I am sure she didn’t know the significance of what she was publishing. I myself do not understand Ulysses… It sounds to me like the ravings of a disordered mind. I can’t see why anyone would want to publish it.
Though the ostensible aim of these sleepy white-haired old men was to protect the sensibilities of women, of the sort they supposed their wives and daughters to be, in fact theirs was an exertion of male authority and power over women. It had been Joyce’s partner, Nora, who inspired the book, Harriet Weaver who funded it, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap who serialized it. Had the all-male court known that most of the women involved, past and future, in this fraught publishing enterprise were lesbian, it would have further fuelled their intent to suppress publication of the ravings of a disordered mind.
Margaret and Jane were sentenced to either ten days in prison or a fine of $100. They had no money and payment was made by Joanna Fortune, a wealthy customer from Chicago. The two editors were then felons with a criminal record. When their fingerprints were taken, Margaret made a fuss about dipping her fingers into the sticky gum, said she could not use the court soap, insisted on more towels and a nail brush, and told them she would sue if her hands were disfigured.
No New York newspaper came to their defence or spoke out for Joyce. ‘The position of the great artist is impregnable,’ Margaret wrote in the Review’s next edition.
You can no more limit his expression, patronizingly suggest that his genius present itself in channels personally pleasing to you, than you can eat the stars.
She had aspired to make The Little Review the most interesting magazine ever launched. She felt she was done. ‘Ten years of one’s life is enough to devote to one idea – unless one has no other ideas,’ she said. She suffered a depressive breakdown, felt disaffected with America and voiced dislike of intellectuals who learned about life from books rather than experiencing it. She said she knew the difference between life and death in everything and that was all she needed to know.
Then in New York she met the opera singer and actor Georgette Leblanc, who for many years had been the playwright Maurice Maeterlinck’s lover. They fell in love, left for France and lived there together for twenty years. It was as if Margaret Anderson gave up fighting for modernism and lived it. Like Natalie Barney, she wanted her work of art to be her life. She, Georgette, Jane Heap and Solita Solano became followers of the philosopher Gurdjieff at his ‘Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man’ in Fontainebleau. She talked of existing in relation to the mystery of the universe.
In 1930 she published her autobiography, My Thirty Years’ War. In it, she described herself as happy and her perceived hardships as illusions: ‘I have never been too hungry or too tired, too ill or too cold, too ugly or too wrong…’ She spoke of her passion for music, nature and ideas and said her true happiness was founded on her love for Georgette Leblanc. This idyll lasted until June 1939 when, in rue Casimir Périer in Paris, Georgette said to her: ‘Look at this curious little swelling. I wonder what it is.’ Margaret then felt she faced two wars: Hitler and Georgette’s inoperable breast cancer.
the greatest writer of my times
When Sylvia Beach first met James Joyce at André Spire’s lunch in July 1920, she had read in both The Egoist and The Little Review such episodes of Ulysses as had escaped the bonfires of puritanism. She was thrilled to meet him in person. Neither of them had been invited to the lunch. Sylvia went with Adrienne, Joyce was taken there by Ezra Pound. Spire, a Zionist activist as well as a poet, was founder in 1912 of the Association des Jeunes Juifs, and at the time of the Dreyfus affair (in which a Jewish artillery captain in the French army was falsely convicted of passing military secrets to the Germans), he had been shot in the arm while fighting a duel with an anti-Semitic columnist for La Libre Parole.
Sylvia talked first to Joyce’s partner, Nora. Tall, with Celtic golden hair and bright eyes, Nora was grateful for conversation in English. She told Sylvia she could not understand a word of what the others were talking about in French but would have been fine were the conversation in Italian. She said she never read what Joyce wrote and wished she had married a farmer, a banker, a ragpicker… anyone but a writer. She complained that he never stopped scribbling, reached for paper and pencil first thing in the morning then went out when lunch was on the table. None the less, Sylvia thought the relationship worked:
What a good thing for Joyce, I thought, that she had chosen him. What would he have done without Nora? And what would his work have done without her?
She thought Nora kept Joyce sane. At Spire’s lunch, Joyce turned his wine glasses upside down to show he was not drinking alcohol. Ezra kept trying to persuade him. Joyce insisted he never drank until the evening – then he usually got through a couple of bottles of Vouvray. At the end of the lunch, he went into Spire’s small library. Sylvia found him there, ‘drooping’, as she put it. ‘We shook hands; that is, he put his limp, boneless hand in my tough little paw.’ She described him as of medium height, thin, slightly stooped, his eyes deep blue. His right eye looked wonky, with the lens of his spectacles thicker than the left. (He had glaucoma and constant and progressive trouble with his sight.) His hair was thick and sandy coloured, his skin fair, his beard ‘a sort of goatee’, his voice ‘pitched like a tenor’s’. He wore bejewelled chunky rings on the middle and third fingers of his left hand. He asked Sylvia what she did for a living, seemed amused by her name, and that of her shop, wrote them down in a little notebook and said he would come the next day to visit her.
Sylvia Beach had found her third great love.
She felt at ease in this initial encounter, ‘overcome though I was in the presence of the greatest writer of my times’. Outside in the street, a dog barked. Joyce went pale, trembled and asked: ‘Is it coming in? Is it fierce?’ Sylvia assured him it was only chasing a ball. He told her he had been afraid of dogs since one bit him on the chin when he was five. His beard was to hide the scar. He was afraid of many things: thunder, heights, the sea, infections. Two nuns in the street would bring bad luck, so would walking under a ladder, a hat left on a bed, an umbrella opened indoors. Black cats were lucky.
He had quaint ideas of propriety and of what could or could not be said in front of women. Formal and prudish in conversation, he never swore and was overly courteous. At home, he liked playing the piano and making up songs – musical hall numbers about a Mr Dooley. His son, Georgio, trained as an opera singer and his daughter, Lucia, as a professional dancer.
Shakespeare and Company to the rescue
Joyce called at Shakespeare and Company the day after the lunch. He sat twirling an ash-plant cane. Sylvia shooed her friendly little dog, Teddy, ‘an intellectual’, into the back room. Lucky, the black cat, stayed. (Lucky chewed customers’ gloves and Hemingway’s hat.) Joyce joined the library and Sylvia wrote out a card: ‘James Joyce: 5 rue de l’Assomption, Paris; subscription for one month; seven francs.’ He borrowed a copy of the Irish play Riders to the Sea by John Millington Synge, which he had once translated into German. Set on the Aran Islands in Ireland, it was about a woman whose husband and five sons drown.
Joyce lamented his problems in getting his work published. Obscenity had been the cry, censorship the reality, from as far back as 1905 when he first tried to get Dubliners published. Twenty-two publishers and printers turned that down. Then it took a decade before A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published. And now Ulysses… He had used up his entire savings getting to Paris. He had come here in an effort to finish his book. He had been working on it for seven years. He had to write at night, which was straining his eyes. He needed to find somewhere to live for himself, his wife and children. He would have to work as a language teacher to provide for them all. Could Sylvia help him find students? He could teach five languages: Italian, French, German, Greek, English; six perhaps – he had learned Norwegian in order to read Ibsen; seven maybe – he spoke Yiddish, knew Hebrew…
Joyce began to frequent Shakespea
re and Company like other young writers, though Sylvia put him in a class of his own: ‘I didn’t imagine a James Joyce going in and out the door.’ One day in the winter of 1920, he brought in the copy of The Little Review with episode 13, ‘Nausicaa’. He lamented the charges against the editors and the court verdict in New York. ‘My book will never come out now’, he said, and sat with his head in his hands. Sylvia found it intolerable to see him so abject and to hear how his masterpiece was pilloried by heathens. ‘Would you like me to publish Ulysses?’ she asked. Joyce said: ‘I would.’
James Joyce and his publisher Sylvia Beach in Shakespeare & Company © Bettmann / Getty Images
She thought he seemed relieved, though it concerned her that he was putting a book it had taken him seven years to write, and which in her view ought to have been the crown of a great publishing house, into the hands of someone young, inexperienced, and not a publisher. But there was no hope of an established publisher taking it on in the English-speaking countries.
the diligent editor and the exigent author
‘Undeterred by lack of capital, experience and all the requisites of a publisher I went right ahead with Ulysses,’ Sylvia wrote. She called Shakespeare and Company ‘my literary welfare work’ and publishing Ulysses ‘my missionary endeavour’. Adrienne approved the plan and was her adviser.
Joyce took over Sylvia’s life. He arrived at the bookshop at noon each day and returned again in the early evenings. Sylvia attended to his correspondence and became his banker, agent and publicist. She rivalled Alice B. Toklas’s dedication to Gertrude Stein. Joyce worked all hours on Ulysses, reworking the same passages, but it was not a book he would ever declare finished.
Sylvia unwaveringly thought Ulysses a masterpiece. She saw its integrity as a work of art. Transparency was allied to mentioning what some might deem unmentionable. Joyce, prudish in person as in many ways was she, dismissed the idea that in literature there were words or thoughts that were off limits. Sylvia agreed. She deplored censorship and the entrenchment into law of what could or could not be said. ‘You cannot legislate against human nature’ was her view of laws that criminalized free expression.
By offering to publish the book, she took on far more than she could reasonably manage. Joyce was obsessively painstaking and worse than demanding. He could not get on with fountain pens or typewriters, wrote with black pencils bought from W.H. Smith, and his handwriting and directions were hard to read. He created a complicated schema of different passages, marked in coloured pencils and peppered with annotations. He put all sorts of cross references on a card index, then pieced passages together. Typists went haywire. Cyprian Beach and Robert McAlmon helped – both were reasonably good at deciphering illegible handwriting. McAlmon was cavalier and made stuff up when manuscript marks were too complicated. Joyce noticed.
He haunted the bookshop in gloom about his book’s prospects. Sylvia and Adrienne called him Melancholy Jesus. He thought if a dozen copies were printed, there would be some left over.
one man’s day and life
Joyce explained his book as the epic story of two races – Israel and Ireland – as well as an account of both one man’s day and life, and of the cycle of the human body. His reader was not invited to distinguish between an external and internal voice. Joyce said Job, not he, invented the interior monologue. Gertrude Stein thought it was neither Job nor Joyce but herself with her magnum opus, The Making of Americans. The ‘continuous present’, she called her efforts. She viewed Sylvia’s proposed publishing of Ulysses as betrayal, cancelled her subscription to Shakespeare and Company and joined the American Library in Paris. Joyce was her rival and undeserving of accolade. She was the genius, the architect of modernism. She created twentieth-century style.
Sylvia, who took a grown-up view of such rivalry, described her and Gertrude’s relationship as ‘friendly protagonists’. Nor, of course, did she think Joyce a lone modernist. Dorothy Richardson was another woman writer who changed the landscape of fiction. She published episodes of her long semi-autobiographical work Pilgrimage from 1915 up until her death in 1957. Pilgrimage was about a Londoner, Miriam Henderson, who rejects nineteenth-century ideas of femininity and evolves a new gender identity somewhere between masculine and feminine. With publication of the first episode, ‘Pointed Roofs’, Virginia Woolf said Dorothy Richardson had:
invented, or, if she has not invented, developed and applied to her own uses, a sentence which we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender.
May Sinclair, in a review of ‘Pointed Roofs’, used the term ‘stream of consciousness’. Dorothy Richardson disliked the term and did not think she was writing a novel. She told Sylvia that Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and herself were all simultaneously using the ‘new method’ in writing style, though very differently. Proust’s first volume of À la Recherche du temps perdu was published in 1913 while she was finishing ‘Pointed Roofs’. James Joyce had begun Ulysses and Virginia Woolf had written her first novel, The Voyage Out.
he spends money like a drunken sailor
Money, or lack of it, was from the start a big problem with Sylvia’s publishing enterprise. Bryher helped by shifting money into Sylvia’s account. Sylvia regularly gave small amounts of this to Joyce. At first he repaid her, but then he did not. Harriet Weaver then made Joyce a bequest to provide him with sufficient monthly income for life. ‘Saint Harriet’, Sylvia called her.
It was a tremendous relief to feel that I could now go ahead and publish Ulysses, and also that Shakespeare and Company was free of encumbrance, so to speak.
The allowance was sufficient for a reasonable person to live on, but not Joyce. He was a spendthrift.
It wasn’t long before he was again hard up and Miss Weaver came again to his help. Adrienne and I just managed to make ends meet by living in the simplest style, but Joyce liked to live among the well-to-do.
That was Sylvia’s polite way of reproaching him. Joyce liked to travel first class. When he visited Harriet Weaver in London, he booked his whole family into the Strand Palace Hotel. In Paris, he and his family dined most nights at Le Petit Trianon at the corner of boulevard Montparnasse and rue de Rennes. The proprietor and staff greeted him from his taxi, took him to his special table, the head waiter read the items from the menu. Joyce cared little for food but he urged his guests to choose the best on the menu and the finest wines. The waiter kept his glass filled.
Joyce would have sat there with family and friends and his white wine till all hours if at a certain moment Nora hadn’t decided it was time to go. He ended by obeying her…
His tips were famous – to the waiters, the attendant who took his coat, the doorman who fetched him a taxi. ‘I never grudged tips’, Sylvia wrote, ‘but knowing the circumstances, it seemed to me that Joyce overtipped.’ She said he enjoyed spending the way other people might enjoy hoarding. A publisher, visiting her shop after dining out with Joyce, said: ‘He spends money like a drunken sailor.’ His parties were elaborate – food supplied by the best caterers, the best wines, though for himself he preferred large quantities of an ordinary white, a waiter hired to serve. He assiduously remembered birthdays and sent huge bouquets of flowers – all of which showed his generosity and largesse – except that the money came from women friends, not employers.
Darantiere of Dijon
Adrienne’s printer, Maurice Darantiere in Dijon, agreed to take on the typesetting and printing. He and his father before him were master printers. They had printed J.K. Huysman’s À rebours and other contentious writers. Darantiere shared his house with his young assistant, liked good food and was unfazed by colourful relationship or supposedly dirty words. He did not know, though, what he was letting himself in for with Ulysses. He did not use linotype machines. He cast Joyce’s 600-page novel, one letter at a time, from tiny metal blocks. The process would have been laborious and costly even with minimal corrections. Joyce viewed proofs as manuscript drafts to be revised; there was no point at
which he considered his book finished and Sylvia told Darantiere to give him all the galleys he wanted.
Sylvia had no capital so Darantiere agreed to wait to be paid until her subscriptions came in. He printed a prospectus advertising the publishing by Shakespeare and Company of Ulysses by James Joyce, ‘complete as written’. The edition would be limited to 1,000 copies, 100 on Hollande paper and signed by Joyce for sale at 350 francs, 150 on Arches paper with special binding at 250 francs and 750 on ordinary paper at 150 francs. There was a photograph of Joyce and excerpts from reviews of the episodes serialized in The Little Review.
Prepaid orders came in fast, though Sylvia did not want to bank this money before delivery. Gide, ‘always sure to give his support to the cause of freedom of expression’, subscribed, as did W.B. Yeats. Ernest Hemingway wanted several copies. Robert McAlmon ‘combed the nightclubs for subscribers’. T.E. Lawrence ordered two of the expensive editions. George Bernard Shaw was antipathetic and complained to Sylvia of the book’s ‘foulmouthed, foul-minded derision and obscenity’.
Sylvia wrote to Holly on 23 April 1921: ‘I am about to publish Ulysses – of James Joyce. It will appear in October.’ She voiced hopes that this might put her shop into profit. Both projections were optimistic.
grey bare hairy buttocks
Printing was held up because no typist could transcribe the ‘Circe’ episode. Seven typists failed to make sense of it, the eighth threatened to throw herself out of the window, the ninth rang the bell of Shakespeare and Company, flung the pages she had attempted to transcribe through the door, then dashed off down the road. Cyprian did her best then handed over to her friend Raymonde Linossier, one of the few women barristers in Paris. Raymonde often helped Sylvia in the shop but had to conceal her lesbian, feminist and freethinking interests from her father. Francis Poulenc hoped for a lavender cover-up marriage with her to hide his homosexuality but she declined. Raymonde struggled with forty-five pages then passed the manuscript to a Mrs Harrison, whose husband worked at the British Embassy. He found pages on his wife’s desk describing Father Malachi O’Flynn celebrating a black mass. He read:
No Modernism Without Lesbians Page 6