James Joyce and Sylvia Beach standing outside of Shakespeare and Company, 1920
Few booksellers can claim to have changed the course of literature, but Sylvia Beach is one of them. This Presbyterian minister’s daughter founded and ran the English-language bookshop Shakespeare and Company in Paris from 1921 to 1942. She also published James Joyce’s Ulysses. The experience cost her dear, but her support for literature and for Paris’s expatriate writers, in particular Joyce, never wavered.
Born in Baltimore on March 14, 1887, Beach was christened Nancy, but preferred Sylvia. (She also habitually amended her birth date, to 1896.) In 1901, her father, the Rev. Sylvester Beach, became assistant minister of Paris’s American Church. The Beaches lived in Paris from 1902 to 1905, when Sylvester became pastor in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1914, Sylvia defied American neutrality, joining Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings and others who volunteered to fight for France. Having no practical skills, she was sent to harvest grapes and wheat in the Loire valley, then to Belgrade, where she “distributed pajamas and bath towels to the valiant Serbs.”
Back in Paris in July 1919, she gravitated to the literary world around the colleges of the Sorbonne, and in particular to rue de l’Odéon. Because of its closeness to the university, this short street near the Luxembourg gardens housed numerous teachers and students, and supported a number of bookshops. Among them was La Maison des Amis des Livres (The House of Friends of Books), owned by the bohemian daughter of a well-connected literary family, Adrienne Monnier. One day, Sylvia’s wide Spanish hat blew off, and Adrienne retrieved it—the beginning of a life-long partnership.
Though Sylvia and Adrienne sensed an instant bond, it was an attraction of opposites. Sylvia was short, trim and severe, a furious smoker, with—as Hemingway noted—excellent legs. Monnier dressed in fitted velvet vests that drew attention to her pretty heart-shaped face, while voluminous ankle-length skirts disguised her overall dumpiness. From a distance, noted one writer, she resembled a farm worker standing knee-deep in ploughed soil.
When Sylvia proposed returning to New York to open a shop selling French books, Monnier, more shrewd than her new friend, urged her to remain in Paris and start an English-language bookshop instead. With $3000 from her mother, Sylvia leased a former laundry on rue Dupuytren, around the corner from rue de l’Odéon, and stocked it with books. She called the shop Shakespeare and Company, and commissioned a hanging sign of the playwright, which also became the shop’s trademark.
In May 1921 she relocated at 12, rue de l’Odéon, just across the street from Monnier. Her two-room shop had an apartment above, which was occupied at various times by avant garde composer George Antheil, and, during World War II, by Samuel Beckett and his mistress. Beckett had worked for the resistance, and hid there from the Gestapo while waiting to flee south.
In 1921, Sylvia and Adrienne moved in together, sharing a fourth floor apartment at 18, rue de l’Odéon. Shortly after, Sylvia met James Joyce at a party. “Is this the great James Joyce?” she asked nervously. Wanly, Joyce confirmed “James Joyce,” and “put his limp, boneless hand in my tough little paw.”
No British or American company dared publish Joyce’s novel Ulysses. An American magazine, The Little Review, had been prosecuted for trying to serialize it. “What a dark age we are living in,” Sylvia wrote sarcastically to a friend, “and what a privilege to behold the spectacle of ignorant men solemnly deciding whether the work of some great writer is suitable for the public to read or not!”
Quixotically, she offered to publish the book herself. Joyce agreed, but insisted on a division of income that made financial loss certain for Sylvia. So great was her respect for him, however, that she didn’t argue, even when Joyce continued to travel everywhere by taxi and both dine and drink well. “The report is that he and all his family are starving,” wrote Hemingway, “but you can find the whole Celtic crew of them in Michaud”—an expensive restaurant. Because of Joyce’s demands, the first edition of Ulysses would sell for more than a British schoolteacher earned in a month. Most of the 1000 copies went to speculators or wealthy collectors attracted by its bawdy reputation.
Fearing English-speaking printers would refuse to set the text, Sylvia sent the book to Maurice Darantiere in Dijon, none of whose staff understood English. As a result, the first printings were riddled with typographic errors. At the same time, she printed a leaflet inviting supporters to buy copies in advance. Writer and publisher Robert McAlmon, who had typed up and edited Joyce’s manuscript, touted the book among Montparnasse’s café crowds, shoving any completed order forms through the shop’s letterbox as he returned home. “Another hasty bunch,” he wrote on one occasion. When McAlmon compiled a collection of his short stories and invited ideas for a title, Joyce proposed dryly, “How about A Hasty Bunch?” Respecting his genius, McAlmon accepted the suggestion.
Sylvia found herself working as unpaid agent and business manager for the half-blind, slow-moving Irishman, and informal gatekeeper to the other stars of Paris’s expatriate literary world. She fielded mail for them, and guarded their privacy. Canadian writer Morley Callaghan, arriving in Paris in 1929, asked Beach for the address of his old colleague Ernest Hemingway. She refused to supply it, suggesting he write a letter, which she would forward.
When Scott Fitzgerald confessed he was too much in awe of Joyce to approach him, Sylvia invited both to dinner. On being introduced, Fitzgerald dropped to one knee, kissed Joyce’s hand, and declared, “How does it feel to be a great genius, sir? I am so excited at seeing you, sir, that I could weep.” Fitzgerald made a crude sketch of the event on the flyleaf of a first edition of The Great Gatsby. It shows him on his knees to Joyce, who’s represented by just a moustache, spectacles and a halo. Sylvia and Adrienne are mermaids.
Ulysses was finally cleared for publication in the U.S. in 1934. Dishonestly, Joyce sold the rights to Random House, giving Beach nothing. Friends helped her apply for a government grant to support the shop. When that failed, André Gide formed the Friends of Shakespeare, members of which alone were admitted to readings. Their subscriptions helped keep the business afloat.
In 1937, Adrienne became romantically involved with young photographer Gisele Freund. Sylvia moved back into the shop apartment, and later to a bigger one in the same building. Shakespeare and Company remained open until 1942, when Sylvia angered a German officer by refusing to sell her only copy of Finnegans Wake. After he threatened to confiscate her stock, close the shop and intern her, Sylvia’s friends hurriedly painted out the name on the façade and, using laundry baskets, transferred the stock to a vacant apartment upstairs.
The Germans did later intern Sylvia for six months, but she survived the war and, though in poor health, was able to welcome Hemingway when he arrived in 1944 with his piratical platoon of cameramen and journalists to “liberate” Odéon. Before agreeing to the reunion, however, Hemingway, always nervous about his image, demanded Adrienne’s assurance that Sylvia had not collaborated with the Nazis.
Except for a symbolic few days in 1944, Shakespeare and Company never reopened. The wooden façade was removed. Subsequently, the premises housed a Chinese gift store, a jeweler and a number of clothing boutiques but never another bookshop. In 1955, Monnier, increasingly tormented by an inner ear infection that caused delusions, committed suicide. The following year, Sylvia published Shakespeare and Company, a rambling memoir. In it, she wrote “My loves were Adrienne Monnier and James Joyce and Shakespeare and Company;” ironically, all three, in one way or another, betrayed her.
The first Shakespeare and Company was at 8, rue Dupyteren. La Maison des Amis des Livres occupied 7, rue de l’Odéon (all addresses 6th). Sylvia, Adrienne, and Shakespeare and Company have no monument in Paris. A small stone tablet on the wall of 12, rue de l’Odéon commemorates the publication of Ulysses. If Sylvia survives, it is in the proliferation of Shakespeare and Company bookshops all over the world.
Sylvia died in 1962 and was buried in Princeton, N.J. The Princeton College Library holds her papers. She “bequeathed” the shop’s name to George Whitman, American proprietor of Le Mistral bookshop, opposite Notre Dame, who bought some of her stock when she closed down. Whitman relaunched Le Mistral as Shakespeare and Company in 1964. It is now owned by his daughter, whom he named, in tribute to his mentor, Sylvia Beach. Some books from the lending library remain at the shop. Others are in the American Library in Paris.
