Expatriates' Home Abroad
BALAKIAN, NONA
Expatriates' Home Abroad Shakespeare and Company. By Sylvia Beach. Reviewed by Nona Balakian Staff member, New York "Times Book Review" Harcourt, Brace. 229 pp. $4.50. THERE ARE at least three...
...At last the ideal site was found in the three rooms of a former laundry and Miss Beach cabled her mother for her life's savings...
...There follows a fleeting mention of service in the Red Cross in Belgrade during the war...
...He gave an impression of sensitiveness exceeding any I have ever known...
...They came to chat with Miss Beach, to pick up the latest books...
...The publication of her memoirs is indeed long overdue...
...There is the man of intellect — judicious, disinterested, yet always "engaged" in the formulation of values...
...When he accepted, she was overjoyed: "I was so glad to see him so cheerful...
...It was the human reasons which impelled Miss Beach in the end to ask Joyce for the privilege of publishing his great work...
...But equally important were such intangibles as good taste, a lively curiosity and a loving heart...
...She credits the success of her venture, inexperienced and unendowed as she was, to the active support she received from such celebrated customers as Andre Gide, who made of Ulysses a cause celebre in the defense of freedom of literary expression...
...Today, Miss Beach cheerfully protests that they "never gave me time to meditate...
...What was the secret of her success...
...the profits were for him...
...It is very possible that Miss Beach is not one to hold grudges...
...Miss Beach was "deeply moved" when she heard from Joyce about the two women who had already fought to publish Joyce's book—and lost...
...Monnier enthusiastically put her four years' of bookselling experience at her friend's disposal...
...She was, above all, hospitable...
...Nor does his name appear in the lists of Friends of Shakespeare and Company, organized in the mid-'30s (chiefly by Gide) to salvage the little shop from bankruptcy, through poetry readings and subscription pledges...
...I could not prevent my bookshop from getting sucked under...
...they remained to unburden themselves to her or to read from their still unpublished works...
...She neither highlights the heroic aspects nor places in proper perspective the many human elements that were involved...
...Her magnet, in tangible terms, was a little bookshop she hopefully named Shakespeare and Company...
...THERE ARE at least three distinct kinds of persons who contribute to a nation's culture...
...Though she does not miss the chinks in their armor, she is all kindliness in her feelings for these great talents...
...The initial impulse behind Shakespeare and Company may have been literary, but it was extra-literary reasons which eventually seemed to draw customers to Miss Beach...
...Immersed as she was in the infectious excitement of artistic experiment and discovery and the generous impulses that seem to be a concomitant of that kind of creativity, she was too secure in her interests and aims to dwell long on personal slights...
...A bookshop in New York proving beyond her reach, she turned to her French friend, Adrienne Monnier, whose bookstore, La Maison des Amis des Livres, she had discovered by chance before the war, Showing not the slightest twinge of jealousy in a potential rival, Mile...
...A model of patience and discretion, Miss Beach is nothing less than indulgent toward Joyce, whether in the matter of his impossible handwriting which drove hordes of typists to the brink of a nervous breakdown, his caprice in having a certain Greek blue for the binding of his book or his compulsive spending when any money fell into his hands...
...Andre Gide was among the first to take out a library card...
...In the unpredictable Gertrude Stein, whose teasing manner had more than a touch of malice, she saw "something of an infant prodigy...
...Perhaps that is why her book is not so much a real memoir as a delightful, flavorsome, chatty collection of memories...
...And in America, Margaret Anderson's magazine, The Little Review, had been seized by the authorities when she published an excerpt from the same work...
...Her book is a kind of hymn of praise to the vitality that was the modern experiment...
...Happily distracted from his poetry, Pound put himself at her service, mending a cigarette box and an old chair...
...With humor and teasing affection, she tells of her trials and tribulations as Joyce's editor...
...There is the creative individual—resourceful, indefatigable, enduring...
...And, finally, in the pivotal role of intermediary between these two and the public, there is the relatively unglamorous figure of the promoter, Whatever the potentials of a culture, the extent to which it flourishes hinges in the last instance on the caliber of this third type...
...In the literary world of our time no one exemplifies this ideal better than that remarkable American woman, Sylvia Beach...
...Nor would her conscience allow her to accept the royalty she was offered: "I wouldn't have considered it for a moment, neither for that matter would Joyce, and I think rightly...
...There was Ezra Pound, for instance, looking like Whistler and talking like Huck Finn: "Mr...
...She managed to succeed single-handed (and with empty hands) where the influence and the gold of the Rockefellers and the Fords all but failed: She created an atmosphere that drew together kindred spirits of the arts of the day...
...Though she herself was pinching pennies, Miss Beach found excuses: "Joyce enjoyed spending the way some people enjoyed hoarding," and besides, was he not making up for the sordid surroundings of his childhood...
...Having worshipped him from afar, she was as meticulous in her observation of him as Boswell with Johnson: She noted the slight stoop, the gracefully narrow hands, the deep blue eyes "with the light of genius in them...
...at least with me...
...but he is often also a teacher, a benefactor and visionary, with large doses of humanity and missionary zeal...
...She was practical...
...The culturally vital periods have always been those in which artists and critics themselves have acted as each other's promoters...
...With a family of four to support on his meager earnings as a private teacher of English, he was at the same time doggedly finishing a novel he knew no one would dare publish...
...Miss Beach didn't mind—having a sense of humor as well as a sense of business...
...In the course of our conversations, he did boast, but of his carpentry...
...Harriet Weaver, editor of The Egoist, had gone bankrupt as a consequence of publishing five installments of Ulysses...
...Andre Maurois, Paul Valery, Valery Larbaud came soon thereafter...
...If she never quite comes to grips with the underlying meaning of this unique adventure and the important part she played in it, she conveys as few persons have done before her the delights and rewards of being a "promoter" of genius—in a manner that no public relations expert can begin to understand...
...This was still not very much, and an individual decor consisting of a French-looking bust of Shakespeare, two pictures of Oscar Wilde, two original drawings of Blake and a Whitman manuscript covered up the fact that her stock consisted mainly of secondhand English books...
...Today a frail, retiring lady of nearly 70, she was for two decades before World War II "the mother of them all" as the youthful, adventurous bookseller on the rue de l'Odeon, Paris, and publisher of James Joyce's widely banned Ulysses...
...A baby belongs to its mother, not to the midwife...
...Pound was not the kind of writer who talks about his, or for that matter, anyone's books...
...Not simply the "writer" or the "artist" but the whole personality responded to Miss Beach, who was quick to perceive the creator behind the thing created and sense responsibility toward it...
...In no time at all, Joyce—with his charming, democratic manner, his idiosyncrasies (among them a terrible fear of dogs), his stoic gaiety in the face of personal disaster—became her special pet, and his physical and spiritual well-being became her primary concern...
...The lending library she incorporated into her shop proved a boon to French writers interested in modern English books but unable to afford them...
...Though there is not the remotest suggestion that the two ever came to blows, it is curious that there is no mention of Joyce thereafter...
...Within a year of her establishment on the Left Bank in 1919, few were the illustrious writers, musicians and artists of both France and America who had not beaten a path to her door...
...The autobiographical background is vague and sketchily filled, as if it did not really interest her...
...In 1917, she returned to Paris for a longer stay, "to pursue my studies at the source...
...And it was "poor" Fitzgerald, even when he recklessly squandered what he earned on the sale of his book in champagne and a pearl necklace for Zelda...
...In the process of settling down on the freer shores of the Left Bank, these self-exiles often gave Shakespeare and Company as their address...
...Miss Beach mentions that her father was a Presbyterian minister in Princeton who took his family to live in Paris for a brief spell when Sylvia was 14...
...What she seemed mainly to respond to was the personal predicament of the self-exiled Joyce...
...Her importance to the survival of the new literature in the early '20s is incalculable...
...The suppression of books in America had created what Miss Beach calls "the pilgrims of the '20s...
...Yet a certain querulousness creeps into Miss Beach's account toward the end almost in spite of herself: "I understood from the first that in working for Joyce the pleasure was mine—an infinite pleasure...
...Once again her account has a fragmentary quality...
...But no one won her heart in quite the way that James Joyce did from the moment she met him in the home of mutual friends in the summer of 1920...
...Where she herself is concerned, Miss Beach is too reticent a woman, too naturally modest, to give us the full dimensions of her story...
...In young Hemingway, newly returned from battle in Italy with a leg wound to show for his stifled urge for heroism, she thought she detected "a deeply religious man...
...Indeed, the ideal promoter, as distinct from the special class of public relations experts we have artificially created in our day, combines qualities of the creative and critical mind...
...After all, the books were Joyce's...
...When in 1931 an American publisher made an offer to publish Ulysses, Joyce took no notice of the fact that his benefactress would get nothing at all for relinquishing her rights...
...Then, two years later, again back in Paris, comes her sudden obsession: to own a bookstore and make French writers known in America...
Vol. 42 • December 1959 • No. 46
