"Fitting people with books is about as difficult as fitting them with shoes"
It is both enviable and awkward to serve as a clergyman to the affluent. Enviable, in that one generally has a comfortable sinecure and access to some of the finer experiences enjoyed by that stratum of our society, and awkward as, no matter how accepting they may be, one is still not a true member of their company. That, you see, takes money, and money is something that clergy rarely have.
This status of simultaneously being an insider and an outsider was something that Sylvia Beach knew well, born as she was in 1887 to a Presbyterian minister who served churches in the tony sections of Baltimore and Paris, and eventually the wealthiest church in his denomination in the United States, First Presbyterian Church in Princeton, New Jersey. In each, Beach met the capitalists and artists who created the foundation of what would become The American Century. This interaction made her aware of the tastes, language, preferences, and pursuits of the elites and the educated, but without anything more than the cursory membership granted to a pastor's daughter.
Her experiences while living in Paris were broader than those of Princeton, as Paris meant freedom and experimentation, both personal and artistic, and it was to Paris that Beach would return once she could, at first as a Red Cross worker during the waning days of World War I, and later as a student of French literature. Gradually, she would be drawn into the exciting and enervating world of the literary salon and meet she who would be her life-long companion, Adrienne Monnier, the owner of a used book store.
As continental writers would gather at Monnier's shop and read from their works, entertain the patrons, and lift a few francs from the register as a "loan", Beach was introduced to the sublime writers, such as the prolific Andre Gide, and the mildly ridiculous, such as Rene Daumal, the author of A Night of Serious Drinking. Inspired by the free-flow of ideas and perspectives, and recognizing that the burgeoning American, Canadian, and British population in Paris carried a remarkable amount of discretionary income, Beach used her mother's small savings to begin an annex to Monnier's shop, a place where books written in English would be found. Thus was born the virtual lighthouse of The Lost Generation: Shakespeare and Company.
Beach's business plan was to provide a store that was both a book shop and a lending library; it was deceptively simple and immediately successful. Virtually all of the English-speaking writers in Paris in the 1920's were patrons of Shakespeare and Company, with many becoming supporters and confidants of Beach. It was her custom to offer generous lending privileges to struggling artists, along with an occasional meal or monetary assistance.
With the largess made possible through the shop's success, Beach extended her support in an extraordinary manner when she offered to publish a novel so modern and controversial that its author could not find any conventional outlet. In 1922, Shakespeare and Company published James Joyce's Ulysses, often recognized as one of the great literary works of the 20th century. While the publication made the small shop world-famous, it also nearly broke Beach as Joyce signed with a more conventional publisher just when the novel was about to make enough money for her to recoup her considerable investment.
[An aside: It was grubby, selfish, and un-kind of Joyce. It is to Beach's credit, and her Christian up-bringing, that she did not pitch Joyce's collected works into the Paris gutter and threaten his only good eye.]
Beach's loyal customers kept her financially viable, however, both after the Ulysses debacle and during the next decade's economic depression. Nothing, though, could protect Shakespeare and Company from the Nazi occupation during World War II. Not only was the shop closed in perpetuity, but Beach was sent to an internment camp for several months until her release was negotiated by an American art dealer in exchange for several paintings given as gifts to Hermann Goering.This status of simultaneously being an insider and an outsider was something that Sylvia Beach knew well, born as she was in 1887 to a Presbyterian minister who served churches in the tony sections of Baltimore and Paris, and eventually the wealthiest church in his denomination in the United States, First Presbyterian Church in Princeton, New Jersey. In each, Beach met the capitalists and artists who created the foundation of what would become The American Century. This interaction made her aware of the tastes, language, preferences, and pursuits of the elites and the educated, but without anything more than the cursory membership granted to a pastor's daughter.
Her experiences while living in Paris were broader than those of Princeton, as Paris meant freedom and experimentation, both personal and artistic, and it was to Paris that Beach would return once she could, at first as a Red Cross worker during the waning days of World War I, and later as a student of French literature. Gradually, she would be drawn into the exciting and enervating world of the literary salon and meet she who would be her life-long companion, Adrienne Monnier, the owner of a used book store.
As continental writers would gather at Monnier's shop and read from their works, entertain the patrons, and lift a few francs from the register as a "loan", Beach was introduced to the sublime writers, such as the prolific Andre Gide, and the mildly ridiculous, such as Rene Daumal, the author of A Night of Serious Drinking. Inspired by the free-flow of ideas and perspectives, and recognizing that the burgeoning American, Canadian, and British population in Paris carried a remarkable amount of discretionary income, Beach used her mother's small savings to begin an annex to Monnier's shop, a place where books written in English would be found. Thus was born the virtual lighthouse of The Lost Generation: Shakespeare and Company.
Beach's business plan was to provide a store that was both a book shop and a lending library; it was deceptively simple and immediately successful. Virtually all of the English-speaking writers in Paris in the 1920's were patrons of Shakespeare and Company, with many becoming supporters and confidants of Beach. It was her custom to offer generous lending privileges to struggling artists, along with an occasional meal or monetary assistance.
With the largess made possible through the shop's success, Beach extended her support in an extraordinary manner when she offered to publish a novel so modern and controversial that its author could not find any conventional outlet. In 1922, Shakespeare and Company published James Joyce's Ulysses, often recognized as one of the great literary works of the 20th century. While the publication made the small shop world-famous, it also nearly broke Beach as Joyce signed with a more conventional publisher just when the novel was about to make enough money for her to recoup her considerable investment.
[An aside: It was grubby, selfish, and un-kind of Joyce. It is to Beach's credit, and her Christian up-bringing, that she did not pitch Joyce's collected works into the Paris gutter and threaten his only good eye.]
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| Beach with the great |
[Another aside: Although done symbolically, in a gloriously quixotic moment, and while ostensibly working as a journalist embedded with an American battalion, Ernest Hemingway cajoled a collection of American soldiers to help him "liberate" Shakespeare and Company from the Germans. He did so out his respect for Beach and her early support, and so that he could write her a florid letter detailing the adventure and assuring her that the Nazis had been driven out of that hallowed location. He also thought there might still be a particularly good bottle of brandy hidden among the shelves.]
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| Beach and Hemingway in happier days in front of the store |
After the better part of a lifetime together, the ill and troubled Monnier would commit suicide in 1955. While Beach would take over Monnier's bookstore, in a nice twist of fate, it would be Shakespeare and Company's brave publication of Ulysses that would seal Beach's status in Western literature and grant her a reputation of greater worth than any of its potential profits. Her memoir of those days, Shakespeare and Company [1959], is still in print, and a fine biography and history, Sylvia Beach and The Lost Generation [1985], is an appropriate appreciation of her selfless role in one of literature's most fertile periods.
Beach would die in Paris in 1962 and be buried in the Princeton Cemetery, the burial plot the final perquisite of her father's tenure at First Presbyterian. Her letters and other papers were bequeathed to the library at Princeton University.
Contemporary visitors to Paris can find a bookstore named Shakespeare and Company on the Rue de la Bucherie managed by Sylvia Beach Whitman. While not a blood relation to her namesake, in her recreation of the ambiance of the original she is certainly spiritual kin to Beach and all of those writers and readers who would study those dusty cramped shelves in the Rue de l'Odean, looking for just the right book that would help them reinvent English prose.
