The Sheila Variations

Happy Birthday to Sylvia Beach

... who is responsible for publishing James Joyce's Ulysses when no one else would touch it. Here is a photo of Sylvia and Jimmy:

Sylvia said of Joyce: "As for Joyce, he treated people invariably as his equals, whether they were writers, children, waiters, princesses, or charladies. What anybody had to say interested him; he told me that he had never met a bore."

(As far as I'm concerned - anyone who can say that he has "never met a bore" is a genius of the human spirit.)

A fascinating woman: born in Maryland, and as an adult a major force in the literary ex-pat community in Paris. She served in World War I with the Red Cross in Serbia, and after the war settled in Paris, where she opened up a bookshop - the enormously influential Shakespeare & Co.. Let's see - here are a couple of the names in Paris at that time: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, Joyce ... (GOD for a time machine!) And so Shakespeare & Co. became the hub-bub, the vortex of them all.

When she met James Joyce, he had already written Ulysses, and it was a finished manuscript by that point (or as finished as any Joycean manuscript ever would be) - but essentially unpublishable, due to its being deemed "obscene". The funny thing about all of this is that Joyce said later, "The pity is that the public will demand and find a moral in my book, or worse they may take it in some serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious word in it."

But Sylvia Beach - who had never published a book before - took a risk and said that Shakespeare & Co. would put out the book, which was already highly controversial. It was an act of courage. Perhaps she went into it recklessly, thinking that giving a space for genius would be its own reward - perhaps she went into it knowing the eventual fallout that would crash down upon her head - But whatever her interior process, she published it.

And the shit hit the fan.

Once it was published, the obscenity controversies heated up, the book was banned (Joyce said later, "I have come to the conclusion that I cannot write without offending people.") everybody was talking about it, who had actually read it? - you could be arrested for trying to smuggle it into certain countries - and there were a couple of years where the only place on the planet you could get a copy of Ulysses was through Beach's bookshop in Paris. And so the orders flew in from folks around the world. People who were book readers, people who were collectors, people who sensed the historic moment and just wanted a copy.

I've seen a photograph of Peggy Guggenheim's letter to Sylvia Beach: "Please send me a copy of Ulysses!!!" Urgent exclamation marks.

The comments of other great writers on this book are, of course, great interest to me. They run the gamut of disgust, elation, despair, awe, humility ... and I love it, too, that Yeats (an early supporter of Joyce) changed his mind. His first response on reading it? "A mad book!"

Then later, as it percolated, Yeats said: "I have made a terrible mistake. It is a work perhaps of genius. I now perceive its coherence ... It is an entirely new thing -- neither what the eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time."

Hart Crane had this to say (or shout): "I feel like shouting EUREKA! Easily the epic of the age."

George Bernard Shaw was disturbed by Ulysses, and its view of Ireland - so much so that it tormented him a bit. He saw it as an indictment (and, in a way, it was). He said, however: "If a man holds up a mirror to your nature and shows you that it needs washing -- not whitewashing -- it is no use breaking the mirror. Go for soap and water."

T.S. Eliot was especially devastated by the book, and his comments on it are numerous. Examples: "How could anyone write again after achieving the immense prodigy of the last chapter?" And also - this quote really touches me, because as a writer, Eliot wasn't half-bad himself: "I wish, for my own sake, that I had not read it." And lastly (and I think this pretty much gets at the root of what was so disturbing to Eliot): "I hold Ulysses to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape."

Goose bumps.

Edmund Wilson wrote of it:

The more we read Ulysses, the more we are convinced of its psychological truth, and the more we are amazed at Joyce's genius in mastering and in presenting, not through analysis or generalization, but by the complete recreation of life in the process of being lived, the relations of human beings to their environment and to each other; the nature of their perception of what goes on about them and of what goes on within themselves; and the interdependence of their intellectual, their physical, their professional and their emotional lives. To have traced all these interdependences, to have given each of these elements its value, yet never to have lost sight of the moral through preoccuptation with the physical, nor to have forgotten the general in the particular; to have exhibited ordinary humanity without either satirizing it or sentimentalizing it - this would already have been sufficiently remarkable; but to have subdued all this material to the uses of a supremely finished and disciplined work of art is a feat which has hardly been equalled in the literature of our time.

Wilson also wrote:

"Yet for all its appalling longeurs, "Ulysses" is a work of high genius. Its importance seems to me to lie, not so much in its opening new doors to knowledge -- unless in setting an example to Anglo-Saxon writers of putting down everything without compunction -- or in inventing new literary forms -- Joyce's formula is really, as I have indicated, nearly seventy-five years old -- as in its once more setting the standard of the novel so high that it need not be ashamed to take its place beside poetry and drama. "Ulysses" has the effect at once of making everything else look brassy."

And here is the lady who first made this "epic of the age" available to the world, at great financial and personal risk:

Joyce eventually moved to another publisher - for later editions - which left Beach financially stranded (along with the Great Depression which really hit Shakespeare & Co. hard.) But Beach had rich influential literary friends - many of whom came to her rescue during this difficult time. Famous writers did readings at Shakespeare & Co., admission was charged, people paid subscription fees - and in this way the bookstore made it through. Beach died in 1962. She wrote a memoir (which I haven't read - my dad said it's okay, not great, but okay) - and is widely revered for her courageous independent move to publish Ulysses - the book that T.S. Eliot said "destroyed the 19th century".

She said:

I was on the platform, my heart going like the locomotive, as the train from Dijon came slowly to a standstill and I saw the conductor getting off, holding a parcel and looking around for someone -- me. In a few minutes, I was ringing the doorbell at the Joyces' and handing them Copy No. 1 of Ulysses. It was February 2, 1922.

Posted by sheila