SYLVIA BEACH AND THE LOST GENERATION: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties

by Noel Riley Fitch ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 1983

The title and subtitle suggest the main problems with this long, often-lackluster study: Fitch, given the dazzling cast-of-characters in some way associated with Beach and her Shakespeare and Company bookshop, can't resist throwing in a largely stale hodgepodge of literary chat, thumbnail-sketches, and mini-essays--which dilute the Beach story without adding up to a pointed or stylish period-portrait. Whenever the central story does surface, it's sturdily handled: Sylvia, daughter of a staid minister and a would-be-bohemian mother (an ultimate suicide), was ""uneasy in a divided home,"" learned to love France as a child, and (like her sisters) chose Europe as the place for liberation/escape; she worked for the Red Cross, developing feminist/socialist views; in 1919 she opened the first English lending-library/bookshop in Paris; there she ""rocked the cradle"" of postwar US literature, though ""more sister than mother"" to her writer/ musician friends; she was a migraine sufferer, a loyal 38-year companion to a French bookseller. (""Eros channeled into sorority yielded both personal and literary fruits,"" in Fitch's stodgy phrasing.) The paramount writer, of course, is Joyce; and, though depending primarily on Richard Ellman's scholarship, Fitch draws on ""suppressed"" drafts of the Beach memoirs (nothing very startling) to add a few new colorations to their fascinating relationship--from the typing/publishing/selling/smuggling of Ulysses through strains, money-quarrels, and schism. (Though JJ is seen as selfishly in the wrong, Beach isn't whitewashed.) But much of the rest--a parade from Stein and Pound (source of Sylvia's little-magazine focus) to Hemingway and Spender--leaves Beach herself on the sidelines, the narrative often becoming an annotated laundry-list of names, oversimplified lit/crit, and near-parodic anecdotage. (""Hemingway continued to box with PrÉvost and play tennis and box with Loeb. . . ."") In the hands of a strong stylist, this grab-bag approach might have produced an evocative, impressionistic mural of literary-Paris. Fitch, however, writes flatly--and the result is choppy and shallow, with Sylvia's small-yet-worthy story swamped by all that unselective, over-familiar Big Name material.

Pub Date: June 16, 1983

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1983

Categories: NONFICTION