“In the rue Princesse, a few streets away from the rue de l’Odéon where Sylvia Beach nurtured the careers for James Joyce and Hemingway, a French woman has created a legitimate haven for books and writers.”2
—barry gifford
As soon as the bookstore opened, browsers and customers started to compare it with Sylvia Beach’s mythical Shakespeare and Company. It was a flattering but specious observation. Thanks to her literary intuition and against all odds, Beach had made history by publishing James Joyce’s Ulysses, the emblematic novel of the modernist movement, censored for obscenity in Great Britain and the United States. However, between 1922, the year of Ulysses’s first printing, and the opening of our bookshop in 1982, the world had changed and censorship was no longer what it had been.
Likewise, quite unexpectedly, successive waves of young American writers and artists, disenchanted with Ronald Reagan’s conservative economic policies, were looking for new horizons and started to converge in Paris. The recently opened Village Voice Bookshop became the venue of their literary and artistic production. The allusion to Beach took on added significance as the Anglophone press began to describe our shop as “the center of gravity for a shifting population of artists and writers in the expatriate colony . . . and, in the tradition of Sylvia Beach, its owner has made bookselling into the art of cultural entrepreneurship.”3
As it happened, this so-called “Third Wave” of American expatriates awakened keen interest in the literature of the 1920s “Lost Generation” and its avant-garde authors, with Ernest Hemingway leading the way. Soon, our shelves were overflowing with reprints of memoirs from that period, along with a flurry of original publications recounting the American expatriate experience of that decade and then on into the 1930s. One of the most striking aspects of this revival was the rediscovery of forgotten women writers and artists who had greatly contributed to the fame of the Lost Generation. Given the increasing number of women’s studies departments around the US, a diligent generation of female scholars started to unearth their findings from dusty archives and give them life through critical works and detailed biographies.
Noël Riley Fitch
On July 31, 1983, the first anniversary of the bookshop, Noël Riley Fitch, a vivacious American woman radiating a definite joie de vivre, presented her biography of Sylvia Beach, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties.4
In addition to her research at the Sylvia Beach archives of Princeton University, Fitch had tracked down friends who had been close to Sylvia and were able to provide new insights into the bookseller and publisher’s life and her Parisian bookstore, Shakespeare and Company. A couple of older people in the audience that night recalled Beach as a bookseller, making her presence almost palpable.
At the start of her talk, Fitch introduced the central issue of the book—James Joyce’s Ulysses and the sad end of the mythical friendship between Beach and the author, alluded to in the famous photograph reprinted on the book cover: the two friends are standing apart and looking in different directions, Beach tentatively glancing at Joyce who is sternly fixed on the camera. They are not talking to each other. Fitch gave a fascinating and precise account of their close but contentious collaboration in the fastidious editing and final printing of Ulysses. After long months spent together poring over commas and semicolons in the novel, their friendship turned sour as Joyce pressed Beach to renounce her rights to the work, bringing their long working relationship to a close.*
Jim Haynes, a most popular figure of the American expatriate community in Paris, was at the reading and later that evening added a personal anecdote: in 1959, as the owner of the Paperback Bookshop in Edinburgh, he had invited Sylvia Beach to visit him. She graciously thanked him for his kind gesture and “especially for not mentioning the name of James Joyce, whom every one of her correspondents felt obliged to cite.” [laughter]
Joyce was not the only indelicate friend of Shakespeare and Company, Fitch told us: according to a certain Eleanor, Beach’s assistant, Hemingway, also a regular visitor, would pick up books and reviews and go out without paying. Aware of their constant cash flow problem, Eleanor would conscientiously but discreetly write down in a notebook the titles taken away and the sums owed for them.
One day, in the absence of Sylvia and alone in the bookshop with Hemingway, she presented him with the bill. Taken aback, he took a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and, without a word, walked out. Briefed by Hemingway about the incident, Sylvia had a word with Eleanor, warning her against such initiatives in the future and insisting that the friends of Shakespeare and Company had the right not to pay if they did not wish to. The latter was flabbergasted and even felt humiliated, but Sylvia did not heed the young author’s boorish advice “to get rid of that female” and refused to fire her. He continued to do as he pleased and paid for only three of the twenty copies of his new book For Whom the Bell Tolls, ordered as gifts for his friends.5
As this episode intimates, Sylvia Beach had a strong personality put to the test more than once in her life, especially during the Nazi occupation of Paris, when, in 1941, she firmly refused to sell a Nazi officer her last remaining copy of Finnegan’s Wake.6 Rather than give in to his threats, she chose to close her bookshop that same day, however vital it was to her survival. After the war, she would never have the chance to reopen it.
Among the questions asked by the audience that night, the most frequent one concerned the current Shakespeare & Co: “Was it Sylvia Beach’s bookshop that moved from Odéon to the quays?” Fitch reminded us that, upon Sylvia’s death in 1962, her sister Holly collected the store’s archives and sold them to Princeton University. The name Shakespeare & Co. had since been freely used by some seven bookshops in Europe and the United States. “Their owners,” Fitch told us, “had taken up the appellation as a way of placing themselves in the literary tradition of Sylvia Beach’s original Shakespeare and Company.”7
Shari Benstock
Sylvia Beach is, naturally, one of the women cited at length by Shari Benstock in her seminal work, Women of the Left Bank, Paris, 1900-1940, that explores the life and writing of some twenty extraordinary female writers and cultural icons of the era.8 Through their literary achievements, they contributed to the unique cultural scene of the Lost Generation, usually associated with male writers such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
An elegant woman with a gentle face and striking presence, Benstock presented Women of the Left Bank at the Village Voice on January 15, 1987. Her friend, Isabelle de Courtivron, a professor of French studies at MIT and author of several works on feminism, introduced her, stressing the unique and essential role of the Paris American literary salons of Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein, and Natalie Clifford Barney “as scenes of intense literary and artistic creativity, enhanced by mutual support and friendship.” Benstock went on to add that “these salons created the ideal conditions for this unique and historical convergence in Paris of so many American women’s talents at one specific time . . .”9
Out of the twenty women in her book, our guest speaker chose to highlight Djuna Barnes, the author of the novel Nightwood (1936), decried by some as a work of lesbian perversion and depravity, but seen by Benstock as a meticulous exploration of “women’s existential torment.”10 This bold novel that portrayed lesbianism in all its complexities is also representative of the modernist narrative form of the time: “not a shadow to Joyce’s Ulysses, but a singular undertaking that addresses woman’s place in the patriarchal construct.”11
Q: “Why did these women from moneyed backgrounds choose to abandon their American privileges for a hazardous life in Paris?” (a recurring question)
Benstock: “To these women, France meant freedom. In America, they transgressed the rules of their class. To write poetry was okay, but fiction was considered too risky, and besides, as a woman, you couldn’t sign your own books. American old-money rules were strict, but behind the decorum and beyond the reproach, gossip reigned and could be dangerous and even destroy a reputation. If you were a woman, a secret, private life was impossible. Paris offered these women a release from American Puritan ethics.”12
Q: “Sapphic love played a major role in these women’s lives and creativity. Could that be the reason why they disappeared from sight until the women’s movement of the ’70s?”
Benstock: “These women adamantly rejected patriarchal values, and they found inspiration in Paris women’s communities. It was not accidental that the city’s three main salons were established by women, and the three of them were lesbians. However, such women were not just pursuing sexual freedom, they were also seeking a stimulating intellectual climate. Admiring the European cultural tradition, they were looking for the company of the great European minds and artists of the time.”13
Natalie Barney’s Temple of Friendship was perhaps the most diversified and cosmopolitan assemblage of talents at that time. In her recollections Aventures de l’esprit, Barney details her conversations and correspondence with such artists as Gide, Proust, D’Annunzio, Valéry, T.S. Eliot, and many others who had immense admiration for this woman of letters.14 Her closest friend was Remy de Gourmont, “the greatest humanistic intelligence of pre-war Europe”15 whose own correspondence with Barney (Lettres à l’Amazone),16 musings on love, absence, pleasure, boredom, memories, and forgetfulness, invites us to imagine their exchanges infused with brilliance, sincerity, and wit.
If intellectual ebullience, together with creative, playful entertainment, was the ferment of Barney’s Temple, sapphic love was its credo. One of Barney’s great loves was Dolly Wilde,17 “the niece of Oscar Wilde, playing the impertinent, frolicking role of puppy Wilde” and whose obscured and extravagant but doomed life is brought to us by Joan Schenkar in her singular biography Truly Wilde.
Joan Schenkar
Quite an original person, sporting a signature crimson red flower in her tousled black hair, Joan Schenkar was an American playwright and biographer who divided her life between New York and Paris, once nesting around the corner from our bookshop. On October 10, 2000, Schenkar conjured up the ghost of Dolly Wilde through the story of her consuming passion for Natalie Barney who, since childhood, had been fascinated by Dolly’s uncle, Oscar Wilde.18 Barney had met him during his triumphant lecture-tour in America in 1882, and her early and lasting admiration for the Irish poet and dramatist may have played a role in their love affair, especially since Dolly dressed like her uncle, often impersonating him.19
The author of Signs of Life: six Comedies of Menace and a lauded biography of Patricia Highsmith, Schenkar is a writer who probes the inner demons of her characters. In her singular biography Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde, Oscar’s Unusual Niece, Joan Schenkar powerfully conveys the tortured life of Dolly Wilde, a woman entangled in her very talents and shortcomings.20 Yet given her beauty and dazzling mind, she was able to attract the most interesting men and women of her generation, including Natalie Barney, her longest love affair. Through a dire combination of drug abuse and irrational behavior, the gifted Dolly, promised to great achievement, ended up destroying herself. “Nevertheless,” Schenkar reminded the audience, “their reciprocal love was inspired by their recognition of each other as women of their time—free, complex, talented, and ambitious.”21
In the context of this fateful passion, our author shows Natalie Barney to be “the radical sustainer of an unprecedented community of art-making women who formed by their work and their relations with each other the only serious critique of Modernism as it was practiced by male artists in the twentieth century.”22
Flyer for small press fair, June 1, 1985. © Village Voice archives
John Crombie, Michael Lynch, Carol Pratl, Odile, Jim Haynes, 1985. © Village Voice archives