CHAPTER 16
Happy Bloomsday,” Sylvia chirped to her first customer on June 16, 1925, using the term she’d invented the previous year to commemorate the day on which the myriad, epic events of Ulysses take place. Teddy, the gray-haired terrier who’d adopted the store, whom Sylvia had adopted in return, yapped cheerfully as if repeating his master’s salutation.
As it happened, her first customer was Ernest, looking bright-eyed and clean-shaven on the hot summer morning. He smelled of sunshine, soap, and the rising steam from the sidewalks that had been rinsed by street cleaners hours before. “Happy Bloomsday indeed,” he replied, stooping to scratch Teddy behind the ears. “I’ve already written most of a story today.”
“My, my, aren’t you productive.”
“Have to be as productive as possible before we leave for Spain.”
“Ah yes, Pamplona. The bullfights. Lady Macduff?” Sylvia chuckled. Lady Duff Twysden was her real name, but she could never hear it without thinking of Macbeth, and so she couldn’t resist the pun. Teddy trotted off to find Lucky, who lived full-time in the store, whereas the little dog bedded down with Adrienne and Sylvia every night. Canine and feline got on well enough during business hours, and Lucky did a tremendous job of keeping Teddy away from Joyce when he stopped by—for which the writer was very grateful, and resulted in his rechristening the tenacious cat Lancelot.
“The very same,” replied Ernest, who squatted to get a better look at the W shelf.
“Will you be at the party later?” she asked, referring to the first—annual, she hoped—Bloomsday party to be held that evening at the Joyces’ fine digs on Square Robiac near the Eiffel Tower. Shortly after Nora’s reluctant return from Ireland, Joyce had found them a spacious and lovely place with grand windows and an especially lovely belle epoque facade. Joyce had confided in Sylvia, “I had to do something to make sure she stays this time. Make our lives more respectable. No more moving about.” Hearing him say these words had filled Sylvia with unexpected relief of her own.
The past two years had felt like a Pax Odeonia. Sylvia commissioned a third edition of Ulysses, she and Adrienne began translating poetry together, lately embarking on a French version of Eliot’s “Prufrock” for a new journal Adrienne was launching out of La Maison, Le Navire d’Argent. They also discovered a new favorite vacation destination in Les Déserts, where they gloried in sunshine and long walks and wildflowers and being entirely away from the relentless pace of their lives in Paris, where more and more Americans were coming to stay. Whether they were single aspiring writers or young families eager to make a fresh start, they came to Shakespeare and Company as soon as they disembarked, smelling of excitement, nerves, and lunch on the train. Tired of repeating the same information again and again, Sylvia had written out a three-page welcome document full of recommendations for restaurants, hotels, churches, and theaters, from which hundreds of newly arrived Americans fervently and gratefully scribbled down insider tips. Bob’s Contact Editions had gotten off the ground and had published Ernest’s first book in 1923, Three Stories and Ten Poems, to great acclaim. Meanwhile, the Joyces set about decorating as they had never before, with wallpaper, Persian rugs, and heavy, dramatic drapes. It cost so much that Harriet Weaver actually mentioned it in one of her letters to Sylvia about her English edition of Ulysses and other matters of Joyce business: “I was under the impression that Paris was inexpensive to live in, which made it more attractive to the young artists—but that cannot be true if Mr. Joyce’s recent housing expenses are to be believed!”
Ernest sounded the same note now as he slid the latest volume of Williams’s poetry across the table toward Sylvia and her ledger. “You don’t think Joyce has gotten too big for his britches in the seventh? With his view of the tower and all?”
“It’s still in walking distance of here,” Sylvia said, lighting a cigarette. “And all his friends are in the fifth and sixth. Visiting him will be like going abroad.”
Laughing, he replied, “No one has ever had a truer friend than Joyce has in you, Sylvia.”
“I hope many of my friends could say that of me.”
“And we do. In fact, Hadley’s planning to make your favorite American chocolate cake for the party as a token of our gratitude.”
“Now that is a cause for celebration.”
“Say, has Scott finally met Joyce?”
“Not that I know of, why?”
“Just curious.”
Right. The two American writers had met in the spring at one of the popular Montparnasse spots—the Dingo, maybe—and according to everyone who was there, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald had started arguing right away, about everything: books, bars, midwestern cities. It was hardly surprising. Though Scott was only three years older than Ernest, he was three novels ahead of him—well received at that—and this was something Ernest could not abide. Sylvia had watched him studiously ignore the constantly replenishing stacks of This Side of Paradise, then The Beautiful and Damned, and now The Great Gatsby as his own slim edition of stories and poems sold merely respectably.
It didn’t help that just a few months ago, Ernest had missed an offer letter from Scott’s editor Max Perkins at Scribner’s that was waiting for him in the pile of mail Sylvia held for him at Shakespeare, while he and Hadley and their little son Bumby were in Austria, where he’d signed a contract with the smaller house Boni & Liveright. The publisher he’d accepted would do right by him, Sylvia knew, but she’d watched as his face darkened and he’d crumpled Perkins’s letter, growling to himself about “my own goddamn impatience. Hadley was right, as usual.”
“I’ve heard he and Zelda are off to the southern coast soon anyway,” she said, not minding that this information would only reinforce her friend’s less charitable image of the Fitzgeralds, that they were spoiled and shallow. Though Ernest wasn’t entirely wrong, Sylvia still found Scott and Zelda to be lively and entertaining when together, and Scott to be charmingly awkward and modest when alone—it had taken him ten minutes to finally get around to introducing himself to Sylvia when he came to the store, and when he did he’d said with wide, boyish eyes, “I can’t quite believe I’m meeting the famous Sylvia Beach.”
“Typical,” Ernest mumbled.
A torrent of piano notes rained down on them from George Antheil’s apartment above the shop. Things had gotten so busy, she’d given up on the tea shop idea and rented the upstairs space to the composer, which supplemented her income in a way that cost her little time and energy.
“He’s at it again, eh?” Ernest said with a mix of amusement and exasperation.
“Every day!” Sylvia sang over the music. “Someday, Shakespeare and Company might be better known as the home of the composer of the Ballet Mécanique.” With the symphony being heard in previews around Paris, young and handsome Antheil was gathering quite a following for himself, none more vocal than James Joyce, whose eyes continued to give him never-ending problems while his ears were mercifully intact and always in need of filling.
“God in heaven, I hope not,” Ernest said. Then, almost as if he could admit it with the music to smother his words, he said to Sylvia, “I don’t think Hadley much wants to go to Pamplona this year.”
“I’m sorry to hear that . . . but maybe she’ll change her mind when she arrives? I know how she’s loved your previous visits.”
“I hope so.”
Sylvia had sensed tension between the Hemingways in the past year, and especially since their return from their ski holiday in Austria; their formerly easy, expansive way with each other, all holding hands and sloppy kisses on cheeks in the day and lips in the night, had given way to a stiff formality. One of them always seemed to have Bumby in arms or on hip as a soft, smiling shield. She couldn’t remember the last time the couple clutched their sides laughing in the shop. It made her sad to think of them.
Much as Sylvia loved her Stratford-on-Odéon, it didn’t seem to have the same effect on marriage that it did on art. Lasting unions like the Joyces’, however volatile at times, were rare—so perhaps they were right to make a home in the seventh, away from parties like the one to which Bob had taken her and Adrienne the week before, with many guests wearing nothing more than paint, and not even bothering to find a private corner for sex when the impulse struck. It made Sylvia queasy to think back on how Adrienne had stared at two women wrapped suggestively in a threadbare sheet that pulsed rhythmically with their lovemaking. Sylvia was satisfied with their sex life and the ways in which it had deepened in intimacy and a certain amount of daring, but Sylvia was always uncomfortably aware that it was Adrienne who tended to introduce the variety and novelty. Sometimes an experiment would end in a fit of laughter, but it was always just the two of them in the room. Watching Adrienne watch the exhibitionism at the party made Sylvia fear there were hungers in her she could not sate, which reminded her uncomfortably of Cyprian’s warning to her when Suzanne was still alive.
“Hadley loves you, Ernest.”
“Sometimes I don’t think I’m worthy of it.”
“I’m sure you have nothing to fear,” she said, though she wondered what weighed on his conscience heavily enough for him to reveal such a fear to her.
So many competing desires.
“I’d rather hoped to see Mr. Pound while I was here,” said Harriet Weaver over tea and meringues expertly made by Adrienne that sultry July afternoon. The three women were sitting on folding chairs in the little cobblestone courtyard of the apartment Harriet had hired for her stay that summer. A breeze riffled the leaves on the branches above them and cooled the perspiration on the back of her neck, exposed beneath her recently trimmed hair. Even Teddy was too hot to beg or play, and had lain down for a nap in the shade.
It was a lovely place a few minutes’ walk from the place de la Contrescarpe, very near Valery Larbaud’s apartment on the Cardinal Lemoine, and Sylvia was pleased to have been able to secure it for the woman to whom she’d always felt so linked, much as their lives were entangled with Joyce’s. Amazingly, this visit was their first time meeting face-to-face. Sylvia looked forward to introducing Harriet to Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, who’d moved to Paris “forever!” the theatrical Margaret had pronounced after her first week of parties and meals in Montparnasse. Their visit to Natalie Barney’s urbane and highly intellectual salon sent her into an orbit of joy. “Why have I not come here before?” she kept asking.
“Ezra seems to be enjoying Italy so much, I wonder if we’ll ever see him here again,” said Sylvia. “More’s the pity. I miss him and Dorothy.”
“Perhaps I should extend my sojourn and pay them a visit,” Harriet said idly. She sipped her tea, and though Sylvia hadn’t been in her presence long, she could tell the other woman was searching for the right words to say what was really on her mind. Adrienne, still shy about her English among native speakers, closed her eyes and slouched down in her seat, allowing the breeze to cool her upturned face.
As she waited for Harriet to get around to it, Sylvia eyed the Englishwoman’s severe gray dress—though it was linen, it was long sleeved and buttoned up to her neck, and Sylvia wondered that she was not positively dying of the heat. Her own white cotton blouse had short sleeves, and she’d eschewed stockings that morning for bare legs under her linen skirt, but she was still uncomfortably warm.
“Do you not think,” Harriet said at last, in a tone so searching as to be pleading, “that perhaps our Mr. Joyce drinks . . . too much?”
Adrienne’s lips twitched into a smile. Even she, Odeonia’s resident gourmet and connoisseur of fine wines and brandies, had wondered this about Joyce—among others of their friends, including Ezra. Sylvia’s answer to the question was always the same, and she delivered it to Harriet now: “Very much so. But there is nothing in the world we can do about it. Nora has tried everything, including leaving him for Ireland.”
“Good for her,” Harriet huffed. “I approve. But she came back! What did that show him?”
“That she can’t stay away. That she loves him as he is.”
Harriet frowned. “What romantic nonsense, Sylvia!”
“Don’t you and I continue to help him despite his flaws? And we’re certainly not in love with him.” His work, maybe, but my heart belongs to Adrienne.
The corners of Harriet’s mouth turned down more. Sylvia knew how many times the Englishwoman had pleaded with Joyce to be more temperate—in all things, not just alcohol. Writing, music, and money, too. The days he received such admonishing letters from his patron, he’d come into Shakespeare and grumble, then go treat whoever happened to be there at eight o’clock to a fine meal at the Deux Magots.
But Harriet never cut him off.
She sighed. “Yes, I suppose we do,” she agreed.
Adrienne’s mouth fixed itself into a thin line.
“I understand your frustration, Harriet,” said Sylvia, tapping a cigarette out of the slim silver case Joyce himself had bought for her as a Christmas present. “I’m constantly advancing him funds for the next editions of Ulysses, and even loaning him money from the store”—though she’d never admit it, even to Adrienne, those loans often went unpaid and were “forgiven” on one occasion or another, like Bloomsday or a birthday—“but I feel strongly that my place is not to meddle in his life. My job is to help him do his work, and then get it into the hands of readers. After all, look at what Ulysses has already done! No one can ignore it. Even writers like Virginia Woolf who originally purported to hate it have been powerfully influenced by it. Have you read Mrs. Dalloway? It uses his style of interior monologue. Ulysses is the most inescapable book of our time.” She lit her cigarette and inhaled, feeling the hot smoke singe her lungs before she blew it out and took a cooling sip of lukewarm tea.
“I agree,” said Harriet with conviction. “Although . . . I do wish I . . . understood his most recent work better.”
“Work in Progress, you mean? Or the poems?”
“The poems seem harmless enough. Not his best work, but I can see how he’d want to write something simpler following Ulysses. No, I mean Work in Progress. I can barely parse much of it, and what I can understand reads to me as mean-spirited. Ulysses was expansive. It broadened our view of Homer’s original, of humanity itself. This new work . . . does not. For me. Does it for you?”
Though her eyes were still closed, Adrienne had knitted her brows together. She hadn’t read Joyce’s most recent and extremely complicated writing, and Sylvia could see that Harriet’s view of it concerned her.
“I don’t think he’s written enough of it for me to judge,” Sylvia replied, which was exactly what she’d been telling herself since she’d read the first pages he’d shown her.
“Well,” Harriet said, “I find that comforting. And perhaps you’re right and it’s never our place to judge.”
Later, though, as Adrienne banged restlessly around the kitchen, assembling a simple supper of vichyssoise and bread as the sky turned from aquamarine to cooler amethyst, she demanded of Sylvia in her most strident French, “Do you really believe that? That it’s not our place to judge?”
“Adrienne, mon amour, I am no critic or poet myself. Not like you are. You know that.”
“Don’t flatter me, Sylvia. You sell yourself short all the time. You’re doing it now.”
“I don’t think I am. I just don’t aspire to criticism. You do. That’s wonderful. I support you in that. And I enjoy the translation work we do together, though it’s nothing compared with the undertakings you bravely take on.” Adrienne had been working even harder lately on Le Navire d’Argent and had engaged Auguste Morel to translate Ulysses for future issues, since young Jacques Benoist-Méchin, who’d done such a marvelous job for the French debut in 1921, had to leave the project for other, better-paying work. Soon Larbaud would also publish an essay on Walt Whitman, and Adrienne was working on one about Gide and Valéry. The long hours strained her, keeping her away from other pursuits like cooking that usually relaxed her. Sylvia was trying to be patient and wait out the worst of it, as Adrienne had done for her in the thick of the Ulysses publication.
“You translate some work on your own as well,” Adrienne argued, with a surprising vehemence in her tone. “And translation is a form of interpretation. Even Pound thinks it’s an art unto itself.”
Teddy poked his head into the kitchen to see what the fuss was about.
“Why are you so upset with me today?”
Adrienne shook her head as if to clear it, then said in a much softer tone, “I . . . I just worry about you giving others more than you need to, and not keeping enough for yourself. Look at Harriet. She gives Joyce everything and . . . what has she to show for it?”
It was true. Harriet’s life did seem to revolve around Joyce. “I have Shakespeare. And you.” Sylvia stepped forward and wrapped her arms around Adrienne’s soft, abundant middle, then kissed her salty, damp jaw, neck, and ear, feeling her relax very slightly. “And we have Teddy. Isn’t that proof enough that I am not completely ruled by our Crooked Jesus?”
Adrienne slid her arms around Sylvia, and they kissed.
“Adrienne . . .” There was a question that had been burning her throat ever since that damn party. And this frustrated outburst from Adrienne was forcing it out at last. “Are you . . . happy? Is there anything you need that we don’t share? That I am not giving you?”
Adrienne closed her eyes and tapped her forehead to Sylvia’s and seemed to be considering how to reply. At last she said, “No. Except I wish you’d ask the same question of yourself. Not if I am giving you enough, but if you are giving yourself enough.”
“I must be, since I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.” Which, she realized, was both true and not at all an answer to Adrienne’s question. “I’ll think more about it.” She kissed Adrienne and slipped her hands under her blouse. “I promise.”