BOOKS AND THEIR MAKERS
SYLVIA BEACH AND JAMES JOYCE
The chattering masses these days are always on about the demise of publishing, by which they mean the vast ramshackle apparatus that churns out hundreds of thousands of inexpensive titles each year, many of which will see the light of fewer than a hundred pairs of eyes. Focussing on the macro is often depressing, any way you approach it: it's sad that the industry is shrinking, because casting a wide net perhaps ensures that the best fish are caught; but casting a wide net also means that a prize catch might not be properly fileted (to take the metaphor a bit too far). If you spend much time, as I do, talking with writers of books that have been published, you will soon acquire the ability, during a conversation about their experience, to predict what they are going to say, even to have their side of the conversation for them. "I had to do my own copy-editing," "I wanted a different title," "I hate the cover art," "It took three years to get my book out." Et cetera. On the other hand, some of the most brilliant people I know are book editors, who work quite literally day and night on behalf of their authors. They have, of course, their own set of complaints.
But that, as I say, is literary suffering writ large. I find it much easier to comprehend and be inspired by suffering on a case-by-case basis. Every Carver needs his Lish, every Lish needs his Carver, and every thinking person (myself and the readers of this blog included) needs to be reminded that great books are often the result of encounters between individuals—sometimes within a larger institutional framework, but sometimes not, meaning that they will continue to occur so long as there are writers and readers, however small the "industry" becomes. To that end, I'm launching a new category on the blog which will present harrowing but touching stories of great literary partnerships, and if you have any that are particularly meaningful to you, please feel free to e-mail me.
First up, Sylvia Beach and James Joyce, as told by Janet Flanner, a.k.a. Genêt, who wrote the Letter from Paris for this magazine from 1925 to 1975. Recently, I picked up a copy of Flanner's "Paris Was Yesterday." In her introduction to the 1972 edition, Flanner describes the process by which "Ulysses," snippets of which had been available to the expat community that frequented Beach's bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, leading up to its publication in toto in 1922, was brought about:
Over the years, Ulysses, though read only in its early fractions, had established itself as part of our literary life to come, when and if eventually completed and published. Thus long before our eyes had ever seen Sylvia Beach's entire printed text in Paris and before our hands had ever lifted the full weight of its 730 pages, Joyce's Ulysses had become part of the library of our minds. As we learned by listening to and watching Sylvia in her bookshop, to accomplish her publishing feat she became Joyce's secretary, editor, impresario, and banker, and had to hire outsiders to run her shop. She organized international and local subscription lists for the book to help finance its printing. After typesetting had begun at Dijon, in a kind of postscript ecstasy of creation, Joyce scribbled some ninety thousand words more on the costly, repeatedly reset proofs, making a four-hundred-thousand word volume, of which Sylvia managed to have two copies printed for his birthday on February 2, 1922—one for him, one for her.
Soon, Joyce was living the lush life, but not, however, with poor, long-suffering Sylvia. Flanner goes on:
Ulysses was the paying investment of his lifetime after years of penury, Sylvia said, while hardly acknowledging the fact that the publishing costs almost wiped out her Shakespeare and Company. The peak of his prosperity came in 1932 with the news of his sale of the book to Random House in New York for a forty-five-thousand-dollar advance, which, she confessed, he failed to announce to her and of which, as was later known, he never even offered her a penny. "I understood from the first that, working with or for Mr. Joyce, the pleasure was mine—an infinite pleasure: the profits were for him."
Further reading: "The Letters of Sylvia Beach," edited by Keri Walsh, due out next month.
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