How to be Modern: The Darantière Press and Anglo-American Writers in France

Abstract

The collaboration between Sylvia Beach, James Joyce, and the Dijon printer Maurice Darantière that resulted in the first printing of Ulysses in 1922 was commemorated in a 1988 study by the modernist scholar Jean-Michel Rabaté: Maurice Darantière, les années vingt: bibliographie d’imprimeur. The bibliography appended to the investigation of Darantière's publishing history (1900-1928) reveals a remarkable number of volumes of English-language poetry, essays and fiction during this period. Along with French translations of a range of English-language short stories (by Sherwood Anderson or Edgar Allan Poe), Darantière’s catalogue boasts over a dozen English-language volumes, including those by some of the key figures of anglophone literary modernism (Bryher, Robert McAlmon, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, H.D.). Darantière’s willingness to print books in a language other than French is a tribute not only to the audaciousness of his enterprise but to the network of influence established among Anglo-American writers, publishers and booksellers in France in the first decades of the twentieth century. What can a new examination of the Darantière collection (Bibliothèque municipale, Dijon) bring to light about the mediation of avant-garde Anglo-American writing in France and what Lawrence Rainey has called the “commodification” (44) of modernist print culture? The contribution of Darantière in the dissemination of Anglo-American literary experiment will be measured alongside the expanding role of the printer, from craftsman to vector of the new expatriate writing.