Sylvia Beach and Shakespeare and Company: Background information when reading Mrs. Hemingway

Sylvia Beach and Shakespeare and Company

This article relates to Mrs. Hemingway

Many writers of "The Lost Generation," including Ernest Hemingway, spent a considerable amount of time in a Paris bookstore run by expat Sylvia Beach. Both Beach and her business offered considerable support to these artists, and in many ways were partly responsible for shaping the American literature of the generation.

Sylvia Beach was born March 14, 1887 in Baltimore, Maryland, as Nancy Woodbridge Beach, only taking the name "Sylvia" in later life as tribute to her father Sylvester. A Presbyterian minister from a long line of churchmen, Sylvester was responsible for his daughter's introduction to Paris, moving the family overseas for his work as an assistant pastor for the American Church in Paris from 1901 to 1905. Sylvia returned to the United States when her father's appointment ended but visited Europe several times over the coming years. She spent two years in Spain learning Spanish and Italian and worked for the American Red Cross during WWI, finally settling in Paris to study French Literature at the Sorbonne in 1917.

While perusing a magazine, Beach came across an advertisement for a Paris bookstore called La Maison des Amis de Livres ("The House of Friends of Books") run by a woman – Adrienne Monnier. She decided to pay a visit to the store and was immediately impressed with Monnier and the shop, which specialized in contemporary French literature and offered the first lending library in all of France. It was a different kind of establishment, more a gathering place than a retail endeavor, with comfortable chairs and tables designed to encourage browsing and discussion. Beach and Monnier became instant friends and eventual lovers, until Monnier's death in 1955.

Monnier encouraged her partner to start her own bookstore, and consequently Beach started Shakespeare and Company in November, 1919, similar to Monnier's shop but stocked with Anglo-American literature instead of French ones. The store did so well that two years later she moved to a larger establishment at the rue de l'Odean on Paris's Left Bank – immediately across the street from Monnier's bookstore. The two did not compete, instead worked to complement each other's business.

The bookstores became gathering places to discuss and debate new ideas, with Shakespeare and Company attracting a large number of disaffected American writers such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein. Beach's establishment offered a freedom that these writers were unable to find elsewhere. Additionally, Beach treated her patrons as friends, offering them tea on cold days, lending them money, and even providing stranded artists a place to stay. The first time Hemingway visited her establishment, she allowed him to borrow books even though he didn't have enough money to join the lending library. (Beach is mentioned kindly in Hemingway's memoir of his days in Paris: A Moveable Feast.)

Perhaps her greatest contribution to American literature was the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses. The book had been deemed unpublishable in the United States because it was considered pornographic. Beach felt it was important, however, and used her own money to see it come to print and to distribute it. Joyce used Shakespeare and Company as his office, frequently revising pages of Ulysses minutes before it went to type. (Unfortunately, Beach's kindness was not repaid; Joyce completely forgot about her after Random House agreed to publish a reprint of the novel, leaving her in dire financial straits as a result.)

Shakespeare and Company fell on hard times in the 1930s when the stock market crashed, but Beach managed to keep it open. Friends organized readings by well-known authors, and patrons purchased subscriptions to these readings.

Beach continued to stay in Nazi-occupied Paris. She had a number of confrontations with German troops, and after refusing to sell a book to an officer who subsequently threatened to confiscate her books (legend claims it was her last copy of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake) she hid all her inventory in others' homes, dismantled the bookshelves and painted over her sign, leaving no trace that the bookstore ever existed. The shop closed on June 14, 1940, never to reopen.

She was rounded up in 1942 when the Nazis incarcerated all American and British women, kept first in the Paris Zoo's monkey house but moved later to a POW camp in Vittel, France. Friends secured her release in 1943, and she returned to Paris to be with Monnier (whose bookstore remained open throughout the occupation). She remained with Monnier until the latter's suicide in 1955. Beach died in 1962 at the age of 75.

A second American bookstore opened in Paris in 1951 with the name Le Mistral. Its owner, George Whitman, renamed it in 1964 to Shakespeare and Company in honor of Beach with the idea of maintaining her original idea of an establishment that was more a haven for writers and artists rather than just a run-of-the-mill shop. Whitman described the venture as "a socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore." According to the Shakespeare and Company website, "Some 50,000 have placed their heads on Shakespeare and Company's famous pillows. Such people as Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Lawrence Durrell and Allen Ginsberg have shared a tea and a pancake with George."

George Whitman died at the age of 98 in 2011, but his daughter, Sylvia Beach Whitman, continues to run the store, maintaining the philosophy and atmosphere first espoused by Sylvia Beach when she opened the original Shakespeare and Company nearly a century ago.

Picture of Sylvia Beach (second from left) with Ernest Hemingway and assistants from John Baxter Paris
Picture of Shakespeare and Company bookstore from Shakespeare and Company Archives

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This article relates to Mrs. Hemingway. It first ran in the July 9, 2014 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.