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By Root 2569 0

Already a figure on the Paris scene, Stein had yet to achieve success in America. Her weekly salon, initiated in 1906, attracted Pablo Picasso and other artists, whose paintings she assiduously collected. In the 1920s, American writers in Paris, including Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson, sought her invitations. Stein became one of the Shakespeare and Company library’s original ‘bunnies’, as Sylvia called them, from the French word for subscriber, abonné. On 12 November 1920, 22-year-old Stephen Vincent Benét became the first young, aspiring American writer to join the library. Sylvia’s English competitors were Brentano’s bookshop for sales and the American Library of Paris for lending, both Right Bank institutions not favoured by the Left Bank bohemians. Brentano’s did not stock books by new writers or sell the experimental literary journals that Sylvia promoted. The blue-stockinged American Library matrons played moral censor, something Sylvia refused to do. When they removed H. L. Mencken’s journal, American Mercury, from their shelves, poet Ezra Pound, another of Sylvia’s American bunnies, wrote, ‘DAMN the right bank pigs, anyway.’ Shakespeare and Company became the haven of a new generation of writers and publishers. Most of its bunnies were students from the nearby University of Paris who, too poor to buy imported English books, paid the small subscription to borrow them.

In the summer of 1920, Shakespeare and Company reopened in a larger space at 12 rue de l’Odéon, facing Adrienne’s shop. Sylvia had two rooms just above Shakespeare and Company, but she did not live in them. She moved in with Adrienne at Number 8 and rented the rooms over the shop to pilgrims, as she called Americans arriving in Paris. Avant-garde American composer George Antheil lived there for several years. He used to climb up the front of the building to enter through a window rather than bother Sylvia by ringing at the shop. At the back, Sylvia kept a stove to brew tea and keep warm in winter. William Shirer, the great American journalist who was then working at the Paris Tribune, recalled how he ‘loved to browse among the shelves or be invited to tea in the back room, when in winter a fireplace blazed and there was much good talk’. Also at the back were children’s books, toys and a little red table. The outline of Odéonia was complete. It comprised the outdoor bookstalls in the arcades of the Théâtre de l’Odéon, the two bookshops, a music store, a library appraiser and, in the boulevard Saint-Germain, the writers’ favoured cafés, the Flore and the Deux Magots, and the Alsatian Brasserie Lipp.

Sylvia met James Joyce in July 1920. Joyce had just moved with his wife, Nora Barnacle, and their two children from Trieste. At the time, he was consumed with writing Ulysses. Sylvia, who had already read his short stories, later admitted, ‘Probably I was strongly attracted to Joyce as well as to his work, but unconsciously. My only love was Adrienne.’ When American courts convicted Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap of the Little Review for printing ‘obscene’ sections of Joyce’s Ulysses, American and British publishers refused to consider the book. Sylvia Beach hated censorship. ‘You cannot legislate against human nature,’ she said. Although she had never published anything, she came to Joyce’s rescue by publishing Ulysses. Adrienne’s French typesetters printed it, and Sylvia proofread every page. It went on sale in her shop, and she persuaded friends like Ernest Hemingway to smuggle copies into the United States. Her friend Janet Flanner called Sylvia ‘the intrepid, unselfish, totally inexperienced and little-moneyed young-lady publisher of “Ulysses” in Paris in 1922’. When the book appeared, Sylvia lost one of her first bunnies, Gertrude Stein. Miss Stein, who hated Joyce, took her custom to the American Library on the Right Bank.

Within six years of opening her shop, Sylvia Beach was called by Eugene Jolas, the American publisher of the Paris literary magazine transition, ‘probably the best known woman in Paris’. If she had any rival for that honour,