Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier: Rue de L'Odéon
[In the following essay, Benstock presents brief overviews of Monnier and Beach's lives, also reviewing the history of their relationship together, both as personal friends and professional colleagues.]
ONE WOMAN READING
In May 1938, the owner of La Maison des Amis des Livres at 7, rue de l'Odéon, broadcast over Radio-Paris a “Letter to Listeners.” Adrienne Monnier began her spoken letter with a hypothetical objection from the male listening audience: “‘les Ami-es des Livres’ … they do not exist, of course. Women are incapable of loving books; far from being their friends, they are their natural enemies” (“Les Amies des Livres,” in The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier, 183).1 More than twenty years earlier, Monnier had opened the first lending library ever established in France. In the front room of her small, sparsely furnished shop potential readers were encouraged to expand their reading and to experiment with their literary tastes. Like Sylvia Beach, who owned the English-language bookshop across the street at number 12, Adrienne Monnier's accomplishment depended in large part upon her personal love of books and of the adventure of reading. While both women successfully imparted to others their enthusiasm for books, Monnier dedicated herself to changing the reading habits of the French and to overturning the lingering assumption that women were impervious to the claims of books.
An unabashedly feminist analysis of women's relation to books, “Les Amies des Livres” examined the historical circumstances that had traditionally prevented women from becoming part of the reading public. These conditions included differences in education between males and females, but more important were the circumstances of family and marital life that made the home the place of woman's work rather than of leisure: “Women are asked to take care of their persons and their homes above all; they are not praised for devoting themselves to housework and it is not considered proper for them to become lost in books, whether these books be frivolous or serious” (184). Monnier carefully differentiated the reading habits of men and women in this essay, focusing on those special traits that a woman brings to the reading situation:
She will not experience the need, like a masculine reader, to own her favorite authors in beautiful and lasting editions—at bottom it is true that she is not a bibliophile in the sense in which this word is generally understood. She will prefer to keep the ordinary editions that were the very ones she read first, and she will surround them with kind attentions; she will cover them with fine patterned paper, she will put in as a frontispiece a portrait of the author that she has cut out of some magazine, she will sometimes slip in a flower. If the book pleases her intensely she will copy passages from it. It is not she who will have that nasty habit of writing in the margins, except perhaps as far as her school books are concerned. The fact of writing in the margins is furthermore specifically masculine. Yes, it is curious, a man and above all a young man, often corrects the author, he underlines, he denies, he opposes his judgment; in fact, he adds himself to it. A woman remains silent when she does not like something, and when she detests something she cuts it out. I know women who are not at all stupid who cannot stop themselves from removing or covering up such and such a displeasing passage of a book; they do that above all for the benefit or to the disadvantage of a work that they admire but that offends them in places, just as to suppress the ugly traits in the characters of the men they love.
(185)
These acute observations of the differences between men and women readers were based on Adrienne Monnier's own experience as a woman and reader. They informed both her desire to become a bookseller and her insistence that Les Amis des Livres not encourage men's love of books at the expense of women's relationship with books.
Indeed, Monnier's own practices as a bookseller were the product of her notions about various kinds of readers and, in particular, her reactions as a woman to the male-dominated world of books. For instance, her shop did not carry expensive leatherbound editions of classic works of literature; thus it did not encourage “bibliophiles.” She could not have afforded to stock such items, nor did she admire the “masculine” mentality that desired to use books for economic profit. In fact, her bookshop was directed less toward the sale of books than to the reading and lending of them. Monnier remained convinced that the French would only buy books that pleased them, works that they already knew well. Her shop encouraged people to browse, to sit near the potbellied stove and read, to take tea with her and discuss the novels, volumes of poetry, and reviews she stocked. She herself knew well every book in her shop and had chosen the individual items because of her own interest in them. She encouraged customers to take books home with them, to live with them for a while before making a decision to buy them.
La Maison des Amis des Livres was, as its name suggested, a house for all of those who loved books. In order for Monnier to succeed in her own terms—to bring people to a love of books—it was essential that she define in advance the kind of person she wished her shop to attract. In “Number One,” the first essay in Monnier's Gazette des Amis des Livres (published January 1938), she explicated the particularly French attitude toward books, later noting that “a French person does not lightly engage in the purchase of a book” (145). Admitting that among Europeans the French were not avid readers, she set herself to determining what might spur them to place a higher value on the reading experience. She noted that the French prefer paperbound books, for instance, because the hardbound variety remind them of the years at school when books were for study rather than for pleasure. They want books that fit in their pockets, whose pages they can bend back a bit, whose weight and size feel comfortable in their hands. Although the French continue to be sensitive to the value of a “pleasing volume,” to the quality of paper, they do not particularly prize beautiful papers or wide margins, both of which seem to them to be unnecessary extravagances. In short, if the French love books, they love to read them. (Monnier's observations on French reading habits were later confirmed by Colette; see “Occupation” in Looking Backwards, 110-111.)
From the perspective of the paperback age of books, Adrienne Monnier's ideas about the place of books in her life and the importance she placed on Les Amis des Livres as a reading room and lending library seem quaint. The great success of the Monnier-Beach endeavor in Paris was due, in part, to the absence of similar bookshops in that city. Although in England and America public lending libraries came into existence in the nineteenth century, they were unknown in France prior to the appearance of Monnier's own bookshop on the rue de l'Odéon. But the success of Les Amis des Livres and Shakespeare and Company was more significantly due to the refusal of these two librarians ever to purchase a book they had not read and loved. Thus the two bookshops represented the reading habits of its two patronnes, women who were not merely lenders or sellers but readers and lovers of the books they chose. These shops were for those who could not afford personal libraries, for whom the purchase of a book was a significant expenditure.
The Americans who came to Sylvia Beach's shop and the French who came to Adrienne Monnier's, however, came for rather different reasons. Many of the Americans in Paris were transients who had left private libraries back home. They had difficulty finding English-language books in Paris (as one still does), and many were longing to read works in their own language by authors well known to them. Shakespeare and Company proved to be an important way station on the expatriate tour. But the Parisians had different needs, in part because the French, who according to Monnier “love books” (“Number One,” 145), were not the best customers for books and because the city offered more exciting temptations than reading. Monnier's idea was to establish a place, a country, in which the French would be encouraged to explore their love for the written word, to discover the pleasures of reading. In establishing her bookshop Monnier created such a world; later, she aided Sylvia Beach in a similar effort. When the two bookshops faced each other across the street leading to the National Theater, they stood at the entrance to a country Monnier called “Odéonia.”
ODéONIA
Specifically situated in time and place, Odéonia nonetheless formed an interior landscape, described by Monnier as a “Country of Memory, where the Mothers lull us and ever smile at us” (“Number One,” 139). This was not only a country that welcomed women, but one that recalled the pleasure in the sound of a mother's voice reading to a small child. The physical boundaries of Odéonia were the sixth arrondissement, but its spiritual boundaries were almost limitless, including all those who loved books. The defining feature of this country was its welcoming spirit. Included among the memorials in the Mercure de France on the occasion of Beach's death, Stein's poem “Rich and poor in English” (written in the early years of their friendship and dedicated to Sylvia) suggests the spirit of this country:
Not a country not a door send them away to sit on the floor.
Cakes. This is not the world. Can you remember.
(“Sylvia Beach,” Mercure de France, 95)
When Adrienne Monnier first established her shop, the rue de l'Odéon was known primarily to students at the nearby Sorbonne and to those who came, in the evening, to performances at the National Theater. Because of La Maison des Amis des Livres and, later, Shakespeare and Company, the street became one of the most famous in Paris, a street on which even today one meets the ghosts of all those who regularly walked up the slope toward the twin bookshops. Behind the large windows that displayed the latest works by French and American writers, the two women waited to welcome any who paused at the threshold. In later years, each of these women used her shop for poetry and prose readings, occasions when well-known and unknown writers presented their work to a Paris audience. At these times, the shop became a small salon—people crowded in to hear Joyce or Eliot, Gide or Larbaud, read; aperitifs were served with small snacks and the tiny rooms were filled with laughter and conversation. A superb cook and hostess, Adrienne often entertained groups of writers in her apartment, at 18, rue de l'Odéon, which she shared with Sylvia for almost seventeen years. For these women made no distinction between their professional and personal lives; their public and private interests were integrated to such a degree that it was difficult even for them to say how their professional alliance was different from their personal and intimate relationship.
In important ways Adrienne served as guide for Sylvia Beach's own efforts to establish herself as a bookseller in Paris. Adrienne drew upon her already extensive experience, and, without her help, the chances for Sylvia's enterprise would have been dim. Adrienne helped her obtain the necessary permit to set up business, found the building, and convinced the landlord to rent it to a foreigner. She gave advice on both the intellectual and business concerns of such an undertaking. Adrienne served as sister and muse, as helpmate and financial advisor, and—perhaps most importantly—as the model librarian and bookseller in whose image Sylvia would fashion her own. Although five years younger than Sylvia, Adrienne Monnier always appeared the more matronly and older of the two. Like Gertrude Stein, Adrienne was plump and motherly; Sylvia, like Alice Toklas, was small and wiry. It was Adrienne who showed Sylvia the possibilities for a free and independent life in Paris, who shared her clientele when Sylvia opened Shakespeare and Company, who provided emotional stability and introduced Sylvia to the pleasures of their long life together.
In March 1917, when Sylvia came into La Maison des Amis des Livres in search of Paul Fort's review Vers et Prose, Adrienne already had established her bookshop as significantly different from others in the sixth arrondissement. She had weathered the initial traumas of setting up a business about which, she later admitted, she knew little. She had no previous business experience, was unfamiliar with even the rudimentary elements of bookkeeping, and felt uneasy in the world of tradespeople and businessmen. It was not common for a woman to establish herself as a bookseller—far more appropriate for her to be a proprietress of a maison de couture or a seller of baked goods or candies. And even as a bookseller, Adrienne Monnier was strikingly different from her colleagues—the difference born, in part, of necessity:
Our first idea was very modest: we sought only to start off a bookshop and a reading room devoted above all to modern works. We had very little money, and it was that detail that drove us to specialize in modern literature; if we had had a lot of money, it is certain that we would have wanted to buy everything that existed in respect to printed works and to realize a kind of National Library; we were convinced that the public demands a great quantity of books above all, and we thought that we had much audacity in daring to establish ourselves with hardly three thousand volumes when some reading-room catalogs announced twenty thousand, fifty thousand, and even a hundred thousand of them! The truth is that only one of our walls was furnished with books; the others were decorated with pictures, with a large old desk, and with a chest of drawers in which we kept wrapping paper, string, and everything we did not know where to put; our chairs were old chairs from the country that we still have. This bookshop hardly had the look of a shop, and that was not on purpose: we were far from suspecting that people would congratulate us so much in the future for what seemed to us an unfortunate makeshift.
(“La Maison,” 71)
It was precisely because her shop hardly had the look of a place of business—its worn chairs invited those who entered to sit and read or chat—that Adrienne Monnier achieved such success. “Business” for her had a “moving and profound meaning.” She thought of a shop as a “place of transition between street and house” and of her own shop as a “magic chamber” where the “correspondence between [the] external attitude and [the] profound self” of those who entered could be revealed to her. Monnier loved books, and made them her business, but she was an eager and intelligent student of human nature, and La Maison des Amis des Livres provided the setting for her studies.
Adrienne Monnier was not satisfied, however, with merely watching her clientele discover the modern literature with which she stocked her shelves; she was also concerned to discover young writers in need of a reading audience. In an early essay, Monnier addressed herself to a fictional poet of her own creation who wrote to her for assistance in finding both a reading public and a “road to posterity” (“A Letter to a Young Poet,” April 1926). She responded as a woman, emphasizing at each turn in the essay her own particular situation as a reader and writer. She claimed that her womanhood, defined as “passive by nature, accustomed over several centuries to attach little value to my mind and its ‘paltry productions,’” had given her a detachment, a perspective from which she could comment on poetry. Responding to this young poet's great desire to see himself “in print,” she suggested that he take various of his rejected, unpublished poems to a good printer, choose the kind of typeface that pleased him, and prepare a small printing of his work. These copies he could give as gifts to friends and circulate to critics, libraries, booksellers, and reviewers in hope of being noticed by some of them. In outlining such a plan of action, Monnier described precisely the desire for publication that led other women friends to set up handpresses to print their works and those of their friends.
Monnier saw in the young poet's particular sense of loneliness and discouragement at continued rejection by publishers and lack of acknowledgment by reviewers a condition common to women, who exist, she claimed, outside the boundaries of the established literary community. To find a place among intellectuals, women often chose to serve the interests of men at the expense of their own development. In their “capacity for being smitten with genius and loving to serve it,” French women, wrote Monnier in 1940, do disservice to their own creative and intellectual energies (“Lust,” 172). Rather than imitate her countrywomen, Monnier set about to undermine the established principles by which women became handmaidens to male genius, disguised their own intellectual aspirations in the pursuit of men, and gave in to male assumptions that women were capable of reading and writing only the most banal literature. Monnier never lived on the margins of the Paris literary community: she embodied the spirit of that community, made the bookshop the locus of its activities, and continued for almost forty years to enlarge its intellectual and literary boundaries. She was always more than the proprietress of La Maison des Amis des Livres—she was also a chronicler of her times, a gifted essayist, a bibliographer, a publisher, and a reader.
With few exceptions, the writers who were supported and encouraged by Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach have paid tribute to the combined genius of these two women. Literary history has acknowledged that each of these women was far more than a mere “bookseller” (they made an “ordinary” profession “extraordinary,” as Leslie Katz remarks), yet their accomplishments have been judged to be practical and personal rather than intellectual or artistic (“Meditations,” 81). Because they lived together and worked in close association with each other, it has often been assumed that their accomplishments were almost indistinguishable. Yet a closer examination of their interests, their personal situations, their daily working lives suggests that Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach saw their professional commitments in distinctly different terms. And the combination of their individual talents constituted an assertive and articulate force among Left Bank intellectuals. To understand something of this special combination of energy and intellectual drive, one must examine the circumstances under which they became booksellers and librarians. Each wanted an independent life, outside marriage. For Sylvia Beach, such a life was possible only by living away from her family, putting as much distance as possible between herself and her mother, a woman who came to her daughters with various emotional needs, and separating herself from her father's professional circumstances. Monnier, however, preferred to stay in Paris—her birthplace—to maintain a close but separate existence away from her parents. Both of these daughters were encouraged to be independent, to interest themselves in the arts and literature, and to establish for themselves fulfilling professional and personal lives. The adult relationship they established with each other ironically extended the values of their upbringing and constituted a reaction against those values.
SYLVIA BEACH: PRINCETON AND PARIS
When Sylvia was 15 years old, her father became associate pastor of the American Church of Paris with a special mission to the students of the Latin quarter. The family moved to Paris from Bridgeton, New Jersey, in 1902. Each of the three Beach daughters was affected by the experience of living and being educated in Europe, but of the three it was Sylvia who eventually made her home in Paris, in part because she wanted to experience the city on her own. She felt restricted during this first three-year stay with her parents: “I was not interested in what I could see of Paris through the bars of my family cage,” she wrote in a suppressed version of her memoirs (Fitch, Sylvia Beach, 25). The later decision to take up a life abroad was also an effort to establish her independence and to separate herself from the tensions of her parents' marriage. Sylvia Beach was the product of a family torn by conflicting values: those belonging to her father were “orthodox,” and those of her mother “heterodox”:
From Eleanor [her mother] she learned to love Europe, particularly France, to seek pleasure and individual freedom, to admire bold and creative artists above all others, and to shun sexual contact with men. From Sylvester [her father]—whose ministry was less a devout call to service than a prestigious profession—she learned social respectability and congenial good manners. From her grandmother Nancy Orbison [for whom she was named] and her missionary heritage, she learned dedication to a cause beyond self-gratification. Prudence and good taste would temper the personal freedom she enjoyed by living in Paris.
(Sylvia Beach, 22)
Despite the increasing physical and psychological distances in Sylvia's relationships with her parents, she maintained strong loyalties to both of them. After the family's three-year stay in Paris, Eleanor Beach spent much of her time in Europe or in California with her daughters, in part to escape the unhappiness of her marriage. Sylvia followed the creative interests of her mother, who was an accomplished musician and painter; it was her mother's money that allowed her to set up Shakespeare and Company. Yet, she maintained powerful—if complex—loyalties to her father. In her adolescence, she stopped using her given name, Nancy, and adopted the name Sylvia, a variant of her father's name, suggesting that she psychologically allied herself with him. Her memoir, Shakespeare and Company, begins by introducing her father. Sylvia's rather difficult relationship with her parents is mirrored in the relationships her sisters maintained with them. Interestingly, both her sisters altered their names as well—her youngest sister, Eleanor, changed her name to Cyprian for the stage; her second sister, christened Hollingsworth, after the family name of a close friend, shortened hers to Holly. Both sisters felt the burden of their mother's increasing dependency on them; each was to feel the need to distance herself from Sylvester Beach.
The Paris experience of 1902-1905, although a rare opportunity whose implications for the lives of the Beach daughters would only later become evident, circumscribed a difficult period in Sylvia's life. Already a young woman whose education had been interrupted by ill health (she suffered from incapacitating migraine headaches that plagued her all her life), Sylvia Beach claimed that the few months she spent in a private school in Lausanne constituted the only schooling she ever had. “Owing to the curious notions of the two ladies who directed it,” Beach explained, discipline at the school “was better suited to a bunch of incorrigibles in a reformatory than to a lot of meek maidens.” After a few months in residence at the school she asked to return to Paris. Upon her return, she claimed she would have been completely happy had it not been for the memory of Holly, who continued on as a student in Lausanne, “still walking out twice a day in twos, never allowed to look out of the window at the Lake of Geneva, or to address a word to anyone except on the walks, and singing with a cork between her teeth to keep her mouth open” (Shakespeare and Company, 6). Rather than a doctrinaire education, Sylvia received brief intervals of tutoring; shortly after her return from Switzerland, she was sent to live with an American family at their country place near Bourre, a spot she came to love, devoting herself to long hours of reading and walking in the woods. Sylvia established the most important friendship of her Paris years with the daughter of this family, Carlotta Welles, whose father was an American businessman in France. Carlotta too had been taken out of school on the advice of the family doctor, who prescribed outdoor exercise. This prescription fit Sylvia's needs admirably. Away from the tensions of her family and pressures of a rigid school atmosphere, her health improved.
Although Sylvia struggled her entire life against tension headaches and eczema, she seemed determined not to repeat her mother's alternating mood swings between the desire for freedom and independence (almost always the reason behind her flights to Europe) and neurotic dependencies. In 1918, a year before the opening of Shakespeare and Company at number 8, rue de Dupuytren, Sylvia was under considerable pressure from her mother to return from Europe. She had been in Europe since 1915, having spent the first two of those years in Spain with her mother. Now her mother wanted her closer to home. In 1918, Eleanor Beach was physically ill from the misery of her marriage and the pressure of social and professional obligations as the wife of the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Princeton. She had been recalled from Europe in 1916 as the result of an item that appeared in New York's Town Topics broadly hinting that her husband was carrying on a rather public affair in her absence. The accusation led to a meeting of the church board at which Sylvester Beach had to defend himself, a defense that suggested his anger at such meddling in his personal affairs. Writing to Sylvia, he avoided mentioning the particular complications of his relationship with his wife, concentrating instead on their mutual commitment to their daughters: “Since we went to Paris 15 years ago, it has not been possible for the family to be together much of the time. Our first duty is to the children. We owe them the best possible chance in life. In lieu of money, which we do not have, we can give them a little travel and experience to fit them for the career they may choose … I wish people would understand that and LET US ALONE” (Fitch, Sylvia Beach, 29).
Eleanor Beach had waited a full year to return, arriving in Princeton in 1917 in an effort to “keep up appearances.” The parsonage in Princeton, however, was the only home she had. By fall of 1918, she was writing her daughters that she could not “live without” them. Sylvester Beach, apparently, had been complaining to her of the young women's expenses. At last, the oldest sister, Holly, made the decision: she urged Sylvia to stay in Europe and sent back Cyprian, whose film career in France was just beginning to succeed. Cyprian would never again find success in a career. Feeling guilty, Eleanor Beach “begged the forgiveness of her three daughters for hurting them with her pressuring and complaining” (Sylvia Beach, 32). By luck or design, Sylvia had been spared the return to the family fold. She was now free to find a career, and her newfound friend, Adrienne Monnier, was ready to help her do so.
Sylvia's effort to find a satisfying career had been delayed by World War I. Listing herself on her first adult passport as a journaliste littéraire, she actually published only one article (on the Musée Rodin in Paris) and did various odd jobs. She had served as a voluntaire agricole in Tourraine and, after Cyprian's return to America in 1918, she set out for Serbia with Holly to work for the Red Cross. Six months later, she returned to Paris with the gift of an engraved cigarette lighter for Adrienne and plans to open a bookshop in London. After spending one week in London and learning from Harold Monro that there was no market for such a shop in London, she returned to Adrienne, who very quickly found appropriate housing for what was to become Shakespeare and Company (Sylvia Beach, 38-39). Although Eleanor Beach still wanted her middle daughter to return to America—perhaps to set up a bookshop in New York—she provided her the initial ＄3,000 that allowed her to open her shop on 17 November 1919. Chiefly a lending library, like La Maison des Amis des Livres around the corner, Sylvia's bookshop included books from Beowulf through the nineteenth century. Soon it would also display radical experimental Modernist writing, the publications of avant-garde journals and local small presses.
ADRIENNE MONNIER: RIGHT BANK/LEFT BANK
By the time Sylvia Beach returned to America in 1908, following her adolescent Paris experience, Adrienne Monnier was nearing completion of her brevet supérieur that would accredit her for secondary school teaching. When she received the degree in 1909, she did not begin teaching but followed Suzanne Bonnierre, her childhood friend and the woman with whom she would later establish her bookshop, to London, where Suzanne had a teaching job. In order to be near the woman with whom she was passionately in love, Monnier worked as a lady's companion and as a French teacher in Eastbourne (Very Rich Hours, 10). When she later returned to Paris, she studied to become a literary secretary and in 1912 became secretary to Yvonne Sarcey, founder of the Université des Annales and editor of Le Journal de l'Université des Annales. After three years of working for Sarcey, Monnier decided that editing an academic journal did not interest her. But in the three years of working on the Annales, Monnier had made another important discovery that was to affect her professional life: she had discovered that the Right Bank, where the offices of the Annales were located, in no way appealed to her. She was to write in her “Souvenirs de l'autre guerre”: “In that stronghold of the Right Bank I had made myself no relationship, no relationship that I wanted to keep and maintain. The authors that I loved did not frequent the place. … My taste and my ideas had been formed in complete independence; the milieu had nothing to do with them. … The Left Bank called me and even now it does not cease to call me and keep me. I cannot imagine that I could ever leave it, anymore than an organ can leave the place that is assigned to it in the body” (Very Rich Hours, 10-11). Years later, following a lunch with Colette, Monnier wrote in a note to the July 1939 number of the Gazette des Amis des Livres, “At bottom, what I am for her: a little provincial of the Left Bank!” Colette too had begun her years in Paris as a “little provincial of the Left Bank.” When Monnier met her in the 1930s, however, Colette was one of the greatest literary figures in France, resident in the Palais Royal, where Cyprian and Sylvia had lived in the year 1918, when Eleanor Beach had forced her youngest daughter to come home. And by the time of this meeting, Adrienne Monnier herself was a well-known person, a leader of the Left Bank literary community. The two women shared provincial roots—one of a family from Savoy and the other from Burgundy—despite their intellectual distance from each other in Paris. Colette's success had taken her across the river to Right Bank respectability, whereas Adrienne's success had tied her more firmly to Left Bank intellectuals.
There was another, unacknowledged, link uniting these two French women, a link that might well have remained unknown to them. In 1913, while still working for Yvonne Sarcey, Adrienne Monnier visited the Left Bank offices of the Mercure de France at 26, rue de Condé, because she claimed that this journal, which she had discovered at age 10, had altered the direction of her literary reading. At the offices, she met Rachilde, the French novelist and the wife of the Mercure editor, Alfred Vallette. It was Rachilde who discovered Colette to be the secret author of the Claudine stories, who befriended the young provincial woman in the years of her marriage to Willy, urged her to leave her taskmaster, and supported her both financially and emotionally at a period in her life when Colette was considered persona non grata by friends of Rachilde and Vallette. Monnier was looking for a literary occupation on the Left Bank, something that would allow her to use the literary experience she had already gained, and she went to Rachilde in hopes that she might provide an introduction to her husband. Although nothing came of this meeting (the editorial staff of the Mercure was, in Monnier's terms, “disabused” of her youth, enthusiasm, and illusion), the decision to find a place for herself on the Left Bank was confirmed by this visit.
In less than a year, because of a tragic accident to her father, Adrienne Monnier's wish to have a bookshop on the Left Bank was fulfilled. Badly injured in a train accident, Clovis Monnier received an indemnity for his injuries, a sum that he gave to his eldest daughter to establish a bookshop (Very Rich Hours, 11). It was Adrienne's father who provided the capital for La Maison des Amis des Livres and Sylvia's mother's money that helped establish Shakespeare and Company, although traditionally such gifts were given to the sons rather than the daughters of middle-class families. Without brothers who might have had first claim on their families' rather limited means, Adrienne and Sylvia were the natural choices for this kind of “financial aid.” And the assistance Adrienne and Sylvia initially received from their families continued over the years, in the form of numerous loans to Sylvia from her mother and in the weekly rations of vegetables and farm products that the Monniers provided for both “daughters.”
According to Adrienne Monnier's memoirs, she was twice favored in 1915—first by the surprise gift brought about by her father's accident and second by “the terrible goddess” of war. Had Monnier been male, she would have been fighting in the trenches. Instead, she was a young woman in search of a profession at a time when those businesses still in operation in Paris were in the care of wives, sisters, and daughters of fighting men. Many businesses had been forced to close, and “shops were available at reasonable prices. … Competition could not slow me down because most of the booksellers were in the army. As life was slowed down, I did not lack the time to learn a profession whose practice I was completely ignorant of. I loved books, that was all” (Very Rich Hours, 12). La Librairie A. Monnier, as it was first called, opened on 15 November 1915, four years ahead of Shakespeare and Company. Monnier thought of her shop as an “ark,” a little ship that sailed the literary waters of the Left Bank. Morrill Cody called Shakespeare and Company “the cradle of American literature” (“Shakespeare and Company—Paris,” 1261). If Adrienne Monnier's hand was the one that guided Le Navire d'Argent, it was Sylvia Beach's that rocked the cradle.
PROFESSIONAL INTERESTS AND PERSONAL ALLEGIANCES
Just as the terms in which Adrienne and Sylvia described their literary enterprises differed, so did the ways in which they thought of their professional service to literature. Adrienne Monnier worshipped books and served the word rather than the writer. Sylvia Beach defined her duty in other terms: she interested herself in both writers and readers, fostering the word by supporting and aiding both. Although many who have written about the two women have used religious metaphors to describe their efforts on behalf of literary Modernism, Monnier's French Catholicism should be carefully distinguished from Beach's American Presbyterianism. Monnier actually thought of herself as someone who had taken religious orders; she described herself as a religieuse ancienne (nun of other times), who “established a house … half convent and half farm” (Very Rich Hours, 13). Indeed, both in dress and demeanor she resembled a combination nun and farmwife. In the uniform of her work—a white blouse, waistcoat, and long gray skirt over which out of doors she wore a full-length cape—she resembled an abbess; in her wide girth, prodigious appetite, and hearty laughter, she might have been a provincial farm woman.
But if Adrienne was the abbess of the avant-garde, Sylvia was the patron saint of literary experimentalism. By contrast to Adrienne's quiet determination, Sylvia exuded energy and missionary zeal. Morrill Cody has described Shakespeare and Company as a “character store,” with Sylvia Beach as the “primary character” (“Shakespeare and Company—Paris,” 1262). She combined seriousness with “witty intelligence” and a sense of humor that kept herself and others laughing. In looks as in demeanor the two women differed greatly. Adrienne was an earthy, Rabelaisian figure. Sylvia was ascetic, combining the looks of a pre-Raphaelite androgyne with a distinctly American demeanor. If Adrienne appeared motherly, Sylvia appeared boyish—even into her old age. If Adrienne indulged her gourmet appetite and enjoyed an occasional evening at the Folies Bergère, Sylvia denied her own impulse to pleasure, uninterested in “entertainment,” new clothes, or any of the usual comforts of life. Describing the differences between the two friends, Noel Riley Fitch writes:
Adrienne had a religious temperament—her ancestors were Catholic; she was drawn to Buddhism, her mother to Theosophy. Sylvia, though reared in an established church, was agnostic. If Adrienne was French and mystical, Sylvia was American and pragmatic. Sylvia bobbed her hair, never wore makeup, and insisted that her skirts be made short for ease of movement and built with pockets—a working person always needed pockets, she insisted. Whereas Adrienne spoke deliberately and philosophically, Sylvia was gifted with an understated and swift wit. She delighted in inventing puns, quoting comic verse, and playing practical jokes. If Adrienne was contemplative, Sylvia had a nervous, restless energy.
(Sylvia Beach, 34-35)
The contrasts between Monnier and Beach were as important as the similar loves for literature and intellectual pursuits that united them personally and professionally. During their many years together, they adapted themselves to each other, Sylvia taking strength from Adrienne's quiet supportiveness, Adrienne finding adventure in Sylvia's enthusiasms.
Only a few months after the opening of Shakespeare and Company, a sudden death changed the relationship that had until then existed between Sylvia and Adrienne. Not a year after her marriage to Gustave Tronche, the administrator for publications of the Nouvelle Revue Française, Suzanne Bonnierre—who, Adrienne admitted, had never returned Adrienne's love in the measure that it was given—died suddenly. Commenting on Adrienne's relationship with this young woman, Jules Romains says that Suzanne “visibly submitted to her empire, received her spiritual orders, participated as best she could in that state of mastered exaltation in which literature sustained Adrienne. This companion separated from her rather quickly, in order to go back to those regions of life in which more ordinary emotions and duties prevail” (Very Rich Hours, 14-15). The shock of Suzanne's death, coming as it did upon Adrienne's loss of her in marriage, exposed certain tensions between Sylvia and Adrienne, most importantly a subtle competitiveness between their two establishments and a marked resistance on Sylvia's part to continuing as Adrienne's willing pupil in the bookselling business. Adrienne had a propensity for playing “the boss,” as she herself admitted (Very Rich Hours, 14), her relationship with Suzanne having suffered from similar tensions.
Adrienne had already become a very fine businesswoman and developed her business skills as the years progressed. She later advised Sylvia on the publishing ventures of Shakespeare and Company. Since Adrienne consistently tried to protect Sylvia's financial interests in the bookshop, James Joyce often found her a formidable influence, a woman sometimes capable of strengthening the resolve of the more acquiescent Sylvia. He bore Adrienne a grudging respect, however, referring to her in a letter to Harriet Weaver as Sylvia's “more intelligent partner” (Sylvia Beach, 322)—a remark that exposed the underside of the politesse he adopted with Sylvia. One senses, however, that in the early years of her professional relationship with Adrienne, Sylvia strained at Adrienne's determined guidance and set about defining her own terms for the literary enterprise that Shakespeare and Company was to become. Having introduced Sylvia to the literary world of the Left Bank, Adrienne had a difficult time letting Sylvia set her own course and make her own mistakes. Adrienne apparently wanted Sylvia to become an astute businesswoman, like herself. But such a dream was never to materialize, in part because Sylvia's generosity of spirit refused commercial constraints. Although both bookshops were intellectual rather than commercial successes, La Maison des Amis des Livres never skirted bankruptcy to quite the same degree as Shakespeare and Company—for reasons that were not entirely Sylvia Beach's fault.
Suzanne Bonnierre's death brought first a confrontation between the two women (“a sort of set-to,” as Sylvia described it, Sylvia Beach, 53) whose resolution led to a deepening friendship. A disagreement that rested in professional concerns, the presumed reasons for this confrontation between the two women may well have masked the underlying tensions of their sexual attraction to each other. Sometime in the months following Suzanne's death, the two women became lovers. Suzanne Bonnierre's death may well have forced them to acknowledge their attraction for each other. Gertrude Stein, who might have sensed the tensions of sexual attraction in this relationship, posed the question in “Rich and poor in English,” “do you care for Suzanne?” Within a few months Sylvia moved in with Adrienne in her apartment at 18, rue de l'Odéon, a residence she kept until 1937. As with other aspects of the relationship between Sylvia and Adrienne, however, the younger woman took the lead, probably seducing Sylvia to sexual love. Adrienne took the initiative in love as she had in professional pursuits.
We do not know whether Sylvia Beach had had earlier love affairs or whether she ever felt jealousy in the knowledge of Adrienne's earlier lesbian pursuits. It is possible that prior to her relationship with Adrienne, Sylvia was entirely naive about romantic love between women. Such relationships often begin at school, which she had not attended, but two earlier friendships—the first with Carlotta Welles and the second with Marian Mason, whom Sylvia accompanied to Florence for a year in 1907—might have offered occasions for her to discover her sexual interests. In her relationship with Monnier, Sylvia was silent on the subject of their shared sexual orientation, remaining reserved even with women friends—like Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas—who were also lesbian. Adrienne Monnier was typically more open about her preferences, writing about her attractions to women, especially her relationship with Suzanne Bonnierre, with some degree of candor. Playing both wife and mother to Sylvia, she cooked for her, looked after her health, protected her interests, and took her into the bosom of a French family that loved Sylvia as their own daughter and helped heal the hurt that Sylvia had experienced with her own family. It is unclear whether Sylvia's parents knew the nature of her friendship with Adrienne, but Sylvia certainly took her sisters into her confidence, in particular Cyprian, who was also a lesbian.
Because neither Adrienne nor Sylvia wrote about their relationship, the intimate aspects of their friendship remain hidden by the natural discretion that marked both women. Letters written during their infrequent separations over the years reveal the depth of their commitment to each other, and Adrienne's letters in particular employ pet names for her adored Sylvia, urge her to protect her health, and express the desire to hold and kiss her. Sylvia's own prudence, developed from years of parsonage life, displayed itself in a discretion that masked sexual repression. Even her own sister Cyprian suggested that the relationship between Adrienne and Sylvia may not have been a sexual one, since she surmised that Sylvia was too repressed to express a latent sensuality.2 For Adrienne—who was by everyone's admission a highly sensuous person—such an arrangement seems unlikely. There is some slim evidence for the sexual nature of their union in its early years (through 1921) in the relief Sylvia experienced from the debilitating headaches that she regularly suffered. These headaches may well have been the result of her efforts to repress certain aspects of her personality; later, under pressure from Joyce's demands and worries about the financial future of the shop, the headaches worsened. Sylvia had been educated to fear, repression, and pain by a mother who detested the physical nature of heterosexual love and who suffered terribly from the demands of her heterosexual union. In an unpublished portion of her memoirs, Beach wrote: “Whether from my puritan ancestry or puritanical upbringing—once when I was in my early teens my mother told me, ‘never to let a man touch me’—I was always physically afraid of men. That is probably why I lived happily so many years with Adrienne” (Sylvia Beach, 367). Earlier Eleanor Beach had confided to her daughters that shortly after Cyprian was born, she began to sleep separately from her husband (Sylvia Beach, 21). As Noel Riley Fitch explains, Sylvia embodied the contradictions inherent in her early homelife, so that her spiritual libertarianism did not extend itself to the physical world, which was still for her marked by puritan morality and reserve (Sylvia Beach, 22).
If Sylvia suffered from apprehensions about physical lovemaking or puritan guilt concerning love between women, it seems likely that Adrienne Monnier—less dominated by contradictory values—worried little about the consequences of physical passion. By her own admission, Adrienne was enchanted with the pre-Raphaelites, an enchantment that “was mingled with that of Eros. I do not say this lightly, you are going to see why.” The face of her first lover, Suzanne, “resembled one by Rossetti, the very one that he painted in all of his pictures, with a strongly modeled mouth and a long neck that swelled at the base—a beautiful face that might have been virile without the sweet animality of its look and its tresses. Was it possible for me not to be smitten with that face?” (“Memories of London,” 315). Her later, and more constant, lover had a pre-Raphaelite figure whose slim, boyish quickness delighted Adrienne. It is far less easy to define the nature of role playing in the Beach-Monnier friendship (which was never described as a “marriage”) than in other relationships between women of the Paris community, most notably the Stein-Toklas union. Although Sylvia often wore rather severe, practical clothes that might at the time have been thought to be “mannish,” she—like Gertrude Stein—was particularly sensitive to fabric, choosing for her professional uniform tailored skirts and Edwardian-style velvet jackets accented with a silk foulard tied in a droopy bow. Like Gertrude Stein, Sylvia loved to work outdoors chopping wood; although she referred to herself as “he,” she did not play the male in her relationship with Adrienne. She was the pursued object of Adrienne's affections, not the pursuing lover. And although Adrienne was the cook and housekeeper, who served as both mother and sister to her lover, she did not play the “wife” in any traditional way with Sylvia.
Perhaps because this relationship was founded on strong intellectual and professional commitments, joining lives of dedicated service to others, Adrienne and Sylvia were not forced into choosing between the two most prevalent models of contemporary lesbian sexuality. Their friendship was not modeled on heterosexual unions, neither was it given to male masquerade or “attic abandonment.” Like the Stein-Toklas marriage, this friendship sought fulfillment in literary activity. Unlike the Stein-Toklas union, Beach and Monnier sought equality in their relationship, seeking support from each other through support of each other. Perhaps because both partners were strong feminists (Sylvia's Socialist feminism was adopted from the English suffragist movement, its politics not necessarily shared by Adrienne), women who had committed themselves to independent and mutually rewarding lives, this long friendship demonstrated an egalitarianism unusual in either homosexual or heterosexual relationships of the period. It was not marked by self-destructive behavior, neither was it given to self-indulgence. Indeed, this union might well serve as an alternative model to the more popular view of Paris lesbian experience, in particular the belief that by inheriting the dominant-submissive structure of heterosexual marriages, such companionate relationships were doomed to unhappiness. Neither of these women lived out in adult life the patterns established by the parental relationships of their childhoods: Adrienne Monnier avoided duplicating the rigid conventions of French marriages and Sylvia Beach openly resisted repeating the behavior of either of her parents. This friendship succeeded, perhaps, because it established itself on equality and mutual esteem.
Although there is evidence that Sylvia thought of herself professionally in masculine terms, often referring to herself as a “tired businessman” or a “tired working man” to suggest the pressures under which she labored in her professional life, there is no indication that she “supported” Adrienne or saw herself as head of their personal household. To the contrary, Sylvia seemed to rely on Adrienne's expertise in financial affairs, to be in constant need of her support, both financial and psychological. Sylvia had found her earlier war work in the Tourraine region of France invigorating, allowing her to wear khaki culottes and a pith helmet over her bobbed hair. As Noel Riley Fitch notes, the pictures of Sylvia from this period show “a woman who is brave, free, and proud of the work she has been doing.” But the war delayed her choice of a career “limited by the options tradition dictated to her” (Sylvia Beach, 31). Ironically, for Adrienne, who had stayed in Paris during these years, the war had offered opportunities she might not otherwise have so easily come by. Thus she was from the beginning able to serve as a role model for Sylvia, to direct her friend's interests along paths she had already traversed. Depressed at the prospect of a future that was “useless” by comparison to her war efforts, Sylvia found in Adrienne an image of usefulness, saw in her the model of an alternative womanhood. But Sylvia would never become as self-assured as Adrienne; neither could she endure the solitude so essential to Adrienne's self-composure.
INTELLECTUAL CONTRASTS
To a far greater degree than Adrienne, Sylvia pushed herself beyond the limits of her physical and psychological strengths in order to make Shakespeare and Company the center of expatriate literary life that it became under her direction. Unlike Adrienne, Sylvia was never able to subordinate the needs of her customers and friends to her own needs; she lacked Adrienne's ability to separate the personal from the professional, to keep her customers' demands in check, to set priorities for the bookshop over the personal concerns of her friends. Sylvia detested confrontation, would avoid it at all costs, while Adrienne often used confrontation successfully, placing the stamp of her personality and intellect on all her professional transactions. Able to argue passionately for the rights and privileges of others, Sylvia was far less forthcoming about her own situation and, consequently, was taken advantage of by her clientele. For many, Sylvia's refusal to separate the personal from the professional was the mark of her genius. Writing in tribute to Beach after her death, Malcolm Cowley comments that for him “the truly fascinating chapters of Shakespeare and Company [were] those in which this publisher describes her most unbusinesslike relations with her author and divinity [James Joyce]” (“When a Young American,” 58). Sylvia's difficulties with Joyce may well have made interesting reading in her memoirs (and many wished she had been more candid than she dared); more often, however, readers have equated Sylvia's reticence in setting limits on Joyce's demands with weakness. Others—including Joyce himself—assumed that her silent acquiescence masked hostility. However one reads the history of Sylvia's personal commitment to the patrons of Shakespeare and Company, it is clear that her industrious cheerfulness was the result of an iron-willed determination to repress anything that might undermine the public identity she had so carefully assumed.
The enormous differences in background and upbringing, in religious and secular education, account for both the attraction of Beach and Monnier to each other and their ensuing tensions. While commentators often suggest the significant physical differences between the two women, less often acknowledged are the even more important differences of intellect and taste. Unlike Sylvia, Adrienne had received a complete, highly structured, and demanding French education. She knew both Latin and French, had studied philosophy and mathematics, knew thoroughly the history of Europe and Asia, and had had her tastes moulded by the rigidly patriarchal system of the French collège. Sylvia's education, like that of many of her female expatriate counterparts, had been uneven and haphazard. She learned French, Italian, and Spanish on her own and constructed her own reading program during the years she should have been at school. Like Virginia Woolf, she was essentially self-taught. She learned the necessary mathematics to keep the accounts at Shakespeare and Company and to juggle the complicated rates of exchange on book purchases, but, like Virginia Woolf, she never was certain of the multiplication and division tables and often resorted to counting on her fingers. She found bookkeeping burdensome, never developing anything more than a rudimentary accounting system that amounted to little more than recording lists of orders and sales. No prices were marked on the books for sale in the shop; at the time of sale Sylvia worked out the price based on the current English or American exchange rate. Her business arrangements with the several customers for whom she served as banker were equally simple. T. S. Eliot, a banker as well as a poet, admitted surprise at Joyce's dependence on Sylvia for such matters, claiming that he “never knew” what “the financial arrangements may have been between those two” (“Miss Sylvia Beach,” 10).
While the bases of logic and the formal expression of literary and philosophical principles in writing became consistent and dominant features of Adrienne Monnier's verbal and written expression, carried over from her school years to her adult life, Sylvia Beach was never able to conduct an ordered critical argument. Her comments on the people she met, like her analysis of the books they wrote, were anecdotal, suggestive, and exceedingly charming. Like Alice Toklas, Sylvia was a mimic, an excellent storyteller, and was able to use both French and English with enormous facility. It was just such qualities of mind and spirit that attracted Adrienne to her:
This young American displayed an original and most attaching personality.
She spoke French fluently with an accent that was more English than American; to tell the truth, it was not so much an accent as an energetic and incisive way of pronouncing words … words never failed her; on occasion she deliberately invented them, she proceeded then by an adaptation of English, by a mixture or extension of French vocables, all that with an exquisite sense of our language. Her finds were generally so happy, so charmingly funny, that they at once came into usage—our usage—as if they had always existed; one could not keep from repeating them, and one tried to imitate them. To sum it up, this young American had a great deal of humor, let us say more: she was humor itself.
(quoted in Sylvia Beach, 100)
Maurice Saillet, executor of Adrienne Monnier's estate, has catalogued a number of “Sylvia-isms” in French, expressions that combine French and English or that transport well-known French expressions into a new context. Many of these invented forms expressed Sylvia's ability to survive in difficult circumstances: nous ne sommes pas à vendre (we are not for sale, are not selling ourselves), in regard to the perilous state of Shakespeare and Company's finances; jusqu'à tous à terre (until all have fallen, a fight until the end) suggests her determination against all odds (“Mots et locutions de Sylvia,” 78, 81).
The lack of formal education may well have been an advantage for Sylvia Beach. It allowed her to find literature on her own, to learn languages in their natural setting rather than in the classroom, to substitute wit and inventiveness for more studied intellectual poses. But the lack of traditional and disciplined education, against which she had rebelled as a young girl, seemed to bother her in later years. Corresponding with her editor about her memoirs, Beach wrote: “About my education, the less said the better: I ain't had none: never went to school and wouldn't have learned anything if I had went. You will have to copy what goes for T. S. Eliot: say I have degrees from all those places, same as him” (Sylvia Beach, 25). Making her untutored condition a situation for humor, Beach often mimicked herself.
But it was not merely that Adrienne possessed a traditional French education while Sylvia had escaped the American equivalent that accounted for such differences in quality of mind. Sylvia came to an interest in French literature and in the Gallic mind by living in Paris. She discovered her first French literature in bookstalls along the quais of the Seine and helped organize poetry readings and musical evenings for American students when her father was a pastor in the Latin Quarter. Adrienne, on the other hand, was passionately interested in and well read in American literature without ever once visiting the United States. Her earliest conversations with Sylvia centered on furthering her knowledge of English-language literature—a language she could neither read nor speak—and she depended on Sylvia to open up new literary works to her: “It is not only the brilliance of a great interpreter that can correct the imperfection of a translated work, but also the ardor of an impassioned commentator. So it was that I could enjoy Eliot's poetry through the spirit of Sylvia; she revealed it to me just as she revealed Ulysses to me” (“A Visit to T. S. Eliot,” Very Rich Hours, 201). As a young woman, Adrienne wanted to be a poet; as a mature woman, she continued to write poetry and essays that combined criticism and fiction.
The selection of essays from Adrienne Monnier's various literary reviews suggests an interest not only in the people of her time (Reverdy, Breton, Cocteau, Gide, Joyce), but a facility in analyzing their works and an interest in the aesthetic and cultural developments they helped create. These essays address a formidable range of topics, from the circus to film, from art appreciation to literary criticism, from social and political concerns to attitudes toward women. Monnier's essays combine anecdote with analysis; they address themselves to the unseen intellectual elements of daily events in the bookshop; they analyze the political and literary realities of France, the reading and writing habits of the French, political issues such as war and anti-Semitism, individual works by Shakespeare as well as Shakespeare in performance, and the role of women in European society. In her Gazette, Adrienne Monnier was able to create a fictional country—Odéonia—and to populate it with the figures, real and imagined, of her years there. Her sketches and occasional essays are the French counterpart to similar efforts by Virginia Woolf to record the literary and social pulse of her time.
Adrienne Monnier's essays begin in anecdote and extend themselves into critical analysis and philosophic speculation. Her letters and journals continue this effort, whereas Sylvia's correspondence—apart from chatty letters to her mother or to Adrienne—stays firmly within the demands of her professional commitment. Perhaps because she lacked the time, Sylvia did not keep a journal or write on a regular basis. But there is also a suggestion that she felt uncomfortable in the writing situation. Sylvia's letters give the impression of an efficient businesswoman pressed for time; she shows herself to be an active person, but not at all a contemplative one. Most of her business correspondence is little more than acknowledgment of payments or announcements for book orders. Adrienne, on the other hand, found the leisure to recount events, to analyze circumstances, and to reflect on the nature of her profession. Adrienne carefully considered avant-garde thought, analyzed the literary movements in which she had engaged herself, and scrutinized the intellectual abilities of the participants in Modernism. Adrienne's analyses of her contemporaries, like those of Janet Flanner, are both lucid and humorous and have been proven correct. Writing of André Gide in her diary of 2 September 1921, she said: “We also had a discussion about the influence [Gide] has on the young writers. Sylvia thinks that it is he who influences the new generation most. I do not think so. His influence is more superficial than real; they acknowledge it all the more because little trace of it will be found in their works. Besides, it is rather chic to like Gide” (“With Gide at Hyères,” 94-95). Adrienne's opinion coincided with Flanner's on the subject of Gide, both women opposing the contemporary assessment of his literary stature and influence. Upon his death, Monnier wrote a moving eulogy for him for the newspaper Combat, a memoir in which she carefully sidestepped the issue of his genius: “Posterity will know better than ourselves the degree of genius that his work attains, but we know that he had the genius of Literature, that he was in his own home there, that he possessed there a discernment that is perhaps without precedent. Never have we seen such a master for apprentice writers as he was—as much through the teaching of his books as through what he gave from person to person with an extreme kindness.” This tribute left open the possibility that Gide might influence younger generations, while her more personal speculations suggested that his contributions would be lost to later audiences. Thus far in literary history, there are few traces of his influence.
Monnier tacitly acknowledged Gide's powerful literary presence in her journals, however, frequently mentioning him and addressing her opinions to him. In July 1939, she commented in her Gazette on the publication by Gallimard of Gide's Journal (in which Gide records Proust's confession of his homosexuality). She looked for references to herself, discovering that on 16 October 1926 she had told Gide that she disliked his recently published Les faux-monnayeurs, asserting that “the fundamental coldness and unkindness that this book reveal[ed] must be the basis of my nature.” Gide commented, “I do not know what to say, what to think. Whatever criticism is addressed to me, I always acquiesce” (quoted in Very Rich Hours, 476). For her part, Adrienne noted, “the devil if I remember that. That October 16, 1926, I was not really too wicked. Unkindness—I knew then perhaps what it is. Do I know now?” (“Unkindness,” 174). In April 1942, she published in Le Figaro Littéraire an open letter to Gide on the subject of the young. Perhaps still thinking of his possible influence on the next generation of writers, Monnier analyzed the work of Gide's contemporaries (Joyce, Valéry, Faulkner, Prévert) and described the altered looks and moods of contemporary youth. This letter, like several others she wrote during the war, was addressed to those living in the Free Zone, its tone suggesting somehow that those who stayed behind in Paris were truly in another country, one little understood by those residing in the relative safety of Vichy. Her essay described the youth not yet old enough to serve in the war, those who might live to discover the influence of Gide, assuring him that “as for yourself, dear great Friend, do not doubt that they love you as intensely as ever. Our young people run all over Paris in order to find your Journal, which has been out of stock for about a year” (“A Letter to André Gide about the Young,” 410). The tone of this letter is particularly difficult to assess, perhaps due to the necessary precautions of passing under the censor's wary eye. The letter simultaneously asked Gide to take comfort that the young search for copies of the out-of-stock Journal and reinforced the reality of his estrangement from Paris. Monnier's relationship with Gide was always ambivalent, this letter revealing (perhaps in ways she could not acknowledge) the depth of that ambivalence.
A woman capable of forming almost instantaneous—and asserted—assessments of those who entered her shop, Adrienne Monnier's powers of observation were well developed. She claimed that, allowed to observe unaware the approach of someone unknown to her shop, she could “know him in his truth.” She maintained that in such an unselfconscious moment “he reveals all the good will with which he is endowed, that is to say, the degree to which he is accessible to the world, what he can give and receive, the exact rapport that exists between himself and other men” (“La Maison,” 69). André Breton, among others, revealed himself to her in that first unguarded moment and was never afterward able to recover her loyalty and friendship.
She was immediately antagonistic, not only to the literary movement he was to head, but to the man himself. Taking Breton as the subject for an essay, Monnier examined the principles upon which the Surrealist movement in literature based itself and the differences between the poetic stance of Breton and his mentor, Apollinaire. She opposed the philosophy that undergirded the movement, even as she made the official organ of the Dadaist movement, Breton's journal Littérature, part of her lending library and encouraged discussion among members of the group around the large table in her shop. Adrienne may well have sensed the underlying misogyny of Surrealism, a subject Anne Chisholm discusses at some length in her biography of Nancy Cunard, who was—briefly—Louis Aragon's mistress:
Apart from personal difficulties, there were other reasons why having Nancy as his recognized mistress cannot have been easy for Aragon. Women played a small part in the Surrealist scheme of things. For all their desire to live unconventionally and to shock the bourgeoisie, the Surrealists had highly conventional, even traditional, ideas about women. No woman writer or painter emerged to join their activities or sign their manifestos. They found it thrilling to visit brothels and befriend prostitutes but at the same time there was a strong romantic, almost puritanical streak in their sexual attitudes. The ideal was an exclusive, reciprocated love with the perfect woman. Foreign women were fashionable in the group, perhaps because they tended to be more independent and available than middle- or upper-class Frenchwomen; but Nancy was all too obviously someone, a person in her own right, with more money and freedom of movement than seemed safe or appropriate. Breton in particular disapproved of Nancy and feared her influence on Aragon. She represented the rich, fashionable world that he despised.
(Nancy Cunard, 150)
The attitudes toward women that marked Surrealism suggest something more than the accidental alliance of literary movement and personal behavior. Adrienne Monnier would have been sensitive to the “puritanical streak” in these sexual attitudes as well as the efforts to manipulate women. Like Sylvia, however, she gave encouragement and support even to those literary movements to which she was unsympathetic and was often called upon carefully and tactfully to negotiate the territory between rival factions or competing philosophies.
THE JOYCE YEARS
Once her loyalties were engaged, Adrienne's commitment knew no boundaries. When Sylvia told Adrienne in 1921 that Joyce had asked her to publish Ulysses, following his frustrated efforts to get it published in England and America, Adrienne most enthusiastically endorsed this venture. She encouraged Sylvia to take the risk in publication and gave her necessary support during the difficult months that followed. In these months, Sylvia's time was almost entirely devoted to Joyce's financial and publication difficulties. She organized the postal and banking services that her bookshop undertook on Joyce's behalf, spent her nights reading proofs of the text and her days dealing with Darantière, the Dijon printer. As soon as Valery Larbaud began reading Ulysses (Sylvia having loaned him copies of the Little Review serial publication), he was taken with the idea of a French translation, for which he would become the official translator. Adrienne wrote that she too was taken with the idea for such a project, offering to publish it under the sign of La Maison des Amis des Livres. The first fragments of the text were not published until 1924, in Commerce, a journal whose administration Adrienne had undertaken at great cost to her health. She too suffered from editing and administration labors on Joyce's behalf, and when it became clear in 1931 that Sylvia's health had been broken by the demands of publication and that Shakespeare and Company was on the verge of bankruptcy because of Joyce's continued loans and advances against royalties, Adrienne wrote to Joyce asking him to release Sylvia from her labors.
Until publication of Noel Riley Fitch's biography of Sylvia Beach, it was not possible to track the financial history of Shakespeare and Company. Although Richard Ellmann's biography of James Joyce suggested his state of continual need and Beach's continuing generosity, that biography did not make a meticulous study of Joyce's finances or of Beach's. Fitch, however, undertook to give an accounting of the Joyce-Beach finances, and the results demonstrate incontrovertibly Joyce's indebtedness to Beach. In 1929, she paid him “between 7,000 and 10,000 francs a month on Ulysses royalties,” and she negotiated “large advances for portions of Work in Progress, for the second German and the second French editions of Ulysses, for Polish and Czech translations of Ulysses, and for productions of Exiles in Berlin and Milan” (Sylvia Beach, 301). Nonetheless, Joyce was building up greater indebtedness to Shakespeare and Company—a record 13,000 francs per month by February 1930. Sylvia's business in that year following the stock market crash was on the verge of bankruptcy, and her health, weakened from worry and overwork, was on the point of collapse. But the letter Adrienne wrote to Joyce as a result of this crisis did nothing to ameliorate Sylvia's situation. Indeed, it may have made it worse. By summer 1931, the finances of Shakespeare and Company were so precarious that Sylvia was forced to dismiss her assistant, sell her car, and give up plans for a vacation. By February 1932, she was forced to release all the Shakespeare and Company publishing claims to Ulysses.
Joyce was apparently upset by the letter, but did not act upon it. He assumed that it derived from Adrienne's jealousy over his attentions to Sylvia rather than from Adrienne's unhappiness at his continued dependence. In this year both bookshops were facing financial difficulties due to the fall of the French franc. The problems were made worse for Shakespeare and Company by the effects of the stock market crash of 1929, which not only devalued the American dollar, but took large numbers of Sylvia's clients back to America. Because Sylvia certainly would not have confronted Joyce on the matter, he might have claimed to be unaware of the severity of the financial constraints on Shakespeare and Company, unaware that she was in danger of losing the bookshop. He appeared, however, to be fully aware of the emotional and physical toll his demands were putting on her. On various occasions he wrote joking apologies or made teasing mention of his constant needs. On 17 March 1927, for instance, he wrote: “It is a grand thing, so I am told, to be a ‘genius’ but I do not think I have the right to plague and pester you night, noon and morning for money, money, and money. You are altogether overworked without my rapping at the door. I am almost inclined to let the bailiffs in and watch them walk off with the furniture and animals in the ark” (James Joyce, 651). As this letter testifies, Joyce was indeed a genius at turning a gesture of sympathy for Sylvia into yet another request for her help. By spring 1931, Sylvia was taking out loans from friends and from her mother and members of her family in order to pay Joyce's escalating debts.
According to Maria Jolas, the letter Adrienne sent Joyce was intended to constitute a rupture finale. In it, Monnier began by suggesting that André Gide might suppose Joyce indifferent to success and money, but that she and Sylvia knew better, and that they had been put upon in order to assure his financial and literary success:
What Gide doesn't know—and like the sons of Noah we put a veil over it—is that you are, on the contrary, very concerned about success and money. You wish others also to go the limit [for you]; you lead them by rough stages to some Dublingrad or other which they're not interested in, or rather, you try to lead them.
In Paris rumor has it that you are spoiled, that we have ruined you with overwhelming praise and that you no longer know what you're doing. And there isn't one of your Seventy, beginning with [Paul] Léon—St. Peter, who doesn't acknowledge everywhere, at all times, that he understands nothing of Anna Livia.
My personal opinion is that you know perfectly well what you are doing in literature, and that you are quite right to do it, especially if it entertains you, life isn't so funny in this vale of tears, as Mrs. Bloom says, but it's folly to wish to make money at any cost with your new work. I won't say you can't make any, everything is possible, but it is most unlikely. The three pamphlets which have been published by Crosby Gaige, Harry Crosby, and Kahane have scarcely sold more than two-thirds or at most three-fourths. …
We haven't the slightest desire, Sylvia and I, to become associated with Kahane. Times are hard, and the worst isn't over. We're travelling now third class and soon we'll be riding the rods.
(James Joyce, 651-652)3
The tone and rhetoric of this letter suggest the degree of anger that Joyce's behavior toward Sylvia had elicited from Adrienne. The letter is an extraordinary document, perhaps the only one of its kind in Joyce's correspondence. Always employing a mode of extreme gentility with women, in particular with “Miss Beach” and “Mademoiselle Monnier,” Joyce was famous for securing the continued assistance and financial support of women who believed in his genius. Following the publication of Ulysses, Joyce's genius was so admired, his personal problems and physical sufferings so well known, that none would have dared breach his defenses. That Adrienne Monnier undertook to do so, that she failed in her effort, that she engendered the wrath of Joyce's friends and hangers on, suggests powerful motivations behind the composition of the letter. Did this letter expose the “Sapphic heart,” as Maria Jolas suggests, or were there other reasons for its blunt accusations and bitter rhetoric?
Adrienne Monnier's letter and the circumstances surrounding Sylvia Beach's renunciation of her publication rights to Joyce's text have been variously interpreted. Like much else about the relationship between Joyce and Beach, these incidents are clouded with ambiguity. Given to reticence and indirection, the two principals required intermediaries who had strong allegiance to the individuals on whose behalf they intervened. Joyce's own personal situation was fraught with worry over illness, and his energies were devoted to the composition of Finnegans Wake in these years. During 1932 and 1933, Joyce was estranged from the two women who had provided his most consistent and solid financial support, Harriet Weaver and Sylvia Beach. Although Joyce and Beach were later to establish an entente cordiale, the relationship never recovered its early enthusiasm. Joyce discovered other, younger supporters, and Sylvia slipped into less public roles, concentrating her efforts on the bookshop and renewing old acquaintances. Meanwhile, Joyce felt that Beach had mistreated him and convinced a number of his friends that she had. For her part, Beach was forced to swallow her anger and hurt, a situation that made the writing of her memoirs, even thirty years later, very difficult for her.
An understanding of this incident and the reasons Beach and Monnier withdrew their support of Joyce depends less on the “Sapphic heart” than on drawing careful distinctions between the kinds of investment that each woman had in the “Joyce enterprise” and their quite distinct views of the contributions their bookshops and their publishing efforts made to the intellectual life of the Left Bank. Adrienne Monnier had the advantage of being French and working among the French. The success or failure of her bookshop was not tied to any particular resident community in Paris; it could—and did—survive all manner of economic hardships, changes in governments, states of war, and shifts in literary tastes. Shakespeare and Company was from the outset in a far more precarious position, dependent on an essentially transient community. The aims of the American bookshop were different from those of La Maison des Amis des Livres just as the interests and special talents of Sylvia Beach were significantly different from those of Adrienne Monnier. In part because their lives, like their bookshops, were so much a part of each other, the individual contributions of these two women have never been carefully distinguished. The differences between them are nonetheless apparent, most obviously in the kinds of things they wrote about themselves and their literary experiences.
SYLVIA BEACH IN RETROSPECT
It has often been claimed that Sylvia Beach would not be remembered today had it not been for her courage in undertaking the publication of Ulysses. It was Joyce's text that brought her fame and—many thought—fortune. Without his book, she would have remained what she was before and after his arrival in her life—a Left Bank librarian and bookseller. That she herself was convinced of the truth of such an assessment is evidenced in Shakespeare and Company, her memoir of the Paris years. Little more than a catalogue of anecdotes about the now-famous writers who frequented the bookshop, Beach's memoir is disappointing, most particularly because it is so successfully self-effacing that we are left with little sense of the woman who played such a pivotal role in Modernism. Unlike the memoirs written by others who experienced these years (most of them written by men), Shakespeare and Company does not make Sylvia Beach the heroine of her own story. Indeed, the memoir is not of her, but of the bookshop, and its title suggests the patriarchal literary heritage of England rather than a woman's contribution to an American expatriate literary enterprise. For reasons that are not clear, the memoir begins by tracing the clerical history of her father's family, perhaps suggesting Sylvia's need to identify with him. Its opening pages discuss Sylvia's family members—father, mother, sisters—and the balance of the book focuses on the personalities that frequented Shakespeare and Company. Beach employed this indirect autobiographical technique in order to deflect interest from herself. She was always a bit outside her own story, seeing the experiences it recorded from an angle. Shakespeare and Company gives little sense of the person responsible for the events.
Other remembrances of Sylvia Beach—most notably those in the special issue of Mercure de France in homage to her—portray quite a different person, one of great strength, wit, self-determination, a woman given to enthusiastic passions and intense loyalties. Marianne Moore writes: “Sylvia Beach,—how do justice to one with impact so great as hers, and unfailing delicacy? Who never allowed logic to persuade her to regret over-charity to a beneficiary; ardent, restive, forever exerting herself, to advantage and give pleasure to one who had, as she felt, benefitted her. During sixty years and more, this has been my impression of her” (“How do justice …,” 13). Bryher, one of Beach's closest friends, captures subtleties of Sylvia's character unremarked by other commentators. Returning to the rue de l'Odéon apartment after Sylvia's death, Bryher feels Sylvia's presence there: “There is not an object that is not soaked in memories and I realise (half consciously, perhaps, as in a dream) that she, more than many of my friends, stamped a strong and living sense of her being upon inanimate objects. What will be their future now? However well librarians or friends may care for them, what will they be but wood, canvas or paper, away from these three rooms?” (“For Sylvia,” 17). Bryher suggests Beach's ability to make books “live.” In part, Beach was able to rescue books from the “inanimate” because she was so committed to those who wrote and read them. Bryher's comments surprise us with their emphasis on the “strong and living sense” of Beach that is retained after her death. Our impressions of her, filtered through her own memoir and through the memories of others, have been of a woman somehow lacking the stamp of personality. Her self-effacing attitude, her discretion, her service to others have often been read as weakness or reticence in the face of the overpowering egotism, for instance, of a Joyce or Stein. Bryher's comments restore the luster to that faded photograph, suggest a woman of strong will and determined energy, a woman sure of her own sense of “self.” Bryher's memoir also makes clear that Joyce was not the only one for whom Sylvia served as “a shield … at so many difficult moments” (19). Her energy, intelligence, discretion, and kindness were given freely to all who frequented her shop, and there is ample evidence that her contributions to literature went far beyond her efforts on behalf of Joyce.
If Adrienne Monnier was suited to her chosen profession by her own literary interests and a continuing desire both to read and to write, Sylvia Beach possessed special characteristics of personality and intellect that allowed her to make a unique contribution to the Modernist movement. Janet Flanner's memorial essay to her suggests that the reasons for Beach's tremendous success as librarian, bookseller, and literary diplomat may be found in the fact that she was not “literary” in any traditional sense. Beach made a profession of being an “amateur” bookseller and publisher:
Sylvia herself did not have a literary mind or much literary taste though in time a certain sense of literature rubbed off into her from the people around her. What she instinctively recognized and was attracted to was merely literary genius or flashes and fractions of it, or of tremendous great talent—men like Joyce, Hemingway and T. S. Eliot or Gide and Valery. … Sylvia had a vigorous clear mind, an excellent memory, a tremendous respect for books as civilizing objects and was really a remarkable librarian. She loved the printed word and books in long rows.
(“The Great Amateur Publisher,” 48-49)
On the surface, Flanner's assessment is not a particularly complimentary one. It reveals a woman comfortable with “books in long rows” on the shelves rather than one who—like Adrienne Monnier—wanted to feel the weight of the book in her hand as she read. Sylvia appeared to value books for their social uses (as “civilizing objects”), to value writers for their “flashes and fractions” of genius, to let literature rub itself “into her from the people around her.” Sylvia's interest was clearly in the people who visited her bookshop, whose lives and anecdotes fill her memoir; she directed herself to analysis of their personalities and qualities of mind rather than to analysis of the literary works they wrote. Beach is present in this story only as a raconteuse. The central portion of the story she tells belongs to Joyce and his modern Odyssey. Beach's history of literary Paris makes it clear that she owed a great deal to James Joyce and that he owed little to her: “I understood from the first that, working with or for James Joyce, the pleasure was mine—an infinite pleasure; the profits were for him. All that was available from his work, and I managed to keep it available, was his” (Shakespeare and Company, 201). Shakespeare and Company published eleven printings of Ulysses, amounting to total sales of several thousand copies.
Joyce himself placed a higher value on Sylvia's contribution to his literary reputation than she herself did: “All she ever did was to make me a present of the ten best years of her life,” he told Maria Jolas (“The Joyce I Knew,” 86). To the same friends to whom he admitted his indebtedness to her, he let it be known that Sylvia had volunteered to publish Ulysses for him. Yet a portion of her self-censored memoirs reveals that Joyce had asked her to publish his book: “I accepted with enthusiasm Joyce's suggestion that I publish his book” (Fitch, Sylvia Beach, 78). One day after Sylvia had made her decision, in conference with the woman Joyce referred to as “Shakespeare and Company's adviser,” she wrote her mother the news, adding in a postscript: “Ulysses means thousands of dollars in publicity for me.” Indeed, for many years commentators on the Joyce-Beach publishing operation have assumed that Beach made money on the publication, if not in actual royalties from the sale of books then from the publicity it brought her shop. The legend has been virtually impossible to dispel, and even those who do not believe the myth that Sylvia Beach made fantastic sums on the publication of Joyce's novel think that she would have had no right to any royalties. Beach's own memoirs confuse the issue, as they continue yet another popular myth—that Joyce received ＄45,000 from Random House on the sale of the American rights (see Jolas, “The Joyce I Knew,” 86). Beach believed him to have received that amount, none of which he shared with her, and her comment, “I know how desperately he needed the money,” suggests a charity on her part that may not have existed at the time: “As for my personal feelings, well, one is not at all proud of them, and they should be promptly dumped when they no longer serve a purpose” (Shakespeare and Company, 205). In fact, as the expurgated portions of the Shakespeare and Company memoir make clear, Beach was bitterly angry over Joyce's treatment of her, but she was forced to repress rather than voice her anger, a repression that cost her painful migraine headaches and divided her against herself. Adrienne, who had taken a more direct approach with Joyce, now refused to see him and drew Sylvia back into a life among their French friends in Paris (Sylvia Beach, 320).
Until 9 December 1930, six months before the letter from Adrienne Monnier to Joyce, a contract for the publication of Ulysses had never existed. As Sylvia stated in her memoirs: “Contracts didn't seem important to either Joyce or myself. At the time I published Ulysses, I did mention the subject, but Joyce wouldn't hear of a contract and I didn't care, so I never brought up the question again” (Shakespeare and Company, 204). Almost ten years after the first edition of Ulysses was printed in Paris, a contract was drawn up at Joyce's insistence with Sylvia, giving her “exclusive right of printing and selling” Ulysses. This contract included a clause that the publisher would “abandon the right to said Work if, after due consideration such a step should be deemed advisable by the Author and the Publisher in the interests of the AUTHOR, in which case the right to publish said Work shall be purchased from the Publisher at the price set by herself” (Sylvia Beach, 308; emphasis mine). On the basis of this contract, she asked the representative of Curtis Brown in New York for a payment of ＄25,000 to Shakespeare and Company, a 20 percent royalty to Joyce and an additional ＄5,000 cash payment to Joyce upon signing the contract. Meanwhile, she signed a contract in Paris with a German firm, the Albatross Press, which gave her 25 percent royalties on all sales of Ulysses for the next five years and 7[frac12] percent for life. Because no future European editions of Ulysses were published, she received nothing on this second contract. The requested ＄25,000 on the American sales was never paid—in fact, the request was never formally made. Working through his friend Padraic Colum, Joyce eventually forced Sylvia to give up any claim to her publishing rights, invoking the “interests of the AUTHOR” clause. Once she had abandoned her rights, the Random House American edition of Ulysses proceeded. Sylvia Beach resigned as Joyce's publisher almost exactly ten years after handing him his first copy of Ulysses; the “thousands of dollars” of publicity she had hoped the publication might bring her bookshop never materialized. Although it is impossible to say with any precision how much Sylvia earned as a publisher, it seems unlikely that she earned more than a few hundred dollars over a decade.
LES AMIS DES LIVRES IN THE 1930S
It is ironic, then, that Adrienne, who had rebelled against the toll that the publication of Ulysses had taken on Sylvia's health and the financial state of Shakespeare and Company, should herself have received a cash payment for the French translation of Joyce's Ulysses. In fact, the payment of 22,000 francs to Adrienne from Gallimard allowed her to pay outstanding debts and to undertake the publication of her Gazette, a project that she had had to delay for almost a decade due to lack of funds. The sale of the French Ulysses saved Adrienne's business in a year when her outstanding debts were 3,000 francs, and she calculated that after twenty years in the bookselling business she earned 1,500 francs a month on the average (“Number One,” 149). In 1921, Sylvia had calculated that Shakespeare and Company earned a total of ＄100 for the entire year. The financial crises that both women faced in the early 1930s were due less, however, to any claims that Joyce might have made on them than to the effects of the American stock market crash. Sylvia's business was immediately hurt, since the dollar was devalued against the French franc, forcing many Americans to return home. It took almost three years for the more general economic depression that affected all of Europe to jeopardize La Maison des Amis des Livres, and when it did Adrienne was saved by the payment from Gallimard.
Although the first and last customers at Shakespeare and Company were the French, it was hardly possible for Sylvia's bookshop to survive without her American clientele. Shakespeare and Company's margin of profit was so slim that any reduction in the numbers of customers immediately put the shop into financial jeopardy. Although Sylvia had become a valued member of the Left Bank literary community, negotiating the distance between the expatriate community and the resident Paris population, her bookshop had always been dependent on a resident, English-speaking population. In the years when all of her energies were consumed by attention to the publication of Joyce's text and worries about his health and financial status, she was torn between her loyalties to him and the demands of the bookshop. Indeed, she eventually ended her relationship with Joyce out of concern for Shakespeare and Company. If it was unclear to her at the time that Joyce's demands represented a drain on her resources rather than a boon to them, it is even less clear today. Her earlier hopes that a professional association between author and publisher might accrue to the benefit of Shakespeare and Company seem to have misfired in ways she could not have foreseen in March 1921, when she agreed to become Joyce's publisher. A decade later, however, as expatriate Americans left for home from the Gare du Nord, Sylvia was brutally reminded that Shakespeare and Company had always depended on the presence and goodwill of expatriate Americans and English.
The clientele of La Maison des Amis des Livres, however, had consistently been the resident French population in Paris. Like Sylvia, Adrienne had spurred interest in her bookshop by arranging poetry readings there, providing occasions to bring the work of both unknown and well-known writers to public attention, and by publishing a journal, writing essays for Paris publications, and later giving radio talks. The publication of the French Ulysse, then, was only one of several publishing ventures in which Monnier had interested herself. Alone, it did not serve radically to alter the direction of her professional life or the quality of intellectual life in her bookshop. Apart from Ulysse, Adrienne had involved herself from the summer of 1924 with the literary review Commerce, sponsored by Marguerite Caetani (the Princesse de Bassiano), an American who had married an Italian prince. The journal was born of the princesse's salon (which met in various Paris restaurants and at her home in Versailles), and it filled an enormous need among French intellectuals following the war. Commerce published the first fragments of the French Ulysse, overseen by Adrienne Monnier, who had to resign her position as administrator of the journal in August 1924, due to overwork. Monnier's exhaustion was due not to Joyce's demands on her time, but rather to Léon-Paul Fargue's strange working habits. He claimed he could contribute poems to the review only by dictating them at night, after Adrienne had spent a long and fatiguing day in the bookshop.
A year later, Monnier began her own review, Le Navire d'Argent (the Silver Ship), which took its name from the emblem of the city of Paris. Valery Larbaud's opening essay, a tribute to the way in which Paris survived the war, explains the title of the review and extends the metaphor of the city as a ship. During the year of its publication, Le Navire d'Argent included poetry by Adrienne, a translation of Eliot's “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” by Adrienne and Sylvia, and, in addition to avant-garde writing by various French intellectuals, a section devoted to critical comments and clippings from reviews of important works in Paris newspapers and journals, a bibliography of French translations of foreign-language literatures (beginning with English), and a “Gazette” in which Adrienne wrote about the people she knew and the events she witnessed and called for comments from her readership. Le Navire d'Argent described itself as a journal of “general culture,” its subjects including letters, philosophy, science, history, moral questions, and politics. Its bibliography was of particular interest, because it listed the first dated translation into French of English-language works, offered a listing of copies signed by famous people, and noted those editions that first appeared in the nineteenth century and now were available from the bookstalls, as well as those owned by La Maison des Amis des Livres (for these, Monnier listed the sales price from the bookshop). Adrienne was forced to stop publication of Le Navire d'Argent because of the expense. Upon publication of the French Ulysse in 1929, Adrienne ended her professional association with Joyce and two years later ended her personal association with him. In the next decade, she devoted herself to her bookshop and to publication of her own writings: the catalogue of her lending library, her Fableaux (1932), the journal Mesures, which she managed from 1935 until 1940, and her Gazette des Amis des Livres.
Given that Adrienne maintained strong literary and intellectual associations apart from Joyce, it is no wonder that she was able to preserve a certain distance and perspective on his involvement with Shakespeare and Company. While Sylvia admitted that she “worshipped” Joyce, Adrienne cast a colder eye on him—and he on her. In a letter to Harriet Weaver in 1931, Joyce catalogued his complaints against Adrienne, resentful of her influence over Sylvia. He focused on the difficulties caused him by Sylvia and the women around her: Adrienne, whom he called Sylvia's “more intelligent partner”; Sylvia's mother, who had recently committed suicide; Cyprian, whom he claimed to be in poor mental health; Sylvia herself, who was suffering badly at the time from migraines. Some time after receipt of Adrienne's 1931 letter, Joyce moved his professional enterprise to the home of Paul Léon, a former St. Petersburg jurist, whose presence in Joyce's life occasioned the snide “Dublingrad” reference in Adrienne's letter. It was Léon who brought the negotiations with Random House to completion (Jolas, “The Joyce I Knew,” 86). Sylvia, Adrienne, and Joyce would “keep up appearances” over the next decade, but the professional and personal relationships that had sustained them since 1920 had come to an end.
In a letter to his son Georgio of 19 February 1935, Joyce wrote of Sylvia's sale of valuable items from her shop, including Joyce manuscripts. As the years advanced, Sylvia was feeling the effects of the general European depression and the loss of American clientele even more keenly and was forced to sell precious items in order to keep the shop going. Adrienne was also forced to sell similar items as the Depression of the 1930s continued: “A propos of the S. B. sale of my MSS (of which I am still officially ignorant), I am journalistically informed that the rumor is current over there [in New York] that she, by her generous sacrifice of all her rights of U to me, resigned herself to absolute poverty. Frailty thy name is woman” (Letters, 3:345). It is doubtful that Sylvia herself used the term “absolute poverty” in referring to the perilous economic state of Shakespeare and Company or that she described the resignation of her contractual rights with Joyce as a “generous sacrifice.” Such terms belonged to friends and associates who felt that she had been badly used by the man and the work she had served so well. Among these friends, Janet Flanner, who advertised the 1935 Shakespeare and Company sale in the New Yorker, concluded that Sylvia “always gave more than she received.” Joyce would certainly have agreed with Flanner's assessment. But, according to Flanner, Sylvia Beach's “generous sacrifice” was not in terminating her contractual agreement or in the sale of her Joyce materials—which included, among manuscripts, Sylvia's personal first edition copy of Ulysses—but rather in what Flanner called her “greatest act of generosity,” the publication of Ulysses (“Great Amateur Publisher,” 51).
Bryher commented in her tribute to Sylvia Beach that the “difficult ending” of her life—which included internment by the Nazis during the war and the closing of her bookshop—“seems richer to me personally than the triumphant beginning” (“For Sylvia,” 18). If the 1920s was the decade of Sylvia Beach's success as the publisher of Ulysses, the time when hundreds of expatriates flocked to Shakespeare and Company, the 1930s was a decade of frustration, often despair, and a great deal of sadness. Beach's professional life, which had always been central to the literary life of the Left Bank community, now began to seem marginal. Adrienne too was pressed with financial difficulties, but her friends remained in the city they had always known. Adrienne involved herself with younger writers and with new literary movements while Sylvia struggled to survive. This decade saw not only the enforced return of a number of Sylvia's close friends to America, but the breakup of marriages and the disruption of long-term friendships.
Sylvia herself was to face such a crisis in 1937. She left Paris in July to visit her father on his eighty-fourth birthday, her first return to America in twenty-two years. Returning from her California visit to the east coast, she became ill and learned that she must undergo a hysterectomy, which required several weeks of rest before her doctor allowed her to return to Paris. When she did finally return to the rue de l'Odéon in mid-October, she discovered that she had been replaced in Adrienne's apartment by Gisèle Freund, the young German photographer. The previous winter, Gisèle—who had been ordered out of France and who had no passport to return to Germany—was taken in by Adrienne and Sylvia and spent increasingly more time with the two women. Adrienne helped her make a “marriage of convenience” to a Frenchman in order to continue living in the country. Whatever the reasons for the move to 18, rue de l'Odéon, Gisèle Freund represented a threat to Sylvia's relationship with Adrienne, and the evidence suggests that in her absence Adrienne had replaced Sylvia with a younger lover. Within days of her return Sylvia had moved into the rooms above Shakespeare and Company; although she still took her meals with Adrienne and Gisèle (there being no proper kitchen in her own apartment) and continued her professional relationship with Adrienne, their long-standing union had effectively been terminated.
Gisèle Freund was forced to leave Paris with the advance of the Germans in 1940, but Adrienne and Sylvia did not take up their former intimacy. Each stayed in her apartment; each continued her professional life. Sylvia closed her bookshop in December 1941, after an unpleasant incident with a German officer who wanted to buy her only copy of Finnegans Wake, which she had displayed in the window. The officer threatened to confiscate her books; with the help of friends, Sylvia moved the books four flights above the bookshop premises, removed the shelves, and had the name of the shop painted over. Within a few hours, Shakespeare and Company no longer existed. In July 1942, Sylvia was taken to an internment camp south of Paris. Although she returned to live in number 12, rue de l'Odéon, after the war, she never reopened Shakespeare and Company. After a long and very painful illness that affected the inner ear, Adrienne Monnier committed suicide in 1955. In the years following Adrienne's death, Sylvia was to maintain two close and long-standing friendships. The first was with Bryher, whom Sylvia had known since the early days of Shakespeare and Company; their friendship had intensified during the war. They corresponded frequently in the 1940s, and after the war Bryher regularly sent Beach money. In these years Sylvia also spent a great deal of time with Camilla Steinbrugge, a woman who had shared a friendship with Adrienne Monnier as well, spending vacations with the two women before Adrienne's death. It was Steinbrugge who filled the space in Sylvia's life left by Adrienne.4
Notes
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Monnier's Gazette, as McDougall explains, appeared irregularly in ten short issues from January 1938 until May 1940: “As the voice of La Maison des Amis des Livres, it was [Monnier's] vehicle not only for expressing herself directly to her own public on whatever topics she chose, but also a means of disseminating a bibliography, which she published serially from the second issue through that of July 1939, the last before the outbreak of the war” (469). Further references to essays in this collection are cited parenthetically in the text according to essay title. Contributions by McDougall are cited parenthetically as Very Rich Hours.
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Letter fom Noel Riley Fitch to author, September 1983.
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Until the publication of Fitch's Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, Richard Ellmann's biography of James Joyce provided most of the factual information about Joyce's relation with Beach and was in part responsible for continuing the myth that Beach dedicated herself happily and unquestioningly to Joyce's career. Although it would have been of great interest to students of Joyce to know precisely his financial indebtedness to Beach, the relevant materials were not examined by Ellmann. The recent publication of Beach's biography has made apparent the risks that Shakespeare and Company incurred in its efforts to support Joyce through his various financial difficulties; until publication of Maria Jolas's article “The Joyce I Knew and the Women around Him,” Monnier's angry letter received only casual allusion. The letter altered Joyce's working relationship with Monnier and Beach (as it was intended to do) by addressing the previously unexpressed tensions that had existed on both sides of the Beach-Joyce partnership. Ellmann's avoidance of such issues suggests that he took Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach less seriously than did his biographical subject.
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Letters documenting Beach's relationships with Bryher and with Camilla Steinbrugge are among those in the Beach papers at Princeton. My thanks to Noel Riley Fitch for documentation of Beach's relationship with Steinbrugge, information that is not contained in Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation.
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