The Dispossessing of Sylvia Beach: Property, Autonomy, Personhood

© 2026 Johns Hopkins University Press

Sylvia Beach was a woman of property. Her “passion projects,” as Melanie Micir calls the rich variety of “queer feminist modernist practice[s]” that Beach and other creative women engaged in, included the founding of her Paris bookshop and lending library; her role as publisher, seller, and distributor of James Joyce’s Ulysses; and the writing of her memoir, Shakespeare and Company (1959).[1] Beach took pride in giving the same name to her memoir that she had given to her bookshop. It was the pride of a property owner, but not one who sought to appropriate all things to herself; her phrase “and Company” signified hospitality: the variety of offerings on her bookshelves, the welcome traffic of writers and readers that flowed through her self-created space on the rue de l’Odéon, and the history of modernism as it took shape within that space. The spaces and places that Beach created were generous and collaborative, but they were also her creations, or largely so, and she was proud of her pioneering spirit and self-reliance.

Property is not things, or merely things. In a basic sense, of course, Beach’s bookshop was leased real property; the books she acquired for stocking her shelves were tangible personal property; her memoir, no less than Ulysses, was a form of intellectual property. But these corporeal and incorporeal assets were only starting points for the relational webs that constitute property in its analytic sense: “the legal interest (or aggregate of legal relations) appertaining to such physical [or intangible] object[s].”[2] A thing is property because its owner has a right to prevent others from taking or using it; those others have a duty to refrain from such taking or using. An owner may grant non-owners a privilege to use the property, whereupon, for the duration of the privilege, the owner will have no right to prevent the use. Property is thus a set of correlative positions that are adjustable and interchangeable; the more complex the property interest is, the more complicated are the relations that aggregate around it. Far from being a static binary of meum and tuum, property is inherently utilitarian and social, a vehicle for mediating and regulating peoples’ conflicting desires to own, to access, to use, and to exclude.[3]

William Blackstone famously characterized the right of property as “that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.”[4] This formulation was offered as hyperbole, a kind of free indirect discourse giving voice to a possessive individualism that existed more in proprietary fantasy than in experience. It is a form of “property-talk” that has served as a “a point of departure” for examining the intricate social patterns that property actually invites and creates.[5] Tyrannical and solipsistic dominion may be an extreme imagination of what “one man claims” from the institution of property, but property’s irreducible complexity yields something quite different when private desire and social need converge in property’s real projects. One woman named Sylvia Beach recognized this social complexity even as she contended with the despotic imagination of one man of property named James Joyce.

Joyce’s proprietary imagination has been well documented in biographical accounts. Real property was never his passion, except for the creative ownership he claimed over the city of Dublin as he recreated it in his map-obsessed fictions.[6] He was a restless city-dweller who blended the roles of vagabond and man-about-town. Even after endowments of patronage supplied his material needs, he and his family moved from flat to flat and from hotel to hotel as he spent lavishly on restaurant meals, taxi tips, and luxury vacations; his patron’s benefactions “made it possible for him to be poor only through determined extravagance.”[7] Chattels were not especially important to Joyce, except for certain family portraits and furnishings that he carried from one apartment to the next, Aeneas-like—less for their material value than as reminders of his Irish origins and ancestors (Ellmann, James Joyce, 571–72). It was intellectual property that activated his proprietary tyranny; he sought to exercise sole and despotic dominion over his writings even when they had never been or were no longer protected by copyrights. (Ulysses in the United States and Japan and Dubliners in Italy are examples.[8]) Late in life, he declared that “though lacking protection under the copyright statute, and even if banned, a work belongs to its author by virtue of a natural right.”[9] Laws, statutes, and judicial decrees might ignore Joyce’s transcendent prerogatives; he located his entitlements in the laws of nature and genius.

Sylvia Beach’s proprietary imagination has received much less attention. Drawing on property theory, biographical evidence, and archival sources, this article examines the complex relations and conflicting desires that surrounded Beach as a property owner and businesswoman, and pays special attention to the dangers that threatened her property and her proprietary identity and that, in poignant and sometimes unseemly ways, came close to dispossessing her of both. The chief danger to Beach was Joyce himself, who often disregarded her identity and dignity as a property owner and annexed her as a willing and sometimes unwilling assistant for his own projects and properties. Beach’s ultimate refusal to be confined to that role is a story of emancipation that rivals, as a profile in modernist courage, her more celebrated exertions as publisher of Ulysses.[10]

A Bookshop of One’s Own: Autonomy and Personhood

In establishing her bookshop, Beach became an owner and proprietor. As her shop grew, she took on other property roles that flowed from that primary identity: seller, lender, publisher, distributor, donor, patron. Two theories or justifications of property are particularly useful for assessing her proliferating roles: the autonomy theory and the personhood theory. The autonomy theory holds that property helps owners to achieve self-determination and self-authorship and to pursue their own conception of the good; property affords owners “as free and equal individuals the possibility of writing and rewriting [their] own life stories.”[11] Although property is not the only or the most crucial source of self-determination, it plays “a distinctive and irreducible role in empowering people” by providing them “some temporally extended control over tangible and intangible resources, which they need in order to carry out their projects and advance their plans” (Dagan, Liberal Theory of Property, 2). Moreover, a property owner’s autonomy necessarily implies the correlative legal disempowering of others who might invade or appropriate her domain, so that the autonomy theory is fully consistent with the understanding of property as relational and social, a choreography rather than a binary.

The classic modernist expression of property’s autonomy theory is found in A Room of One’s Own, where Virginia Woolf offers the provocative shorthand that, for a woman to “speak her mind” freely as a writer, she must have “a room of her own and five hundred a year.”[12] This is no vulgar exaltation of “material things,” she insists. “[F]ive hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate, [and] a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself” (Woolf, Room of One’s Own, 110). Woolf relocates meaning from property as things to its role in signifying female autonomy: what it “stands for” and “means.” Property—an exclusive space and a modest capital—secures freedom from the demands of others, the ability to think as an uncoerced individual, and a material basis for authoring oneself no less than one’s novels, stories, and reviews. With autonomy, the self can become a passion project that stretches out over a lifetime.

In Shakespeare and Company, Beach celebrates the autonomy that her Paris bookshop afforded her, and she appeals directly to Woolf’s conception of female self-development by titling one of her chapters “A Bookshop of My Own.” With funding from her mother and advice from her romantic partner and fellow bookshop owner, Adrienne Monnier, Beach opened what she refers to in her memoir and its drafts as “my bookshop,” “my little shop,” “my pet.”[13] This caressing language of fond possessiveness is varied by other attestations: Beach is “proprietor” of Shakespeare and Company; Monnier’s wise counsel makes her “a sort of partner in the firm.”[14] The convergence of the sign over Beach’s bookshop with the title of her memoir is a double acknowledgment of self-authorship: the shop in Paris stood for and meant her identity as a modernist collaborator; her book tells the story of that ardent, arduous Bildung.

The personhood theory of property also recognizes the value of property for individual freedom, but it stresses the unique psychic and emotional importance that certain kinds of property have for their owners. Items such as the family home, a portrait of a parent, or a wedding ring are signifiers of affective investment; they can’t be neatly separated from the owner’s sense of self, nor can they be equated with replaceable assets such as cash or ordinary chattels. Loss of such treasured forms of property often causes emotional or dignitary pain for their owners. As the personhood theorist Margaret Jane Radin observes, “if a wedding ring is stolen from a jeweler, insurance proceeds can reimburse the jeweler, but if a wedding ring is stolen from a loving wearer, the price of a replacement will not restore the status quo—perhaps no amount of money can do so.”[15]  

Radin distinguishes between property that is fungible and property that is intimate and inimitable. These two types are “theoretical opposites—property that is bound up with a person and property that is held purely instrumentally” (Radin, “Property and Personhood,” 960). Whereas autonomy theory has an instrumental, utilitarian aspect—property ownership conduces to self-development—personhood theory recognizes a value more deeply interfused in certain property: the value of rooted identity, a profound sense that one is “bound up” with the thing one owns (960). Here, the classic idea of property as a set of legal and social relations radiating out from the owner is reversed: the affective powers of loved property converge intensely on the owning self.

The depth of Beach’s personal attachment to her bookshop can be measured by the emotional suffering she underwent as Joyce increasingly pestered her for unscheduled royalty advances and other disbursements and pressured her to move her operations to the United States in order to combat the unauthorized reprinting of Ulysses by the New York publisher, Samuel Roth (Beach, Shakespeare and Company, 180–81). In an unsent letter to Joyce, dated April 12, 1927, Beach wrote of the “terrifying prospect” of having to “finance” his travel plans, and of her fear that “I and my little shop will not be able to stand the struggle to keep you and your family going from now till June.”[16] Here, Beach and her bookshop are merged as an embattled pair swept by alarms of Joyce’s many demands; property as personhood galvanizes her anxious resort to personification to register the gravity of a threat both material and intimate. Beach’s family (“I and my little shop”) is pitted against Joyce’s family (“you and your family”) in a domestic, clannish competition for resources that ought to be shared more equitably. Shakespeare and Company was “my invention,” she later wrote; “though it is on a very different level from a Ulysses . . . all the same it was something I could really claim as mine.”[17] Autonomy and personhood mingle here; just as Joyce’s sense of self was deeply bound up with Ulysses, so Beach’s identity was inseparable from her “little shop.” Bookseller and book writer were self-identified and self-authored in their respective inventions.

In her memoir, Beach often employs lighthearted language to describe Joyce’s prodigal expectations. Though people thought she was profiting as the publisher of Ulysses, she writes, Joyce “must have kept a magnet in his pocket that attracted all the cash Joycewards” (Beach, Shakespeare and Company, 201). This rhetoric of wry tolerance for allowed genius is found in another book published in 1959: Richard Ellmann’s acclaimed biography of Joyce.[18] But such strained facetiousness surely cost Joyce’s biographer less, emotionally, than it did his sustainer. At times, the pain is so close to the surface of Beach’s prose that quips and sallies can’t plaster over the resentment. “Shakespeare and Company was given power of attorney by Joyce to deal with his affairs, but no profit was derived from it—services were free” (Beach, Shakespeare and Company, 136). The recollection of unrewarded service rankles: “working with or for James Joyce, the pleasure was mine—an infinite pleasure; the profits were for him” (201). Both collaboration and service (“working with or for”) took the same form with Joyce: a compulsory patronage in which the glare of genius threw into shadow any question of fair labor and reward. “It seemed natural to me,” Beach writes, “that the efforts and sacrifices on my part should be proportionate to the greatness of the work [Ulysses] I was publishing” (60). The language of just proportionality is only manifest content here. It was often less a balanced collaborative parity that Joyce expected from Beach than tribute paid to an idol.

In addition to making her fearful of insolvency, Joyce repeatedly urged Beach to give up her Paris bookstore and move to the United States to act as “an agent over there” to battle the piracies that Roth was perpetrating against the uncopyrighted Ulysses and segments of Work in Progress that had appeared in Europe.[19] Beach variously refers to Joyce’s pressure campaign as an effort to get her to “transfer,” “transplant,” or “abandon” her Paris operation. She evidently gave the matter serious thought; as late as 1931, when copies of Roth’s Ulysses forgery were still selling in America, she wrote the Acting Register of Copyrights about the copyrightability of Ulysses in the United States, and she collected numerous Copyright Office bulletins and other legal materials for ascertaining steps for securing protection for books.[20] Although Beach may simply have been assisting Joyce in his quest for American publishers of Ulysses and Work in Progress, it is possible that she was exploring the idea of transferring her one-author publishing concern to the States, the better to engage in single combat with Roth.[21]

Beach refused to transplant herself to New York, and not just because the practicalities were against it. “I couldn’t abandon Shakespeare and Company,” she wrote (Shakespeare and Company, 180–81). In a parallel passage in draft materials of her memoir, she wrote, “I couldn’t afford to give up my library in Paris and go to America to fight those [pirates],” and even more poignantly: “it was out of the question to transfer my business to the United States. It would have required a great deal of capital—and besides, it belonged in Paris. Just as the Gotham Book Mart’s place was in New York.”[22] The power to abandon or to transfer property is among the incidents of legal ownership; to abandon property is a correlative act that alters the owner’s relations with the rest of the world (Hohfeld, Fundamental Legal Conceptions, 51–52). But Beach’s language of “belonging” reaches beyond formal legal doctrine to a deep emotional bond with her bookshop. Shakespeare and Company not only belonged to her; it belonged in Paris, a city she had come to love. The word “belong” is related to the affective verb “to long,” as in, to crave or desire, to wish for.[23] Beach’s language touches on rootedness: her place is with her bookshop; her bookshop’s place is in Paris. In urging her to pull up roots and transplant herself to America, Joyce was violating her sense of an elective, and now habituated, expatriation. He was treating her capacity for belonging, in all its colorings, as a transferable good instead of an identity, a feeling for property and self (proprius, one’s own) that had first given her autonomy and by now was imbued with passionate personhood. Joyce’s insensitivity was the more shocking because he regarded everything pertaining to his own life and art—with almost despotic consistency—as an extension of his personhood. His treatment of Beach’s expatriate identity as moveable and fungible was responsible in no small way for the rift that eventually grew between them.

“En-Joycening”: Proprietors, Servants, and Expatriates

Joyce’s personhood claims extended beyond his own property to Beach’s shop itself. In an unpublished portion of her memoir, she wrote that he “saw Shakespeare and Company as something God had created for him, but to me it had other sides than the Joycean” (quoted in Fitch, Lost Generation, 260). Though the institution of property is profoundly relational and therefore social, personhood-tinged attitudes can sometimes undermine relationality and turn ownership into an antisocial, even dangerous identity, the opposite of the “human flourishing” celebrated by personhood theorists.[24] Beach resisted, she wrote, “anything that threatened to turn the place completely into a Joyce plant.” His effort to get her to “abandon” her bookshop and to “transplant” it to America was his “final attempt to totally en-Joycen me.”[25] To “transplant” Shakespeare and Company would have been to allow it to become a “Joyce plant,” and would have meant the engulfing of Beach’s personhood by Joyce’s. (Her punning and verbal play are under-examined features of her letters and memoir; they sometimes suggest a quiet rivalry with Joyce’s more overt linguistic drollery.) Joyce’s spendthrift habits and breezy depredation of Beach’s funds had already threatened to cause her shop to be “sucked under” (Beach, Shakespeare and Company, 201). Now he even wanted to draw her self-forged identity into what she called “the Joyceweb.”[26]

In Shakespeare and Company and its drafts, Beach struggles with her often-conflicting roles of proprietor and servant. She and her coworkers in the bookshop became Joyce’s “bankers, his agents, his errand boys,” she writes (Beach, Shakespeare and Company, 88). Our contemporary sense of “agency”—self-possession, self-actualization—is not what Beach means here. Rather, she uses the word in its legal and corporate sense of an authorized agent who acts for a principal, a deputy appointed to manage the business affairs of another—a trusted servant.[27] She often places invisible quotation marks around these uncomfortable words and phrases—she was Joyce’s “nice lady editress,” she quips at one point—but her tolerant irony is palpably forced. Samuel Roth, resentful that Beach had stigmatized him as a literary pirate, sneeringly described her as “secretary to James Joyce.”[28] Her voluntary “carework” continues to color her received role in modernism today.[29] The editors of a recent collection of Beach’s letters to Joyce refer to her as “helper, facilitator, adviser, intermediary . . . secretary, bookkeeper, moneylender and errand girl . . . indispensable assistan[t] . . . Joyce’s agent.”[30] This catalogue is not inaccurate—Joyce required these roles and Beach played them—but it is incomplete. By their cumulative force, they crowd out her autonomous identity as a property owner and creative agent (in the potent sense), her founding of a bookshop of her own and other self-authoring projects.

Beach and Joyce were expatriates. Voluntary exile from their native countries gave them a power of perception, a rootedness in deracination, that enabled them to claim autonomy for their respective creative endeavors. (Edna O’Brien described her own self-exile from Ireland as providing the “formality and perspective” she needed to write about her country: a kind of property in achieved distance.[31]) Expatriation was, for them, a cultural and geographical counterpart to Woolf’s room of one’s own, a self-won space in which autonomy and self-authorship could thrive. The enormous room of self-exile was, in this respect, a property interest claimed through the Lockean labor of self-definition.[32] Joyce figured the heroism of expatriation as part of a male lineage, as when Stephen Dedalus, poised to leave his “home and friends” in Ireland, contrasts the practical ministrations of his mother (she is “putting [his] new secondhand clothes in order”) with the fabulous paternal figure to whom he calls out for moral sustenance: “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.”[33] For Beach, material female assistance, far from being a subordinate mode of expatriate production, was crucial to her heroic autonomy. Her partner Adrienne Monnier provided valuable advice; her mother sent “all her savings” to help with the opening of the bookshop, initially in the rue Dupuytren (Beach, Shakespeare and Company, 16–17). In place of a Joycean father figure, Beach’s project was to be watched over by “the dear old concierge, ‘la Mère Garrouste,’” almost as if Beach had chosen a French fairy tale in preference to Greek archetype as the mythical method of her new proprietorship (17). Instead of invoking a fabled father for spiritual passport, Beach cabled her mother: “Opening bookshop in Paris. Please send money” (17). Eleanor Beach of Princeton, New Jersey, became her daughter’s first patron.[34]

Macro-Patronage and Micro-Patronage

The modernist institution of patronage was shaped by many powerful, generous women, yet it was easy then, as now, to characterize them as mere tributaries of genius. Ezra Pound had a peculiar phrase for it, “Conservatrix of Milésien,” as he wrote in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920).[35] The meaning of this elusive epithet—or one of its meanings—is made clearer in Pound’s “Translator’s Postscript” to a work by Remy de Gourmont: “Woman, the conservator, the inheritor of past gestures, clever, practical . . . not inventive, always the best disciple of any inventor.”[36] Here was the female patron as Maundy foot-washer, an ardent but passive handmaid to active male genius, a person who was “second always” but from whom the artist “takes strange gain away,” as Pound put it in “Portrait d’une Femme” (Pound, Personae, 57). Beach undoubtedly felt subordinated to Joyce’s inventions, yet she must be numbered among modernism’s significant patrons, not because she bestowed large sums of money in the manner of Harriet Shaw Weaver (though Joyce’s many impromptu raids on the Shakespeare and Company cashbox undoubtedly added up to a large donation, all told).[37] Rather, Beach’s patronage was more in kind than in coin. She rendered a micro-patronage that was spread out over years in small and large “chores” (her word) which she performed as Joyce’s publisher and business manager (Shakespeare and Company, 191).

Indeed, Beach’s piecemeal patronage-in-kind may be compared to the many pro bono legal services that John Quinn performed for writers and artists. The New York attorney is famed for his more familiar patronage-in-coin, but his unpaid legal work was prodigious: he wrote letters and legal memoranda to help W. B. Yeats and Pound with the intricacies of copyright law; printed and registered for copyright works by Yeats, J. M. Synge, and Lady Gregory; prepared legal briefs, filed motion papers, and appeared in court for Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, the editors of The Little Review, when they were charged with publishing indecency.[38] Quinn practiced law in an era before the billable hour became the standard measure for compensating lawyers, so it is hard to assign a dollar value to his pro bono exertions.[39] Today, New York lawyers with his experience and prestige commonly charge $1,000 per hour or more for their work. Quinn’s macro-patronage—his gifts and other payments to authors—was rivaled by the less spectacular micro-patronage he rendered as Anglophone modernism’s first counselor-at-law in the early decades of the twentieth century.[40]

Like other property transactions, gifting is a relational act; it unites donor and donee in a bond of intimacy that can be more than a mere transfer of wealth. Gifting often creates an ongoing relationship that can grow onerous, as gratitude hardens into entitlement and generosity shades into obligation.[41] Although Beach made voluntary gifts of her service to Joyce, there was increasingly a forced or harried quality to her patronage (as there was at times to Quinn’s). Joyce seemed to acknowledge the importuned, sacrificial nature of Beach’s gifting when he later admitted to a friend, “[a]ll she ever did was to make me a present of the ten best years of her life.”[42] A complete picture of modernist patronage is not to be found in accounts of the grand monetary gestures of a Weaver, a Quinn, a Peggy Guggenheim, or an Otto Kahn.[43] For Beach, patronage-in-kind was a way of life, a regular rendering of what at times she complainingly referred to as her “free” service to Joyce (Shakespeare and Company, 136). That this service came to seem an ongoing oblation to an uncaring god is clear from the anguished cry she gave in her unsent letter protesting Joyce’s endless requests: “Is it human?”[44] Here we might be glimpsing a dark side of modernist patronage, a daily gift of self that was not quite voluntary, not quite commensurable with what we think of as the volition of donation, a gift that had something compelled, even co-dependent about it.[45] What kind of a gift is it that is not freely and fully given, but freely and fully taken?
If Joyce felt entitled to the proceeds of Shakespeare and Company as an appanage of his talent, Beach came to regard herself as a co-owner of Ulysses, a book she had sacrificed much to publish and keep in print. Of course, her claim had nothing to do, initially, with intellectual property; those rights, to the extent they were valid in various countries, were indisputably Joyce’s alone. Nor was it a claim derived from what today we might call collaborative or social authorship—the theory that books are the collective products of authors, publishers, printers, patrons, and others making up the communications circuit.[46] Beach’s relationship to Ulysses had always been more intense than that of an ordinary publisher to a book. Her claim was personal, almost familial.                                                 

Indeed, the respective psychic investments of Beach and Joyce sometimes placed them in a personhood-charged rivalry for Ulysses. She was distressed to learn that within months of her publishing the first edition of Ulysses in February 1922, Joyce and Harriet Shaw Weaver were planning a British (“English”) edition to be printed in France and sold abroad at the much lower price of £2 2s.[47] This was Joyce’s attempt to “cash in,” Beach wrote in a draft of Shakespeare and Company, “on the seven years [sic] Ulyssean labors.”[48] Her immediate concern was that booksellers who had purchased the expensive first edition were complaining that the hasty, cheaper English edition was “a transgression against the rules governing limited editions,” though she self-effacingly blamed her own inexperience as a publisher (Beach, Shakespeare and Company, 96–97). Her real feelings are legible in her choice of metaphors. After the English edition, she agreed to resume reprinting Ulysses: “I took back Ulysses,” she wrote in a draft of her memoir, “after its infidelities in the second edition.”[49] The transferred epithet is telling. In accusing the book of unfaithfulness, Beach registers the pain of what she felt as a kind of betrayal by Joyce and Weaver. In the published version of this passage, Beach tries to conceal her resentment under playful figures: after the book’s attempt “to skip over the Channel and the ocean, Shakespeare and Company’s ‘lost one’ returned to the rue de l’Odéon” (Shakespeare and Company, 97). She personifies Ulysses as a wayward child, a prodigal, and then shifts the figure abruptly to the parable of the lost sheep.[50] Yet, mixed with the joy of the bergère who has recovered her strayed charge is an allusion to Lionel’s heartbroken aria from the opera Martha, his painful cry for the loved “lost one,” which Joyce used in the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses to fuse together Simon Dedalus’s widowhood and Leopold Bloom’s imminent cuckoldry in a “cry of lionel loneliness.”[51] Beach records her grief over the temporarily lost Ulysses by means of a complex, shifting intertextuality in which the autonomy and self-definition that property can bring to its owner have given way to the desolations of deprived personhood.

Beach also figured her feeling for Ulysses in its various identities—work of art, physical object, lovingly reprinted book—as curiously and complexly maternal. When in the early 1930s, Joyce finally got her to surrender her claims in preparation for American publication, she felt that an “injustice” had been done, as she wrote in draft passages. Ulysses was a book that she “had been nursing at least as many years as Joyce had spent in writing it.” It “had been my nursling.”[52] This ambiguous metaphor, casting Beach indecisively as a mother or a wet nurse, is painfully amended in the published memoir: “After all . . . [a] baby belongs to its mother, not to the midwife, doesn’t it?” (Shakespeare and Company, 205). Joyce is now the proprietary mother, and Beach’s quasi-maternal “nursing” has been starkly replaced by the subordinated function of “midwife.”[53] Yet her concluding question (“doesn’t it?”) is not merely rhetorical. It is directed to readers who can assemble the clues and reach the conclusion that she herself had reached in a draft version: that “the manner in which I was led to relinquish Ulysses  . . . rather hurt my feelings.” For Joyce “to dispose of it without the slightest token nor any formality seemed to me rather unfair.”[54] Beach’s repeated use of “rather” to soften the blow of her reproach is as unconvincing as her rhetorical attempts to convert pain into drollery. An “injustice” had been done, no less searing than when Joyce preferred his vacationing family to Beach’s strapped, stay-at-home bookshop. Her ownership of Shakespeare and Company and co-ownership of Ulysses had helped her to achieve independence and selfhood. They were properties with which her identity had become intimately bound up.

The Dispossessing Contract

If the first, temporary separation of Beach from her property was the “infidelity” of the English edition of Ulysses, a more serious dispossession occurred when Joyce persuaded her on December 9, 1930, to sign a contract that ostensibly transferred world rights in Ulysses to her. This “Memorandum of Agreement” might initially have seemed a legal confirmation of her deeply felt co-tenancy in the book. After all, the agreement granted her “the exclusive right of printing and selling throughout the world, the work entitled ULYSSES.” Moreover, if she ever “abandon[ed] the right to said Work . . . in the interests of the AUTHOR,” then her right was to be “purchased” from her “at the price set by herself, to be paid by the publishers acquiring the right to publish said Work.”[55] It was a strange document, and one not drafted in Beach’s interests. First, it required her, as a duty, to “transfer” rights back to Joyce whenever he “deemed” such a transfer “advisable.” Second, though it stated that Beach would be compensated at her own price if she ever relinquished Ulysses, it imposed this duty of compensation not on Joyce, but on any publisher that eventually acquired rights in the book. In other words, the duty to repay Beach for giving up Ulysses was left to an entity who was not a party to the contract that purported to create the duty. This meant that Joyce would have to make a good-faith effort to see that any successor publisher paid Beach her price. He never did.

Joyce put the agreement to a sordid purpose, though this can scarcely be gleaned from Beach’s sanitized gloss on the “sudden” contract: “to prove, in a matter in which he was engaged at the time, that Ulysses was not his property but mine. In a letter to the lawyer who was prosecuting the pirate of Ulysses, Joyce stated plainly that Ulysses was not his property but belonged to Sylvia Beach.”[56] Beach is here protecting Joyce at the expense of the whole truth. His New York lawyers were no longer “prosecuting” Samuel Roth. That litigation had concluded a full two years earlier when Roth agreed to a court injunction preventing him from making further commercial use of Joyce’s name in connection with Ulysses.[57] In truth, the “matter in which [Joyce] was engaged,” as Beach put it, was dodging his lawyers’ invoices for payment of their services, which came to roughly $3,000. (Three thousand dollars in 1930 had approximately the same buying power as nearly $58,000 today.[58]) Joyce had arranged to pay a portion of those fees, but he adamantly refused to pay the balance (some $2,000) to attorneys who, he argued, had been guilty of “bungling the [Roth] case.”[59] When one of the lawyers pressed him for payment, Joyce sent him a copy of the agreement, claiming that it was a “mere formalization” of Beach’s understanding that dated back to 1922.[60] Joyce had originally engaged the lawyers to bring suit, he falsely claimed, in the mistaken belief that he was “the owner of [the Ulysses] rights”; only recently had he learned that Beach had been the rights-holder from the start. He would not pay for legal work that concerned someone else’s literary property.[61]

The lawyers must have seen through Joyce’s paltry trick, but it would have been difficult to pursue legal claims against a famous, defaulting client an ocean away. Beach was shocked to learn that Joyce had written such a scheming letter. She “raised an objection,” he told Weaver, “to my sending it on account of a ‘falsehood’ in it. . . . Nevertheless I sent the letter.”[62] Not only had Joyce lied, he had set Beach up as a target for invoicing lawyers. Never mind that he had originally agreed to pay the legal bills and had paid a portion of them already. Never mind that the lawsuit had nothing to do, on its face, with anyone’s property rights in Ulysses—there was no US copyright in the book, anyway—but instead was a damages case against Roth for his alleged commercial misappropriation of Joyce’s name under the New York Civil Rights Law.[63] Had the lawyers decided to pursue the unpaid debt aggressively, Joyce could never have sustained the childish defense of having transferred literary rights to Beach in 1922. Indeed, his action amounted to something like a fraudulent conveyance, a trick that debtors sometimes play by concealing assets under others’ names.[64]

It is one measure of Beach’s desire to paint an uncontroversial picture of her relations with Joyce that she wrote in Shakespeare and Company that she “had never seen [Joyce’s prevaricating letter to his lawyer] till lately, when it was shown to me” (204). In fact, she had seen it as early as December 1931 and could scarcely have forgotten what had struck her then as a “falsehood” and must have appeared as one more attempt to raid her coffers. Joyce’s tawdry purpose would have been especially hurtful in that Beach had come to feel a shared proprietorship in Ulysses, a rooted joint tenancy that was both material and affective, beyond paper contracts and signed memoranda. That Joyce would violate her personhood by employing a document that purported to grant her property rights for the low purpose of shirking his debts and shifting them to her must have been intolerable. It was a cynical pantomime of a property relation. In manipulating an improbable legal fiction about Beach’s ownership of Ulysses, Joyce was in fact dispossessing her of the emotional property she had acquired in the book she loved.

The $25,000 Demand

Beach took her revenge by treating Joyce’s fiction as reality, though revenge was only part of her motivation. When Joyce was actively seeking an American publisher of Ulysses in 1931, Beach stood by the “abandonment” clause of their Memorandum of Agreement and insisted that she receive from any successor the sum of $25,000 for giving up her exclusive rights in the book. She reminded Joyce’s literary agents that the agreement really existed, since he had not mentioned it to them.[65] She resented being treated as “Joyce’s representative in Paris, not as his publisher”—again the demeaning distinction between a proprietor and an agent-servant. It was as if American suitors “were proposing to publish a manuscript, not to take over a book that had been published by somebody else for almost ten years” (Beach, Shakespeare and Company, 202). Beach was sticking to her $25,000 figure, she said, because she believed that an American Ulysses would absorb the market for her Shakespeare and Company edition, though Joyce and his representatives argued that the two could coexist profitably.[66] An American edition would result in her “shutting her shop and rearing chickens,” she told Joyce.[67] The image is as powerful as it is disarming. Losing Ulysses without being compensated would reduce Beach to a hardscrabble existence, returning her to the occupation of “volunteer farm hand (volontaire agricole)” that she had followed during World War I, before she founded a bookshop of her own (Shakespeare and Company, 14).

The sum of $25,000 was a large one in 1931, the equivalent of nearly $530,000 in buying power today.[68] There was more than a bit of anger and resentment folded into Beach’s price tag, but also something impassioned and vital. She explained to Joyce’s literary agent that “[c]onsidering that much time, expense and influence have been used in developing the sales during all these years, this is a modest estimate of the value that ‘Ulysses’ represents for me.”[69] Her language balances financial with personal considerations—“the value that ‘Ulysses’ represents for me.” This was more than an appeal to the measure of the marketplace. But, as was often the case, Beach disguised the rawness of her feelings when she came to publish her memoir: “I explained to Joyce that my figure was only a proof of my esteem for the book” (Shakespeare and Company, 202). This bland formulation substitutes the distance of courtesy for the immediacy of her emotional claim, as if her demand had been only a way of complimenting Joyce or paying homage to the achievement of Ulysses. It is true that she felt that by giving Ulysses away without a financial return, she would appear to be “dumping” a valueless article (202). But there was deep affective investment here as well, the feeling of an owner whose sense of self had become merged with the thing owned.

This merging was more than what economists call the endowment effect—the tendency of an owner to assign greater value to property than a non-owner would—though the endowment effect may accompany personhood-charged ownership.[70] Beach’s sum was a measure of her sense of her own life over the ten years she had “nursed” Ulysses. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., put it succinctly when he wrote that long-enjoyed property “takes root in your being and cannot be torn away without your resenting the act and trying to defend yourself, however you came by it. The law can ask no better justification than the deepest instincts of man.”[71] Beach’s deepest instincts had taken root in Ulysses. It was not simply a book to be printed and sold. She had become a co-owner by virtue of diligent collaboration, personal sacrifice, and passionate investment.

Joyce carefully avoided the question of what Beach might be owed under their contract. He let others—hopeful publishers, exasperated agents—do the objecting. “I waited for Joyce to speak up,” she wrote, “but he never did” (Shakespeare and Company, 202). He was firmly opposed to Beach’s receiving anything that would diminish his own royalties (“Joyce would not consent to that”), so the burden of paying her fell squarely on any intending successor publisher.[72] As Noel Riley Fitch suggests, Joyce may have breached the agreement by refusing to help Beach obtain some remuneration under the “abandonment” clause (Lost Generation, 309). Though he could not force a publisher to submit to her demands, he had an implied duty of good faith and fair dealing not to harm her right to receive the fruits of the contract, to use the law’s jargon.[73] Equally, Beach had a duty to protect Joyce’s reasonable expectations, yet her insistence on a buyout of $25,000 stood in the way of his American conquest. In reality, this bizarre agreement was never a thing to be strictly observed. For Joyce, it had seemed a useful ploy for escaping debtorship; for Beach, it had come to express her emotional and material stake in Ulysses. For both, the contract was a way of memorializing extra-contractual desire. It emblematized their competing proprietorships and personhoods.

The Christmas Present

Beach could not cling to her $25,000 figure indefinitely. The pro-Joyce pressures were great and mounting. In October 1931, if not before, she told Joyce that she was considering a lesser sum (Fitch, Lost Generation, 321). That same month, the American lawyer Morris L. Ernst, who would soon lead the litigation to free Ulysses from the US customs ban, opined that Ulysses was becoming a “valueless property in the United States except for a few isolated pirates.”[74] It may have been the threat of unchecked piracies by Roth and others that was decisive for Beach; in an unpublished portion of her memoir, she wrote that it “all ended by the loosening of what some people thought (and rightly) my clutch on Ulysses which left me feeling very sad I must admit.”[75] The phrasing catches Beach in typical transition from resentment to resignation, a process of emotional revision that is evident throughout the numerous drafts of Shakespeare and Company. Here, she characterizes her demands from the viewpoint of the Joyce brigade (“some people”), as an unreasonable “clutch” on her property claim. The mournfully appended clause, “which left me feeling very sad I must admit,” floats grammatically above the rest of the sentence, referring perhaps to Beach’s fierce “clutch” or to its “loosening” or even to what “some people thought.” The dominant mood, however, is one of melancholy dispossession, of proprietary belatedness, of being bereft and stranded, “left” without Ulysses. Beach’s chirpy “(and rightly)” is as unconvincing as it is intrusive. It is a stock conciliatory phrase that she sprinkles in various forms throughout her memoir and its drafts, especially when she is trying to confront her ambivalence about Joyce’s despotic behavior. It is a gift of forbearance.[76]

In the end, Beach relinquished Ulysses in a gift to Joyce that enclosed all of her suppressed rage. He had been pressuring her by proxy to give up her monetary demand, sending delegations of friends to haunt and hound her. It was following one of several visits by Padraic Colum that she broke: after he badgered her (“You’re standing in the way of Joyce’s interests”) and denied the validity of her contract with Joyce (“That’s no contract”), Beach telephoned Joyce to tell him, as she put it in Shakespeare and Company, that “he was now free to dispose of Ulysses in any way that suited him and that I would make no further claims on it” (204–5). The truth was uglier. Joyce described Beach’s mood during the phone call as “confused and excited,” and he confided to Weaver that she had “screamed at me” and “said she would give the rights to me as a Xmas present.”[77] It was worse than that. Beach had called Joyce a “liar” and possibly a “cheat.”[78] She recalled her sign-off in a memoir draft: “its [sic] a Christmas present I said: adieu.”[79] This was a poison gift, delivered with a ferocity that summed up all her stifled resentment of the ways, material and emotional, in which Joyce had separated her from Ulysses and diminished an attachment that had come to define her personally.

In the aftermath of the explosion, Beach felt tired and alone. It was “painful,” she wrote, “[t]o lose ULYSSES that I have always admired and loved above everything.”[80] In early 1932, she told Joyce’s secretary and lawyer Paul Léon that she had “made a present to Mr Joyce last December of my rights to ULYSSES, as far as an edition published in America was concerned.” She no longer expected to receive an “indemnity” for relinquishing her claim. Though Léon had asked her to execute a new contract reflecting her cession of rights, she was through with contracts and signings. The most she would do was to state that she “hereby agree[d] to cancel the contract between us for ULYSSES, and to give up my claims to this work for future editions.”[81] All this jargon of cancellation, cession, and indemnity must have added to Beach’s humiliation; these were terms that treated her part in Ulysses as if it were detachable, convertible, something to barter and haggle with in treating with new applicants for the role she had played voluntarily for so many years.[82] She brushed aside all this lifeless language of property by adhering to one simple fact: “I gave up my rights to ‘Ulysses’ completely.”[83] So much, at least, was emotionally true. If she could think of her parting with Ulysses as a cauterizing divestment, a violent gifting, she might retain some dignity of personhood.

Here was a further, almost final, station in Beach’s devotional patronage of Joyce. It had always been in some sense a patronage under duress; now she would embrace all that coerciveness and transcend it by divesting herself of the very thing that had held all the pieces of her micro-gifting together for so many years: Ulysses. Her final gift of rage and outrage enabled Joyce to complete his conquest of America; as his fame set out on its journey westward, Beach would more and more fall into the shadows.

Laying Down the Burden of Joyce: Final Gifting

If Beach had to give up her identity as owner of Ulysses, then she would also resign the role of agent-assistant. In October 1932, replying to Joyce’s usual flurry of tasking, she wrote: “Although I shall always continue to be devoted to your work . . . I am sorry that I shall no longer be able to serve you personally.”[84] She later recalled that she could no longer continue her “services to him,” because “my bookshop needed me very much and besides I was tired” (Shakespeare and Company, 205). Yet her bookshop had always needed her, and fatigue had never prevented her in the past from assisting Joyce with the endless small things. This was a declared independence in which Beach simultaneously dispossessed herself of Ulysses and gave her notice as factotum, throwing proprietorship, patronage, and peonage on the same valedictory pyre. Not long afterward, she told Robert McAlmon that she had “set down the load of Joyce responsibilities.”[85] The image almost suggests one of the washerwomen from Finnegans Wake laying down her heavy basket of others’ clothing on the riverbank. And why not? Shakespeare and Company had begun in a shop that had once operated as a laundry taking in gros and fin, “both sheets and fine linen” (Beach, Shakespeare and Company, 16).

Beach had surrendered cherished property and dutiful service. One thing remained to be divested: her resentment. A record of this transaction is found in the successive drafts of Shakespeare and Company, a book she worked on from 1937 to 1959, several years longer than Joyce devoted to Finnegans Wake (Bishop, “‘Garbled History,’” 6–7). Her revisions show a gradual movement away from the raw pain of her treatment by Joyce towards a more tolerant, resigned, even cheerful embrace of that history. As noted above, her bitterness remains legible in portions of the published memoir where she acknowledges Joyce’s driving egotism and her driven altruism. Some of her pain was ineffaceable; it bleeds through the bandages of the multiple revisions. But nowhere in the final text does her criticism become sustained or thematic, as it does in the more visceral drafts. Joyce’s selfishness is undeniably there in the published version, assigned its place in history, but more often than not it is treated as a quirk of character to be accepted as part of the price of genius and modernism.[86] In this respect, Beach both offers charity to Joyce and instrumentalizes his faults by treating them to a kind of transactional logic—a moral currency exchange—that she had no wish to extend to her own passion projects, steeped as they were in a personhood that merged means and ends.

Beach’s self-divestment as a memoirist, her gradual relinquishment of bitterness in the course of composing the biography of her bookshop, was something more than “[writing] through her anger,” a characterization that suggests a personal regimen of psychic confrontation and resolution (Bishop, “‘Garbled History,’” 6). It was partly that, of course, but it was also the final chapter of Beach’s patronage, the gifting away of her anger in a productive clemency that was meant not only to benefit Joyce but to make a record of their separate and combined roles in the history of modern literature. She quitclaimed her personal resentments, the better to portray her bookshop, not inaccurately, as a collaborative, comradely space into which the friends of books entered and from which the books of friends emerged.[87] Beach thus made dispossession a strategy for repossessing her legacy as a founder of modernism. By textually divesting herself of rancor over wounded proprietorship, she claimed a recompense and a role from history.

Though Joyce looms large in Beach’s history of modernism on the rue de l’Odéon, he does not “en-Joycen” it, mostly because Beach knew how to quitclaim emotional property that no longer served her historiographic ends. In a melancholy aside in her memoir, she wrote, “my personal feelings . . . should be promptly dumped when they no longer serve a purpose” (Beach, Shakespeare and Company, 205). The generative thud of that decision is audible today as we read her chronicle of the enterprise that she called her “pet.” Just as she had laid down Joyce’s washing at the end of her personal service to him, so she knew as a writer when to turn self-dispossession into a gift that might serve the larger purposes for which she had lived her life as a proud expatriate and proprietor.