Happy Birthday to Sylvia Beach

… who is responsible for publishing James Joyce’s Ulysses when no one else would touch it.

A fascinating woman: born in New Jersey, I think? Dad? 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.. Because of the amount of expatriates of a literary stripe in Paris at that time (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein … GOD for a time machine!!!) Shakespeare & Co. became the hub-bub, the vortex.

When she met James Joyce, he had already written Ulysses, and – hm. Trying to get my story straight here: It was a finished manuscript (or as finished as any Joycean manuscript ever would be) – and because it was thought of as “obscene”, nobody would publish it.

But Sylvia Beach – who had never published a book before – took a risk and said that Shakespeare & Co. would put out this highly controversial work. Once it was published, the obscenity controversies heated up, and there were a couple of years there where the only place you could get a copy of Ulysses was through Beach’s bookshop in Paris.

I wish I had my little book with me, called yes I said yes I will Yes.: A Celebration of James Joyce, Ulysses, and 100 Years of Bloomsday, published last year in honor of the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday. It’s a James Joyce “commonplace book” – filled with quotes and excerpts from reviews and anecdotes about the man, and his own sketches of himself, etc. It’s a great little reference. In it, Sylvia Beach is, of course, a major character.

There’s one photograph in it – of Peggy Guggenheim’s letter to Sylvia Beach: “Please send me a copy of Ulysses!!!” The urgency people felt about this mysterious book, and its mysterious author – and the fact that having a copy was ILLEGAL – made people want to read it all the more.

Sylvia Beach – a courageous and interesting woman.