[In the following essay, Ford provides a fairly detailed overview of the life of Sylvia Beach, also reflecting on the impact of her bookshop as well as her efforts to help Joyce publish his Ulysses.]

I

The story of how the proprietor of an obscure little bookstore in Paris became the publisher of what is widely considered to be the most important novel of this century will probably always provoke a few incredulous gasps, if only because so audacious an undertaking was accomplished by a slight, brisk, quick-tongued American woman whose knowledge of publishing, a business at least as circuitous in France as in America, was practically nil. Her triumph—destined to be indissolubly linked forever with the author's—brought her immediate and lasting fame. Sylvia Beach “is probably the best known woman in Paris,” the literary critic Eugene Jolas wrote in 1925, and “certainly one of the important figures in contemporary letters.” By then others were bestowing similar encomiums on her bookshop, which she had diplomatically named Shakespeare and Company (“it was a peace-inducing choice”), and confidently predicting the time would come when it would be recognized as America's single most important literary outpost in Europe. Morrill Cody prophesied, with impressive accuracy, that its distinction would arise from the “aid and encouragement” it would offer writers who perhaps otherwise would be lost in the shuffle, and from giving readers a new angle on the personality and intimacy of books and their authors. Even before the accomplishment of the publishing feat that made it the most famous American cultural landmark in pre-World War II Paris—and for nearly twenty years the best-known bookshop in the world—Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company had gone far toward fulfilling Cody's predictions.

From her own telling, the adventure that so splendidly and permanently transformed her life she herself had initiated in a way so natural that, in retrospect, it almost assumes the simple dimensions of a fable. One day in the summer of 1921, barely a year after she had opened Shakespeare and Company, a grumpy, disconsolate James Joyce came to the shop and told the young proprietor the grim news that the prospects of having Ulysses published in the United States had just vanished with the suppression in New York of the Little Review for printing installments of his novel. The editors, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, although brilliantly defended in court by Joyce's friend, the lawyer and bibliophile John Quinn, had nonetheless been found guilty of printing obscenity (i.e., Ulysses) and fined a hundred dollars. Depressed as much by the charge as by the abrupt loss of all expectations of seeing Ulysses published in America, Joyce had cabled his New York publisher, Ben Huebsch, to withdraw the book. Bad news had also come from his English publisher and benefactress, Harriet Weaver, who reported that the five installments from Ulysses that had appeared in her magazine, The Egoist, had provoked similar charges in England. She was certain British printers would never consent to set type for a book which authorities would undoubtedly find objectionable, and for which the law would hold them accountable. Crushed, Joyce had resigned all hope of seeing Ulysses appear in either country, a sad prospect, since he had already labored on it for seven years and presumably would now have to finish without the assurance of publication. In a tone of “complete discouragement” he told Miss Beach that Ulysses would “never come out now.”

Was it Joyce's plaint, the example of the Little Review, her own feeling that the author's pride had been hurt, or all three, that inspired Miss Beach to do something about the situation? Whatever the answer, she did what she must have intuitively believed would at least relieve the gloom and repair Joyce's injured pride. “It occurred to me that something might be done, and I asked, ‘Would you let Shakespeare and Company have the honor of bringing out your Ulysses?’” The question, coming from one who at that time was hardly more than an acquaintance, must have startled Joyce, and although her offer contained a promise to rescue his book, he had no reason to believe that she, an inexperienced bookseller, could assume the complicated and challenging responsibilities of publishing Ulysses. Joyce, however, had few, if any, alternatives, and he could not have regarded with any equanimity the prospect of waiting for restrictions to be lifted in England and America. His response, recalled Miss Beach, was immediate and joyful acceptance of her proposal, a response apparently so unexpected that, despite the pleasure it brought, she herself regarded as slightly incautious. It seemed rash “to entrust his great Ulysses to such a funny little publisher.” Joyce nonetheless “seemed delighted,” no doubt feeling that at last his misfortune had been reversed. Sylvia Beach was delighted, too, and they parted “very much moved.”¹

The rhetorical question, “Who is Sylvia?” provided a Paris Times reporter with the opening line for his column on Miss Beach, one of many to appear in the city's English-language dailies before and after the appearance of Ulysses. Invariably reporters asked her the same questions, and Miss Beach, invariably—and patiently—repeated the facts of her life. “Well,” she would begin, “I come from Princeton. My father was pastor to Woodrow Wilson. My grandfather was pastor to Grover Cleveland. I came here [Paris] during the war—in 1915—to study French books. I worked for a while as a volontaire agricole in Serbia.” Facts like these and others, such as having nine ministers among her ancestors, added a tantalizing piquancy to her character, and many openly wondered how she had ever come to publish a book that was reputedly as erotic as Ulysses. What Miss Beach was, and what to many she may have seemed to be, created complications and confusion from the start. For those who assumed she intended to make erotica a specialty—and who sometimes mistakenly brought such work to her for consideration—there awaited a revelation that was “too funny.” And for those who came to Shakespeare and Company expecting to find a renegade with advanced prurient tastes there was bound to be a sudden reversal of expectation. Even her attire suggested restraint and a no-nonsense approach to things. Removed from her bibliophilistic surroundings she might have passed for a corporation secretary, or a schoolmistress, prim, forceful, formidable. She preferred mannish clothing: a tailor-made velvet jacket, a bow tie set in a low white collar, a felt hat, a shirt of nondescript dark cloth, and sensible American shoes. She did not believe she looked any better this way, she once told a curious reporter; it was simply a matter of being “too busy to wear anything but a uniform.” Her hair she kept neatly crimped. A sufferer all her life from poor eyesight (an affinity with Joyce that many noticed), she wore steel-rimmed glasses that gave her features a touch of severity. Direct and cheerful and endowed with a lively and curious mind and a retentive memory, she radiated a passion and a respect for literature and a near-adoration for those whose “literary genius or flashes and fractions of it” she had instinctively recognized. As Archibald MacLeish observed, Sylvia “cared less for books than for the men who wrote them,” foremost of whom, of course, was James Joyce.

Ulysses brought Miss Beach exactly what she wanted and needed to survive: customers. By the mid-twenties, flocks of tourists, mostly English and American, their curiosity divided between sampling the contents of Joyce's banned book and seeing the woman responsible for its existence, began finding her shop, relocated by then in larger and more comfortable quarters in the rue de l'Odéon. Across the street stood its French pendant, La Maison des Amis des Livres, a bookshop-salon owned and presided over by Adrienne Monnier, a stoutish, animated Frenchwoman with a Whistlerian penchant for grey and white. Like others in the Quarter Miss Monnier had fashioned her own costume, a cross between a peasant's and a nun's habit, consisting of a white silk blouse with an ample white collarette, a velvet waistcoat, and a long full skirt of grey wool. Looking “extremely alive,” she was easily the “most striking-looking person” Miss Beach had ever seen; and years later, when describing the circumstances that led to their first meeting in 1918, she hardly bothered to disguise the belief that it just might have been foreordained:

One day at the Bibliothèque National, I noticed that one of the reviews … could be purchased at A. Monnier's bookshop, 7 rue de l'Odéon, Paris VI. I had not heard the name before, nor was the Odéon quarter familiar to me, but suddenly something drew me irresistibly to the spot where such important things in my life were to happen.

Around Miss Monnier at that time thronged congeries of young French writers (some of them like Louis Aragon and André Breton on leave from the front) who responded, with touching gratitude, to her almost maternal interest in them and their work. With nunlike devotion she labored to make her little place the most advanced bookshop in Paris, stocking all the avant-garde publications and maintaining the first circulating library in Paris to offer subscribers translations of American and British books. To keep the “friends of books” informed, she published the monthly Le Bulletin des Amis des Livres, containing short literary notices and announcements of coming events; and a review, Le Navire d'Argent, in which she printed French translations of stories by Hemingway and Robert McAlmon, poems by E. E. Cummings and William Carlos Williams, and Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. As a salon La Maison des Amis des Livres had no rivals. To Miss Monnier's weekly gatherings came special friends like André Gide, Paul Valéry, Léon-Paul Fargue, Paul Claudel, Sorbonne professors and students, poets and novelists and critics, and of course all the “friends of books.” The programs included poetry readings (Jules Romains read his peace poem, “Europe”), lectures (Paul Valéry discussed Poe's “Eureka”), and tryouts, when authors would read from their work in progress. Perhaps the most memorable of Miss Monnier's “seances” occurred one evening in December 1921, when Valéry Larbaud and Jimmy Light each read selections from Ulysses in French. Joyce, who was present but unseen during the program, received an enthusiastic ovation at the conclusion. Miss Monnier later published the first French translation of Ulysses by Auguste Morel. The whole atmosphere of La Maison des Amis des Livres, Sisley Huddleston described as one “laden with an indefinable emanation of the intellect”; the place was a forum for theories and ideas, ideally suited for writers “planning, confiding their intentions, their hopes, their ambitions to each other.”

That sampling of French haute littérature at Miss Monnier's turned what had long been Miss Beach's cherished dream to operate a bookstore into an obsession, one which, with her friend's blessing, she came close to satisfying after the war when she traveled to New York intending to open an American branch of La Maison des Amis des Livres, which the two women agreed might perform the commendable function of acquainting Americans with modern French literature. But when she discovered that real-estate costs and other expenses would be more than she could afford, all the plans to bring the “friends of books” to America had to be abandoned. Next, she wondered if a French bookshop could succeed in London, and the answer she obtained from Harold Munro, who at his Poetry Bookshop in Great Russell Street performed the functions she would later assume in Paris, was a firm no; there simply was not enough demand in London for French books, old or new. Still undaunted and still “juggling many ideas as to how [she could] be the most useful to Americans,” she went back to Paris, where Miss Monnier, instead of offering condolences, suggested that she reverse things and open an American bookshop in the Quarter. Besides the practical advantages that Paris offered of lower rents and cheaper living expenses, the services that an American bookstore with a large circulating library of English-language books could provide would be immensely valuable to French as well as English-speaking customers. She reminded Sylvia that the demand at her shop for contemporary American writing had always exceeded the supply, that she had often herself said that the French should know about Eliot, Anderson, and Dreiser, and that something had to be done to get them out of the rut of reading Twain, Galsworthy, Kipling, and London. Moreover, Miss Monnier promised to guide her friend's “first steps” and to send her “lots of customers.” Persuasive arguments they were for one already resolved to have her own shop. And for a fervent Francophile, what better reason than business could she possibly have for staying in Paris, perhaps forever?

In November 1919 Shakespeare and Company opened for business in a converted laundry which, at a cost of three thousand dollars (supplied by members of the Beach family), had been attractively renovated and stocked with books hastily collected from shops in London and Paris. Although it was auspiciously launched by the indefatigable Miss Monnier and god-fathered by Valéry Larbaud, who announced that his influence and support would have to take the place of the traditional gift of a silver cup, Shakespeare and Company from the start needed and, as expected, received the support of friends to remain afloat. The important thing for anyone opening a bookshop in France to remember, Sylvia Beach once remarked, is to get adopted by the French. That way you avoid being regarded as a tourist and “are in the home of your adoption.” Managing to be adopted by many of her adopted country's literary figures had been, with Miss Monnier's help, an easy accomplishment for her, and for a time they outnumbered her American supporters, among the first of whom were Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, who drove up one day in their war-seasoned Ford to look over the new American outpost. Miss Stein subscribed to the lending library but remarked that it had “nothing amusing, none of the works that had formed the foundation of American literature—for instance, The Girl of the Limberlost and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine,” two of her favorites. True enough, Miss Beach replied, but then no other library in Paris offered the works of Gertrude Stein either, and certainly none had two copies of Tender Buttons in circulation. Miss Stein may have wanted to compensate for that “unjust criticism” when she later donated copies of The Portrait of Mable Dodge at the Villa Curonia and Have They Attacked Mary: He Giggled: A Political Caricature to Miss Beach's library. Dorothy Shakespeare Pound, another early visitor, turned out to be more constructive than Gertrude Stein. While appreciative of the quaintness of the location Miss Beach had chosen for her shop, she nonetheless feared that its very remoteness would deter more customers than it would attract. Not only did taxi drivers have trouble finding it, but few Americans could pronounce the street on which the shop stood. Mrs. Pound's remedy was a map of the Quarter, with the location of Shakespeare and Company well indicated, which Miss Beach afterward never failed to print on all her trade circulars.

For those who found Shakespeare and Company, with or without a map, there were pleasant rewards. The lending library contained several hundred classic and modern British and American books, many of them gleaned from second-hand bookstores in Paris. Subscribers, nearly two hundred of them in 1919, included, from the English contingent, Ronald Firbank, Nancy Cunard, Roger Fry, Aldous Huxley, Edith Sitwell, and Walter de la Mare; from the French, André Gide, Georges Duhamel, Jules Romains, Louis Aragon, and Paul Valéry; and a handful of Americans. The purchases made on a hasty expedition to London a few months before the opening consisted of a small but good selection of English poetry. From New York had come some recent American books, and from Elkin Mathews (London) a few volumes of Yeats, Pound, and Joyce. American and British periodicals—Nation, Dial, New Republic, New Masses, Egoist, and the New English Review—hung side by side on a review rack. Two Blake drawings, photographs of Oscar Wilde, portraits of Emerson, Whitman, and Poe—the beginnings of an ever-expanding gallery which would eventually include most of the writers and artists who passed through Paris—shared wall space with black-and-white hangings from Serbia, some of the owner's war mementoes. Several little Whitman manuscripts formed a permanent display in a back parlor, just behind Miss Beach's desk. An assortment of mostly “flea-market” furniture ringed the fireplace (Joyce appropriated one of the two armchairs—known as good-wife—perhaps associating its blue cushion with Ulysses). In the narrow display windows, decorously arranged, rested leather-bound volumes of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Poe, Eliot, and of course Joyce, as well as a prominently displayed edition of Three Men in a Boat, a great French favorite and, because it was one of the first books Miss Beach sold, a permanent window resident and a good-luck charm. Over the entrance, suspended by a “sort of iron finger,” hung the shop's ensign, a portrait of Shakespeare, a proper patron saint. Miss Beach marveled that the artist, Charles Winzer, seemed to know instinctively how Shakespeare should look—“rather Chinese, with slanting eyes” and dressed “in black with buttons down the front and a gold chain”; sometimes she even thought Winzer's portrait resembled Joyce, though the artist had never met the author of Ulysses.

One senses that during the hectic years when Miss Beach was supervising the publication of Ulysses and then serving as Joyce's unofficial secretary and publisher, she must have often looked back nostalgically to that brief period of calm, her apprenticeship days, when learning the job meant being in the midst of it and when the pace at the shop allowed time to savor those bookish rewards so long anticipated. Shakespeare and Company was “like a house with the members of the family growing up in it.” Even if she had not met Joyce and published his book, the uses for the shop would have increased, and with them, the tempo of its life. Financially, though, the first three years were almost better forgotten. Some days Miss Beach took in only fifty francs, around four dollars. For 1921 her expenditures (24,858,000 francs) came perilously close to matching her receipts (25,738,550), and if it had not been for the small amounts regularly received from home she no doubt would have had to consider closing the shop. Although financial solvency came slowly and was never a certainty on which she could depend from one year to the next, there was scarcely any delay before the popularity of her shop was a fact. A Tribune columnist reported a year before Ulysses appeared that “almost all the literary celebrities of the day are Miss Beach's friends” and that hardly “a day passes that some stray poet or novelist does not drop in to browse at her crowded shelves.” Among those literary itinerants were the first American exile writers—the vanguard of the vast migration that followed—“pilgrims,” Sylvia Beach called them, who in those pre-Ulysses days invariably asked to see Gertrude Stein and to whose pavillon in the rue de Fleurus she usually consented to conduct them. On Stephen Benet the meeting with Gertrude Stein probably left few traces; but Sherwood Anderson's visit to the rue de Fleurus turned into a banquet of mutual appreciation and admiration that would have long-lasting results for both. In an unpublished notebook Anderson kept at the time he called Gertrude Stein “the very symbol of health and strength” and noted that she smoked and laughed and told stories “with an American shrewdness in getting the tang and the kick into the telling.” The generally amiable relations between Miss Stein and Miss Beach quickly worsened, however, when Ulysses was published in February 1922. More than anything it was Joyce's fame that bothered Miss Stein, and even Miss Beach had to agree that Joyce's work “had a way of monopolizing the attention of everyone around him,” and that it was probably that fact which explained Miss Stein's resentment of Joyce as well as a larger resentment that extended to “the whole writing world” for having been so neglected. Certainly Miss Stein made no secret of her displeasure, something she was almost certainly dramatizing when she notified Miss Beach that she wished to transfer her lending library subscription to the American library on the Right Bank.

Of the other early semi- or permanent American residents, Ezra Pound, Robert McAlmon, and Ernest Hemingway were the shop's steadiest users. Pound, who had just fled England, where, he told Miss Beach, the water was beginning to creep up over the islanders who would probably soon develop webbed feet, found Shakespeare and Company a convenient and hospitable parliament. McAlmon, besides making the place his permanent mailing address, used it as a club and eventually as a storage and distribution center for his Contact Publishing Company. “Pilgrim” Hemingway, who turned up late in 1921 bearing the now-famous letter of introduction from Sherwood Anderson, became Shakespeare and Company's “best customer,” for which the main recompense perhaps was unlimited hours of uninterrupted reading in the back room of the shop. Hemingway, boyishly attractive and cosmopolitan, enchanted Miss Beach as well as Miss Monnier, and the two women, their excitement nearly equalling his, often accompanied him to boxing matches and bike races. When he told them he planned to read a story he had just written called “In Our Time” and invited them to attend the reading (for the occasion Hemingway borrowed an apartment from Dorothy and Louis Galantière), they accepted the invitation with honor and later described the event as having the same rapturous sensation as discovering an excellent wine; and Adrienne Monnier remarked that young Hemingway had the “true writer's temperament.” Both women added practical support to their praise. In Le Navire d'Argent Miss Monnier published “The Undefeated,” the author's first French translation. Miss Beach, when asked by Jonathan Cape what American author he should publish, instantly replied: “Hemingway.” Cape became Hemingway's first English publisher. In A Moveable Feast, his book of rather testy recollections of Paris in the 1920s, Hemingway remembered Sylvia Beach as a “delightful and charming and welcoming” friend. “No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.”

II

Joyce, galvanized by the decision to publish Ulysses, at once got in touch with Harriet Weaver and recommended that in some way she try to amalgamate her long-planned edition of the book with the Paris publication, a suggestion she rejected in favor of issuing her own edition later on. She did agree, however, to supply Miss Beach with the names of prospective English subscribers, and proposed that, once the Paris book was fully subscribed, sheets be sent to her for an “ordinary” edition which she would sell for 10/6. By the time Joyce conferred again with his new publisher, Miss Beach had had some misgivings that required the reassurance and strength of Miss Monnier to dispel. The enormity of the task ahead had all at once overwhelmed her. After all, she had never before thought of going into publishing, and now, without any clear notion of how to proceed, she had agreed to become the publisher of the one work she most admired. What she realized was that she had picked out “the most difficult book in the world” with which to make her debut. The challenge could hardly have been larger, or the possibilities for failure greater. Although Miss Monnier did not know Joyce, and knew nothing about Ulysses, she immediately—and enthusiastically—assured Miss Beach that her decision was sound and that she could depend on her for support and guidance. Together, she recommended, they would visit her printer, Maurice Darantière, who would know exactly how to proceed. They also decided (probably on Miss Monnier's advice) to restrict the first printing of Ulysses to a thousand copies, a figure which Joyce later complained was far too high for a limited edition. Miss Beach would be better off printing a dozen or so (on one occasion he reduced the figure to two), and even then, he feared, there might be some left over. Joyce's pessimism failed to deter Miss Beach. Shortly afterward, she announced that her edition of Ulysses would be available in three impressions: the smallest, 100 copies, printed on Holland paper and signed by the author, would sell for 350 francs; the next, 150 copies, on Vergé d'Arches paper, for 250 francs; and the largest, 750 copies, on plain linen paper, for 150 francs. (The price in United States currency for the cheapest edition of Ulysses at 150 francs was ＄11.50. During the decade the franc varied from about 13 to 25 for the dollar.) For any who complained that the prices were too high she had an explanation. “Considering the seven years Joyce had spent on the book and the loss of his eyesight, it didn't seem to me as dear as all that.”

As expected, Darantière not only listened sympathetically to the account Miss Beach gave him of the misfortunes of Ulysses and its creator, but unhesitatingly accepted the assignment of printing Joyce's opus, delighted at having been chosen to do a book by the writer whom Miss Beach described as “our greatest.” Perhaps it was his elation that made it easy to accept her rather exacting financial stipulations. Determined not to permit Ulysses to plunge her into bankruptcy (she had no reserves and depended on contributions and loans to operate the shop), she had put prospective subscribers on notice that their orders would be filled by registered mail immediately “on receipt of payment.” They would be notified when the book was available and would be expected to send their remittance before it was posted. Darantière, she requested, must not begin printing Ulysses until enough money had either been collected or promised by subscribers to cover the costs of printing. And he must not press her. Further, she asked that he agree to have his bill settled in installments when, or if, “the remittances for the subscriptions came in.” That he accepted these terms struck her as “very sporting.”

For the job of actually selling subscriptions, she could depend on a small band of loyal and energetic friends: Adrienne Monnier, who said it was “everyone's duty” to subscribe to Ulysses, and Léon-Paul Fargue and Valéry Larbaud collected the names of interested Frenchmen; Harriet Weaver, as promised, supplied the list of Egoist readers, all long-time Joyceans, as well as the names of others who had inquired about the book; André Gide paid a personal visit to the shop to place his order, not so much to subscribe to Ulysses, she thought, as to show “a friendly interest” in her enterprise and to support the “cause of freedom of expression.” From the Little Review crowd, now settled on the Left Bank after having suffered the “curtailment of so many of their pleasures,” the final one being the suppression of Ulysses, came numerous orders. Ezra Pound, himself a subscriber, brought in many more from all over the world, and one from his friend W. B. Yeats. Hemingway was down for several copies. No one quite outsold Robert McAlmon, however, who, with his pockets perpetually stuffed with subscription blanks, moved from café to café, waiting for an opportunity to inveigle his drinking companions into signing up for a copy of Joyce's book. On opening the shop Miss Beach would often spy a batch of signed orders (“hasty bunches,” McAlmon called them) that McAlmon had deposited under the door sometime during the early morning hours. The most famous non-subscriber was George Bernard Shaw. Though he admitted that Ulysses was a truthful book and though he wished it success, Shaw accused Miss Beach of not knowing Joyce's countrymen very well if she believed any of them, particularly the elderly, would spend 150 francs for a “revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilization.” Reading only fragments of Ulysses had convinced him that Joyce had written an obscene book, and if Miss Beach preferred to regard it as art, then she was probably “a young barbarian beglamoured by the excitement and enthusiasms that art stirs up in passionate material.” Miss Beach, while admitting Shaw was right in saying that Ulysses had certainly stirred her, and lots of others, more than anything Shaw had ever written, resisted the urge to tell him so, preferring to enjoy his denunciations privately with Joyce. On one point, however, Shaw was wrong. Among the nearly five hundred names that finally filled the subscription list were several “elderly”—and presumably affluent—Irishmen. Approximately one-third of the subscribers lived in Paris, one hundred or so in New York, fifty throughout England, a dozen in both Italy and Ireland, and one or two in such places as Belgium, Sweden, Norway, China, and Borneo.

With the problem of subscriptions settled, Darantière began setting type, and, as agreed, supplied Joyce with as many proofs as he wanted, usually five, the first batch of which reached him in June 1921. For Joyce, reading proof was “a creative act” which Miss Beach, probably more out of naïveté than an inducement to creativity, abetted by permitting him to make unlimited changes directly on the proof sheets. By the time Joyce had finished developing and rewriting Ulysses it had swollen to a third again its original size. Darantière, although alarmed, at first remained silent out of deference to the publisher's wishes and respect for Joyce, but as more and more proof sheets arrived at the printery “adorned with Joycean rockets and myriads of stars guiding the printers to words and phrases all around the margins,” he decided he must speak. Did Miss Beach understand that resetting type time after time would increase production costs enormously, and perhaps even plunge her into the “financial quagmire” she wanted to avoid? Could not something be done to curtail Joyce's “appetite for proofs”? Nothing could, and as far as Miss Beach was concerned, nothing would. Neither the protestations of the printer, no matter how sincere and correct, nor the heavy burdens she herself had assumed of reading and rereading the proof sheets sent back from the printery, ever had the slightest effect on Joyce's habits. Doggedly Miss Beach insisted that publishing Ulysses was her responsibility. Writing it was Joyce's, and therefore it “was to be as Joyce wished, in every respect.” The only salving thought she allowed herself contained a characteristically sturdy puritan rectitude: “It seemed natural to me that the efforts and sacrifices on my part should be proportionate to the greatness of the work I was publishing.” And sometime later, when asked about her association with Joyce, Miss Beach referred again to the mutual dedication to work on which their collaboration rested: “He [Joyce] was never a slacker. If he was, I would never have helped him. He did great work. He gave himself to his work and expected you to do the same.” So the lights in the old vine-covered Dijon printery continued to blaze all night as Darantière's toilworn printers, none of whom spoke or read English, went on with the tedious business of deciphering Joyce's emendations and resetting their type.

Nearly as worrisome as the author's proliferating proofs was the problem of finding reliable typists to copy his manuscripts. Those who offered their services often left after a short time, necessitating renewed searches for replacements, and at least one volunteer typist introduced changes into the text of Ulysses. While copying the Penelope section, McAlmon inadvertently misplaced some of Molly's thoughts, and deciding that the order of her ruminations would not matter much, left the mistakes uncorrected and never bothered to mention the matter to Joyce. When Ulysses appeared he was pleased to see that his transpositions had been retained, and asked Joyce whether he had noticed. Joyce replied that he had but decided McAlmon was right and let them stand. The difficulties involving the Circe episode, however, on which nine typists had labored and failed to finish, caused Joyce so much distress that, in desperation, he left the unfinished section with Miss Beach, who promised to have it typed, and soon, for Darantière had at that moment sent word that printing had caught up with the supply of text and that the missing section was causing a delay. First to volunteer (for a short time) was the publisher's sister Cyprian, whose French replacement made “wonderful progress” for someone whose language was not English before she, too, departed. Volunteer three, the wife of a British Embassy official, perhaps would have completed the project had not her husband, scandalized by what he one day accidentally found his wife copying, dispatched Joyce's manuscript to the flames. Horrified by the loss, Miss Beach broke the news to Joyce, who made matters no better by revealing that the only copy of the destroyed section had already been sent to John Quinn, in New York. Quinn, who had arranged to purchase the entire manuscript of Ulysses and was receiving it from Joyce section by section, stubbornly refused to return the Penelope section to Paris despite the pleadings of both Joyce and Miss Beach. Finally, he consented to allow it to be photographed, and, to everyone's delight, the reproductions came out clearer than the lost manuscript. After only a slight delay a new copy was made (by Cyprian) and rushed to Darantière.

Even the covers for Ulysses turned into a problem, one that might have defeated a publisher less determined than Miss Beach. Joyce insisted that they had to be blue, not any shade of blue, but the same as that found in the Greek flag, one of which, “in honor of Odysseus,” hung outside Shakespeare and Company during the incubation of Joyce's book. Satisfying Joyce's latest request exhausted and exasperated printer and publisher alike. “Alas!” exclaimed Miss Beach, “merely to look at that flag gave me a headache.” First, the color samples Darantière brought to Paris did not match the blue in the flag. Retiring to Dijon, he tried again, and the new samples came no closer. Finally, he traveled to Germany and there tracked down the elusive blue, only to discover at that point that the paper was wrong, a problem he fortunately was able to solve by having the blue lithographed on white cardboard covers, thus producing, perhaps without realizing it, the national colors of Greece—blue and white.

Presumably unaware of the delays his own demands were causing, Joyce began letting it be known, around December 1921, that Ulysses would appear about the time of his fortieth birthday on February 2, 1922, just two months away, and despite the announcements Miss Beach had issued to the contrary (the publication date had been changed and reposted again and again) he emphasized in a spate of letters and telegrams to both Miss Beach and Darantière that they must make every effort to meet that date. It was a preposterous demand, considering all that remained to be done, including the blue covers, but knowing how much he looked forward to celebrating the publication of Ulysses on his birthday, Miss Beach went to Dijon and held a “conversation” with Darantière, the substance of which was that, although it would be impossible to deliver the complete edition of the book in February, it just might be possible to place “one copy in Joyce's hands” by then. Darantière, however, did even better. On February 1, he notified Miss Beach that he was dispatching two copies of Ulysses with a conductor on the Paris-Dijon express, due to arrive in Paris at 7:00 A.M., February 2. On the platform the next morning, her heart going like a locomotive, Miss Beach searched the incoming train for Darantière's emissary. Finally he stood before her, holding a large parcel bearing her name, which, with nearly unbearable excitement, she opened and found did indeed contain two large blue copies of Ulysses. Copy Number One was, of course, for Joyce, which she dropped off to him on the way to the shop, where Copy Number Two, her own, went on display in the front window, causing simultaneous excitement and disappointment among those who had waited a good part of the night to claim their copies only to learn that Miss Beach had received only one for herself. Joyce, presumably too delighted with having the book to complain about the numerous typographical errors (in the 732 pages, “complete as written,” Miss Beach estimated there averaged one to half-a-dozen per page), wrote to thank his publisher for such a momentous birthday gift. “I cannot let today pass without thanking you for all the trouble and worry you have given yourself about my book during the past year.” To commemorate the occasion he had dashed off a few verses containing, along with praise for her Yankee bravery, some clear directives concerning her future responsibilities to him:

Who is Sylvia, what is she
That all our scribes commend her.
Yankee, young and brave is she
The west this pace did lend her
That all books might published be.
Is she rich as she is brave
For wealth oft daring misses?
Throngs about her rant and rave
To subscribe for Ulysses
But, having signed, they ponder grave.
Then to Sylvia let us sing
Her daring lies in selling.
She can sell each mortal thing
That's boring beyond telling
To her let us buyers bring.

J. J. after W. S.

As much as Miss Beach would have liked pleasing Joyce, for awhile she had no copies of his book to sell or send subscribers. By this time it had been almost fully subscribed, and after word spread that publication was imminent the demand far exceeded the number of copies she would be able to provide. With Joyce's impatience increasing daily, Darantière labored to correct a flaw in the cover, and a week after publication he had managed to ship only fifty copies to Paris. In mid-March, with deliveries still lagging, Miss Beach and Miss Monnier went to Dijon to confer with the printer, and soon afterward the flow of copies increased. For the next few months Shakespeare and Company was transformed into a wrapping and shipping room. Joyce came in almost daily—more interested, one gathers, in supervising than helping—although occasionally he would glue the labels on the parcels and then tote them to the post office nearby, complaining of their weight (one kilo, 550 grams). Conditioned to view customs men with suspicion, particularly in Ireland, he urged Miss Beach to mail Irish subscribers their copies immediately; he reminded her that “with a new Irish Postmaster General and a vigilance committee in clerical hands” the situation in Ireland could deteriorate at any moment. Joyce was right. By mailing copies to England and Ireland at once, before postal authorities realized what was passing through their hands, all reached their destinations safely. However, finding ways to circumvent American customs officials—who, after passing copies sent to Quinn and a few others, had become more vigilant and were delaying or impounding the book—demanded more ingenuity than either Miss Beach or Miss Monnier possessed. Exasperated, they finally put the problem before Hemingway, and the plan he devised must be one of the most successful booklegging operations on record. A friend of his, a painter named Barnet Braverman, he told Miss Beach, might be persuaded to go to Windsor, Canada, where there was no embargo on Ulysses and where copies, therefore, could be safely mailed, and from where, Hemingway explained, Braverman could carry the book to the United States by ferryboat, making as many crossings as needed to transport the forty copies American subscribers were still expecting. Miraculously the scheme worked. Using his artist's equipment as decoys, Braverman began shuttling between Windsor and Detroit, each time carrying at least one copy of Ulysses, which he would carefully unwrap on the Canadian side of the border and retie and rewrap on the American. When in early 1923 he had delivered the final copy, he submitted a bill to Miss Beach for ＄53.34, and asked if she would kindly tell him who in Paris had ever recommended him for such a tiresome job. Young Braverman's accomplishment delighted Joyce, who rewarded him with a signed copy of his book.

If Sylvia Beach wanted to curtail or stop altogether the services she had provided Joyce and even resign from her position as the publisher of Ulysses, now that it had been distributed and a second edition was about to appear, she gave no sign that she wished to dissolve their partnership. Despite all the taxing, annoying, and time-consuming demands Joyce had made, she could honestly say she had enjoyed “the Joycean job.” Nor did Joyce do anything that would suggest he wanted to close his relationship with his “funny little publisher.” In fact, beginning in the months following the publication of Ulysses, he practically took over Miss Beach's shop as well as her life. In her words, he became a “perfect octopus.” If one did anything for him one did everything. He kept Miss Beach as well as her various helpers (especially Myrsine Moschos, who for several years served as Miss Beach's closest assistant) busy attending to his correspondence and banking; they became “his agents, his errand boys … made appointments for him, made friends for him, arranged all the business of the translations of his work published in Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia.” Miss Beach herself carefully recorded all his royalties, loans, payments, and expenses in a dozen small memo books. Her own accounts, nearly empty except for a few spare listings of the cost of food and travel, testify to the vast expenditures of time and devotion she willingly granted Joyce. On some days he would appear at the shop around noon, skip lunch, and continue conferring with Miss Beach about the problems of Ulysses for the rest of the day. Any unfinished business they completed in the evenings. With his growing fame he had become increasingly dependent on friends to shield him from “strangers, fans, and members of the press,” and in Sylvia Beach he had a sentry of steel who guarded his privacy as diligently as she conducted his business. Over the next ten years, catering to Joyce's needs developed into a full time occupation which, with a total lack of self-glorification and in absolute modesty, Miss Beach assumed uncomplainingly, only resisting her “hero” when he threatened to turn Shakespeare and Company into “a Joyce plant”; for although it was true he had given “great lustre to the bookshop”—and from it got his “boost”—she vowed that he should never completely engulf it.

As soon as Joyce realized he had underestimated the demand for Ulysses and that the thousand copies Miss Beach had printed would not begin to meet it, he suggested to Harriet Weaver that she go ahead with her plans for a second edition. Miss Weaver, who had already published the author's Dubliners and The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and had reluctantly cancelled plans to publish Ulysses when the suppression of the Little Review made publication of the novel in England inadvisable, had been encouraged first by the appearance and then by the sales of the Paris edition. When she told Joyce she would act immediately, he went to see Miss Beach and, without mentioning his negotiations with Miss Weaver, asked her to allow Miss Weaver to print her edition from plates made from the original type, a request, since it was in Joyce's best interests and not the bookseller's, Miss Beach could hardly refuse. Joyce pressed Miss Weaver to bring the Egoist edition out quickly, first because he needed the funds, second to deter pirates (“My book isn't a bibelot,” he said), and third to take advantage of the mounting interest and demand for the book. Miss Weaver asked John Rodker, an experienced printer and publisher of limited edition books, to go to France and oversee the operation. It was agreed that little could be done to correct the errors but Rodker did insert a list of errata and collected more subscriptions. In early October 1922 Darantière finished printing the entire edition of two thousand copies, which was priced at £2.2, not 10/6, as Miss Weaver had originally proposed, and like the first edition it sold out almost at once. While Rodker and the publisher attended to the problems of spiriting copies into England and America (without much success, for in both countries large numbers were either confiscated or destroyed, five hundred of them by New York Postal authorities), Miss Beach suddenly found herself facing a rebellious crowd of Paris booksellers who were among the best customers she had for Ulysses. Disturbed by the unexpected appearance of the second edition (Joyce's “precipitated second edition,” Miss Beach called it), coming so soon after the first, they accused Miss Beach of having violated the “ethics of a limited edition publication.” Not only did the cheaper Egoist book threaten to undercut their sales, but, being almost a duplicate of the first, it had turned hers into a “dishonorable fraud.” Moreover, she had not allowed them enough time to dispose of her expensive limited edition. Since it was Joyce who had precipitated the Egoist edition, Miss Beach forwarded the booksellers' complaints on to him and suggested he investigate. Joyce did, and from his son, dispatched to make “oblique enquiries,” he learned that in the three leading “English selling shops in Paris”—Brentano, Terquem, and Galignani—only two copies of both the first and the second editions were in stock, and that there “was no sign of any angry attitude about edition 2.” In a letter to Harriet Weaver, Joyce defended the publication of the second edition, noting that it had not only been agreed to “by all parties” but differed “in size and weight” from the first and, furthermore, was “plainly marked a second edition in two places for any buyer who can read.” In a show of pique he exclaimed that “no bibliophile has the right to tell me how many copies of my book are to be inflicted on a tolerant world.” Any boycott of Ulysses that disgruntled booksellers might organize would fail “where there is a strong demand on the part of buyers.”

Fortunately for Joyce—and Miss Beach—the discord over the second edition, though putting a strain on their relationship, never threatened to dissolve their partnership, and by the time their business association formally ended, in 1939, the year Ulysses was vindicated and published in America, Joyce's “funny little publisher” had solicitously watched over the birth of nine more editions of Ulysses, totalling at least twenty-eight thousand copies. Subscription and bookshop sales accounted for most of the profits, but tourists would often come to her shop to purchase single copies, for which Miss Beach would prudently provide such suitable jackets as Shakespeare's Complete Works Complete in One Volume or Merry Tales for Little Folks. Being a banned book, Ulysses was of course cut off from “its normal market in English-speaking countries.” However, as distasteful as it was for Joyce to have his book relegated to the erotica shelf with Fanny Hill and Raped on the Rail (he estimated that no more than five percent of Ulysses could be called erotic), he was aware that the classification had distinct financial advantages. Warning customers in search of smut that Ulysses would be a disappointment seemed pointless to Miss Beach, since its reputation as a “banned book” had been so solidly established. Royalties paid to Joyce remained high—sixty-six percent of the net profits—and often even before those of one edition were gone he would request the royalties for the next, which usually meant that Miss Beach would relinquish her share of the profits even before she had time to clutch them. The practice strengthened her already firm belief that Shakespeare and Company would probably always remain more picturesque than profitable.

III

By 1930, the pirating of Ulysses, particularly in the United States, had expanded into a profitable business. For Miss Beach and Joyce, however, it meant shrinking profits. Finding ways to halt the practice concerned them both. Joyce thought that Miss Beach should abandon her bookshop and transplant it to the United States in order “to take up the fight for Ulysses in [her] own country,” but that was a suggestion she was determined to oppose no matter how dire the circumstances. Her recommendation to Joyce was that he should find an American publisher who would bring out Ulysses reasonably quickly. Joyce also suddenly decided to formalize the partnership with Miss Beach, and in a document of his own creation willingly gave the publisher world rights to Ulysses, while granting himself the right to authorize the purchase of his work from the publisher, “at a price set by herself,” at such time as it was “deemed advisable by the Author and Publisher in the interests of the Author.” In May of the same year the last edition of Ulysses Miss Beach would publish came off the press; it was the eleventh and the largest (four thousand copies) she had ever ordered, and, since the appearance of the first American edition of Ulysses was not far off—unbeknownst to both publisher and author at the time—it was more than adequate to meet her demand for some time. In 1933 Judge John M. Woosley issued his historic decision that freed Ulysses for publication in America. “Ulysses,” wrote the Judge, “has a rather strong draft, somewhat emetic, but not aphrodisiac.” Immediately, Random House announced that it was publishing Joyce's book.

No doubt plans for the American edition had been made with a certain amount of subterfuge on Joyce's part. While negotiations were going on, Miss Beach had only the barest hints of what was happening. At one point when Joyce inquired what she would ask for her rights to Ulysses she had facetiously replied “twenty-five thousand dollars.” There had also been the unexpected and prolonged visitation of a Joyce emissary, a poet she had long revered, who had spent several days insisting that Joyce's interests had to be understood and advanced and that by remaining his publisher she might be “standing in the way” of his interests and, further, that Joyce's makeshift contract with her was probably worthless. If the object was to convince Miss Beach that any hold she might have thought she had on Joyce was indeed indefinite, if it existed at all, the poet's efforts succeeded. Soon afterward she telephoned Joyce and announced she wanted to be free of the whole situation. He could dispose of Ulysses at whatever terms and amount he wanted. The decision, of course, meant she was cutting herself off from the main source of her income. Joyce had not, and would not, pay her anything for the rights she held to his work. The separation, following a decade of the most arduous and rewarding collaboration, could hardly be accepted resignedly, although Miss Beach tried. While confessing she “was not as a rule very grasping,” she could not help “feeling the injustice of taking over without any compensation a work … [she] had been nursing at least as many years as Joyce had spent writing it.” It was a plaint in which an author who had denounced so vehemently those responsible for the wholesale thievery of his property might have found some justification.

Although Shakespeare and Company survived the thirties,² barely, and gallantly remained open even after the Germans occupied Paris and only closed then under threat of confiscation, no period of its history surpassed the remarkable decade that followed the publication of Ulysses. Most of Miss Beach's memoir is a reflection of those bountiful years from 1921 to 1932, the years when her shop served as a club, seminar room, lending library, and bookstore for the legions of writers and artists then converging on Paris, and the years when she, in the words of André Chamson, “carried pollen like a bee,” cross-fertilizing “her” writers, and doing more “to link England, the United States, Ireland and France than four great ambassadors combined.” All the most talented appear in her book. In addition to the prodigious portrait of Joyce and the marvelously illuminating sketches of Hemingway, Adrienne Monnier, Robert McAlmon, and George Antheil, her memoir abounds with incisive cameo-portraits of the many who wandered and worked in the Odéon neighborhood: Bryher, quietly observant, a “shy young English girl in a tailor-made suit”; Janet Flanner, “brilliant,” a “great worker” who “always found time to look after people”; Djuna Barnes, “so charming, so Irish, and so gifted”; Thornton Wilder, “rather shy and a little like a young curate”; Mary Butts, “a personality … with red cheeks and red hair” whose life turned tragic; Marsden Hartley, “attractive, though perhaps a little melancholy”; F. Scott Fitzgerald, “blue eyes and good looks,” a “wild recklessness,” and a “fallen-angel fascination”; Mina Loy, a poet more beautiful than her beautiful daughters; André Chamson, “steady, studious, versatile, level-headed”; Jean Prévost, “erratic, temperamental, moody”; Stuart Gilbert, a “delightfully humorous, witty, paradoxical, rather cynical, extremely kind Englishman”; Ada and Archibald MacLeish, talented and considerate; André Gide, “kind-hearted” but impatient with any who “tried to pin him down”; Paul Valéry, “a brilliant talker,” kind, “completely unaffected”; Valéry Larbaud, a charming man, with large beautiful eyes, who “was proud of his feet.” Dozens more appear fleetingly: Allen Tate, Nancy Cunard, Louis Bromfield, Marc Allégret, Jules Romains, Natalie Clifford Barney, Anais Nin, Katherine Anne Porter, Eugene and Maris Jolas, Thomas Wolfe, Berenice Abbott and Man Ray (the unofficial photographers for Shakespeare and Company), Georges Duhamel, Kay Boyle, John Dos Passos, Nathan Asch, Jean Schlumberger, Léon-Paul Fargue, Jo Davidson, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Walsh, Ford Madox Ford, Virgil Thomson, George Moore, Arthur Symons, Ken Sato, Robert Sage, Ethel Moorhead, and Elliot Paul.

Time not spent doing the multitudinous Joycean chores was lavished on her friends and customers. “I wasn't someone,” she said, “who received certain days, worried to death if so-and-so wasn't coming, counting great names. My customers were in and out, coming usually on business. Their books were out. … They had to meet a transatlantic ship. Readers were prowling in the underbrush. My role was keeping house open for the writing professionals, bringing them in contact with each other and readers, keeping them peaceful if possible, giving them opportunities to appear in magazines or books, translating into French, etc.—someone whose interest in them was that of a mother of a family.” With the French, who comprised nearly half her customers, she enjoyed being pedagogical, introducing them to new writes and bringing them “up to date” with a lecture on American literature. As for the Americans, whose attitude was of revolt, not of submission or resignation, and whose influence prevented a precious tone from pervading the atmosphere, there were always introductions to arrange, especially now with Joyce, books to order and recommend, and favors (too many) to grant. Among those favors she generally allowed were requests for small loans or for the return of subscription card deposits, practices which made the shop at times seem more like a “left bank” than a bookshop. Spare minutes she used to catch up on commercial chores—selling, distributing, ordering, and filling orders, and trying to keep accounts with dealers in England and America straight (in New York the Gotham Book Mart, Holliday Book Shop, and Harry Marks; in Chicago the Powers Bookstore and A. Krock; in London the Poetry Bookshop), to and from which flowed an unbroken stream of orders. Besides stocking the publications of major houses in both countries, she carried those of small private presses like Nonesuch, Orioli, Cresset, Fanfrolico, Hogarth, and Egoist as well as the books turned out by little presses in Paris. Accounts—of necessity kept in three currencies (American, French, and English)—always remained the “most puzzling [of] occupations,” wasteful of time, and almost as exasperating as trying to fit some customers with books, like the one who returned each year to ask for a copy of Raphael's Ephemerides. The always prosperous and popular circulating library that filled three or four large bookcases demanded attention, too. Subscribers, usually averaging around a hundred, many of them Sorbonne students, had to be issued cards (seven francs—fifty cents—per month), and delinquents, like Natalie Clifford Barney and Joyce, had to be notified when they failed to return a book on time. Miss Beach's method of retrieving overdue books was to send delinquent borrowers a card showing a distraught Shakespeare tearing out his hair and weeping oversized tears.

With so many demands competing for her time, what Miss Beach could hardly begin to contemplate was taking on any additional publications. Yet as news of her publishing success spread beyond Paris, even before Ulysses had been distributed, writers started plying her with requests to publish their books. A lady author living in Peking, determined to prove to English publishers who had refused her book that she could “live without them,” offered to pay all expenses if Miss Beach would publish her study exposing conditions in North India. An English playwright, admitting he had not followed Shaw's advice to send his manuscript to Ezra Pound for submission to Miss Beach, hoped she would consent to print privately, or publish, at least five hundred to a thousand copies of his play. Requests of this sort were easily refused, but others made in person were more difficult, and barely a day passed without another visitor turning up with a manuscript. “I think they let me read [their manuscripts] because I never criticized them,” she once said, and modestly added, “They had too much talent for me to pass judgment on anything they wrote.” When D. H. Lawrence called on Miss Beach not long before his death to ask if she would consider publishing an edition of his much-pirated Lady Chatterley's Lover, difficult as it was to say no, she did, offering explanations she correctly feared would not impress him. Lawrence had his own publishers and he had people to take care of him. Joyce, on the other hand, had no one. In any case, she did not really like Lawrence's work. “It was all preaching, preaching.” Just the same it was “hard to refuse such a man,” and later she admitted that if he had proposed his poems, which she liked, she probably could “not have resisted him.” No explanations, however, softened her refusal to a “blonde lady, aggressively partisan,” who one day marched into the shop brandishing a “prospectus announcing the ‘forthcoming Memoirs of Aleister Crowley’” under the imprint of Shakespeare and Company, as well as the “draft of a contract” stating that Crowley would receive fifty percent of the earnings! More firmness was needed, though, to turn down a tantalizingly immodest proposal made by the major domo of Maxim's, who graciously offered her the first right to his memoirs, the appearance of which, he prophesied—after injecting a reminder that he had “known everybody who was anybody in his time”—would be a literary sensation rivaling and perhaps even surpassing the publication of Ulysses. (Miss Beach later commented on the major domo's offer: “I thought it was too small a frame at Shakespeare and Company for such a picture, and that anything so important should be handled by a great firm. I suggested Messrs. Macmillan.”) The only book Miss Beach said she might have published probably did not exist at the time it was proposed. Someone representing Tallulah Bankhead offered her the memoirs of the actress, but according to Miss Beach's reckoning, Miss Bankhead “could hardly have been more than a child at the date of that letter.”

When she refused Lady Chatterley's Lover Miss Beach told Lawrence she “did not want to get the name as a publisher of erotica.” Although she stopped short of saying his novel might revive the mistaken impression that many had derived from the publication of Ulysses—that she intended to make erotic books a specialty—she certainly implied as much. That misconception, first dramatically publicized in the London Sporting News (April 1, 1922) under the sensational title “The Scandal of Ulysses,” had brought her a cascade of manuscripts “intricate with perversion—love children”—by a flock of writers who, having seen the success of Ulysses, assumed Miss Beach would be interested in taking on more books at least as erotic as Joyce's (“a nice career for a minister's daughter”). It seemed at times that all that was unpublished in Anglo-Saxon countries headed for the rue de l'Odéon. “You might have thought,” she complained, “I was offering a prize for the lewdest book of the month.” Finally, “I got rather sore about this nuisance. I wondered what I had ever done to deserve it.” In Ulysses the “erotic has its place and certainly part of the importance of the book is due to the way Joyce dealt with the subject. He was the great purifier who rid us of the naughty word and the immoral situation and brought everything out in the good old English language and our poor funny human nature. But Joyce spent seven years on Ulysses. He thought it would interest very few readers and he never counted on any financial returns from it. This was the contrary with every one of the authors who turned up with a proposition. They looked on it as an easy way to make money.”

Of those who came to Shakespeare and Company ready to read passages from books they believed might titillate Miss Beach and make money, no one quite surpassed the histrionics employed by Frank Harris, who, after ceremoniously drawing up to the shop in a “barouche and pair hired for the occasion,” deposited a huge parcel containing a manuscript which, he assured her, “went much further than Joyce.” Harris' complaint was that the author of Ulysses “was just another of those Thomas Hardys who never get anywhere near a woman.” Even in the Penelope episode Joyce had not managed to get “inside a woman.” His (Harris') book “showed how it was done.” In spite of the spirited reading that doubtless followed that claim (Harris spent the entire afternoon at the shop), Miss Beach remained unenthusiastic. The best she could do was to suggest he try Jack Kahane, a friend and publisher of Obelisk books, who was always looking for “hot books.” Harris did not leave without gaining something, however. Miss Beach agreed to sell My Life and Loves, but not promote it. Nonetheless, from time to time mysterious people would come by her shop for bundles of Harris' book to sell in England where it had been banned.

What Miss Beach did not tell Lawrence, but what must have been apparent, was that she had made up her mind to be a “one-book publisher.” A more accurate description would be a one-author publisher, for in 1927 she had agreed to bring out Joyce's slender volume of poetry Pomes Penyeach, and in 1929 had overseen the production of the first apologia of Finnegans Wake, which appeared under the inflated title of Our Exagmination round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. In the final year of the decade Ulysses was going into its tenth edition and still selling steadily, with no likelihood of either an American or British edition appearing soon. It was a sound decision. Having rescued and succored Joyce, one of Shakespeare's company, whom she and a multitude of admirers revered as the “greatest writer” of the time, Miss Beach had come to occupy the place of a high priestess among Joyce cultists. No book of this century aroused more discussion or more controversy than Ulysses, most of which redounded to her credit. That she could ever again publish a book of the same magnitude was neither likely nor desirable. Besides, she once said when asked why she had not published others, “nobody else seemed interesting enough to me.”

Ulysses was her trial, her torture, and finally her triumph. It brought Shakespeare and Company a second celebrity, a living bard, who turned the shop into a literary shrine. It burdened our literature with a work of extraordinary versatility. It canonized Sylvia Beach. To those fitfully wondering whether to try and follow in her footsteps she was the object of envious glances and acclaim. What she had accomplished they had only dreamed of doing and, remarkably, she had done it despite a shaky budget and with little knowledge of what the effort would entail. She succeeded partly because she did not know what she could not or should not do. To contend, however, that success was practically guaranteed, given the prepublication publicity Ulysses received, is to suggest that the publisher was endowed with a degree of prescience she could not have had prior to February 1922. Even Joyce gloomily predicted dismal sales for his book. Sylvia Beach had what every publisher needs—intuition—and on that quality rested her lasting belief in Joyce and in the greatness of Ulysses.

Notes

1. Both Miss Beach and Joyce have contributed to the confusion that still surrounds the matter of whether it was Miss Beach who first proposed to Joyce that she publish Ulysses, or whether it was Joyce himself who first asked her to do it. In a letter he wrote to Harriet Weaver at the time Joyce mentioned that he had “arranged for a Paris publication to replace the American one.” Later in the same letter, however, he qualified his statement, saying that he had “accepted a proposal” made him by Shakespeare and Company “at the instance of Mr. Valery Larbaud.” According to Miss Beach, Larbaud had nothing to do with the transaction; in fact, he became interested in Joyce's work only around the time Ulysses went to press. Miss Beach is also the source of two conflicting versions. In one of the several drafts of Shakespeare and Company, her memoir, she wrote: “I accepted with enthusiasm Joyce's suggestion that I publish his book. I felt that my little bookshop was immensely honored.” In later drafts, however, and of course in her published memoir, she stated that it was she who asked Joyce to let Shakespeare and Company publish Ulysses.

2. Besides losing Ulysses to Random House, by the middle thirties Miss Beach had started to feel the effects of the Depression which, among other things, had reduced the number of Americans in Europe to a fraction of what it had been a few years before. In 1936 she had reached a low point and let it be known that Shakespeare and Company would probably have to close. Determined that it should not, a group of friends and writers hastily formed Les Amis de Shakespeare and Company and organized monthly readings by Eliot, Gide, Valéry, and Hemingway which brought in enough money to keep the shop operating.