CHAPTER 18

Sylvia buzzed from guest to guest as the crowd spilled from her shop into the street on the mild April night of the opening of her Walt Whitman exhibit. Eliot had come all the way from England, Ezra from Italy, and her parents from the West Coast of America. Even her most dogmatically modern literary friends had come to the party, if not to toast Whitman—because as Eliot pointed out, what need does Old Walt have of their celebrating when he sounds his barbaric yawps loud enough from the pages he wrote—then to support Sylvia and celebrate each other. Curiously, it was her original Paris friends and clientele, the potassons from Adrienne’s store, who were most enamored of Whitman. And Joyce, of course. Just when she thought she couldn’t take any more of his complaining about his eyes and money, he’d turn up at the store reciting “O Me! O Life!” or “What I Heard at the Close of the Day” with a fist full of daffodils, and she couldn’t be irritated any longer.

“Pity Gertrude couldn’t make it,” said Ernest. “She might be the only American in Paris not here tonight.”

“Don’t be disingenuous, it doesn’t suit you,” Sylvia replied with a grin, for she knew of Ernest’s recent break with Stein. Though she didn’t have the details, she knew there had been some sort of rift between them, and she couldn’t say she was surprised. What with Ernest’s hot head and his ego, and Gertrude’s intolerance for anyone who dared to dissent from her in any way, it seemed inevitable. And while Sylvia was relieved to know that she and Joyce weren’t the only people Gertrude was willing to excise, she also felt genuinely bad for her. It was only herself and Alice she hurt with her recalcitrance.

“Disingenuous? Me?” Ernest asked wickedly.

Ever the gadfly, Ford Madox Ford passed by with a bottle of champagne and refilled both their glasses before moving on to the next clutch of people, and Ernest and Sylvia spent a few minutes reliving their adventure to the final of the six-day Vél d’Hiv bicycle races earlier in the month. The sound of the cycles and cheers of the crowds inside the Vélodrome had been loud and invigorating. “I’ve been meaning to suggest that you sponsor a Parisian writers’ boxing tournament,” Ernest said.

Sylvia laughed. “Just what I need, writers with knuckles too bloodied to write!”

“I think Thornton and Ezra are in good enough shape,” he said. “Joyce would get a pass because of his eyes, of course.”

She shook her head, “I don’t know how you find the time, Ernest!”

“I don’t know how others don’t,” he replied. “And nice dodge, Sylvia.”

She ducked in the way she’d seen his favorite boxers do to escape a punch, and he chuckled and then clinked his glass to hers.

Next she found herself sucked into what seemed like a conversation from five years before. Ezra, Larbaud, McAlmon, and Joyce were locked in an intense discussion about the fate of Ulysses.

“. . . and Quinn was simply wrong,” Ezra was saying as she joined them.

“I’m having déjà vu,” she said. “How could he be wrong again, from the grave?” The lawyer had died suddenly, close to two years ago; he’d only been in his midfifties and everyone was surprised.

“His mistakes about the copyright still haunt us,” Ezra grumbled. “Which is how Samuel ‘The Pornblisher’ Roth can pirate Ulysses with impunity.”

“Pity Quinn’s too dead to regale with his wrongness,” said Bob.

“I did worry about this very issue to Quinn three years ago, when I asked if I should have a copy cataloged with the Library of Congress. He assured me that The Little Review chapters would suffice to cover its copyright.” Sylvia shook her head. “There was no arguing with him, and so he wouldn’t help.”

“I rue the day I ever trusted him,” said Ezra.

“Who else were we to trust?” she asked. “It wasn’t like other lawyers were lining up for his job. I seem to remember that Margaret and Jane asked around.” Sylvia glanced around to see if she could see the two editors, but couldn’t find them in the crowd.

“Let’s not forget that he was a great collector, and patron,” Joyce pointed out. “And at the time, he seemed to want the best for the book.”

“Do you have a plan for fighting the pirated edition?” Ezra asked Sylvia.

“Not yet,” she said, annoyed that this topic was overtaking her party for Whitman. “But we do plan to fight it. It’s a source of income for both Joyce and the store. We can’t just have Roth siphoning off what’s rightly ours.”

“Exactly,” said Joyce, nodding.

“Well, if you need anything, please let me know,” Ezra said, as if offering to fix one of her creaky chairs or tables. She noticed, though, that he shot Joyce a kind of scolding look, and wondered if she even wanted to know what it was all about.

Excusing herself to say hello to Sara and Gerald Murphy, but in fact to get away from the rain cloud of a conversation, Sylvia drifted off. From across the store, she glimpsed her mother kissing Julie, Amélie, and Michel goodbye, and her father watching with tender eyes. She was glad he was accompanying her mother on her upcoming buying trip to Italy, even though he had work of his own to accomplish there as well. She thought it was best if her mother wasn’t alone, though Cyprian’s recent letter on the subject intruded on her peace about it: “Mother just seems moodier when Dad is around. Less able to relax and be herself.” Sylvia had been so busy these past days that she hadn’t been able to gain much insight into the relations between her parents when they were in town together. But surely her mother was better off now than she’d been in the fall? She looked it, anyway.

As Sylvia made her way over to her parents, Ezra stopped her and said quietly, “You know that Joyce contracted with Roth to publish pieces of his Work in Progress last year in Two Worlds journal?”

Sylvia shook her head, and felt that same sense of exclusion she’d felt years ago when Joyce hadn’t kept her up to date on the trial of Ulysses. It was his prerogative to serialize his writing in the United States, but she did wish he’d run the idea by her.

Ezra leaned in closer and with narrowed eyes said, “Roth’s been hounding Joyce for Ulysses for years. And I wouldn’t put it past Roth to have sent him a contract that implied more permission than simply publishing bits of that Rag in Progress he’s writing now. Nor would I trust Joyce to have read the document carefully enough to have stayed out of such a trap. Roth’s a snake and Joyce a lamb. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“I consider myself duly warned,” she replied, feeling her blood get hot, flushing her cheeks and making her neck itch. “Thank you, Ezra.”

Oh, Walt. How did you stay so optimistic as—of all things—a writer?

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“It sold how many copies?”

“Twenty thousand.”

“In its first year alone?”

“Apparently.”

Joyce slumped into his chair, and Sylvia stood beside him with a hand on his shoulder. “The Great Gatsby isn’t Ulysses. Not even close,” she said. “It’s not even a bestseller at that many copies.”

“It could well become one.” Joyce looked at Sylvia pleadingly. “Do you think Gatsby will last? You’ve always said Ulysses will last.”

“I don’t know,” she said, unable to be anything other than truthful, even with her favorite writer, because Fitzgerald’s novel did have something special about it. True, it aspired to be a popular novel, and it was not even in the same league with Joyce’s tour de force. Any yet. It sparkled. It was moving. It tapped into something essential about being American. There was something Whitmanian about it. “I do know that there has always been plenty of room in literature for both the avant-garde and the commercial. It doesn’t have to be a competition.”

Joyce didn’t reply. A minute or so ticked by, and then he said, “I missed him the last time he was in Paris, but I’ve seen pictures of him everywhere. He and his wife are beautiful. Magnetic, I’ve heard.”

“Yes,” she said carefully. “He and Zelda are charming.”

“Ernest met him, and told me that one of the reasons Mr. Fitzgerald wanted to come to Paris was me. He said any city in which Ulysses could be written and published was for him. I wasn’t sure if I believed it. What does the great F. Scott Fitzgerald need of Leopold and Stephen?”

“How can you say that? We all need Leopold and Stephen. Any writer worth his salt has to reckon with them.”

“You mean that?” Joyce looked at her with his one milky, bespectacled eye, and the other behind a black patch.

“Of course I mean it,” she said.

“Have you ever thought about opening a branch of your store in New York?”

This was such an abrupt change of topic, Sylvia had to shake her head and say, “Pardon?” to make sure she’d heard him correctly.

“New York,” he repeated. “I was thinking the other day, it might be easier to fight Roth from his side of the Atlantic.”

“But my home is here.” What’s he talking about? Is he joking?

But he wasn’t. “It would only be temporary. Just long enough for you to set up shop in America, vanquish Roth, and begin publishing my work there.”

“But . . . Ulysses isn’t any more legal in America now than it was four years ago.”

“Perhaps we could find another, better lawyer than Quinn to fight for it again. That’s next to impossible from Paris, as we discovered last time.”

Breathing hard against a rising panic in her chest, Sylvia considered for a moment what to say. “I’m not sure if I ever told you this, but my original idea for the store was to open a French-language bookshop like Adrienne’s in America. But rents in 1919 were already too high. They’ve only gone up since then. My mother and sisters had to go to Pasadena, all the way out west in California, to open their boutique, and California is just as far from New York and publishing as Paris.”

He frowned. “I can see you’re not interested in my idea, even though it could be just the thing to fix our problems.”

“It’s not that I’m not interested, it’s that I see it creating as many problems as it might solve.” And it would throw my life into utter chaos.

He shrugged in a pouting manner; I disagree, it clearly said.

“We will find a way to fight Roth,” said Sylvia with conviction. She wasn’t sure how, but she would. She had to. She was smuggling hundreds of copies of the novel all over the world, in the face of the Comstock laws, John Sumner, and the post office. Samuel Roth wasn’t going to stop her.

But Joyce’s lack of reply was what pushed the words from her mouth: “Mr. Joyce, did Roth publish part of your Work in Progress?”

His head snapped up in such surprise, Sylvia felt the wind knocked out of her.

Then, returning to himself and waving a lazy hand, he said, “A chapter or two. He wanted more, but I saw him for the swindler he is.”

“I wouldn’t blame you, you know, if you’d corresponded with him. Especially if he was offering you a handsome sum.” She was leaving the door wide open for him to be honest with her.

“You are my publisher, Miss Beach,” he said firmly. Conversation over.

She wished she felt more reassured.