April 9th, 1962: Portrait of the artist as being 'very demanding and spent money like water'

FROM THE ARCHIVES: Sylvia Beach, the owner of the Parisian bookshop Shakespeare Co and first publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses…

FROM THE ARCHIVES:Sylvia Beach, the owner of the Parisian bookshop Shakespeare Co and first publisher of James Joyce's Ulysses, was interviewed in her 75th year in Paris by Peter Lennon, the Irish journalist and filmmaker, for the Guardian. This is an extract from the interview which was published subsequently in today's Irish Timesin 1962. –

YOU HAD the feeling that if you asked her to do a jig, she’d be up like a shot. A friend told me that quite recently he had seen her swinging away at a pile of wood with a great big axe nearly as big as herself. She was watching me closely and came out with a direct answer to my thoughts: “Joyce always said that I had great energy. Let’s hope, he would say, Sylvia’s energy will never diminish. And it hasn’t! Do you know he was nearly going to take this place [her apartment] one time? When I was living downstairs in the bookshop he sent his son to have a look at it. But it wasn’t modern enough for him. There is no bathroom you know . . . he had very high-falutin’ ideas.

“I thought he never had much money?”

“He hadn’t – not until towards the end when Miss Weaver took care of him. She never wanted it to be known how much she gave him but I can tell you it was a perfect fortune. But when he came here from Trieste he had nothing. I helped him a lot. But he was very demanding and spent money like water if he had it. He would come to me and say: ‘Sylvia, it’s my birthday and I have nothing for my guests, would you advance me something?’ And of course I had to. But he wouldn’t just give them sandwiches like anyone else – oh no, he had to have the caterers in. Every time he travelled with his wife and family, he always put up at palaces. He liked the grand style.

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“He was supposed to have had a beautiful singing voice?”

“He thought so, anyway. He thought that he and John McCormack should have had twin careers . . . You know anyone who took up with Joyce had to take care of all his problems. He was very demanding. He thought that people had nothing else to do but read his books. If you did anything for him you did everything. Just like a nurse with a child.” She laughed.

“Sometimes I would want to get away for a few days to a little cottage in the country but Joyce would want me to stay and take care of his business. When I would go he would pursue me. He would bombard me with letters and telegrams. I never saw such a man! He was a perfect octopus!”

“Didn’t people get tired of his demands?”

“Ah no! We liked him too much. And he was perfectly charming. Mind you, he was not liked at dinners and things like that because he had no small talk, but with people he knew, he was a delightful man. And then he was a great worker. In Trieste he worked for hours in the Berlitz to support his family and then wrote his books at night. Nothing could put him off – even failing eyesight. He still worked on when he was practically blind. I helped him because he helped himself. He was never a slacker. If he was,” she said with the air of a severe schoolmistress, “I would never have helped him. He did great work. He gave himself to his work and expected you to do the same . . . Finnegans Wake – you could swim around in that! I thought Yeats was pale beside him.

“They always said that Joyce was very nice the way he would never say a bad word about anyone else’s writing, but the truth is they never existed for him. He only read his own work. Of course, he had reading he loved, and when, for example, his daughter was illustrating Chaucer, he would read Chaucer, but he never read the new stuff.”


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