Sylvia Beach

A minister's daughter from Baltimore

She was born Nancy Woodbridge Beach on 14 March 1887 in Baltimore, Maryland, the second of three daughters. Her father, Sylvester Woodbridge Beach, was a Presbyterian minister. She changed her own first name to Sylvia as a teenager and used it for the rest of her life.[3]

The family came to Paris in 1902, when her father was appointed assistant minister of the American Church. They stayed three years, and those years decided the rest of her life: she learned French and decided she wanted to live in France. The family then moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where her father took a congregation whose members included Woodrow Wilson, then president of the university.[4]

Coming back to Paris

Beach returned to Europe in her twenties and settled in Paris in 1916, while the First World War was still being fought. She was twenty-nine and had no career and no fixed plan. She joined the Volontaires Agricoles, a wartime farm-labour scheme, and spent months in the Touraine picking grapes, bundling wheat and grafting trees. In 1919 she and her sister Holly went to Serbia with a Red Cross mission, where Beach worked as a translator and secretary.[5]

What she did have was an idea about bookshops. She had been reading French writers and wanted to open a French bookshop in New York. She went looking for a literary magazine at a small shop on the rue de l'Odéon. After that visit she dropped the New York plan and decided to open an English-language bookshop in Paris instead.

Adrienne Monnier

The shop was La Maison des Amis des Livres at 7 rue de l'Odéon, opened in 1915 by Adrienne Monnier. It was a bookshop and a lending library, and it was the center of a circle of French writers. Monnier and Beach met in 1917 and were partners, in life and in work, until Monnier's death.

Monnier showed Beach that a bookshop could be run as a literary institution rather than a business. She also gave practical help: how to build a lending library, where to find customers, which writers to court. When Beach opened her own shop, she opened it a few steps away, and eventually directly across the street.[5]

Opening Shakespeare and Company

Beach opened Shakespeare and Company on 19 November 1919, at 8 rue Dupuytren. She had a small amount of money from her mother and a stock of English and American books that were hard to find in Paris.[6]

In May 1921 she moved to a larger space at 12 rue de l'Odéon, opposite Monnier's shop. The two bookshops faced each other across the street for twenty years, one selling French books and one English. Writers walked between them daily, and the rue de l'Odéon became the address where French and expatriate literary Paris met.[7]

The shop was a lending library as well as a bookstore. Members paid a subscription and borrowed books. Writers who could not afford to buy could read anyway, which is why so many of the people who used it were young and broke.[7]

What the shop actually did

Shakespeare and Company was an address, a bank, a post office and a club. Beach let writers use the shop as their mailing address, held their letters, cashed cheques, lent them money and put them up when they had nowhere to go. She introduced French writers to American ones and found translators for both.

Hemingway first came in during December 1921, and Beach gave him a lending-library card on trust. He described the shop in A Moveable Feast as the warmest place he knew in Paris in the years when he had no money, and said she let him borrow as many books as he liked without paying the deposit. Other regulars included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Man Ray, Djuna Barnes and Bryher.

Meeting James Joyce

Beach met James Joyce at a party in July 1920. He was thirty-eight, had moved to Paris weeks earlier with his family, and was trying to finish Ulysses.

Parts of the novel had been appearing in an American magazine, The Little Review, until a New York court convicted the editors of publishing obscenity in 1921 and stopped the serialisation. No commercial publisher in Britain or the United States would touch the book after that, and printers refused it because they could be prosecuted too.

Publishing Ulysses

Beach offered to publish Ulysses herself. She had no experience of publishing, no capital and no distribution, so she used the only method available: she sold the book before it existed. Subscribers signed up in advance and their money paid the printer.

The printer was Maurice Darantière of Dijon, who agreed to set a book he could not read in a language he did not know, and who kept resetting it while Joyce added material to the proofs. The first edition ran to 1,000 copies in three grades: 100 signed copies on Dutch handmade paper, 150 on large vergé d'Arches, and 750 on ordinary paper.

Ulysses was published on 2 February 1922, Joyce's fortieth birthday. Beach had the first two copies brought from Dijon by train that morning so the date would be right.

Selling a banned book

Ulysses was banned in the United States and effectively banned in Britain, and the ban was enforced at the border. Customs officers seized copies. Buyers hid them in luggage. For more than a decade the Paris edition was the only one that existed, and readers in English-speaking countries got it by smuggling.

That situation lasted until 1933, when an American court ruled that Ulysses was not obscene and could be imported. The decision opened the book to ordinary publication in New York, and it ended Beach's position as the only source.

Joyce and the Random House contract

Beach supported Joyce for years. She published him, advanced him money, handled his correspondence, chased his royalties and absorbed the costs of his endless revisions.

In 1932 Joyce sold the American rights to Ulysses to Random House. Beach was not consulted and received nothing from the sale. She held the publishing rights to Ulysses and released them without payment so the American edition could go ahead. The friendship survived; the working relationship between publisher and author did not.

The shop between the wars

By the 1930s the shop was in financial difficulty. The Depression cut the number of Americans in Paris, and many of the writers who had made the shop famous went home. In 1936 André Gide organised a subscription society, the Friends of Shakespeare and Company, whose members paid to keep the shop open; French writers of the first rank subscribed to save an American bookshop. Beach kept it going on that, on sales, and on the loyalty of a smaller circle.

In twenty-two years the shop never turned a profit, and Beach lived plainly throughout.

Closing in December 1941

Germany occupied Paris in June 1940. Beach was American, which for the first eighteen months meant she was a neutral rather than an enemy, and she kept the shop open.

In December 1941 she closed it. The account she gave afterwards was that a German officer came in, demanded the copy of Finnegans Wake displayed in the window, and threatened to confiscate everything when she refused to sell it. She and a group of friends emptied the shop in a single afternoon — books, shelves, light fittings, the painted sign — and carried it all to an empty apartment upstairs. When the Germans came back there was nothing there.

Shakespeare and Company never reopened.

Internment

The United States entered the war in December 1941, which made Beach an enemy alien in occupied France. She was arrested in 1942 and interned at Vittel, in eastern France, for six months. She was released through the intervention of a friend with contacts in the Vichy administration.

She spent the rest of the occupation in Paris, mostly hidden, and kept her books hidden with her.

The liberation of the rue de l'Odéon

In August 1944, during the liberation of Paris, Hemingway arrived in the rue de l'Odéon with a group of armed men and announced that he had come to liberate the street. Beach came down and they embraced in front of the building. He then went up to the roof, in his account, to deal with snipers.

Hemingway and Beach both told the story afterwards, and their versions differ in detail. The accounts agree that Hemingway reached the rue de l'Odéon in August 1944, that Beach came down to meet him, and that the two had not seen each other since before the occupation.

After the shop

Beach did not reopen the bookshop after the war. She stayed in her apartment at 12 rue de l'Odéon, kept lending books to people who asked, wrote, and gave interviews and talks about the writers she had known.

Adrienne Monnier's health broke down in the 1950s. She developed Ménière's disease, which caused constant unbearable noise in her head, and after years of it she died by suicide on 19 June 1955, taking an overdose of sleeping tablets. She and Beach had been together for thirty-eight years. Beach called it the great sorrow of her last years.

The memoir

In 1959 Beach published Shakespeare and Company, her account of the shop's twenty-two years, with Harcourt, Brace in New York. She was seventy-two.

The memoir is written in plain, conversational prose. It is funny about her famous customers and precise about how the shop ran and what publishing Ulysses actually involved. It has stayed in print and remains the main first-hand source for the daily life of expatriate literary Paris.

Death and afterlife

Sylvia Beach died at her apartment at 12 rue de l'Odéon on 5 October 1962, aged seventy-five. Her papers, including the Ulysses correspondence and the lending library records, went to Princeton University, where they are still held and where scholars use them to reconstruct who read what in Paris in the 1920s.

In April 1964, on the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's birth, an American bookseller named George Whitman renamed his shop on the rue de la Bûcherie, near Notre-Dame, Shakespeare and Company in her honour. Beach gave the renaming her blessing. It is a different shop in a different building, opened in 1951 as Le Mistral, and it is still trading. The name is a memorial rather than a continuation.

Why Sylvia Beach matters

Beach published Ulysses in 1922 with no capital and no experience of publishing, after every commercial publisher in Britain and the United States had refused it. The novel is now considered one of the most important written in English, and it existed as a book only because she decided it should.

Her second contribution was the shop itself. For twenty-two years it was where these writers met each other, borrowed the books that formed them, collected their post and got their introductions. The writers now grouped together as the Lost Generation were connected largely through Beach, and she did that work daily for two decades.