Time Was Soft There

by Jeremy Mercer

  “What are you doing here?”

  This wasn’t asked in a particularly mean fashion, but it wasn’t friendly, either. I pointed to my tea and said something about passing through Paris.

  “Get out. This city is no good.”

  Paris was dead, he insisted, dried up and used up. It was full of pretenders now, not like May 1968, which he’d seen personally and could personally say was a hell of a lot better than anything going on today. To mark his point, he took a flask of pastis from his vest pocket and took a wet pull.

  Inspired to defend the city I’d so recently adopted, I noted the virtues of its parks, its boulevards, its markets, but the pirate only dismissed me with a wave of his hand.

  “Bah, you’re too weak to leave. You’ll end up here, just like all the rest.”

  Bristling, I began to argue, but before I could finish a sentence, the man with the turquoise muumuu blundered into the room, grabbed a mound of custard cookies, and squelched onto the couch. The pirate recoiled like the Wicked Witch doused in water, while the man in the muumuu wriggled about beside me to make room for his large frame.

  Okay, I thought. Given the poet, the pirate, and all that had gone on below, it’d been a pleasantly unconventional visit, but my jar of tea now stood empty and outside the rain had stopped and a peek of sun had even appeared through the clouds. I excused myself from the couch, much to the disappointment of the poet, who’d finally found his chapbook, and went to thank Eve for her kind invitation.

  Around the corner from the sitting room was a most bizarre kitchen. There was another bookshelf, along with a framed photograph of Sacco and Vanzetti on the wall, a wooden table, and then, along with the fridge and stove, row upon row of sticky cans, a jumble of utensils and plates, jars filled with moldy-looking preserves, and, most unsettling, the husks of dried cockroaches scattered across the countertop. Here, I found Eve, who looked happily at home and was stirring an enormous cauldron of tea, her cheeks bright pink from the steam and exertion.

  “Are you having a good time?” she asked, pushing more custard cookies at me with her free hand.

  It had been an interesting afternoon, I said, though some of the guests were rather …

  “Strange?” she said, finishing for me. “There are some unusual ones, aren’t there? I think George likes them that way.”

  “George?”

  Eve stopped her stirring and peered at me.

  “You mean you don’t know who George is?”

  She beckoned me deeper into the apartment. We entered what appeared to be the master bedroom, which contained a king-size bed, more books, and a collection of photographs lining three walls. Some of the pictures featured Hemingway, Miller, Joyce, and such, while in the rest another man figured prominently. Depending on the year the picture was taken, he either sported a curling goatee and a wild skew of brown hair or tufts of short gray hair and rumpled suits.

  “That’s George.” Eve was pointing to one picture where the man was leaning over a table covered with books, a broad smile on his face. “He runs Shakespeare and Company.”

  She said this as if it explained everything, but it still didn’t make sense. Nothing made any sense: the tourists out front … the man at the wishing well … the men making soup … and the beds … there were beds everywhere … .

  “But what exactly goes on here?” I was gripping her arm a tad tightly.

  Eve smiled like a teacher smiles at her student and gently unfurled my fingers. “The bookstore is like a shelter. George lets people live here for free.”

  She left me alone in that back room, gazing at the picture, marveling at fate.

  5.

  For the better part of a century, an English bookstore by the name of Shakespeare and Company has served as a haven for artists, writers, and other wayward souls of Paris.

  It began with Sylvia Beach. Born in Baltimore and raised in New Jersey at the end of the nineteenth century, Beach was fourteen years old when she first traveled to Europe. Her father, a Presbyterian minister, had been appointed the assistant to the pastor of the American Church in Paris and moved his family to France in 1901. Beach tumbled into love with the city, and after working as a nurse in World War I, she returned to make Paris her home. Always of a literary mind and keenly aware of the need for English books, she opened the original Shakespeare and Company in November 1919 on rue Dupuytren. In 1922, Beach moved her store to rue de l’Odéon, a side street in the sixth arrondissement, near St.-Germain-des-Prés.

  This strange nook of a bookstore became the hub for a generation of American and British writers in Paris. The likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound gathered here to borrow books, discuss literary matters, and drink hot tea in the private parlor at the back of the store. In his Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway described Beach’s Shakespeare and Company as “a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living.” Most notably, it was Beach who raised the money to edit and publish her friend James Joyce’s manuscript Ulysses when other publishers rejected it as scandalous and sexually provocative.

  “There was a tremendous amount of talent in Paris then,” Beach wrote later, “and my shop seemed to be a gathering place for most of it.”

  This original Shakespeare and Company was shut down in 1941 when the Nazis occupied Paris. Romantics say the store was closed after Beach refused to sell her last copy of Finnegans Wake to a Nazi officer, while others claim the shop’s reputation for creative nonconformity worried the Germans. Whatever the case, Shakespeare and Company was closed for the duration of the occupation and Beach spent World War II in an internment camp. Hemingway himself liberated the premises when he entered Paris with the American troops in 1944, but Beach preferred to retire. She never opened the shop doors again.

  A decade later, a similar bookstore opened on the Left Bank, not far from the old shop on rue de l’Odéon. It, too, was run by a rogue American, this time a vagabond dreamer and writer by the name of George Whitman. He’d spent years wandering the world, and after settling in Paris in the 1940s, he devoted his life to the quixotic pursuit of bookseller.

  George was born in East Orange, New Jersey, on December 12, 1913, the first of Walter and Grace Whitman’s four children. The Whitmans had deep roots in the New World, their family line tracing back through two different sets of relations to the Pilgrims who arrived on the Mayflower in 1620.

  Grace Whitman was the granddaughter of Joseph Bates, a Connecticut sea captain, and the daughter of Carlton Bates, a prosperous factory owner who manufactured sewing implements such as ivory buttons, knitting needles, and crochet hooks. Grace’s father was a determined man with a flair for business. As a fourteen-year-old boy, he began the job of lighting the stoves at the factory; twelve years later, at the age of twenty-six, Carlton Bates bought the factory for himself. George’s paternal grandfather, George Washington Whitman, was a Civil War veteran who had fought at Gettysburg; he then went on to become a farmer and seasonal factory worker in Norway, Maine. George’s father, Walter Whitman, was a science editor and writer who worked at the American Book Company in New York. In 1916, he resigned that position to take a job as a professor at Salem Teacher’s College in Massachusetts. George’s father went on to write five high school textbooks and founded the professional journal General Science Quarterly. To this day, among George’s cherished possessions are a copy of Household Physics that his father authored and a letter Albert Einstein wrote to his father about a possible collaboration on a textbook.

  When Walter took the teaching position, the Whitmans moved north from New Jersey to Salem, just a short drive from Boston. They moved into a three-story white-frame house with a large front porch, it was just half a block walk from the Atlantic Ocean. The family now numbered four, George’s sister Mary having been born in 1915. A few years later, another sister, Margarite, died in the hospital after becom
ing sick as an infant during the influenza epidemic of 1918. In 1924, George’s younger brother, Carlton, was born.

  Grace Whitman had been raised with an abundance of religion in her home and she insisted her children embrace the church. She and the three children trundled off to services every Sunday, though George’s father hid himself away in his office and could only be convinced to attend on Easter and Christmas. At school, George showed an aptitude for the written word. In the fifth grade, he got straight A’s in reading and literature, though he consistently got a D in penmanship. Considering he ended up owning one of the world’s most celebrated bookstores, it isn’t surprising George was a compulsive reader as a child. Each night, he would hide himself under thick blankets with a book and a lamp to escape the wrath of his mother, who was convinced so much reading would ruin his eyes. Sure enough, he could barely open them in the mornings, but he devoured the great novels and read Thoreau’s Walden when other children his age were struggling with their school primers.

  George’s father was a risk taker and a promoter, but he lacked a real sense of business. He became a regular player on the stock market but probably lost twenty years of royalty income from his textbooks thanks to ill-conceived investments. These financial dealings were a constant source of worry for Grace, who preferred to put the money she inherited from her family into AT&T stock and the regular dividends this provided.

  Walt also yearned to explore the world. As a young man in the 1890s, he got a job on a ship carrying live cows to Europe. He took a bicycle with him, and after the ship docked, he wheeled off to explore the Continent. Later, he accepted assignments as a traveling professor in places like Greece and Turkey. One of the greatest adventures came in 1925, when he took a job at Nanking University and moved the entire Whitman family, save for young Carlton, who was left with relatives, to China for a year. After traveling by train across Canada, they took a boat from Vancouver to Tokyo and then made their way through Shanghai to Nanking. Though his mother had him enrolled in the local Christian Endeavour program, where thirteen-year-old George made complicated maps of Saint Paul’s biblical journeys, he was captivated by the more novel aspects of his new life. He kept a journal, in which he described feeding a pig every day on his walk to school, hearing other children brag about seeing a baby cut in two, and playing in graveyards, where he once “put a man’s leg bone in my pocket but decided not to keep it.” It wasn’t an easy transition for the Whitmans. Both George and Mary were called yang gui zi, meaning “foreign devil,” and were often showered with pebbles by other children as they made their way to school. But George’s eyes had opened to the world and they became wider on the way home when the family stopped in Calcutta, Delhi, Bombay, Aden, Jerusalem, Cairo, Constantinople, Bucharest, and Vienna before returning to Salem.

  In high school, George was known for the small businesses he ran, his attempts at school newspapers, and his somewhat unruly appearance, which his high school yearbook described as that of a “revolutionary.” George was fifteen when the Great Depression struck, and with two of his uncles losing their jobs and the streets suddenly filled with out-of-work men, he became interested in social justice and turned away from his mother’s church. But it was at Boston University, where he was studying journalism, that he was transformed. In 1933, in an essay entitled “My Freshman Year at College,” George wrote:

  I entered college a devout believer in the Christian superstition and a staunch supporter of the capitalist system and of the military systems which is the tool of capitalist imperialism. For eight months these ideas were subjected to the food for thought and mental callisthenics which are dispensed at the College of Business Administration and at the end of that period my “idea factory” was turning out a wholly different product. In short, I had become a radical—a socialist, atheist and pacifist.

  Upon graduating in 1935 with a degree in science and journalism, George received tempting offers. The Christian Science Monitor invited him to apprentice for a job and his father urged him to coauthor a science textbook. But George politely declined them both. His new “idea factory” had pushed him in a different direction: He wanted to explore the world and mix with the people.

  George headed west, hopping trains, sleeping in hobo jungles, living off the kindness of strangers, seeing America from the bottom up. There were struggles, of course, mostly with local police. He says he was jailed more than fifty times during his travels, courtesy of the strict vagrancy laws. Utah was the worst, he remembers, with police combing the trains for drifters and throwing them straight into jail. In one town, George was jailed for seven days, then driven into the desert. Left there with his sparsely packed bag, he was warned it would be six months’ imprisonment if he ever showed face in the county again.

  Despite these occasional lumps, the life became infectious and he came up with an even grander scheme: to walk around the world, an 113,000-mile journey, with 30,000 of them on foot. He set out from California in 1936 and walked for months, down through Mexico, where he met Mayans in the Yucatan, then onto Belize, where he met some Caribs. This was before there were roads in many places, and so he clambered through jungles and waded through swamps. Once, he walked himself into such a state of exhaustion that he collapsed under a palm tree, sure he was going to die. But, as George tells it, natives discovered him, hoisted him onto their shoulders, and carried him back to their village, where they resuscitated him with milk from a nursing mother.

  “No finer way of life is there in all the earth than this,” wrote George at the time. “To wander through the palace of the world on foot, to walk, to dance, to sing, and to read—to read the Book of Life.”

  Arriving in Panama in 1937, he was lured by the promise that no able-bodied man would be refused work at the Panama Canal. He was given a job at one of the neighboring construction sites and worked as a “powder monkey.” From dawn to dusk every day, he scampered across the rocks, drilling holes, then stuffing them with gunpowder so the earth could be blown aside. Staying at the YMCA in Cristobal, George continued his socialist investigations. He wrote of the exploitation of the local population and kept statistics on the death rate among the workers in the Canal Zone. Already an adherent of magazines like New Masses and having read all of Trotsky and Marx, George was ready for the next step in his political growth. In a letter he wrote to his mother from Panama, he declared, “I am a communist and I will always be a communist, completely and unequivocally.”

  When he was ready to move on, George got a job with the Matson Line on the five-thousand-ton sugar freighter Lihue, which was leaving Panama for Asia. His plan was to continue his walk in the direction of Moscow, but after union problems led to a mutiny among the ship’s crew, the boat stopped in Hawaii. George stayed on the island for months, living on beaches and learning the rudiments of the Polynesian language. But, the momentum of his travels lost, he eventually caught a boat back to the United States and returned to Boston.

  After his travels, George was convinced the world order would have to be changed. He took an apartment in Cambridge so he could study Russian at Harvard and prepare himself for the future. “There is only one beacon and lighthouse that will shine undimmed over the stormy seas of the coming years and that is the Soviet Union,” George wrote in 1940. To aid the dawning of this new era, he attempted to launch a magazine called Leftward, which would feature articles such as “Fascist Tendencies in American Universities,” and he railed against the lack of political insight of the average workers and middle-class citizens of his country. He even attempted to recruit his younger brother to the cause. When Carl was a teenager, George would teach him Russian phrases, insisting they were the only ones with any “good ideas.”

  To earn money to visit his promised land, George worked as busboy, and later he negotiated to join the National Maritime Union so he could work on freighter ships again. But in the meantime, Pearl Harbor was attacked and the United States entered World War II. George was twenty-eight years old when he was
taken into the military, and perhaps the commanding officers took his unusual nature into consideration, as he was sent to an obscure military base in Greenland. For two years, George lived north of the Arctic Circle, dispensing medicine to the occasional soldier and, more frequently, to the curious Eskimos. Still, when the war was over, he got his letter from Harry Truman, thanking him for undertaking “the most severe task that one can be called upon to perform.”

  On returning to the States, he served at the Myles Standish military base in Taunton, Massachusetts, and used the time to set up his first bookshop. Declaring that “not reading is worse than not knowing how to read,” George opened the Taunton Book Lounge. His clientele were mainly men from the base, but he also shipped books to soldiers serving overseas. After receiving his discharge, he flirted with the idea of opening a bookstore in Mexico City, even writing the U.S. trade commissioner in Mexico for details on foreign investment. But instead, Europe beckoned. Reading about the need for volunteers in France, George decided to cross the Atlantic.

  After arriving in France, George first volunteered in a camp for war orphans, but then he moved to Paris. The city was an attractive place for Americans to be in those days. Paris was in full romance with its liberators, and the cost of living meant that sparse funds could support regal lifestyles. George was also motivated by other concerns: The rumblings of the anti-communism movement had begun and his kind weren’t particularly welcome in the United States.

  George ended up taking a French civilization course at the Sorbonne and living in a cheap room at the Hôtel de Suez on boulevard St.-Michel. He scrounged enough to buy up a decent collection of English books, and since these, like everything else in the occupation-weary city, were in short supply, he soon found himself running an impromptu library. Dozens of books would go out every week, and George kept meticulous track of what was borrowed, even noting that Arthur Miller’s new play, Death of a Salesman, was his most popular book, as it was borrowed on average eight times a month. Early on in his stay at the Suez, George lost the key to his room and stopped locking his door. One day, he returned from class, to find two strangers reading his books. Considering his belief in shared property and communal living, it was a thrilling development. His sole regret was that all he had was coffee to offer, so from that point on there was usually soup and bread ready for those who came.