Adrienne Monnier

Savoy and Paris

Adrienne Monnier was born in Paris on 26 April 1892. Her family came from Savoy, and she spent parts of her childhood there; her father, Clovis Monnier, was a postal worker who sorted mail on night trains.[2]

In November 1913 a train crash left her father with a permanent limp. The railway compensation, ten thousand francs, was handed to his daughter to set her up in business.[1]

Monnier had worked as a secretary and had read constantly. She used the money to open a bookshop.

La Maison des Amis des Livres

La Maison des Amis des Livres opened at 7 rue de l'Odéon on 15 November 1915, in wartime, when paper was short and many of the customers she might have had were at the front.[3]

The name — the House of the Friends of Books — describes the model. It was a bookshop, but the core of the business was a subscription lending library: members paid a fee and borrowed. That let poor writers and students read what they could not buy, and it gave Monnier a membership list rather than a stream of strangers. Colette, Walter Benjamin, André Breton and a young Simone de Beauvoir were all on the cards.

She sat at the back in a long grey skirt and white blouse that made visitors compare her to a nun or a shepherdess, and she ran readings. Writers read new work aloud to an audience of subscribers, and the readings became events: Valéry, Gide, Claudel, Larbaud, Fargue and Joyce all read there. The most consequential was the séance of 7 December 1921, at which Valery Larbaud introduced Ulysses to Paris, two months before the book existed.

Valery Larbaud had a name for the street the two shops stood on. He called it Odéonia.

Sylvia Beach

In 1917 Sylvia Beach, an American, came into the shop looking for an issue of a literary review. Beach and Monnier became partners in life and in work, and remained so until Monnier's death.[4]

Monnier showed Beach how the lending-library model worked, and encouraged her to open an English-language version. Beach opened Shakespeare and Company in November 1919 at 8 rue Dupuytren, around the corner, and moved in 1921 to 12 rue de l'Odéon, directly across the street.

For twenty years the two shops faced each other, one French and one English. Writers crossed between them daily, and translations, introductions and friendships came out of the traffic.

Publishing

Monnier published as well as sold. Her imprint issued work by Valéry, Fargue, Georges Duhamel and others, and from 1925 she ran a review, Le Navire d'Argent, edited with Jean Prévost.

Le Navire d'Argent lasted twelve issues and lost her money. It printed the first French translation of T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, an issue devoted to American writers, and early work in French translation by writers including Ernest Hemingway.[5]

She sold part of her own library to cover the debts when the review closed.

The French Ulysses

Monnier's largest publishing project was the French translation of Ulysses. Beach had published the English original in 1922; Monnier published Ulysse in February 1929, seven years later.

The translation was made by Auguste Morel, revised by Stuart Gilbert, and checked over by Valery Larbaud and by Joyce himself. It took years, and Joyce's involvement made every stage slower.

To mark the launch she gave a lunch at Les Vaux-de-Cernay outside Paris, in June 1929, for Joyce and about thirty guests, among them Paul Valéry, Jules Romains, Léon-Paul Fargue and Samuel Beckett. The guest list survives, which is why the lunch is described so often.[6]

Writing

Monnier wrote as well as sold and published. She produced poems, essays and memoirs, and translated from English and German — she and Beach translated Eliot's poem into French together, and she later translated Walter Benjamin, who was a customer and a friend.

Her collected pieces about the shop and its writers were published in French as Rue de l'Odéon. They are the best record of what the readings and the arguments were actually like, from the person who organised them.

The occupation

Monnier kept the shop open through the German occupation of Paris, from 1940 to 1944, which meant operating under censorship and rationing.

She helped Beach, who was American and therefore an enemy alien after December 1941, and she was involved in hiding Beach's stock when Shakespeare and Company closed in December 1941. She also helped Jewish friends during the occupation, though the record does not say in what way.

Illness and death

After the war the shop struggled and Monnier's health failed. In 1951 she gave up La Maison des Amis des Livres after thirty-six years.

In 1954 she was diagnosed with Ménière's disease, a disorder of the inner ear. Her case produced constant loud noise in her head — she described hearing voices and unbearable sound that never stopped — and it did not respond to treatment. She could not read or work.

She wrote in the first person for her own readers, in pieces she called gazettes, and revived them after the war as La Gazette des Amis des Livres, which ran from 1938 to 1940.

On 19 June 1955 Adrienne Monnier died by suicide at her flat in the rue de l'Odéon, from an overdose of sleeping tablets. She was sixty-three. She left a note saying that she was ending a life she could no longer bear, after eight months of illness with no hope of improvement.[2]

Sylvia Beach, who had been with her for thirty-eight years, called it the great sorrow of her last years. Beach died seven years later.

The Paris council later put a plaque on the building at 7 rue de l'Odéon, naming her the sainte patronne des libraires, the patron saint of booksellers.

Why Adrienne Monnier matters

Monnier worked out a way of running a bookshop as a literary institution. It had four parts: a lending library with paying members, readings by the authors, a publishing arm, and a proprietor who chose the writers and made the introductions. Sylvia Beach copied the model directly when she opened Shakespeare and Company in 1919.

Between the wars the rue de l'Odéon held two bookshops facing each other, one French and one English. The traffic between them produced the translations, the meetings and the friendships that connected French writing to Anglo-American modernism. Ulysses was published in English on one side of that street and in French on the other, seven years apart, by two women who lived together.

The gazettes

Monnier wrote a first-person column she called a gazette, which began in her review Le Navire d'Argent. She revived the form after the war as La Gazette des Amis des Livres, printed in small numbers with old-rose covers, which ran from 1938 to 1940 until the war stopped it.