Bookshops

  During those decades, Léon-Paul Fargue was the bridge between that Anglo-Saxon-French Paris and Latin American Paris. Alejo Carpentier describes him as astonishingly erudite and a brilliant poet, always dressed in navy blue, the ultimate wanderer in the night addicted to the metropolis and averse to travelling. Despite his random urban itineraries and lack of punctuality, he was apparently faithful to the Lipp beer house, the Café de Flore—where he would meet up with Picasso—the rue de l’Odéon and Elvira de Alvear’s house, where he hobnobbed with Arturo Uslar Pietri and Miguel Ángel Asturias. Another fetish poet and bridge between the two shores was Paul Valéry, whom Victoria Ocampo met in 1928, a crucial visit since she was in the process of preparing the great project of her life, the magazine Sur, the first issue of which would be published three years later. Over several months she got to know philosophers, writers and plastic artists. She visited the Russian Lev Shestov in the company of José Ortega y Gasset. She didn’t survive her encounter with Pierre Drieu La Rochelle unscathed: they escaped to London embroiled in an adulterous passion. After meeting Monnier and Beach, who introduced her to the work of Virginia Woolf, Ocampo crossed the Channel again in order to meet her in 1934 and returned once more in 1939, accompanied by Gisèle Freund, who took photographs of Woolf that were to become more famous than the ones Man Ray took of Ocampo. The bookselling couple also introduced her to Valéry Larbaud. And Monnier drank tea more than once in the house that Alfonso Reyes and his wife rented in Paris during the previous decade. Nevertheless, to judge by their articles, letters and books, none of these Latin American names resonated in the memories of the Parisian pair of booksellers.

  Without a doubt both were radically committed to the literature of their time: the owner of Shakespeare and Company risked her economic well-being to publish the masterpiece of one man and the owner of La Maison des Amis des Livres risked hers to publish her own literary magazine, Le Navire d’Argent. However, Monnier had a more visible profile as a critic than Beach and a greater desire to intervene in contemporary debates. Included in her book is a close reading of the poetry of Pierre Reverdy. Beach recounts an after-dinner conversation with Joyce and Jules Benda where Monnier argued about the best contemporary French writers. In terms of the avant-garde, she states: “We were all very conscious that we were heading towards a renaissance.” And on the function of a bookshop with regard to the literary present she says:

  It is truly indispensable that a house devoted to books be founded and directed conscientiously by someone who unites with an erudition that is as vast as possible a love for the spirit of what is new, and who, without falling into the wrongheadedness of any kind of snobbery, is ready to assist the new truths and forms.

  To keep both majority and minority happy it is necessary to perform genuine feats of organization and, above all, to keep the space to a minimum. La Maison was a small bookshop and, consequently, it is hardly surprising that its offerings were limited. Many of the writers who paid a visit looked to see whether their books were displayed, or gave them to the library, so it is understandable that the circle of friends and supporters influenced what was for sale, especially if the owner was defending them aesthetically in her interventions in the cultural sphere. In this way the bookshop is transformed into an anomalous place, where exceptional works that, according to Mallarmé, didn’t find an opening in modern bookshops are both on sale and find subscribers, investors, translators and publishers.

  Monnier writes: “And what discoveries are possible in a book shop, through which inevitably pass, amid the innumerable passers-by, the Pleiades, those who among us already slightly

  resemble ‘great blue persons,’ and who, with a smile, justify what we call our greatest expectations.” The bookseller, critic and cultural activist includes herself in the elite. Beyond the difficulties they have finding a publisher or even subsisting, they are the best writers of the period. They possess the aura of recognition: they are recognized by those who see them in person, because they may not have read them, but they have seen them in photos, as might have happened with the Eiffel Tower. Chateaubriand says in Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb:

  I was in a happy mood; my reputation made my life easy: one dreams endlessly in the first intoxication of fame, and one’s eyes are first filled with the joys of the light that breaks through; but when this light goes out, it leaves one in darkness; if it persists, the habit of seeing it soon makes one insensitive to it.

  The key word is, of course, reputation. Another that is equally crucial depends on it, consecration. From the birth of modernity, a highly complex literary system has been articulated through sites of consecration: publication by particular houses, praise from specific critics or writers, translation into certain languages, the winning of awards, prizes, important recognition first locally then internationally, knowing the right people and visiting key cafés, salons and bookshops. Paris during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth constituted the world’s pre-eminent republic of letters, the centre where a large slice of world literature was legitimized. When Goethe describes a bookshop in his Italian Journey he counterposes three cultural influences: the German he carries with him (and the language in which he is writing his book), the English (the much praised English edition of the book he buys) and the Italian (Palladio and the bookshop itself). As Pascale Casanova has reminded us, Goethe spoke in his work about both a world literature and a world market for cultural goods. He was fully aware that modernity would be based on the transformation of cultural and artistic objects into merchandise that moves in two parallel markets, the symbolic one (the aim of which is prestige and distinction) and the economic one (the goal of which is the earning of profits for work done, that is part craft and part art).

  As is the case with most biographies, essays and most cultural critiques, Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters does not mention the important role of bookshops in an atmosphere of progressively more international literary geopolitics. Shakespeare and Company is referred to once in relation to Joyce, and La Maison des Amis des Livres appears a few pages earlier, in a paragraph on the topic of the writer as a passer-by with no certified fatherland:

  This improbable combination of qualities lastingly established Paris, both in France and throughout the world, as the capital of a republic having neither borders nor boundaries, a universal homeland exempt from all profession of patriotism, a kingdom of literature set up in opposition to the ordinary laws of states, a transnational realm whose sole imperatives are those of art and literature: the universal republic of letters. “Here,” wrote Henri Michaux with reference to Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop, one of the chief places of literary consecration in Paris, “is the homeland of all those free spirits who have not found a homeland.” Paris, therefore, became the capital for those who proclaimed themselves to be stateless and above political laws: in a word, artists.

  In the titular 1969 article from Extraterritorial, George Steiner speaks of post-modern authors like Borges, Beckett or Nabokov, representatives of a “multilingual imagination,” of “internalized translation,” the inspiration for their remarkable work. Friedrich Nietzsche was impressed by the existence of trilingual bookshops in Turin when he lived there. Further north, in another polyglot frontier city, Trieste, the Librería Antiquaria, in the inter-war period, was the place where the great writers of Trieste, like Umberto Saba, the poet who ran the bookshop, or his friend Italo Svevo, conversed with writers from other countries, like James Joyce. Consequently, changes of abode and language led to a state of artistic extraterritoriality, but as citizens artists continued to be subject to formal laws and as authors to the rules of the game in their respective literary fields. Although writers in Paris could cultivate a fiction of freedom, it was perhaps easier to do that in relation to geopolitics than in relation to the mechanisms of literary consecration. As well as being a bookseller, Monnier was a literary critic: she judged and she reported. Her important ro
le as a consecrator was recognized by her contemporaries: in 1923 she was accused publicly of exerting a powerful influence with her book recommendations in Histoire de la littérature française contemporaine by René Lalou (according to an article in Les Cahiers Idéalistes she “ignored those books that weren’t on her shelves”). In her defence, the bookseller argued that she simply stocked titles that were not available in other bookshops, and, by listing them, she shaped a canon.

  The Monnier and Beach duo constituted a doubly anti-institutional site: respectively, opposing the big local legitimizing platforms (daily newspapers, magazines, universities, government bodies), and as a clandestine cultural consulate, opposing the big US legitimizing platforms (especially publishers). From Paris they foiled the American censors and made it possible to publish Joyce’s work in New York: an accomplice of Beach’s ferried copies of Ulysses from Canada by hiding them in her trousers. That anti-national oppositional-space emphasis hardened during the Nazi Occupation, when it became a bunker for symbolic resistance.

  In 1953, Monnier wrote a piece entitled “Memories of London” in which she recalls her first trip to the English capital in 1909, when she was seventeen. It is striking that she does not mention a single bookshop. Perhaps she had not yet found her vocation, although people tend to reinforce myths about themselves in retrospective accounts. I think there may be a more straightforward explanation: at the beginning of the last century, it was difficult to find any awareness of belonging to a tradition. In fact, the strong tradition of conceptually related independent bookshops (Shakespeare and Companies) was born in that transition between Library and Bookshop that was a revelation for Sylvia Beach:

  One day at the Bibliothèque Nationale, I noticed that one of the reviews—Paul Fort’s Vers et prose, I think it was—could be purchased at A. Monnier’s bookshop, 7 rue de l’Odéon, Paris VI. I had not heard the name before, nor was the Odéon quarter familiar to me, but suddenly something drew me irresistibly to the spot where such important things in my life were to happen. I crossed the Seine and was soon in the rue de l’Odéon, with its theatre at the end, reminding me somehow of the colonial houses in Princeton. Halfway up the street on the left was a little grey bookshop with “A. Monnier” above the door. I gazed at the exciting books in the window, then, peering into the shop, saw all round the walls shelves containing volumes in the glistening “crystal paper” overcoats that French books wear while waiting, often for a long time, to be taken to the binder’s. There were also some interesting portraits of writers here and there. At a table sat a young woman. A. Monnier herself, no doubt. [. . .] “I like America very much,” she said. I replied that I liked France very much. And, as our future collaboration proved, we meant it.

  The book was published in 1959 and its natural readership was Anglo-Saxon (hence the comparison with Princeton), as she was fully conscious of the fact that her bookshop was an inevitable reference point and the recreation of its origins would be of interest to literary history. Her tale of discovery is a reader’s journey and implies that a frontier must be crossed (the Seine) to reach the unknown. Through the shop window (the second frontier), Beach is linked to Goethe’s sense of surprise: businesses still existed that didn’t bind their bundles of paper, so the reader could choose the binding to match his or her own taste. The desire in the gaze is concerned as much with the (attractive) books on display as with the (interesting) portraits of writers, which to this day continue to provide the usual bookshop decor. Their alliance would be finally sealed by a statement of tastes that, with the passage of time, was reinterpreted as a declaration of intent. And of love: Monnier and Beach were a couple for almost fifteen years, although their private relationship does not surface in the books they wrote (nor does the fact that they were among the first women booksellers in the world to be completely independent of male power or investment). That alliance was the first stone laid in their myth. Beach knew she was arriving on the scene four years later and positioned herself in a line initiated by La Maison des Amis des Livres. What she could not know when she published her book was that both bookshops were already part of a tradition connecting the lost generation to the beat generation. Moreover, Beach wrote about the former: “I can’t think of a generation less deserving of this name.”

  The second Shakespeare and Company opened its doors at 37 rue de la Bûcherie in 1951, under the name of Le Mistral, and was not renamed after its admired predecessor until 1964, following Sylvia Beach’s death. George Whitman was little more than a scruffy Yankee tramp with some army experience when he arrived in Paris. After graduating in 1935 in science and journalism, he spent several years travelling the world, until the United States’ entry into the Second World War led him to a medical clinic in Greenland, north of the Arctic Circle, and later to a military base in Taunton, Massachusetts, where he opened his first, rudimentary bookshop. It was there, after discovering that personnel were needed in France, he volunteered to help in a camp for orphans. But he was attracted to the capital, so moved there and signed up for a course at the Sorbonne. He bought a few English books with the idea of earning a little from a small lending fee, and suddenly saw his rented bedroom invaded by strangers in search of reading matter; he soon made sure that bread and hot soup were available for those who came to his incipient business. That was the communist embryo of his future bookshop.

  Because Whitman was always an uncomfortable figure by US standards. He sold banned books in Paris, like Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, to soldiers from his country. His American dream followed, as Jeremy Mercer notes, the Marxist principle “Give what you can, take what you need”; and he always saw his project as a kind of utopia. From the very first day in Le Mistral he installed a bed, an oven to warm up food, and a lending library for people who could not afford to buy books. The melding of bookshop and hostel continued for decades, Whitman sacrificed his privacy and continually lived with strangers. In sixty years, some hundred thousand people have lodged in Shakespeare and Company in exchange for a few hours’ work in the bookshop spent reading and writing, because new and second-hand books live together, and the presence of sofas and armchairs invites you to use the building as if it were a large library. The presiding motto is written above one of the thresholds within the labyrinth: “Be not inhospitable towards strangers lest they be angels in disguise.” An amateur poet, Whitman stated on several occasions that his great work was the bookshop: each of its rooms “was like a different chapter of the same novel.”

  On one of the windows of Shakespeare and Company it says: “City Lights Books.” And above the entrance to City Lights in San Francisco, probably hand-painted by Lawrence Ferlinghetti himself on the green background: “Paris. Shakespeare + Co.” Twinned with its Parisian prototype, conscious that it walks the same path, after the four years the beat poet spent studying at the Sorbonne, when he befriended Whitman in his rented room full of books and the smell of simmering soup, the mythical bookshop on the West Coast was born a mere two years after he returned in 1953. It immediately became a publishing house, bringing out books by Ferlinghetti and poets like Denise Levertov, Gregory Corso, William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg. The list was not focused on beat poetry, but many of the books emerged from that orbit: from stories by Bukowski to political texts by Noam Chomsky. The publishing house and its publisher entered literary history in autumn 1955, when Ginsberg gave a reading in the city’s Six Gallery: Ferlinghetti suggested publishing “Howl.” He did so, and it was very soon withdrawn from circulation by the police, who accused an employee of the bookshop and the publisher of fomenting obscenity. The case received lots of media attention and the verdict, found in favour of City Lights, still constitutes a reference point in the legal history of the United States in matters of freedom of expression. “Books not Bombs” greets you in graffiti on paper hanging in the stairwell. The bookshop defines itself on its walls: “A literary meeting place”; “Welcome, have a seat and read.”

  P
ublic readings and performance have been a constant from the very start in the Parisian and Californian bookshops. In a famous recital at City Lights in 1959, Ginsberg said he had concentrated hard in order to capture a rhythm to write what he was about to declaim and that, from then on, he improvized with the help of something very similar to divine inspiration; he also led readings opposite Shakespeare and Company while drunk on red wine. Both shops are committed to agitation and libraries, to hospitality and openness to the new. Both have well-stocked sections of fanzines that continue to be a means of expression for the same counterculture that emerged in the 1950s. Whitman witnessed the events of May 1968 from the balcony of Shakespeare and Company. It is not by chance that both shops have their poetry and reading rooms at the top of their respective buildings, if one bears in mind their vagabond, beatnik, protest character—neo-Romantics, in a word. Constant renewal is guaranteed in the Paris bookshop by dint of the continual flow of young, temporarily bohemian bodies.

  As Ken Goffman writes in Counterculture Through the Ages, French artistic society at the beginning of the twentieth century linked the search for artistic originality with bohemian life:

  In the first four decades of the twentieth century, this Parisian artistic bohemia really exploded into something that bordered on a mass movement. Literally hundreds of artists, writers, and world historic characters whose innovative works (and, in some cases, challenging personas) still resonate today, passed through the portals of what literary historian Donald Piece has labelled “The Paris Moment”. . . As Dan Franck, author of the historical work Bohemian Paris: Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse and the Birth of Modern Art, wrote, “Paris . . . [had] become the capital of the world. On the pavements, there would no longer be a handful of artists but hundreds, thousands of them. It was an artistic flowering of a richness and quality never to be rivalled.