Sylvia Beach, the sharp-eyed Paris publisher of James Joyce, once noticed “on his narrow feet, not so very white sneakers.” With her penchant for the unheralded detail, Beach might have made a very good journalist. Instead, with $3,000 in 1919, she founded Shakespeare and Company, the English-language bookstore and lending library at 8 rue Dupuytren. It is hard to know Beach well from her spry, self-effacing memoir, Shakespeare and Company (1959)—only the exemplary company she kept. To find her, one must go to her letters.
Keri Walsh’s compact and revealing volume introduces Beach as a character’s character, one whose struggle for existence in the madcap world of continental literature never ended, not even when her store did. The romantic, frisky American provocateur who emerges from Walsh’s book fairly cries out for film treatment. The Hollywood version might begin when Beach—a self-described “adventuress” and the daughter of an unhappily married, Princeton-based Presbyterian minister—cheekily questions the legendary publisher Ben Huebsch about her career prospects. A born-again Parisian by her teens, she worked as a grape-picker (“vendangeur”) alongside German pows in the vineyards of wartime France. Next, she toiled as a translator-secretary for the Red Cross in Belgrade, just in time to report back on the dead horses littering the roads and the great Serbian cakes for sale in pastry shops. These exploits, which occasion some of Beach’s finest dispatches here, provide a personal context, previously missing, for her devoted labors to come in the field of modernism.
As suggested