The Books: The Letters of Sylvia Beach

Daily Book Excerpt: Memoirs:

Before I get started on the book, my OCD-nature requires of me that I explain this Book Excerpt thing for those of you who may be new to me. I don’t know how many books I have, but I’m sure it’s way up in the thousands. Dealing with my book collection in small apartments has always been a struggle, because although I don’t re-read a lot of books, I like to have them around. It pleases me to have a LIBRARY. I prefer to look things up in my books (if I have them) than the Internet. Nothing makes me happier than having a question in my head (“Now … what exactly happened during the Battle of Yorktown?” or “When did David and Irene Selznick get divorced? Was it before Streetcar??”) and be able to pull a book down off a shelf and find the answer. It makes me feel like my father. It’s important to me. I finally live in a place appropriate to my book collection, and my books, instead of piling around rooms, overwhelming me, are placed beautifully in Ikea shelves that stretch to the ceiling on all sides of me. My dad would love my study.

So. I started blogging in October of 2002, mainly as a reaction to 9/11 and not knowing what to do with everything I wanted to say. I went a little bit into the history of how I started blogging when I reached my 8-year mark. One of the things I liked to do was daily book excerpts, pulling a book off the shelf and putting up some interesting excerpt. My books are really important to me, and it was fun for me to share parts of my collection. There was no organizing principle to my book excerpts yet, just stuff I found interesting. But in 2005, I decided to challenge myself to do an excerpt from every book I had on my shelves. My books are organized by genre (and genre, for me, is kind of a loose concept) so I decided to go from genre to genre, methodically doing a post a day from every damn book I had on my shelves, going in alphabetical order. That way, I couldn’t make an editorial choice, like: “Oh, I don’t feel like excerpting this book about the Ukraine today … let’s skip it.” No. Today that book is the one that happens to be next on the shelf, so you must get your act together and find something intelligent to say about it. I liked the challenge and the limitations the project put on me.

Well. The first book excerpt I did was in 2005 (it was from Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon), and I am still nowhere NEAR done with the project. That was 2005. It is now 2011. Granted, I stopped the book excerpt thing from time to time, due to life circumstances and, frankly, getting overwhelmed by the sheer volume of books I had – but in general, it’s been a regular feature on my site. And, of course, since I started in 2005, my book collection has changed – I’ve gotten rid of some books, and added many more. So it’s a project that will keep on giving.

The genres I have “completed” so far are as follows (and each tag will bring you to every book excerpt in each particular genre): Entertainment Biography/Memoir, Scripts, Adult fiction, Nonfiction, Young Adult fiction, Children’s books, True crime, Current culture, U.S. history, Religion, Politics, and Science. It’s rather daunting, just looking at all of that, to see how long I have been doing this. I just finished all of the books on my Poetry shelves.

Which genre to take on next? Straight biography? Hollywood history? The making of movies? Acting technique books? I decided to go with what I call, loosely, “Memoirs”. (I have some quirks in my cataloging practices. I keep all actors/Hollywood-types in their own section. THEIR memoirs are not looped in with the memoirs of those who are not actors. It makes it easier for me to find stuff). And, in my case, “Memoirs” include anything first-person, so we have Diaries and Letters in this genre as well. I love reading people’s journals and also their letters, it’s one of my favorite types of book, so next up, we will go through the Memoirs that I have on my shelves.

First book on that shelf is the newly-published The Letters of Sylvia Beach, edited by Keri Walsh.

Sylvia Beach is one of my heroes, the “midwife of modernism”, due to her influential bookshop in Paris (Shakespeare & Co.), and her nurturing of the writers of that time. You know, minor writers like James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. When nobody would publish Joyce’s Ulysses due to its already-controversial nature, she decided that Shakespeare & Co. would put the book out (her first foray into publishing – not too shabby, to start with Ulysses). She got in big trouble for that – as books were confiscated at customs houses in England and America, and obscenity trials heated up over the next decade. There was a time on the planet where the only place you could find a copy of Ulysses was actually AT the bookshop in Paris. This small unassuming woman from New Jersey was at the center of the literary event of the century. I’ve written a lot about Sylvia Beach (one of my posts is here), and I mainly have known about her from my reading on all of the literary giants of the day. She was one of those people who intersected with everyone. She was the daughter of a minister, and during WWI, she served with the Red Cross in Serbia. Then, her mother helped her finance a little bookshop in Paris – which had always been Beach’s dream – and over the next 2 decades, it became a smashing success, and a hub for all of the famous literary ex-pats in Paris at that time. Oh, for a time machine. My #1 destination would be Shakespeare & Co. in Paris in, oh, 1925. That’s where I want to go, please. When the Nazis marched into Paris, Beach repeatedly refused to leave her books, although she was ordered to. There is an anecdote about a German officer coming to her shop and asking (in English) to buy the copy of Finnegans Wake that was in the shop window. Sylvia Beach refused. She would not serve a German, certainly not AS the city was being occupied by them. The officer was in a rage about it and told her that the next time he returned, it would be with a squad who would confiscate her entire collection. He left, and Sylvia Beach promptly boxed up her entire collection, hid it away, and painted over the Shakespeare & Co. sign. The Germans did return, and while they did not get her books, they got HER, and they put her in an internment camp where she stayed for the next 6 months, surrounded by French Jewish prisoners who would all end up in Auschwitz. There’s another great anecdote about Ernest Hemingway, who was with the Allied army when they liberated Paris – and Hemingway went PERSONALLY to “liberate” Shakespeare & Co.

All of this can be read about in Beach’s own memoir (Shakespeare and Company) – but here, for the first time, editor Keri Walsh has collated Beach’s voluminous correspondence, so we actually get to hear Beach’s unedited voice.

That was one of the best things about this volume (which I tore through at the speed of light last year): getting to know her unselfconscious in-the-moment voice, the voice one uses when writing a letter (as opposed to something more planned-out). I always knew that Beach was a homey regular kind of person, not an obvious intellectual – but more of a can-do fix-it “I’ve got a barn, let’s do a show” kind of person. She was part of a family of daughters, and all of them were strong autonomous interesting women (they obviously had been raised well – none of them seemed to have a sense that there was anything they couldn’t do, being women) … and Sylvia Beach, who loved books (obviously) had a dream of opening a bookshop. That’s all. She didn’t have a dream of attaching herself to a writer, or publishing books, or anything like that. She wanted a gathering-place for book lovers. She happened to be in the right place at the right time, AND she was a canny businesswoman who knew how to make important connections (and, judging from her correspondence, KEEP those connections). She was, to use a well-trod phrase, a “people person”. She was also not embarrassed to ask for things. She often needed help, either financial or otherwise, and she, like all talented people of business, knew who to go to to get things done, and knew to ask at the right time. The publication of Ulysses obviously put her on the map (for better or worse), and she had an awareness of that at the time, writing to her sister, “Ulysses is going to make my place famous.”

She’s one of those people who intersected with everyone, and, as I got to know her chatty friendly voice, full of misspellings and multiple exclamation marks, I fell in love with her. She was so enthusiastic, such a champion. Let the artists do their work, let them be eccentric and strange … she was there to usher them into the limelight where they belonged. Sylvia Beach was a lesbian, and had a lifelong relationship with Adrienne Monnier, a French book-store owner. They were business partners and life partners. This is so much just a fact of Beach’s life that it is barely mentioned in the book, and the acceptance of it is one of those things that makes you realize that life on the ground is often very different from up in the stratosphere where ideologues argue things out on an abstract level. There is no sense at all that Beach had to hide her sexual orientation. She lived with Adrienne Monnier for decades. They were partners. When Monnier passed away, people from all over the world sent Beach consolation letters. Beach was now a widow, regardless of the “legality” of their relationship. It’s a beautiful example of the individual doing what the individual wants to do, regardless of the prejudice that exists in limited little minds. This is still the case today. Beach goes about her life with very little fanfare, which is ironic considering how famous (and infamous) she became for publishing a “dirty book”.

I loved the humor in this volume (Beach was quite funny), and I loved encountering her real voice. It was not at all what I expected. Really homey American-style speech, self-deprecating and funny. Yet she’s corresponding with Gertrude Stein and H.D. and Hemingway. They all loved her. Reading these letters, you can really see why. What a breath of fresh air.

Here is one of her letters to Marion Peter, one of her lifelong friends back in America. They corresponded for decades, and I love, too, how Beach is so interested in her friend’s life as well. She’s not just listing what SHE is up to. Maintaining relationships was important to her. Ulysses had come out on February 1, 1922, and was immediately problematic. It was not allowed into the United States, or England, or anywhere else, boxes of books were confiscated at Customs Houses. Marion Peter often helped her out getting copies smuggled into the States for this or that person.

Excerpt from The Letters of Sylvia Beach, edited by Keri Walsh

75. To Marion Peter, May 29, 1923

Dearest Marion,

Excuse me for typing this. I always try to write to my friends by hand, but I see that the only way to get off a letter to you at once is to make such a noise with this machine that people will leave me alone to finish what they think must be some business correspondence. Marion, if you knew how I never get a minute until late in the evening when I am quite too “abrutie” to think of anything! It was disgusting of me all the same not to write you a Christmas letter explaining about the present I was sending you. Mrs. Heyworth Campbell whose husband is on Vogue was so kind as to offer to take home the garment and it was all arranged in a sudden rush – I had about one minute to get you something and to give it to her and I never heard from her afterwards, nor she from me, nor you from me nor her!!!!!!!!!!

I’m very glad you got the nightgown safely and hope it fits you and that you don’t mind the color. What a pity you had the trouble of writing to Vogue about it. I am so sorry. Please forgive me, Marion dear. Yes, I see everything I mean one but you. Your father has often been in my shop and has told me all your doings and was very patient when I made him describe over and over again just what little Sylvia looks like and behaves like. Also I saw not long ago your nice pianist friend who was on her way to Milan I think. Of course Blanche I used to see also when she was in Paris. You will have to try to get over here soon. You must be very much tied down with the children, and perhaps your husband can’t get away long enough to come to Europe.

Marion, you were such an angel to take all that trouble bootlegging for me! As for the two copies that were confiscated, it was a miracle they were not all taken. 500 copies of the 2nd edition [of Ulysses] which appeared in October were seized in the States and the same number were destroyed in England about two months ago by the enlightened (?) authorities. What a dark age we are living in and what a privilege to behold the spectacle of ignorant men solemnly deciding whether the work of some great writer is suitable for the public to read or not!

How is your voice? What has become of Charles Clark? I went with [James] Joyce and his wife and son one night to hear John McCormack sing. He and Joyce are old friends. He sang beautifully but it’s a pity he doesn’t keep away from the subject of that Old Rose of Summer. I went to the Ballet Suedois and there was Ganna Walska in a box. Oh la-oh-la oh la.

I am kept very busy with my little shop from 9 in the morning till about 8 at night but it’s an interesting life. The interesting people that come in make up for the raft of “vieux chameaux” that make a business of pestering the life out of you.

Did you know that my father has resigned from his church? The congregation has made him pastor emeritus so that he will have a little salary to live on and not be obliged to work any more. He was always such a hard worker; he even preached in the summer when he was supposed to be on his vacation. Mother is getting ready to move out of the parsonage. She is going to sail for Italy on the 5th of June. Holly and Cyprian [Sylvia Beach's sisters] are running the shop in Pasadena and have done very well so far. Mother is coming to replenish the stock which has run low again.

Goodby Marian dear and thank you again,

With best love,
Yours,
Sylvia