A Moveable Feast
How Sylvia appears in its pages: Proprietor of the Shakespeare and Company lending library, who let him borrow books on trust when he couldn't cover the deposit.
Proprietor of the Shakespeare and Company lending library, who let him borrow books on trust when he couldn't cover the deposit.
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeSylvia keeps the lending library at 12 rue de l'Odéon, and the book's account of her is simple: no one was ever nicer to him. On his first visit, short the money for a membership deposit, she waves it off and lets him carry away Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky on trust. The shop is warm in winter, stocked with everything, and functions as the neighborhood's post office, bank, and clubhouse for writers.
What she wants is writers reading and being read — she publishes, lends, forwards mail, and advances cash against royalties that may never come. In a memoir that files its portraits sharp, hers has no edge at all: she is the book's proof that the era's generosity was real.
How the book draws them
- The faceSharply sculpted and quick, with brown eyes as alive as a small animal's and as merry as a girl's, and wavy brown hair brushed back from her forehead.
- The mannerJokes, gossip, and undivided attention — the book treats her curiosity about people as a form of kindness.
- The shopWarm in winter, stacked to the ceiling, and run on trust; the deposit she waves away is the era's most famous line of credit.
- The wallsHung with photographs of the writers of the house, the living and the dead together — a family album the whole quarter belonged to.
- The servicesMail held, money advanced, news exchanged — a post office and a bank that happened to lend books, all run from one desk.
- The syllabusShe starts him on the Russians — Turgenev first, then Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky — carried home in armloads that set the course of a whole winter's education.
At a glance
- 'Sylvia' — bookseller and lender of first resort
- 'Shakespeare and Company,' and wherever books or money run short
- Sylvia Beach · 1887–1962 · Baltimore, Maryland
Nothing in her chapters needs a spoiler warning — the aftermath does. Beach published Ulysses in 1922 when no one else would, nearly went under doing it, and lost the rights when Joyce signed with Random House a decade later. The shop she kept for the whole era closed for good in 1941, during the Occupation — by her own account after she refused to sell her last copy of Finnegans Wake to a German officer — and she was later interned for six months as an enemy alien.
She lived to write her own memoir of the street, Shakespeare and Company (1959), and died in Paris in 1962 — two years before A Moveable Feast told the deposit story. The name of her shop was revived in 1964 by George Whitman's bookstore on the rue de la Bûcherie, which carries it today.
