101: Sylvia Beach and Ulysses
KIM: Hi, everyone! Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Kim Askew…
AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes. So we started the summer with a “Literal Beach Reads” episode, and I guess you could say we’re doing another twist on that theme for today’s short mini. Only in this case the “Beach” we’re talking about is Sylvia Beach, the American proprietor of the famous bookshop Shakespeare and Company on the Left Bank in Paris between the two World Wars.
KIM: Yes, she was a remarkable woman and we could devote an entire episode to her life and the literary impact she had, but today we’re going to talk about Beach’s instrumental role in the 1922 publication of a book many deem the single greatest novel in the English language: James Joyce’s Ulysses. We celebrate the book’s centennial this year.
AMY: Yeah, you’ll be noticing a preponderance of Ulysses articles (if you haven’t already, it’s going to be popping up a lot throughout the year.) The book consistently tops (or ranks very high) on those “best books of all time” lists. But Kim, do you think it merits that level of praise or all we all collectively being Punk’d?
KIM: Okay, at the risk of sounding like a complete literary snob, I have to say it does deserve that level of praise. And let me just say, I had the opportunity to read it in a course in grad school with a lot of other students and an instructor guiding us through it, and I found it an absolute joy. It’s like a puzzle that you’re unraveling the whole time. It’s almost like learning another language. It reminds me of when I studied Beowulf in Old English in undergrad. There’s a challenge to it, but it’s so rewarding. So I will say yes. Uh, yeah, again, at the risk of sounding like a snob.
AMY: So for all of those reasons, you just spelled out, I'm gonna say, no, it does not merit being called the “greatest book in the English language,” because can a book that is that inaccessible and really not read by 99% of the general public, really qualify as the greatest? I mean, if you have to have somebody hold your hand and explain it all to you… now, I think I read portions of the book in college with a professor. We didn't do the whole book, but maybe if I had the opportunity, like you did, to really have somebody walk me through it, I'm sure I would get so much more out of it. And I'm sure it would be revelatory, But I don't know. I just… Virginia Woolf of all people, when she first read it, she hated it and she called it “ultimately nauseating.” Now she later back pedaled from that after everybody else was like, “No, no, no. It's amazing. It's amazing.”
KIM: Yeah, I, I get that feeling, and we've had it with some books that we've discussed where we're just like, “Everyone loves this and we don't.” I will say, I just want to clarify: it was great having an instructor to run ideas by. I don't think… I think it's more understandable than you realize.
AMY: Okay. Yeah, because I haven’t actually read the whole thing through, I don’t think.
KIM: And you do have to have, um, an English major's background almost, or a very widely read and wide and deep, um, knowledge of historical literature, because he uses so many references, you know, obvious ones are Shakespeare and things, but there's other things running throughout it too, that, um, you would need to be well read, I think, to fully appreciate it. Anyway…
AMY: Okay. Listeners, let us know what you think. If you've read it, if you haven't read it – do you think it should be as heralded as it is? We want to know.
KIM:: So anyway, whether you think Ulysses is pure genius or a total sham, it’s very interesting to me that a woman was actually the first to publish it as a novel. Which gets us back to Sylvia Beach.
AMY: Yeah, so here’s the story of how it all came about. She and Joyce met at a lunch party at the house of a French poet. (and Ezra Pound was there, too, that day, incidentally.) She recalls being starstruck and said she was frightened and scared at the prospect of meeting the great Irish writer. In an interview later in life, she said: “I imagined Joyce up in the clouds somewhere with the gods. I never thought I could meet him in the flesh.”
KIM: So although Beach felt like a nobody, upon meeting her, Joyce was very interested to hear about her bookshop. He wrote the address down and began frequenting it. He even signed up to participate in her lending library program. This alone probably had Beach feeling like, “Okay, I can officially die now.”
AMY: But let’s not forget that Beach’s bookshop had already become kind of a hot place, you know. It was a nexus for young writers. If you were an aspiring writer moving to France, you knew to look up Sylvia Beach. We’re talking people like Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thornton Wilder, Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein. Shakespeare and Company was their second home in Paris, and I want you to think of it like the “Central Perk” of the Left Bank. (You know, the coffee shop from “Friends?”) So there were comfy lounge chairs and a little kitchenette where refreshments could be had. The writers would hang out there and drink and converse. A lot of authors actually used the bookshop as their postal address!) There’s an anecdote that Hemingway had a letter of introduction when he went to meet Beach for the first time, and he forgot to bring the letter along, but she said she didn’t ultimately need to see it because she was charmed by him right away when he asked her if she wanted to see his war wounds and proceeded to take off his shoe to show her all his scars!
KIM: Oh my god. That’s hilarious. And actually, I’m thinking more like “Cheers” than Central Perk with all these men.
AMY: Oh, yeah. Totally.
KIM: … taking off their shoes to show their scars. Oh my god. So Beach (as Shelly Long, no…) Beach was known as the “Mother Hen” to all these writers, and one thing she remembered is that they were ALL clamoring to read Ulysses….. It was THE most highly-anticipated book at the time, and it was being released in sections in New York in The Little Review magazine. All the young writers were obsessed with it and wanted to read the entire thing.
AMY: Unfortunately, Joyce’s magnum opus was facing huge obstacles in America. The sections being run in The Little Review were deemed obscene and the US Postal Service actually seized the magazine. No American or English publisher wanted to touch Ulysses with a ten-foot pole given all the controversy surrounding it. (Which, of course, made everyone want to read it all the more.)
KIM: So at the time when Beach met Joyce and he started to frequent her bookshop, he was a bit despondent over the trouble Ulysses was mired in. Beach recalled that he sat there with his head in his hands bemoaning the fact that this book might never see the light of day. So she said to him, “Would you like me to publish it?” He immediately said yes. History in the making! This was a book that took him 7 years to write, that he’d poured his heart and soul into, and he was entrusting it to this inexperienced young woman. She admits she was surprised that he chose her, but she got down to business. It actually took two years of working closely with Joyce in the editing process, working to secure funding and signing up advance subscribers for the book. (Can you imagine?) It finally came out on Joyce’s birthday, February 2, 1922. The initial print run was 1,000 copies. The cost of publishing the book (remember, it was 730 pages!) it nearly wiped her out financially.
AMY: Bear in mind, also, that it would be more than a decade before Ulysses would finally be published in the United States by Random House. So if you were able to get your hands on a copy in Paris and bring it back home to the States in the 1920s, that would be considered very cool cultural contraband. (And actually, Shakespeare and Company helped out its American customers by mailing the book with fake covers so that it wouldn’t get confiscated at the ports. I love that.)
KIM: I know, Amy, that makes me think of the section of Tess Slessinger’s The Unpossessed where the character Elizabeth and her boyfriend are in Paris and in their break-up they argue over who gets to keep their joint copy of Ulysses.
AMY: Yeah, it makes a lot more sense now, right? Because it was like, “We’re not going to be able to get a copy when we get back home, so who gets to take it with them,” you know? And also, you have to keep in mind that Beach’s father was a Presbyterian minister back in America, so it’s a minister’s daughter publishing material that was considered obscene!
KIM: Yikes.
AMY: She’s a naughty girl! After Ulysses came out, tons of writers started flocking to Beach begging her to publish their erotic fiction, which she found totally annoying. The truth of the matter is, publishing Ulysses wasn’t some huge financial windfall for her, and at the end of the day, publishing books wasn’t really her line of business. She did end up publishing another collection of poetry by Joyce, and by the way, she basically served as his manager, literary agent and personal assistant in addition to being his publisher! It was basically her second full-time job apart from running the book store. She even managed his personal affairs (T.S. Eliot was surprised to discover that when Joyce needed money he wrote to Beach and she arranged it with his bank. Her friend, the French bookshop operator Adrienne Monnier thought Joyce was taking advantage of her and she grew angry with Joyce because of it.) Probably the fact that she’d been so starstruck by him made her willing to do anything he asked of her… I think anyone else might have told him off at a certain point.
KIM: Yeah, whow. That’s a complicated relationship. And interestingly, despite everything Beach did for him, Joyce got into a little bit of a business dispute with her over earnings from Ulysses, so she ended up giving him back the publishing rights to the novel. He made a small fortune when he sold the book to Random House in 1932. He never gave Beach a cent of that money, we should note, even though she did not strike it rich publishing his book the first time around.
AMY: Hmm. Well, there’s a 1962 British television interview she did which we’ll link to in our show notes. In it she talks a lot about publishing Joyce (she speaks of him only with admiration). So if there had been any bad blood at all, she did not feel it later in life. She also in that interview tells some amazing stories about remaining in Paris when the Nazis invaded during WWII. So at one point, she obstinately refused to sell a German officer her last copy of Finnegan’s Wake. He had seen it in the bookshop’s window, and she said, “No, you’re not going to get it.” He threatened her, and she said, “No, you’re still not going to get it. This is my copy.” She ended up having to hide all of the books from Shakespeare and Company in an empty apartment to keep them safe. And this whole time, the Gestapo was tracking her and they eventually rounded her up along with some other Americans. She was detained at the zoo, of all places, initially, and later she was moved to a prison where she was held for, I don’t know, five or six months I think. Finally she was released and then when Paris was liberated it was none other than Ernest Hemingway, himself, who shouted her name from down the street, having come to find her. He swooped her up in a big hug and spun her round and round. She let him know there were still German shooters upon the roof. And, of course, he took some of his men and took care of it, so to speak. So literally, she was liberated by Ernest Hemingway. Watch the video that we’ll link to, because she has so many great stories like that. And honestly, she is the most adorable little old lady. You will just love her.
KIM: She sounds so brave. I mean, someone has to do a movie about her and her time operating Shakespeare and Company and all this that you’re talking about afterward with the Gestapo and everything. I mean, think about all the talent she fostered over those years… .the stories must be endless!
AMY: Yeah, and she comes across as just really unassuming, you know? Like, it’s not like she’s this badass. I mean, she is badass, but that’s why I say watch the video, because she’s like a sweet old grandma, you know? And honestly, now that I know about her own involvement with the publication of Ulysses and how much she admired Joyce and his work, it makes me have more of an open mind about that novel. I do think it would be interesting to maybe give it a go at this point in my life now that I’m older and perhaps, a little bit wiser. It might be a good time for me to check it out again.
KIM: Yes, although speaking of time, you’re not going to have any to read this book right now. We have too many others.
AMY: Yeah, that would be like my second Clarissa novel undertaking, which I still haven’t finished!
KIM: A Ulysses podcast?
AMY: Maybe that’s what I need to find. I’m sure there are Ulysses podcasts out there.
KIM: Oh, I was suggesting that as our second podcast!
AMY: No! N to the O!
KIM: Okay, all right, all right. You know me, always coming up with ideas. We don’t have to do all of them.
AMY: So that’s all for today’s episode, join us back here next week and don’t forget to share this podcast with your favorite literary-minded peeps. Help us spread the word about these amazing women of the literary world!
KIM: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.