When this genre first became popular, it was known as “faction”, a blend of fact and fiction. Now the term seems to be biographical fiction, taking the life of a real person, usually historical, and weaving a novel around it. Here Kerri Maher has chosen Sylvia Beach, founder in the 1920s of the famous Paris English-language bookshop Shakespeare and Company, and the first publisher of James Joyces’s Ulysses.
Beach was part of the 1920s generation of Americans and others who settled in Paris in the hectic years after the first World War. In France, to be gay was not a crime and at the time of censorship and Prohibition in America, life in Paris was freer and more appealing for many of Beach’s circle included Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Joyce and, a little later, Ernest Hemingway.
There was also a big group of French writers and intellectuals, including Beach’s long-time lover, Adrienne Monnier who founded and ran A. Monnier Bookseller, the French bookshop that was complimentary to Shakespeare and Company.
Beach’s monumental achievement was to publish Ulysses and a quick internet search shows that the famous first edition is being offered for sale currently at $300 000.00. The book was described in the States as obscene and pornographic and was the subject of court cases, so it was an extraordinarily brave thing to do, not least because of the difficult and often devious Joyce. But it makes a stunning centrepiece for Maher’s story as she deals with the vicissitudes of Beach’s work, which cost her both financially and emotionally.
For me, the author’s style, particularly in the early part of the book when Maher is setting the scene, is rather grating. As well as showing, she tells, often making the reading somewhat tedious and repetitive. But the story is a powerful one, and, as Maher says towards the conclusion in what is rather obviously a piece of special pleading, that when thinking of writing a memoir, Beach wondered if the real truths of life were not best left to fiction.
The Paris Bookseller is published by Headline Review: ISBN 978 1 4722 9076 2 or 9781472290779 - Margaret von Klemperer
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