The Letters of Sylvia Beach

by Sylvia Beach, Keri Walsh (Editor), Noël Riley Fitch (Preface)

Founder of the Left Bank bookstore Shakespeare and Company and the first publisher of James Joyce's Ulysses , Sylvia Beach had a legendary facility for nurturing literary talent. In this first collection of her letters, we witness Beach's day-to-day dealings as bookseller and publisher to expatriate Paris. Friends and clients include Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, H. D., Ezra Pound, Janet Flanner, William Carlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Richard Wright. As librarian, publicist, publisher, and translator, Beach carved out a unique space for herself in English and French letters.

This collection reveals Beach's charm and resourcefulness, sharing her negotiations with Marianne Moore to place Joyce's work in The Dial ; her battle to curb the piracy of Ulysses in the United States; her struggle to keep Shakespeare and Company afloat during the Depression; and her complicated affair with the French bookstore owner Adrienne Monnier. These letters also recount Beach's childhood in New Jersey; her work in Serbia with the American Red Cross; her internment in a German prison camp; and her friendship with a new generation of expatriates in the 1950s and 1960s. Beach was the consummate American in Paris and a tireless champion of the avant-garde. Her warmth and wit made the Rue de l'Odéon the heart of modernist Paris.

Genres: France, Nonfiction, Autobiography, Biography, History, Womens, Books About Books

376 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

From 1919, American bookseller Sylvia Beach, originally Nancy Woodbridge Beach, owned an influential store in Paris to 1941 and published the first edition of Ulysses of James Augustine Aloysius Joyce in 1922.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_...

Reviews

[Elaine · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sylvia Beach is certainly interesting and it's interesting to see correspondence with Joyce, Pound, Hemingway et al. She herself is a clever raconteur and I forced myself to put her occasional casual anti-Jewish remarks down to the spirit of the times, or whatever.

Keri Walsh's edition, however, is terrible. The footnotes are bizarre: Walsh chooses to give footnote explanations/bios for mentions of quite obvious things like “Woodrow Wilson" and "the League of Nations" (to give but two examples), sometimes repeating the identical footnote in a matter of pages. However, she never identifies some of the relatives or friends that Beach mentions over and over again in her correspondence but only by first name, nor does she bother footnoting events in Beach's life that are referenced but not explained in the letters. In other words, the notes could have been written by anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of 20th century literary history, and certainly (and better) by anyone with Wikipedia, and do not evince any special scholarship of Beach's life or circle.

Similarly, it is irksome that an abbreviated chronology of Beach's life appears after the introduction, but then the chapters themselves are simply letters, with no framing material to say, for example, that in the 40s Beach was imprisoned in a prison camp by the Nazis, lost her business, and her parents died. Something was needed so that the big events (which are not for the most part alluded to in letters) do not slip by unnoticed as they will if you do not constantly flip back to the chron.

Finally, and very upsettingly, I at first thought that Sylvia had written her letters to her lover, Adrienne, in a type of gobbledygook, but (of course) there was no note to explain why they were so terribly written. Then I realized that the letters were surely originally written in French as they bore the earmarks of French grammar translated literally and Beach was fluent, of course. But they were not translated by a competent translator but rather word for word without regard for linguistic differences, such that one expects that Walsh may have resorted to Babel Fish or Google Translator.

Walsh should be ashamed. Beach deserved a better book. This read like a half-assed senior project put together on the eve of graduation. Maybe it was.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The letters in this book were written by a woman who, in the 1920s and 30s, ran a bookstore/ lending library in Paris, France. Significantly for literary history, she was also the woman who published James Joyce’s novel Ulysses when it was banned in America. Sylvia Beach was a daughter, a sister, an independent businesswoman, and friend to some of the most significant writers of the “Lost Generation,” and the letters included here supply an additional perspective on how she inhabited these many roles.

The volume begins with letters Beach wrote to her family in America during her early travels in Europe; in some of these, she describes her experiences in the American Red Cross during WWI, while in others she discusses her work in the fields in Serbia. These are followed both by letters in which Beach discusses her new bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, and by some of her earliest letters to writers like Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. Further on, we begin to get an idea of how much work Beach did for Joyce with regards to the publication and distribution of Ulysses: in a number of letters, Beach asks friends whom she knows are traveling to America whether they would be willing to smuggle copies of Ulysses through customs to American subscribers. During this period, she continues to write to her family and to friends about her work at the bookstore.

Following letters written in the early 1930s, in which she comments on how the Great Depression is affecting tourism and book sales, there is an interesting chronological gap in writing, reflecting the period during WWII during which Beach was detained in an internment camp and access to the mails was under heavy restriction (curiously, even in letters written after the end of the war and the liberation of France, Beach makes very few references to her experiences of internment). Her postwar letters show her gradually retiring from bookstore business; in addition, they reflect how she was never entirely finished with work connected to Joyce: in many letters written during this period, Beach comments on the academic institutions and private collectors expressing interest in the Joycean manuscripts in her possession.

In addition to describing her business experiences, Beach’s letters reflect the kinds of social communication typically associated with the personal letter. Because of the people with whom Beach associated herself, however, her birthday greetings, holiday wishes, congratulations on births and weddings, and expressions of sympathy for bereavements frequently have increased significance for literary history. Beach writes to Hemingway, for instance, to ask how his health is following a plane accident. She writes to Joyce’s patron, Harriet Weaver, to discuss Joyce’s eye problems. She writes to Alice B. Toklas to communicate her condolences following Gertrude Stein’s death.

The text represents a lot of work: editor Keri Walsh has brought the letters reproduced here from a number of different archives and collections. She has kept Beach’s spellings, which frequently supply an additional level of wordplay. Footnotes inform the reader about some of the things to which Beach makes reference in her letters, as well as translating into English the foreign phrases she employs. An introduction tells you what you need to know about Beach’s life in order to read the letters—you do not have to have read Ulysses, for instance, to enjoy Beach’s comments on that work.

While the book will certainly be of interest to those wanting to know more about the Lost Generation, it should also be of interest to the general reader as well, as Beach’s letters reflect something of the day-to-day experiences of a strong woman running an independent bookstore (an English-language bookstore, moreover, in the French capital). One gets a sense, for instance, of Beach’s personality, and in particular of how detail-oriented she could be, whether describing her experiences, expressing gratitude (most often for loans of money extended by family and friends) or doing business with other publishers.

The book includes a full index and a Who’s Who type list of the names and biographical information of those with whom Beach exchanged letters (including such writers as Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle and Marianne Moore).

One area in which this book seemed to supply more detail than that supplied in Noel Riley Fitch’s Sylvia Beach And The Lost Generation was in regard to information about Beach’s own literary work, and in particular her translation of Henri Michaux’s Barbarian in Asia.

Many thanks and much love to my charming and beautiful wife who, knowing of my interest in modern English literature, and of the traditions associated with anniversary gifts, gave me my copy of The Letters of Sylvia Beach as a gift for our first anniversary.

Acquired Jun 7, 2010

[Margaret · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the letters themselves, but I did feel that the editing left a lot to be desired. The letters lacked context and framing, and the footnotes were oddly random and/or repetitive. Why not tell us who Morrill Cody was when Sylvia first writes to him, for example, rather than a couple of letters later when she mentions him to someone else? And I can only assume that the letters to Adrienne Monnier were originally in French, but badly translated.

[Sharon Lee · Rating 2 out of 5]

Such potential for an interesting collection of letters, but the composition and selection was tedious.

[Shane · Rating 4 out of 5]

I purchased this copy at the Shakespeare and Company bookshop that I finally visited in Paris after many failed attempts in the past. What better memento of this visit than a copy of the personal and business letters of its founder, I thought.

The letters are one-way – i.e., from Beach to the many people she corresponded with – and include, in addition to family and friends, such notables as James Joyce (whom she always addressed as Mr. Joyce), Ernest Hemingway (whom she always called “Hemingway”), Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright, and Scott Fitzgerald. An intimate portrait emerges of a woman dedicated to the avant garde in literature—especially the modernist movement of the time—one who waged a relentless war against plagiarism, and who paid the price of staying on to run her bookshop in Paris when France fell to the Nazis.

The earlier letters deal with her youth and rather privileged life as an American in Europe before the wars, where the cost of living was considerably cheaper than back home. Imagine having President Woodrow Wilson as a family friend! Life was an eternal round of holidays, horse riding, and soirees between Italy and France. When WWI breaks out, Beach volunteers in the ambulance field service and picks grapes in the countryside, then serves in Serbia with the Red Cross.

After the war, and after discarding New York and London as possible locations, she decides to open an American-British book shop cum library, on the advice of her friend, mentor, and lover, Adrienne Monnier, herself the custodian of the first French lending library in France. Shakespeare and Company soon becomes the watering hole for all exiled literary personalities of the age who were still to gain immortality. The library side of the house does better than the bookshop. Beach pegs her hat on James Joyce and publishes Ulysses, a book banned in the English-speaking world for obscenity. This is her maiden foray into publishing that she knows nothing about. She soon becomes not only Joyce’s agent and publicist, but his medical co-ordinator and real-estate agent, shepherding the nearly blind and bankrupt author from one crisis to another, while going on to reprint 11 editions of his masterpiece over the same number of years. Joyce leaves her rather coldly when bigger fish like Knopf come calling, but she retains a trove of Joyce publishing memorabilia and copyrights that she tries to trade on in later years to exhibitions and universities. In all, Beach published just three books, all by or about Joyce, before the “fall”: i.e., the war intervened, the Americans returned home, her library collection was ferreted away to safety, Beach herself was interned, and the bookshop was shuttered. She never re-opened for business, although the present owner of the store, now located at Rue de la Bucherie and not at Rue de l’Odéan, opened his own bookshop in 1951 and was gifted the celebrated name, Shakespeare and Company, by Beach.

In her later years, she continued to live above her old bookshop, was a rainmaker for the literati in Europe, dabbled in translations, and wrote her memoir which was finally published in 1956. The letters, especially in the later years are so widely spaced apart in time, that they are sketchy about a few key events: the deaths of Joyce and Hemingway, her internment by the Germans, the split between Beach and sister Cyprian, and the events leading to the closure of her shop. She does lament when Paris was devoid of sugar, milk, meat, and coal during the occupation. And she was convinced that apart from Collette and Monnier, French women writers were useless.

The letters paint the picture of a hyperactive woman, full of optimism (war and dying only happened to other people), determined to have her way, whether that be by flattery, threat, or persistence. She was not afraid to ask for financial assistance from friends, family, or patrons, and the help always came. Running a shop and a publishing house during the Depression and between the wars, when technology was archaic, was a challenge, and she was subject to crippling migraines from overwork that laid her low for long periods.

Although she didn’t know it at the time, but perhaps had an inkling of it during her sunset years, she was in the epicentre of a literary movement and subculture that still reverberates a century later. Her life as an independent bookseller and publisher stands as a beacon for those of us who toil in her footsteps with a plethora of automated tools that Sylvia would have salivated to get her hands on.

[Judy McCarver · Rating 5 out of 5]

Handwritten letters are as powerful a teller of history as any history book or historian ever could be. And Sylvia Beach’s letters are absolute gold. I found myself wincing when there was a break in the writing, for instance a total lack of letters (published here) during the Paris occupation of which she spent a year or so in internment in Vittel France, placed there by the Nazis. She was a passionate champion of literature. She was determined to bring together the literary giants of both the French and the English writers, and in particular American writers. From her bookshop in Paris, Shakespeare and Company, she single handedly published Irish writer James Joyce’s Ulysses when no English speaking country would do so. She was extremely well read and I can imagine if she were alive today, she would be horrified at the way social media, video games and television have supplanted the written word - both handwritten letters and books. What continues to amaze me about Sylvia, the more I learn about her, is not only how passionate she was but how equally COMpassionate she was. She was a fiercely devoted friend and compatriot. She was relentlessly loyal to those she loved and to the cause of literature and with that, freedom of expression. She was equally all American and all Parisienne. She never lost her love of her native country and as far as I can tell; never breathed a foul word about her America. On the contrary, she was an unofficial American Ambassador, not by appointment but by way of her own personal character, her work ethic, her formidable goals and uncanny perseverance in the face of obstacles. And most importantly by her humility. She worked tirelessly to unite the USA With France and her masterful plan to link the two together? Books. I would say unequivocally, she was over the top successful. In the annals of American and French history, Sylvia deserves a place of distinction.

[Sosa Coleone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Were frightening

[Pearl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Paris and Sylvia Beach, James Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Eliot, and so many other luminaries, who were not luminaries then, have long fascinated us. Sylvia Beach helped make all of these writers and more well known, but she mostly has remained in the shadows. Even Woody Allen, in his recent and popular "Midnight in Paris," didn't feature Ms. Beach, although we did see Shakespeare and Co, her bookstore/lending library.

But, as interested as I was/am in this period, you would need to be much more fascinated by the trivia of her life to really enjoy this book. She writes to many young artists, who have now become famous; to her family, and to her friends but her letters are not very revelatory. Many of them are cursory remarks about her business dealings and her struggles to keep her shop open. Some are very girlish letters to her childhood friends.

She spent a few years in internment by the Nazis but whatever letters she wrote or could have smuggled out seem not to exist. She was an early supporter of women's suffrage but her letters reveal very little of her activities. (Woodrow Wilson was a family friend.) Her efforts to get "Ulysses" published is mentioned not only to her friends but also in her letters to Joyce but, again, rather scantily it seemed to me, given the importance of that effort. A few short letters to Pound show her support and admiration for him. A few short letters to Richard Wright show that she encouraged and was a good friend to him. I'd still like to know more about Sylvia Beach in Paris, but I'll have to read something besides a collection of her letters for that.

The book does have an interesting introduction and a good chronology of her life and the events of her day.

[Abbey · Rating 3 out of 5]

POPSUGAR 2022: A book that features two languages

I was reading The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas while I read this book. It was really interesting reading a primary source of what was happening in the book, only from a different point of view. Again, this would be an excellent companion to A Moveable Feast.

This book does feel like only hearing one half of a thousand conversations, since they are only Beach's letters, and she wrote letters like we write emails.

Most of her letters are very matter of fact, business-related letters, illuminating the day to day realities of running a bookstore in the early 20th century. It's interesting to see how business was conducted, and how different things are now.

Her dealings with Joyce regarding the publishing of Ulysses are almost interesting; again, we are missing chunks of the conversation.

I'm not sure I'd recommend this to anyone, but it's certainly an interesting puzzle piece if one is doing a deep dive in the literati of Paris in the 1920s.

[TinHouseBooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heather Hartley (Paris Editor): The Letters of Sylvia Beach is a complete, gorgeous compilation of her correspondence. A sensitive writer with a subtle sense of humor, Beach’s letters are addressed to a large cast of characters including many writers (no surprise with her amazing entourage of writer friends), lovers, publishers, acquaintances and family members. A fine way to read about the history of Beach’s Shakespeare & Company—and Paris—in the early twentieth century by randomly opening and browsing a few letters.

[Heather S. Jones]

nytimes review here -- i love learning about this time in paris among writers and artists!!

[Ahmad Saidullah]

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksda...

[Bonnie]

paris book - diana

[Suzanne Jauchius · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating insight into writers of that time, especially the legends.

[Steve Shilstone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Literary Paris in the '20s. Syl was in the middle of it. She loved writers and writing, had a fine sense of humor, and knew how to write a bang-up thank you letter.