PASSAGE DE L'ENTRE-DEUX-GUERRES

Review par Danièle Gasiglia-Laster

Women of the shadows, discreet and generous, Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach gave much and received little. These modest booksellers nevertheless worked for literature with more efficiency and abnegation than many great publishers. Adrienne opens La Maison des Amis des livres, rue de l'Odéon, in 1915. Her bookstore is also a lending library, which allows her to better acquaint her customers and friends with contemporary literature, still little disseminated at the time. She savors books and offers them to taste like good little dishes. This inveterate gourmand cannot help comparing the texts she loves to the dishes that please her, the happiness of reading to that of eating. Conviviality and shared pleasure: such are for her the necessities of a good table and a good bookstore. She advises her visitors, discusses with them, organizes literary evenings where conferences and readings are offered. Paul Claudel composes and reads at her request an introduction to his works; Paul Valéry gives a reading there of Mon Faust, then unpublished. She publishes in pamphlets texts by these authors but also by Georges Duhamel, Jules Romains, sorts of extensions of the conferences or discussions offered at the bookstore, launches a journal, Le Navire d'argent, which, despite its quality, sinks into financial difficulties, accepts the administration of Commerce. She is not open to everything however and does not appreciate Proust's work, expected one evening in 1920 at an evening devoted to Léon-Paul Fargue and whose chair remains empty. But his coming, thinks Laure Murat, would probably not have converted Adrienne to the Recherche. If she gets along well with the young Louis Aragon, the surrealists, whose revolutionary spirit she does not share, frighten her a little and her relations with Breton are not the most harmonious. This rejection is largely explained by her deep taste for the religious. The violent anticlericalism of the surrealists is certainly not to her liking. Prévert will nevertheless write—well after his passage through surrealism, but in no way tamed—a very beautiful homage to Adrienne, reprinted and annotated in volume II of the poet's works in the Pléiade, an edition which, better consulted, would have allowed Laure Murat to avoid some errors concerning this author. As for Artaud, he sends to the bookseller, from the asylum of Rodez, a pathetic letter that proves the attachment he bears her. Adrienne is solicited from all sides to serve as intermediary. Paulhan asks her to persuade Claudel to give a text to the NRF; journalist Janet Flanner obtains through her an interview with Jean-Paul Sartre then wants to cancel the appointment, the New Yorker being afraid of the writer's pro-communist opinions. But despite some disappointments of this kind, Adrienne lends herself graciously to what would be called today public relations activity. For her part, the American Sylvia Beach founds in 1919, rue Dupuytren, Shakespeare and Company, an English-language bookstore-lending library on the model of La Maison des Amis des Livres. Having become very close to Adrienne Monnier—the two women have a romantic relationship—Sylvia Beach installs her bookstore at 12 rue de l'Odéon, very close to Adrienne's, in 1921. The visitors there are also very prestigious: Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Hemingway, among others, frequent Shakespeare and Company. "Literary ambassador of the United States in France," Sylvia Beach also organizes meetings between American and French writers. But above all, she will embark on an adventure that is both exciting and trying: publishing Joyce's Ulysses (the English title is written with a final s). The first edition appears in 1922; Sylvia Beach carries and defends it against all odds, taking care of the book more than the financial troubles of her bookstore. She succeeds in making Joyce known in France while becoming herself the most famous American in Paris. With Adrienne, she then strives to find the best translators to offer Ulysse to francophones. The publication of the novel by the two women, Laure Murat rightly notes, "remains the most complex and brilliant chapter of the book of their life." The writer will not always behave as he should have with Sylvia Beach, drawing from Shakespeare and Company's cash register what he considered to be advances and making no effort to have the publisher's rights recognized when the Americans finally decide to publish Ulysses.

The first five chapters of the book abound with precious information about the literary life of the time, anecdotes that are never anodyne and often very revealing, and show to what extent Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach played an important role in the literary life of their time. The last four seem less necessary: Laure Murat accords too much importance to the homosexuality of Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach. Even if, at the time when they lived, it must have been difficult to be lesbians, it is above all as women that they had to struggle to impose themselves in a masculine society; the American, more feminist than the French woman—not only timid but sometimes even reactionary on this point—was well convinced of this. Some interesting facts are recounted in this second part—for example the first semi-public performance of Erik Satie's Socrate at La Maison des Amis des livres in 1919—but one wonders why certain events are not reported in a more linear manner. If chronological biographies are no longer much in fashion, they nevertheless avoided somewhat abrupt flashbacks, had the merit of clarity, allowed one to see the character's evolution and dispensed with a thematic or other structure, sometimes arbitrary. One has a bit the impression here that the essential has been said in the first part and that the second often strays from the subject. The Chronology proposed at the end of the volume nevertheless reestablishes an order and operates an excellent synthesis, highlighting the most striking facts. Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach loved books with passion and knew how to create places of cultural exchange that, even today, could be models. They well deserved to be honored.