For many readers a book that incorporates history, literature and a famous bookstore conjures a unique and irresistible alchemy. If you take for your cast of characters a roll call of the “Lost Generation” such as James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound and set it in 1920s Paris, (called by Archibald MacLeish “the greatest period of literary and artistic innovation since the Renaissance”) you have a surefire concept for a book. 

The Paris Bookseller by Kerri Maher has all these drawcards and more. Not only is it set in Paris, but it includes “Paris” in the title. Like the recent spate of books with “Girl” in the title, “Paris” novels have become another trend. There are many listed on Google that have hit the bestseller ranks in recent years. (The Paris Wife, a phenomenal success for Paula McLain comes to mind.) Despite civil unrest, political turmoil, riots, terrorist attacks and economic turbulence, Paris remains for many a perennial fantasy. Readers and movie-goers alike whose idea of escapist bliss is time-travelling back to a bygone era in the fantasy city have been generously catered for in fiction and film. The Paris Bookseller” is another offering in this vein. 

“The Paris Bookseller” tells the story of Sylvia Beach, an American woman who established the English language bookstore Shakespeare and Company in Paris in 1919 and, through her publication of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” in 1922, became one of the most celebrated expatriate figures in Paris between the First and Second World Wars. Although she lived until 1962, this book only covers her life from 1917 to 1936. As the author says in her Author’s Note, she “felt it told the story of her life as a bookseller and publisher most satisfyingly”. However, to omit 26 years (or approximately a third of her lifespan) leaves the story of Beach’s life as a woman apart from her accomplishments unfinished. It’s uncomfortably reminiscent of “What Is Remembered”, Alice B. Toklas’s account of her life that ended with the death of her partner Gertrude Stein, despite the fact that Toklas herself lived on for another 21 years. (In fairness Maher does include a biographical postscript in her Author’s Note.)

It’s Sylvia Beach’s life as a woman that I felt was insufficiently explored in this book. As well as being an iconic figure of literary history, she was a ground-breaking feminist. That an unassuming, genteel woman, or as her friend Katherine Anne Porter described her (in her story “A Little Incident in the Rue de l’Odéon“), this preacher’s daughter of a Baltimore family, brought up in unexampled high-mindedness, gentle company and polite learning” followed her dream and in doing so changed the course of literary history, is a singular example of a woman’s power to implement change in a society that was even more paternalistic than our own. As Caitlin O’Keefe writes in a 2019 article in The New York Review of Books, titled “The Secret Feminist History of Shakespeare and Company”, “Beach’s biography is often framed as a Cinderella story of Modernism”.

The risk in any fictional biography populated by the famous is that they and their notorious histories come to overshadow the protagonist. It’s even more problematic in this case because Beach in many ways acted as a factotum to the great, or as Noël Riley Fitch (author of “Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation”) described her, “a midwife”. (She herself in an interview recorded in 1962 joked she was a “mother hen”). But as Caitlin O’Keefe notes, it would be wrong to cast her in the mould of a handmaiden to “Great Men”. To look back at her involvement with feminism, of which her work with Hélène Brion is but one example (and there are many others detailed in her letters), it’s clear she was made of much stronger stuff than is apparent from Maher’s fictional characterisation. For example, Maher shows her as still tentative about the idea that the inequitable treatment meted out to women is gender discrimination.  (“And there was also the place in her chest that was still smarting from the knowledge that Joyce hadn’t bothered to tell her any of this. Was it because she was a woman?”) As someone who had committed themselves to counteracting the prevailing “gendered approach to literary culture,” (well documented in Caitlin O’Keefe’s article) she would have been quick to recognise bias when she saw it.

Lovers of Paris will be charmed by the Parisian setting. It is of course that fantasy Paris alluded to earlier – the gentle, nostalgic, Bohemian Paris of freshly baked baguettes and roasting chestnuts, burbling fountains, history seeping from old stone, flickering gas lamps, and puppet shows in the Jardin du Luxembourg. A strong sense of place is important in historical fiction, and Maher doesn’t disappoint, but it’s tempting to sprinkle the narrative with nods to the escapist yearnings of readers rather than strengthen their engagement with the characters. (I know because I’ve done it!). And judging from some reviews, it sells books.

As portrayed by Maher, Beach is an entirely engaging character, one who readily evokes reader empathy. And it’s true she was unassuming, modest and sympathetic (as any good factotum or midwife should be). As Katherine Anne Porter said of her – “God knows modesty could hardly take denser cover, and this she did at incredible expense of hard work and spare living …”. But in Maher’s version of her there’s a deference, a tentativeness, a flavour of the ingénue, which belies Beach’s self-belief, resolve and determination. She was and had to be indomitable. Her devotion to literature and opposition to censorship drove her to risk everything including her beloved bookstore to publish Ulysses, at a time when women didn’t do such things. Her strength of character was remarkable as was her refusal to condemn Joyce, despite his disgraceful exploitation of her generosity. “A baby belongs to its mother, not to the midwife, doesn’t it?” she says in her memoir. A better example of grace under fire would be hard to find. To have further explored this dichotomy in Beach’s character between all-accommodating helpmate and steely individualist would have added considerable depth.

Maher’s Beach is almost one-dimensional, watery, designed to charm. There’s barely the slightest hint of the Sylvia Beach her friend Katherine Anne Porter knew:

“For she was wild—a wild, free spirit if ever I saw one, fearless, untamed to the last, which is not the same as being reckless or prodigal, or wicked, or suicidal. She was not really afraid of anything human, a most awe-inspiring form of courage. She trusted her own tastes and instincts and went her own way; and almost everyone who came near her trusted her too. She laid her hands gently, irresistibly on hundreds of lives, and changed them for the better; she had second sight about what each person really needed.”

Historical fiction is a recalcitrant beast. No matter how many prototypes and precedents, every author who takes up its challenge must wrestle anew with the quandary of how to breathe life into characters who are dead, how to remodel the historical record to shape it to their purpose. What to follow slavishly, what to leave out, what to re-invent and what to make up. As Maher says in her Author’s Note, “there is simply no such thing as The Real James Joyce, or The True Hemingway, or The Actual Adrienne Monnier” (or as she may have said The Real Sylvia Beach). “They are dead.” But in dying they’ve left archives full of evidence about who they were. And if you make up or reinterpret them in ways that contradict the record, or in a manner that conceivably does them a disservice, or confounds too extravagantly someone else’s interpretation, there may be no arbiter to say “this is wrong”, but plenty of critics to say “your story is wrong”.

In her Author’s Note Maher refers to a series of BBC lectures given by Hilary Mantel in which she stated (with the panache we would expect from her) “[readers] of historical fiction are not buying a replica, or even a faithful photographic representation – [they] are buying a painting with the brushstrokes left in”. In the same lecture Mantel also said, “the dead are invisible they are not absent”.

No matter how many liberties historical fiction writers take to meet the demands of their story, the compromise between the record and the fiction should not be so great that the dead have become in fact absent. There’s a middle ground between the facile cameo portrait, the tired old stereotypes or a gang of the Lost Generation from central casting (thinking here of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris) and obscuring the past to the extent it’s unrecognisable. Somewhere in this middle ground lies the opportunity to offer a fresh and original perspective on the past in a manner that pays obeisance to historical fidelity but also offers insights into the present.

To write about amazing characters is not to write an amazing story. The poet Ezra Pound’s injunction to “make it new” is often used to define modernism. It could also serve as advice to writers of historical fiction, as could “make it meaningful”. While “The Paris Bookseller” is a delightful excursion to bygone Paris, ultimately it fails to deliver anything either new or meaningful.