PART I

IN A BOOKSTORE IN PARIS

by Bruce Handy

VANITY FAIR

OCTOBER 21, 2014 12:00 AM

LITERARY ESTATE George Whitman and daughter Sylvia in front of Shakespeare and Company, circa 1985. Inset, Sylvia, now 33, outside the 63-year-old shop, 2014., Large photograph by Deborah Hayden.

Beginning of the Vanity Fair article:

Perhaps the most famous independent bookstore in the world, Shakespeare and Company can feel like something of a literary utopia, where money takes a backseat and generations of writers—Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, William Styron, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Dave Eggers, among others—have found a Paris home. Chronicling the life of its late owner, the eccentric, irascible, and visionary George Whitman, Bruce Handy meets Shakespeare’s greatest asset in the age of Amazon: Whitman’s daughter, Sylvia.

Shakespeare and Company, arguably the most famous independent bookstore in the world, occupies a prime piece of real estate facing the Seine in Paris, not far from the Latin Quarter, Place Saint-Michel, and Boulevard Saint-Germain. The river is just a stone’s throw from the front door, and a strong ultimate-Frisbee player could probably nail the south side of Notre Dame—halfway across the Seine on Île de la Cité—from one of the shop’s second-floor windows. The view is that good.

Strolling up to the store’s early 17th-century building on a one-block stretch of Rue de la Bûcherie, with its small half-plaza in front, its weather-beaten bookstalls, its green-and-yellow façade, its hand-hewn, rustic-looking signage, can feel like entering a time warp to a quieter, older Paris—a little bit Beat Generation, a little bit Victor Hugo.

PART II

Vanity Fair and a Moment Captured in Paris

Deb Hayden, Marin Photo Club Member, was recently asked, by "Vanity Fair", if they could use her photo for their November 2014 Issue.This led to a wonderful memory of the day that photo was taken, as well as a lasting connection with this classic bookstore.

It was 1985 and four-year-old Sylvia Beach Whitman was playing with her father George in front
of Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris. Sylvia saw me with my camera and smiled. I pushed the shutter button on my Nikon FE2 with a 105mm 2.8 Nikor lens and captured this moment. I realize looking back that if I had a camera with a slight delay, as some digital cameras now have, I would have missed that smile. I took two photographs. In the second the moment had passed.

Picaresque (no—not picturesque) is the word I would choose to describe this photograph and its serendipitous adventures. When I got home, I had my role of slides developed. Thinking George would like this shot, I had two 8x10 prints made and mailed one to him. I imagined that it joined the archive of photographs and letters sent by people who had stayed over the years in the rooms on the second oor, which he called the Tumbleweed Hotel. I was one of the Tumbleweeds who lived there in 1968. George's word and image treasure lled the bathtub in his apartment on the top floor.

Last year a friend forwarded an announcement asking for contributions to a book on the history of the bookstore. George died in 2011 at 98 and Sylvia had taken over as proprietor. I emailed the editor, Krista Halverson, offering details of life there in 1968. I had my copy of the George and Sylvia photo in my kitchen, where it had been all this time, so as an afterthought, I scanned it and attached it to my email.

Krista emailed back that this photograph, blown up to poster size, had been featured for years in the bookstore. And it was used as the cover photo for a beautiful brochure of photos and text about their history. Krista told me that someone had autographed the poster and they thought he must be the photographer, so they were looking for him for attribution.

I pause for a moment to savor what it meant to hear that they had searched through thousands of photographs to chose this one and that it was Sylvia's favorite photograph of herself with her father. And so I wrote a chapter for their book, which will be published soon, based on a journal I kept during that remarkable year, 1968. The bookstore had been closed by the French government, so the other students and I circulated a petition to André Malraux, de Gaulle's Minister of Cultural Affairs, to reopen the store. George was assembling the first issue of The Paris Magazine, featuring an article by Jean-Paul Sartre.

And then this September, out of the blue, came an email from a woman at Vanity Fair requesting permission to use the photograph for an article on Shakespeare and Company. To my immediate "of course!" she responded," I hope it's ok if we pay you?" Imagine my delight and astonishment to see my photograph in the November issue of Vanity Fair (with a readership of 6.6 million), that lucky shot caught in a moment in 1985 when Sylvia Beach Whitman looked at me and smiled. It was a two-page spread introducing the article, with an insert of Sylvia as she is today.

When I was a student in Paris, I lived first at the Sorbonne student housing, then at Shakespeare and Company, and for the last few months, in a tiny room in a seven story walk-up apartment building near the Eiffel Tower. I took a picture of myself in a mirror, set against a porthole window. (I guess this would be an early Sel e.) My friend Bonnie Kuhr photoshopped the scratches out of the print that I have. Since this was almost a half century ago, I wonder-- is that person really me? I welcome comments- -especially from those of you who remember when a roll of film was 36 exposures and every shot counted.

PART III

Shakespeare & Company 1967-68 Deborah Hayden

When Krista asked me to write a section for the History of the Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart that she was editing, I sent her the text below. She took section to use in the final book. What is below is considerably longer.

March, 2013

After graduating from college, I spent a year in Europe, six months of it in Paris. With a student visa, I lived at the Cité Universitaire and took French classes at Alliance Française. In November I discovered Shakespeare and Company. These are notes from my journal that year.

November, 1967

On the Cité bulletin board, this notice: "For Paris Magazine, submit articles to Shakespeare and Company, 37 rue de la Bûcherie." I typed a short story and dropped it in the post. The following week I went with Jean Pierre to a student conference in Germany on Britain's entry into the Common Market at a hotel on the Starnbergersee, the lake in The Wasteland. Back at the Cité, the concierge handed me a note from George Whitman: "I like your story very much. Can you come to dinner, say Friday?" But Friday had passed. I found rue de la Bûcherie on a map and went by the next evening. I was just finishing a warm beurre et sucre crêpe in a cone from a street vendor when I got there. Peering through a dirty window, I could make out a room full of books. Scraps of paper were posted on the door: "Free writer's guest room, second floor."  A penciled note: "Jean-Michel--I'm leaving at midnight and need my luggage. Be here." A printed note inviting browsers to come in and read -- written on the card -- read used books only, please. Beside the door a display case with broken glass filled with wet Larousse dictionaries and notes announcing meetings -- a Viet Nam study group, a Mensa group.

The next day, Jean Michel's note was gone and a stack of Paris Magazines, published by Shakespeare & Company, were in the window with articles by Sartre and Lawrence Durrell. (What was I thinking, sending my story?)

Friday: again to the bookstore. A frail man with a goatee was locking the door. "Mr. Whitman?" He glared at me. He was wearing a baggy suit with holes and had no raincoat. I told him my name. "Oh yes." He fumbled in his pocket and gave me a ring of keys. "I shouldn't give you my keys. I don't have copies. Oh well, I have to trust you. There's chicken soup on the stove. Upstairs."  He pointed up and then peddled his scooter into the street as it started to rain.

I tried all the keys and finally figured out there were two locks on the heavy door. Upstairs a timer turned the light out just as I opened the door and I was startled to see someone moving across the room. But it was only myself, reflected in a dark mirror with a gilt frame. I could see Notre Dame through the window. Books everywhere, a red table, a radio, an armchair and a bed. The carpet was plush dark red. And dirty. Everything was very, very dirty.

I found a light switch and the room warmed. The kitchen was in a hallway between a front and a back room. A hole in the floor the size of a man's foot, tenuously covered with wire, revealed the bookstore below. A gas stove, a refrigerator, a jumble of dirty dishes and dried-up food. And a pot of chicken soup. 

Then he was back, putting parcels on the table. His vague watery blue eyes made me think of an opium pipe. "How are you, dear?" His voice barely audible. I matched it with my own whisper. I heated the soup and put it two bowls. He found butter and matzoh crackers. Then he told me about the magazine, about the bookstore being closed by the French government. He showed me the back room with a desk piled high with papers spilling onto the floor. I smelled something burning. He spun into the kitchen and heaved smoking soup into the sink. He smiled, revealing missing lower teeth.

Somehow I found myself agreeing to help him reopen the store, publish the next magazine, and find some order in the general disarray. "Noon Wednesday," he said. "Come to lunch. We're entertaining a very famous anthropologist who will write for the magazine. I'm tired. Up all night. When you come back, knock like this -- tap tap tap, wait. Tap tap tap, wait. Tap tap tap. Good-bye."

The anthropologist didn't show up for our lunch Wednesday. I began spending most of my time at the bookstore, often staying over night in whatever cot wasn't taken by someone else. A number of students came and went with no regularity. I cleaned, cooked, helped George balance his disastrous ledgers and prepare for his tax meeting, turned away people who came at all hours wondering where is George, why is the bookstore not open? Mostly I read in the immense library. When a friend from home, Amy, came to visit, she moved in. She bought a new, clean red bedcover and a notebook to schedule George. (That didn't work). When she caught him cutting his hair with a candle, she threw a towel over his head.

We celebrated Thanksgiving two weeks early, for the anthropologist who again didn't appear. George, Amy and I crammed into the small kitchen area, cooking a turkey, stuffing, applesauce, cranberry sauce, chestnuts, carrots, gravy, three kinds of homemade pie and homemade ice cream. George's niece from Smith showed up. George wore a formal suit from a rummage sale. He wasn't happy when I heated water to wash the greasy plates from the closet: "Cold water will do." The meal was delicious. We ate everything, except for the chestnuts because they fell on the floor and George scraped them off the carpet and put them back in the bowl.

December 1967

At S&Co--slept poorly. Street noises, street light shining thought the window, thinking about applying to the University of Chicago. At midnight a couple banged on the door below and yelled up that George had their mail. I found it in the pile in the back room and threw it down to them. 

The broken Turkish toilet sprays water over ten years of Paris Reviews that now smell moldy. We use the bathroom at the Petit Pont. 

George wanders off with his knapsack. He's been gone three days and we're worried. He said, "Don't open the door for anyone but Anaïs, Larry or Henry," coming back to add "or Allen Ginsberg." Yesterday when I went home to the Cité to shower and get clean clothes, someone said he had seen Henry Miller wandering around in front of the bookstore late at night, looking at the dark upstairs window. In the pile of hundreds of unopened letters, I see one with Lawrence Durrell's return address.

Happiest day yet in Paris: the chore--to wash the front bookstore window. Waking up to the cold air and the smell of George's freshly brewed coffee. I play French songs on the radio, heat a pot of water to use with vinegar and towels. Move piles of books. And then -- a startling moment first looking through a swipe of clean glass to see black storm clouds, a beam of light breaking through on Notre Dame, and a parade of horses and carriages and men in red uniforms. People going by smile at me. The light changes on Notre Dame. I was rained on washing the outside. I feel like a child in a children’s story, playing bookstore.

We type letters for George on his French typewriter, awkwardly learning the unaccustomed order of the keyboard. George says there’s an electric typewriter in the catacombs, which remind me of Poe's "Cask of Amontillado". The key for the Turkish toilet works for the basement door. I light a candle. The steps are narrow and the candle doesn't throw much light. The "cellars" are damp rooms opening onto one another. I'm afraid to go too far in case the candle goes out or I get lost. George tells us he had tried to buy the last cellars to use for conference rooms. Mark shows me a picture he took of a heavy iron door at the end of one of the corridors. He was trying to pry it open with a crowbar. He thought it led to a tunnel under the Seine ending at Notre Dame. I find the typewriter but it doesn’t work.

George is circulating a petition to André Malraux, deGaulle’s Minister of Culture, to request that the bookstore be allowed to reopen. Amy borrows George’s scooter to take the petition to Henry Miller’s gallery for his signature. We have a big celebration when one of Malraux’s staff comes by to tell George it looks like the petition will be successful.

Amy comes by with a young guy from Ibeza and a traveling scholar from Harvard. Meet Jean Pierre later at the Café de la Sorbonne. Read two chapters of his autobiography and he swings me in a big circle in traffic. It's cold today.

Free time on another continent: my path is organized by metro stops. The only scheduled time, classes at Alliance, where the teacher says, "We need a good laugh today. Let's let the American read." So I stumble through with pathetic French and try not to cry. Is it worth this mortification? 

Make tea, read. Later, swimming at the American Center, talk to Dave. We go to the Petit Pont, then a smoky cellar on rue de la Hûchette --curved staircase, candelabra, Dylan and Coltrane. Out until 3 am; George is still up.

Duncan, a sweet man who writes for the New Yorker, wanted to go to an art gallery but we all decided to go to the Louvre. They don't turn the lights on until 4:45 and it's too dark to see19th century backgrounds. We joke about getting arrested if we light matches.

Days are slow, evening has a better tempo. Reading Alexandria Quarter, Anaïs's novels. Buy Nexus in French.  "Devenir le victime d'une machine qui ne cesse de tourner, de broyer and de moudre. La machine mentale."  Heavy rain, chilly. Wrap up in blankets, cup of tea, read Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar, William Burroughs on his cut-up technique.¨ 

George returns in the evening in a good mood. Burns a pot of chicken soup and tells stories about the history of the building, the white slave trade, the woman who fed her husband arsenic to inherit the building. I find a used book in the store that identifies the building as having been a brothel and a safe house for persecuted monks from Notre Dame. George is delighted. He brings the electric heater from his room upstairs and we huddle around it while he tells stories of his adventures, experiences in various jails. We discuss the books we read that day. He complains about being penniless because the bookstore has been closed for a year. He smokes cigarettes in a holder and coughs. About ten o’clock he shoulders his backpack, pockets a handful of cookies and disappears.

The man who owns the framing shop next door says of George:  "Il vient, il part, comme un éclair."

Amy found a room to rent and moved out, a guy from Stanford moved in. Brought Jacques by the store. George is again in good humor, gives Jacques the perfunctory hello and then the Royal Pamplemousse greeting when he found he was French.

At the Cité: Madame Loquet comes in to get the sheets. It's raining. Ivy beating against the French glass throws patterns on the wall. Jacques leaves a sweet poem for me with the concierge.

Bob has moved into George's with something very special: an electric typewriter.

We go at dawn to Les Halles and have French onion soup. The vendors are setting up, washing the streets. 

Viet Nam rally. I show up for it and am surprised to see George marching at the front of a group. Stokely Carmichael, with a woman to translate, sparks a wildly enthusiastic crowd. We're never sure why the bookstore was closed. Back taxes, problems with a French license, or maybe because of the anti-Viet Nam war meetings that happen in the back room. We never ask.

In April Amy and I leave to hitchhike through Italy for a month and then on to Crete. We miss the Paris student riots in May. I return on a ship. Sailing into New York harbor, on the skyline an intense red sunrise. Over the loudspeakers, the announcement that Bobby Kennedy has been assassinated. I am home.

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May, 1985

Almost two decades later, back in Paris, staying at the Relais Christine. I go by Shakespeare & Co, hoping George and the store are still there. And there it is, full of people, and something else: it’s clean. George is outside by the bulletin board, without a shirt, pinning up notices. "Do you remember me?" He barks, "Of course I remember you. Are you here to work? Are you here to be House Mother? Go inside!  Get to work!!" I check out the shelves filled with colorful new books. A beautiful four-year old blond child playing in the store turns out to be George's daughter, Sylvia Beach. We have dinner with George, his wife Felicity, and the students currently staying there. George cooks meatballs with tomato sauce and for dessert we have his homemade strawberry ice cream.