"Your Friend If Ever You Had One": The Letters Of Sylvia Beach To James Joyce ed. by Ruth Frehner and Ursula Zeller (review)

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• “Your Friend If Ever You Had One”: The Letters Of Sylvia Beach To James Joyce ed. by Ruth Frehner and Ursula Zeller
• Miranda Dunham-Hickman (bio)

“YOUR FRIEND IF EVER YOU HAD ONE”: THE LETTERS OF SYLVIA BEACH TO JAMES JOYCE, edited by Ruth Frehner and Ursula Zeller (Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2021), xxxiv + 329 pp. $146.00 cloth, ebook.

This astutely annotated volume at last provides a robust capture of the other side of the correspondence published in 1987 by editors Melissa Banta and Oscar A. Silverman, James Joyce’s Letters to Sylvia Beach, 1921–1940.¹ “Your Friend If Ever You Had One,” housing letters from Beach to both Joyce and, starting in the 1930s, Paul Léon—Beach’s successor in the informal role of Joyce’s secretary and administrator—is a windfall made possible in large part through a bequest from Hans E. Jahnke, stepson to Joyce’s son Giorgio. Roughly three-quarters of these letters derive from this donation, with additional letters supplied to round out the collection from the University at Buffalo, the National Library of Ireland, and Princeton University. [End Page 632] Of the edition’s 145 letters, 131 are published for the first time. The compilation offers a vivid portrait in letters of Beach, the owner of the famous Parisian bookshop Shakespeare and Company, tracing her evolving working relationship with Joyce through its periods of flourishing, tension, and eventual diminution in the 1930s, as Beach ceded her place as Joyce’s primary assistant to Léon.

The moment of the earlier Banta and Silverman correspondence indicates a context important to discerning the significance of this new collection. Around 1990, just before the emergence of the New Modernist Studies, scholarly attention increasingly turned to the cultural workers who provided supportive infrastructure for the development and publication of modernist writing—such as editors, publishers, and patrons—who oversaw and ran what Lawrence Rainey called the “institutions of modernism.”² With a new view-finder trained on textual production, there followed a decade of dispelling the myth of the modernist as solitary genius, engaging with the socio-material and collaborative realities of textual production and dissemination. In welcome ways, this line of work upended the lore around the “men of 1914”—Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis—as primary movers of modernism, with their flashing eyes and floating hair, training attention instead on the mundane actualities needed to make things go, elevating as important agents of textual production many players in the field traditionally considered auxiliary, such as editors and publishers.

In such scholarship, the spotlight frequently fell on women, often serving in such roles. Jayne E. Marek’s Women Editing Modernism featured editors of little magazines integral to modernism’s growth— such as Harriet Monroe of Poetry, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap of The Little Review, and Bryher of Life and Letters Today.³ It was also a moment of heightened focus on writers’ correspondence with editors and publishers: the genre of the letter valuably placed in the forefront, relevant specifics traditionally in the background—details of fees and costs, day-to-day errands, uncertainties, and revisions: the quotidian underpinnings essential to the cultural work of modernism. Such welcome fine-grained information is similarly richly in evidence in this edition.

Here, seen through a mosaic of such day-to-day transactions, is the woman responsible for the landmark publication of the book that would be banned for obscenity in both the United States and England. Beach’s 1922 publication of Ulysses in Paris was crucial to what became the annus mirabilis of modernism, which also saw the publication of Eliot’s The Waste Land and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room.⁴ Beach knew the stakes of what was emerging: as she wrote playfully to her [End Page 633] mother in April 1921, with a glint of the big dreams that accompanied the usual apparent modesty of “SB”:

[The bookshop is] more of a success every day and soon you may hear of us as a reglar [sic] Publishers and of the most important book of the age. . . . . . its [sic] a secret . . . and its going to make us famous. . . .!^5...