One hundred years ago this month, the Shakespeare and Company bookshop opened its doors for the first time in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. As we celebrate the centennial, the popular story of the shop’s founding is sure to be retold. The origin story of the shop often goes as follows: during the 1920s, Sylvia Beach, a devoted enthusiast for the literary genius of her time, decided to set up shop a few steps from the Luxembourg Gardens. From there, Beach’s biography is often framed as a Cinderella story of Modernism. When James Joyce asked her, an amateur bookseller, to publish Ulysses, and she rose to the occasion, she underwent a transformation from an anonymous shopkeeper into an internationally famous figure. Beach then provided a home for expatriates like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald who came to Paris during “Les Années Folles,” France’s version of the Roaring Twenties. Beach has thus been memorialized as the “midwife to Modernism.”
“Certain people are meant to be midwives—not mothers of invention. Sylvia was one,” wrote Noël Riley Fitch, author of Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation (1983), in the most recent introduction to a collection of Beach’s letters. Yet to characterize Beach as merely a “midwife” and to remember her primarily for bringing into being the work of Great Men is to misrepresent her and the everyday work of her shop. Revisiting the story behind Shakespeare and Company’s creation reveals that its roots lie in early twentieth-century feminist activism and, in particular, Beach’s own deep-rooted conviction that women had a right to an intellectual life.
In the four years since my daughter first learned to read, I’ve been hoping to teach her the joys of reading for pleasure. No one wants to be nagged into enjoying themselves or doing something that’s good for them. Instead, I turn off the TV, grab the dog and a blanket, and make a nest so cozy the FOMO sucks in my daughter. You’d be surprised how often it works. But even for a lifelong reader like me—with the responsibilities of middle age: the emails to send, checkups to schedule, sitters to book, pages to write, and bills to pay—it can be difficult to access anything like joy. Contentedness? Sure. Admiration for an author’s achievement and the gratitude that comes with having your world increased and your knowledge deepened? Of course. But the joy in discovering a book that’s too good to resist? That’s been rare—until I started reading with my daughter.
Food preferences are a chicken-and-egg problem. Do we choose them or do they choose us? The Good Tastes Study was designed to tease such mysteries apart. Over the next six months, a hundred and six babies will pass through Building 500 and try the samples. Afterward, two experts in human expression will scrutinize their faces on the videos. They’ll divide their features into zones of activity and classify every twisted lip and wrinkled nose according to a Facial Action Coding System. The system can sort adult expressions into emotional categories: Happiness, Sadness, Surprise, Fear, Anger, Disgust, and Contempt. But baby faces are too pudgy for such specificity, Johnson says, so she’ll settle for positive, negative, and neutral. (When a baby makes a gesture known as “the rake” and claws the kale off his tongue, that’s negative.) She’ll correlate those responses with the electrode readings, compare them with the babies’ reactions to a control substance (oatmeal), and then circle back to see how the parents reacted to their children’s reactions.
Baby food shouldn’t be this hard. After a few hundred thousand years of raising children, humans ought to have this part down. No food has been more obsessively studied, no diet more fiercely controlled, no dining experience more anxiously stage-managed. Yet we still get it wrong. On any given day, a quarter of American toddlers eat no vegetables. When they do eat them, the most popular choice is French fries. Why don’t babies know what’s good for them? And why don’t we?
This wasn’t much fun. For one thing, I was depriving myself of the pleasures of my mother’s cooking. Some families are brought together by faith; we were brought together by food. By secretly not eating, I was isolating myself. As I grew thinner, I felt both proud and terribly lonely. Toward the end of the summer, my parents became aware that I wasn’t myself; in photos from that time I look gaunt and unhealthy. When we returned home from the shore, my parents took me to a child psychologist, Sidney Hyman.
Dr. Hyman was in his late fifties, wore a bow tie, and liked to crack silly jokes. He didn’t ask many questions, but I remember playing a lot of board games with him. I’d become very serious, and I think he wanted me to rediscover what it was like to have fun. Trying to have fun is what started me cooking. I opened a cupboard, found some chocolate—I’d hardly touched any since becoming obsessed with my weight—and decided to make what I called fudge. I put the chocolate in a plastic container and placed it in the toaster oven. The container melted a bit, but the warm, liquefied chocolate was delicious, and the fact that I’d melted it myself was exciting: I had transformed something.
Each time I return to San Francisco, I begin to sweat. As the 5 gives way to the 580, cutting west between yellow hills that insulate the Central Valley, my vision slows. As chrome windmills, a hundred feet tall, glint the tips of their blades in an unhurried spin, I hunch lower in my seat. As the bus descends into a hazy field of buildings along a cool, tinny shore, my shoulders tense. And even though I can’t place the source of pressure along my back, I accept it. Hold it close. Like a fetish, I savor it. Because the weight has become familiar to me.
I’ve fled this city more times than I can count, but each time I return, the water is still shallow. Still the same, milky green. Its deep currents flow toward the mouth of the bay where, under the arc of a bridge more ochre than gold, the silt floor drops to the ocean’s bottom 150 feet below. Maybe it’s that invisible suction, the confluence of small waves from the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers, that pulls me back. Each time I succumb to this gravitational tug, I am reminded of the simple fact that this is no longer my city, although I wanted it to be — my foreverland. Now, when I cross the Bay Bridge high above the city’s protective waters, I enter as a visitor. It may feel like a homecoming, but it’s a home no longer inviting. No longer viable. Gliding through the skyscrapers that clump along the Embarcadero, I can hardly breathe. The anxiety of remembering presses against the windows: how the rooms of this town made me, molded my view of the world as a place ruled not only by law or politics but by magic.
A pure, queer divine.
Fall-into-winter: the time of year when we come together to light a candle, carve a bird, raise a glass. It’s a season that is cherished and dreaded often in equal measure. But while attending the company holiday party or fa-la-la-ing with family might seem like a chore, social scientists and other experts make a compelling case that there is strength in numbers: Gathering is good for our body and our spirit.