Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Sylvia Beach interview on James Joyce and Shakespeare & Company (1962)

I find Sylvia's voice unique and strangely soothing, while her conversation on the tale of the tribe proves illuminating.  That it was mostly women who were determined to help get Ulysses published reinforces, to me, the importance of Joyce studies within gender/identity politics in 2018.

Ulysses and Finnegans Wake seem like a performance by example of male-feminism in literature, and show a great capacity to explore the other in all it's forms and shadows: a modernist, or post-modern tendency toward comprehensive thinking.               

From wikipedia: "In 1956, Beach wrote Shakespeare and Company, a memoir of the inter-war years that details the cultural life of Paris at the time. The book contains first-hand observations of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Valery Larbaud, Thornton Wilder, André Gide, Leon-Paul Fargue, George Antheil, Robert McAlmon, Gertrude Stein, Stephen Benet, Aleister Crowley, Harry Crosby, Caresse Crosby, John Quinn, Berenice Abbott, Man Ray, and many others.

After Monnier's suicide in 1955, Beach had a relationship with Camilla Steinbrugge. Although Beach's income was modest during the last years of her life, she was widely honored for her publication of Ulysses and her support of aspiring writers during the 1920s. She remained in Paris until her death in 1962, and was buried in Princeton Cemetery. Her papers are archived at Princeton University.

2 comments:

tony smyth said...

Thank you for that. Brilliant. RAW lived really close to Joyces Tower. Sylvia B is wonderful.

دارلفیحا نقل اثاث said...

Nice blog
Amazang
Good work
نقل اثاث الشارقة

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