These were the fragile roots of George Whitman’s Shakespeare and Company, this cramped hotel room with a bedlam of books and a pot of communal stew. George hosted most every impoverished expatriate in Paris, including a young poet by the name of Lawrence Ferling, who was getting a doctorate in French literature at the Sorbonne. The poet, who later retook his family’s original name, Ferlinghetti, had met George’s sister Mary while studying at Columbia University and enjoyed a romance with her. Upon arriving in France, he looked up George and, using funds allocated under the G.I. bill, he began buying books from him, including Gallimard’s complete edition of A la recherche du temps perdu.
“The first time I saw George, he was in his tiny hotel room with no windows, there were books stacked to the ceiling on three side and he was sitting on the floor heating his dinner over a can of Sterno,” Ferlinghetti recalls. “I knew I had found a true bibliophile.”
The two became friends, and George noted in a letter home to his mother that Ferlinghetti had been “lionized by a group of French writers ever since he wrote his first novel last Summer.” When Ferlinghetti left Paris and headed to San Francisco, he, too, opened a bookstore, the famous City Lights, which to this day remains the sister bookstore of Shakespeare and Company.
As George watched Paris come back to life at the end of the 1940s, he thought it might be time to open the bookstore he’d always dreamed of. First, he tried renting a location in the seventeenth arrondissement; then he tried to buy a property near St.-Germain-des-Prés. It was in 1951 that he finally found the storefront across the Seine from Notre Dame. It had been a small Arab grocery, but the owners had run into financial difficulties and were willing to sell the property cheaply, thinking it would be seized by creditors. George was thirty-seven years old then and had been drifting for almost two decades. Though he didn’t have much money, he did have stocks his father had recommended to him, particularly in a company called Bath Irons Works. It was a little more than two thousand dollars, but that was enough to get started in postwar Paris, so he decided to gamble it all on a bookstore. He opened for business in August 1951.
George initially called his bookstore Le Mistral, which was both his pet name for Jacqueline Tran-Van, his girlfriend at the time, and the name of the famously fierce wind that blows through the south of France. The store was tiny, just half of the main floor as it stands today, but George made the best of it. He lived the Marxist creed of “give what you can; take what you need,” and with this spirit he built the bookstore. From the first day, he installed a bed in the back for friends who needed a place to sleep, kept soup bubbling for hungry visitors, and ran a free lending library for people who couldn’t afford his wares. On the night of August 15, 1951, he gave his first writer a place to sleep, the playwright Paul Abelman, who would go on to write such books as I Hear Voices.
“It was exceedingly disagreeable and uncomfortable,” recalls Abelman. “But it was generous of George and I had no other place to go.”
Paris was in the midst of another glorious literary era then, and the bookstore was its unofficial clubhouse. Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin were constantly about. To this day, the intimacy of George’s relationship with Anaïs remains the subject of constant speculation. Richard Wright, who lived up the street on rue Monsieur-le-Prince, gave readings at the store, and eventually his son earned a job working the desk. Alexander Trocchi set up the offices of the Merlin literary journal in the back of the store, George Plimpton and the Paris Review crowd stopped by regularly, and even Samuel Beckett moped about, though George says the two didn’t have much to say and mostly sat and stared at each other.
Then the Beats arrived, with William Burroughs using George’s bookstore as a library to research medical deformities, Allen Ginsberg gulping wine to find the courage to give a reading of Howl on the front esplanade, Gregory Corso stealing first editions to fuel his various habits, and Brion Gysin and the rest of them stirring up the Kerouac-istical blues just a few blocks away at the hotel on rue Gît-le-Coeur.
In 1963, George celebrated his fiftieth birthday, and a year later he changed the name of the store. He’d long been a devotee of Sylvia Beach and admired the name Shakespeare and Company, “a novel in three words,” as he called it. He and Beach met for tea and she even visited Le Mistral on occasion. After Beach died in 1962, George bought her collection of books, and then in 1964, on the four hundredth anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth, he rebaptised his store Shakespeare and Company. Detractors claim he stole the name and profited from the association, but if George were a mercurial sort, he never would have turned his bookstore into a sanctuary for the disaffected and creatively desperate.
Though its name was now more literary, the store became, if anything, more political. George continued to house radicals and writers as they passed through Paris, but he also held a lecture series called the Free University of Paris, ran a long-standing protest against the Vietnam War, and hid the students of the May 1968 uprising among his books. He even teased that Shakespeare and Company offered honorary degrees in LSD, with “Make Love, Not War” buttons as diplomas.
On through the seventies, eighties, nineties, the decades now counted like years, his reputation and his store constantly grew. Room by room, Shakespeare and Company expanded, until it spread over three floors of the building, “a giant literary octopus,” as Ferlinghetti described it. With each expansion, George always made sure to add more beds, and the rumor spread to the corners of the world that there was a strange bookstore on the Left Bank in Paris where you could sleep for free. By the thousands they came, and George invited them all to stay, at least as many as the bookstore could feasibly hold. A generation of writers and wanderers were sheltered and fed, and then that generation’s children.
By the time I had my cup of tea at Shakespeare and Company in January 2000, George was telling people he’d let forty thousand people sleep in his store, more than the population of his hometown of Salem when he was growing up. After my visit, I was intent on becoming the next.
6.
After the tea party, I felt so exhilarated that I climbed the six flights of stairs to my hotel room effortlessly. For hours, I leaned out the narrow window of my room and watched smoke curl from the clay chimneys on the surrounding roofs. It was long past midnight when I finally tried to sleep, but even then I could only lie awake with the restlessness of a child before Christmas.
From what Eve had told me, George welcomed lost souls and poor writers. I qualified on both counts. Considering the precious little money in my pocket and the scarcity of options before me, it didn’t take long to decide that fate had brought me to Shakespeare and Company that rainy Sunday afternoon. For the first time since the threatening phone call, I began imagining a future. I would write a brilliant novel at the bookstore, I would be acclaimed a genius, I would bask in untold fame and fortune. It was absurd, of course, but I reveled in this sudden ecstasy of optimism after so many bleak days. I felt the adrenaline of a gambler who watches the roulette wheel spin with his last chips on the table. Outside the window, the sky was molting from night black to morning gray before I finally fell asleep.
The next afternoon, I washed thoroughly in the bathroom down the hallway from my room and even hung my best shirt outside the shower to smooth its wrinkles. Standing before the cracked mirror, I practiced my smiles and rehearsed my introduction. Nothing seemed good enough. By the time I was ready to leave, I was so nervous that even though the line four metro cut almost directly from the hotel to the bookstore, I decided to walk so as to better measure the mission before me.
With each step toward the bookstore, I became more apprehensive, my stomach a sour mix of a thousand first dates and job interviews. Who was I to go live in a bookstore? Would I even be accepted? And that constant nagging worry: What exactly was I doing with my life?
I walked by the African groceries and call shops of boulevard Or-nano, then under the iron beams of the elevated metro at Barbès, where men off
ered gold chains from their coat pockets. Past the Gare de Nord, then the Gare de l’Est, a voice inside wondering if maybe I shouldn’t just hop a train and try my luck in another city. Three times, my resolution faltered and I started back toward the hotel. But I always turned and continued on to Shakespeare and Company. There was really no other choice.
In the midst of this anguished walk, I heard my name called out. It was Fernanda, a young Brazilian woman with dark hair and happy cheeks. She was a student from São Paulo who’d saved for two years to come to Paris. We’d met at the language school, and as we were the only people in the class with baguette budgets, when the others lunched in cafés, Fernanda and I ate sandwiches in a park and jabbered in our broken French.
While I had spent my time in Paris in a most aimless fashion, Fernanda was at the pinnacle of touristic efficiency. She went to all the museums and galleries, found discount passes for the theaters and opera houses, knew the metro system better than many Parisians. That day, she was coming from a free exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. Grateful for the distraction, I invited her for coffee.
Sitting in a grim brasserie on rue Beaubourg, we ordered the cheapest drinks on the menu, the tiny café express, and two glasses of water. It didn’t take Fernanda long to note my agitated state, and I was happy there was somebody to listen. I explained my money had almost run out but that I couldn’t go home to Canada because of the troubling circumstances I’d left behind. I told her of my brooding walks and the miserable emptiness before me. Then I came to my visit to Shakespeare and Company the day before. Fernanda listened with great intensity and asked for several parts of the story to be repeated. After absorbing it all, she sat back in her chair and looked at me with serious eyes.
“This is a sign from God,” she said.
Coming from a family of lapsed Catholics, I’d seldom given time to spiritual matters. I was happy enough to use the word God as a noun to explain the mysteries of existence that still escaped modern science, but that was about it. Fernanda, on the other hand, was devout and had worshiped in more than a dozen Paris churches. We’d already spent many an hour talking about questions to which there are no answers, so I only smiled without conviction when she said this. I was just about to launch into another refrain of “God-doesn’t-actually-exist-but-is-only-a-necessary-human-invention,” but I stopped when I saw the hope blossoming across her face.
“You must go and ask to stay,” she insisted. “This is meant to be. I am sure of it.”
Then, before I could say anything, she was on her feet, pulling a street map from her shoulder bag.
“I am going to pray that this George man tells you yes,” she said, and then rushed out the brasserie’s door.
I didn’t try to stop her. At that moment, I would take help from wherever I could get it.
Shakespeare and Company sits on the very left edge of the Left Bank. The store is close enough to the Seine that when one is standing in the front doorway, a well-thrown apple core will easily reach river water. From this same doorway, there is an inspired view of Ile de la Cité and one can contemplate the cathedral of Notre Dame, the Hôtel Dieu hospital, and the imposing block of the main police prefecture.
The bookstore’s actual address is 37 rue de la Bûcherie. It’s an odd cobbled street that begins at rue St. Jacques, runs for one block, hits the public park of St.-Julien-le-Pauvre, then continues on for another two blocks before ending at the square Restif-de-la-Bretonne. The bookstore is on the part of rue de la Bûcherie close to rue St. Jacques, where, thanks to a quirk of city planning, there are only buildings on the south side of the street, which is what gives the bookstore its splendid view.
This end of the street is reserved for pedestrians, but this is only part of the reason it retains a certain calm. There is also a tiny city garden that separates the bookstore from the racing traffic of Quai de Monte-bello and then the sidewalk widens in front of 37 rue de la Bûcherie to create an almost private esplanade for Shakespeare and Company. For the coup de grâce, there are two young cherry trees on this esplanade and a green Wallace drinking fountain sitting majestically to the side. All this gives the bookstore an air of tranquillity that is shocking in the midst of the frenzy and noise of downtown Paris.
As for the bookstore itself, there are actually two entrances. Facing the shop, the main part of the store with the narrow green door I entered on the day of the tea party is on the right. It is here that one finds the famous yellow-and-green wooden Shakespeare and Company sign and the broad picture window. To the left of the main store, there is a second, smaller storefront. This is the antiquarian room. Along with the shelves of centuries-old books, the antiquarian room has a desk, a lovely stuffed armchair, and, of course, a creaky but thoroughly sleepable bed.
When I arrived after my coffee with Fernanda, it was nearing dark and the streetlights were flickering to life around me. The window of the main shop glowed a soft yellow against the early night, and at the desk there was an elderly man with a rumpled suit and a faraway look in his eyes. From the photographs I’d seen the day before, I knew this man to be George. Taking one last breath for courage, I stepped inside.
The door creaked to announce me, but George kept gazing out the window, deep in private thought. In the store’s irregular light, I could see his uneven tussle of fine white hair and the thin wrinkles that lined his face. After long moments, he shook his head as if awaking from a dream and turned to look at me. His eyes were an impossibly pale blue.
“What do you want?” he demanded.
His voice was so gruff that I took a step backward. Stammering, my rehearsed lines disappeared and I mumbled something about being a writer with no place else to go.
“I wouldn’t stay for long,” I finished. “Just enough time to catch my feet. I’ve hit a bit of a rough patch.”
He stood there, appraising me with those pale eyes, stopping time.
“You’ve written books?”
I nodded.
“Are they self-published?”
Using a vanity press is akin to buying sex, but more shameful in a way. Visiting a prostitute is at least a private act, while paying to publish one’s book is a very public display of creative desperation. Despite my nervousness, I took affront to the question. Though the crime books I’d written were hardly works of great literature, I was proud of what I’d accomplished.
“No, not at all,” I replied, trying to keep the anger from my voice. “I’m not saying they’re the best books ever written, but I had a real publisher.”
George waved the back of his hand at me as if I were speaking nonsense, but a smile crept across his face.
“A real writer wouldn’t have asked; he would have just come in and taken a bed. You, you can stay. But you’ll sleep downstairs with the rest of the riffraff.”
And like that, things changed forever.
7.
The next afternoon, I checked out of the hotel and, my meager bag in hand, I came to the bookstore. George was at the desk, pricing a stack of used paperback novels with a dull pencil. He would pick a book up, look at its cover, read a paragraph or two, smile to himself, then scratch a price on the front page. When I said hello, he didn’t seem to recognize me at first, but then his eyes flashed and he chuckled.
“The Canadian writer,” he said. “Come with me. I have your lunch warming upstairs.”
Putting aside a copy of Malamud’s The Assistant, George called out to a tall blond woman shelving books at the back of the store. As she came forward to cover the desk, she paused to give him a kiss on the cheek.
“This is my surrogate daughter.” He beamed. “She’s the only person who ever wrote me a thank-you letter for being invited to my tea party, so I gave her a job in the store.”
The woman smiled modestly. “I’m Pia. I hear you’re moving in?”
For the second time at the bookstore, I found myself confronted with a woman of such confounding beauty that words vanished. All I could do was nod dumbly until Geor
ge finally tugged me back to the narrow staircase.
“She wants me to go to China with her in the spring,” George said, catching me staring back at Pia. “I don’t know if I can take a break. Things are too busy at the bookstore, always too busy.”
He took me up past the children’s bunk bed, through the narrow corridor with the writer’s cubbyhole, and into the front room with the window that looked across to Notre Dame. Here, a young man sat at the desk, banging loudly on the typewriter. He was American handsome with tanned, even features, politely messy hair, and strong white teeth.
“George!” he bellowed. “I’m writing!”
He waited for approval, but George only grunted and fumbled with his keys. Disappointed, he began to eye me suspiciously.
“This is the new man. He’s a writer,” George said. “He’s going to sleep in the antiquarian room, but he’ll need a bed up here until that gets sorted out.”
The fellow at the typewriter looked perplexed by this news, but before anything else could be said, George dragged me through to the building’s common staircase. Instead of climbing to the third floor, where the tea party had been held, he opened a door across the hall and gestured for me to follow him inside.
Time Was Soft There Page 4