[In the following essay, Flanner examines Beach's contributions as a publisher as well as her own acquaintance with Beach as she worked to publish Ulysses.]

In the evolution of literature the book publisher has undeniably been the second main essential. Yet individually he has rarely been famed as this necessary major element connected with the appearance of a new great book or even much thanked by its readers. He has been literature's common carrier, like a donkey, with the authors and occasionally their weight of genius loaded on his back. As the original publisher of Ulysses, the late Miss Sylvia Beach escaped one or two of these constrictive categories. She became famous for having published only this one enormous magna opus of James Joyce, so difficult to read and fathom that readers and many critics had at first to take their time about it to appreciate it. At the beginning she was mostly thanked merely by the very commotion it increasingly provoked in the whole western literary world of the opening Nineteen Twenties. Then as the years proceeded, for her service to literature she was thanked in person by literally the thousands of tourists and readers and writers from both sides of the Atlantic who came to her little Shakespeare bookshop in the rue de l'Odéon, which had become an incalculably large radiating center of literary influence and illumination over which she modestly presided, as small in her person as in her premises,—adolescent in her size, with a schoolgirl cut of bobbed hair and white low collars, and economical steelrimmed glasses. Where she did not escape the publisher's fate was as the beast of burden struggling beneath the crushing load of a singular author's genius and egotisms, heavy as stones or marble in the case of the Dubliner Joyce. There is no record of any other great writer of English prose in our time inhabited by so monumental a personality as he possessed or with a character so deeply inscribed and carved by his own ego. He was like a thin dapper granite column set up in his own honor.

A part of her fame came from her being an amateur woman publisher with the courage to publish so daring a modern masculine classic as Ulysses. All of Joyce's gratitude, largely unexpressed, should have been addressed to her as a woman. For the patience she gave to him was female, was even quasi maternal in relation to his book. In one of those British obituaries so often remarkable for their mixture of justice, candor and dry humor, Mr. Darsie Gillie, the Paris correspondent of the Guardian wrote after her death last year to signal her as “a woman who has left a mark on literature that has very few parallels. That Ulysses became the sort of book it is is largely due to her, for it was she in this, her one publishing venture, who decided to allow Joyce an indefinite right to correct his proofs. It was in the exercise of this right that the peculiarities of Joyce's prose reached their novel flowering. Sylvia Beach was brave to risk the publication of this strange book so soon after opening her bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, and with her slender means, but she was still braver to give Joyce this incomparable freedom for expanding and entangling his sentences.”

She was a sufferer from migraine headaches and her eyesight was not strong. The seemingly endless entanglements of his inter-written or rewritten or newly written sentences on his Ulysses page proofs sent from the Dijon printer were a tiring trial even to that loyal volunteer company of her friends and his admirers—a handful of Americans, English and bilingual literary French—who struggled to decipher his cryptic handwriting as his own sight worsened and was not redeemed by surgery. For Sylvia the never-ceasing proof-reading was a nightmare. But the strain of responsibility for the welter of his scrawled additional phrases had to be hers alone, as the swelling book of genius progressed into gigantism. The two years of labor and of collaboration, of financial worries and of eye troubles shared by the author and publisher until the book was finally printed, were probably sustained by the ideal formality of their relations. In his notes to her he invariably wrote to her as Miss Beach and in conversation she always addressed him as Mr. Joyce. Even the irrepressive Ernest Hemingway did not call him by his first name; apparently the outstanding Left Bank exception to this respectful practice was the gifted and intrepid Djuna Barnes, who feared no man. She called Mr. Joyce Jim.

Sylvia's forebears had included nine Presbyterian ministers, counting her father, and her mother was born in India where her own father was a medical Protestant missionary. Sylvia had inherited morality and you could feel it in her and actually enjoy it, too, in her bookshop, which she dominated with her cheerfulness, her trust in other human beings and her own trustworthiness for good things, like generosity, sympathy, integrity, humor, kind acts and an invariably polite démodé vocabulary. She was no renegade. A coarsening of the American language, spoken and written, was just coming in with the Nineteen Twenties as a form of realism following world war one, as a form of rebellion, too, against our Puritanism, our hypocrisy, against Prohibition, against our anti-hedonism generally. By a coincidence in expatriation, a half-dozen of what turned out to be indubitably the most talented young American writers—Hemingway, Dos Passos and Fitzgerald were the leaders—were all collected on the Paris Left Bank. Their talent was like a form of colonial energy that had come back to Europe in the brains of these few expatriate writing outlanders. They all used Sylvia's bookshop as their club and parliament. 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 Valéry, Frenchmen whom she knew through her French friend Mademoiselle Adrienne Monnier, who ran Les Amis des Livres bookshop across the street. Sylvia had a vigorous clear mind, an excellent memory, a tremendous respect for books as civilizing objects and was a really remarkable librarian. She loved the printed word and books in long rows. She exerted an enormous transatlantic influence without recognizing it.

In 1935 her bookshop and personal finances were at a low ebb. The depression in the U. S. A. had stopped the flow of American tourists to France and many of the American colony living on their incomes in Paris had to go home. Her lending library had few book borrowers and the French could not afford to buy her American books, more costly than French paperback volumes. She had never received, been offered or sought any profit from her original publishing of Ulysses. Early in 1935 she told me with sadness, with grief, that she was going to have to sell some of her treasures like her Joyce manuscripts and Joyce first editions, and asked if I had any prosperous American friends who were collectors and might be interested. Because her coming sale was important if melancholy international news, I suggested that I ought to announce it in the Paris Letter in The New Yorker which I had been writing for many years, optimistically assuring her it would surely attract the eye of some useful bibliophiles because hers would be the first important Joyceiana offered since the famous Quinn sale. Her Joyce items were of course unique, such as her first edition of Ulysses bound in Greek blue morocco, number 2—Joyce had number I—of the de luxe limited edition of one hundred copies printed on handmade Dutch paper, enscribed to her by Joyce, containing in his handwriting a little poem he had written in presentation and bound in the back of the volume his original schema for writing the whole masterpiece. He had also given her a manuscript version of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, consisting of about six hundred pages, all that was left after he had thrown it into the fire in despair at publishers refusals of it. There was, too, the manuscript of Chamber Music from which Joyce had read the poems aloud to the other Irish poet Yeats. There were some odd pamphlets published by Joyce himself including that by Skeffington, murdered in the Irish revolution, and a blasphemous broadside Joyce himself wrote and left on leading Dublin citizens doorstep when he quitted Dublin forever. This last was a great rarity indeed as most the citizens had burned their copies in horror. Her non-Joyce treasures included two original drawings by William Blake and an original manuscript by Walt Whitman, two of her earlier favorite geniuses. To my humiliation no Americans who later attended her sale and made purchases seemed to have been brought there by my Paris Letter announcement, a mortification intensified when Sylvia insisted upon giving me, for my effort at least, a numbered uncut first edition of Ulysses on vergé d'Arches paper, which carried with it an original page of the manuscript which Joyce had overwritten with his typical extra entangling sentences, dealing with the so-called Circe incident. This concerned the music-hall actress Fay Arthur and the “non political concupiscience” caused by “Fay Arthur's revelation of white articles of underclothing while she (Fay Arthur) was in the articles”.

It was not until after the second war, in 1950, when Paris was still chill and expensive, that I decided to sell my Ulysses, which she had given me, for her benefit, without informing her until it was a fait accompli. A Boston bibliophile friend of mine, in France for a visit, had happened to say he wished to give some fine modern book to the Morgan Library, one not already included in their collection, his gift to be made in memory of Miss Belle da Costa Greene, a friend of his during her post as the Library's first director. What would I suggest as a suitable book? I said that if the Library contained no Ulysses I myself could furnish one with a rather special history, which I related to him, which I would cede to him at the going market price for such a rarity, adding optimistically (once more!) that it would probably be around ＄500,—I hoped. It turned out that the current price at this time was exactly ＄100. This still seems to me shockingly little for a first edition of a book which had in 1922 created such a shock that even pirated copies sold for far more. My only satisfaction was that Sylvia accepted the sum, perhaps because it was so niggardly, without demur and was actually delighted that her volume, and in a way mine, would now belong forever to a great and glorious third party, the Pierpont Morgan Library. In consequence the 1950 Report to the Fellows of the Library announced the acquisition of “a first edition of one of the most famous contemporary novels, James Joyce's Ulysses. This volume is a presentation copy from the publisher, Miss Sylvia Beach, and is in mint condition in its original printed wrappers. Accompanying it is an early draft of the manuscript, a portion of the controversial Circe episode.” The card catalogue on the acquisition further noted that it was accompanied by Miss Beach's engraved calling card, pasted on the book's front lining, and bearing her autographed inscription, “For Janet Flanner with Sylvia Beach's love and gratitude”.

She always gave more than she received. Publishing Ulysses was her greatest act of generosity.