A thank you letter to Sylvia Beach publisher of the first eleven editions of Ulysses

Dear Sylvia Beach

I imagine Mr Shallwesigh or Mr Shallwelaugh*                              
might have meant to send James Joyce’s thanks again to you?
Or, albeit belatedly, from that grave in Zurich where Nora was pauper laid
beside the great author — maybe she nudged his bleached bones —
through the cold dark sod of eternity before she too became dust.
— to remember you then still archiving your life’s work in Paris
perhaps even his regret for abandoning you in May 1930 when –
after 11 editions and 28,000 copies of Ulysses were in print —
he sold the English publishing rights to Random House for $45,000
referring to you as a midwife only who could not keep the child.

Even if you only moved that literary baby from the breach position
by engaging a French speaking master printer who missed the ‘obscene’ bits
(because English language printers were scandalized and even pulped pages they had already printed)
thanks to your care for seven years of Joyce’s labour
the text was born into a world that would gradually grow to know and love it
Being an independent woman you simply knew how to go around a problem
(as women have always known how to do).

Tonight I offer you this letter of collective thanks
thousands of kilometres away and more than a century on.

Ten years ago we went to Dublin to experience Bloomsday 2016
after a worthy morning tour from the James Joyce Centre
we had lunch in Temple Bar then turned a corner to find ourselves
in Meeting House Square where Bloomsday Readings were in full swing
the incantatory power of voices rang out across the seated crowd
& wafted around the corner as fun and poetics were met by laughter
as devotees uttered the almost magical words Joyce used
to forever describe his beloved but abandoned city
due to what he saw as its hypocritical society.

As Gabrielle Carey noted in James Joyce a life
February 2nd is the Christian calendar’s Candlemas Day
as well of course as St Brigid’s Day in old Irish traditions
she pointed out that it is also Groundhog Day!
Whatever its name, the date threads through time from Imbolc
the midpoint between winter solstice and spring equinox
and the Irish word i mbolg has been translated by academics as
‘in the hold or the belly’ of sheep and that ‘ewes milk comes in’ then
It is likely this obscure joke appealed to Joyce’s sense of humour
that his book should be published on that pregnant date (pun intended)
whilst the reader relives event on the one day he met Nora in 1904
he transposed to his ‘favourite year’ 1916.

So again Sylvia, thanks for giving Joyce the promise of spring’s beginning
for which he had giddily thanked you in 1922 when on his 40th birthday
after years of struggle he finally held Copy No 1 of Ulysses in his hands
the premium edition you personally delivered to him fresh off the train from Dijon
having arranged its printing to his exacting specifications
on finest Holland handmade paper ready for him to sign
its Hellenic Blue cover bearing only the title and his name reversed out in crisp white letters
Joyce regarded it as his own (Modernist) flag that flew in proud defiance against 19th century censorship.
Later that same Parisian day you placed Copy No 2
in the window of Shakespeare and Company
your pioneering English language bookshop and lending library
to garner advance orders from subscribers around the world
your readers knew Ulysses had been banned in England and America
or who had read The Little Review excerpts before the US Customs suppressed it.

How could you be so brave Sylvia?
Was it love of an intellectual and platonic kind given you loved women more?
Or was it that Joyce’s work stood as an ally to women and personal freedom?
at least better than most men or writers of the time
Any personal failings aside, he hated the systemic oppression of women under patriarchy and the Church.

Was that the secret of your devotion?
You’d known Joyce for less than a year when The Little Review
which had serially published 13 of 18 chapters in America was shut down for obscenity
by US Customs and editors Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap were jailed, fined and left penniless.

Despite this in 1921 you asked the despondent author
‘Would you let Shakespeare and Company have the honor of bringing out your Ulysses?’
And were delighted when
‘he accepted my offer immediately and joyfully. I thought it rash of him to entrust his
great Ulysses to such a funny little publisher. But he seemed delighted, and so was I’.

Sylvia you were such a daring woman
living in self-imposed exile from the parochial conformity just as Joyce was
your mother had bankrolled your Paris endeavour which soon became
a hub of ideas and egos and a shelter at times from life on the street
for other yet-to-be-discovered giants of the Modernist literature —
Hemingway, Pound, Steine and Eliott — but Joyce was your favourite.

You and Joyce were two exiles from the margins of oppressive cultures
who’d met by chance at a French poet’s dinner party neither of you were invited to
the rebellious writer — you the trailblazing bookshop owner
mavericks both who had fled the constraints of your country of origin.

You were always rightly proud of the gamble you took to publish Ulysses
in 1941 when Paris fell to the Nazis your last remaining copy
was on display in your shop window but you refused point-blank
to sell ‘the last copy in Paris’ to an officer of the Gestapo!

He stormed out and with the help of your friends Shakespeare and Company was packed up and all trace vanished before Nazi troops returned
You hid all the books in an empty apartment upstairs in the same building
from the erased bookshop – even the sign had been painted over!

Your flair for practical defiance eventually cost you dearly
as you were later sent as an American alien to a concentration camp.
But you survived.
Two decades after Joyce’s death you visited Ireland for the relatively new ‘Bloomsday’
In 1961 at 85 years of age you were invited to the opening of the James Joyce Tower
to talk about the work that drew you together and changed English language literature
Not only the site Joyce’s opening salvo in Ulysses between Stephen and Buck Mulligan
but the Martello Tower was a metaphor of sorts for the battles you wage alongside Joyce to bring Ulysses to life, and a suitable endnote to your life long support for daring literature.

You died a few months later, and we are indebted to you and thank you — and all the other brave women including the patron Harriet Weaving for the work we celebrate and enjoy today

It seems that Mr Shallwelaugh won the gamble in the end and sends his best regards.

* (from Finegan’s Wake)

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. Linda Adair is a poet and a publisher of Rochford Press, and co-editor of Rochford Street Review and a (re)emerging artist. Her Irish ancestors arrived at Port Jackson from the early to mid 1800s to escape the English occupation of Eire and then the food shortage which was weaponised and rebranded as the Great Irish Famine. Her debut poetry collection The Unintended Consequences of the Shattering was published in 2020 by Melbourne Poets Union.  Her poetry has also been published in various journals, both in Australia and internationally. She has featured at La Mama Poetica, The Bergy Bandroom as part of both Sonic Poetry Festivals, Don Banks, Poetry at The Wickham, Cuplet, Reading the River at Brooklyn,  Bilpin International Ground for Creative Initiatives,  Back to Newnes Day and at the Newcastle Writers Festival. She has also read in Glasgow, at Poetry Plus in Poetry Plus in Carrick-on-Suir and at Charly Byrne’s Bookshop in Galway Culture Night 2025.

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