Sylvia Beach ([June 1923]) | Willa Cather Archive

#0694: Willa Cather to Sylvia Beach, [June 1923]

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"SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY"
SYLVIA BEACH
____________ 192 12, RUE DE L'ODÉON
PARIS (VI^E) Dear Miss Beach¹:

I called hoping you could take me to see M. Becàt³, but you are asleep. I climbed his stairs and he, too, is asleep. I’ll let you know before I come into town² next time and perhaps you can arrang to introduce me.

Sincerely Willa Cather

Information about this letter:

Source File:: cat.let0694.xml
Letter identifier: 0694
Contents: Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto only.
Person to whom letter was written: Sylvia Beach¹
Date letter was written: [June 1923]
Explanation of conjectured date: This letter was likely written during Cather's 1923 trip to Paris, when she was considering Paul-Emile Bécat to paint her portrait before ultimately deciding by July 1923 on Leon Bakst (see #0690).
Place letter was written: Paris, Île-de-France, France²
Location of original letter: Sylvia Beach Papers (C0108), Princeton University, Firestone Library, Princeton, NJ

Person Annotations

0279

Beach, Sylvia (1887-1962). Expatriate American bookstore owner and publisher. Born in Baltimore, MD, Sylvia Beach made her first trip to Europe in 1907 and made France her home from 1916. During World War I, she met Adrienne Monnier, who became her life-long companion, and the two ran book shops across the street from one another, Monnier’s La Maison des Amis des Livres selling only French-language books and Beach’s Shakespeare and Co. only English-language ones. Beach is best known for publishing James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and for facilitating cultural exchange between the French and American authors and intellectuals who bought and borrowed books from her shop. Willa Cather met Beach on her 1923 trip to France. In 1941, in response to the German Occupation, Beach closed Shakespeare and Co. and resisted pleas to reopen it after the war.

1754

Bécat, Paul-Émile (1885-1960). French painter and engraver. Paul-Émile Bécat studied under Gabriel Ferrier and François Flameng and exhibited at the Salon de Paris in 1913. In the early 1920s he was known for his portraits of literary figures, including Sylvia Beach, Paul Valery, Sherwood Anderson, and James Joyce. On returning from travels in Africa in 1933, he specialized in drypoint engravings of erotic subjects.

Place Annotations

Paris, Île-de-France, France