“€˜Ulysses€™ is going to make my place famous.” – Sylvia Beach, 1921

And indeed it did.

I’m in heaven these days due to the recent publication of The Letters of Sylvia Beach, which I have not read yet, but it means that Sylvia Beach is all over the place right now. It’s wonderful! It’s wonderful to see her name everywhere. Naturally this means that Joyce’s name is everywhere, too, so consider me thrilled.

Here is a review of the letters, which makes me drool to get my hands on a copy. This is all well-trod ground for me, having read many biographies of Joyce (and other literary giants of the day), where she plays a prominent role. But there’s something about reading someone’s letters … the un-cleaned-up un-edited thought process and syntax revealed. Relationships made clear, without an editorial voice inserting itself. For example:

More and better literary gossip is spilled in Beach’s 1959 memoir, but these letters have tart moments on nearly every page. Beach introduced Sherwood Anderson to Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald to James Joyce, and knew everyone. She describes a reading in her bookstore, given by Hemingway and Stephen Spender, during which beer and whiskey were “displayed on the table in front of the boys, of which they were partaking freely.” The sight of this made Joyce stand up and leave. It “made him too thirsty,” she writes, “to stand it any longer.” Beach, a popular giver of dinner parties and a bohemian cult hero, was unpretentious. Inviting the writer Bryher to a reception, she wrote: “You know it won’t be at all formal, never is in our house, and people don’t dress up here. I never wear an evening gown no matter what they invite me too — haint got none.”

Go read the whole thing.