A Moveable Feast (Hemingway) really started something... Since then, from that era and/or coterie, we've had The Paris Wife (McLain); The Beautiful and Damned (Fitzgerald); and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Stein). And now here's Sylvia Beach (1887-1962), and this memoir, which was published in 1959.


Available for loan from Internet Archive. Pity about the terrible cover...

The Shakespeare and Company of the title is an American bookshop-cum-library, located in Paris (first at 8 rue Dupuytren, and then round the corner at 12 rue de l'Odeon). Having arrived back in Paris in 1917, Beach and her sister make the acquaintance of Adrienne Monnier, who runs a French-language bookshop, La Maison des Amies des Livres, on the rue de l'Odeon. After volunteering as a farm hand, and working for the American Red Cross in Belgrade, Beach returns to Paris in July 1919.

She had long wanted to open a bookshop, and she is supported in her ambition by Monnier. Having found suitable premises, Beach tells us she cables her mother: "'Opening bookshop in Paris. Please send money,' and she sent me all her savings." Wow... Such a different life...


Google images of Adrienne Monnier

Beach launches Shakespeare and Company in November 1919, with French author Andre Gide (later a Nobel prize-winner) as one of the earliest subscribers. It drew in the big literary names who were moving to Paris for the sake of a more congenial working environment: "I didn't foresee, when I opened my bookshop..., that it was going to profit by the suppressions across the seas. I think it was partly to these suppressions, and the atmosphere they created, that I owed many of my customers -- all those pilgrims of the twenties who crossed the ocean and settled in Paris and colonized the Left Bank of the Seine... Often, they would inform me that they had given Shakespeare and Company as their address, and they hoped I didn't mind."

Over the next decade or so, the bookshop's fame grew: "It was always crowded with new and old customers, and was written up more and more in the newspapers and magazines." But it was badly hit by the depression, and by 1936, Beach feared it would have to close definitively.

But Gide rallies a supportive group of well-known writers who offer a series of readings calculated to draw more subscribers. Gide is the first to contribute to this programme, followed (inter alia) by Andre Maurois, Paul Valery, T.S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway: "By this time we were so glorious with all these famous writers and all the press articles that we began to do very well in business."

But times change. Shakespeare and Company initially remains open when WWII began. Then the German military sweeps across France, eventually arriving in Paris. The US Embassy encourages repatriation. But Beach stays. She has a Jewish volunteer helper, and so becomes very familiar with the restrictions now in place.

But things become harder still when the US joins the war. Resident Americans have to register with the authorities once a week. And when a high-ranking German wants to buy her last copy of Finnegans Wake, and she refuses to sell it, he tells her that her goods will be confiscated. From one day to the next, she moves everything to an apartment on a higher floor, takes down the shelves, and paints out the sign. "Did the Germans come to confiscate Shakespeare and Company's goods? If so, they never found the shop." That was in 1941. Beach never reopened her shop.

She ends up being interned for six months in 1943. She is discharged conditionally, but as she could be taken in again at any point, her friends arrange for her to go into hiding.

The liberation is much more messy and ad hoc than we often picture it. And it's Hemingway (according to this version) who liberates the rue de l'Odeon... He turns up with a string of jeeps: "He wanted to know if there was anything he could do for us. We asked him if he could do something about the Nazi snipers on the roof tops in our street... He got his company out of the jeeps and took them up to the roof. We heard firing for the last time in the rue de l'Odeon. Hemingway and his men came down again and rode off in their jeeps -- 'to liberate,' according to Hemingway, 'the cellar at the Ritz.'" Hem must have loved all that...



Over the course of the narrative, we meet many of the figures we're now familiar with:

"Not long after I had opened my bookshop, two women came walking down the rue Dupuytren. One of them, with a very fine face, was stout, wore a long robe, and, on her head, a most becoming top of a basket. She was accompanied by a slim, dark whimsical woman: she reminded me of a gipsy. They were Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas... Her remarks and those of Alice, which rounded them out, were inseparable. Obviously they saw things from the same angle, as people do when they are perfectly congenial... Alice had a great deal more finesse than Gertrude. And she was grown up: Gertrude was a child, something of an infant prodigy."

Beach is very kind, almost invariably gracious. But she tells it straight: Stein "took little interest, of course, in any but her own books... [She] had so much charm that she could often, though not always, get away with the most monstrous absurdities, which she uttered with a certain childish malice." Beach also has a little laugh when Sherwood Anderson's wife, Tennessee, attempts to rebel against Stein's no-wives rule, and Alice puts her "wife-proof technique" into action. Beach often acts as intermediary for people who want to visit Stein, but are a little scared to approach her...

For Ernest Hemingway she feels "the warmest friendship" from the day they met. And she adds a curious observation: "Baptized or not -- and I am going to say this whether Hemingway shoots me or not -- I have always felt that he was a deeply religious man. Hemingway was a great pal of Joyce's, and Joyce remarked to me one day that he thought it was a mistake, Hemingway's thinking himself such a tough fellow and [writer and publisher Robert] McAlmon trying to pass himself off as the sensitive type. It was the other way round, he thought. So Joyce found you out, Hemingway!" She also comments that Hemingway spoke to her "rather bitterly" about his childhood, and is severely self-critical, but "hypersensitive to the criticism of others". Wyndham Lewis got badly under his skin (as he also did under James Joyce's). Hadley Hemingway, meanwhile, "was an attractive, delightfully jolly person".

After her decision to publish Joyce's Ulysses (more below), D.H. Lawrence asks her to help with Lady Chatterley's Lover. She says no: "I didn't admire this work, which I found the least interesting of its author's productions... D.H. Lawrence was a man of great personal charm. It was always a matter of wonder to me why a writer so greatly gifted never seemed to have the power to produce what his readers were expecting of him. As a man he was very interesting -- fascinating. I could understand the devotion of Lawrence's friends, and why women pursued him across countries and over the seas."

Scott Fitzgerald, meanwhile, was "one of our great pals". There's a nice little vignette: "We liked him very much, as who didn't? With his blue eyes and good looks, his concern for others, that wild recklessness of his, and his fallen-angel fascination, he streaked across the rue de l'Odeon, dazzling us for a moment... Poor Scott was earning so much money from his books that he and Zelda had to drink a great deal of champagne in Montmartre in an effort to get rid of it... [They] always left money on a plate in the hall of the house where they lived, so that people coming with bills or those to be tipped could simply help themselves. Thus did Scott shed all he earned without concern for the future."


Sylvia Beach and James Joyce

A large segment of the book is devoted to James Joyce (1882-1941), whom we had so much to do with in Trieste, and whose work I finally started reading in December. Beach is an unabashed admirer -- "I worshiped James Joyce" -- and very much takes him and his family (Nora and two children) under her wing. When she meets them in 1920, they had only recently arrived in Paris, at the suggestion of Ezra Pound. "This first time, and afterward," she recalls, "I was always conscious of his genius, yet I knew no one so easy to talk with."

It is interesting to read of his departure from Trieste when World War I broke out: "It had been a narrow escape. The Austrians were about to arrest him as a spy, but a friend, Baron Ralli, obtained a visa just in time for him to get his family out of the country. They had managed to reach Zurich, and had stayed there till the end of the war."


Trieste, 2023. "The Greek community of Trieste was extremely wealthy and influential in Joyce’s time and the Irish writer counted among his students some of their leading members, like Baron Ambrogio Ralli, Count Sordina and the Galatti family. Joyce attended Greek-Orthodox religious services"

Beach builds up a quite a portrait over the course of the memoir. He's always a bit shabby, but has a very distinguished bearing. He exclaims a lot (his daughter refers to him as "l'Esclammadore"), but his manner is mild and unemphatic. He has terrible eye problems, suffering from glaucoma and occasional attacks of iritis. He's a prodigious linguist. He's afraid of dogs, thunder, heights, the sea, and infection. He's superstitious. And his attitude to money is not exactly practical: He's always short of cash, and yet his family dines out every evening; he tips extravagantly; and he entertains generously. Despite Nora's sceptical attitude towards his writing (she tells Beach she hasn't read a page of "that book", meaning Ulysses), Joyce's is "certainly the happiest marriage of any writer I knew".

And he comes often to the bookshop, where he meets the likes of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

Joyce has been working on Ulysses for many years when he meets Beach, and some installments have appeared in The Little Review, but increasingly, there is trouble with censorship. (The full story of the Ulysses trials can be found here.)

So Beach offers to publish it in France... Pre-publication subscriptions come in, with many big names behind the project (G.B. Shaw, notably, was not one of them). But it's absolutely not an easy undertaking. Joyce has continual eye problems; and dealing with his approach to proofs is both time-consuming and expensive. But the book is published -- all 732 pages and 1.55 kilos of it -- in 1922.


Proof-correcting, a la Joyce

As copies start to be seized at the Port of New York, Ernest Hemingway comes up with a suitably flamboyant scheme to get them to Canada, and then across the border into the US.

It sells well (with notoriety probably helping): "Tourists developed quite a technique in smuggling Ulysses into the United States. It was more difficult to get it into England..."

But Joyce absorbs a lot of Beach's time, one way and another. She attempts to have his play Exiles staged (in the event it was not performed in Paris until 1954). In 1927, she publishes Pomes Penyeach, a collection of 13 poems. (Beach's favourites are On the Beach at Fontana and A Prayer. But many readers were disconcerted by these little pieces, and Joyce was "seriously wounded" by Ezra Pound's dismissive comments about "the sort of poetry to be kept in the family Bible".) And in 1929 she publishes a compilation of pieces reflecting on "Work in Progress", which would eventually become Finnegans Wake.

Joyce's work was constantly subject to piracy, and at one point a fake copy of Ulysses appeared, complete with the imprint of Shakespeare and Company: "Thus, for the next few years, some pirate succeeded in putting into his pocket the earnings of a writer who had not only spent a long time on his work and was losing his eyesight, but whose financial problems were becoming more and more serious." The more things change...



Beach is a patient person, but this man is evidently trying: "I was willing to do everything I could for Joyce, but I insisted on going away weekends, and every Saturday there was a tussle with Joyce over my departure for the country. If it hadn't been for Adrienne pulling on my side, I could never have got loose. Joyce, as Saturday approached, always thought up so many extra chores for me that it usually looked as if he were going to win. But Adrienne and my own doggedness to hold on to my Sabbath in the country armed me for resistance."

When he finally has a stroke of luck, and Ulysses is published with Random House, thereby earning him USD 45,000, you can detect more than a little hurt in Beach's jumble of emotions: "I felt an immense joy over his good fortune, which was to put an end to his financial troubles. As for my personal feelings, well, one is not at all proud of them, and they should be promptly dumped when they no longer serve a purpose... Joyce tried to persuade me to bring out a cheap Continental edition of Ulysses, but I couldn't get interested in this idea. I was too hard up, and it would also have meant continuing my services to him -- which was impossible because my bookshop needed me very much and besides I was tired."

Poor Beach... You feel, despite her reticence, much pain that her devotion has been poorly rewarded. James Laughlin, in the Introduction to the edition I read, gives Joyce fairly short shrift: "[He] was seldom very recognizant of benefactions except to his great patron, Harriet Weaver." And Kathryn Hughes, referring to a letter that Beach wrote to Joyce but never mailed, dated 1927, notes: "Addressing it to 'Dear Mr Joyce', Beach explains tautly that 'as my affection and admiration for you are unlimited, so is the work you pile on my shoulders', before proceeding to that lament which we would all love to scream to the world: 'I am poor and tired too'. Shortly after not receiving this letter, Joyce shifted the focus of his emotional and financial needs on to another well-bred woman, this time the British Harriet Weaver, whom he proceeded to suck dry in much the same way." But Beach would never have put it like that...

There is still a "Shakespeare and Company" in Paris. Founded by George Whitman, it opened in 1951, 10 years after Beach shut up shop. In a different location, and originally named Le Mistral, it assumed the name Shakespeare and Company in 1964, with the blessing of Sylvia Beach. It is now run by Sylvia Whitman, George's daughter.

Something else to visit when we go back to France, as SNCF keep suggesting we do...