Ex-Pat Paris as It Sizzled for One Literary Lioness
Patron saint of independent booksellers?

By Dwight Garner in The New York Times
Published: April 18, 2010
 

 THE LETTERS OF SYLVIA BEACH
Edited by Keri Walsh
Illustrated. 347 pages Columbia University Press. US$29.95.

If the world’s dwindling independent bookstores have a patron saint, an exemplar to cling to in moments of duress, she is Sylvia Beach (1887-1962), the soulful and fearless owner of Shakespeare & Company, the English-language bookstore she founded in Paris in 1919 and operated on the Left Bank until the German occupation during World War II.

Left - Sylvia Beach in her apartment, where she hid her book stock during the war.

Beach was the first publisher of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and helped smuggle copies to readers in the United States. She coined the term Bloomsday to describe the day on which the novel is set. Her bookstore, packed with fresh journals, good sunlight and plump armchairs, was a sanctuary for the era’s best writers, ex-pat and otherwise. Her friends — she introduced many of them to one another — included Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Janet Flanner and the poet H. D. For her favorites she operated as banker, post office, clipping service and cheering section. She was a prizewinning translator of Paul Valéry and Henri Michaux.
As it happened, she also had “pretty legs and she was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip,” Hemingway wrote in “A Moveable Feast.” “No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.” Beach’s story has been told before, in her appealing memoir “Shakespeare & Company” (1959) and more exactingly in Noel Riley Fitch’s “Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation” (1983). But the missives in “The Letters of Sylvia Beach,” edited by Keri Walsh, have an unvarnished charm all their own. Written to friends, writers, customers and family members, they depict a witty and resourceful woman struggling to keep her business, her writers and her precarious existence afloat.

Beach was an unlikely champion of literary modernism. The daughter of a Presbyterian minister, she was the second of three daughters and grew up in Bridgeton and Princeton, N.J. She didn’t attend college but saw the world, working during World War I as a volunteer agricultural laborer in France and then as a Red Cross volunteer in Serbia. She was plucky. One letter home from Belgrade describes a springlike day ruined by the “bomby” air.

She was a bibliophile from an early age and debated opening a bookstore in New York or London. But in Paris she met and fell in love with a bookstore owner, Adrienne Monnier, who would become, Ms. Walsh writes in her introduction, “her lifelong personal and professional partner.” (This book’s dust jacket speaks of these women’s complicated “affair,” an odd phrase for a decades-long relationship. That phrase also goes farther than Beach does; she was reserved about her sexuality, and these letters are quite chaste.)
The full story at NYT.