The Letters of Sylvia Beach, edited by Keri Walsh
‘Nine stenographers gave up the typing… and a gentleman from the British Embassy burned a dozen pages in a rage …Ulysses is a masterpiece and one day will rank among the classics of English literature…Joyce is in Paris and I told him I would publish his book after the publishers in New York threw up the job in a fright.’ (1921)
Sylvia Beach’s Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company had barely been open two years when she decided to publish Ulysses.
Beach was in her early thirties, and had settled in Paris in the days when a small amount of money and a lot of hard work went a long way. Her French lover Adrienne Monnier ran a French language bookstore, La Maison des Amis des Livres, but Sylvia wanted an English language bookstore, and soon the two of them had premises opposite each other in the rue de l’Odeon.
Everybody came; Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Andre Gide, William Carlos Williams. They didn’t come sometimes, they came often, using the bookstore as a meeting place, a reading room, an accommodation agency, a think-tank, and a bank.
Writers and readers alike could buy books or they could borrow them. Favoured clients like Hemingway and Joyce could borrow money too, and while Hemingway was scrupulous and seems to have really loved Sylvia – ‘No-one that I ever knew was nicer to me’, Joyce’s gigantic ego nearly ruined Sylvia. He took her cash, let her take all the risks on his (at the time) unpublishable book, and later reneged on the letter and the spirit of their agreements, simply reselling to Random House when he was famous enough to do so.
Sylvia was broken but not bitter. Indeed her great success with Shakespeare and Company was the success of her personality. Her all American can-do, her brio, her true love of books and writers, made her what her first biographer, Noel Riley Fitch called ‘the midwife of Modernism.’
Sylvia’s energy is very clear in her letters, collected here for the first time, and a pleasure to read, in the way that letters are, perhaps especially now, when so few are written, and when collected emails and texts and tweets face us as a future.
For anyone who loves books, and who mourns the loss of so many independent bookshops, and must now mourn the loss of the book itself and wonder at its ghostly reincarnation as an electronically disembodied text, the Sylvia Beach legacy has hope in it.
Although Sylvia had to close her bookstore during the Second World War when she was interned, and she never re-opened it, what she had achieved was bright burning enough to fire up a young GI called George Whitman. Stationed in Paris during the war, and loving books, Whitman was determined to follow Sylvia’s example. In 1951 he opened his own English language bookshop, Le Mistral, and soon cut a deal with Sylvia Beach to call it Shakespeare and Company.
Like Sylvia, George wanted writers as well as readers in his store, and offered food and somewhere to sleep to the Beat generation of poets coming over from the States. He built beds in the shop itself, giving literature-loving travellers the chance of an eccentric billet in return for a couple of hours work in the bookstore – and the condition that anyone who stayed should read a book a day too, as George did himself, and does still.
George Whitman is ninety-five now, and perched over his shop like an old eagle. Shakespeare and Company is run by his twenty-nine year old daughter, Sylvia Beach Whitman. The story goes that when she was born, George, aged 66, drove his red moped to the hospital and yelled up at his wife’s window ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ On hearing that it was a girl he shouted, ‘She’s called Sylvia.’
Like the first Sylvia the next Sylvia slept among the books
There is a wonderful interview between Malcolm Muggeridge and Sylvia Beach in his 1960’s BBC series Appointment With… filmed not long before Sylvia died in 1962. It is well worth seeing, as a poignant piece of archive, and as a reminder that when someone – anyone- loves what they do, simply and for its own sake, then things happen around that person, and knowingly or not, they allow things to happen for others too, a ripple of influence that can’t be calculated but is profound.
Hemingway, as a Major in the American Army, came personally in his own tank to liberate Sylvia at the end of the war, swinging her up in the air and giving her a cake of soap. She continued to write to him, delighted with his Nobel Prize, watching the writers she had done so much for become the names of the twentieth century.
Yet she never forgot the personal –there is a brief note to Alice B Toklas, written in 1946, the day after the death of the writer Gertrude Stein, Toklas’s partner of forty years. ‘I am very sad about Gertrude leaving us and send you my deepest sympathy. I know it must be terribly hard for you.’
Gertrude Stein had fallen out with Sylvia Beach, because of her commitment to Joyce, but Beach always had a feel for the personal, and although she had been interned, lost her bookshop, and was struggling with money and health worries after the war, she never lost the ready warmth that was part of her love of life, her love of books.
The spirit of Sylvia Beach is everywhere present in Shakespeare and Company as it is now, divided into a thriving bookshop plus beds on three floors, and an impressive antiquarian business. The present Sylvia is planning a theatre and cinema space and a café. In the meantime she has started a wonderful literary festival – this year titled Politics and Storytelling, bringing together writers from around the world in a series of events that happen in a tent right by the shop, overlooking Notre Dame.
To be in Shakespeare and Company at any time is to remember how wonderful books are, especially piled in their thousands, but not in the chilly corporate way of chainstore retail, rather as a noisy conversation, - books, readers and writers talking to each other, which is what happens ten-fold at festival time, a chaotic, exuberant celebration of the written word and its power,
The shop inevitably spills onto the street, the tent events spill into the park, and everything happens until midnight. Store hours are a reader-friendly 11am to 11pm, but even when the shutters go up you know that behind them are six people busily reading their book a day.
Reading Sylvia Beach’s letters, I can’t help thinking that her bookstore begun on $3000 dollars from her mother was itself a letter sent out across time, put down, picked up, re-read, and now written again, with further exciting news.
The best news is that a bookstore that helped shaped the twentieth century world of ideas and exchange, has moved vigorously into the twenty first century, communicating to a new generation the vitality of the book – as Sylvia said of it, ‘her missionary endeavour.’
published in The Times in May 2010 .
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