Beach, Sylvia (1887–1962)

American bookshop owner and publisher who was at the center of the American and English literary colony in Paris during the 1920s. Name variations: changed her first name to Sylvia in 1901. Born Nancy Woodbridge Beach in Baltimore, Maryland, on March 14, 1887; died in Paris, France, on October 5, 1962; second daughter of Sylvester Woodbridge Beach (an American Presbyterian minister) and Eleanor (Orbison) Beach (who was born in a missionary family in India); educated mainly at home; never married; companion of Adrienne Monnier; no children.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Sylvia Beach owned and ran Shakespeare and Company, a Paris bookshop. The shop became the community center for "lost generation" intellectuals from Britain and America, including James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Stephen Spender, Djuna Barnes, Kay Boyle, Natalie Barney, Mina Loy, Margaret Anderson , and Gertrude Stein , as well as for prominent French writers like Paul Valéry, André Gide, and Paul Claudel. When the vogue for literary exile had passed, Sylvia Beach stayed in France and endured the Second World War under the Nazi occupation.

She was born in Baltimore, christened Nancy, and moved as a child to Bridgeton, New Jersey, where her father Sylvester Woodbridge Beach, D.D., served as Presbyterian minister. Nancy (who changed her name to Sylvia as a teenager) was the second of three sisters, each of whom learned to be independent and grew up to have a career of her own. The youngest, Cyprian , became a French film star during the First World War. Sylvia first went to France in 1902 when her father became minister of an American church in Paris, and she lived there from ages 15 to 17. Next the family took up residence in Princeton, New Jersey, where the Reverend Beach had Princeton president and future U.S. president Woodrow Wilson as a member of his congregation at the First Presbyterian Church. As the girls grew up, their parents were increasingly estranged, and, from 1914 onwards, mother and daughters lived almost all the time in Europe: first Spain and then France. They were in Paris during World War I, and Sylvia, despite a childhood of neurasthenic headaches, uncertainty about her future, and dilettantism, volunteered for an arduous job as a farm worker in Touraine. The 12-hour work days appeared to make her healthier and soon afterwards she found her long sought vocation.

Beach, Cyprian (1893–1951)

Younger sister of Sylvia Beach. Born on April 23, 1893, in New Jersey; died of cancer of the bladder on July 26, 1951; studied music with Jean Alexis Perier; lived with Helen Eddy .

While living in Paris at the Palais Royale with her sister Sylvia, Cyprian Beach studied opera and, unbeknownst to her parents, secretly pursued a film career. She knew early success when she portrayed Belle-Mirette in the French serial Judex, directed by Louis Feuillade. But when mother Eleanor Beach 's marriage and health took a turn for the worse, it was Cyprian who sacrificed her fledgling career and returned home to Princeton to help out.

Monnier, Adrienne (c. 1892–1955)

French bookseller, writer, and publisher who discovered and aided new writers. Born around 1892 (she was five years older than Sylvia Beach); daughter of Clovis Monnier; committed suicide in France on June 19, 1955, a victim of Mènière's syndrome (aural disturbances of the inner ear); elder sister of Marie Monnier; companion of Sylvia Beach.

In 1915, with money awarded her father Clovis for injuries sustained in a railway accident, Adrienne Monnier founded Maison des Amis Livres (The House of the Friends of Books), where she sold works of significant new French writers and lived above her shop. Before this, she had read palms, taught school, and worked as a secretary. Monnier's bookshop was a French literary center, frequented by the likes of André Gide, Jean Schlumberger, Paul Valéry, Jean-Paul Fargue, Erik Satie, Valéry Larbaud, and Jules Romain. Books were sold or rented and readings were held in the back parlor where Mme Monnier was forever hostess. She was also responsible for the French language publication of Ulysses and the costly, short-lived magazine Le Navire d'Argent.

In 1917, Adrienne Monnier met Sylvia Beach . Two years later, when Beach opened her own bookshop, Monnier and Beach became friends, especially after the death of Monnier's business partner Suzanne Bonnière that same year. In 1921, Beach moved her bookstore directly across the street from Monnier's on the Rue de l'Odéon. "The immediate compatibility of these two extraordinary women shopkeepers, opposite numbers in what became a cultural Franco-English language stream flowing down their street, visibly added to its picturesque quality," wrote Janet Flanner in Paris was Yesterday.

Adrienne was mildly spectacular. Buxom as a handsome abbess, she was a placidly eccentric neighborhood figure in a costume she had invented for herself and permanently adopted. It consisted of a full long gray skirt and a sleeveless velveteen waistcoat worn over a white blouse…. [She] looked like some char acter actress from the Théâtre de l'Odéon at the head of their street, who had strolled out from a dress rehearsal in full stage costume.

Soon, Beach moved in with Monnier, and they lived together until 1937. That year, Monnier became involved with the photographer Gisèle Freund , and Beach began to live above her own shop. Monnier and Beach remained lifelong companions, however, and, after Monnier took an overdose of sleeping tablets in 1955 (for nine months, she had complained of maddening noises), Beach wrote: "My loves were Adrienne Monnier and James Joyce and Shakespeare and Company."

Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier had an enormous impact on the cognoscenti of literary Paris. Following his first visit to Paris in 1923, Archibald MacLeish wrote:

Turning up from St. Germain to go home past the bottom of the gardens to the Boulevard St. Michel one kept Shakespeare and Company to starboard and Adrienne Monnier's Amis des Livres to port, and felt, as one rose with the tide toward the theatre, that one had passed the gates of dream…. It was enough for a confused young lawyer in a grand and vivid time to look from one side to the other and say to himself, as the cold came up from the river, Gide was here on Thursday and on Monday Joyce was there.

suggested reading:

Monnier, Adrienne. The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier. Translated by Richard McDougall. Bison Books, 1996.

One of her closest French friends was Adrienne Monnier , who owned a bookshop on the Rue de l'Odéon called the Maison des Amis des Livres, on the west bank of the River Seine. After meeting Monnier, who became her lifelong companion, Beach decided not to return to America, despite her mother's pleading, but to stay on permanently in Europe. At the end of the war, however, she spent six months away from Paris after volunteering with her sister Holly to join a Red Cross mission to Serbia. Sylvia worked as a translator and secretary and found the domineering ways of the Red Cross' male leaders a stimulus to her interest in feminism. Serbia was shattered from years of war and famine, and Beach's experiences there intensified her conviction that war could never be justified, a view she retained until the Second World War forced her to see the legitimacy of forceful resistance to Nazism.

My mother in Princeton got a cable from me, saying simply: 'Opening bookshop in Paris. Please send money,' and she sent me all her savings.

—Sylvia Beach

From Adrienne Monnier, Beach learned the book business and realized, as the exile community swelled after the war, that an English-language bookstore in Paris might be economically viable. With Monnier's encouragement and with a $3,000 check from her mother back in the States, Beach set up shop just around the corner from the Maison des Amis, in 1919, in a building that had previously been a laundry. It doubled as a lending library and setting for public readings, and in the early days Beach slept in a room behind the store to save money. Even so, the shop required further transfusions of cash from her mother and from sister Holly to stay afloat, and always carried the air of a hobby-project as much as a hard-headed business proposition. "Fitting people with books is about as difficult as fitting them with shoes," wrote Beach in her memoirs, and she always took a close personal interest in the lives and tastes of regular customers. To add to the club-like atmosphere, she usually kept the shop open from nine in the morning until midnight.

Janet Flanner , who wrote Paris articles for The New Yorker (founded 1925) and was a close friend, noted that Beach was as "thin as a schoolgirl," and "dressed like one, in a juvenile short skirt and jacket over a white blouse with a big white turndown collar, like one of Colette's young heroines, and a big colored bowknot at the throat." With the help of influential literary friends, her shop quickly prospered, bringing in American and British exiles as well as French literary stars. Certain American writers, particularly Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman, enjoyed a great vogue in France at that time, and the presence of an English language bookstore and literary circle attracted other French authors. In 1926, Beach mounted a Whitman exhibition, backed by a gigantic stars-and-stripes banner left over from Paris' welcome to the American doughboys in 1917. André Gide was one of many writers experimenting with homosexually explicit writing, and he treated Whitman as a homoerotic antecedent. Despite her Presbyterian upbringing, Beach was uncensorious and did not object. Besides, it is fairly certain that she and Monnier were lovers: they spent most weekends together at Monnier's parents' house in the countryside near Chartres cathedral and went away to an old farmhouse in the Savoyan alps every summer.

Beach, Holly (b. 1884)

Older sister of Sylvia Beach. Name variations: Holly Beach Dennis. Born Mary Hollingsworth Morris Beach on June 17, 1884, in New Jersey; eldest daughter of Sylvester Woodbridge Beach (an American Presbyterian minister) and Eleanor (Orbison) Beach; married Frederic James Dennis (d. 1945), on January 21, 1929.

Beach was a gifted writer in her own right but self-effacing: she preferred the reflected glory of her friends to a spotlight of her own. Paris had many attractions for American writers after the First World War. Many often felt a sense of intellectual inferiority to Europe and regarded London and Paris as the centers of the intellectual world. A favorable exchange rate meant that a writer with a small dollar income could live much better in Paris than at home. Prohibition, in effect from 1919, dismayed hard-drinking novelists like Hemingway, as did the morally censorious and politically repressive atmosphere which followed the war. Paris, by contrast, offered an open and tolerant mood. Gertrude Stein, writer, art patron, and friend of Picasso, Braque and Matisse, who had already been living in Paris for 15 years, was among Beach's new customers. With her inseparable companion Alice B. Toklas , Stein often spent time at the shop discussing literature with Sylvia Beach and meeting other exiles. One young American, Stephen Vincent Benet, who was then an aspiring novelist, admired Stein but was afraid to visit her alone, so Beach chaperoned him to Stein's salon. She also befriended Man Ray, the avant-garde photographer, and he made portraits of many of her regular customers, in addition to photographing life at Shakespeare and Company. (Photographer Gisèle Freund also documented the bookstore.) Surviving photographs show groups of literary lights standing before an array of their own portraits, with short, modest Sylvia Beach standing beside them. One features Hemingway with a theatrical-seeming bandage around his head after an accident with a skylight, being smiled upon by Sylvia.

Among Beach's closest literary friends was James Joyce, the Irish novelist. She was his most enthusiastic supporter as he wrote Ulysses, and he reveled in her friendship, often coming to Shakespeare and Company and reading long passages to her aloud. Sections of this revolutionary stream-of-consciousness novel had already appeared in little magazines at the end of the teens and the start of the 1920s, but under Beach's guidance Joyce finally gathered his massive manuscript together for publication. She appealed to all the English and American visitors to her shop to help finance the work since its unconventional style and (for the time) very sexually explicit passages led conventional publishers to fear prosecution for obscenity. While assistants took care of Shakespeare and Company, she then found typesetters in Dijon to assemble the work, who were handicapped by lack of an English speaker among their entire crew. Not surprisingly, in view of this language barrier and in view of the book's 730-page length, with literally tens of thousands of invented words, there were a huge number of typographical errors, repetitions, and omissions. Even so, Joyce was so excited when he saw the proof sheets that he promptly wrote another 90,000 words, which had to be painstakingly (and expensively) inserted into the text. After months of work, the first copies arrived in February 1922, just in time for Joyce's 40th birthday.

British and American censors both labeled Ulysses obscene and seized copies as they entered their countries but enough copies sold in Europe to make Joyce comfortably well-to-do after years of privation. Until then, he had been a shameless scrounger, hitting up everyone he knew for loans which he never repaid and sometimes even taking money from the till at Shakespeare and Company, leaving little IOUs for Sylvia. Now he began to spend money on himself, his family, and friends with reckless abandon. "Joyce's tips were famous," she wrote. "The waiters, the boy who fetched him a taxi, all those who served him, must have retired with a fortune." With Joyce, she was always forgiving, convinced that he was a genius who must be indulged and exempted from the normal rules of conduct. She enjoyed his annual birthday parties, which were also anniversaries of Ulysses, and liked to hear him, half-drunk, singing Irish songs while accompanying himself at the piano. She was indignant when pirate publishers, in Europe and America, began reprinting unauthorized versions of Joyce's books, and all the more indignant by the 1930s when she began to discover translations in other languages, all made without his consent. He in turn was annoyed when Sylvia Beach left Paris for her annual vacations in the mountains. He wanted her nearby at all times and bombarded her with plaintive letters and telegrams, urging her to cut short her holidays and come back to Shakespeare and Company. She remained firm but tolerant and even forgave him when he declined to offer her any of the $45,000 he was given for Ulysses once it was cleared for unexpurgated publication in America by Random House.

In addition to seeing Ulysses into print, Beach helped promote the many little magazines which her friends started in the 1920s, including Ford Madox Ford's Transatlantic Review, Ernest Walsh's The Quarter, and Arthur Moss' Gargoyle, which introduced the work of Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot to both French and American audiences. Eugene Jolas' little magazine transition was a platform for the early publication of James Joyce's "Work in Progress," the book which, on its completion, became Finnegan's Wake. Meanwhile Adrienne Monnier was promoting a parallel group of French literary magazines from her own store nearby.

In the 1930s, the decade of the Great Depression, many of the American authors in Paris went home but Sylvia Beach was resolved to stay. "I missed them," she wrote, "and I missed the fun of discovery and the little reviews and the little publishing houses. It had been pleasanter emerging from a war than going toward another one." But she was consoled by the continued presence of Joyce and Hemingway, and by the arrival of Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Katherine Anne Porter , Thomas Wolfe, and other literary newcomers. The shop itself, first mentioned in the American press in the early 1920s when it had the flavor of a risqué and bohemian setting, was a famous stop for all American visitors to Paris by 1935. Even so, the Depression cut deeply into the profits of what had always been a shaky business. Bankruptcy was imminent in 1936, prompting André Gide to gather a group of prominent French admirers to underwrite a loan. Their way of doing it was to pay 200 francs each to join a club whose members met at the shop once each month to listen to a public reading of an unpublished work by a

prominent member. Gide led the way, followed by Paul Valéry and André Maurois. Among the English supporters of the bail-out were T.S. Eliot, Bryher , Stephen Spender, and even Hemingway, who hated reading aloud but made an exception for his old friend. Their collective help to their longtime friend, publisher, and patron enabled her to survive the crisis.

The onset of World War II led to a much greater exodus of Americans than the onset of the Great Depression, and the American embassy urged Sylvia Beach to leave too, offering to make all the arrangements for her. She declined the offer and was still working in her shop when the German army swept into Paris in June 1940. As other entertainments became scarce, books became more attractive than ever, and Beach now had a large, albeit mainly French, clientele. She risked persecution by hiring as her assistant Françoise Bernheim , a Jewish student who had been expelled from the Sorbonne because of her race. For the next two years, America was a neutral power in the war, but, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Germany and the U.S. declared war on each other. Beach now saw the writing on the wall. Rather than letting her stock be seized, as a German army officer threatened, she hid as much of it as she could manage, then abandoned the shop. For a while, she was permitted to stay in Paris, so long as she agreed to register each week as an enemy alien. But in August 1942, she was arrested and taken off to an internment camp at Vittel in Eastern France, where she passed the time in a converted hospital with dozens of other American and British women internees. She kept busy as unofficial postmistress and assistant to a group of nursing nuns. Released after six months, Beach returned to Paris, where she was allowed to live out the rest of the occupation quietly, though she was in touch with the literary members of the French Resistance.

American, French, and British soldiers liberated Paris in August 1944, and the next day her old friend Hemingway returned. Beach was now 58 years old and a celebrity. Life magazine ran a story about her years in occupied France and about the dramatic "rescue" of her books when she hosted a party for her literary friends in the apartment where they had been stored. Despite the urging of T.S. Eliot, Louis Aragon, Paul Valéry, and other old friends, she said she was now too old and frail to restart the business. But as ever she stayed in Paris with Adrienne Monnier, now helping the Red Cross and the American library, translating modern French literature into English, and befriending a new literary generation, including the rising star of French feminism, Simone de Beauvoir , and the African-American novelist Richard Wright.

In 1956, Beach published her memories of Joyce. Three years later, she issued a book of her own memoirs, Shakespeare and Company, a lively conversational account of the shop during the interwar years. She had a large collection of James Joyce's first editions, manuscripts and memorabilia, and as Joyce's reputation continued to grow—though he had died in 1940—Beach was approached by dozens of Joyce scholars for access to her collection. The greatest sorrow of her last years was the death of Adrienne Monnier in 1955, who committed suicide prompted by delusions of continuous deafening noise, a side effect from Mènière's syndrome (aural disturbances of the inner ear). For Sylvia, writes Noel Fitch, "personal happiness went with the death of Adrienne, who for thirty-eight years had been a sister, lover, mother, and mentor." Beach herself died, widely admired and honored for her life's work, in 1962, and after a Paris funeral, her ashes were sent for burial in Princeton.

sources:

Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. NY: Harcourt Brace, 1959.

Ellman, Richard. James Joyce. NY: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Fitch, Noel Riley. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation. NY: Norton, 1983.

Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. NY: Scribner, 1964.

collections:

Sylvia Beach Papers, Princeton University Library, Princeton, New Jersey; James Joyce Collection, State University of New York, Buffalo, Lockwood Memorial Library.

Patrick Allitt , Professor of History, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia