The candle flame burned closer to Sylvia Beach’s hand as she searched for hours through the piles of books. By the mid-1920s, Sylvia Beach was, as one writer called her, “probably the best known woman in Paris,” and her career had begun in the unlit cellar beneath the Boiveau and Chevillet bookshop. She had filled two trunks with poetry in London and scoured the bookstalls along the Seine for any English or American book she could find, but her biggest discoveries were in the shadows of M. Chevillet’s cluttered cellar, where she salvaged a Twain, an Austen, a Whitman and a family of Henry Jameses with sturdy bindings. Abandoned Kiplings and Dickinsons peeked out like survivors in the paper rubble.
The idea of her own bookstore had taken shape in Belgrade. In the winter of 1919, Sylvia Beach was trudging through Belgrade’s snowy streets in the aftermath of World War I. Serbia’s capital was a linchpin of the Balkans, Europe’s most vexing tangle of ethnicities. The war that began when a Serbian nationalist walked up to the archduke’s motorcade in Sarajevo ended five years later with more than seven hundred thousand Serbs dead, most of them civilians. Nearly a fifth of the Serbian population was gone (the war’s highest casualty rate), and Belgrade was still in ruins. Victorious survivors wandered along the trenches collecting shrapnel and battlefield souvenirs. Independence still felt new. Serbia had endured centuries of alternating control by the Ottomans and Austrians, and each conquest had destroyed Belgrade all over again. Buildings over two stories high were rare.
When Sylvia Beach arrived with the American Red Cross, she saw the skeletons of horses strewn along the roadside—she couldn’t tell if they had been killed or euthanized or if they had starved to death. Serbia was stagnant. There was no electricity or running water. There were no schools, factories, airports or bridges, and she navigated around mortar shell craters on her way to the market. She struggled with the language, but she learned three important phrases: “Please,” “How many” and “Cream puffs.”
The market vendors hailed from all around the Balkans. Serbs, Albanians, Macedonians and Bosnians came to town in their national clothing, and so to walk through the Belgrade marketplace was to wade through turbans, headdresses, fezzes and Astrakhan hats. Gypsy women in colorful layers smoked pipes as they traveled through town. Women carried egg-filled baskets dangling from both ends of a pole resting on a shoulder. People kept warm with a drink called salep that was made from the dried tubers of orchids and boiled in tin cans over bits of charcoal. There was little else to buy.
Beach’s sister Holly was a Red Cross translator, and she got Sylvia a job as an administrator. She handed out pajamas, blankets and condensed milk to underweight Serbs standing barefoot in the snow—she didn’t know why they didn’t bring shoes. The Red Cross funneled columns of German and Austrian prisoners into Belgrade’s delousing plant, where their tattered uniforms were baked and their bodies scrubbed clean. The Red Cross opened hospitals and orphanages, and the nurses went from house to house documenting inhabitants, medical conditions and primary needs. Beach produced the survey forms on a groaning mimeograph machine and filed them when the nurses returned each day.
Despite all the work they did, the women controlled nothing in postwar Belgrade. Beach found it nettlesome at first, but it soon became infuriating. “The Red Cross has made a regular feminist of me,” she wrote to her mother in New Jersey. “It’s seeing men doing all the managing and helping themselves to all the pleasant things that come along.” The women, she said, “rank as buck privates—are ordered hither & thither, forced to obey unquestioningly.” Their treatment was especially galling for a woman who had grown up in Princeton and Paris. Beach’s father was a Presbyterian pastor (President Woodrow Wilson’s pastor, actually), and the last of nine generations of clergymen. Sylvester Beach was a community leader, a women’s suffrage advocate and a firm believer in the independence of his wife and three daughters. His second daughter changed her name from Nancy to Sylvia in his honor.
Sylvia Beach settled in Europe permanently in 1914, and in 1917 she volunteered to work twelve hours a day on a farm in Touraine while the men fought in the trenches. She was proud of her khaki uniform, though the women picking grapes and bundling wheat alongside her disapproved of her bobbed hair and trousers. It could have been worse. When she was in Spain in 1915, villagers threw rocks at her and her sister Cyprian because they were wearing riding pants. But the desolation of postwar Belgrade deepened her perspective as nothing else had. The low mountains surrounding Belgrade trapped the cold Black Sea wind as it carried storms into the city. Snow collected in the crevices between the low-roofed houses and melted down the sloping streets to the muddy Sava River, which curved below the city to meet the brown Danube.
Postwar Belgrade’s dreadful beauty gave Sylvia Beach a new resolve. For years, she imagined running a bookshop that would be more than a business or a showroom for books. She imagined an alcove for a literary community, a place where readers and books could find one another, where writers lifted off the page and became real people walking through the door to greet their readers. The money she had been saving wasn’t sufficient, but she was willing to write to her mother for help. “I’m sure you would approve of my wanting to make a supreme effort to take something interesting and worthwhile for a life work instead of working under someone at an uninspiring task—with ideas and art taboo and you might as well be a squirrel in a wheel.” Her mother was skeptical. It “would be such hard indoor work,” she reminded her daughter. Sylvia was small, and her parents always thought of her as delicate.
Nevertheless, she telegrammed her mother when she returned to France: “Opening bookshop in Paris. Please send money.” Until then, her prospective bookstore was to be in London, but a trip to England convinced her that the rents were too high and the market already saturated. More important, Sylvia had fallen in love. In March 1917, before leaving Paris for volunteer work, she visited La Maison des Amis des Livres. It was, strangely, both a bookshop and a lending library. She walked in to find the friendly round face of Adrienne Monnier. Her eyes, she remembered, were alive like William Blake’s.
After the war, Monnier suggested that Beach open an English bookshop in Paris so they could have sister shops on the Left Bank. Adrienne would lend and sell French books, and Sylvia would lend and sell English books. Monnier could teach her about the book trade in Paris, and without good advice a bookshop in any city would be daunting. By the time Monnier found a vacant storefront in a former laundry around the corner from her shop, Beach was convinced. A few days after her pleading telegram, her mother sent three thousand dollars over the Reverend Beach’s objections.
Beach went to the flea market for a table and comfortable antique armchairs that would invite people to stay and read. She purchased drawings by William Blake and portraits of Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman. Beige sackcloth covered the walls, and Serbian rugs blanketed the hardwood floor. The lion’s share of the money went to books. She purchased essential modernist titles in London, and her sister Cyprian sent books from New York. By the time she searched the cellar of Boiveau and Chevillet, she was piecing together the backbone of her shop—the secondhand books that comprised her lending library.
Adrienne Monnier’s shop was the first lending library in France, and her success convinced Beach that there was room in Paris for her. The plunging value of the franc made foreign books too expensive to buy—this was, after all, before the paperback revolution—yet there was a growing demand for English-language books in Paris, and she could meet it by lending instead of selling. Members could take out as many books as they wanted, one at a time, for seven francs per month (about fifty cents). To save money, the shop doubled as Beach’s apartment. She put a cot in a small back room with an adjoining kitchenette and slept against a barred window that looked out to the courtyard’s water closet. At night she watched the rats “running up and down the bars like fingers on a harp,” but she didn’t care. She had a bookshop of her own.
On a Monday morning in November 1919, Sylvia Beach hung a small wooden sign above her door and opened the shutters to Shakespeare and Company. The signboard was a painting of the bard. Monnier helped spread the word, and members of the French literati came immediately, including André Gide, Georges Duhamel, Jules Romains and Valery Larbaud, all prominent French writers. English and American writers weren’t far behind. Shortly after Ezra Pound moved to Paris in 1920 (England had become too docile, he complained), he sauntered into Shakespeare and Company, surveyed the premises and asked Miss Beach if there was anything he could fix for her. He applied his expertise to a cigarette box from Sarajevo and a wobbly chair.
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SYLVIA BEACH had impeccable timing. The First World War had created a generation of transnationalists. Young men and women who never thought of leaving their hometowns found themselves serving in allied or enemy countries and imagining cosmopolitan lives. The booming American and British economies and the plummeting franc made Paris the perfect cosmopolis. Between 1915 and 1920, the franc lost nearly two-thirds of its value against the dollar, and Paris’s affordability made its charms irresistible. Only fifteen thousand Americans had visited France annually before the war. In 1925, American tourists numbered four hundred thousand, and many of them stayed. There were eight thousand American permanent residents in Paris in 1920. Three years later, there were thirty-two thousand. The influx made Paris’s changes seem like Americanizations. One-way streets and electric signs appeared along with English-language newspapers. There were American churches and grocery stores, Masonic lodges and basketball leagues. Cabarets and café concerts were supplanted by large music halls where expatriates listened to jazz while sipping bright jumbles of alcohol they called “cocktails” without having to worry about federal raids.
Shakespeare and Company transformed an Anglophone convergence into a community. It was, in fact, a thinly monetized social center. Library membership fees barely covered expenses, and the shop made only one hundred dollars in profit in 1921. The importance of Shakespeare and Company had nothing to do with money. By the end of the year, it was a place where readers and writers could talk to one another, where older and younger people exchanged ideas and where Sylvia Beach introduced writers to editors and publishers. If you wrote or read literature and found yourself in Paris—for a week, a month or a decade—you knew where to go. Shakespeare and Company became a literary node in a cultural metropolis.
Culture needs locations. It is not a seamless backdrop so much as a patchwork of local phenomena. Cultures have centers, specific arenas where artists join institutions, where people influence and repel one another, where activities change because of planned and unplanned events and where one can be exposed to people and ideas from Japan, Moscow, West Africa and Dublin all in the same day—cultural centers exist because they are hubs for the peripheries. If modernism had a preeminent location, it was Paris: atop Montmartre before the war and then, when prices became too high, the Left Bank, less than two square miles of narrow streets and wide boulevards south of the arcing River Seine.
Left Bank neighborhoods were diverse, inexpensive and saturated with cafés. This was especially true of Montparnasse, a Left Bank neighborhood where working-class people, immigrants and political refugees mixed with artists and the bourgeoisie as well as students from the adjacent Latin Quarter. Artists like Chagall and Brancusi drank with butchers at the Café Dantzig because Montparnasse’s major artist colony was next to a slaughterhouse.
Cafés were more than just the accoutrements of Paris’s cultural life. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were more drinking establishments in Paris than in any other city in the world—one for about every three hundred people. That was three times as many per capita as in New York and more than ten times as many as in London. The sheer number of Parisian cafés facilitated the formation of small groups in uncrowded spaces, which allowed people to talk, plan and argue freely. If the arguments became fierce, the café culture helped with that, too—there was always another one down the street, and their sidewalk access facilitated the chance encounters that allow groups to form, dissolve and reconfigure. Though fluid, café interactions were far from frivolous. They thrived in France partly because they were havens from stringent nineteenth-century assembly laws. Uprisings from 1848 to the Paris Commune to 1919 arose seemingly spontaneously because workers organized in cafés rather than through unions. Left Bank cafés were at once intimate and ephemeral, playful and consequential, semipublic proving grounds for ideas and semiprivate sanctuaries from the state. They were the perfect spaces for modernism and for a book as urban as Ulysses.
Shakespeare and Company was a hybrid space, something between an open café and an ensconced literary salon, which suited Anglophone patrons for whom café culture was always adoptive. Sylvia Beach’s bookshop gave British and American travelers a dose of the stability that cafés didn’t provide. Several members had their mail sent to Shakespeare and Company (for some writers it was their only reliable address), and Beach used a pigeonhole box to sort their mail alphabetically. The Lost Generation had a home.
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ON A HOT SUNDAY AFTERNOON in July 1920, Adrienne invited Sylvia Beach to an early dinner party at the home of a French poet named André Spire. Beach didn’t want to go. She admired Spire’s poetry, but she didn’t know him personally, and he hadn’t invited her. Adrienne nevertheless insisted and, as usual, she had her way. Spire’s warm welcome put his American guest at ease, but as they entered, he pulled her aside and whispered something that terrified her. “The Irish writer James Joyce is here.”
The dinner was a welcoming party for Joyce, who had just arrived in the city he would call home for the next twenty years. The move had been unplanned. Ezra Pound had convinced Joyce to relocate to Paris when the two men met for the first time in Italy the previous month. Pound detected the sensitive man beneath the “cantankerous” Irish shell and urged him to move closer to the center of modernism. It was a good time to relocate. Joyce had just finished the fourteenth episode of Ulysses, “Oxen of the Sun,” which takes place in a maternity hospital, and its nine-part structure links the development of the English language to the gestation of a fetus. Joyce mimicked dozens of styles, from Anglo-Saxon to Middle English to Elizabethan prose to Milton, Swift, Dickens and others before unraveling into Irish, Cockney and Bowery slang. The episode cost him a thousand hours of work, and he expected the next one, “Circe,” to be even more challenging.
Pound prepared the city for Joyce. He sent copies of his work and favorable news clippings to important individuals. He found a French translator for A Portrait and a furnished three-bedroom apartment free of charge (for a few months, at least). The final touch was a sumptuous literary dinner to introduce Joyce to Paris’s literati. Beach saw Pound slung across an armchair in a velvet jacket and a blue shirt with the collar open wide, and Dorothy Pound, Ezra’s wife, was speaking to a statuesque woman with full auburn hair. Dorothy introduced Miss Beach to Nora, and Beach perceived a certain dignity to Joyce’s wife. Nora was happy to find someone with whom she could speak English, and Beach was happy to approach Joyce indirectly, as if by his reflected light.
Spire announced the meal and began loading plates with cold cuts, fish and meat pies. Salads and baguettes circulated around the long table, and the host filled glasses with red and white wine. Only one guest was not drinking. As the man in the ill-fitting suit kept declining Spire’s repeated offers, the other guests began to watch. James Joyce turned his glass upside down to prove that he meant it. He never drank before eight in the evening. As a jest, Ezra Pound lined up all the bottles in front of Joyce’s plate in case he should change his mind. Everyone laughed, but Joyce was red with embarrassment.
After dinner, he slipped away as the conversation turned to literature, and Beach wandered into Spire’s small library after him. When she saw Joyce hunched in the corner between two bookcases, with his hair swept back from his forehead, she began trembling.
“Is this the great James Joyce?”
He peered up from the book at the petite American woman with the resolute chin. He extended his limp hand and said simply, “James Joyce.”
He expressed himself with careful precision, as if speaking to an audience still learning English. She admired his gentle voice and Irish accent. He pronounced “book” to rhyme with “fluke.” “Thick” was sharpened to “tick,” and his r’s trilled upward. The novel he was writing was “Oolissays.” Joyce’s skin was fair and flushed. He had a small goatee, and there were lines etched into his forehead. She thought about how handsome he must have been as a young man. But there was something abnormal about his right eye, something magnified or distorted by his thick glasses. It was nearly grotesque.
The name Shakespeare and Company made him smile, almost as much, perhaps, as “Sylvia Beach.” He was looking for signs of luck in Paris, and these were auspicious names. As she told him about her bookstore, he pulled a small notebook out of his pocket and held it close to his eyes so he could write down the address. It was heartbreaking. Just then, Joyce jumped at the sound of barking from across the road. She went to the window and saw Spire’s tiny dog bounding after a ball.
“Is it coming in? Is it feerrce?”
She assured Mr. Joyce that the dog did not look at all fierce, and he was certainly not charging toward the library. He had been bitten by a dog on the chin when he was a boy, he explained, and they had terrified him ever since. The great James Joyce was a blushing, trembling man with weak eyes and a fear of dogs. He was adorable.
The next day, Joyce walked into Shakespeare and Company wearing a dark blue serge suit and a black felt hat. He had a slender cane and a regal bearing undercut by dirty canvas shoes. He ambled over to the photographs of Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman, and if she wondered in those brief moments what he thought about her small bookshop, her anxiety was relieved as he sat down in an armchair and asked to join Miss Beach’s lending library. He could afford a subscription for one month.
Sylvia Beach saw Joyce as sensitive and vulnerable. His list of fears included the ocean, heights, horses, machinery and, above all, thunderstorms. As a child, he hid in the cupboard at the sound of thunder, and the tempests seemed to pursue him all his life. Beach remembered him cowering in his hallway during thunderstorms, which he blamed on the preponderance of Parisian radio broadcasts. Beach encouraged Joyce to talk about his troubles, and he had a few to discuss. The apartment that Pound got for Joyce and his family was a small, fifth-floor servants’ flat in Passy. It had one double bed, no bathtub and no electricity. Joyce was in the midst of borrowing a desk, linens, blankets and money. He was also, of course, writing Ulysses, and he believed the strain of writing at night exacerbated his eye troubles.
Joyce sketched a picture of an iridectomy on the back of one of the bookshop’s circulars. He drew two amoeboid circles, one inside the other, and a few erratic scribbles for iris tissue. Sylvia stared at what appeared to be a drawing by an eight-year-old (this was not, after all, Joyce’s medium). He scored five quick lines radiating out from the eye (to signify pain? eyelashes?) and dug the lead of the pencil into the paper as he described the Swiss surgeon’s incisions from the edge of the iris to the margin of the pupil. To clarify, it seems, he drew the eye again—circles, scribbles, slashes and all—though the second time he added a heavy dot on the iris. She kept both drawings.
He claimed his eye surgery in Zurich was poorly timed. They should have waited until the iritis subsided, and the doctor’s haste impaired his vision. Wasn’t it difficult to write? Couldn’t he dictate? That was out of the question, he said. He wanted to be in contact with the words, to shape each letter with his hand. Nora groused about how single-minded he had become with his writing. In the morning, barely awake, his first impulse was to reach for his pencil and paper on the floor, and his novel would distract him for the rest of the day. He’d stroll out of the house just as Nora was about to serve lunch because he was oblivious to the time. “Look at him now!” she complained to Beach. “Leeching on the bed and scribbling away!” She wished he could have been something other than a writer. Sylvia Beach could not agree.