Joyce and Co
Mark Amory
Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation Noel Riley Fitch (Souvenir £14.95) t starts as a romantic story. Sylvia Beach,
the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, comes from the New World on a visit, falls in love with Paris and contrives to stay, more or less, for the rest of her life. She ()Pens a shop for English and American books on the Left Bank, and it becomes a lending library and then a meeting place for artists of all sorts, especially her fellow countrymen. Young and gay, what did they care if their stomachs rumbled as they scrib- bled? They were out to revolutionise tech- niques and become rich and famous. Beach herself cast off the puritanical shackles of her past and found happiness with a charm- ing (if plump) woman, Adrienne Monnier. This is all scarcely exaggerated, and if she had died in 1921, when she would have been 34 but was thought to be less, it would all have been a 20th-century La Boheme, in which it does not matter much whether the characters are in fact talented.
But she did not, and they were. Two of her earliest and most frequent visitors were James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, who can indeed claim to have been the two men who have had the greatest influence on English prose in the last 100 years. Hem- ingway soon achieved success with The Sun Also Rises, Joyce's came more slowly, and over ten years of Beach's life were dedicated to publishing just the one book, Ulysses. The French printer was an asset in that he did not understand quite how risque and therefore risky this manuscript was, but the misprints were endless. About a third was added to the proofs in impossible writing with arrows leading to squiggles. Then it had to be promoted, there were pro- secutions and confiscations, it was smuggl- ed into America: rarely can a book have been harder to translate, and always the Perfectionist, Joyce was impossibly demanding about everything, including money. Between the struggles, the il- lustrious names flit through: Ezra Pound manages 'to perform the feat of lounging in a straight-backed chair, sprawled on the end of his spine with his legs stretching ftnrn one end of the shop to the other', Scott Fitzgerald (not much around) sket- ches the guests at a dinner-party in his new edition of The Great Gatsby, Tom Eliot is sympathetic, young Beckett runs errands, F, ; Madox ;Ford ; wheezes , asthmatically, Gertrude Stein is usually jealous and of- fended, as when Edith Sitwell (England's answer to her?) fails to read her poems. The gang's all here; Beach really knew them and they are the real thing, but the glamour is
tired now, 0 the tinsel fading. Still it was ex- hilarating to live through.
In the early Thirties everything began to go sour. The Americans went home for economic rather than political reasons. There had never been much money, now there was less. But worse was the fact that the Two Greatest Influences turned out to be, among other things, an oaf and a shit. Rich and famous Hemingway ordered 20 famous books the shop could scarcely af- ford to acquire and then took only three; on another occasion, he was simply not pay- ing, and when a new assistant asked for money, he rang up later to complain about her. More central was Joyce's egomania, which was on such a scale as to be im- pressive from a safe distance but no fun to live with. Finally, when it suited him, he removed his affairs. Sylvia Beach, though , faced with bankruptcy, scarcely complain- ed; her migraine became a little worse. She struggled on, never left Paris and when the Germans came and an officer demanded her copy of Finnegans Wake, she said it was not for sale. He returned, she refused again, and the shop was shut, but she hid her stock successfully, After the war, she talked to academics, wrote her self-effacing memoirs and died in 1962.
So it becomes a brave, rather sad story, largely familiar but still worth telling. Yet somehow the qualities which all agree she possessed, her daring, her charm, her wit, her generosity, never hold the stage. Here, as in life, she is surrounded by attention- grabbers and yields easily. Noel Riley Fitch, a woman, sees things from her angle and in- deed puts in the occasional feminist dig, usually at Joyce, who is cast as oppressor. She is also in control of her vast mass of material and has ruthlessly and rightly con- densed the last 20 years into ten pages, while allowing 300 to the Twenties. But she faced a tricky problem with her stars, and she has not solved it. Clearly the details of Beach's relationships, again particularly with Joyce, are the justification of the book, but so much of their story is known. For instance, their first meeting is, she ad- mits, oft-repeated but only partially told. So she tells all — how he looked, what Beach unremarkably said, what he replied, what he thought, what else he probably thought, how he pronounced 'look', when he smiled, how he wrote down the address of her shop, how a dog barked across the road, that he almost trembled when he ask- ed 'Is it corning in? Is it feerce?' We expect the definitive account, but when we are kept informed about people not quite trembling the pace does tend to slacken (Joyce has another fault as leading man, in that almost all the anecdotes about him consist of his meeting some other important person and having nothing to say to him). Similarly, there is no denying that who bought books and the finances of the early editions of Ulysses are central themes, but the lists we get are exhausting as well as ex- haustive. I had hoped for light on minor characters such as Harry Crosby, Duff Twysden or Djuna Barnes, and they and many others do appear but only in crowd
scenes. The index is dazzling, and there is much information here clearly laid out. An estimable and attractive woman has been given her due. But as Sylvia Beach was described as 'a woman for others', so, as far as reading straight through from cover to cover is concerned, this is a book for others.
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