Note: This piece is airing worldwide this week on This Way Out (TWO), the syndicated LGBT radio show. Click here to listen to the entire show.
(TWO is the first international LGBTQ radio news magazine.)
I was just telling a friend that the Left Bank of Paris in the 1920s and 30s – and the lesbians that still live on in history and my imagination — is my favorite era. Then a copy of Never Anyone But You arrived. This book is heralded as “A literary tour de force,” is written by Rupert Thompson and published by Other Press in 2018. The writing does live up to its reputation and, just as importantly, the story holds together.
As the novel wanders through Paris, the reader glimpses cameos of legendary places and people – most notably the bookstore “Shakespeare and Company” run by Sylvia Beach and her partner Adrienne Monnier. But as I turned the last page and wiped the wetness from my eyes, I realized that it wasn’t the history that got to me. It was that the author exquisitely captured the life time of love that existed between these two women who are actual historic figures.
The story opens in 1909 when teenage Suzanne Malherbe and Lucie Schwob meet, fall in love and scheme about how to have a life together. Through a series of events, Suzanne’s mother marries Lucie’s father. This renders the two teens step sisters, a convenient cover for the social mores of the time. Suzanne paints and Lucie writes.
The two “sisters” reinvent themselves with male names. Lucie takes the name Claude and Suzanne goes by Marcel. They move to Paris (from a provincial town in France where they were from) and become involved with the Surrealist movement. In the 1930s with anti-Semitism on the rise (Claude is from a Jewish family), they leave Paris for the island of Jersey, off the coast of France, where eventually they are forced to deal with Nazi occupation.
Along the way are interesting asides, such as this quote from the well-known writer of the time and place Djuna Barnes, who described Paris as having “the fame of a-too-beautiful woman” meaning that as Thomas wrote, “One could be overwhelmed by Paris. One could become sated. And it was hard for a city to retain that kind of allure.”
Early in their relationship when the two girls chose their male names, the author writes:
“And then, in a finger snap, my new name came to me, the name that would be mentioned in the same breath as hers, and it flew straight from my brain into my mouth and out into the air. “Marcel Moore.”
“What?” Claude too, it seemed, had been in something of a trance. I repeated what I had said. Marcel, after her uncle. I had never met him, but I admired him, both as a writer and as a spirit. And there was another factor. Marcel was a man’s name, and yet it sounded feminine. I liked the way it loitered between the genders, as if it couldn’t make up its mind. Claude was nodding. “And Moore?” “It’s an English name.” “You wanted to set yourself apart … “ “Yes.” Though the truth was, I had chosen the name to appeal to the Anglophile in her. Also, she claimed she was related to George Moore, the Irish novelist. “How did you think of it?” “I don’t know. It just arrived.” Claude leaned her elbows on the table, her slender forearms upright and considered me. “Marcel Moore,” she said. “That sounds like someone I could love.”
The novel covers a fair amount of history. And while it is obviously well-researched, enlightening and the thing that first hooked me, it was the love that I remember, the love between these two women Suzanne and Lucie and the names they gave themselves, Marcel and Claude.
To learn more about my novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders (just published by Adelaide Books New York/Lisbon), click here.