CHAPTER 24

In the summer of 1931, correspondence about Joyce’s novel began to make Sylvia feel like she was standing in a rainstorm with no umbrella or galoshes.

Dear Miss Beach,

I am writing on behalf of Mr. Bennett Cerf regarding the novel Ulysses by Mr. James Joyce. We have received a copy of your contract with Mr. Joyce, and we are well aware of the time and effort you have spent publishing this Work. We understand that you have gone through many trials in the publication, translation, and dissemination of this Work, including but not limited to fighting piracy, the post office, and ignorant readers and reviewers. Please understand we hold you in the highest regard.

The price of $25,000 to release you from your rights to the Work is too high, however; furthermore, we have explained something similar to Mr. Joyce about his request for 25% royalties and a $5,000 advance. Please also understand that we will have to embark on an expensive and time-consuming legal battle to remove the ban on the Work in the United States. We are confident that the mood in the country and courts has shifted since the trial of 1921, and it can be done, but not without some trouble.

Mr. Joyce appears willing to negotiate, and we hope you will rethink your position as well, in the interest of this great masterpiece.

Yours most sincerely,

William Bates

It was such an irony. After years of insisting they didn’t need a formal contract, the previous year, Joyce himself had demanded that Sylvia sign a simple one-page document assigning him 25 percent of royalties for Ulysses, and giving her the power to accept or reject an offer from an American publisher: “The right to publish said Work shall be purchased from the Publisher at the price set by herself, to be paid by the publishers acquiring the rights to publish said Work.” The written arrangement felt fair, and after he’d taken Work in Progress elsewhere, Sylvia had felt deeply reassured by the power Joyce had given her to veto offers by other publishers. At the time, she’d assumed it would never come to this.

The only reason she was considering any offers at all to buy her out of Ulysses was that an American publisher could potentially make the novel legal in the new, humbler post-crash America. At least, that was what Ezra and Joyce and Ernest and Bob all thought, because Cerf and a handful of other New York City publishers had been wooing Joyce with convincing arguments about more liberal courts and savvier legal representation. Ernest had added, “And it’s because you published it first, Sylvia. You’re the one who showed everyone the novel could find an audience and not corrupt it.”

She wanted, first and foremost, for the book to succeed. She believed that it would continue to be the most important novel of the twentieth century—people would look back in the 1950s, ’70s, and ’90s and see that it changed literature for the better. Close to a decade after her first edition, it was already proving true: she was fond of pointing to William Faulkner and his As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, both of which he wrote all the way in the American south, in Mississippi for crying out loud, for proof of Ulysses’s reach and influence.

Equally, though, she had to look out for herself and Shakespeare and Company. Twenty-five thousand dollars was just barely a fair price for an American publisher to buy her out of her rights to a decade of her life and her future livelihood. They were getting the finest crown jewel of literature, after all! But given their silence on receiving her offer, three editors—Ben Huebsch, who’d moved to Viking, Laurence Pollinger of Curtis Brown, and Bennett Cerf of Random House—all men, of course, seemed to think otherwise.

Fine, let them. Inside her stirred the young feminist who’d once campaigned for women’s suffrage and felt the injustice of women being held back from everything important. Even Harriet Weaver, whose willingness to rescue Joyce every single time, had written to Sylvia in solidarity, saying, “It’s about time the men of publishing recognize what you’ve done for them.” Adrienne had said vehemently, “You’re worth every centime and more, chérie.”

She needed to stay confident and strong.

Dear Mr. Bates,

Thank you for your letter. I understand that you will have to bring Ulysses to trial again and that it is no small matter. I thank you for this valiant effort and hope you will prevail.

Please understand, however, that I am just as much a publisher as you, despite the disparity in our sizes. I, a single person, have been doing the jobs of editor, agent, production manager, printing expert, assistant, publicist, and sales team. As you point out, I have also had legal troubles on behalf of Ulysses and its author, and these have had to be paid for, sometimes out of the coffers of my other business, the bookstore and lending library Shakespeare and Company, not out of the royalties from the sales of Mr. Joyce’s writings.

You are also asking to buy me out of my rights to this novel, which might be written as a simple phrase in a letter like this, but is quite complicated in actuality; the repercussions of its sale are many for its publisher. My investment in Ulysses is not limited to the Paris edition, but includes foreign rights in more than a dozen countries, critical works about the novel, and—this reason cannot be overstated—the business it brings to Shakespeare and Company. This business is incalculable and to lose it during this ever-worsening Depression could be catastrophic for an institution in Paris that many of your own writers have called home.

I speak of writers like Sherwood Anderson and Thornton Wilder, whose bestselling novels will, I am confident, more than foot the bill for the new trial of Ulysses until Ulysses itself is able to repay the debt a thousandfold when you bring it out in an affordable edition and market it to every reader in America. Not to mention the large sum I am sure you’ll make when a London publisher purchases the rights from you.

What Mr. Joyce decides in this matter is his own affair. Whatever he might agree with you for an advance now pales in comparison to what he will make in royalties when you bring the book out in mass scale, and Mr. Joyce is well aware of this. He is one of the shrewdest writers I’ve ever met in financial matters, and I include in my circle of friends and acquaintances virtually every published writer of the past decade. I stand to make nothing from future royalties and thus cannot afford to compromise at this essential juncture. I thank you for your time and understanding.

Sincerely,

Sylvia Beach

Heart thudding as she finished typing, Sylvia panted as if she’d just chopped wood. What she couldn’t say in these letters, or aloud to anyone she knew, is that as much as she wanted Ulysses to go into the world and succeed wildly, a part of her hoped that Cerf said no. Is this how parents feel about their children? God, she wished she could ask her mother.

My dear Mr. Pound,

Whatever you may think of my Work in Progress—which is stalled in any case because of the burden the fight about Ulysses has placed on me—I hope you might see your way to supporting Stephen and Leopold once again. You were their first champion, and you understand them better than anyone. I think now you might also understand better than anyone the corner the women in my life have boxed me into. Miss Weaver with her tight fists and pleas for temperance disguised as concern for my health; Mrs. Joyce with her elderly body as needy as ever and her demands about our children; our new landlady Fraulein Merck, who refuses to let us pay rent even a day late; and worst of all is Miss Beach, who believes she has some ownership in a novel she did not write, and inhibits me from making my future living because of this unfounded notion. Only my darling Lucia suffers as much as I do.

I think Miss Beach might listen to you if you would only write her a line or two. You’ve published works and let them go—encourage her to do the same, I beg of you.

Mrs. Joyce and I have had quite enough of the damp in this terrible English city and have such a hankering for Italy, you might just see us soon.

With deepest gratitude,

James Joyce

Dearest Sylvia,

What terrible news I hear about Ulysses, though I wish I could say it’s surprising. Jane and I always found Joyce to be a writer of genius but not integrity, and that novel seems to curse every woman involved with it, including the characters! It still stings my heart to remember poor Gerty so maligned in the Jefferson Market Courthouse by those pea-head judges who couldn’t even bring themselves to acknowledge the sex of the publishers of the chapter. Women, they said, couldn’t understand such writing; it’s too difficult. Even when John Quinn, who was certainly no friend to women, pointed out that Jane and I were indeed female, they would not deign to look at us sitting before them.

It seems that the book brings out the worst in men, its writer included. I’m sorry, Sylvia, and wish I could offer more than my solidarity, and you have that in spades. Please also give my best to Adrienne.

Wishing you all the luck in the world,

Margaret Anderson

CHIN UP THE WORLD IS FULL OF BASTARDS AND EVERYONE KNOWS YOURE NOT ONE OF THEM TAKING YOU TO DOME NEXT MONTH ERNEST

Dear Jim,

I’m afraid there is a difference—and a rather large one at that—between publishing short works in a journal as I have, and publishing many editions of a novel, as Sylvia has. And didn’t you ask her to sign a contract? I never would have advised that, but here you are and you must honor it, else be no better than the women you deride. Sylvia’s one of the sensible ones. Perhaps she’ll come up with a solution.

—Ezra

Dear Miss Beach,

We regret that we cannot publish Ulysses under the current terms. We hope you reconsider.

Sincerely,

William Bates

Dear Mr. Joyce,

Much as Random House wants to publish your important novel, we simply cannot do so under the terms set by Shakespeare and Company. If you have the funds to purchase the rights from Miss Beach at the price she is asking, I am sure we can come to an agreement between us on royalties. Given your contract, I don’t see another way.

Please keep me apprised of your progress.

Yours in hope,

Bennett Cerf

“Have you heard from Joyce directly?” Larbaud asked. Sylvia was sitting on the wooden chair in his flat on the rue Cardinal Lemoine, where Joyce and his whole family had stayed that summer of 1921 as he furiously and blindly finished Ulysses. Today her French friend was bundled in sweaters and blankets on a chaise a few feet away, although it was a mild early fall day. It seemed he could never get warm enough.

“Not a word.” Joyce had been in London for months, at last marrying Nora in the Kensington Registry Office to secure his line of inheritance for his children.

“I hope his silence means he is consulting thoughtful advisors.”

“Like Léon-Paul? Eugene Jolas?” Both of whom ran his errands and agreed with every word that came out of his mouth.

“Good point,” he sympathized.

“The last time we spoke, he did say he’d written to his agent in London to see if there might be a way through this. He said I deserved to be bought out of the rights.”

“I wonder how much influence the Depression is having on Joyce and the American publishers?”

Sylvia snorted a laugh. “Joyce with Harriet’s bottomless purse, and the American publishers with huge books like A Farewell to Arms, Dos Passos’s latest, plus the usual Agatha Christie novels and now these Nancy Drew books for children? Hardly.” Just saying all that aloud strengthened her resolve.

“Surely fewer people are buying books.”

“Yes, and I’m taking the brunt of that in Shakespeare and Company because it’s a shop for expatriated bohemians, not a big store in New York catering to the people whose money never seems to run out. But all that really means is that publishers won’t be taking any risks for a while. They’ll only publish sure bets, and Ulysses is that. They will make a packet from it. And truly, I don’t care about the money for myself. I feel almost . . . unclean . . . discussing Ulysses in those terms. I love the novel.” She patted her heart. “I love it. But I love my store just as much, and I have to protect it.

“You know,” she went on, clearing her throat, “our old friend Samuel Roth has brought out another edition of ten thousand copies. Ten thousand. Ernest wrote me that he’d seen them at the Gotham Book Mart.”

“I imagine that only makes the matter feel more urgent to Joyce. And I know you don’t want to sacrifice your friendship with him over this.”

She nodded. Yes. Somewhere in all of this was the wretched truth that she had to choose between her relationship with the book and her relationship with the writer. How that was possible, when she’d seen them—and loved them and supported them—as one and the same for a decade, was too excruciating to think about.

Larbaud looked tired. Standing and closing the distance between them, she set her cool hand on his hot, damp forehead, and he closed his eyes.

“I must get home,” she said quietly. “But I’ll be back soon.”

He nodded.

How she wanted to go home and crawl into Adrienne’s soft embrace, but that was out of the question because of Adrienne’s feelings about Joyce and the American publishers, which only made the longing more intense. Larbaud set his head heavily on his pillows, and she knew it was time to go.