Books November 2010
Shorter notice
A review of The Letters of Sylvia Beach by Sylvia Beach.
Sylvia Beach, the sharp-eyed Paris publisher of James Joyce, once noticed “on his narrow feet, not so very white sneakers.” With her penchant for the unheralded detail, Beach might have made a very good journalist. Instead, with $3,000 in 1919, she founded Shakespeare and Company, the English-language bookstore and lending library at 8 rue Dupuytren. It is hard to know Beach well from her spry, self-effacing memoir, Shakespeare and Company (1959)—only the exemplary company she kept. To find her, one must go to her letters.
Keri Walsh’s compact and revealing volume introduces Beach as a character’s character, one whose struggle for existence in the madcap world of continental literature never ended, not even when her store did. The romantic, frisky American provocateur who emerges from Walsh’s book fairly cries out for film treatment. The Hollywood version might begin when Beach—a...
A Message from the Editors
As The New Criterion enters its fifth decade, your support has never been more vital.
Since 1982, The New Criterion has nurtured and safeguarded our delicate cultural inheritance. Join our family of supporters and secure the future of civilization.
