Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation 1940–44. Charles Glass
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On Wednesday, more of Paris’s cafés and restaurants were opening. Adrienne, who made a long inspection of the city on foot, saw ‘Fouquet’s open with great style. The Triomphe and various others of lesser importance also open.’ Paris acquired an unexpected array of German musical bands. Adrienne heard one at the Rond-Point des Champs-Elysées ‘composed chiefly of drums, brass instruments, and Chinese bells. Rather monotonous march.’ A little further on her promenade, near the Hôtel Crillon, was ‘another orchestra, playing somewhat lighter marches’. In the Place de l’Opéra, the Café de la Paix was ‘open with terrace: many Germans at the tables’. She ate lunch at ‘the Danish Patisserie, which never shut’. In the evening, she and Sylvia walked in the Luxembourg Gardens ‘to see the borders of pink flowers’. When Sylvia asked a woman with a dog whether she made drawings of her pet, she answered, ‘No, only when he is dead.’ On Thursday, things were better. Sylvia and Adrienne found ‘superb escarole and even tarragon and chives’ at the market in rue Mouffetard and ‘a bit of beef at the butcher’s’, but no butter or potatoes.
On Sunday, 23 June, the day after Germany and France signed the Armistice at Compiègne, Sylvia and Adrienne took afternoon tea at the apartment of a young American diplomat, Keeler Faus. Adrienne thought his flat was ‘ravishing, books in profusion, fine old furniture, etc.’. She observed, ‘Feeling of the embassy people, completely isolated, as if on an island, with the German police next to them (quartered in the Ministry of the Navy).’ Walking home, the two women saw ‘an interminable procession of vans and artillery pieces [on the] boulevard Saint-Germain’. But a ‘working class man’ there told them, ‘The game isn’t over; if the English were to beat them, that would give me pleasure, really.’ The next week set the pattern for their life under occupation: a Sisyphean quest for food that appeared as mysteriously as it vanished from patisseries, greengrocers, butchers and black marketeers. On Friday, 28 June, ‘Sylvia goes to Nortier’s (she had been told that there would be butter). No butter … No meat. Almost nothing on the market.’ On Sunday: ‘Nothing at the market, no meat. Still no butter or potatoes. Ate peas at noon bought yesterday at the Bon Marché; the most tender of the year … A few raspberries, like yesterday, a little bit mushy.’
Adrienne needed butter for her Savoyard sauces and to make pastry, which Sylvia called ‘her great amusement and indoor sport’. But there was never enough. On Tuesday, 2 July, she moaned, ‘This morning, saw at Nortier’s a queue of more than a hundred people [waiting] to have a quarter [kilogram] of butter.’ The monthly soap ration was only 100 grams, and women had to queue for that. Adrienne and Sylvia needed patience even to buy books to sell in their shops. ‘We often have to stand in line at the publishers,’ Adrienne wrote, ‘and most of them give us copies of the good titles one at a time.’
‘Parisians who survived the exodus came back,’ Sylvia wrote of the early months of occupation, ‘and my French friends were delighted to find Shakespeare and Company still open. They fairly stuffed themselves on our books, and I was busier than ever.’ Although busy, she was unhappy. Her world had been separated from almost everyone, apart from Adrienne, she loved. James Joyce was in eastern France at Saint-Gérand-le-Puy, awaiting a visa to enter Switzerland. Her oldest friend, Carlotta Welles Briggs, had moved to Altadena, a suburb north of Los Angeles, where Sylvia’s father and sisters already lived. The letters Sylvia wrote to them revealed a growing anxiety about her father’s health. The Reverend Sylvester Beach at the age of 88 was losing his sight and his hearing, and he was increasingly distracted. In his lucid moments, he fretted for his daughter in occupied Paris.
Sylvia’s relations with her father and mother, while close, were troubling. Her mother had warned her, when she was in her early teens, ‘never to let a man touch me’ and later confessed to Sylvia that she and Sylvester had a ‘miserable marriage’. After her three girls grew up, Eleanor Orbison Beach travelled in Europe without her husband. When Sylvia was studying Spanish in Madrid in 1915 and 1916, Mrs Beach lived with her. She also stayed in Paris near Sylvia and her youngest daughter, Cyprian, who were sharing an apartment in the Palais Royal in 1917. The Reverend Sylvester Beach remained at his rectory in Princeton amid occasional rumours that he was philandering. Sylvia had always been passionate about her father. Christened Nancy for her maternal grandmother, she changed her name at an early age to Sylvia, the feminine equivalent of Sylvester. (Eleanor Beach had originally intended to name her second daughter Gladys, inspiring James Joyce to call a character in Ulysses ‘Gladys Beech’. Sylvia’s change of name from that of Eleanor’s mother to a version of her father’s may have seemed like a declaration of disloyalty.) Sylvia felt the tug of two parents vying for their children’s affections within a marriage marred by emotional warfare. Nonetheless, both parents encouraged their daughters to pursue careers and establish independent lives. Of the three girls, only Mary Hollingsworth Morris Beach, called Holly, married. Sylvia was a publisher and bookseller, and her sister Cyprian became an actress. At the time, publishing Ulysses, deemed obscene by Puritan America, and appearing in films were scandalous. ‘The cinema for my sister and my Ulysses publication must have made life difficult for my father,’ Sylvia admitted. If Sylvester Beach had qualms about his daughters’ work, he never said so.
Sylvia’s estrangement from her sister Cyprian was also hard. As youngsters, they had been inseparable. Cyprian’s beauty made her a star in French silent films, but no one thought Sylvia was beautiful. Even one of her greatest admirers, the writer Katherine Anne Porter, observed, ‘She was not pretty, never had been, never tried to be.’ When the two sisters were living in the Palais Royal, an actor in a play next door at the Théâtre du Palais Royal was so besotted with Cyprian that he climbed up to their balcony and went inside to introduce himself. Sylvia was not surprised: ‘Cyprian was so beautiful that you couldn’t blame a fellow for coming in the window without an invitation.’ The actor was not the only one to dote on her. ‘Among my sister’s admirers was the poet [Louis] Aragon, then active in the Dada movement,’ Sylvia wrote. ‘After raving about his passion for the momie [mummy] of Cleopatra at a Parisian museum, Aragon told me he had now transferred his admiration to Cyprian. Later, in search of Cyprian, he made frequent visits to my bookshop and sometimes recited for me his Alphabet poem and the one called “La Table”.’ ‘Alphabet’ was a monotonous recitation of the alphabet, and ‘La Table’ endlessly repeated the word ‘table’. The poet Léon-Paul Lafargue also declared his love for Cyprian, but she was as indifferent to him as to the fans who recognized her as Belles Mirettes (Beautiful Eyes) in a 1917 film serial that was playing in weekly instalments at Paris cinemas.
Sylvia’s publication of Ulysses in 1922 had made her one of the most famous women in Paris, while Cyprian’s film career was fading. In 1923, the two sisters had a mysterious argument over something that they kept secret from everyone else. In January 1923, Cyprian sent a letter to Sylvia that said she was ‘miserable’ when she was with her and wanted never to see her again. She moved back to the United States, where she looked for movie roles in Hollywood.
An unexpected tragedy further distanced Sylvia from her family. In 1927, French police served Sylvia’s 63-year-old mother with an arrest warrant. It seemed Eleanor Beach had been accused three years earlier of shoplifting at the Galéries Lafayette department store. The sum involved was only a few francs, but she had left France without appearing in court. When she received the summons on a subsequent visit to Sylvia, Mrs Beach feared public disgrace. She wrote a long letter protesting her innocence and took an overdose of pills. At five o’clock that evening, she died in the American Hospital of Paris. Sylvia covered up the suicide, permitting her father and sisters to believe the cause of death was a heart attack. If Sylvia suffered the guilt that usually follows the suicide of a loved one, she had to bear it alone.
When the war began in September 1939, the Reverend Sylvester Beach asked Sylvia to come home. On 9 January 1940, she wrote to her sister Holly, who had invited Sylvia to stay in California, ‘It’s pleasant to think of a visit to the folks, but this is not the right time for such plans unless there is something definite in view for me over there. I would not be allowed to return here and the journey would use up enough money for me to live on a year or two here. And Carlotta has provided a perfectly safe comfortable delightful dwelling I can go to anytime Paris got uncomfortable.’ Carlotta Welles Briggs