FROM TLS
Sylvia Beach, the midwife of Modernism
From the Red Cross to the rue de l’Odéon: how the smallest of small publishers produced the biggest of big books
Sylvia Beach was a midwife of Modernism, and she adored her blue-eyed boys. F. Scott Fitzgerald she liked “very much, as who didn’t? With his blue eyes . . . he streaked across the rue de l’Odéon, dazzling us for a moment”. Paul Valéry gave his daughter “beautiful blue eyes, like his own”. Beach grafted blue eyes, with matching shirt, on to Ezra Pound in an article she published in Mercure de France, “but he wrote to me immediately to say that he never had blue eyes at all”. There was no doubt about James Joyce, however. His eyes were “a deep blue, with the light of genius in them . . . extremely beautiful”.
The genius visited Shakespeare and Company in Saint-Germain-des-Prés for the first time in the summer of 1920. “Joyce came walking up my street”, Beach wrote in the charming and whimsical memoir she named after her creation. “He stepped into my bookshop . . . he inspected my two photographs of Oscar Wilde. Then he sat down beside my table.” On being introduced at a dinner party the day before Joyce’s arrival at the bookshop, the pair shook hands: “That is, he put his limp, boneless hand in my tough little paw” – where she intended it to stay.
The Letters of Sylvia Beach relates the stories of Shakespeare and Company (1959) in rough-draft form, often with the same affectionate humour and self-effacement. Beach had originally thought of situating the business in London, but a visit there in 1919 “was enough to show me that London was not the town to start my shop in”. Her mother – invariably addressed as “Dearest Little Mother” – who was to finance the project, had proposed Greenwich Village as a likely place, tempting us to wonder how the history of Modernism would have looked if Beach had been an obedient daughter. By this time, however, newly discharged from war duty in Serbia, she had met Adrienne Monnier, proprietor of La Maison des Amis des Livres in rue de l’Odéon. “Monnier herself”, she told her mother, “the Pope-to-be-ere-long-throughout France in that Branch of art”, meaning bookselling.
Beach conceived the idea of a companion establishment, catering to British and American readers, as well as French and other seekers after English books. Dearest Little Mother sent “all her savings” – $3,000 – and on November 19, 1919, Shakespeare and Company opened its doors for the first time. In the window were the works of “our Patron” – Shakespeare – of T. S. Eliot, and a copy of Monnier’s favourite English novel, Three Men in a Boat. Beach not only sold books but lent them out via her subscription library, which attracted young writers to the shop. Among her favourites was Ernest Hemingway, who invited Beach to a boxing tournament where the bloody noses shocked and thrilled her. He elected himself her “best customer”, and she was pleased to agree; one who was “not only a regular visitor, but spent money on books, a trait very pleasing to the proprietor of a small book business”.
The original shop was at No 8 rue Dupuytren, not far from rue de l’Odéon, but in 1921 Beach found premises opposite Monnier’s, and the scenery was in place for the drama of Ulysses, with cameo appearances by Hemingway, Pound (“I saw Mr Pound seldom”), Valery Larbaud, André Gide and others. The friendship between the neighbouring booksellers developed into deep and lasting companionship, but Beach might have been surprised to read the claim by Columbia University Press that The Letters of Sylvia Beach “reveals . . . her long love affair with the French bookstore owner Adrienne Monnier”. It doesn’t. There is no indication in the letters that Beach or Monnier is involved in any love affair, with one another or with outside parties. The editor Keri Walsh says that their relationship “would grow into a lifelong mutual devotion, one rooted in a shared commitment to writing, reading, and serving the artistic community”, for which there is abundant evidence. “Everybody assumed that they were lovers”, Brenda Maddox wrote in Nora (1989), her biography of Joyce’s wife, and perhaps they were. Monnier had “blue-grey” eyes, after all, which “reminded me of William Blake’s”. But don’t look for revelations here.
Nancy Woodbridge Beach, called Sylvia by her father Sylvester, a minister, and her mother Eleanor, the daughter of a missionary, was born in Baltimore in 1887. When she was fifteen, Reverend Beach was appointed assistant minister at the American Church in Paris, and the Beaches moved to France for three years. Family friends included the future US President Woodrow Wilson, of whom Beach writes warmly in her letters. Her younger sister Cyprian appeared in silent films and later lived with a somewhat better-known actress, Helen Jerome Eddy. “How successful you’re being in films!”, Beach congratulated her sister in 1917. Four years later she informed their elder sibling Holly that “Cyprian did some film in [Paris] the other day and there were crowds of star-gazers”.
While Cyprian cultivated stardom, Sylvia and Holly were active with the Red Cross in Belgrade. “The r.c. has made a regular feminist of me”, she told her mother in 1919:
It’s seeing men doing all the managing and helping themselves to all the pleasant things that come along – the women are subjected to humiliations that American women are not at all accustomed to . . . . A mere nothing of a man is a Lt, but the women at the head of their departments rank as nothing whatsoever.
Wondering how best to dispense her literary enthusiasm when the war ended, she studied French poetry. In 1950, her translation of Henri Michaux’s poem Un Barbare en Asie was published by New Directions as A Barbarian in Asia and won the Denyse Clairouin Memorial Award. Beach welcomed it, while characteristically informing the administrators: “I am well aware of the shortcomings of my translation”.
We learn from Beach’s letter to George Macy that the honour brought with it some “generous Prize money” – but how much? Who was Denyse Clairouin? Who was George Macy, and what are the George Macy Companies, which sponsored the award? Keri Walsh, an assistant professor at Claremont McKenna College, CA, does not think it worthwhile telling us, though on the same page she offers the information that the “F. M. Ford” mentioned in a letter to Pound is “Ford Madox Ford”. (Denyse Clairouin, French translator of D. H. Lawrence, Graham Greene and others, died in a concentration camp in 1945. George Macy was the founder of the Limited Editions Club, publisher of fine illustrated books.) Likewise, it would have interested readers to learn something about Cyprian Beach’s screen career, beyond the information that she “played ‘Belles Mirettes’ in the French silent film series Judex”. A reference to George Bernard Shaw’s famous letter to Beach, setting out his reasons for not subscribing to Ulysses, is footnoted “see Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, 104–105”. For those who don’t have a copy of Fitch to hand – or, for that matter, Shakespeare and Company, where the letter is helpfully reproduced – the relevant information is as follows: Shaw told Beach that, having read parts of Ulysses in serial form, he found it “a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilization”; but, he added, “it is a truthful one”. Readers are expected to work out for themselves that between the letter of August 27, 1919, to Dearest Little Mother and that which follows it in this volume, of May 5, 1920, to Gertrude Stein, Beach’s bookshop opened for business. The information is contained in the idiosyncratic chronology – “1921. Shakespeare and Company relocates to 12 rue de l’Odéon . . . . The Harlem Renaissance begins in the United States” – but Walsh neglects the duty of conveying readers smoothly from one bumpy patch in an eventful life to the next, with as little head-scratching – or dashes to the library to consult Fitch – as possible.
“Already the publicity is beginning, and swarms of people visit the shop on hearing the news”, Beach wrote to her sister Holly on April 23, 1921. The news was Ulysses, which at that stage existed only in Maurice Darantière’s printer’s shop in Dijon. “All American & Eng subscriptions are to be sent to me and if all goes well I hope to make some money out of it.” She became fully occupied with coping with demand, at the same time as arranging for the last chapters to be typeset and for Joyce to receive his latest proofs. Unfortunately, there are no letters to or from Darantière in The Letters of Sylvia Beach, though it would be a surprise to learn that none existed. A more conspicuous absence is the lack of any letters to Joyce concerning the production of Ulysses. Walsh explains that the 108 letters Beach wrote to Joyce, “which form part of the Jahnke Bequest at the Zurich International James Joyce Foundation . . . are closed to scholars indefinitely”, which to the innocent ear sounds like an outrage. The earliest letter to Joyce here is an incomplete one, dated July 16, 1924; the next is May 15, 1929 and concerns “the volume with the long, long title”, Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, a collection of essays on “Joyce’s experiment”, Finnegans Wake, by Samuel Beckett, Eugène Jolas, Robert McCalmon and others. “Dear Mr Joyce”, Beach wrote, “This is the proof of the ad in Transition. What do you think of one in the New Statesman as well as Times Lit Supplement?” (An advertisement duly appeared in the TLS of May 30, 1929.) By this time, Beach was devoting a large portion of her energy to catering to Joyce’s ever-increasing demands, caused partly by his failing eyesight, while attempting to fight off bowdlerizers and pirates taking over her delicate craft. Beach was editor, publisher, distributor and seller: wholesale, retail, mail order. The most intimidating pirate was Samuel Roth, who included abridged chapters of Ulysses in his journal Two Worlds Monthly, then issued an unauthorized edition of the entire novel in the United States in 1929. It bore the false imprint of Shakespeare and Company, and is now advertised by second-hand book dealers as “the true First American Edition (unauthorized)”, fetching up to $16,000. The authorized Random House edition (1934) had to wait for Judge John M. Woolsey to overturn the decision of an earlier court that Ulysses was obscene. Again, there is next to nothing about this in The Letters of Sylvia Beach, only a complaint to her sister Holly, made in 1926:
The reason I haven’t written is that there’s this awful pirating of Ulysses business that takes all my time. Douglas sent me a clipping of the Roth interview in the NY Evening Post and we had to take action at once. The enclosed will tell you all about it.
The “enclosed” and the action must remain mysteries to readers of The Letters. The Douglas who kindly sent the clipping may have been her cousin Douglas Orbison, or else Norman Douglas, who hoped that Beach’s improbable renown as the publisher of an unprintable book would encourage her to champion other casualties of censorship and suppression:
Oh dear! What does Mr [Norman] Douglas take me for . . . ? a rich amateur no doubt.
Oh dear oh dear oh dear! I haven’t the slightest desire to have those de luxe copies made for Shakespeare and Company nor to pay forty pounds or anything although I like his book and D. H. Lawrence deserves to be held up as an example.
The book was Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which Douglas helped to have printed in Italy in 1928, after Beach’s refusal. “It’s all preaching, preaching”, she later told the Guardian journalist Peter Lennon about Lawrence’s novel. “It’s nobody’s duty to go in for sex if he doesn’t want to, is it?”
Walsh writes in her introduction that Beach enjoyed refusing “hot books”, which she would pass along to the Obelisk Press, run by the Mancunian Jack Kahane, though this is to compress the chronology, as Kahane did not begin publishing until 1929. He was keen to take over Ulysses but had to be content with a portion of Finnegans Wake – Haveth Childers Everywhere (1930) – and a de luxe edition of Pomes Penyeach with illuminated capitals designed by Lucia Joyce (1932). Originally published by Shakespeare and Company in 1927, Pomes Penyeach is one of only three titles to emerge from Beach’s press, the other being “the volume with the long, long title”, what she called “Our Exag”.
Beach’s faux-naif humour, familiar to readers of her memoir, is genially displayed all through the letters. Pound had made a recent visit to Paris, she wrote to Hemingway in 1931, “and an Italian tried to stick a stiletto into him during a soirée given in his honor at the Brasserie de l’Odéon. I think people should control themselves better”. By then her business, like many others, was suffering from “le Krach americain”. Joyce had become an insupportable burden, and, it seemed to her, an ungrateful one. Only the survival of his offspring concerned the Irishman, not the welfare of the midwife. A fairly stiff communication of November 10, 1931, returned to Joyce “herewith Mr Pinker’s letter of the 6th”. The literary agent Pinker was one of several intermediaries who were colluding to prise the rights to Ulysses out of Beach’s tough little paw. “As regards ‘Pomes Penyeach’”, she wrote, I took out the American copyright of the book this summer and I do not consider its publication in a volume with Chamber Music at all opportune at the present moment. The 5,000 copies of my 1927 edition being now exhausted, I am arranging about a second edition.
Three months later, in February 1932, she told another of Joyce’s advisers, Paul Léon, that she had “made a present to Mr Joyce” of her rights to an authorized American edition of Ulysses which, had she retained them, could have made her rich: the Random House edition immediately sold 35,000 copies. She also revealed that “Mr Joyce was not satisfied with the contract between us for ULYSSES ‘because neither party was free to act without the consent of the other’. I replied that I supposed it resembled other contracts in that way”.
The single piece of paper devised in 1930 (Ulysses had existed for eight years without a contract) was torn up. She wished Joyce now to “consider himself free from all obligation to me”. The feeling of being badly done by was not new to her. Five years earlier, in a letter never sent which is included as an appendix to The Letters, Beach told Joyce that “as my affection and admiration for you are unlimited, so is the work you pile on my shoulders”. Sustaining not only Joyce but the Joyce family had become “a very terrifying project”. Joyce made her presents of manuscripts, including those of Stephen Hero and Chamber Music, which she stored carefully and later sold. In 1959, her hoard formed the basis of an exhibition, The Twenties, organized by the American embassy in Paris.
Shakespeare and Company staggered on through the 1930s, with ever fewer American and English patrons. To boost funds, readings were organized. Gide led off the programme in 1936; afterwards there was a reading by André Maurois, followed close at hand by Hemingway and Spender . . . . They had just arrived from Spain where Hemingway was doing some articles, and insisted on having a double reading. Spender is a gentle boy with nice manners . . . . Hemingway is, as everyone knows, a Tough Guy, and several times while he was reading one or two of the older un-married ladies almost got up and left, but stayed hoping for worse, which they got.
When the Nazis entered Paris, Beach, who had lately made a visit home to the United States where she underwent a hysterectomy (she was also “knocked out by headaches” all her life), declined to leave rue de l’Odéon a second time. In her memoir, she told the almost too-cinematic story of how a “high-ranking German officer” entered her shop one day and, “speaking perfect English”, asked to buy the single copy of Finnegans Wake (published by Faber and Faber) displayed in the window. Beach told him it was not for sale, and duly removed it.
A fortnight later, the same officer strode into the bookshop. Where was Finnegans Wake? I had put it away. Fairly trembling with rage, he said, “We’re coming to confiscate all your goods today.” “All right.” He drove off.
Within a few hours, she had boxed up the stock, removed the sign and painted over the patron’s name. The Germans did not get Finnegans Wake, but they did get Beach. She spent six months in an internment camp at Vittel, alongside Jewish prisoners who would later be removed to Auschwitz. When she returned to Paris, she thought it prudent to “disappear”, and lived for a time in a student hostel in Boulevard Saint-Michel. In an endearingly vertiginous piece of hero worship, she credited Hemingway with ridding rue de l’Odéon of German snipers: “He got his company out of the jeeps and took them up on the roof”, she wrote in the final paragraph of Shakespeare and Company. “We heard firing for the last time in rue de l’Odéon.”
She lived above the shop until her death in 1962, but Shakespeare and Company never reopened for business. Its spirit would be reincarnated by other shops: first Gaïte Frogé’s English Bookshop on rue de Seine, then George Whitman’s Librairie Mistral, which after Beach’s death became the second Shakespeare and Company. The Letters of Sylvia Beach tells the story, though only partially, of how the smallest of small publishers produced the biggest of big books. “Sylvia Beach would have been more staggered by her own intrepidity”, Richard Ellmann wrote in his biography of Joyce, “if she had not been so busy” with preparations for Ulysses.
Keri Walsh, editor
THE LETTERS OF SYLVIA BEACH
376pp. Columbia University Press. $29.95; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £19.95.
978 0 231 14536 7
James Campbell’s books include Paris Interzone: Richard Wright, Lolita, Boris Vian and others on the Left Bank, first published in 1994. A collection of essays, Syncopations, appeared in 2008.
The genius visited Shakespeare and Company in Saint-Germain-des-Prés for the first time in the summer of 1920. “Joyce came walking up my street”, Beach wrote in the charming and whimsical memoir she named after her creation. “He stepped into my bookshop . . . he inspected my two photographs of Oscar Wilde. Then he sat down beside my table.” On being introduced at a dinner party the day before Joyce’s arrival at the bookshop, the pair shook hands: “That is, he put his limp, boneless hand in my tough little paw” – where she intended it to stay.
The Letters of Sylvia Beach relates the stories of Shakespeare and Company (1959) in rough-draft form, often with the same affectionate humour and self-effacement. Beach had originally thought of situating the business in London, but a visit there in 1919 “was enough to show me that London was not the town to start my shop in”. Her mother – invariably addressed as “Dearest Little Mother” – who was to finance the project, had proposed Greenwich Village as a likely place, tempting us to wonder how the history of Modernism would have looked if Beach had been an obedient daughter. By this time, however, newly discharged from war duty in Serbia, she had met Adrienne Monnier, proprietor of La Maison des Amis des Livres in rue de l’Odéon. “Monnier herself”, she told her mother, “the Pope-to-be-ere-long-throughout France in that Branch of art”, meaning bookselling.
Beach conceived the idea of a companion establishment, catering to British and American readers, as well as French and other seekers after English books. Dearest Little Mother sent “all her savings” – $3,000 – and on November 19, 1919, Shakespeare and Company opened its doors for the first time. In the window were the works of “our Patron” – Shakespeare – of T. S. Eliot, and a copy of Monnier’s favourite English novel, Three Men in a Boat. Beach not only sold books but lent them out via her subscription library, which attracted young writers to the shop. Among her favourites was Ernest Hemingway, who invited Beach to a boxing tournament where the bloody noses shocked and thrilled her. He elected himself her “best customer”, and she was pleased to agree; one who was “not only a regular visitor, but spent money on books, a trait very pleasing to the proprietor of a small book business”.
The original shop was at No 8 rue Dupuytren, not far from rue de l’Odéon, but in 1921 Beach found premises opposite Monnier’s, and the scenery was in place for the drama of Ulysses, with cameo appearances by Hemingway, Pound (“I saw Mr Pound seldom”), Valery Larbaud, André Gide and others. The friendship between the neighbouring booksellers developed into deep and lasting companionship, but Beach might have been surprised to read the claim by Columbia University Press that The Letters of Sylvia Beach “reveals . . . her long love affair with the French bookstore owner Adrienne Monnier”. It doesn’t. There is no indication in the letters that Beach or Monnier is involved in any love affair, with one another or with outside parties. The editor Keri Walsh says that their relationship “would grow into a lifelong mutual devotion, one rooted in a shared commitment to writing, reading, and serving the artistic community”, for which there is abundant evidence. “Everybody assumed that they were lovers”, Brenda Maddox wrote in Nora (1989), her biography of Joyce’s wife, and perhaps they were. Monnier had “blue-grey” eyes, after all, which “reminded me of William Blake’s”. But don’t look for revelations here.
Nancy Woodbridge Beach, called Sylvia by her father Sylvester, a minister, and her mother Eleanor, the daughter of a missionary, was born in Baltimore in 1887. When she was fifteen, Reverend Beach was appointed assistant minister at the American Church in Paris, and the Beaches moved to France for three years. Family friends included the future US President Woodrow Wilson, of whom Beach writes warmly in her letters. Her younger sister Cyprian appeared in silent films and later lived with a somewhat better-known actress, Helen Jerome Eddy. “How successful you’re being in films!”, Beach congratulated her sister in 1917. Four years later she informed their elder sibling Holly that “Cyprian did some film in [Paris] the other day and there were crowds of star-gazers”.
While Cyprian cultivated stardom, Sylvia and Holly were active with the Red Cross in Belgrade. “The r.c. has made a regular feminist of me”, she told her mother in 1919:
It’s seeing men doing all the managing and helping themselves to all the pleasant things that come along – the women are subjected to humiliations that American women are not at all accustomed to . . . . A mere nothing of a man is a Lt, but the women at the head of their departments rank as nothing whatsoever.
Wondering how best to dispense her literary enthusiasm when the war ended, she studied French poetry. In 1950, her translation of Henri Michaux’s poem Un Barbare en Asie was published by New Directions as A Barbarian in Asia and won the Denyse Clairouin Memorial Award. Beach welcomed it, while characteristically informing the administrators: “I am well aware of the shortcomings of my translation”.
We learn from Beach’s letter to George Macy that the honour brought with it some “generous Prize money” – but how much? Who was Denyse Clairouin? Who was George Macy, and what are the George Macy Companies, which sponsored the award? Keri Walsh, an assistant professor at Claremont McKenna College, CA, does not think it worthwhile telling us, though on the same page she offers the information that the “F. M. Ford” mentioned in a letter to Pound is “Ford Madox Ford”. (Denyse Clairouin, French translator of D. H. Lawrence, Graham Greene and others, died in a concentration camp in 1945. George Macy was the founder of the Limited Editions Club, publisher of fine illustrated books.) Likewise, it would have interested readers to learn something about Cyprian Beach’s screen career, beyond the information that she “played ‘Belles Mirettes’ in the French silent film series Judex”. A reference to George Bernard Shaw’s famous letter to Beach, setting out his reasons for not subscribing to Ulysses, is footnoted “see Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, 104–105”. For those who don’t have a copy of Fitch to hand – or, for that matter, Shakespeare and Company, where the letter is helpfully reproduced – the relevant information is as follows: Shaw told Beach that, having read parts of Ulysses in serial form, he found it “a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilization”; but, he added, “it is a truthful one”. Readers are expected to work out for themselves that between the letter of August 27, 1919, to Dearest Little Mother and that which follows it in this volume, of May 5, 1920, to Gertrude Stein, Beach’s bookshop opened for business. The information is contained in the idiosyncratic chronology – “1921. Shakespeare and Company relocates to 12 rue de l’Odéon . . . . The Harlem Renaissance begins in the United States” – but Walsh neglects the duty of conveying readers smoothly from one bumpy patch in an eventful life to the next, with as little head-scratching – or dashes to the library to consult Fitch – as possible.
“Already the publicity is beginning, and swarms of people visit the shop on hearing the news”, Beach wrote to her sister Holly on April 23, 1921. The news was Ulysses, which at that stage existed only in Maurice Darantière’s printer’s shop in Dijon. “All American & Eng subscriptions are to be sent to me and if all goes well I hope to make some money out of it.” She became fully occupied with coping with demand, at the same time as arranging for the last chapters to be typeset and for Joyce to receive his latest proofs. Unfortunately, there are no letters to or from Darantière in The Letters of Sylvia Beach, though it would be a surprise to learn that none existed. A more conspicuous absence is the lack of any letters to Joyce concerning the production of Ulysses. Walsh explains that the 108 letters Beach wrote to Joyce, “which form part of the Jahnke Bequest at the Zurich International James Joyce Foundation . . . are closed to scholars indefinitely”, which to the innocent ear sounds like an outrage. The earliest letter to Joyce here is an incomplete one, dated July 16, 1924; the next is May 15, 1929 and concerns “the volume with the long, long title”, Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, a collection of essays on “Joyce’s experiment”, Finnegans Wake, by Samuel Beckett, Eugène Jolas, Robert McCalmon and others. “Dear Mr Joyce”, Beach wrote, “This is the proof of the ad in Transition. What do you think of one in the New Statesman as well as Times Lit Supplement?” (An advertisement duly appeared in the TLS of May 30, 1929.) By this time, Beach was devoting a large portion of her energy to catering to Joyce’s ever-increasing demands, caused partly by his failing eyesight, while attempting to fight off bowdlerizers and pirates taking over her delicate craft. Beach was editor, publisher, distributor and seller: wholesale, retail, mail order. The most intimidating pirate was Samuel Roth, who included abridged chapters of Ulysses in his journal Two Worlds Monthly, then issued an unauthorized edition of the entire novel in the United States in 1929. It bore the false imprint of Shakespeare and Company, and is now advertised by second-hand book dealers as “the true First American Edition (unauthorized)”, fetching up to $16,000. The authorized Random House edition (1934) had to wait for Judge John M. Woolsey to overturn the decision of an earlier court that Ulysses was obscene. Again, there is next to nothing about this in The Letters of Sylvia Beach, only a complaint to her sister Holly, made in 1926:
The reason I haven’t written is that there’s this awful pirating of Ulysses business that takes all my time. Douglas sent me a clipping of the Roth interview in the NY Evening Post and we had to take action at once. The enclosed will tell you all about it.
The “enclosed” and the action must remain mysteries to readers of The Letters. The Douglas who kindly sent the clipping may have been her cousin Douglas Orbison, or else Norman Douglas, who hoped that Beach’s improbable renown as the publisher of an unprintable book would encourage her to champion other casualties of censorship and suppression:
Oh dear! What does Mr [Norman] Douglas take me for . . . ? a rich amateur no doubt.
Oh dear oh dear oh dear! I haven’t the slightest desire to have those de luxe copies made for Shakespeare and Company nor to pay forty pounds or anything although I like his book and D. H. Lawrence deserves to be held up as an example.
The book was Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which Douglas helped to have printed in Italy in 1928, after Beach’s refusal. “It’s all preaching, preaching”, she later told the Guardian journalist Peter Lennon about Lawrence’s novel. “It’s nobody’s duty to go in for sex if he doesn’t want to, is it?”
Walsh writes in her introduction that Beach enjoyed refusing “hot books”, which she would pass along to the Obelisk Press, run by the Mancunian Jack Kahane, though this is to compress the chronology, as Kahane did not begin publishing until 1929. He was keen to take over Ulysses but had to be content with a portion of Finnegans Wake – Haveth Childers Everywhere (1930) – and a de luxe edition of Pomes Penyeach with illuminated capitals designed by Lucia Joyce (1932). Originally published by Shakespeare and Company in 1927, Pomes Penyeach is one of only three titles to emerge from Beach’s press, the other being “the volume with the long, long title”, what she called “Our Exag”.
Beach’s faux-naif humour, familiar to readers of her memoir, is genially displayed all through the letters. Pound had made a recent visit to Paris, she wrote to Hemingway in 1931, “and an Italian tried to stick a stiletto into him during a soirée given in his honor at the Brasserie de l’Odéon. I think people should control themselves better”. By then her business, like many others, was suffering from “le Krach americain”. Joyce had become an insupportable burden, and, it seemed to her, an ungrateful one. Only the survival of his offspring concerned the Irishman, not the welfare of the midwife. A fairly stiff communication of November 10, 1931, returned to Joyce “herewith Mr Pinker’s letter of the 6th”. The literary agent Pinker was one of several intermediaries who were colluding to prise the rights to Ulysses out of Beach’s tough little paw. “As regards ‘Pomes Penyeach’”, she wrote, I took out the American copyright of the book this summer and I do not consider its publication in a volume with Chamber Music at all opportune at the present moment. The 5,000 copies of my 1927 edition being now exhausted, I am arranging about a second edition.
Three months later, in February 1932, she told another of Joyce’s advisers, Paul Léon, that she had “made a present to Mr Joyce” of her rights to an authorized American edition of Ulysses which, had she retained them, could have made her rich: the Random House edition immediately sold 35,000 copies. She also revealed that “Mr Joyce was not satisfied with the contract between us for ULYSSES ‘because neither party was free to act without the consent of the other’. I replied that I supposed it resembled other contracts in that way”.
The single piece of paper devised in 1930 (Ulysses had existed for eight years without a contract) was torn up. She wished Joyce now to “consider himself free from all obligation to me”. The feeling of being badly done by was not new to her. Five years earlier, in a letter never sent which is included as an appendix to The Letters, Beach told Joyce that “as my affection and admiration for you are unlimited, so is the work you pile on my shoulders”. Sustaining not only Joyce but the Joyce family had become “a very terrifying project”. Joyce made her presents of manuscripts, including those of Stephen Hero and Chamber Music, which she stored carefully and later sold. In 1959, her hoard formed the basis of an exhibition, The Twenties, organized by the American embassy in Paris.
Shakespeare and Company staggered on through the 1930s, with ever fewer American and English patrons. To boost funds, readings were organized. Gide led off the programme in 1936; afterwards there was a reading by André Maurois, followed close at hand by Hemingway and Spender . . . . They had just arrived from Spain where Hemingway was doing some articles, and insisted on having a double reading. Spender is a gentle boy with nice manners . . . . Hemingway is, as everyone knows, a Tough Guy, and several times while he was reading one or two of the older un-married ladies almost got up and left, but stayed hoping for worse, which they got.
When the Nazis entered Paris, Beach, who had lately made a visit home to the United States where she underwent a hysterectomy (she was also “knocked out by headaches” all her life), declined to leave rue de l’Odéon a second time. In her memoir, she told the almost too-cinematic story of how a “high-ranking German officer” entered her shop one day and, “speaking perfect English”, asked to buy the single copy of Finnegans Wake (published by Faber and Faber) displayed in the window. Beach told him it was not for sale, and duly removed it.
A fortnight later, the same officer strode into the bookshop. Where was Finnegans Wake? I had put it away. Fairly trembling with rage, he said, “We’re coming to confiscate all your goods today.” “All right.” He drove off.
Within a few hours, she had boxed up the stock, removed the sign and painted over the patron’s name. The Germans did not get Finnegans Wake, but they did get Beach. She spent six months in an internment camp at Vittel, alongside Jewish prisoners who would later be removed to Auschwitz. When she returned to Paris, she thought it prudent to “disappear”, and lived for a time in a student hostel in Boulevard Saint-Michel. In an endearingly vertiginous piece of hero worship, she credited Hemingway with ridding rue de l’Odéon of German snipers: “He got his company out of the jeeps and took them up on the roof”, she wrote in the final paragraph of Shakespeare and Company. “We heard firing for the last time in rue de l’Odéon.”
She lived above the shop until her death in 1962, but Shakespeare and Company never reopened for business. Its spirit would be reincarnated by other shops: first Gaïte Frogé’s English Bookshop on rue de Seine, then George Whitman’s Librairie Mistral, which after Beach’s death became the second Shakespeare and Company. The Letters of Sylvia Beach tells the story, though only partially, of how the smallest of small publishers produced the biggest of big books. “Sylvia Beach would have been more staggered by her own intrepidity”, Richard Ellmann wrote in his biography of Joyce, “if she had not been so busy” with preparations for Ulysses.
Keri Walsh, editor
THE LETTERS OF SYLVIA BEACH
376pp. Columbia University Press. $29.95; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £19.95.
978 0 231 14536 7
James Campbell’s books include Paris Interzone: Richard Wright, Lolita, Boris Vian and others on the Left Bank, first published in 1994. A collection of essays, Syncopations, appeared in 2008.
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