they did what they could to encourage them. Soon, everything the couple did was to push H.D to keep working. When ennui struck, they cavorted around the world making offices out of Mediterranean islands and the Swiss Alps while Perdita, spared from a life in foster care, received a top-notch education. Deeply in love, and not entirely obtuse, Bryher did seek actual help for H.D, arranging for her to be a patient to Freud himself. Unsurprisingly, sessions with a living legend weren’t free, they ran Bryher (the equivalent of) $255 an hour.
In a way, this economic setup, wherein a benevolent knight saves a wayward princess, reads like a fairy tale. But actually, it leaves those being cared for, people like H.D with mental and physical disabilities, without any agency. Even though Bryher’s suffocating attachment was toxic for H.D at times, there was no way she would ever be in a position to become independent from it. H.D could be loved by Bryher or starve. It was that simple.
Bryher’s story of billionaire philanthropy is one we still see today. One where wealthy people get to handpick what world issues we focus on, making decisions that boil down to who lives and who dies. In Bryher’s case, their wealth allowed them to pick which Jewish intellectuals they helped escape from death camps. That’s not to disparage the inherent goodness of that act, however, it’s just another instance where one’s class is either a death sentence or a ticket to freedom.
So basically, if you’re born into the right resources, maybe one day, someone might care if you live or if you die.
The only thing heartening about Bryher’s financial might is that, for all their wholly human flaws as a lover, Bryher was intensely progressive, and they understood firsthand what it’s like to be an outsider. If they have had the language we have today, Bryher might have identified as trans or non-binary, but even in their lifetime, they knew gender is more complex than genitals.
"They chose to be defined by the sea, the cliffs, and by a landscape beyond gender."
As passionate as they were empathetic, Bryher funded projects that were ahead of their time and aligned themself, bank account included, with the oppressed and the revolutionaries.
They had that in common with Natalie Barney, another black sheep of an affluent family, with an H.D in their life: Romaine Brooks. At the age of 26, Natalie’s father died, leaving her with today’s equivalent of 75 million dollars to do with as she pleased. And she pleased to do a lot of things. Writing plays, poetry, traveling, and constructing a Parisian paradise for bohemian lesbians filled her first few years of independence.
NATALIE BARNEY
Living out a philosophy of life and love that could be boiled down to the more the merrier, Natalie’s lovers were numerous and overlapping. Being gorgeous, gifted, and protected by her millions from society’s rough grasp, Natalie Barney was a one-woman pride movement. And, like a modern pride parade, her overt sexuality was both praised and berated in a way that pushed her into the popular narrative regardless.
Using her social mystique and privilege, she built The Temple of Friendship, where she hosted the universe itself according to French writer, Edmond Jaloux. Every notable poet, painter, thinker, and performer let their own worlds collide, creating exhilarating new dimensions of art and culture. It was very much like Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Company, just part sex club. Eventually, one of the painters to attend this sultry salon was Romaine Brooks.
It’s likely hers is a name you’ve never heard; I couldn’t even reassure you that you’ve at least seen her work. However, history could have forgotten Romaine Brooks completely if she was not drawn into the orbit of the illustrious Natalie Barney.
In all the research I have done on her, one anecdote comes up more than others. It goes – upon visiting Brooks in the 1940s, Truman Capote responded to her wall of portraits by saying it was the all-time gallery of famous d***s. “A daisy-chain of international lesbians.”
Other contemporaries of Brook’s, however, understood the gravity of her work. Édouard Georges Mac-Avoy described her as the first Surrealist.
Specializing in portraiture, Romaine Brooks used animals to symbolize her subjects’ dominant qualities. Intense, saturated, and emitting an unmistakable mood, Romaine’s work had a mythic knack for capturing the essence of a person. Critic, Robert de Montesquiou called her “the thief of souls”. This was true in a way, sitting for Romaine meant having your likeness preserved in an expertly blended palette of grays, blacks, steely blues, offset by the earthy burn of umber and ochre. Italian writer, Gabriele D’Annuzio wrote a poem based on her that included the line,
“the most profound and wise orchestrator of grays in modern painting.”
To become an almost forgotten master, Romaine suffered through a lonely, abusive childhood where her mother neglected and humiliated her in favor of an ailing older brother. During this time, she found solace in her pad and pencil no matter where in Europe her family had dragged her off too. Unlike H.D, Romaine did not need her lover to be her patron, though Natalie’s connections didn’t hurt her career. Her family had the sort of money that made Romaine prey to greedy marriage proposals.
Instead, Romaine owes her artistic development to an upper-class education. She attended Mademoiselle Bertin’s Finishing School before heading off to Rome for art school, then Capri to begin her career. Had Romaine been the unloved daughter of an impoverished family, her commitment to the visual arts could have been usurped by housework, child labor, or a marriage proposal she couldn’t have refused. There wouldn’t have been anything or anyone to foster her’s talents as is the case for so many others who cannot afford to explore the artistic worth of their trauma.
Even still, Romaine herself was almost left to complete obscurity, but her relationship with Natalie did more than just secure funding and international studio space. Being as publicly queer and eccentric as she was, Natalie used the spotlight which generational wealth cast upon her to showcase the work of other lesbians, Romaine chief among them. Rubbing – err – elbows with Natalie kept her narrative kicking around in the public’s consciousness until now when her work can finally be analyzed and lauded for her genius, not her sexual orientation.
Beyond notoriety, though, I’d be remiss not to point out that wealth, for all of Diana Souhami’s subjects, bought them safety. Not just Sylvia who had to be rescued from the Nazis, but every one of them. Especially Natalie Barney, whose flagrant disregard for social mores of her time could have gotten her assaulted or killed if there weren’t an entire newspaper industry ready to write about it.
At least Barney and Bryher used their safety and financial security to lift up other women, queer people, and controversial voices. Using their monetary strength, they actually forced culture to change for everyone’s benefit, but before we get too comfortable about that idea, for every Natalie and Bryher, there’s a set of Koch brothers.
Benevolence is not an economic plan. That’s a fable we’re fed to imagine a fantasy where special, deserving people are plucked out of obscurity and delivered to the public consciousness. Truth is, sometimes gatekeepers from marginalized groups work harder to keep their own out, as the final subject of No Modernism Without Lesbians proves.
GERTRUDE STEIN
Gertrude Stein liked repetition, so when she became a literary giant, she used her clout to repeat the status quo in the next generation. As far as her own capital goes, Gertrude Stein invested in paintings, a wealthy person’s game. Few, if any, however, were painted by women. Matisse, Picasso, and Cézanne could be found in her collection, but none of the talented lesbians running in her circle.
In her own salon-style home, women were directed to the kitchen while only men surrounded Gertrude in conversation. In many ways, aspects of Stein’s life echoed the worst elements of misogyny. Especially if we look at her marriage. Her wife, Alice B. Toklas was a woman committed to surviving. In need of somewhere to live, Toklas knew she had to fulfill the proper role of a woman, even if she was in love with one because Gertrude was set on assuming the conventional role of a man. Ownership included. Souhami tells us that Alice:
“was an experienced and capable manager, adept at subsuming her own ego. And she was a very good cook. Whatever Gertrude wanted, Alice would provide.”
In short, a perfect wife that allowed Gertrude Stein to take up the position of the brooding, brilliant husband. And she did; Gertrude “lived in a cocoon of her own intelligence and meandering imagination. According to Stein,
“it’s hard work being a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing.”
With Alice by her side, Gertrude had arranged a lifestyle that allowed her to think, write and muse to her heart’s content. Like the men of her time, her past and future, this and the accomplishments it bore were paid for by the invisible work of women.
Beyond being the beasts of every emotional burden put upon us, women do the work of raising families, overseeing domestic duties, feeding, and gifting our independence to our partners. It’s a relationship that society tries to convince us is symbiotic, insisting that women are naturally creatures who crave the satisfaction of unpaid labor.
Without this arrangement, Capitalism can’t work. One of the numerous reasons it’s failing us now is because it’s an economic system built by assuming specific white men would own workers, enslaved people, wives, servants, and children, to support the necessary structures that house their bloody, mass of stolen wealth. On this foundation, history’s fondly remembered men built a world suited only to themselves.
But that foundation is crumbling. A house that’s no longer safe for anyone to occupy.
These four people were able to emancipate themselves from this domestic role capitalism required of women, and personally redistributed the hoarded wealth of men. But what they achieved was entirely dependent on luck and genetics. That’s the definition of a happy accident, not an egalitarian way to produce masterful art. Had any one of these women been poor, black, or disabled there would be no way to know who would be famous, who would be destitute, or who would be dead.
The biographies comprised in No Modernism Without Lesbians remind us that a tremendous amount of our progression towards equality is being done without actually affecting the undercurrent of inequality: Capitalism. Looking at the lives of Sylvia, Bryher, Natalie, and Gertrude, it’s hard not to wonder if any one of us could become just as exceptional in our own disciplines if given a fraction of the opportunities they had been.
Furthermore, what wonders await us in a world where every individual has enough time and resources to make sense of themselves and the world around them?
Despite what wealth and privilege went into its creation, Diana Souhami does show us how incalculably valuable art and literature have been to the human experience. For those who create it and each one of us who consumes it. Flag down any bystander on the street and ask them what they would think of a life without movies, television, books, photography, painting, sculpture, music, theater, dancing, or fashion. Ask that of yourself. Can we really call ourselves a society without ways to build our cultural identity?
And if that cultural identity is only able to be shaped by people who can navigate an affluent white patriarchal system, then what good is it at all?
Soon after the last sentence, “And the lovers of love and refreshment in life still loved, and loved lovers and loved love”, what once read like a saccharine literary treat began tasting like my broke, bitter reality again. As if my husband could see the resentment settling into the corners of my mouth, he handed me a proverbial penny buying me a chance to spit out my thoughts like envious cud.
“I have three big takeaways from this. One, I’m not a fan of Gertrude Stein. Two, I think James Joyce is a little shit, and three, a more appropriate title for this book would be “No Modernism Without White, Rich, Lesbians.”
Narrowing my eyes, I checked to see if his begrudgingly amused smile welcomed my rant before I really got going.
“The lovers of love and refreshment don’t always get to love. Sometimes life tells you to go fuck yourself. I admire these people, but it’s pretty hard to ignore the part that their daddy’s money played in this whole book. In a way, I get it. Take your resources and distribute them to better, but it would be fairer if our government started doing that instead of having to rely on random ass individuals.”
It bears mentioning that the man I’m speaking to has offered me as much of a white, rich, lesbian’s lifestyle as possible. Being older, free from student debt, a property owner, and better established in his career, I am able to lean on my husband for financial support while I develop my voice. It’s a setup a saw a lot of in the art industry; one person has a great job and the other has a passion project.
By no stretch of the imagination, however, do we have the FU money these women had. Really, all I have in common with them is being a white woman. I still work to pay my own bills, cater to all of the domestic work, and pick up the slack of my husband’s life that American working hours require he drop.
Familial wealth has helped in the past, but the most impactful financial support we ever received was direct payments through the pandemic. They helped us pay off debt from medical bills and having to live on credit and disability payments, while the time off work helped me address attention deficit issues that slowed down my writing process. A venture, it should be pointed out, that’s been funded by our state-subsidized healthcare program.
I’m not trying to conduct the world’s smallest violin here. Rather, I’m creating an itemized receipt for the cost of an artist. Even a novice one like me. Gertrude was not facetious when she said that genius requires doing a whole lot of nothing. Artists speak deep truths about life specifically because they take time to observe them in action. Without an endless well of experience, knowledge, curiosity, and observation, goosebump-giving metaphors aren’t possible. Formulating an entirely new shade of gray takes a tediously practiced eye.
One thing No Modernism Without Lesbians does prove without a shadow of a doubt is that artists need time. Translate that into the Western vernacular of late-stage capitalism and what Souhami is really saying is: artists need money. In many ways, the reality of an artistic process is exactly as romantic as we make it out to be. Let’s stop thinking of that as a frivolity, though. During downtime is when the human-animal evolves into a consciousness. I’d asked you to imagine a society without art, but in fact, there is no society without art.
Ours can be a better one too. Instead of indulging all the whims of the self-obsessed few, as Harriet Weaver and Sylvia Beach did, we can create social programs that enable everyone the dignity of a daydream; that full-body sensation of eureka.
Once the green monster of jealousy excused itself from my company, I mulled over my own privilege and realized that No Modernism Without Lesbians doesn’t have to reach the tone-deaf conclusion I’ve projected on it.
Instead of imbuing this text with a “boot straps’ narrative, wherein we dismiss insane wealth and pretend these four people came to prominence on account of their singular natures, we can use this book as an argument for robustly funded social programs.
That’s right, No Modernism Without Lesbians is an inadvertent socialist manifesto.
In five chapters, Diana Souhami makes it clear that structural systems of oppression work to silence notable voices just because of their sex, gender, race, or class. All things inherited by the accident of birth, not, as some still believe, from some inherent superiority.
As meticulously demonstrated on every page, the world is a better place because monetary privilege happened to befall a few worthy underdogs. Diana Souhami believes these four people are worthy of the advantages they were given, but the truth of it is, we will never know if someone is “worthy” of something until they’re given it. Knowing that, it makes more sense to continue under the assumption that everyone should be considered worthy. Because aren’t they?
In every single person, there is a spark that could be fanned into an intellectual and artistic flame. Should we want to see a society that is as vibrant, awe-inspiring, and innovative as it is equal, we need to do as Diana Souhami suggests and give artists money. And because, as she illustrates, we can’t use a prescribed rubric to figure out who has the next pivotal idea percolating inside them, we have to treat everybody like an artist and invest our economic resources in them.
Insisting the contrary, that benevolent philanthropy can somehow sus out genuine potential, only works to reinforce long-held systems of oppression that imprint implicit bias on us. We cannot always see past our initial expectations of someone and therefore are always in danger of overlooking something extraordinary. By shifting instead to robust social programs, we can actually ensure an equity of experience for would-be-creators.
My life is a perfect demonstration of that. When I couldn’t lean on the direct advantages of my circumstance and race, government programs stepped in. I’m a graduate of community college, recipient of a Pell Grant, and enrolled in subsidized public health care. In the end, though, being an American, my privilege did most of the work. Much like Sylvia Beach, the guilt and unease that comes with that has tainted my personal freedom.
I want to stand on the shoulder of giants, not crush the backs of the less fortunate.
That won’t happen until we build on our social infrastructure. We all know our culture and economic system isn’t working for anyone, even its staunchest defenders. If we want America to be a land where free people use the best of themselves to build an exceptional country, we’re going to need more than the scraps of century-old social programs.
Sylvia Beach illustrates how transformative individual grants are, H.D proves a need for healthcare that includes mental health as well as childcare and Alice B. Toklas drives home the power of affordable housing. Public parks could be a way for anyone to take a holiday from their writer’s block, and codifying a 4-day work week would give everyone their critical daydreaming time back.
From accessible quality education to gap year stipends, yes, even Universal Basic Income; all government-funded programs that lift financial burdens off the populace and improve public life will work to create better artists, intellectuals, innovators, and inventors.
These vital players in the human race are not luxury items, they’re our MVPs. Artists make civilization worth living in.
Investing in them isn’t a liberal frivolity either; it also makes financial sense, especially in America. In 2019, for instance, this country made about $919.7 billion from the Arts and Entertainment industry.
That figure makes sense since our best and biggest export as a country is undeniably our culture. American pop music plays abroad while musicians from around the world flock to our coasts carrying dreams of making it. Our movies, theater, fashion, and literature are envied internationally which should be an immense source of communal pride. Our arts have given us international bragging rights for decades, but we have never put our money back where it actually comes from.
Nothing delights the American rich more than scoffing at their artistic child piddling away the earnings from hedge fund management, only to turn around and invest a million dollars in a painting. Only ensuring that same humiliating kid won’t ever have to work. It’s a flawless encapsulation of America’s paradoxical relationship with the arts.
Should we, for once, prioritize the public and economic good over the smug satisfaction of the 1% among us who are swelling with wealth like a tick on a stray dog, then we might actually rehabilitate American life.
For now, the pursuit of happiness reads like a fantasy.
Looking beyond economics or entertainment, at its deepest level, creative expression is how our own existential condition becomes slightly tangible. Both the art we make and the art we appreciate become the only tools we have to be understood by somebody during an existence where everything else is darkness. Art is a light we can see and show to others.
Surrounded by a cold, suffocating universe, sharing a warming spark of solidarity is the reason life feels like it has meaning. In its glow, we feel a little less isolated and slightly less confused.
Money can pay for social programs like universal basic income, public healthcare, paid family leave, disability, gap year programs, free public education, and Pre-K – 12th-grade art programs, but it cannot make meaning for us. Only human connection does that.
So, let’s use money to fund what gives us that sense of solidarity: art. Perhaps Diana Souhami didn’t want us to envy the people she wrote about in No Modernism Without Lesbians. Maybe the point was to encourage us to create an economic system that acts like rich, white, lesbians by giving people money.
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