October 6: Sylvia
Beach died on this day in 1962. Her memoir Shakespeare
and Company (1956)
contains a series of charming anecdotes about life at her Parisian bookstore,
hardly a day going by there without one famous modernist or another showing up
to browse or chat. "My Best Customer" turns out to be the young
sports reporter Ernest Hemingway—"best" because Beach and her
partner, Adrienne Monnier, found him personable and engaging, and because he
actually bought books instead of just thumbing them. Their friendship was no
highbrow, salon affair, Hemingway at one point becoming Beach and Monnier's
guide and tutor for a range of sporting events. "Our studies began with
boxing," writes Beach:
Hemingway led us to the ring, a tiny one that you had to go
through a sort of backyard to reach, and we found seats on narrow benches
without backs. The fights and our instruction began. When, in the preliminary
matches, the boys swung their arms around and bled so profusely that we were
afraid they were going to bleed to death, Hemingway reassured us….
[The] last fight led to another—in which the spectators participated. Opinion
was divided on the referee's decision; everybody got up on the benches and
jumped down on each other—a real Western. What with the socking, the kicking,
the yelling, and the surging back and forth, I was afraid we would be "Hemmed"
in, and that Hadley would be injured in the melee. Calls for "Le flic! Le
flic!" [the cop] were heard, but evidently not by the cop whose attendance
at all French places of amusement, whether it's the Comédie-Française or a
boxing ring in Ménilmontant, is obligatory. We heard Hemingway's voice above
the din exclaiming with disapproval: "Et naturellement le flic est dans la
pissotière!"
A few paragraphs later, Beach tells of
Hemingway reading to them from the stories which became In Our Time (his first major-press book, published eighty-five
years ago yesterday). They recognized his talent immediately, and declared him
a future contender: "Maybe we didn't know much about boxing, but when it
came to writing—that was another thing. Imagine our joy over this first bout of
Ernest Hemingway's!"
Daybook is contributed by Steve King, who teaches in the English Department of Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. His literary daybook began as a radio series syndicated nationally in Canada. He can be found online at todayinliterature.com.
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