HEMMINGWAY'S WALKS IN PARIS
La Maison des Amis des Livres: 7 rue de I'Odeon
Hemingway was just learning to make his way around the cold, windswept streets of the 6th arrondissement (6e) in December 1921, when h~ sought rue de I'Odeon. Sherwood Anderson had given him several letters of introduction - one to an American bookshop on this street - when he told young Hemingway that he had to go to Paris if he wanted to be a serious artist. Because Anderson had dined with Beach and Monnier, Hemingway undoubtedly knew from him that there were two bookshops in rue de l'Odeon. Hemingway probably walked from the Hotel Jacob et d'Angleterre, through the narrow streets ofSaint-Germain to Boulevard Saint-Germain and turned right when he saw the Theatre de l'Odeon up the street.
As he entered Carrefour de l'Odeon, he passed No. 15, where Arthur Moss and Florence Gilliam published Gargayle from August 1921 to October 1922. It was the first English-language review to appear after the war. 'Greenwich Village in Montparnasse', one contributor called the little magazine. Although he had begun visiting Stein's salon and Shakespeare and Company, Hemingway was not yet known in intellectual circles. 'I don't know that gang', he wrote to a friend about the Gargoyle group the month after they ceased publication.
The French bookshop and library of Adrienne Monnier was on the left as one enters rue de I'Odeon from the Carrefour de l'Odeon. The site remained as a bookstore until 1987. Walk up the left-hand side of the street and you will see the wrought-iron cut-out ahead. It was made from a photograph of James Ioyce and Adrienne Monnier walking along this street. Monnier published the French translation (still the standard edition) of Ioyce's Ulysses in 1929.
Monnier, a writer and editor, presided over the leading French salon and lending library from 1915 to 1955 - a meeting place for Paul Valery, Andre Gide, Leon-Paul Fargue, and the young Surrealists. Her House of the Friends of Books is remembered in the name of the art shop that now occupies the space, Les Amis du Dessin. Monnier believed that Hemingway had 'the true writer's temperament' and published his first story ('Fifty Grand') in French in her Le Navired'Argentin March of 1926. It was an all-American edition containing essays by Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Robert McAlmon, E. E. Cummings, and Hemingway. Though small, it had a prestigious circulation and Hemingway was unknown by the French at the time. Since the Second World War, his influence can be felt in many French novels, such as those of Cam us.
Archibald MacLeish, lawyer and poet who would later become Librarian of Congress and an undersecretary of state, remembers taking Hemingway to a French literary afternoon here, where Andre Gide and Jules Romains among others sat in stiff-backed chairs 'talking as if they had rehearsed all morning'. Hemingway's 'hulking body and artless air and charming smile' soon intimidated Gide, who with the others was watching Hemingway, who 'watched the floor'.
It was too much for Gide. He dropped the topic, whatever it was, and drew Hemingway aside to explain how he punished his cat. He punished his cat, he said by lifting him up by the scruff of his neck and saying PHT! in his face. Whether Hemingway restrained a desire to hit him, I don't know. I was watching the back of his head.
The only French writer Hemingway befriended at La Maison des Amis des Livres was Jean Prevost, with whom he occasionally boxed. Prevost for a time worked as Monnier's assistant editor. She arranged a lively boxing match between the two young men. Apparently Hemingway broke his finger on Prevost's hard head.
Across the street is No. 12, now unrecognizable with a new facade but once home of Shakespeare and Company, operated by Monnier's companion Sylvia Beach. Beach loved this street leading to the c01umned theatre that somehow reminded her of the 'colonial houses of Princeton', New Jersey, her home town.
Shakespeare and CompanylRobert McAlmon's Contact Publishing Company: 12 rue de I'Odeon
In some of the fondest memories of A Moveable Feast, Hemingway describes this haven and shrine:
On a cold windswept street, this was a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the . window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living .... and even the dead writers look as though they had really been alive.
Sylvia Beach was the owner and operator of this American bookshop and library (it was to the right of the door to No. 12) which Hemingway visited the week he arrived in Paris. She lent him his first books before he could pay the deposit. He would become her 'best customer', borrowing hundreds of books - Turgenev, Tolstoy, Stendhal, and F1aubert - from the lending library shelves. Here he also met many of his contemporary writer friends, including Ezra Pound, Allen Tate, Thornton Wilder, and James Ioyce,
A minister's daughter from Princeton, New Jersey, Beach had opened her bookshop in 1919. When she met Hemingway in December 1921, they became instant friends. She thought he was handsome and Latin looking; he admired her wit and shapely legs. She was publishing James Ioyce's Ulysses, which appeared on 2 February 1922 - a 'most goddamn wonderful book', Hemingway exclaimed. In addition to selling subscriptions to Ulysses, Hemingway later signed the petition against Samuel Roth's piracy of her publication - the first a gesture of friendship to Beach, the second an acknowledgement of the importance of the pioneering role of the novel.
Shakespeare and Company was Hemingway's library, post office, and club house during his first years in Paris. Beach lent him the money so that he and Hadley could return to Toronto for the birth of their child. Upon their return to Paris, Ernest would bring the baby to the shop where Bumby would wait patiently for his Papa to read the latest journals. For nearly two decades Hemingway played an active role in the major literary events of the library. He never quarrelled with Beach and praises her in his memoirs: 'no one that I ever knew was nicer to me'.
Katherine Anne Porter, who has written such classic short fiction as 'Flowering Judas' and 'Noon Wine', recalls that Sylvia Beach introduced her to Hemingway in the bookshop one cold spring day in 1934. He was visiting Paris oil his way back to Florida from lion hunting in Africa. Beach made the mistake of calling them 'the two best modem writers'. Immediately the telephone rang and Beach retreated to answer it. Hemingway looked long and hard at Porter, who later called him a 'fraud', then walked out without a word.
Hemingway and T. S. Eliot were the only Americans to join a list of distinguished French men-of-letters who gave readings in 1936-7 for the Friends of Shakespeare and Company - a group organized by Andre Gide to raise money to save the bookshop. Afraid to appear alone, Hemingway recruited Step hen Spender, a young British poet whom he had met in Spain where both were observing the Spanish Civil War. Before their reading at 9 p.m. on 12 May 1937, Hemingway fortified himself with spirits during a dinner in Adrienne Monnier's apartment. He was truly intimidated by the challenge of reading to an audience that included james Ioyce, Stuart Gilbert, Natalie Barney, and the new US Ambassador to France, William Bullitt; French writers, Romains, Maurois, Duhamel, Paulhan, Prevost, Chamson, and Valery; and two newspaperwomen, Hemingway's longtime chum Janet Flanner and Martha Gellhorn, with whom Hemingway had recently begun an affair in Madrid. He stammered at first, then gulped down some beer and began reading 'Fathers and Sons' from Winner Take Nothing (1933).
For his final drama in rue de I'Odeon, its 'liberation' from the Nazis, see site No. 3. Beach was forced by the Nazi occupation to close her bookshop during the last days of 1941. She died upstairs at this address in 1962 at the age of 75. |
