Time Was Soft There

by Jeremy Mercer

  Tom had left Portland the year before with his guitar and a plane ticket to the Czech Republic, where he had a job teaching English. After a salary dispute with the head of the school escalated into arson, Tom headed south to Morocco. There he learned Arabic, adopted a stray cat, and received an offer from a fellow traveler to live free at a house outside of London. He was on his way to England when he stopped over in Paris to stretch his legs after more than sixty hours on the bus.

  That first night in the city, Tom slept under a bridge on the eastern part of the Seine and at dawn his guitar case was stolen. He was in the habit of sleeping with his instrument, but the case had been filled with clothes, toiletries, and several cartons of cigarettes he’d bought cheap when leaving North Africa. For Tom, who smoked two packs of unfiltered Lucky Strikes a day, this was a devastating blow. In deep distress, he walked along the Seine and passed Shakespeare and Company. Tom thought the bookstore would simply be a place to warm his bones for a few hours, but instead he ended up moving in, Moroccan cat and all.

  That was in December, and since then the cat had run away and Tom had fallen for Gayle. A few weeks before, he’d moved out of Shakespeare and Company after receiving a gracious invitation to live with her at the New Zealand embassy.

  “I’d always thought she was easy on the eyes,” Tom said, winking. The devil having been spoken of, Gayle reappeared after distributing bread through the rest of the bookstore. Her mood bright, she invited us both for coffee. At Panis, we snagged stools, chatted with Nico, and Gayle even had a crumb of bread left over to feed to Amos the dog.

  When I returned to the store, the tea party was well under way. Eve was passing out custard cookies and stirring the cauldron of tea, there was the woman with the one-eyed dog, and many of the other exotic characters from the week before. The handful of new visitors could immediately be identified by their wide-eyed countenances. Watching their bewilderment, I couldn’t believe only a week had passed since I’d come to Shakespeare and Company myself.

  Once the last guest had left, I helped Eve wash the cups and tidy the apartment. George, who rarely appeared at the tea party itself, came upstairs shortly after and offered us dinner, a feast of chicken, ratatouille, and Chinese beer.

  As we ate, George fussed over Eve, filling her glass and making sure she received the choicest morsels of chicken. “She’s my little Nastasya Filippovna!” he said with a glowing smile. “She’s the only one who really loves me.”

  Eve responded with a kiss on his cheek. It was the first time I’d seen an eighty-six-year-old man blush like a little boy.

  With George in such good humor, I was tempted to raise the subject of the bookstore’s future, but I decided it was futile. George was clearly a man who did things at his own pace, so I decided just to sit back and enjoy the evening. At one point, George pulled an electric organ from one of the couches and, with us all well under the influence of Tsingtao’s touch, we sang the official Shakespeare and Company song.

  If you ever come to Paris

  On a cold and rainy night

  And find the Shakespeare store

  It can be a welcome sight

  Because it has a motto

  Something friendly and wise

  Be kind to strangers

  Lest they’re angels in disguise

  More beer was opened, more cheeks were kissed, and George put his arm around my shoulder. “Comrade,” he said, “I’m glad you came to my little bookstore.”

  19.

  Over the years, there has been many an offer to help secure the Shakespeare and Company legacy. Some were from those passing through like me, awed by the bookstore and thunderstruck it could be lost. Others were the work of do-gooders who devote their lives to preserving such troves of literary history. But the most serious attempts came from two men dear to George, his younger brother, Carl, and his old friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

  Carl Whitman is the youngest of Grace and Walt Whitman’s children and the last living member of George’s immediate family. Because of the eleven-year age difference between the brothers, there was a certain distance growing up. Carl admired his older brother, but there was never the deep bond that might have been established if they had been closer in age. Beyond this, there was another subtle rift, the result of the religious discord between the Whitman parents.

  George’s father was the son of New England farmers and his fierce intellect propelled him to study at a university and then go on to work as a professor and textbook author. Walt was a man of books, a student of history, and a world traveler. And, perhaps most importantly, Walt was ambivalent about religion. Not that he was a declared atheist; he was just so caught up in science and the wonders on earth that he didn’t have time to contemplate more heavenly pursuits. Grace Whitman’s life was a stark contrast to her husband’s. George’s mother was raised in a wealthy family that had chauffeurs and owned one of the first Rolls-Royces on the East Coast. But greater was the spiritual divide: Grace was a staunch Presbyterian, a woman who devoted herself to the church. She convinced her children to give themselves over to Jesus—George signed a document when he was thirteen years old that stated, “Trusting in Lord Jesus Christ for strength, I promise that I will strive to do whatever he would have me do”—and she generally frowned upon her husband’s ways. By their later years, Walt had retreated to the third floor of the Whitman house and began living among his books and journals.

  It is no surprise that in such a household the children tended to choose sides. George and his sister Mary were drawn to their father’s path. Mary was ambivalent about religion and followed her father into academia, earning a doctorate in philosophy at Columbia and then working as a professor, first at Wellesley, then at Vassar. George, meanwhile, declared himself an atheist from the moment he first read about the doctrine of disbelief and dedicated his life to the written word. But Carl embraced his mother’s world. He picked his own church as a child, after not getting along with the family pastor, and had been a devout believer ever since.

  It seemed that Carl always had a foot in both worlds. He attended Cornell for engineering and then got pulled into the navy during World War II. He was actually on the way to serve at Pearl Harbor when the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan and the war was declared over. Back home, he felt torn. He read of George’s adventures in letters to the family and had been convinced by many of his brother’s socialist sermons. But his parents insisted it would be better to get a teaching position and strive for a greater stability. Always having looked up to George, Carl first tried a spell on the road himself to see if it fit. He hitched across the country, working in coal mines, laying rails, unloading crab boats. On one occasion, when he and his mother visited Paris in the 1950s, he even took a trip to Russia at George’s urging.

  In the end, perhaps to no one’s surprise, Carl chose a middle road. He became an academic and an activist. When he got his master’s, he was the first white student at Fisk University in Nashville, an institution that was founded in 1866 to educate freed slaves. After first taking a job as a professor at Fisk, he later moved to Florida A & M University, where he was involved with the campus union and worked with refugees who came north from Central America. It was at this time he also started volunteering with Witnesses for Peace, the Christian group that fights oppression and poverty in Latin America. He became so committed to the group that he eventually served on the organization’s board of directors.

  The brothers’ lives further diverged when it came to family. Carl remained close with his mother and later got married and had four children. George, meanwhile, seldom had the time to go home, missing such crucial events as his father’s funeral and Carl’s wedding. The family became so worried about George’s distant ways and his decision to open a bookstore in Paris, Grace even withheld his portion of the inheritance for three years after his father’s death in 1952. She hoped, as she had hoped with his tramping and his communism, that this was just another phase and George would one day retu
rn to the United States.

  Yet, if anything, family relations became worse. On the upsetting occasion when his sister died, George even remained out of touch for more than a week after receiving the telegram. By the 1950s, Mary Whitman was teaching at the University of Buffalo. One evening, while entertaining a guest at home, she choked during dinner and retreated to the bathroom. Her airway became clogged by a piece of steak and by the time her friend came to help, it was too late. George’s sister died in 1956 at the age of forty-one. When George eventually wrote the family, he explained the delay as the result of a motor accident and apologized for being so distant.

  I suppose that, as a family, we tend to be negligent in vital situations—For years I have understood certain facts about Mary & the family—in fact, ever since she came into the Taunton Book Lounge in 1946 I realized she was desperate & yet because of my passive nature I failed to give her sufficient encouragement … . I just didn’t have enough brotherly love to see her through a difficult period & thrash out her problems with her. Because after all a psychoanalyst is just a crutch for what the family doesn’t provide.

  Between the missed funeral and George’s resentment at having his inheritance delayed, his relationship with his mother suffered. In his later years, he would carry a deep resentment for her, accusing her of everything from refusing to breast-feed him as a child to biting him as punishment when he was an infant. It was no surprise to anyone, then, that when Grace Whitman died in 1979, George was unable to attend that funeral as well.

  But George and Carl were clearly beneficiaries of the same extraordinary vitality. After retiring from the university at the age of seventy, Carl tramped the jungles of Nicaragua and Guatemala, investigating atrocities and helping poor villagers as part of his duties for Witnesses for Peace. That winter I was at the store, Carl was seventy-seven and continually on the move, touring Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe with his wife, a traveling professor for an international education program.

  As the years passed, the two men made efforts to build a friendship. Carl wrote regular letters to George and began staying at the bookstore whenever he passed through Paris. It was on one such visit that he came up with an idea to help the store.

  Carl knew of the uncertain future ahead of Shakespeare and Company and thought the best option was to set up a nonprofit foundation that would both protect the bookstore after George was gone and cement its historical standing. This could be done, he reasoned, by selling the bookstore’s archives and using the money to start a nonprofit foundation to manage the store.

  The Shakespeare and Company archives were sure to be cherished. Among the many boxes and files were the papers concerning the start-up of the bookstore and correspondence from five decades of authors including a piquant collection from Anaïs Nin, letters from the likes of Howard Zinn and Max Ernst, and even a brief note from J.D Salinger. There were also posters heralding the hundreds of readings and book signings held at the store, first editions and rare books, such as two of the original copies of Ulysses he’d inherited from Sylvia Beach and volumes from Graham Greene’s personal library, items that George had managed to buy when the author died.

  The archives also contained records of the various literary magazines that had been run from the store, including Alexander Trocchi’s Merlin and Jean Fanchette’s Two Cities. Trocchi’s battles with heroin and his work with Jean Genet, Henry Miller, and Samuel Beckett are well chronicled, but George remembers the soft-spoken Fanchette with more fondness. A psychoanalyst from the island of Mauritius, Fanchette conspired with George to publish Two Cities from the upstairs library of the bookstore for more than half a decade. During that time, George introduced Fanchette to Lawrence Durrell who would go on to become the Mauritian’s friend and adviser.

  The finishing touch to these archives was the autobiographies from forty years of bookstore visitors. Stashed around the store were the scribbled stories of everyone from Allen Ginsberg to John Denver and they gave tantalizing glimpses of the thousands of people who passed through Shakespeare and Company. Astonishingly, the themes kept repeating themselves: people disillusioned with mainstream culture, looking for a place to lick their wounds, yearning to make the world a better place. In fact, according to George, the only major difference between his first guests in the 1950s and 1960s and present-day guests was the status of their families. “You didn’t see so much divorce then,” he told me. “Today, everybody seems to be from a broken family.”

  Carl had already talked to Boston University about these archives and there was a great amount of interest. He even had a meeting with an attorney in Paris to discuss the project. Yet the idea was rejected by George. The archives first had to be properly organized—not a slipshod job by a temporary resident of the bookstore, but a proper cataloging by a qualified librarian. A professional archivist had offered to come from the United States to do the work and had even told George he would live in the store to reduce the expenses. There would still be a fee of twenty dollars an hour, though, and forever frugal, George balked at such an expense.

  The idea of an official foundation still remained a possibility. A state-recognized foundation with a board of directors and a constitution would mean the bookstore’s future would be assured. This is what Ferlinghetti had done with City Lights and this is what George’s old friend was encouraging him to do with Shakespeare and Company.

  After receiving his doctorate from the Sorbonne, Ferlinghetti left Paris in 1950, the year before George opened Le Mistral. In 1953, Ferlinghetti, with his partner, Peter Martin, created the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco. Ferlinghetti’s hope was to create a home for “a running conversation between authors of all ages, from ancient times to modern.”

  Ferlinghetti did just that, fostering a literary community around his bookstore, installing a mail rack so writers with no fixed address could receive letters, and starting City Lights Publishing. He went on to produce almost two hundred books, including work by Jack Kerouac and Paul Bowles. When Ferlinghetti was brought to trial on obscenity charges for publishing Ginsberg’s Howl, City Lights became synonymous with creative freedom. Ferlinghetti also earned acclaim for his own work, most notably his collection of poems, A Coney Island of the Mind, which was one of the best-selling volumes of American poetry in the 1970s.

  Born in 1919, Ferlinghetti was seven years younger than George, but he had already faced up to the question of the future. The city of San Francisco had helped set up the City Lights Foundation, a nonprofit cultural and educational organization dedicated to nurturing literacy and the literary arts. Ideally, this is what George needed to do in Paris. As Shakespeare and Company and City Lights were sister bookstores, there was even talk of George joining Ferlinghetti’s foundation.

  “I supported the idea,” recalled Ferlinghetti. “I thought it would officialize our status as sister bookstores.”

  But there were several obstacles. First was the instore bookkeeping at Shakespeare and Company. George had never done well in such business matters, and not surprisingly received F’s both times he attempted the Advanced Accounting Theory course in university. The bookkeeping at the store consisted largely of random pencil scribbles in green account ledgers. Getting the store’s books in order promised to be a mountain of a chore and when City Lights’ lawyers examined the paperwork, they quickly advised Ferlinghetti to postpone any decision.

  More unsettling was the hundreds of thousands of francs’ worth of repairs and renovations that would be required before Shakespeare and Company could gain any official sanction. The electrical system was the prime suspect, as evidenced by the major fire in July 1990 that destroyed more than four thousand books and whose soot still blackened the beams in the library. The writer Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno was staying at the store at the time. Having already published a successful biography of Paul Bowles, he was researching his book The Continual Pilgrimage, which was about American writers in Paris after World War II. He was in George’s office when the fire b
roke out in the library and witnessed the gushing black smoke and the mountain of smoldering books on the esplanade in front of the store. He also remembers George standing out front of the bookstore, rallying people with Joe Hill’s famous words: “Don’t mourn—organize!” The loss was devastating, yet amazingly, despite such a traumatic warning, no efforts were made to assure the store met city safety codes. Officials complained about everything from the width of the front door to the lack of a fire exit.

  And what proved to be the biggest hurdle to any foundation was George himself. He’d spent half a century building Shakespeare and Company and had a very particular view of how things should be done. He wasn’t ready to cede control to anybody, whether it be his old friend Ferlinghetti or a foundation’s board of directors. Shakespeare and Company was his passion, his life, his child. In the end, just days before he was to transfer money to Ferlinghetti in order to start work on the dual foundation, George decided to go it alone.

  20.

  It was during a visit to the Sandwich Queen that I learned of the bookstore’s newest resident.

  Kurt was continuing to school me in cheap Parisian food, and that afternoon was my introduction to the glories of the discount sandwich. As we left the store, he jovially informed me the tuition fee was the price of his own lunch. Though financially in no position to be so magnanimous, I couldn’t bring myself to refuse, so off we went on another culinary adventure.

  “Trust me, it’s worth it to you,” he insisted. “These sandwiches are legend around here.”

  Around the corner from the bookstore, on rue St. Jacques, just a few doorways before Polly Magoo’s, was a narrow storefront that most people passed without noticing. Though the space was no wider than the average arm span, an ingenious craftsman had turned it into a sandwich counter. Here, a round Cambodian woman stood behind a glass case of cellophane-wrapped baguettes. This was Tuee the Sandwich Queen, a regular stop for the low of budget on the Left Bank.