Bookshops

  Who knows who is right, if indeed anyone can be? All myths exist to be shattered.

  I am particularly interested in the reading that the author of For Bread Alone gives of that gilded foreign legion. From his perspective, infected by his economic dependence on Paul Bowles, who helped him write his first book and translated it into English, thus launching him on the international market, Genet was little more than an impostor, not only because his poverty wasn’t comparable to the real poverty suffered by the Moroccans Choukri describes so graphically in his autobiographical books, but also because he did not speak a word of Spanish, which meant his tales of the underbelly of Barcelona or certain parts of Tangier could not be taken seriously. He christened Bowles the Recluse of Tangier, because he spent the last years of his life lying in bed and because, in his view, he never properly connected with the Arab culture around him. One only has to read Bowles’ letters to realize that though he physically resided in Morocco, his cultural focus was the United States, where he psychologically spent more and more time as he grew old. Nonetheless, his intellect allowed him to grasp that the traffic of Anglo-Saxon writers was turning the city into a masquerade, into a fiction, that the visitors never bothered to explore Moroccan society in depth, no doubt because he himself was not interested in such a total view. In a 1958 article titled “Worlds of Tangier” he wrote: “A town, like a person, almost ceases to have a face once you know it intimately,” and that requires time. At some point in the next forty years he decided a certain level of intimacy was enough. In 1948, in a letter written in the Hôtel Ville de France in Tangier, Jane said to him: “I still like Tangier, maybe because I have the feeling of being on the edge of something I will some day be part of.”

  Paul Bowles in Tangier begins: “How ridiculous. I think nothing is more ridiculous than that exaggerated nostalgia for the Tangier of yesterday and that longing for its past as an international zone.” However, I keep wondering why Choukri really wrote this book, or its twin, Jean Genet and Tennessee Williams in Tangier, and to what extent his desire to demystify is unconnected to the fact that he will only continue to be read in the West if he writes about French or Anglo-Saxon celebrities. It is not clear and never will be. The pain seeping through his words is undeniable; he is not killing his own father in vain: “He liked Morocco, not Moroccans.” The Cabaret Voltaire edition of his portrait of Bowles was launched in Tangier, in mid-2012, by its translator, Rajae Boumediane El Metni, and by Juan Goytisolo in the Librairie des Colonnes, naturally.

  In her notebook of reminiscences, Muyal describes her first encounter with Choukri (“We were having dinner on that wonderful scented terrace of La Parade restaurant on a summer’s night with my pretty young cousins when a young stranger tried to give us flowers. When he saw we weren’t going to accept them, the boy started to take the leaves off and eat the petals”), the way her reading of For Bread Alone shocked her because she was unaware such extreme, blatant poverty existed in her own city, and how he often intervened in the conversations on literature and politics in his many visits to her establishment. Tahar Ben Jelloun translated him into French, so he had two exceptional translators in the two most important languages in the world of publishing, but For Bread Alone soon became one of those books famously banned in its own language: “Two thousand copies were sold in a few weeks, I received from the Ministry of the Interior a note banning the sale of this book in any language.” Nevertheless, fragments of his book were published in Arabic in newspapers in Lebanon and Iraq. When the narrator of Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) asks another character to recommend a book “in keeping with his idea of authentic fiction” to him, the latter doesn’t hesitate to jot down the title of Choukri’s most famous book on a scrap of paper. He contrasts him with the more lyrical Ben Jelloun, “an Orientalist” integrated into Western circles, while Choukri “stayed in Morocco, lived with his people,” never leaving “the street.” In another novel published a year later and on another continent, Street of Thieves, Mathias Énard also has his narrator defend the Moroccan writer’s magnetic qualities: “His Arabic was hard like the blows his father rained down on him, hard as hunger. A new language, a way of writing I thought was revolutionary.” An American writer of Nigerian extraction, Cole hits the nail on the head when he defends the importance of Edward Said for our understanding of Oriental culture: “Difference is never accepted.” What Choukri did for the whole of his life was precisely that: he defended his right to be different, critically, approaching and distancing himself from those who gave him recognition, as always happens in life, in every kind of negotiation.

  In Never Any End to Paris, Enrique Vila-Matas talks of Cozarinsky, whom he often came across in cinemas in the French capital: “I remember I admired him because he knew how to combine two cities, two artistic allegiances,” he notes in fragment 65 in his book. He is referring to Buenos Aires, Cozarinsky’s birthplace, and Paris, his adopted city; but the fact is that a tension between two places exists in all his work: between Tangier and Paris, between the West and the East, between Latin America and Europe. “I especially admired his book Urban Voodoo, an exile’s book, a transnational book, employing a hybrid structure very innovative in those days.” If Bolaño had a re-encounter with Borges in Madrid, Vila-Matas discovered the stories of Borges in the Librairie espagnole in Paris, thus following in Cozarinsky’s footsteps: “I was knocked out, especially by the idea—found in one of his stories—that perhaps the future did not exist.”

  I am also knocked out by the fact that this idea was suggested to him on premises run by Antonio Soriano, a Republican exile who nourished the hope of a future without Fascism. The Spanish diaspora sustained the cultural activity of resistance at the back of the Librairie espagnole, as well as in Ruedo Ibérico. The project is linked, as is almost always the case in the history of a bookshop, with a previous one, the Librairie Espagnole León Sánchez Cuesta, established in 1927 in five square metres of the rue Gay-Lussac, with two window displays: one devoted to Juan Ramón Jiménez and the other to young poets like Salinas and Bergamín. It was run by Juan Vicéns de la Llave, who went so far as to consider publishing books from Paris in Spanish (the first was Ulysses in Dámaso Alonso’s translation). In order to return to Madrid during the turbulence in Spain in 1934, he left the bookshop in the hands of a former employee, Georgette Rucar. But during the war, as the official responsible for Republican government propaganda in its Paris Embassy, he used the premises as a centre for spreading the ideas that were being crushed by Franco’s army. After the Second World War, it was Rucar—as related by Ana Martínez Rus in “San León Librero: las empresas culturales de Sánchez Cuesta” (“St Leon the bookseller: the cultural enterprises of Sánchez Cuesta”)—who made contact with Soriano, who had settled down as a bookseller in Toulouse, to suggest he took over the stocks of the old bookshop. This book could be called Metamorphoses rather than Bookshops.

  When Vila-Matas arrived in Marguerite Duras’ attic in 1974, he witnessed the last gasps of that world, if not the photographs of its autopsy. As a mature man, the author of A Brief History of Portable Literature revises his initiatory experience in Paris, the Paris of his personal myths, as in Hemingway, Guy Debord, Duras or Raymond Roussel, where everything evokes a splendid past that has necessarily been lost, which paradoxically never goes out of fashion. Because each generation relives a kind of Paris in its youth, which can only be gradually demystified as one grows older.

  Someone had drawn a graffiti sketch of Duras in the emergency exit of La Hune, with her famous saying on the left: “Faire d’un mot le bel amant d’une phrase.” It took me five trips to Paris to discover that of its hundreds of bookshops, perhaps the best three are Compagnie, L’Écume des Pages and La Hune. On my previous visits, apart from persisting with Shakespeare and Company, I stepped inside all those I encountered, but for some reason these three never figured on my itineraries. So, before leaving on my last trip, I asked Vila-Matas himself for advice, and
once back, I sought out and found them. I discovered the poster of Samuel Beckett (his arboreal face) against a cork background on a wall in Compagnie. And the art deco shelves in L’Écume des Pages. And that unlikely staircase and the whitest of columns in the middle of La Hune, part of a 1992 renovation, the work of Sylvain Dubuisson. The first is located between the Sorbonne, the Musée de Cluny and the Collège de France. The second and third are close to the Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots and open every day until midnight in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, perpetuating the old bohemian tradition of combining bookshop, wine and coffee. Although in the time separating the writing of these lines from their publication, La Hune has already disappeared (like the odd other bookshop mentioned here).

  When Max Ernst (after marrying Peggy Guggenheim and becoming a habitué of the Gotham Book Mart), Henri Michaux (after bidding farewell to literature to concentrate on his painting), or André Breton (after his American exile) returned to a Paris without the bookshops on rue de l’Odéon, they found in La Hune a new space where they could converse and browse. One need only reflect that, in 1949, the same year it moved to 170 Boulevard Saint-Germain, La Hune hosted the exhibition and auction of the books, manuscripts and furniture from Joyce’s Paris flat (he died in 1941), together with part of Beach’s archive on the publishing history of his masterpiece, on behalf of the writer’s family. Soon after, Michaux began to experiment with mescaline and the graphic work he produced led, in the mid-1950s, to books like Misérable miracle and exhibitions like “Description d’un trouble,” in the Librairie-Galerie La Hune. Its founder, Bernard Gheerbrant, who died in 2010, was a key figure in Paris’ intellectual life and directed the Club des Libraires de France for over a decade. Because of his importance as a publisher of texts and graphic art, his archives are preserved in the Centre Pompidou, where he curated the exhibition “James Joyce and Paris” in 1975. After a brief, failed attempt to explore other approaches, La Hune finally shut down in June 2015. The artist Sophie Calle decided she would be the last person to buy a book. The last customer, the last reader. Her performance began a period of mourning that has yet to end, and which isn’t restricted to the shop’s Parisian customers but is felt by all of us who passed through its doors and left ever so slightly, but quite definitely, changed.

  Like most of the bookshops mentioned in this essay, these three are fetishes in themselves as well as places for the exhibition of fetishes. A fetishism that goes beyond the classical Marxist definition, according to which all goods are phantom fetishes, which hide their status as manufactured commodities and maintain an illusion of autonomy in relation to their producers; a fetishism promoted by the agents of capital (publishers, distributors, booksellers, every one of us) who have fun (as we do) championing cultural production and consumption as if they were not subject to the tyranny of interest; a fetishism that borders on the religious and even on the sexual (in Freudian terms): the bookshop as the deconsecrated temple where idols, objects of worship are housed, like a store of erotic fetishes, of pleasure. The bookshop as a partially deconsecrated church transformed into a sex shop. Because a bookshop feeds on the energy generated by objects that seduce by virtue of their accumulation, by the difficulty of defining demand that becomes palpable when one finally locates the arousing object, demands an urgent purchase and a possible subsequent reading (the arousal doesn’t always survive, but the percentages of the price of the book, the expenditure and profits do remain behind, like ashes).

  Dean MacCannell has analyzed the structures of tourism and provided a basic schema: the relationship of the tourist with the view via the marker. Namely: the visitor, the attraction, and all that denotes it as such. The crucial element is the marker that indicates or creates the value, importance and interest of the place and transforms it into something potentially touristic. Into a fetish. The shop selling would-be antiques in Beijing was a fantastic marker. Although the value may be iconic in the first instance, in the end it becomes a discourse as well: the Eiffel Tower is first a postcard, a photograph, and then the life of its inventor, the history of its controversial construction, of other towers in the world, the topography of Paris that surrounds it and which can be seen from the top. The most meaningful bookshops in the world highlight, with greater or lesser degrees of subtlety, the markers that add commercial potential or transform them into tourist spots: antiquity (founded in, the oldest bookshop in), size (the biggest bookshop in, so many miles of shelving, so many hundreds of thousands of books) and the chapters in the history of literature to which they are linked (the base for such and such a movement, visited by, the bookshop where X bought, visited by, founded by, as can be seen in the photograph, bookshop linked with).

  Art and tourism are similar in their need for luminous signage that draws a reader towards the work. Michelangelo’s David would attract little attention if it were an anonymous work in the municipal museum of Addis Ababa. After successfully publishing The Golden Notebook in 1962, Doris Lessing sent a new novel two years later to several publishers under the pseudonym of an unpublished writer, and all but one rejected it. In the case of literature, publishers first generate the markers, through the blurb on the back cover or the press release, and critics, the academy and bookshops soon create their own, which will determine the book’s fortune. Sometimes authors themselves do this, consciously or unconsciously, by structuring a narrative around the conditions in which the work was produced, or the state of their lives at the time. Suicide, poverty or the context of the writing are elements often incorporated into the marker. That narrative, the legend, is one of the factors that allows a text to survive, to live on as a classic. The first part of Don Quixote was supposedly written in prison and the second part was a reaction against the usurping of Cervantes’ characters by Avellaneda; the reading of A Journal of the Plague Year as if it were not a novel; the legal procedings against the authors of Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du mal; the broadcast reading of The War of the Worlds and the collective panic created by the chronicle of that apocalypse; Kafka on his deathbed ordering Max Brod to burn his work; the manuscripts of Malcolm Lowry that were burnt, that disappeared; the scandal surrounding Tropic of Cancer and Lolita and Howl and For Bread Alone. The marker is sometimes unpredictable and created years later. That is the case of novels rejected by multiple publishers like One Hundred Years of Solitude or The Conspiracy of Fools. Of course, it was not used as a selling point when they were—finally—published, but when they were a success it was recovered as part of the mythical narrative: their predestination.

  The stories behind several books published in Paris like Ulysses, The Naked Lunch or Hopscotch, have clearly been fetishized and now constitute commonplaces in the history of contemporary culture. For the beat generation, which felt it was heir to symbolism and the French avant-garde, Ulysses was the obvious reference point for their idea of a rupture. Written in the heady days in Tangier, shaped by Ginsberg and Kerouac, completed in France, The Naked Lunch was submitted to Maurice Girodias, the Olympia Press editor on the Left Bank, who did not understand such rubbish and declined to publish it. But eighteen months later, when the publication of a few fragments had begun to build the novel’s reputation for outrageous obscenity, a marker, Girodias’ interest in the manuscript was rekindled. By that time, the success of Lolita had made him a rich man, and Burroughs’ novel, the writing of which was by now but a hazy memory for the author, helped him become even wealthier. He fitted within a fine French tradition: that of the dealer in scandalous books, often banned for being pornographic or obscene, which were published in Switzerland and entered France thanks to the inevitable bribes at the border, and which in the twentieth century were published in Paris and even reached the United States through a motley array of picaresque subterfuges.

  Kerouac wrote about On the Road: “Ulysses, which was thought to be a difficult read, is today thought of as a classic and everybody understands it.” We find the same idea in Cortázar, for whom this tradition is ce
ntral and who linked himself to Paris, not only in the way he contextualized the first part of his novel, but also through a partial rewriting of Breton’s Nadja. In a letter to his publisher, Francisco Porrúa, he cites the same reference point as a paradigm of difficulty, rupture, resistance and distinction for his contemporaries: “I reckon this must always happen; I’m not familiar with the contemporary reviews of Ulysses, but I expect they went something like this: ‘Mr Joyce writes poorly, because he doesn’t write in the language of the tribe.’” Like The Naked Lunch, Hopscotch has a structure that functions on the basis of fragments, collage, chance, and has a politically revolutionary intent: the destruction of the bourgeois ordering of discourse, the exploding of literary conventions, which are so similar to social conventions. That is why in his letters to his publisher the writer tries to spell out the marker, the discourse that should guide the reading of the book. We have to make an effort to imagine the difficulties of a publishing relationship carried out through epistolary means, the delays, misunderstandings, lost letters (for example, the envelope with the mock-up of the novel Cortázar put together that went missing):

  I would prefer it if this book was not highlighted as “a novel.” That would rather cheat the reader. I know only too well that it is a novel and that its intrinsic value resides in its appearance as a novel. But I wrote it as an anti-novel and Morelli takes it upon himself to say that and spells it out very clearly in the passages I quoted to you previously. As a last resort, I think one should emphasize what we might call the axiological sides to the book: the persistent, exasperated denunciation of the inauthenticity of human lives [. . .] the irony, the derisory tone, the self leg-pulling whenever the writer or characters descend into philosophical “seriousness.” After On Heroes and Tombs, you must understand that the least one can do for Argentina is to denounce at the top of one’s voice the ontological “seriousness” of the creeps our writers aspire to be.