Paris Bound
The Story of a Bookstore
On a cold windswept street, this was 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. The photographs all looked like snapshots and even the dead writers looked as though they had really been alive.
—Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Growing up in family of Francophiles, I have always felt connected to my French heritage. (My paternal grandfather and his cousin spent years tracing our ancestors back to the original Huguenot resident of southern France, Jean Girardeau, whose children fled to the American colonies in 1680.)
But after all the build up, the most distinct memory I have of my first visit to Paris at age 10 is convincing my parents to let me order escargot at a restaurant, then falling asleep before dinner (at 10 p.m.) with my head on the table.
I didn’t get back to Paris again until one Christmas break in college, when my sister and I stayed in the Latin Quarter for a few nights on the way to Toulouse, where my dad was spending a sabbatical year. This time, Paris lived up to its legend. Swaddled in scarves and thick coats, we strolled the narrow, student-filled avenues, eating far more Camembert, croissants and chocolat chaud than we could possibly burn off; stopping to watch the fire eaters and street musicians; and warming ourselves next to the chestnut carts. Because my sister was even younger than I on our first visit, this short second stay swept us up in the euphoria of youth and discovery. We saw Guernica for the first time in a giant Picasso retrospective at the Petit Palais and Van Gogh’s Starry Night at the Jeu de Paume (whose Impressionist collection is now housed in the Musee d’Orsay); snapped endless close ups of Notre Dame’s gargoyles; and stood transfixed by a flutist’s solo in the stained glass serenity of Sainte Chappelle.
For me, the high note of that entire trip (London to Paris to Toulouse) was the hour I lost in Shakespeare and Company. The store’s namesake was founded in 1919 as an English-language bookstore and lending library by American expatriate Sylvia Beach. “Stratford on Odeon,” as James Joyce called it, became the meeting place for the Lost Generation of writers that included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and many more. She sold books, like D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, that had barred from the U.S. and Britain, and she nearly went broke publishing James Joyce’s Ulysses (which was also promptly banned) in 1922.
According to writer Charles Glass in his book, Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation, the shop was forced to close after Beach refused to sell the store’s last copy of Finnegan’s Wake to a Nazi soldier. She was interned for six months during the war, but managed to hide and save her book collection. Despite Hemingway’s symbolic “liberation” of the store at the war’s end, it never opened again.
In 1951, kindred spirit George Whitman opened the Le Mistral at 37 Rue de la Bûcherie, near a hotel frequented by the Beat Poets. Because the store was the only free English-language library in Paris, writers and artists soon began to gather at the store. Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti founded his San Francisco bookstore-publishing-hangout hybrid City Lights Books as the sister shop to Shakespeare and Company in 1953.
Eager to learn about this new generation of writers, Sylvia Beach became a frequent visitor and close friend. When his daughter was born, Whitman named her Sylvia (Her middle name? Beach, of course.)
After Beach’s death in 1962, Whitman inherited most of her book collection and the right to name his bookstore in Beach’s honor. From the beginning, the eccentric proprietor followed the biblically inspired edict emblazoned above one of the bookstore’s doorways, “Be not inhospitable to strangers/Lest they be angels in disguise.” He was known for taking in writers and artists in exchange for their labor building bookcases, cleaning up, and shelving and selling books. According to writer Jeremy Mercer, who wrote Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare and Company, Whitman called it “a socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore,” and claimed that as many as 40,000 nomadic artists rotated through its thirteen sleeping spaces over the years.
In 1980, Whitman himself rang up my purchase (a book of Sylvia Plath’s letters that is still in my library). One of my biggest regrets to this day is that I had to turn down his invitation to the bookstore’s plum pudding party on Christmas Eve. (We had to catch a southbound train.)
In 2003, at age 22, Sylvia Beach Whitman took over the management of the store. By organizing readings, a festival and other events, she helped transform Shakespeare and Company from an old curiosity shop for tourists into a vibrant participant in the city’s cultural life. When George Whitman died in 2011 (at age 98), he left a far greater legacy than the “few old socks and love letters” he once joked about. Thanks to him and his daughter, Shakespeare and Company continues to be a place with a direct link to Paris’ literary past, a place where time travel almost seems possible.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Ellen Girardeau Kempler’s articles and essays have been published in the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor, Westways and many other publications. She writes about balance, travel and the metaphorical journey on her website, Gold Boat Journeys, and shares short, sweet tweets @goodnewsmuse. This article was originally published on Gold Boat’s Ship’s Log (aka, the Slog) on May 6, 2014.
