Five by Five with Keri Walsh

The CMC assistant professor of literature discusses her new book on the letters of Sylvia Beach, "The Lost Generation" in Paris, and why Ernest Hemingway is still intriguing. In this modern era where Kindles and iPads are poised to replace printed books, perhaps it's nice to reflect on the singular joys that can come from the tactile feel and smell of hard bindings and paper.
In a new book, The Letters of Sylvia Beach (Columbia University Press, 2010) edited by Keri Walsh, assistant professor of literature at CMC, we are transported to Beach's Left Bank bookstore Shakespeare and Company during the heady days after World War I when Paris was a Mecca for aspiring, expatriate writers.
The New York Times calls Walsh's project a "lovely book, scholarly and well annotated, a pleasure to hold." It documents, writes the Times, what Beach once called "my missionary endeavor" and also what she called, correctly, her "interesting life." (Read full review)
Beach was the first publisher of James Joyce's Ulysses and her bookshop, filled with overstuffed chairs and floor-to-ceiling shelves stacked with volumes, was a haven for budding literary heavyweights like Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Janet Flanner, William Carlos Williams, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
"Working on these letters taught me so much about what it means to support artists and the arts," Walsh says. "If a friend of Beach's published a book, she would buy it. If a wandering minstrel needed a place to crash, she would find one. She taught me that anyone can be an advocate and activist for the arts in daily life."
Walsh says that as she transcribed Beach's letters, she noticed how good she was at getting people interested in writers and literary causes. "She always made it seem like fun, and she never forgot to thank people," Walsh says. "In 1923 she wrote to her friend Marion Peter, who smuggled copies of Ulysses into America: You were such an angel to take all that trouble bootlegging for me!' There was a bit of the fairy godmother about her."
The arrangement of Beach's letters is chronological with two long chapters in the middle ("Shakespeare and Company: Expatriates" and "Shakespeare and Company: 1930s,") that trace the most legendary period of Beach's life.
"But I was equally interested in the earlier chapters of her story, especially her time working for the American Red Cross in Serbia at the end of World War I," Walsh says. "Those letters capture an aspect of American women's experiences in the First World War that I hadn't encountered before."
The last part of the book details Beach's life after World War II, when she saw French literary culture boom. "In the 1940s she became a friend of Richard Wright's," Walsh says. "As she aged, she remained connected to the expat women and Joyce supporters who had been her friends since the 1920s."
And how does Professor Walsh feel about those Kindles and iPads?
"I'm not yet a convert, though it could happen at any time," she says. "I'm certainly not willing to give up printed books, and I think there are enough other bibliophiles and book fetishists out there to keep bookstores in business, especially charming, independent bookstores where you can linger as long as you like, strike up good conversations, and find second-hand copies of things you didn't know you were looking for."

**** CMC: What first attracted you to this project ... a love of "The Lost Generation" in Paris? Keri: Yes, it began with a love for Paris, for the period between the wars, and for women who make their way through life on unconventional paths. On a trip to Paris in the summer of 2002, I stumbled upon the current Shakespeare and Company bookstore in the shadow of Notre Dame, and spent a lovely evening reading in the dusty stacks. Then I started my Ph.D. studies at Princeton with a plan to work on women writers and artists of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s. I was drawn to adventurous expats like the photographer Lee Miller, the poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), and the cabaret sensation Josephine Baker. There's still an appeal in the fantasy of running off to Paris, but this was especially true for artists and intellectuals after the First World War. The exchange rate was excellent: you could live much more cheaply in France than in America or Britain. And for creative women, setting up shop in Paris also meant side-stepping some of the usual expectations to marry and have children. CMC: Did you learn anything new about Sylvia Beach or her circle when researching and editing her letters that you didn't already know? Keri: I was most surprised by the lessons I learned from Sylvia Beach about how to live and work in a creative community. Sylvia Beach was so good at what she did, which was creating an aura of excitement, urgency, warmth, intellectual seriousness, and romance around literary culture. She achieved this because she was great with peoplean extraordinary diplomat who always used wit and kindness to keep the wheels of modernism rolling. She was a reasonably good administrator, yes, but really she led by inspiring people. She was a wit, a dreamer, and a fantasist, a whimsical person who dressed in velvet like an 1890s decadent, loved going to the plays and concerts, and in fact had a rather theatrical sense of life. As the American diplomat Morrill Cody said in his profile of the Shakespeare & Company bookstore for Publishers Weekly in 1924, "Miss Beach's bookshop is essentially a character' storethe grotesque Chinese goldfish, the pair of brass scales (just as though books were sold by the pound as they were in the olden days), and the feeling of old wood, homeliness, comfort, always clean without being shiny. But Sylvia Beach is the principle character." CMC: Among Sylvia Beach's writer-friends and confidantes, who is your favorite and why? Keri: Bryher stands out to me, both as a person and a writer. She was born Annie Winifred Ellerman, the daughter of an extraordinarily wealthy shipbuilding magnate. Eventually she took the name of her favorite of the Isles of Scilly, Bryher. Like Beach, Bryher was a champion of the arts, but she had much more money than Beach, and she used her wealth to support many Parisian expatriates. She was the longtime partner of the American poet H.D. and was also a really interesting writer, an early film journalist, and a committed anti-fascist in the 1930s. Bryher wrote a series of historical novels. These are now mostly out of print, though a few have been released in the last 10 years. A future project that interests me is bringing together an edition of Bryher's works. CMC: What is your take of some modern writers who find it fashionable to dismiss or downgrade Ernest Hemingway for his literary machismo? Keri: Well, for a long time Hemingway's camp machismo was an irresistible target, but I think that in the past 20 years or so, developments in the way we think about sexuality and genderfor instance, a more nuanced attention to categories like masculinity, heterosexuality, whiteness, imperialism, mental illnesshave shed new light on Hemingway. Ultimately, his writing expresses a feeling of besieged masculinity. It's important to retain a feminist perspective on where these styles of masculinity might lead for the women in Hemingway's fiction and his life, but once you recognize that the very exaggerationsthe bullfighting, the marlin-fishing, the safarisexpress an undeniable uncertainty about what it takes to be a man, it becomes possible to read Hemingway more empathetically. He and Sylvia Beach were kindred spirits, and their friendship meant a lot to both of them. In Beach's memoir she gives a glimpse of a different side of his personality. Recalling his relationship with his son, she remarks that "Hemingway was serious and competent in whatever he did, even when he went in for the care of an infant Dropping in one morning and seeing him give the baby a bath, I was amazed at his deft handling of Bumby. Hemingway p?re was justly proud, and asked me if I didn't think he had a future as a nursemaid." She also talks about the fun she had going to boxing matches in Paris with Hemingway and his wife, Hadley. CMC: What are you working on right now? Keri: I'm finishing a book called Antigone in Modernism: Classicism, Feminism, and Theatres of Protest. It's a history of modernist theatre through the lens of adaptations of Sophocles's "ultimate political play," Antigone. The figure of Antigone captivates me for some of the same reasons Beach does, and for different ones as well. She's a charismatic and a feminist heroine, too, but a much more volatile, tragic, and dangerous one than Beach. I'm interested in how dramatists and actors and audiences have understood Antigone in the 20th century, especially in moments of political crisis. One chapter in the book, for instance, looks at the production of Jean Anouilh's play Antigone in Occupied Paris. I show the revisions that were made to the play before its London premiere (starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh) to bring it into line with British conceptions of French Resistance during the Second World War.

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