The Letters of Sylvia Beach (review)

Woody Allen’s recent film, Midnight in Paris, has the dual effect of demonstrating that the legend of 1920s expatriate Paris still looms large in the cultural imagination while chastening lost generation aficionados for the roseate perspective of contemporary nostalgia. The Letters of Sylvia Beach achieves something similar, even if its approach is more historical and less fantastical. Sylvia Beach owned and ran the bookshop (or “bookhop,” as the window read when the store opened in 1919), English-language lending library, and literary gathering place Shakespeare and Company.¹ Beach was also the first publisher of Ulysses in book form. She orchestrated the smuggling of copies of the banned novel into America, defended Ulysses against unscrupulous publishers of inferior editions, and supported Joyce, whose demands taxed her patience and her pocketbook. In spite of these difficulties, Beach recognized her enviable position in the literary Left Bank; she wrote to Sisley Huddleston, the author of Bohemian Literary and Social Life in Paris (1928), that she and her partner Adrienne Monnier were “awfully proud of being in it. We expect to get murdered by a horde of envious persons now, so when you read in the paper about the mysterious crime in the rue de l’Odéon you will know it is your fault” (122).

Envy is certainly one reaction inspired by these letters, which reflect Beach’s fascinating life. This volume is the first collection of Beach’s letters, though Joyce’s letters to Beach were published nearly thirty years ago; this compilation is thus long overdue and, happily, well worth the wait.² Keri Walsh is an exemplary editor, drawing from multiple archives and annotating the text with a model combination of concision and context. Her timeline, integrating Beach’s biography with a history of Anglo-American modernism, provides a rich context for the letters that follow, while the glossary of correspondents that concludes the book is a crucial reference tool for the reader. Walsh’s eloquent and wide-ranging introduction establishes the scholarly importance of this compilation while evoking the stylistic pleasures of Beach’s prose.

And Beach’s voice is indeed a delight—variously arch, affectionate, indignant, or professional, but invariably sharp, lively, and eloquent. A collection of letters seems exactly the right way to assess and preserve Beach’s legacy, since her professional and literary achievements lay largely in her interactions with her wide group of friends, including Ernest Hemingway, George Antheil, Bryher and H. D., Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, William Carlos Williams, Archibald McLeish, Thornton Wilder, and, later, Richard Wright. This collection also attests to the sheer labor of literary marketing and preservation, as Beach promoted not only her bookstore but also the Joyce archive as she later navigated the vagaries of public exhibitions and university library donations.

The ample evidence here of Beach’s unflagging literary advocacy (in spite of her apologies for debilitating headaches and delayed replies) renders the deterioration of her relationship with Joyce all the more painful. This collection includes many missives that Beach sent on Joyce’s behalf over the years to collect royalties, pursue new avenues of publication, and arrange meetings with other authors. Noel Riley Fitch’s biography, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation (1983), and Janet Flanner’s memoir, Paris Was Yesterday 1925–1939 (1972), both detail Joyce’s exhausting demands. While Beach was notably diplomatic on the subject in her memoir Shakespeare and Company (1959), one of the treasures of this book can be found in the appendix in the form of an unsent and previously unpublished letter to Joyce: “The truth is that as my affection and admiration for you are unlimited, so is the work you pile on my shoulders. When you are absent, every word I receive from you is an order. The reward for my unceasing labor on your behalf is to see you tie yourself into a bowknot and hear you complain” (319). This volume pays Beach the tribute that Joyce was reluctant to offer, foregrounding the...