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Bricktop and Sylvia Beach in Interwar Paris. (Under the Direction of Dr ABSTRACT BILLHEIMER, SARAH GRACE. Champagne and Shakespeare: Bricktop and Sylvia Beach in Interwar Paris. (Under the direction of Dr. Katherine Mellen Charron.) The names “Bricktop” and “Sylvia Beach” appear sprinkled throughout histories of the expatriate experience of Paris in the 1920s and ‘30s. Bricktop’s nightclubs on the Right Bank of the Seine River, and Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s bookshop on the river’s Left Bank, served as two of the most popular gathering places for Paris’s native and foreign residents. Sylvia Beach is well-represented in scholarly studies of the Lost Generation of writers, artists, and intellectuals, and was the subject of a lengthy biography, but Bricktop has received less serious attention. This thesis compares and contrasts her life with that of her contemporary Sylvia Beach, in an attempt to establish Bricktop as Beach’s equal in the position of hostess to the City of Light’s illustrious expatriates. Relying on archival sources, each woman’s own published account of her life in Paris, the published letters and remembrances of fellow expatriates, and related secondary sources, this study thus also challenges the simplistic divisions that have crept into our common conceptions of interwar Paris. Literary memoirs like Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, or even scholarly treatments such as William A. Shack’s chronicle Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story Between the Great Wars, have contributed to a stratified portrait of Paris’s expatriate community, often separated according to gender, race, class, profession, and location. While such distinctions certainly did exist, examining the lives and careers of Bricktop and Sylvia Beach reveals a fascinating, and more complicated network of social and commercial connections among the various sets of international celebrities in Paris than we have usually acknowledged. © Copyright 2015 by Sarah Grace Billheimer All Rights Reserved Champagne and Shakespeare: Bricktop and Sylvia Beach in Interwar Paris by Sarah Grace Billheimer A thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts History Raleigh, North Carolina 2016 APPROVED BY: _______________________________ ______________________________ Dr. Katherine Mellen Charron Dr. Blair Lynne Kelley Committee Chair _______________________________ Dr. Lloyd Kramer ii DEDICATION To the memory of my grandfather Edwin John DuCongé, Jr., who first told me about his aunt Bricktop, and who encouraged me to honor the past. iii BIOGRAPHY A North Carolina native, Sarah Billheimer is an M.A. candidate in the Traditional History program at North Carolina State University. After receiving her B.A. degree in French Education from Campbell University in 2011, she spent time teaching English in France and Latin in Cary, North Carolina. At NC State, her research interests have included cultural history, modern Europe, and African American history. Upon graduation in May of 2016, she hopes to pursue a career in French or History education. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks and love go first to my family – to my parents for their continued support throughout this whole journey, and to my siblings for their ridiculous text messages when I needed a brain break. I owe so much to my grandparents, as well, for encouraging me to pursue my education and for helping to make that possible. To my “home team” of friends, especially the MVPs, Carrie, Abbe, and Lynne: thanks for your encouragement and for keeping me grounded in the 21st century. To Kayla: I am grateful to you for being the first (only?) one to nerd out with me over Sylvia and Co., going back to our days in Lyon! To Nathan: I am so glad you showed up during this process. Thanks for the coffee, your unflagging support, helping me with pesky formatting issues, and for holding on with me through all of the craziness that was 2015. Looking forward to being just as much there for you as you experience the pains and pleasures of grad school for yourself soon! I am also grateful to faculty and staff at both NC State and UNC-Chapel Hill for their help with not only this project, but also my pursuit of a graduate degree in History. Thank you to Director of Graduate Programs Susanna Lee and the staff in the NCSU History office for providing tireless assistance and guidance. I am thankful, as well, to the late Jonathan Ocko for making travel funding available to our department’s graduate students. His advocacy made possible my trip to Princeton to look at Sylvia Beach’s papers. I have greatly benefitted from each of the professors with whom I have studied, and under whom I have worked as a graduate teaching assistant at State. Thanks to Stephen Vincent and David Gilmartin at NC State, and William Ferris at Chapel Hill, for reading early versions of some of this material and providing helpful feedback. v Finally, I must extend my gratitude to my thesis committee. To Blair Kelley of NC State and Lloyd Kramer of Chapel Hill: I so appreciate your taking the time to read my thesis and offer your thoughts. Greatest thanks, of course, to my advisor and committee chair, Katherine Mellen Charron: the idea for a thesis on Bricktop originated with you, and you have patiently seen it through to the end! As your student, teaching assistant, and advisee, I have learned greatly from your knowledge, experience, and dedication. This project owes so much to your encouragement and guidance. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER 1: Bricktop and Sylvia Beach: Américaines in Paris.......................................... 21 CHAPTER 2: Night and Day: Bricktop and Sylvia Beach as Businesswomen and Hostesses in Paris ................................................................................................................................... 57 CHAPTER 3: Memories and Myth-making: The Crowded Recollections of Bricktop and Sylvia Beach .......................................................................................................................... 90 CONCLUSION: A View from the Reviews..........................................................................122 REFERENCES ......................................................................................................................127 1 INTRODUCTION “Sylvia Beach, the bookshop owner who made literary history when she became the first to publish James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ was found dead last Saturday in her apartment at 12 Rue de l’Odéon. She was 75 years old.” – New York Times Obituary, October 10, 1962.1 “Bricktop, the legendary singer and entertainer whose cafe society nightclubs in Paris in the 20's and in Mexico City and Rome in the postwar years drew royalty, writers and the fashionably riffraff, died in her sleep early yesterday in her apartment on West 68th Street. She was 89 years old and had been in fragile health.” – New York Times Obituary, February 1, 1984.2 The paragraphs above open the respective obituaries of Sylvia Beach and Ada “Bricktop” Smith DuCongé, two American women whose stories help to illuminate the complex coexistence of the various expatriate groups in 1920s and ‘30s Paris. Sylvia Beach, a white minister’s daughter from Princeton, New Jersey, operated a bookshop and lending library on the Left Bank of the Seine River. Her shop, Shakespeare and Company, attracted many of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, artists, and musicians before they achieved fame. She spoke French fluently and resided permanently in Paris from 1919 until her death in 1962. Bricktop, on the other hand, was a redheaded African-American from West Virginia, come to Paris by way of the nightclubs of Chicago and Harlem, and the chitlin’ circuit of black vaudeville that crisscrossed the United States. After her arrival in France in 1924, she worked in the nightclubs of Montmartre, on the Right Bank of Paris, until World War II forced her to return to the United States. 1 Author unknown, Obituary for Sylvia Beach, “Sylvia Beach, 75, First to Publish Joyce's 'Ulysses,' Dies in Paris,” New York Times, October 10, 1962. 2 Albin Krebs, Obituary for Ada “Bricktop” Smith DuCongé, “Bricktop, Cabaret Queen in Paris and Rome, Dead,” New York Times, February 1, 1984. http://www.nytimes.com/1984/02/01/obituaries/bricktop-cabaret- queen-in-paris-and-rome-dead.html 2 Despite the differences of race and class between them, glimpses into the lives of Sylvia Beach and Bricktop also reveal connections. The wealthy European and white American businesspeople, socialites, and minor nobility who congregated in the more fashionable areas along Paris’s Right Bank represented the bulk of Bricktop’s clientele. Yet several of Sylvia Beach’s Left Bank intellectual customers also found their way to the Montmartre clubs in which Bricktop provided entertainment, as works like Robert McAlmon’s Being Geniuses Together and Bricktop’s own autobiography reveal.3 This overlap in patronage challenges the standard narratives of separate social groups presented in many stories of interwar Paris. As businesswomen and hostesses to a diverse group of patrons, Bricktop and Beach exerted a unique influence in the expatriate community. Like many of their contemporaries, both women also published books filled with their memories of expatriate days in Europe. Bricktop’s narrative encompasses the entirety of her life and work as a club owner and entertainer, while
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