LITERARY FRANCE

Hemingway, Sylvia Beach, F. Scott Fitzgerald and the famous  Shakespeare and Company

France in the 1920s and 1930s was like a Mecca for foreign artists. For American artists, much of the attraction could be contributed to France’s freedom from Prohibition, its lack of political and social oppression (such as anti-homosexual discrimination), and, importantly, France’s permissiveness in terms of censorship.

Many literary greats such as James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S Eliot and Ezra Pound lived in Paris during these years. And the place they all congregated at was the bookshop Shakespeare and Company.

Ex-pat American, Sylvia Beach originally opened the store 19 November 1919 at 8 rue Dupuytren. In her memoirs she claims the name came to her in a dream. The store, which two years later was moved to its famous location at 12 rue de l’Odéon, was so much more than a bookshop. Ernest Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast, said, ‘On a cold windswept street, this was a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living. The photographs all looked like snap shots and even the dead writers looked as though they had really been alive.’ And of Sylvia Beach he said, ‘She was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip. No one that I ever knew was nicer to me’.

While Sylvia Beach sold new books at Shakespeare and Company, she also had a large library of English language books which she freely lent to writers and friends. Her store at 12 rue de l’Odéon served as a postal address, a general first-aid station, a bank and a meeting place for the world’s literary elite. But maybe her greatest contribution to literature was finally managing to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Sylvia Beach met Joyce one Sunday at a party and urged him to call into her store (then at rue Dupuytren). In her memoir, Shakespeare and Company, Beach wrote, ‘He stepped into my bookshop, peered closely at the photographs of Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe, then at the two Blake drawings; finally, he inspected my two photographs of Oscar Wilde. Then he sat down in the uncomfortable little armchair beside my table. He told me again that Pound had persuaded him to come to Paris. Now he had three problems: finding a roof to put over the heads of four people; feeding and clothing them; and finishing Ulysses.’ 

Joyce had been working on his oeuvre for five years. There had already been several unsuccessful attempts in England and the United States to secure a publishing deal for this controversial work. Finally, an American magazine, Little Review, agreed to publish Joyce’s work in segments (he was still finishing it), however, after only the fourth instalment the magazine publishers were taken to court by the Society for the Suppression of Vice for publishing what they deemed to be ‘pornographic’ material.

Sylvia Beach recognised that Joyce’s work was a literary masterpiece and bravely determined to publish it herself. Joyce finished Ulysses and Sylvia Beach managed to release the book to coincide with his fortieth birthday on 2 February 1922.

Equally famous is the circle of friends Sylvia developed. Hemingway was a regular visitor and spent long hours talking to her. Through Sylvia, Hemingway met James Joyce and the two became great friends. Another frequent visitor was F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, by 1925 had already established himself as a successful writer with his novels This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned and The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald was eager to meet Joyce too, but couldn’t conjure the courage to introduce himself and so Sylvia Beach and her life-partner Adrienne Monnier held a dinner party for the two writers and their wives.

Also in their circle of friends was writer Gertrude Stein and her life-partner Alice B. Toklas. Stein was impressed with the Cubist movement in art and was one of the first writers to incorporate their theories into writing. Stein was an important figure in encouraging fellow writers and artists to break new boundaries in expression. Her home was a veritable modern art museum decorated with paintings by her friends Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.  

When World War II broke out and France was occupied by the Nazis, Sylvia Beach was forced to close the store. She was never to re-open it.

In 1964, a bookstore using the name Shakespeare and Company was opened at 37 rue de la Bucherie by George Whitman. This store remains open today and maintains the traditions of the original store with poetry readings, lectures and literary hospitality.