It
seems only appropriate (given my love of bookstores) that I
review the book written by the woman who should be canonized as the Patron
Saint of Booksellers. Ninety-five years ago, American Sylvia Beach
opened the now-famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris
Before
delving into the particulars of this wonderful book, it is probably best to
clear up any confusion over the store itself. In another well known-book, Time
was Soft There, Jeremy Mercer chronicles his time at Shakespeare and
Company. However, the store Mercer writes about is not the store Sylvia Beach
founded, but one that another expatriate American named George Whitman opened
in 1951 and renamed Shakespeare and Company after Ms. Beach’s death. In what
was either a double homage or a case of grand larceny (depending on your
viewpoint), Whitman not only took the name of Sylvia Beach’s bookstore for his
shop, he also took her name as well: his only daughter is named Sylvia Beach
Whitman, and she now runs his Shakespeare and Company.
The
original Sylvia Beach started Shakespeare and Company in 1919 with $3,000
borrowed from her mother. As is the case with independent booksellers to this
day, it was never a lucrative enterprise but rather a labor of love. She began
the store as a lending library for those looking for books in English, charging
a small monthly membership fee; this practice was quite common in the early
part of the last century, but has essentially vanished today. As time went on
she began selling more books than she loaned, but the shop’s fortunes remained
tenuous for its entire existence.
What
makes Shakespeare and Company (the memoir) so appealing is the melding
of Beach’s light, anecdotal writing style with the monumental people about whom
she writes. This is more than a book about a bookstore; it is a chronicle of
the writers, artists, publishers, and others who essentially made the shop
their second home throughout the 1920s and 1930s. And while anyone writing a
memoir likes to drop a name or two, the names in Shakespeare and Company
stand out a bit.
One
of Sylvia Beach’s best customers was a young, unknown (when she met him) writer
named Ernest Hemingway. He was covering sports for a Canadian newspaper at the
time, and it was to Sylvia Beach and her longtime partner Adrienne Monnier that
Hemingway read his first short story. Hemingway and his wife Hadley later
introduced Beach and Monnier to the grand sport of boxing. She knew all of the
so-called "Lost Generation" writers, and her memoir contains stories
about Hemingway, Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, T.S. Eliot, Robert McAlmon,
Thornton Wilder, Andre Gide, Gertrude Stein, and Alice B. Toklas. It was
Sylvia Beach who took F. Scott Fitzgerald to meet James Joyce when Fitzgerald was
too nervous to go alone.
Her
relationship with James Joyce and his family takes up a good part of the book,
and with good reason. By her own admission, Sylvia Beach worshiped James Joyce.
Her shop became an office of sorts for him; he met with other writers there,
received his mail there (as did many other writers who had no stable address),
and read through the inventory of the bookstore. But Sylvia Beach’s greatest
contribution to both Joyce and literature was offering to publish his novel Ulysses
when it had been rejected as obscene by his publishers in England and America
Because
she felt that authors deserved to be paid more for their work than the people
who published them, she took no royalties from her publication of Ulysses,
and nearly sent herself and the bookstore into bankruptcy covering the costs
and expenses. It was only the intervention of several writer friends that saved
her from having to close her doors permanently, but she seemed not to be
concerned about what happened to her as long as Joyce’s novel made it to the
readers who clamored for it.
Shakespeare
and Company is
a quick read, although you may have to look around a bit to find it. I was
determined not to buy it online, but rather from a real local bookstore, and it
took me about a week to track down a copy. It is a glimpse into an amazing time
in the history of American literature, a wonderful chronicle of a bygone era,
and a fine portrait of the woman to whom Hemingway gave his highest praise: "No
one," he wrote in A Moveable Feast, "was ever nicer to
me."
