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A review by jenniferaimee
Shakespeare and Company by James Laughlin, Sylvia Beach
4.0
This may be evidence of obliviousness on my part, but I'm fairly certain I had never heard anyone mention Sylvia Beach and her "lending library" until I read an introduction to The Great Gatsby (although it may have been mentioned in Kenneth Slawenski's J.D. Salinger: A Life or, more likely, John Baxter's The most Beautiful Walk in the World, but I'm still bitter over that book so I don't want to give it the credit). My ignorance is hopefully evidence of the fact that I haven't read much Joyce; I hope that if I had read Ulysses or if I had studied Joyce in school, Sylvia Beach's name would have been mentioned. Because, of course, Sylvia Beach is ultimately responsible for the publication of Ulysses.
Sylvia Beach opened Shakespeare and Company in 1919, and it fast became the home base for many English-speaking writers who lived in Paris—James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald among them. Beach spent a lot of time with Joyce, both in the process of publishing Ulysses (which was banned in the States and therefore rejected by big-name publishers) and after its eventual success, and much of her memoir does address their friendship. But Shakespeare and Company is not in any way limited to Joyce, and that is one of its best qualities.
Told through a series of anecdotes, each headed by a person's name or few-word summary of the section, the book is engaging and fast-paced. I found Beach's writing style to be fairly chatty (for its time, acknowledging that this was first published in 1956), and was quickly engrossed in her descriptions of the various people who settled on the couches in her bookstore and the many dramas they brought with them. Shakespeare and Company serves well as a descriptive and non-chronological Who's Who of the "lost generation." The best part about this, though, was that Beach didn't limit herself. With twenty-two years of material, she surveyed the best of those who visited her shop, and if she talked about Joyce and Hemingway and Fitzgerald, she also mentioned Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Bryher, H.D., and Djuna Barnes—some of whom she claimed were among the foremost writers of their generation, many of whom I had never heard of. (I realize this review is casting a lot of doubt on my education. Whoops.) I read Shakespeare and Company with my phone open to Wikipedia, and I did a lot of research while reading. The Wikipedia pages on many of the above women (as well as some of the lesser-known male authors and others mentioned throughout the book) are fairly limited, and many of them list Shakespeare and Company among their source materials. Which leads to the question: Why has more scholarship not been done on these authors—all of whom were, based on their Wikipedia pages, very interesting? (I do wish I had more of a background on this era to uncover why that is—why study Ulysses and not Ruan? It could be down to quality, but I'm doubtful.) Regardless, Shakespeare and Company is valuable in that it does include the various lesser-known figures of the interwar period. Beach doesn't make comparisons between the authors, but she does suggest that the ones who aren't household names are as deserving of study as Joyce and Hemingway.
This book would have been valuable if it had been a dry recounting of the people who turned Beach's bookstore into a center of culture in Paris, but Beach was a gifted writer herself, and she made the book very readable. Really the only flaw I found (and I might not even call it a flaw) is that at times the gossipy nature of it felt more People Magazine than The New Yorker. It was as if she was sharing gossip just to share gossip, rather than for some overarching purpose. This only bothered me sometimes, because Beach was a member of this inner circle, her shop provided the structural basis for it, and therefore her occasional shift into the role of an outsider or onlooker providing insider gossip felt a little affected. Like I said, though, in most cases I found the style of the book to be a positive thing.
Overall, I really enjoyed this. I very much wish I had discovered it earlier, and I look forward to reading some of the authors Beach introduced.
Sylvia Beach opened Shakespeare and Company in 1919, and it fast became the home base for many English-speaking writers who lived in Paris—James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald among them. Beach spent a lot of time with Joyce, both in the process of publishing Ulysses (which was banned in the States and therefore rejected by big-name publishers) and after its eventual success, and much of her memoir does address their friendship. But Shakespeare and Company is not in any way limited to Joyce, and that is one of its best qualities.
Told through a series of anecdotes, each headed by a person's name or few-word summary of the section, the book is engaging and fast-paced. I found Beach's writing style to be fairly chatty (for its time, acknowledging that this was first published in 1956), and was quickly engrossed in her descriptions of the various people who settled on the couches in her bookstore and the many dramas they brought with them. Shakespeare and Company serves well as a descriptive and non-chronological Who's Who of the "lost generation." The best part about this, though, was that Beach didn't limit herself. With twenty-two years of material, she surveyed the best of those who visited her shop, and if she talked about Joyce and Hemingway and Fitzgerald, she also mentioned Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Bryher, H.D., and Djuna Barnes—some of whom she claimed were among the foremost writers of their generation, many of whom I had never heard of. (I realize this review is casting a lot of doubt on my education. Whoops.) I read Shakespeare and Company with my phone open to Wikipedia, and I did a lot of research while reading. The Wikipedia pages on many of the above women (as well as some of the lesser-known male authors and others mentioned throughout the book) are fairly limited, and many of them list Shakespeare and Company among their source materials. Which leads to the question: Why has more scholarship not been done on these authors—all of whom were, based on their Wikipedia pages, very interesting? (I do wish I had more of a background on this era to uncover why that is—why study Ulysses and not Ruan? It could be down to quality, but I'm doubtful.) Regardless, Shakespeare and Company is valuable in that it does include the various lesser-known figures of the interwar period. Beach doesn't make comparisons between the authors, but she does suggest that the ones who aren't household names are as deserving of study as Joyce and Hemingway.
This book would have been valuable if it had been a dry recounting of the people who turned Beach's bookstore into a center of culture in Paris, but Beach was a gifted writer herself, and she made the book very readable. Really the only flaw I found (and I might not even call it a flaw) is that at times the gossipy nature of it felt more People Magazine than The New Yorker. It was as if she was sharing gossip just to share gossip, rather than for some overarching purpose. This only bothered me sometimes, because Beach was a member of this inner circle, her shop provided the structural basis for it, and therefore her occasional shift into the role of an outsider or onlooker providing insider gossip felt a little affected. Like I said, though, in most cases I found the style of the book to be a positive thing.
Overall, I really enjoyed this. I very much wish I had discovered it earlier, and I look forward to reading some of the authors Beach introduced.