THEn a book by Kerri Maher tells the story of the legendary Parisian bookshop that made the history of literature and its very special owner. To compatriot Ernest Hemingwaypenniless at the time and like her in love with Paris, Sylvia Beach had recommended laughing, putting a book from his library in his hand: “Make sure you don’t read it too quickly!”
Sylvia Beach, portrayed in Paris, in 1919, on the shelves of Shakespeare and Company. (Photo by Gisele Freund / Photo Researchers History / Getty Images)
Hemingway himself tells it in the third chapter of Moveable feast, the memoir about his early 1920s in France: «In those days there was no money to buy books. The books I borrowed from Shakespeare and Company, which was Sylvia Beach’s bookshop at 12 rue de l’Odéon and it also served as a library. […] Sylvia had a lively face that looked sculpted and brown eyes, lively like a pet’s and cheerful like a little girl’s, wavy brown hair that brushed back to reveal her beautiful forehead and cut to the height of the collar of her brown velvet jacket. . She had nice legs and a friendly, helpful and sympathetic manner, and she knew how to appreciate jokes, jokes and some gossip. No one had ever been so nice to me“.
Sylvia Beach, the bookseller who saved writers
Who it was this beautiful-legged Sylvia, book-librarian who treats Hemingway wellemerges with great pleasure from Kerri Maher’s book The Paris Booksellerjust released by Garzanti with the title The bookseller who saved the books, where a beautiful and multifaceted story is told. In an interview with the site’s Robert Lee Brewer in January writersdigest.com, author Kerri Maher declares her intentions: «There are two things I hope. The first is that the readers become aware of how much Sylvia Beach was instrumental in changing the course of 20th century literature thanks to its Parisian bookshop Shakespeare and Company, publishing theUlysses by Joyce when no one else had the courage to do so. The second is that the many have in mind reasons why bookstores and libraries are important“.
1920: Sylvia Beach in front of her bookshop. (Getty Images)
Sylvia Beach, an American in Paris
Well: let’s go and browse the pages of the book then. “What if, instead of a French bookshop in America, I opened an American one in Paris?” you ask Sylvia, American from Baltimore, born in 1887, arrived in France at the end of the First World Warafter an experience in the Red Cross in Serbia. In Paris he meets a young bookstore, Adrienne Monnier, and she becomes its special friend. It is Adrienne who finds “an ideal location for Sylvia’s new bookshop, around the corner of the Carrefour de l’Odéon, at 8 rue Dupuytren”. It will be called Shakespeare and Company. The bookshop, soon moved to 12 rue de L’Odéon, becomes a paradise for foreign writers in Paris. By selling and lending English-language books, the shop is the perfect complement to the store The Maison des Amis des Livresacross the street, run by Sylvia’s friend and lover, Adrienne. Their shops are in fact modern literary salons that host, to name a few, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, TS Eliot, Gertrude Stein, but also Tamara de Lempicka and Colette.
In the evening we drink wine, smoke (Sylvia always has a cigarette in her mouth), eat, musician friends like Erik Satie play for everyone. Booksellers, especially Sylvia, are not economically good: the books they recommend they have read and loved, without making too many accounts. It is the heart that commands the wallet. And the highlight of Sylvia’s deep involvement is reached with the epochal meeting with James Joyce, whom she admires so much. While Joyce completes the revolutionary Ulysses, Sylvia’s bookcase becomes her refuge in every sense.
Sylvia Beach’s gamble as a publisher
Sylvia Beach with writer James Joyce, whose Ulysses will be published at her own expense. Filed, 8/1959. (Getty Images)
In the book, Kerri Maher describes Joyce almost mercilessly, with her ash walking stick, her phobia of dogs, her poor eyesight due to glaucoma (“The eyes behind the brass wire frame were a magnificent blue, except that the left iris was clouded by a dull veil”). Sylvia becomes his lifeline when bigoted, prohibitionist America persecutes him and the most prestigious publishers swarm away, frightened by the accusation of obscenities. It will be she who will print her discussed masterpiece, amid a thousand difficulties, from his indecipherable handwriting that puts typists on the run to the capricious pretense of a thousand changes in the course of work, to the reluctance of printers frightened by censorship. She will hand over excitedly the first fresh print copy on his birthday, the February 2, 1922, one hundred years ago round. She will be the one to fight with the pirate editions, to pay Joyce the ophthalmologist’s fees and bills (“I have attached several invoices that I forgot to pay before leaving – could you please deduct them from my advance?” he writes candidly) and even the bills of the luxury restaurants that he attends with the whole family. Nonetheless, Sylvia defends him against everyone. Having published Ulysses “had allowed his bookstore to feature in newspaper articles throughout Paris and New York, but also in Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and the Saturday Evening Post …”.
Shakespeare and Company survived
After all this Joyce will be fair to her when other famous publishers finally step forward, or ditch her like a cheating lover, after using it for more than ten years as a luxury secretary, translator, editor, publisher, advertising agent, confidant and having reduced it on the verge of bankruptcy? It doesn’t matter, because Sylvia knows what Shakespeare and Company goers know: it was she, the American bookseller in Paris, who made the triumph of Ulysses possible, who allowed its pages to conquer America and America first. England and then the world. His friend Adrienne had told him, confident: “Shakespeare and Company will change the world”. As far as the literary world is concerned, at least, he was certainly not exaggerating.
In spite of adversity, the bookshop continues its journey even after the end of the thirties, when Kerri Maher’s narration stops. The Great Depression marks a watershed, the bookstore has big problems: it will be André Gide himself to sign a collection to prevent its closure in 1936. But the winds of war gather and when the Nazis entered Paris in 1941 Sylvia was arrested and sent to Vittel, in a former thermal establishment transformed into a concentration camp for prisoners from enemy or neutral countries, where, fortunately, detention is not particularly rigid. She stays there for six months, then she is freed thanks to the interest of an American art dealer, Tudor Wilkinson, who, thanks to her acquaintances with her, has her released.
To thank him, Sylvia gives him a first edition of Ulysses signed by Joycewho in the meantime died in Zurich from the consequences of surgery for a duodenal ulcer. Sylvia’s library-living room-refuge will never reopenbut after her death in 1962 another American bookseller in Paris, George Whitmanchanges the name of its shop, opened in 1951 as Le Mistral, and titled it after the original Shakespeare and Company, in honor of Sylvia. In no time becomes the meeting point for many Beat Generation writers, such as Allen Ginsberg or William Burroughs. In 2001, Whitman’s daughter took over the shop at 37 rue de la Bûcherie. From February to June of this year, 110 friends from the bookshop have read the over 900 pages of Joyce’s Ulysses. Oh, I forgot: Whitman’s daughter is called Sylvia too.
Like Sylvia Beach, the woman who had allowed that Ulysses to exist.
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