SOURCE: Beach, Sylvia, and Jackson Mathews. “Conversation with Sylvia Beach & Company.” Kenyon Review 22, no. 1 (winter 1960): 137-50.

[In the following interview with Beach, Mathews discusses both her memoir Shakespeare and Company as well as other events and literary personalities that had a connection with Beach's bookshop in Paris.]

Shakespeare and Company is a record of the people and their doings that made Miss Beach's bookshop in Paris the literary headquarters of the twenties. Above all, it is a personal record. When you have read it, you will find a sensitive and moving image of James Joyce in your memory. Adrienne Monnier will be there too. And Hemingway. And some others. And then, clearest of all, though she never says much about herself: Sylvia Beach.

She is alive and present in the character of her remarks. The reviews of her book have shown, by quoting so many of them, how irresistible, rememberable they are. I have often heard her say that there was a great deal more she had wanted to tell, especially about the French writers who helped to turn her bookshop into a foyer, a fiery center. Why not invite her to spend an afternoon telling us (and a tape recorder) some of the things she left out?

Miss Margaret Marshall, who had her own literary headquarters at The Nation for a good many years, and who is Miss Beach's editor, agreed to join us.

Others present: at first, Marthiel Mathews, Jackson Mathews, Pomme, a poodle; and later, Isabella Gardner and Allen Tate.

[Sylvia Beach]: I had this woman come into my shop, an English poetess. Let's see, what was her name? It began with W. Wick … Wickham, Anna Wickham—a good poetess. She went around with some people in Montparnasse who taught her tricks. She came into my shop one day when I was looking probably better than usual, full of pep, and she said, “O how tired you look, you're ill!” I said, “Not at all, not at all.” So out she went, and presently I had a fever, which I really had. I got over that, it took me only two days. Then she came back, and she said, “How are you?” I said, “I'm all right now.” And she said, “Thank God!” and she went down on her knees and kissed my hand. Old Anna Wickham. Always full of whiskey. She thought she'd killed me, you know. She probably wanted to for some reason. I didn't sell enough of her poetry, maybe.

[Marthiel Mathews]: She ought to have made her own spells for selling her poems.

Adrienne Monnier, too, was very superstitious, you know. Believed in old spells.

[Jackson Mathews]: Hers came from the Savoy country, I suppose.

The Savoie, that's it. They are very superstitious there. It's those long winter evenings.

[J. Mathews]: I'd like to hear more about Adrienne.

I didn't really say in my book what I wanted to about Adrienne Monnier. She was such an interesting person that I was afraid she'd take over the whole show.

[M. Mathews]: When you first knew her, did she dress as she did when we saw her later, in her peasant full skirt?

She always dressed in this very full skirt, down to her feet. And then she wore a white satin blouse and a kind of waistcoat over it that went in points, here. She was so stout and then of course this very full skirt made her still stouter. It was just splendid for her to augment herself this way.

[Margaret Marshall]: How did she happen to get into the bookshop business, Sylvia? What was her background?

Her father was a postman and traveled on the railways two days a week. He was in the worst wreck they ever had on the railroads, at Melun, and he got an indemnity because he was crippled for life. He gave this indemnity, I believe it was 12,000 francs, to his daughter to open her bookshop. But before that she had worked at the Annales.

[J. Mathews]: Wasn't that the Université des Annalse? A sort of lecture series, wasn't it? I know about it because Valéry used to lecture there. That's where he had his greatest public successes in Paris.

[M. Mathews]: He talked about the dance once there, and Argentina danced to illustrate his talk. Did you see that?

No, I didn't, but it was Adrienne, you know, who first started Valéry lecturing.

[J. Mathews]: He gave his first talk in her shop, didn't he? What did he talk about?

He talked about Edgar Allen Poe's Eureka.

[J. Mathews]: That's right. And that talk became the essay on Eureka.

But to come back to Adrienne. She went to the Mercure de France from the Annales because the Annales was such an official milieu and all her favorite writers were not there. Valéry wasn't, at that early time, you know. She went to the Mercure and asked them if they couldn't give her a job sweeping out the place. That's the way she was launched. She had a real vocation. And when her father gave her the money, she opened her bookshop.

[J. Mathews]: When was that, Sylvia? I've never quite known.

In 1915, in the middle of the war. She took an apartment when everybody else was leaving Paris. There were all the apartments in the world to be had but nobody wanted them. She took an apartment in the Rue de l'Odéon and she took this bookshop on the other side of the street.

[J. Mathews]: Is that the apartment we lived in later, at No. 18?

That's the one. And where Valéry used to come many a time for supper and lunch, where he read his Mon Faust the first time. And Joyce read Anna Livia Plurabelle there too.

[J. Mathews]: While we are reminiscing about that apartment, I want to remind you of that funny drawing by Scott Fitzgerald in your book.

Yes, he came there to meet Joyce.

[J. Mathews]: Doesn't he call that drawing “The Festival of St. James?” With you and Adrienne at each end of the table as mermaids, and “St. James” on your right and Scott Fitzgerald kneeling before him.

Yes, Joyce sitting there with a halo and Scott kneeling at his feet.

[J. Mathews]: I like very much to remember that that was our dining room.

And you would want to know too another person who came to that dining room. That was St. John Perse, but he wouldn't like me to say anything about him. Except what a great poet he was, and that we knew. But we always made fun of our poets, you know, and we knew he was one of the great ones.

[J. Mathews]: Made fun of them in just the right way.

Well, they all loved coming to Adrienne's. I lived with Adrienne at that time, you know.

[M. Mathews]: At No. 18? I thought you'd always been at No. 12.

My bookshop was at No. 12, but it was only in 1936 that I went to live above the bookshop, in the rooms I had there. In 1921 when I came to the Rue de l'Odéon I moved to Adrienne's apartment because she said there's no use living in the back room of your shop—as I did at first, and used to have to get up in my pyjamas to open the door for that Sorbonne professor. An awfully early bird. That room had its inconveniences. Léon-Paul Fargue used to look in my back windows. He was so curious to know everything that was going on. If the front shutters were up, as they were at night, then he'd come around to the back in the courtyard where I had a big window, with iron bars. I had my bed right below this window, and I'd see him peering in. He always hoped to see something interesting.

[M. Mathews]: Well, did he?

I'm not going to tell.

[J. Mathews]: Did Claudel ever come around Shakespeare and Company?

Never. Claudel was the one who influenced Adrienne the most. They looked something alike. They might have been brother and sister. I went in once to her shop and there he was sitting beside her table, and I was struck by this resemblance between them. Adrienne was like a sister to him, and he would have done anything for her. She published his work and knew everything of his by heart. There was something akin to her in his mystic and lyrical sense. She loved his work always, and when she started her bookshop, Claudel came immediately and was one of the pillars. Until Joyce came along. The affinity between Claudel and Adrienne stopped I think where this great Catholicism of Claudel's set in. He was becoming more and more Catholic, and Adrienne of course was quite free of all that. She was a Buddhist. She was just as much a mystic as he was. Claudel informed her in a letter that will be published sometime that since she had published that wicked James Joyce … well, I don't know, but what he said amounted to James Joyce being the Devil. I was sitting in Adrienne's bookshop one day and saw Claudel stop and look in the window. Then he crossed himself and hurried on. He had seen Joyce's Ulysses in the window. That to him was the Devil. It was Portrait of the Artist though that offended him. Ulysses, I don't suppose he ever went on to read that.

[J. Mathews]: I wish Allen Tate were here now. What would he say to this story? They are coming after a while, you know, Allen and Isabella.

Well, he'll appreciate that. You know, I never could go in much for Claudel myself. But as I say in my book, I asked Adrienne to help me with Claudel, I needed help. I never needed any with Valéry.

[J. Mathews]: Sylvia, you remind me of my favorite memory of Adrienne Monnier. When I went over to Paris in '51 to get the Valéry edition started, naturally I went around to the Rue de l'Odéon, to Adrienne Monnier's. You were there, and we talked about Valéry. I remember something Adrienne said. You'll tell me whether it rings true. This is the way I remember it: Je prends un peu de Valéry tous les jours. Ça fait du bien.

Ah ha, that's true. You know when she died she was reading a book of Valéry's, and saying his poems to herself. I think it was more Valéry's poetry that appealed to Adrienne than his prose. His philosophy appealed to me. She was always reciting his poetry, knew it by heart, and read it beautifully. At one of those readings in her shop she read Valéry's Palme. She read that beautifully. But his prose, I suppose I was more amused by that than Adrienne was. At least no one could have been more so than I was.

You remember that German officer who came to close my shop, when I wouldn't sell him my last copy of Finnegans Wake? Well, he went rushing out in a great rage. But those boots always made them seem much more enraged than they were, even. You know how Henri Michaux talks about the noise pigeons make as they fly away? Just like boots, he says. The noise of boots. In France, the boots of the Germans were legendary. Whenever anybody had on boots you just let them alone, or else you threw them into the river at night. Boots were Germans.

[J. Mathews]: Henri Michaux, another good French poet. I wish we could get him to come over here. I have tried once or twice, but you know his health won't let him. Wouldn't you like to talk about Michaux?

Yes, let's talk about Michaux. I admire him so much, and think there is nobody like him today.

[J. Mathews]: I know you have done a great deal for his work over here, with your translation of Barbarian in Asia, and other ways too.

Michaux said that he didn't have the health nor the money to travel anymore, but he was going to travel in another way. So he wrote these mescaline books. He discovered this mescaline drug that the Mexicans used once a year to get up a religious fervor, and he was very anxious to try the effects of this on inspiration for a poet. And also to “travel.” He thought that Aldous Huxley's writing on the subject was inadequate, that he hadn't really done anything with the subject, and so he shut himself up and took this mescaline. Had a doctor with him who stayed with him all through the first experiment, with one or two friends, and he went all through this very courageous experience with mescaline where he went really beyond the threshold. You know he really went mad at one point. He lost his head and was going to destroy himself. He took a dose that was supposed to be the maximum, and a little more, and a little more than that, until he took way beyond the allowance. And then when he came out of that he thought that that was enough and he wrote this book called Misérable Miracle. This was a very interesting performance because it was the first time that anyone under the influence of a drug had produced drawings and notes all through. All the time. Usually they note these things afterwards and make drawings afterwards trying to remember, but he made drawings under the influence and at the very last moment, when he was almost incapable. So Misérable Miracle with his illustrations constitutes something unusual as a document, extraordinary, and displays such bravery on the part of the poet. Michaux is a very brave poet anyhow. If you read Plume you'll see what he thinks of a poet's life.

But Michaux then, much to the fear of all of us, started writing a second volume, for he hadn't done everything he wanted to in the first. And began to shut himself up with that. And then the doctor wouldn't stay with him through this, he said he couldn't take the responsibility beyond a certain point. So Michaux went on and took more mescaline, went on and did another volume, L'Infini turbulent, that is equally interesting if not more so, though he went over the same ground somewhat. I'd like very much for the two volumes to come out in English, if they could be combined. Mme. Louise Varèse has done a translation which I think is admirable of the first volume, Misérable Miracle. And the second volume is now being done by Patrick Gregory and I think his is very fine. He has brought out a part of it already in New World Writing. Mme. Varèse has published a part of hers in Evergreen Review.

[J. Mathews]: Sylvia, I don't think you said anything in your book about how the Germans took you off to the internment camp.

Well, I'd gone out to buy some honey. I heard there was some honey at last in a place over by the Madeleine, so I went on my bicycle, with a large bucket. When I came back with my bucket of honey, the concierge came running out looking very pale. The Germans had come for me, and were coming back. So I went upstairs to get ready. They were back right away and hardly gave me time to put my things in a knapsack. The only clothes I had were suitable for camp anyway. The Germans stood there while I was getting ready. They never left you out of their sight. When I got down to the truck there was a chair for me in the back, and sitting in one of the other chairs was my great friend Katherine Dudley. Katherine was dressed as if for the opening of a show, high heeled shoes. She attended all the openings. She was a friend of Picasso and Matisse and all those people. Then we rode around and rode around looking for other Americans. Every time the Germans stopped at a place, we waited while they went in to look. If they came out without anybody we'd all give a cheer. We were taken round and round town until we didn't know where we were, and suddenly found ourselves in the Bois de Boulogne at the zoo. Of all places, we thought, to take these dignified American women. We were taken into a large room that we called the monkey house. There was a great friend of ours who was in the Resistance out at Barbizon. She was there. She ate a boiled potato every night and was beginning to miss that very much. There were people of all kinds in this camp, some we knew and some we didn't, all the different professions. One of my pals at the camp was Miss Sarah Watson. She ran that American student hostel on the Boulevard St. Michel, and she tried to make the camp just like a student hostel. As soon as we were put in this large room, about 200 of us thrown into the same room with cots all around, she was rushing around making the cots more comfortable, or trying to, getting the right people into the right places, making herself another student hostel. It was a model camp. At Vittel, a watering place, a spa. Grand hotels and all that. And then this rather awful hotel they put us Americans in, to serve us right. The Germans gave us nothing to eat at all, a perfectly disgusting soup at noon that we queued up for. It smelled so awful we could hardly bear to take it back to our room, to heat it on our little stove. But we had parcels from the Red Cross and these parcels kept us alive. Once a week we had these delicious things out of the parcels, things we never had in Paris at all. Nescafé and sugar and cocoa and cigarettes and soups. These parcels were a marvel to anybody who had been in Paris where you couldn't get a potato nor salt nor sugar nor coffee. …

[M. Mathews]: When did you leave the camp? Did they let you go?

I was there for about 6 months. And then these people we called “collabos”—we all had friends who were collabos, that is, they were on good terms with the Germans, and I never knew exactly which collabos I knew, but they worked for my release. I had a certificate from my doctor saying I had these terrible headaches, and so I had, and was in the hospital most of the time at camp. So I was released in 6 months and allowed to come back to Paris, with a paper from the German Kommandatur saying I was subject to being taken away again at any time. But I decided instead of being taken away I'd be hidden. I had my telephone taken out so no one could call and say I was to be taken away. Miss Watson told me I could come to the student hostel and sleep in the kitchen on the top floor. In this kitchen the water ran all the time. You couldn't stop the spigot. But I didn't mind at all because it sounded like a millionaire's garden where they pay so much to have something dripping all the time.

(Isabella Gardner and Allen Tate come in.)

[J. Mathews]: I think this occasion calls for a drink, to Isabella and Allen.

Here's to Allen Tate and Isabella, and their marriage. … I have a grudge against you, Allen Tate. When you came and lectured in Paris you never invited me. So I sneaked in, just managed to get into a back seat.

[Allen Tate]: Why, you were right down in the front row. I saw you.

Well, anyhow, it wasn't your fault, you know.

[Tate]: I never invite people to my lectures. I don't think that's proper.

[J. Mathews]: Allen tries to keep people away from his lectures.

[Isabella Gardner]: Out of loyalty.

[J. Mathews]: I was disloyal and went.

Well, anyhow, I wouldn't like missing anything you said or did. Weren't we going to ask Allen Tate if he is a Claudélien?

[J. Mathews]: Yes, we were talking about Claudel and Adrienne Monnier a while ago, and how Claudel's becoming so Catholic had come between him and Adrienne.

He fell out with Adrienne, you know, because she published Joyce. He said that Joyce was an enemy of God.

[Tate]: Isn't that strange.

I thought perhaps you were a Claudélien.

[Tate]: No, I never have been. I haven't read all of him by any means, and haven't looked at him for a long time, over 10 years. I never met him either. You knew him of course, Sylvia?

Well, I've seen him but I couldn't say I knew him. When Adrienne began to publish Joyce, Claudel left the Rue de l'Odéon for good.

[Tate]: That was pretty bad for him to desert an old friend on that account. That would have nothing to do with it.

[M. Mathews]: You don't desert an old friend just because he's the devil.

[Tate]: Or because he's in league with the devil.

That hurt Adrienne very much but she was steadfast. She wouldn't let herself be intimidated. By nobody nor nothin'. Claudel thought the Portrait of the Artist was terrible, it terrified him.

[Tate]: He was more Catholic than the Pope. A lot of Catholic theologians are beginning to come around to Joyce.

The Catholics liked Joyce. They never put his books on the Index.

[J. Mathews]: Sylvia says that Claudel came by Adrienne's shop once, and when he saw a volume of Ulysses in the window, he crossed himself and hurried on.

Now Paul Valéry was too intelligent a man to be affected by anything like that. He always said he didn't understand much about Joyce but he never thought of opposing him. Valéry wouldn't have had any jealous feelings anyway. He was quite above that.

[J. Mathews]: But neither would he ever have read a line of Joyce.

No, I don't think he ever read him at all. But he encouraged him every chance he got, just as Gide did. The very fact that Adrienne and I published Joyce, that was enough for Valéry.

[J. Mathews]: I remember the famous luncheon you gave for Valéry and Joyce, that photograph in your apartment, of Joyce and Valéry sitting side by side, you standing behind Joyce, and Adrienne behind Valéry.

[Marshall]: Did Joyce speak French well?

Joyce spoke French beautifully, yes.

[Tate]: He spoke Italian perfectly, too.

Perfectly. And German.

[Gardner]: Did his wife speak any language except English?

She spoke Italian as well as English. They spoke Italian at home. They lived in Trieste, you know, for many years. That's where Joyce picked up low Greek, from the sailors in Trieste. The Joyce family spoke Italian always at home. So when they came to Paris they all spoke Italian together. The children called their father Babbo. Joyce was called Babbo.

[M. Mathews]: Didn't Mrs. Joyce have a wonderful name? Nora Barnacle.

Joyce worked that into his Finnegans Wake, you know. The barnacle and all that … there's a great deal about barnacles.

[M. Mathews]: You say in your book that you knew Joyce's writing already when you met him. When did you read him first?

Portrait of the Artist came out first you know, and I read that in Princeton. I read everything of his I could get hold of. Ulysses was coming out in The Little Review, and there was Dubliners. But I read Portrait of the Artist first.

[Marshall]: Do you remember where you got Portrait. Did you buy it in a bookstore in Princeton?

I don't know. You can never tell how a booklover, how a bookworm gets hold of a book. They simply make for … this diet of theirs. … At Princeton it's sort of mysterious getting hold of anything like that. It's a University town, you know.

[J. Mathews]: Now that the Tates have left us, I think you should hold the floor, Margaret.

I think you and Margaret should discuss something hotly together.

[Marshall]: Perhaps we should talk about Sylvia.

[J. Mathews]: Let's do talk about Sylvia, all of us.

I think we'd better not let Margaret get started. Think of having all that recorded.

[J. Mathews]: Oh yes, I think we should let the editor turn loose on this author, and see what she has to tell.

All right, go ahead, Margaret. You have an angle on me, I guess, that nobody else has.

[Marshall]: One of the most interesting things about Sylvia is that she says she can't write.

I've been told so Margaret. One of the criticisms of my book that interested me most was the one that said, “It's strange that a woman who has lived among such fine writers never learned how to write, herself.” That's splendid. I never considered myself a writer at all, I don't have to say so even. I am just telling … it's the chronicle of my bookshop, that's all.

[Marshall]: What delights me about Sylvia's book is that, all the way through, you hear the sound of her voice. You are never conscious of the apparatus of writing. This is Sylvia speaking, and her talk, even about serious things, is light and bright and warm. That is the real charm of her book.

[J. Mathews]: Her voice does come through, all right.

[Marshall]: Sylvia has a power of perception, she goes right to the point. It's a remarkable quality … and I'm going to talk about her now as if she weren't here.

[J. Mathews]: Sylvia, you'll just have to sit and take it.

[Marshall]: It's much more than literary taste she has. It goes much deeper than that. It's a feeling that comes right from her roots, about what is good, what is genuine, that's the word I really want. She has a sense for the genuine, in everything, that to me is extraordinary.

[J. Mathews]: It's one of her great qualities. But Sylvia, you can take that handkerchief off your face. You don't need to go into mourning just because you're being talked about. I'm afraid you'll have to be patient for a while—I want to say something too. You know, at your party the other evening, Miss Marianne Moore made a fine remark. I thought you might like to hear it.

I'd love to hear it. I can hear these things without paying much attention because I consider that they just come from the kindness of people's hearts.

[J. Mathews]: Miss Moore had in mind the remark you've made so often about not being a writer. She said, “The strategy Sylvia uses of not being a writer is so effective because of course she is a writer.”

That was very nice of Marianne Moore. But don't you think she's a kind person?

[J. Mathews]: Why, she's quite right, that's all. The proof is the way your voice comes through. This is the voice of a writer. Your voice is perfectly intact in the book, and carries beautifully.

Well, I think that's a slight mistake. I think we can say that I have a chatty style. Pomme agrees with me. That's what she is saying, barking this way. Let's let Pomme do the talking now. She wants to give me her bone.

[M. Mathews]: She is very fond of you. She has the same sort of perception of people that you have.

[J. Mathews]: Sylvia is trying to shut us up now. But I have something more I want to say about her.

You might say that a dog just barks naturally. I do my barking as naturally as I can.

[Marshall]: You are absolutely right, and that is what is so wonderful.

[J. Mathews]: When Robie Macauley invited me to say something about Sylvia's book, the thing that came to my mind first of all was how Sylvia never separates the writing from the writer. She has a sense that operates on both at once. For a long time now we have been taking writing too seriously, I think, without taking writers seriously enough. The main thing about Sylvia is that she knows how to take writers seriously. She has the gift of knowing how to admire and how to praise—how to give it just the right intimacy and lightness to make the praise really serious. Praise is a difficult art, and not many people in our century have tried it. The great exception of course is in the poems of St. John Perse. But his is a different kind, in a different genre. It's not personal. Sylvia's book is a little classic in the way of taking writers seriously. I think this must account for a great deal in what your bookshop meant to your generation. Your way of talking about Joyce for instance. You don't say much about his writing in a way the critics would approve of—you don't isolate the writing and talk about it in a way that would interest them. But your way of writing about Joyce assumes an understanding, a real passion for his work. You start from there and go on. Your interest begins in the right place—that's clear from what you were saying a while ago. You knew Joyce's writing, had read it in The Little Review, in The Egoist … you had read Portrait of the Artist, Dubliners, you knew Joyce's work thoroughly before you ever met him. And when you met him, the man and the work came together for you, and you worked for Joyce the writer with the same sort of passion you had for his work, without making a difference between them. They were one and the same for you. That is how Joyce comes alive in your book in a way he couldn't possibly exist anywhere else. The other writers too who came around your shop I am sure felt this. They felt that you brought them alive somehow by the way you treated them. You gave them a sense of themselves as writers that they didn't feel or find anywhere else. And this, I think, is what created the literary center you had there in Paris. It was a unique thing, it will simply never be repeated.

I feel very much touched by such praise, from both of you. I can't believe it, of course, but I'll be so set up over it there'll be no living with me. I'll go around now as an author. I'll probably buttonhole T. S. Eliot, walk right up to him.