Geniuses Together : American Writers in Paris in the 1920s (9780571309412) Read online

  Not everyone appreciated Natalie’s contribution to Left-Bank life. The American journalist Morrill Cody judged her Fridays and Gertrude Stein’s Saturdays as equally tiresome events. Being invited to either, he says, was ‘considered quite an honor and part of one’s education, but was really quite a bore’. On the other hand Ezra Pound, who began to correspond with Natalie shortly before the First World War, when he was translating one of Remy de Gourmont’s novels for the Egoist in London, classed her as one of those people who get a great deal out of life, ‘perhaps more than was in it’. And, like Gertrude Stein, she was expert at introductions. As Truman Capote observes, ‘she was one of those people who is always trying to bring other people together’.

  * One might suppose that she chose Paris because lesbianism was easier to practise in safety there than in the USA. But there do not seem to have been any prosecutions for lesbianism at this period in the USA, and the case of the poet Amy Lowell, who in 1914 openly set up home in New England with an actress, whom she addressed by a masculine name and to whom she wrote love poems, indicates that such ménages were tolerated there.

  3

  Sylvia and Company

  Like Gertrude Stein and Natalie Barney, Sylvia Beach was introduced to Parisian life during childhood. She was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister from Bridgeton, New Jersey, who brought his family to Paris in 1902 for a three-year ministry to American students in the Latin Quarter. He held his Sunday evening services in a big studio in Montparnasse, and declared that the students, who had been misrepresented as ‘unconscionable Bohemians’, were really ‘soberminded’ and lived lives of ‘privation and unselfish devotion to work’. Not surprisingly Sylvia, then aged fifteen, found that in her father’s company it was impossible to get ‘anywhere near the living Paris’.

  After this, the Reverend Sylvester Beach was called back to New Jersey, to a ministry at Princeton, where the family settled. But, says Sylvia, ‘we often went to France for visits or longer stays, sometimes the whole family, sometimes just one or two of us. We had a veritable passion for France.’ She managed her first adult trip there when she was twenty, in the company of her mother, and came again on her own four years later. She hoped for some sort of literary career, but nothing materialised, and in 1916, when she was twenty-nine, she decided to settle in Paris and try to get work as a journaliste littéraire, the profession she had optimistically given on her passport.

  At first she lived with a sister who was a successful film actress in France. She did war work from 1914 to 1918, on the land with the Volontaires Agricoles, and became clear in her mind about the future. ‘When the war is over,’ she wrote to her mother, ‘if I’m not old and buried by that time, I must have a bookstore, I must … I could make a nice little bookshop in New York go, working up a certain regular clientele. Good English and American books and a supply of French and others. I should love it (all but being in N.Y.).’ One day in Paris in 1917, in search of a book, she went to the rue de l’Odéon, a quiet side-street which led up from the Boulevard St Germain to the Odéon theatre and contained a number of specialist bookshops. One of these, which bore the name A. Monnier, displayed American literature in its window, so Sylvia opened the door and peered inside. At a table sat a young woman, presumably A. Monnier herself.

  As I hesitated at the door, she got up quickly … drawing me into the shop, [and] greeted me with much warmth. This was surprising in France, where people are as a rule reserved with strangers … As I stood near the open door, a high wind suddenly blew my Spanish hat off my head and into the middle of the street, and away it went bowling. A. Monnier rushed after it, going very fast for a person in such a long skirt … Then we both burst out laughing.

  Something like a love affair quickly began.

  Adrienne Monnier was twenty-five years old, an enthusiast of American books who had read almost everything that had been translated into French, beginning with the works of Benjamin Franklin. She had opened her bookshop with money paid to her father as compensation for injury in a railway accident. To save expense she lived in a room behind the shop. She ran a lending library as part of the business. Plump, dark, and handsome at the time that Sylvia met her, she soon became very solid-looking; the poet William Carlos Williams says she seemed like a farm labourer standing up to her knees in heavy loam.

  Sylvia herself was no beauty, but had a striking, determined appearance; she was only 5 feet 2 inches high, but her firm chin gave her an air of self-confidence. One day she aroused the admiration of local urchins when she dived into the Seine fully clothed to rescue her parrot, which had escaped and been swept away by the backwash from a barge.

  After a few months she moved in with Adrienne. She enjoyed the lively atmosphere of the shop; French writers were always dropping in for conversation, some of them in army uniform straight from the front, and in the evenings they would sometimes give readings from their latest work to members of the lending library. ‘Crowded into the little shop,’ writes Sylvia, ‘and almost on top of the reader at his table, we listened breathlessly’ – to Jules Romains, Paul Valéry, André Gide. ‘I believe that I was the only American to discover the rue de l’Odéon and participate in its exciting literary life at the time.’

  By the summer of 1919 Sylvia had changed her mind about setting up her own bookstore in New York; she decided to establish it in London instead, to be nearer Adrienne. But when she went to London, Harold Monro – who ran the Poetry Bookshop and published the Georgians – said there was no British market for a shop specialising in French literature, which was what Sylvia had intended. So she went back to Paris and determined to operate there instead, selling American and English books. Adrienne found premises for her just around the corner from rue de l’Odéon, at 8 rue Dupuytren, and Sylvia began to ransack Paris bookstores for everything from Walt Whitman to Beowulf. She got a sister in New York to forward her the American literary ‘little magazines’, among them the Little Review, which was serialising James Joyce’s Ulysses, already widely regarded as the most exciting book of its generation. Her mother mailed her large photographs of Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other giants of American literature, for display in the shop. More important, Mrs Beach also sent $3,000 to pay the first six months’ rent.

  Sylvia chose to decorate the shop in a Greenwich Village rather than French manner. She laid white woollen rugs on the floor and hung beige sackcloth over the rather tattered walls. For her own costume as manager she chose a velvet smoking jacket. She had thought of calling the shop ‘The Little Book Club’, but one night the name ‘Shakespeare and Company’ came into her head, and seemed perfect. She commissioned a friend to paint a signboard depicting Shakespeare, and – despite Adrienne’s disapproval of so un-Parisian a proceeding – had it hung at right angles to the shop front, like an English pub sign. On the shutters were painted the words ‘Lending Library’ and ‘Bookhop’ (sic), an error that Sylvia did not hurry to correct, feeling it rather appropriate to so dotty an enterprise.

  It was certainly a risky venture, for English-language books were already plentifully available in Paris. The sheer quantity of bookstores in the city astonished one American visitor, Sherwood Anderson: ‘In Paris there are as many bookstores as there were saloons in Chicago before prohibition. Imagine the 1st ward in Chicago with every saloon of the old days turned into a bookstore. The Latin Quarter here is like that.’ Sylvia’s hope was that Adrienne’s literary friends would give her a good start.

  Sure enough from opening day, Monday 17 November 1919, they began to turn up at Shakespeare and Company; the first was Louis Aragon. But though there was no shortage of interest, actual sales were another matter. Few Frenchmen in 1919 could afford to buy new foreign books, with prices translated into francs at a very unfavourable rate of exchange. Nor could Sylvia’s lending library pay for itself, not least because it was conducted according to what Adrienne called le plan américain, that is, no plan at all; at first Sylvia did not even bother to keep a
record of borrowers’ addresses. Fortunately her mother was willing to continue subsidising the enterprise with her savings.

  *

  Though the lending library failed to make money, it quickly acquired dozens of subscribers. Natalie Barney was among the first, though Sylvia noticed that she only took out works by writers who were expected at her Friday salon, sending a chauffeur to the shop a day or two in advance. Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas made their first visit to Shakespeare and Company about six months after it had opened, Gertrude paying 50 francs for a year’s subscription to the library. Sylvia was ‘very joyful over my new customers’. Gertrude borrowed about seventy volumes during her first two years of membership, but Sylvia felt that really ‘she took little interest … in any but her own books’. However, Gertrude did present Sylvia with a poem she said was designed to attract attention to the shop; entitled ‘Rich and Poor in English’ and subtitled ‘Sylvia Beach’, it made no reference to Shakespeare and Company by name, and seemed of rather dubious value as advertising copy. It began:

  Not a country not a door send them away to sit on the floor.

  Cakes. This is not the world. Can you remember …

  Sylvia was encouraged to appear at the Saturday-night salons at 27 rue de Fleurus, and she began to bring American writers to meet Gertrude, since they were often too nervous to approach her direct: ‘So the poor things would come to me, exactly as if I were a guide from one of the tourist agencies.’ Her first significant introduction to Gertrude was an author who arrived in Paris in June 1921. ‘One day,’ writes Sylvia, ‘I noticed an interesting-looking man lingering by a book in the window … Winesburg, Ohio, which had recently been published in the United States. Presently he came in and introduced himself as the author.’

  Then in his late forties, Sherwood Anderson had made his name with Winesburg, Ohio and with Poor White (1920), a novel about the corrupting effects of industrialisation on a rural community. He explained to Sylvia that he had ‘suddenly abandoned his home and a prosperous paint business, had simply walked away one morning, shaking off forever the fetters of respectability and the burden of security’. Leaving his family, he had gone to Chicago to become a writer.

  He had arrived there soon after the so-called Chicago Renaissance in American literature had got under way, centred on the offices of the magazine poetry, with Harriet Monroe editing and Ezra Pound in London stirring up expatriate poets to contribute. Anderson met the Poetry set, which included Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay who were trying to write distinctively Mid-Western poetry, and he was introduced to Margaret Anderson, who was just starting the Little Review in Chicago. He had already written some fiction, which he now reworked under the influence of Gertrude Stein’s word-portraits. For days he carried around a notebook in which he experimented with new combinations of words. ‘The result,’ he says, was ‘a new familiarity with the words of my own vocabulary … I really fell in love with words, wanted to give each word I used every chance to show itself off at its best.’

  In Paris, Anderson explained to Sylvia Beach what Gertrude Stein meant to him, and asked if she would introduce them. The meeting took place and was highly successful, Gertrude being delighted by the homage of Anderson, the first successful American writer to say she had influenced him. After the tea party he wrote down his impressions of her in his own version of her style: ‘A strong woman with legs like stone pillars sitting in a room hung thick with Picassos … She laughs, she smokes cigarettes. She tells stories with an American shrewdness in getting the tang and the kick into the telling.’

  His second wife Tennessee, who was there too, tried to take part in the conversation with Gertrude, but in vain. ‘Alice held her off,’ says Sylvia. ‘I knew the rules and regulations about wives at Gertrude’s … Alice had strict orders to keep them out of the way.’

  *

  As a mark of their approval of her, Sylvia was sometimes invited for drives in the open-top car Gertrude and Alice had purchased after the First World War, and had named Godiva (Gody for short). ‘Gertrude showed me Gody’s latest acquisition – headlights that could be turned on and off at will from inside the car and an electric cigarette lighter. Gertrude smoked continuously …. When a tyre blew out, she did the mending. Very competently too, while Alice and I chatted by the roadside.’

  Meanwhile, news of Shakespeare and Company spread in American literary circles, ‘and it was the first thing the pilgrims looked up in Paris … Many of them looked upon [it] as their club. Often, they would inform me that they had given Shakespeare and Company as their address, and they hoped I didn’t mind.’

  PART TWO

  Being Geniuses Together

  1

  Melancholy Jesus

  Eight months after the opening of the shop, on a hot Sunday afternoon in July 1920, Adrienne took Sylvia to a reception at an apartment in a side-street off Avenue Foch, near the Bois de Boulogne. Sylvia did not want to go; she had never met the host, a poet called André Spire, and she feared it would be a rather daunting gathering of literary types whose gossip would mean nothing to her. But Adrienne insisted.

  When she arrived, Sylvia was relieved to spot several familiar faces from the hallway. There was Jenny Serruys, Paris agent for one of the New York publishers, and Madame Ludmilla Bloch-Savitsky, who had taken out a subscription to the Shakespeare and Company library. Also, Sylvia could see Ezra Pound and his English wife Dorothy – her maiden name was Shakespear – who had recently come to inspect the shop; they were passing through Paris on their way back to London after an Italian holiday.

  No sooner had Sylvia begun to feel at her ease than the host whispered in her ear: ‘The Irish writer James Joyce is here.’ Sylvia, who had read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and had been following Ulysses in the Little Review, was greatly alarmed. ‘I worshipped James Joyce, and on hearing the unexpected news that he was present, I was so frightened that I wanted to run away.’ However, Spire told her it was the Pounds who had brought Joyce and his wife. ‘I knew the Pounds, so I went in.’

  In the drawing room, there indeed was Pound, stretched out in a big armchair. ‘His costume-the velvet jacket and the open-road shirt-was that of the English aesthete … There was a touch of Whistler about him; his language, on the other hand, was Huckleberry Finn.’

  Sylvia struck up a conversation with Dorothy, who immediately introduced her to Joyce’s wife, Nora. Sylvia thought Mrs Joyce charming and entirely natural – she said she was relieved that they could speak English together, since she knew no French and could not understand a word that was being said. ‘Now if it had been Italian!’ she exclaimed. The Joyces had lived for years in Trieste, and the whole family spoke Italian, even among themselves at home. They had been there for most of Joyce’s self-imposed sixteen-year exile from Dublin earlier; he made such money as he could by giving English lessons. When the family had moved temporarily to Zurich during the First World War they still went on speaking Italian en famille – Joyce said it was the easiest language on the voice.

  André Spire announced that everyone should take their place for lunch. Sylvia identified Joyce, and noticed that he refused all offers of wine, turning down his glass and saying he did not want to touch a drop until the evening. Pound responded facetiously by lining up all the wine bottles opposite Joyce’s place; he knew how much Joyce drank when he was not abstaining. Joyce seemed distressed by all the attention.

  Soon, the usual sort of talk about publishers and authors was under way, most of it in French. Sylvia felt out of her depth, so as soon as everyone got up from their places she escaped to a little back room, which was lined with books. But Joyce had had the same thought. He hated the false sophistication of literary salons. When someone took him to Natalie Barney’s one Friday, he happened to observe that he ‘couldn’t bear Racine and Corneille’. Miss Barney responded icily: ‘Don’t you think that sort of remark shows something about the person who says it?’ Joyce spent the rest of that evening trying to pretend he
was not there.

  Now, Sylvia found him drooping in a corner between two bookcases. ‘Trembling, I asked: “Is this the great James Joyce?”

  ‘“James Joyce,” he replied.

  ‘We shook hands; that is, he put his limp, boneless hand in my tough little paw.’

  She observed that he was

  of medium height, thin, slightly stooped, graceful … His hands … were very narrow. On the middle and third fingers of the left hand, he wore rings, the stones in heavy settings. His eyes, a deep blue … were extremely beautiful. I noticed, however, that the right eye had a slightly abnormal look and that the right lens of his glasses was thicker than the left … On his chin was a son of goatee … I thought he must have been very handsome as a young man.

  He was now thirty-nine. Sylvia goes on:

  His enunciation was exceptionally clear. His pronunciation of words such as “book” (boo-k) and “look” (loo-k) and those beginning with “th” was Irish … Otherwise there was nothing to distinguish his English from that of the Englishman. He expressed himself quite simply but, as I observed, with a care for the words and the sounds – partly … I believe, because he had spent so many years teaching English.’

  She asked him about his recent adventures moving from Trieste. At Pound’s recommendation he was going to try living in Paris. He hated travelling, but ‘Mr Pound’, as Joyce always called him, had done everything possible: arranged lodgings, found folding beds for the children, looked for a French translator. Mr Pound, said Joyce, was insistent that Paris would be a good deal cheaper than Trieste, and that the French and the expatriates could easily be persuaded to take an interest in Joyce’s work.