We worked on a beach on Long Island. She was visiting Norman Rosten the poet…. I asked her what she was reading when I went to pick her up (I was trying to get an idea of how she spent her time). She said she kept Ulysses in her car and had been reading it for a long time. She said she loved the sound of it and would read it aloud to herself to try to make sense of it — but she found it hard going. She couldn’t read it consecutively. When we stopped at a local playground to photograph she got out the book and started to read while I loaded the film. So, of course, I photographed her. It was always a collaborative effort of photographer and subject where she was concerned — but almost more her input. EVE ARNOLD

Monroe’s Molly: Three Reflections on Eve Arnold’s Photograph of Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses

1. Griselda Pollock

It is often said that Marilyn Monroe was even more brilliant in posing for still photography than for cinematic performances. She posed for a range of remarkable photographers creating a secondary archive of ‘still Monroe’. Eve Arnold was one of the only women who contributed to this archive. Does gender inflect the images she made of this complex modernist woman of the 1950s? The photo-shoot that brought Arnold and Monroe together in 1955 has incited comment from both cultural and literary scholars because of the seemingly bizarre combination of the sex-goddess reading the most challenging modernist text, Ulysses by James Joyce. As part of the author’s current project to re-‘read’ the Monroe still and moving image archive using the tools of a Warburgian art history focusing on gestures and affects, a postcolonial feminist class analysis of modern women as creative agents within/against sexist and racist cultural institutions, and as a feminist cultural theorist using psychoanalytically-inflected image analysis within historical specificity, this article seeks to revisit and re-read the double agency of the two women at work together making images mediated by what was offered to Baker-Monroe – and knowingly incorporated by her – by the gendered voice of Penelope-Molly in the final section of Ulysses.

Marilyn Monroe, James Joyce and Anthony Burgess

Here is Burgess looking at a famous image (by the photographer Eve Arnold) of Marilyn Monroe reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. Monroe appears to have nearly finished the book, and may be studying Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. Burgess is at the 1982 Joyce centenary celebrations (wearing the commemorative tie) and seems to be in the James Joyce Museum in Dublin.

Burgess wrote extensively on Joyce, including the two critical studies Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (1965, also published as Re:Joyce) andJoysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce (1973). He also edited A Shorter ‘Finnegans Wake‘ (1966), and prepared at least part of A Shorter ‘Ulysses’ (now lost). His publications on Joyce sought to make accessible the challenging work of one of his favourite writers.

Burgess’s 1992 essay on Monroe dwells on her iconic status: ‘That she was a great comic ought to detract from her divine glamour. She had a quality she may have learnt from Mae West, the blonde seductress who mocked seduction, indeed mocked sex: this was the intimation that she, the true she, was somewhere outside her body, that her body was a kind of glorious impersonation, an image of an archetypal love goddess’. He never met Monroe himself, though his French collaborator Georges Belmont conducted an important interview with her in 1960.

Eve Arnold’s image of Monroe adorns the cover of Ulysses and Us(2009) by Declan Kiberd, the latest popular exegesis of Joyce’s text.

LA RUE DE L'ODEON DANS TOUS SES ETATS : Rue de l'Odéon, à Paris (VIe' arrondissement)

. - Cette rue commence au carrefour de l'Odéon et finit à la place de l'Odéon. Sa longueur est de 176 m.

L'ouverture de cette rue, sur l'emplacement de l'hôtel de Condé, fut autorisée par lettres-patentes du 10 août 1779, registrées au parlement le 7 septembre suivant, et sa largeur fixée à 40 pieds. Elle ne fut exécutée que sur une largeur de 12,90 m. Cette dimension a été maintenue par une décision ministérielle du 4 nivôse an IX, signée Chaptal, et par une ordonnance royale du 12 mai 1841. Elle porta d'abord le nom de rue du Théâtre-Français.

HABITANTS CELEBRES :no 4 : imprimerie du Cercle social, dirigée par Nicolas de Bonneville, où étaient édités différents journaux révolutionnaires tels "La Bouche de fer" de l'abbé Claude Fauchet ou le "Bulletin des Amis de la Vérité". no 7 : Adrienne Monnier avait fondé en 1915 sa librairie La Maison des amis des livres, à cette adresse. no 10 : Thomas Paine, intellectuel anglo-franco-américain proche des Girondins, habita cet immeuble de 1797 à 18022. L'éditeur et libraire Guénégaud s'installa ici. Le sculpteur Olivier Pettit, y demeura chez ses parents de 1945 à 1952. no 12 : Sylvia Beach avait fondé en 1919 sa librairie Shakespeare and Company à cette adresse et y publia en 1922 le Ulysse de James Joyce2. La libraire resta dans la rue jusqu'en 1941 date de sa fermeture3. no 21 : hôtel particulier classé aux Monuments historiques. Débouche sur le théâtre de l'Odéon. no 22 : Camille Desmoulins avec sa femme Lucile Desmoulins et Fabre d'Églantine habitaient la maison de l'actuel numéro, à l'angle de la place de l'Odéon, lorsqu'ils furent arrêtés puis exécutés le 5 avril 1794

The dispersal of Sylvia Beach’s books

When Sylvia Beach died in 1962, relict in her apartment were books, business papers, correspondence, photographs, paintings, and literary memorabilia. By agreement with her sister, Holly Beach Dennis, Princeton purchased these effects in early 1964. Associate librarian for special collections, Howard C. Rice arrived in Paris in late March and spent three weeks in the rooms over her famous bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, 12, rue de l’Oléon.

Even though Sylvia Beach had given away 5,000 books to the American Library in Paris in 1951 (New York Herald Tribune, April 25, 1951) and even though she had sold her ‘Joyce Collection’ (as she called it) to the University of Buffalo in 1959, the apartment held, counting just the books, according to her sister’s lawyer, Richard Ader, 8,000 to 10,000 volumes. Untold numbers of papers and other objects filled closets, shelves, and walls. Howard Rice described as a ‘struggle’ his efforts to sort, collocate, organize, pack, and arrange shipping or further disposition of the apartment’s contents. When Rice returned to Princeton in April, he had completed dividing the contents as follows:

• 31 shipping cases sent to the library filled with more than 2000 books, hundreds of photographs, thousands of pages of personal and business papers, as well as some paintings and artifacts. For customs purposes Rice said these should be described as two paintings plus ‘books and papers for an educational institution.” He also described it as “‘the Sylvia Beach Collection’ proper — that is, her papers, inscribed copies of books, first editions of American, French and English authors, inscribed photographs, drawings, etc., …” Today these are arranged in two groups: the Sylvia Beach Papers (C0108) and the book collection given the location designator ‘Beach.’

• Another group of books – on the order of 3,000 to 4,000 – “constituting the basic library of English literature which once formed the core of the ‘Shakespeare and Company’ lending library was presented “to the University of Paris, for use in the library of its English Department, the Institut d’Etudes Anglaises et Nord-Américaines.” Rice wrote that these books were “…. far more than a mere circulating library for current reading. French teachers, students, and English scholars, as well as translators and writers, were in the habit of finding [at Shakespeare and Company], alongside the avant-garde writers of the twentieth century, not only Shakespeare, but also, in his company, the Elizabethan poets, the eighteenth-century novelists, the Romantics and the Victorians. Such books, which Miss Beach brought into France, with persistence and discrimination, from across the Channel or the Atlantic, may now continue their ambassadorial and fertilizing role among new generations at the Institut’s library, located in the Rue de l’École de Médecine, in the ‘heart of Paris,’ where Sylvia Beach lived for more than four decades.” (Princeton University Library Chronicle, 26:1, p. 12) Current successor to the library of the Institut is the Bibliothèque du Monde Anglophone <http://www.dbu.univ-paris3.fr/…/bibliotheque-du-monde-anglo…>

•An unnumbered group of books was consigned by Howard Rice to antiquarian bookseller André Jammes. One document in the librarian’s records (AC123, box 51) shows these amounting to a 1500 Francs credit (or about $300).

•Maurice Saillet, a friend of Sylvia Beach since the 1930s, acquired her apartment after her death, and, according to Howard Rice’s notes, was “the key person during HCR’s sojourn.” Saillet’s collection of Sylvia Beach and Shakespeare and Company is now in the Carlton Lake Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas. It evidently includes some of Beach’s books.

Coda: In the late 1950s, Sylvia Beach prepared a 53 page list headed “The Library of Shakespeare and Company / Sylvia Beach / Paris – VI” together with a one page list of “Memorabilia from the Shakespeare and Company Bookshop, 12, Rue de l’Odéon – Paris -VI” Plans for making this list are mentioned in Sylvia Beach’s letter to Jackson Mathews, dated 2 July 1959. (Letters of Sylvia Beach, ed. K. Walsh [2010], p. 284). A copy of the list is in the Noël Riley Fitch Papers (C0841, box 3, folder 10).

Coda II: Photographs from Howard Rice’s memoranda in C0108, box 276.

This entry was posted in Book history, Library history, Noteworthy long-held accessions by Stephen Ferguson.

Le magasin MOICANI au 12 rue de l'Odéon dans le 6ème arrondissement à Paris, vous souhaite la bienvenue sur son nouveau site.

"Quand un salon littéraire devient un boudoir pour dames"

Le 17 novembre 1919, l'américaine Sylvia Beach née à Baltimore dans le Maryland le 14 mars 1887, ouvrait 12 rue de l'Odéon sa célèbre librairie " Shakespeare andCompany ".

Jusqu'en 1941, ce lieu de rencontres et d'échanges accueillit " Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, ErnestHemingway, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, JamesJoyce mais également des français comme André Gide,Paul Valéry, André Breton, Jules Romain, Jean-Paul Sartre qui y venaient faire des lectures de leurs ouvrages.

Sylvia Beach publia le 2 février 1922 " Ulysse " de JamesJoyce.

"Shakespeare and Company " fut fermée par les nazis en 1941 et Sylvia Beach passa 6 mois internée dans le camp de Vittel.


Le magasin MOICANI se joint à l'associationL'ODEONIE qui a pour vocation de faire revivre ce lieu historiquement célèbre.

Vous pouvez visiter notre blog, ouvert au public depuis le 10 septembre 2008 : http://moicani.over-blog.com