dual personalities

Tag: Sylvia Beach

March 14, 2019

“When we were very poor and very happy.” *

by chuckofish

Today is the birthday of Sylvia Beach (1887-1962), who was quite a gal. Daughter of a Presbyterian minister, she moved with her family to Paris in 1901 when her father was appointed the assistant minister of the American Church in Paris  and director of the American student center. The family moved back to New Jersey in 1906. Sylvia served with the Red Cross during WWI and never returned to the States.

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Sylvia is best known today as the owner/founder of the bookstore Shakespeare and Company in Paris and as the original publisher of Ulysses by James Joyce. (She wasn’t afraid to publish it.) Ernest Hemingway was a big fan of hers, and famously said that she was nicer to him than anyone he ever met.

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I wrote a paper about Sylvia Beach when I was in college. That was when my father told me that he had sat on Gertrude Stein’s lap as an infant–his way of saying his parents were a part of all that in Paris in the twenties. They probably hung out at Shakespeare and Company. He never elaborated because why would he do that? C’est la vie.

Anyway, in reading up on Sylvia, I was reminded that although Shakespeare and Company remained open after the Fall of Paris, Beach was forced to close by the end of 1941.  But she never left. Indeed, she was held for six months during WWII at Vittel, an internment camp for enemy aliens of the German Reich, until  Tudor Wilkinson managed to secure her release in February 1942. Wilkinson was an American  art collector and amateur art dealer, who was born and raised right here in St. Louis, Missouri! In gratitude for her release, Sylvia gave Wilkinson a first edition of Ulysses signed by Joyce.

When daughter #1 was in Paris a few years back, she made a pilgrimage to the second incarnation of Shakespeare and Company which I much appreciated. I probably have a photo of that occasion, but, of course, I can’t put my hands on it now.

Well, it may be time to dust off my copy of Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company and re-read it. I will toast Sylvia tonight. I wish I had some French wine.

*Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

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May 21, 2012

The art of (not) mincing words

by chuckofish

Sylvia Beach, American ex-patriot, minister’s daughter and owner of “Shakespeare and Company”, a bookstore in Paris, decided to rescue Ulysses which had been banned in English-speaking countries, by publishing it herself in France. A prospectus was printed announcing that Ulysses by James Joyce would be published “complete as written” by Shakespeare and Company Paris, in the autumn of 1921. The edition was to be limited to 1000 copies. On the back of the prospectus was a blank form to be filled with the subscriber’s name and his choice of the kind of copy he wanted (there were 3 choices).

Sylvia sent a prospectus to George Bernard Shaw, even though Joyce said he would never subscribe. They made a bet. She received the following reply:

Dear Madam,

I have read fragments of Ulysses in the serial form. It is a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilization, but it is a truthful one; and I should like to put a cordon around Dublin, round up every male person in it between the ages of 15 and 30; force them to read all the foul mouthed, foul minded derision and obscenity. To you possibly it may appeal as art; you are probably (you see I don’t know you) a young barbarian beglamoured by the excitements and enthusiasms that art stirs up in passionate material; but to me it is all hideously real: I have walked those streets and know those shops and have heard and taken part in those conversations. I escaped from them to England at the age of twenty; and forty years later have learnt from the books of Mr. Joyce that Dublin is still what it was, and young men are still drivelling in slack-jawed blackguardism just as they were in 1870. It is, however, some consolation to find that at last somebody has felt deeply enough about it to face the horror of writing it all down and using his literary genius to force people to face it. In Ireland they try to make a cat cleanly by rubbing its face in its own filth. Mr. Joyce has tried the same treatment on the human subject. I hope it may prove successful.

…I must add, as the prospectus implies an invitation to purchase, that I am an elderly Irish gentleman, and if you imagine that any Irishman, much less an elderly one, would pay 150 francs for such a book, you know little of my countryman.

Faithfully,

G. Bernard Shaw

Sylvia was amused by being called “A young barbarian beglamoured”, but she lost the bet all right.

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