Maitresse

On George Whitman, 1913-2011

George Whitman, the founder of Shakespeare and Company bookshop (in its current incarnation), has died. He was 98 years old. For those close to the shop, it was no surprise, as George had suffered a stroke two months ago. Even for those not close to the shop, to die at 98 is no surprise. But none of that mitigates how heartbreaking it is to see him go.

I will skip the personal reminiscences because they’re not that interesting, and other people will do that better; I met first met George in 1999 and met him again over the years, but my more profound relationship was with his shop, and with the literary legacy he carried out. I’ve used different words at different stages to describe my interest in Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company: first I was seduced by the myth of the Lost Generation; later, as a scholar of transatlantic modernism, I came to see the shop in sociological terms as an important nexus in the sustaining of an epoch-defining literary hub. The present-day shop borrows from both categories: it gestures at this illustrious history and extends it through the 1950s and the Beat Generation on to the present moment, when it has once again, under the guidance of George’s daughter Sylvia Whitman, assisted by Jemma Birrell, David Delannet, Hilary Drummond, Thomas Collard, Terry Craven, and Linda Fallon (my apologies to the others I’m probably leaving out, not to mention the volunteers, interns, and Tumbleweeds), become a meeting-point for a group of expatriate writers, as well as an impressive array of Anglophone literary luminaries as they pass through town.

Though-- let’s be honest-- none of us who hang around it can claim to be a Stein or a Hemingway, our Shakespeare and Company does play a similar role in the Anglophone community. No, they don’t lend out their books, you must buy them, but they will buy your old ones, or let you trade them in for something of equal value. You can attend readings, and have a glass of wine on the house; and you can sit in the upstairs library (The Sylvia Beach Memorial Library) and treat it as your own reading room. On a recent visit to the shop for a reading, I sat, antisocially, in the upstairs room, where the speakers’ voices are piped in via the sound system. My mind wandering from the reading, I made a catalog of the books on the wall next to me. Here they are:

The Pig in the Barber Shop
The Bishop’s Jaegers
I Capture the Castle
Herrold’s Leap
Topper Takes a Trip
Rain in the Doorway
Shelter Bay
The Stray Lamb
Peregrine Pickle (volume 1)
Humphrey Clinker
The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves
The Conscience of the Rich
The Mandelbaum Gate
These Lovers Fled Away
Wolf Solnet

This list, for me, testifies to George Whitman’s most salient qualities: he was a generous and eccentric hoarder. Judging from the contents of the library, no books are turned away (expect, perhaps, for books about the shop, of which I can think of at least one that was banned when it first came out). George’s Shakespeare and Company goes beyond the standards of a “good bookshop,” the defining aspects of which, for me, include being well-curated, able to surprise me with the right book at the right moment; reliable, with a solid backlist; and not outrageously expensive. George’s vision for Shakespeare and Company was to make all of this readily available in his "rag and bone shop of the heart." But because of his particular genius, he created a space that was so much more than just a shop: it was an experience. Many people today are quoting the lines that are prominently displayed in the shop: “Be not inhospitable to strangers, for they may be angels in disguise.” A self-proclaimed “tramp,” George Whitman welcomed all those who tramped through his doorway. He presided over a community, and we are sad to see him go.

And what has gone with him is another connection to our literary heritage.  It is not through nostalgia or sentimentality that I say that I sometimes have a difficult time moving forward, leaving people trapped in the fabric of the past. This is as much an intellectual difficulty as a personal one.  George is said to have met Sylvia Beach after the war, to procure her blessing on borrowing the name of her shop, and is even said to have taken some of her stock with him to the new shop. (I have never really tried to verify this. NB: I have been told in the comments that apparently George was too shy to actually ask for permission to use the name, in case Sylvia Beach said no. And then Jeanette Winterson claims that Sylvia Beach came to the shop with Lawrence Durrell in 1958 and formally bequeathed George the name. Who knows what's true? George would often embellish for effect.) By virtue of having met Beach, and Anais Nin, and Henry Miller, and many others, he symbolized a link with this storied past, when even if the plumbing was sketchy, the exchange rate was favorable, you couldn’t cross the Boulevard Montparnasse without tripping over a Russian painter, and the Left Bank was cheap enough for artists. It was meaningful to have, upstairs at Shakespeare and Company, the living link to that period. The literary modernist era is said to have ended in 1941, with the deaths of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. But in fact, it ends today, with the passing of George Whitman. I'm sure I speak for all of us when I wish Sylvia and David and everyone at the shop my deepest sympathies.

Wake in Progress

At the reading last week to celebrate Shakespeare & Company's inaugural Paris Literary Prize I found my attention wandering repeatedly to a pair of prints hanging over the till. Riverrun, I read, past Eve and Adam's, why does this sound so famil--

Although any self-respecting modernist would have made the connection as soon as they read the word "Riverrun," I blame my delayed reaction on the fact that I was simultaneously listening to one of the three short-listed authors reading from their work.  I was, of course, looking at the first sentence of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which is also a continuation of the last sentence of Finnegans Wake ("A way a lone a last a loved a long the").  

As it turns out, the prints I was looking at were part of Stephen Crowe's project "Wake in Progress," in which the artist is illustrating every page of Joyce's late masterpiece. In honor of Bloomsday, they were on display the previous night at the party where the winners were announced, but I had apparently had too much champagne to notice what was on the walls of the Société des gens de lettres.

According to Crowe, "Joyce’s final work is a giddy, disorienting dream that dramatises the internal conflicts of a sleeper's unconscious through a wild, satirical mash-up of history, myth and tall tale-telling." Crowe honors "the book's playful miscellany by plundering the history of the visual arts, from Medieval illuminations to cartoon strips."

The prints will be up at Shakespeare and Co until June 30th. For more information on the project, visit Crowe's website. And don't miss this short reflection on "Why Finnegans Wake is Better than Ulysses."

 

And the winner is

Shakespeare & Company announced the winners of their first ever Paris Literary Prize last Thursday.

Awarded for a novella (the perfect form, some say-- more room to develop than a short story but leaner and trimmer than a novel*), the judges included Erica Wagner, Breyten Breytenbach, Darrin Strauss, and Denis Loy Johnson of Melville House, who will be publishing the winner.

Rosa Rankin-Gee (she of Le Carmen Book Swap and A Tale of Three Cities) took top honors for "The Last Kings of Sark," while Adam Biles and Agustin Maes were the runners-up. (Bios here)

Shakespeare & Company held a reading the next day where we got to hear the three of them read a sample of their work. Here's Adam Biles reading from his novella, "Grey Cats."**

 

 

*Novella fever is everywhere-- my second novel is actually two long novellas which take place in the same apartment 30 years apart.

**The cafe Biles mentions is Le Select, where I'm often to be found, and yes, the cat is still there.

 

 

How to be a tourist

Some shots from Badaude's talk last night at Shakespeare & Company, about embracing the role of the tourist, to celebrate the launch of her new book, London Walks!

The evening included a race between a turtle and a lobster, a theatrical adaptation of "A Room With a View" (starring Badaude as Miss Lavish and yours truly as Mr Eager) and a description of Notre Dame from the Wallpaper Guide to Warsaw:

Long Live Her Royal Majesty!

The Paris-based literary magazine Her Royal Majesty is one of the most beautiful arts & literary quarterlies on the market-- editor Harriet Alida Lye and her band of merry helpers go to the trouble not only to produce a magazine, but to make it an objet d'art. The kind of thing you want to be seen reading on the metro, so Parisians will covertly note your impeccable literary and aesthetic taste.

Printing costs, etc., do mount up, and so in order to off-set charges, HRM has started a pledge drive. As little as a dollar will help-- donate and watch a fun and informative video here, starring Ms Lye herself, part of Anne Marsella's face, Adam Biles of Gulper Eel, and the illustrious Shakespeare & Co.

“Est-ce le parfum d’une robe / Qui me fait ainsi divaguer?”

Keri Walsh has an article about Adrienne Monnier in the current issue of Brick Magazine that I encourage you to go and read.

Interestingly, Keri spends a bit of time discussing the translation into French of "The Love Song of J. Alfrd Prufrock" that Adrienne Monnier and her life partner, Sylvia Beach undertook. 

It was at the crossroads of their two poetic traditions, French and English, that Beach and Monnier undertook one of their most influential joint works, the first French translation of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which appeared in Monnier’s Le Navire d’Argent in 1925. For its first French appearance, Beach and Monnier deleted the epigraph from Dante, and in keeping with Prufrock’s stilted temperament, they wisely chose the formal “vous” for the famous first lines of the poem: “Allons alors, vous et moi” (“Let us go then, you and I”). Their translation reminds us that “Prufrock” is a poem that is deeply at home in French, inspired by the decaying urban scenes of Baudelaire and the Symbolist verse of Jules Laforgue. This provenance is especially apparent in the poem’s more hypnotic, undulating passages. The lines that follow Prufrock’s “hundred indecisions” lose very little in their French adaptation and scarcely seem to require translating at all: “Temps pour vous et temps pour moi, / Et temps encore pour cent indecisions, / Et pour cent visions et revisions, / Avant de prendre un toast et un thé.” Monnier remarked on the ease of rendering the poem, even though she lamented the necessary loss inherent in the process. For Eliot and others, she named the status of “poor translated poet” as a kind of exile. And indeed, there are passages that utterly resist the move into French: the alliterative noise of Prufrock’s “Do I dare?” hardly comes through in the French “Oserai-je?,” nor is the translation “Est-ce le parfum d’une robe / Qui me fait ainsi divaguer?” a satisfying substitute for the jangling rhythm of “Is it perfume from a dress / That makes me so digress?” Both in what the poem captures (that entrancing, prolonged French sound of the narrow streets that seem returned to their native habitat when they become “des rues étroites”) and for what it loses (those plosive sounds, that distinctly English self-deprecation, the deflationary effect of Eliot’s light rhymes), their translation reveals the poem’s origins and allegiances in a new, Parisian light.

Keri pretty much nails the deficiencies of French for an Anglophone writer, and the subtle attractions of it as well. I'm writing the same project in both English and French at the moment, and while I love the feel of French, I much prefer the sound of English.

Which doesn't bode well for the French half of my project, but oh well. It's a worthwhile exercise, no doubt.

Paris Literary Prize partners with Melville House

Shakespeare and Company has upped the ante on their first ever Paris Literary Prize (which I told you about back in October): the winner, in addition to receiving 10,000 EUR and a trip to Paris, will now be published by Melville House, the fine people behind the excellent (and highly collectible)  Art of the Novella series.

Makes it a little easier to swallow that 50 EUR submission fee, I'd imagine! And when else can you expect to have your work read by Erica Wagner, Breyten Breytenbach, Darrin Strauss, and Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House? (They're on the jury.)

The submission deadline has been extended until December 18, 2010.

On Winterson and criticism

I spent my thirtieth birthday with Jeanette Winterson.

She didn’t know it was my thirtieth birthday.  I mean-- I think she was told it was somebody’s birthday, because she showed up that day with champagne, and a cake from Boulangerie Eric Kayser magically appeared.  I was on the inaugural Faber Writer’s Workshop at Shakespeare & Co; in the morning, we worked with Tobias Hill; in the afternoon, Jeanette came in and dazzled pixie dust on us. The workshop happened to coincide with my birthday, and so we celebrated, that October evening, out on the patio in front of the bookstore, across the river from Notre Dame, which obliged us with an hourly carillon of bells to mark the passing time. 

Something Jeanette said to us that day stuck with me. 

She said she doesn’t much care for literary critics, or academics. Only those who have accomplished a serious work of art, does she trust.  Critics, she has written, “ plant more obstacles than they remove” (Art Objects, 191).

So when Scott Esposito, the editor of The Quarterly Conversation, asked me to write an essay on Winterson, I balked. I hemmed, hawed, missed deadlines, etc. I was terrified. Not that she would read it-- god no. No risk of that. But I was still afraid that somehow she would know, when next I saw her, that I had written about her and that she would not approve if she happened to read what I wrote. (Classic anxiety of influence: the writer may correct her foremothers but she also craves their approval.)

She said something else that day that stayed with me: “You have to turn up for work.” You can’t wait around to be visited by the Muse-- you have to show up for work whether the Muse is there or not.

Winterson shows up for work and she creates new worlds. 

The literary critic shows up for work and mediates those worlds. 

You want to look at it up close, to appreciate each delicate meeting of gears: the balance wheel, the pivot, the click. You want to tell what you saw.  You’re not studying it to learn how to make a watch.  You’re not a watchmaker.  The point is to be able to point to that watch and say-- look what a wonderful watch that is.  It is of a quality you don’t find every day.  You ought to try it on.

Winterson’s work seems absolutely to beg for a literary critic to come along and work on it, and maybe that’s why she’s so mistrustful of us. She doesn't think of literature as something that should be taken apart. It would be like unweaving a tapestry: “The fabric of a book is more than its material; it is the weave of the words” (AO 174):

It is redundant to try to analyze a poem, or a piece of fiction that undertakes poetic principles, by separating out the parts, meaning on one side, words on the other.  When a thing is perfectly made it has no fastenings or seams.  It will not come apart in your hands. What you do manage to pull to pieces is a construct of your own. (AO 171)

Exactly.  What a challenge. Watches or tapestries?

If I may, the work may look like a tapestry to its writer, but a critic knows it’s a watch. And with all due respect, I want to take hers apart.  I put it off long enough, and now here I am.  Turning up for work.   

You can read what I came up with here.

and the Paris Magazine goes to...

...Meghna Prakash! Thank you all for your contributions, I loved reading them. Here's Meghna:

Shakespeare & Co. to me isn't just a bookstore. It's a huge part of what Paris means to me. But all this needs context so bear with me a little. I'm Indian and was born and brought up in India. My father was in the Indian Government and consequently, we moved around a lot as I was growing up since the nature of his job involved deputations to different states. I am also an only child. So making friends through that nomadic existence was a little difficult. But the one thing I did have were my books. I started reading at an early age and there came a time when I would devour anything in print that came my way. If I were given a book and left alone with it, I was the happiest child. Of course, this drove my parents to distraction since they worried that I would grow up insular and unwilling to interact with the rest of the world. I'm a corporate lawyer today. Suffice to say, their worries have been laid to rest. 

I moved to Paris late last year for a new job and am now in my 8th month of calling it 'home'. While I won't say that my move was rife with apprehensions about a city that I didn't know or interacting with people in a language that I didn't understand (blame it on the eternal optimism of a 20-something-year old and being a veteran of settling into new places), it took me a while to find my feet here. In my first month in the city, while I was still in my wide-eyed "I live in Paris!" phase, I came across the bookstore. If you would believe it, I had only heard of it in passing before and I think, in retrospect, that was a good thing. It offered a quaint charm, tucked away in an arrondissement that I was fast falling in love with. I can pretty much credit the bookshop with my going around to all my friends in Paris and telling them that come what may, I would move to the 5th, just so I could be closer to the store. I think I provided the French with some amusement. 

On my first foray into the shop, I remember coming to a complete halt, just drinking in the sight of books from the floor to the ceiling and the smell of paper and binding, which I don't think can be replicated. Then through the haze, I realized people were speaking in English (I'm Indian of the 80s, ergo I consider English my mother tongue). I can't explain the irrational happiness I felt on hearing words that were familiar to me. It's the same feeling I get now when I realize I understand what the French are saying, thanks to months of French lessons. Since I had moved to Paris without any books, thanks to the ridiculous 20 kilo limit that airlines have imposed on us Asian immigrants, I simply walked up to the cash counter and told the person there that I wanted something new to read. The poor girl took the time to show me the new collection, asked me my taste in books to figure out what I would like and spent a good half an hour helping me pick out some new tomes. I've never had such personalized service in a bookstore. Having done that, when I checked out with my new purchases I was asked if I wanted their stamp on the books and I unthinkingly said 'yes'. It struck me much later that this was my first acquisition in Paris and I promptly took a picture of the first page of one of the books with the stamp to commemorate the occasion. It still symbolizes to me the start of my new chapter in this city. 

Over the months, I've gone back to the store on several occasions, usually on Sundays when I don't have much else going on. I spend hours in the upper section of the store reading, looking out the window, marveling at the sight of the Notre Dame, shaking myself out of the "I can't believe I live here!" feeling and then wandering down the river to people watch. I love that the people who work there genuinely like what they do and I love, even more, that they leave you alone to browse or read. The store symbolizes to me everything that I'd like my bookshop around the corner to be.

I can sincerely say that I've now come to think of Paris as home and I know that Shakespeare & Co. has contributed in no little part towards that.

blogging the 2010 Shakespeare & Company literary festival

My report from the 2010 Shakespeare & Company festival has gone up over at The Millions:

The theme of the festival was “Storytelling and Politics,” and over three days, 6,000 people gathered in a tent in a small park across the river from Notre Dame to hear writers like Will Self, Martin Amis, Fatima Bhutto, Ian Jack, Breyten Breytenbach, Philip Pullman, Hanif Kureishi, Nam Le, Petina Gappah, and Jeanette Winterson talk through the relationship between the storyteller and his political context. But the World Cup was on everyone’s mind; in nearly every session I attended, someone tossed off a reference to it…

Meanwhile, here are some of the anecdotes that didn't make the final cut:

However, like any good soccer match, the spectators did get rowdy.

Getting together this many fabulous writers together under sort of a small tent and making the whole thing free means there were a lot of people fighting over seats. As far as I know no blood was shed, but I did see one woman try to sit on another.

On Sunday I meet up with Sharmeine Reid, the London-born owner of an English language bookshop in Berlin called Dialogue, to see Mathias Enard and Raja Shehadeh talk about violence and writing. It is the only panel featuring a French author, and while there are a lot of people there, the seats in front of us remain empty. In between Enard/Shehadeh and the next panel, with Hanif Kureishi, two of our friends join us. One of the empty seats has a knapsack on it, but it does not belong to the man sitting beside it. Had its owner had tried to reserve his or her seat while he or she skipped a session? In any case, they haven’t been there for over an hour, and we elect to put the bag on the floor and reclaim the seat.

Shortly before Kureishi began, the knapsack’s owner returns, and, irate, demands we yield up the seat.

“It’s first-come first-served,” we explain. “Sorry.”

“But I’ve been sitting there for three days!” she says.

“All the more reason to give it up. You can’t reserve seats like that.”

“But--”

“That’s fine, enjoy the rest of the festival,” Sharmaine says with finality. Confused, the woman thanks her and walks away, only to come back a few minutes later, to try to sit on our friend.

Moments after we divest ourselves of the great chair reserver, the woman behind us spills coffee on the woman next to her. “It’s alright, it’s on you, not on me,” she says. The woman who got doused, German I presume (whose fault it was, really, that the coffee spilled, I saw the whole thing), answers “but it’s all over my yacket!”

There are snacks.

Organic ones at that. And a coffee cart.  And the audience comes prepared-- I see people munch on pretzels, carrots, M&Ms; one woman produces a carton of gazpacho from her purse and drinks from the nozzle.

The players will sign autographs. Or your book, as the case may be.

But if your work is too erudite for the general masses who just came to see Philip Pullman, you might find yourself chatting only to the people who work at the shop and their friends, while you sit behind your table expecting to sign books.

Poster by Badaude

Post-festival/Paris Magazine giveaway update

Well dears, the fourth biannual Shakespeare and Company festival has come to an end, and everyone over here is still recuperating.

I did pick up a copy of the newly-relaunched Paris Magazine as promised; I had said to send me your favorite stories of Shakespeare and Company but it then occurred to me that to make it more inclusive I should widen the topic a bit.

So new assignment: write in about your favorite book that is set in Paris and your contribution will be entered into the running. All entries must be in by June 29th please! 

There are no immediate plans to continue the magazine; the editor, Fatema Ahmed, says it was planned as a "one-off" (I hope the success of this issue will prompt them to keep going with it!). So if you didn't pick up a copy at the festival, or couldn't get to Paris for the festival, here's your chance to score a copy become an artifact of literary history. 

Meanwhile, stay tuned for some post-game analysis in the next couple of days.

Interview: Keri Walsh and Sylvia Whitman

Happy Bloomsday! In honor of James Joyce's chef d'oeuvre, it seems fitting to talk about Sylvia Beach today, who after Joyce is no doubt the person who put the most time and energy into bringing Ulysses into the world. Beach, for those of you who are unfamiliar with her, was an American expatriate who ran a legendary bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, in the rue de l'Odéon in the 1920s and 30s.  When the book was banned for obscenity in the US and UK (after parts of it were serialized in The Little Review and The Egoist, Beach published Ulysses at her own expense, and continued to do so until she finally gave up the rights in 1930, allowing Joyce to find a publisher who could properly handle the book's wider distribution. 

Sylvia Beach's letters were recently published by Columbia University Press, edited by Keri Walsh, who is an assistant professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College. Her letters, never before collected, to figures like Joyce, Hemingway, H.D., Richard Wright, William Carlos Williams, and others provide a vivid portrait of Paris in the 20s and 30s. She is frequently referred to as the "patron saint" of independent bookselling as well as the "midwife of modernism."

[Read an excerpt from the letters here]

When Keri was in Paris this week, I got to interview her together with Sylvia Beach Whitman, the present-day owner of the present-day Shakespeare and Company bookshop (backstory here) to discuss modernism, bookselling, cross-dressing lesbians, James Joyce, and, of course, the incomparable Sylvia Beach.  


The timing also happens to coincide with the biannual Shakespeare and Company literary festival, Festival and Co, taking place this coming weekend, 18-20 June, which is a nice reminder of how Beach's legacy continues to bring together readers & writers.


We started off talking about-- what else? the "Lost Generation," and its enduring mythology.  
 


Sylvia Whitman:  People come here to Paris with their dreams and aspirations, ready to be inspired.  That in itself makes for a very interesting atmosphere, because people are just coming at your with their projections and their ideas, and that obviously can also include disappointment, or cliché, or whatever, but I love it, I think it’s quite magical. 
 
And also-- as with every cliché, there’s a reason behind it. There’s such an amazing, rich, literary history here, there’s just no doubt about it. 



Keri Walsh: Paris lives up to that. 
 


Lauren Elkin: But if there are all these people projecting their literary dreams onto Paris and everything, you’re sort of the screen-- not that you’re a blank screen or anything, but you didn’t choose this heritage. The fact that we’re sitting here having this conversation is because your father projected this history onto you when he named you after Sylvia Beach. That’s got to put you in an odd position. 



SW: Actually, when I first came back in 2003, my dad wrote this piece, which is very nicely written and everything, but the headline was “Sylvia Beach is back in Paris.” And he handed it out to people in the shop when I was there. And I was mortified by this. So embarrassed. And he didn’t see anything wrong with it, he thought it was really funny, and he said, “well I named you after her, of course, this is just my way of celebrating you coming back and wanting to work in the bookshop.” So it meant something really different to him from what it meant to me. But I was mortified.  I kept trying to get them back from customers who were walking off with them, saying “No! I’m not Sylvia Beach!” 


 
LE, to SW: You have a theatrical background, though; do you ever feel you have to draw on it to get into the role of doyenne of Shakespeare and Company? 


 
SW: Well-- when you’re in bookselling, so often you’re able to hide behind a book, it’s not really you in the limelight. But there are a few moments when I’ve felt that way.  Like when I had to introduce Paul Auster in front of 700 people, that was a really nerve-wracking experience, I had to draw on all my training.   
 


KW: You have a background in theatre? 
 


SW: I didn’t ever think of going into bookselling, I just wanted to go into theatre-- I was just obsessed. In school I did a lot of Oscar Wilde, and Chekhov, and Shakespeare -- The Importance of Being Earnest, I played that many times-- and then at university I did a lot of theatre.  When I started at the bookshop, my plan was still always to go back to do theatre, but then I started really enjoying being in the bookshop, and Dad was like [imitating her father] “why do you want to go back to London and work in the theatre when this is a theatre, you could be a star… behind the till!” 
 


KW: Just like the first Sylvia. Her sister Cyprian acted in silent films, and they shared a theatrical sense of life.    The interior of Shakespeare and Company was arranged like a stage set.  Beach knew how to create an ambiance.   A newspaper article from 1924 said that “Miss Beach’s bookshop is essentially a ‘character’ store, the brown burlapped walls, the grotesque Chinese goldfish, the pair of brass scales (just as tho books were sold by the pound, as they were in the olden days), and the feeling of old wood, homeliness, comfort, always clean without being shiny.  But Sylvia Beach is the principal character.”  
Beach was always going to concerts and to the theatre.  In 1904, she met the dancer Loie Fuller, who gave her a ticket to see her famous radium dance at the Moulin Rouge.   Beach even costumed herself to sell books.  She had these little Wildean velvet blazers made for herself, you know: in the pictures you can see her wearing them, along with decadent  1890s ties.  She’s trying on the Wildean aesthetic to create this lifestyle. 



SW: The impression that I get of her bookshop (and certainly of ours as well), and what we have in many good, quirky independent bookshops is very much a theatrical atmosphere, because the type of people that come in are so extraordinary. Bibliophiles are such interesting people, and often quite eccentric-- you get this real array, an extraordinary collection of characters. 



KW: I think you’re right; I haven’t encountered many spaces outside the theatre world where there’s this unique blend of tolerance and intimacy.  It seems that Shakespeare and Company was one of these places.  Sylvia Beach fondly recalled the days, before she opened her store, when she lived near the Palais Royal Theatre (“where the naughtiest plays in Paris were put on”) .  She loved spending time amidst the acrobats and theatre folk.  She was drawn to that carnival world, and so was Adrienne Monnier, who wrote beautiful essays about circus and cabaret.   Her attraction to the theatre led Beach to value people as characters, rather than judging them according to their social status.   
 


SW: Also I remember thinking, when I was getting to know the way my dad had put the bookshop together, that he ran it a bit like a boat-- 


 
KW: That’s another good metaphor.  Life aboard ship. 



SW:  He was the captain, and he always had his tea lady, and he always had a house mother, and he always had his crew, who all had their roles. And these roles would be taken by different people every now and then, someone would leave and then someone else would become house mother! Like a cast of characters. Especially the writers who would hang out in the shop. 
 
 I’ve met lots of people who have talked about making a film of her, of that era, but how difficult it would be, to have character, story, development-- it would be too much! How could you? 
 


KW: I agree. There would be a lot of different elements you’d have to balance—her work for the Red Cross in Serbia, her friendships with Richard Wright and H.D., her relationship with Adrienne  Monnier.  But I have to admit that for me, Beach’s passionate admiration for James Joyce as a person and artist is still the central mystery of her life. I don’t find it surprising that she loved Adrienne Monnier, that makes perfect sense, but that she gave ten years of her life to Joyce in spite of such great odds and difficulties—I don’t fully understand it yet.  If there’s a dramatic story to be told, if there is a play by Tom Stoppard or Peter Shaffer in this, that is the story.  Understanding the motive for her all-consuming dedication to Joyce.

 
SW: That’s what I think is interesting about her memoir, outside of her relationship with all these writers. She’s quite polite about everyone, and you get the sense that there were layers behind that.  Whereas the letters show more, don’t they. 
 


KW: They’re less circumspect. I think maybe because they were written on the fly, and were addressed to particular people.  She wasn’t thinking of an audience.  The tone is more insouciant than the one we find in her memoir Shakespeare and Company.

 
SW: She lets herself go a lot more in the letters, whereas in the memoir she’s quite restrained. 
 


KW: I agree.  But even when I was re-reading the memoirs this week, I was struck by how well-written, how entertaining they are. She solves the problem of writing about this big cast of characters by giving everyone a little section of their own.  She figured out how to write about this cast of characters.  James Laughlin, the New Directions publisher who wrote the introduction to Beach’s memoirs, says he borrowed the style for his own memoirs. 
 


SW: She headed every section with a name, so it’s a series of vignettes, you know, like Bryher, and Hemingway, and he borrowed that style. 
 


KW: I know she didn’t write very much, and that’s a pity, but what she did write is lovely.  She gave us some of the most vivid anecdotes we have about Joyce.  I love her stories about how he was afraid of dogs and would cower during thunderstorms. It’s just so funny and endearing, what she captures. 
 
Without airing people’s dirty laundry, she still gives something that feels personal and honest, that isn’t the canned answer. She goes off-script, but without violating people’s privacy.  
 


SW: She seems to pick a very simple moment with someone that gives us a really good understanding of that person. It’s very subtle. 
 


KW: Exactly, like when she meets Joyce, she recalls telling him the name of her bookstore, Shakespeare and Company.  He takes out a pen and paper to note it down, and it makes her sad to see him holding the book so close to his eyes, because of his failing vision.   
 
Also I love her letters to Robert McAlmon, who’s this walking party, a charismatic wastrel.  She liked him very much but worried about the way he squandered his talent.  She wrote to him on one of his world tours, “That’s funny about your starting an American colony there.  I didn’t see that in the Tribune.  But you always do seem to found a new settlement wherever you go.  And bars soon spring up.  Anyhow Paris has never been as much fun as when you were here.”   


LE: What I was surprised by was the degree to which Sylvia relied on her family and friends to get the shop up and running-- her mother of course provided the funding, and she kept writing to her sisters to send books, and she talks so much about how much guidance she received from Adrienne on how to be a bookseller, not to mention administrative assistance. I had this idea of Sylvia Beach as this forceful woman with a vision, but the letters reveal something quite different. 



SW: I think a lot of people have that idea of her.  She gives this impression of having done so much, and you just never imagine any moment of weakness starting out, because she accomplished so much. 
 


LE: Yes, and the letters really highlight what a collaborative effort her bookshop was. So I thought I would ask Keri to talk about the role of the network for Sylvia and her cast of characters, and Sylvia, if you could talk about how that collaborative idea comes into play at the present-day Shakespeare and Company? 
 


KW: One of the reasons I’m glad the letters are out there is they show us how folksy and lively and impromptu everything was.  Her bookstore was built on family and friendships rather than on any kind of business model.   One thing her letters reveal is just how charming and witty Beach really was. Sometimes I think that in the biographies of other people, Beach tends to come across as this kind of hardworking, administrative schoolmarm or something.   But she didn’t find herself at the spiritual heart of modernist Paris because of good shorthand skills.  She led with personality and vision.

Beach was very gracious, always looking to credit other people for their role in her successes.  Sometimes that gets lost in literary biographies, because great writers tend to be megalomaniacs.  But Beach wasn’t a writer, and she wasn’t a megalomaniac either.  She was always writing thank you letters to people, and making everyone feel part of the enterprise, and being very diplomatic, and coaxing people into things; I think of her primarily as someone with extraordinary social skills.  Someone described her shop as a “merveille”-- it was a place where people felt good.  She listened to people and took care of them.  The person she owed most to, I think, was Adrienne Monnier.  She helped her navigate the red tape of doing business in a foreign country, and taught her how to run a bookstore, and advised her about publishing and translating.

 
LE: It gives us a new way of thinking about the relationships between these writers.  You often see these really cheesy articles written about Literary Paris in the 20s but what they don't explain is-- how did all these people supposedly know each other? As the myth goes, they all hung out together at La Coupole or something. But it’s a very superficial reading of the actual relationships between these people, which were maintained through this network of letters and dinners, that we see Beach helping to facilitate. 
  


SW: Also, like the so-called Beat generation, they didn’t know that they were supposed to be a “generation.” They had no sense of themselves as a group. These terms came much later, and were projected onto the past. 
 


KW: [to SW] And so what do you have to say about teamwork in your shop?  
 


SW: Well, I’ve always felt how lucky I was to come into a bookshop that was already established, that had a name, a clientele. Particularly in France, which is quite a bureaucratic country as we know, I think it must be such a headache to start something up. So it’s extraordinary that she managed to get everything together. You really would have to rely on someone like Adrienne Monnier for advice. So I often reflect on that, on how difficult it must have been for her, or even for George [Whitman] to start up. I definitely think that in the bookshop where it is very much a community, you have to have a small community of people who are running it. It’s not very difficult to do that in an intimate bookshop. Most of the people who work there are not punching out at 5 o’clock. They’re actually really interested in meeting writers, in writing a review for a book they just read.  It’s such a milieu full of passionate people. They do tend to be very dedicated. 
 


KW: We talked about the parallels to the theatre, and to the ship, but the other one is the alternative university, people can learn from each other, speaking to each other, having these exchanges-- 
 


SW: That was very important for Sylvia Beach as well-- 
 


KW: Yes, to be this Common Reader. There are just so few places in the world like that, but this place has that feeling, that lovers of books are here because they want to talk about them. 
 


SW: My father’s always been really loud about that-- that the first floor’s not commercial, it’s for people to sit and read, that’s why we have chairs everywhere, that books are one of the most democratic things in the world, and anyone should be able to have access to books. 
 
That sounds a bit like Google, doesn’t it, what I just said! I just fell into the trap! 
 


KW: I think it’s not a cliché, because it’s the easiest thing in the world to be snobby about books. But we have to continue what Sylvia Beach did, which is to think that the next James Joyce could be coming in from anywhere, not necessarily from an Ivy League school or from Oxbridge. You have to look at everyone as a potential talent, or a potential reader. And remembering that, and having faith in the world, so few of these spaces exist. I was at another one recently, the Brecht Center in New York. I went to see a production of Antigone there, and it’s right on the West Side Highway, it’s the weirdest location, and they have this 30s style Brecht Forum banner and once you go in there, it’s all these free books-- 



LE: Free books? 



KW: Yes, and reading groups, where you can study Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit over the course of ten weeks, with other people who just feel like reading it!  And I thought to myself, this is one of the coolest places I’ve seen. And I also love Bluestockings bookstore in New York.  These kinds of intellectual spaces are unusual. 



SW: That’s something that I feel Dad was very influenced by Sylvia Beach-- in terms of being a library, and very open to people, also this idea of what you were saying about the next James Joyce being from any kind of background. Some of the people he’d have coming in were sort of phony, but he didn’t care, because they were saying that they were writers, and they had self-published something, and so he was like “Come in, come in! Here’s my bed!” 
 


KW: The world doesn’t treat writers like this, I think that’s why people love Shakespeare and Company, where they say “this is our priority: art!” 
 


SW: France does that too, isn’t that true? Writers have this god-like status here. Paul Auster, for example, who spends a lot of time here, he’s always commenting on this. He can’t get over the fact that--  
 


LE: He’s like a rock star here. 



SW: Yes! He can’t get over the fact that writers are sort of worshipped here.   



LE: The government gives a serious amount of subventions [grants] to writers… 
 


KW: Even international writers? 



LE: I don’t know, I haven’t really looked into it. 
 


SW: Maybe you have to be writing in French, I presume…  



KW: So many people-- actors, musicians-- say France is where they come to feel good about themselves as artists, and this was true for Joyce too.  Beach wrote to Harriet Weaver that French writers embraced Joyce with open arms, and he never felt that he could get that kind of reception in Ireland. 
 


LE: There’s this funny moment where she says to Richard Wright, I think, “sorry that that little bookseller made you sit down and sign books, all the French writers know to say no!” Because today it’s just the opposite--  they make writers sit for hours and sign books! 
 


SW: They do! It’s really weird, they don’t even do any readings!  



LE: They sit the writer down at a table with a stack of books and people queue up. 
 


KW: It sounds so boring. 



LE: It’s kind of changing now-- now, of course, the trend is for, like, textes et voix-- having actors come in and read the texts-- 



KW: That is such a good idea. 
 


SW: They did a lot of that at Paris en Toutes Lettres. 
 


LE: Yeah, exactly. And for Festival America this year they’re planning on doing a lot more of that as well… that’s really the direction that French readings are going in, I think. That’s what I wrote about in the Five Dials piece [for which I interviewed Sylvia last year], about this new “eventiness” on the literary scene in France, the turn toward combining different arts together, to make it more interesting and dynamic for the public, rather than just, like [miming a writer about to sign a book] “to whom?” 



LE [to SW]: Do you want to tell us a little bit about Paris Magazine? It looks great, especially the cover. 
 


KW: Very stylish.  Are you doing another edition? 



SW: We’ll see… it’s an experiment. 
 


KW: Who’s the primary editor? 
 


SW: Fatema Ahmed, who was at Granta for 10 years. 
 


KW:  So it may continue… 



SW:… to be discussed. 
 
It’s funny because Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who’s a close friend of ours, over the last few years he’s been asking us a lot-- every time I see him-- he gets into a fury, “why are you wasting time, it’s so logical to have a publishing house, you’ve already got a bookshop!” He actually gets annoyed. He says “All you’ve got to do is publish one book a year, you don’t have to publish a whole catalog!" and distribution is actually really easy now, these big companies that you can just sort of loop in with, and for him it’s sort of very black and white. 
 


KW: I always felt that way reading Sylvia’s letters.  I kept thinking like a business person, wishing she would take advantage of the momentum she had created. I thought to myself, “OK, Sylvia, you just published Ulysses, and now you’ve got the world’s attention, quick, now publish Lady Chatterley’s Lover! 
 


SW: I’m so surprised that she didn’t. But she was really a one-man show, though, wasn’t she. 
 


KW: All I can think is yes, she was obviously the kind of person who worked from love, and she didn’t love Lady Chatterley’s Lover, that’s for sure.   I think the book just put her off. But it’s interesting because it goes to show the extent to which she wasn’t thinking about profit.  It obviously would have been a great business move to publish Lady Chatterley’s Lover, or to publish some more great modernist works-- 
 


SW: Henry Miller applied to her, didn’t he? 
 


KW: And William Carlos Williams sent her a manuscript.  She didn’t make the strategic moves that would have made her rich.  And that’s one of the reasons I love her. 
 


LE [to SW]: So then what was the impulse to do a literary journal? 
 


SW: I do feel very interested in that idea, and I really see exactly why Lawrence says it’s such a good idea; he feels that independent bookshops like this are very much a space where things are happening, and you can tap into a certain energy. The only reason he published Howl is because Ginsberg read in the bookshop and people went wild.  And he didn’t want to be a publisher before that, but he felt like this had to be out there. And so I think that’s really inspiring. I love the format of City Lights, you go there and they have a mezzanine with the publishing house on the first floor, you can hear them practically editing while you’re looking at an amazing stock of books, it’s such an interesting space! 
 


KW: It’s like being in a butcher shop when the sausages are being made.  The books are being made to order as you buy them! 



SW: Yes! 
 


KW: There are few enough places like this that could introduce a writer to the world, and the world would listen. And it’s nice to use that voice that you have to present people to the public. 
 


LE: Is there anyone you’re really excited about in the magazine? 
 


SW: It’s such a weird mix of things, which we did on purpose-- we thought that represents what the bookshop is. We’ve got different voices, something that’s kind of like Lydia Davis from Jesse Ball, and a note on reading from Jeanette Winterson, and a new poem translation from Ferlinghetti-- so it’s a real mix of people you’ve never heard of next to established writers, poetry, to something completely random. I love the Tumbleweed biographies [“Tumbleweeds” is Shakespeare and Company slang for the writers who pass through the bookshop and stay the night]-- I put a lot of work into that, and contacted a bunch of the Tumbleweeds who used to stay in the bookshop in the 50s and 60s, and had a real moving encounter with each of them. So that’s probably my favorite, because there’s so much history behind that.  
 


LE: It’s funny, Sylvia Beach had her “bunnies,” and you have your Tumbleweeds.  
 


SW: I call them the Troubleweeds, when they get drunk. 
 


KW: I love the idea of putting established and unestablished writers together, because trying to break in is hard, and there are so few journals where Jeanette Winterson could appear alongside someone you’ve never heard of. I can’t even think of one. 
 


SW: To me it feels totally the normal way to do it. But it’s true it’s not very common. 
 


KW: If you wanted to go on with the revue it seems like that could be one of its unique strengths.

LE: So I guess to wrap up we can come back to this idea of comparing Sylvia Beach’s literary Paris with Sylvia Whitman’s literary Paris-- how has it changed? You’ve probably been asked this a thousand times.  


SW: I think that goes back to what we were talking about in the beginning-- I come across a lot of people here who are hopeful Hemingways, and aspiring Kerouacs, and they come with these dreams and aspirations, and it does put into question what the scene is now, it makes you compare it -- 



[We are interrupted because a customer has found a first edition Henry Miller in the outside bin under a tarp. “It’s a mistake,” Sylvia tells Lauren, who is working at the till and has come in to ask why they’re selling a first edition Henry Miller from under a tarp. “It must be from upstairs. It’s not for sale.” She comes back in and shrugs. “That happens a lot.”] 
 


SW: People come as if that world of the 20s still exists, and inevitably they find that it doesn’t, and I think we really romanticize how it was, don’t we?  But I find it an interesting question, that we’re often asked, and I never know how to answer it, because we’re still discovering what’s happening now.  The internet, and our different attitude toward traveling-- those things have really transformed  the way we think about movement, and where people physically are. Even early in the early 50s, there must still have been this sense of “I’m in Paris,” which was a big deal, and “I’m going to call up these people”-- Ferlinghetti told me when he first came here in the 40s he telephoned Gertrude Stein! And said “I’m an American in Paris, can I come and see you?” and he went round. And he would do that now.  
 


LE: There’s still a sense that if you have a friend of a friend who’s a writer here you might drop them an email. But you’re not going to cold call Mavis Gallant or Nancy Huston to say “Hi, I just moved to Paris, can I come and see you?” 
 


KW: There’s also that socio-economic component, which is that it was advantageous for Americans to be here in the 1920s, because of the exchange rate. You could actually come here to save money, and it was the same with the people who came on the GI Bill, those were people from across the class spectrum of America, who could come and actually make a life in Paris-- 
 


SW: That’s Ferlinghetti and my dad, they were both on the GI Bill. 
 


KW: Absolutely, and it’s a totally different story from now, I mean, I imagine if we polled the Americans who are here now they were be largely college-educated, middle class people. And so it might be interesting to think where aspiring artists can afford to live. 
 
SW: Well look at Paris-- the artists are going out to Montreuil-- 
 


LE: Or Berlin. 
 


SW: Or Berlin, yeah, that seems to be where a lot of things are happening, it’s a lot cheaper for the space that you get. I think now we’re onto a different level now, with blogging and twittering and the internet. But it’s so new, we still have yet to discover what kind of an effect that’s going to have on writing. 
 


KW: Writing the history of the present is so hard. People keep asking me, what are the comparable artistic communities to the 1920s and I say I don’t know.  We’ll see in 20 years. 
 


SW: I guess now it revolves around the N+1 or McSweeney’s… there are still trends and groups, but it’s not as strong and striking as the modernist movement… But then as we were saying before, they weren’t really a group. We’re talking about them even now as if they felt themselves to be a group. 
 


KW: And one thing I think is really interesting about Sylvia Beach is how she didn’t conform to any of the stereotypes of 1920s Paris. She wasn’t a drinker, she wasn’t having multiple love affairs, she was discreet-- even though she was a bohemian-- 
 


LE: She was a cross-dressing lesbian... 
 


KW: Ok we’ll give her that. But maybe one reason she’s so beloved is because she domesticates that figure in a way that makes it much less threatening for people, because she still conforms to most of our ideas of decency or good behavior, as opposed to somebody like Anais Nin or Simone de Beauvoir who are living these really challenging lives, polyamorous, incestuous. Beach never did anything like that. 
 


SW: And that’s perhaps why she was such a good bookseller, to use a word that you used before, she’s diplomatic, & very grounded. Writers often have difficult egos, difficult personalities, and she managed to deal with all of that by being this kind of neutral force. 



KW: And it’s funny to think of the people she kind of clashed with, like Gertrude Stein, I think Stein perceived her as a threat, this rival American woman down the road who had this public salon, which was quite different from Stein’s private, elitist one, sometimes even anti-feminist one.  Beach once commented that she and Monnier didn’t practice the “cruelty to wives” that they observed at Stein’s.  So we’re back to this idea of truly trying to have a space that’s open to people along different lines of gender, race, and class. 
 


LE: But finally she loved her male writers, Sylvia Beach, and did most of her promoting for them... just think of that scene Beach describes, with Hemingway and Stephen Spender doing a double reading in 1937 at a table littered with bottles of beer and whiskey. 
So macho. I love that image, though!


SW: Me too, I love it! 



LE: Maybe we can get Martin Amis and Nam Le to split a bottle of whiskey at the festival this weekend. 
 


SW: I don’t think that would be difficult to arrange. 
 


KW: This is what I was so grateful to Jeanette Winterson for, because the Times Literary Supplement reviewer wrote “Sylvia Beach loved her blue-eyed boys.” True. But I love how Jeanette Winterson came back with a piece in the Times reminding everyone about “Her French lover, Adrienne Monnier.” We can’t fall into the idea that Beach wasn’t really a Left Bank lesbian because she didn’t talk about her sex life in her letters. And I love how Winterson broke the silence and came out and said, come on, with Sylvia Beach, we’re talking about a major chapter of gay history. 
 



[At this point we brought the chat to an end; Sylvia had to get back to last minute work for the festival, and Keri had left her husband writing upstairs in the bookshop.  Sylvia Beach would have approved.]  


**** Keri Walsh will be reading tonight at the American Library in Paris, at 19h30. 10, rue du Général Camou, 75007.

To buy The Letters of Sylvia Beach: Powells (US); The Book Depository (UK/Europe)

Or go to your local independent bookstore!

The Paris Magazine giveaway!

  It's here! Shakespeare and Company's newly-relaunched literary magazine, dubbed by founder George Whitman "The Poor Man's Paris Review," has just arrived at the shop. I picked up my copy last night and it is gorgeous-- chic and sexy and all the things you'd want a newly-relaunched literary magazine to be.

They're on sale at the shop for 6 euros, and with the biannual Shakespeare and Company literary festival coming up this weekend, I expect they'll sell briskly...

Inside there's a real eclectic mix of work, from Jeanette Winterson to Luc Sante to Lawrence Ferlinghetti to Marie NDiaye and Irène Nemirovsky and Michel Houellebeq to Rivka Galchen and Jeremy Harding.

That, my friends, is a wide range.

Chatting to Sylvia Whitman, I asked her if she had a favorite piece in the issue.  She said no, not really, but if she had to choose she'd opt for the Tumbleweed biographies.

"Tumbleweeds" is Shakespeare and Company slang for the writers who comes through the shop and stay a night (or a few years), sleeping amidst the books and helping out in the shop for an hour a day (and reading their required one book per day).  The French police required that George Whitman take the name, passport number, and photograph of each Tumbleweed who blew through, and that is how the Tumbleweed biographies began: before long they were each asked to contribute a mini-autobiography to the collection-- a few of which have been reproduced here.

My favorite begins like this: 

When my grandfather, David Rakovitze, arrived in South Africa in 1911 he bought a banana from a fruit seller. Having heard that this fruit was just one of the boundless pleasures available to him in this new land devoid of snow and pogroms, he no doubt had his hopes up.  He hated that banana. Years later, my family found out why-- he had never peeled it. How must this Jewish man from Neshviz, Latvia looked? 4 feet tall, his Semitic features standing out crude against the Dutch noses, blond hair and blue eyes of the Dutch settlers of Cape Town, eating a banana with the peel on, muttering Yiddish curses of disappointment?*

...And it only gets better from there.

SO. If you can write in with your favorite story about Shakespeare and Company, I will send you a copy of the magazine. The winner will be drawn at random, because I bet all your stories are great, and I'm not going to presume to judge which one is "best." Leave your story in the comments, or email me if you don't want it to appear on the site. I'll run a selection (say, the 4 runners up?) after the festival is over.

On your marks, get set.... go!

*This particular Tumbleweed went on to become a writer. Maybe you've heard of him.

Get out your tap shoes, Francis--

Shakespeare and Company's doing a magazine!

This just in from Publisher's Weekly (although I should have known months ago, when Charlotte Mandell told me she was translating a Marie NDiaye story for "some magazine about Shakespeare & Co.").

Here are the details:

Paris Magazine, edited by former Granta managing editor Fatema Ahmed, will include fiction, nonfiction, and illustrations. The current issue, with a 5,000-copy print run, contains a new translation of a poem by Apollinaire by Beat Generation writer Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a short story by N’Diaye, and another short story by Jesse Ball.

 

The bookstore will also award a 10,000 euro ($12, 292) prize every two years to the author of the best novella containing 20,000-30,000 words. Initial submissions are to be received by Dec. 1, 2010, and shortlisted entrants must submit their complete novella by March 1, 2011. The contest is open to unpublished writers only and there is an entry fee. Full details and entry forms will be made available on the bookstore’s website, on June 20, the last day of this year’s literary festival. The prize is sponsored by the De Groot Foundation.

Fire up those typewriters!

writing & residing at Shakespeare & Co.

If you aren't already subscribed to the Shakespeare & Co email newsletter, I highly recommend you put yourself on the list. Every month they send out a message stuffed with interesting tidbits, quotes, reviews, ideas, and news about upcoming events at the shop. You can sign up at their site, look in the upper left-hand corner for the words "sign up here".

This month's newsletter includes a few words from Michael Smith, author of The Giro Playboy and most recently Shakespeare & Co's writer-in-residence, on his time living above the bookshop in the special room reserved for visiting writers (which I hope he doesn't mind my excerpting here):

I had wanted to stay ever since a friend told me about this mythical room years ago, and now here I was, sitting at the big wooden desk below the guilded [sic] Belle Epoque mirror, hammering the words out while ‘Three Blind Mice’ peeled out from the bells of Notre Dame beyond the tall French windows... its gothic towers dominated the view from the little room covered floor to ceiling in rare and wonderful books... if you closed your eyes and reached out and picked one, it was virtually guaranteed to be fascinating... the place is a “free university” indeed... I would take a breather from the writing and the books and wander over the bridges of the islands while the Seine flowed beneath and Paris played out her promise to inspire the best in us... one afternoon I ended up in the Marais, and Proust’s writing room, which was covered in cork so he could work without the city sounds distracting him; I loved it; I thought my room, alive with the sounds of unfamiliar French police sirens and the ding dang dong of Notre Dame was better... one evening I found out Burroughs had written parts of Junkie or Naked Lunch in the same room I was staying in, and later on a great dirty cockroach scurried across the desk and winked at me from behind my cheese plate... the little bastard was a living link to a great and noble tradition, I thought, and I was very happy to be sharing that room and that tradition with him... so as I sit here now, remembering it all in the East End of London, I raise a glass to that noble tradition, and to Shakespeare and Co, and to all who sail in her. --Michael Smith

I'm not sure I would have found the cockroach as inspiring as he did (which is why I'm glad I'm a writer with my own roach-free apartment here in Paris), but the rest sounds pretty great.

Drawing on the Walls at Shakespeare & Company

Badaude is the bomb.  But you knew that; she's the one who designed the wonderful new banner for my blog this summer.  And apparently that task was quite inspiring to her, for when she met Sylvia Whitman in September at the Five Dials party (recounted here and here and here and documented here-- this one caught me and Badaude sitting on a bench, front and center!) she suggested doing the same thing to Sylvia's wall that she did to my blog! And the result is so fantastic I can't even tell you! Look:

But I'm not the only one who thinks Badaude's the bomb. BOMB thinks she is too! So Paul Morris interviewed her and you can read it here. An excerpt:

Paul Morris: Your illustrations are an interesting fusion of image and text. How does your experience as an artist inform your appreciation for literature in general—and for literary figures in particular?

Joanna Walsh: [...] My drawing always relates to writing, whether because I’m responding to a text or mixing my own writing and pictures. Writers are also “commercial” artists—books have to sell to a certain number of people in order to be published. This doesn’t mean that I think “blockbusters” are better than “literary fiction” because they sell more, but I am interested in the knife-edge balancing act whereby writers write what they have to in such a way that enough readers will want to go out and buy a copy.

In drawing the Shakespeare & Company writers—looking at the way they presented themselves in the reference photos I used-I became interested in how the image of being, and the story of becoming, a published writer in Paris was so central to the myth their lives; a myth so hugely attractive it frequently became their subject matter (Quartet, A Moveable Feast, Tropic of Cancer). This is why I chose the quote from Ulysses (full excerpt at bottom), hidden in the wallpaper design of the mural, in which Stephen Dedalus remembers his “Latin Quarter hat,” “puce gloves,” and other “Paris fads” with which he—and no doubt his hipster-goatee’d creator—furnished his Paris persona.

Here, on her own blog, she explains what it was like to draw on the walls of a 17th century building. (I made myself useful by erasing her pencil marks, handing her pens, and shelving books in the children's section with Sylvia and Gemma. Hey, if I'm only ever a handmaiden to genius, that's enough for me.)

And here is the text of the wonderful quote from Ulysses that snakes its way through the William Morris-inspired "wallpaper":

“My Latin quarter hat. God, we simply must dress the character. I want puce gloves. You were a student, weren’t you? Of what in the other devil’s name? Paysayenn. P. C. N., you know: physiques, chimiques et naturelles. Aha. Eating your groatsworth of mou en civet, fleshpots of Egypt, elbowed by belching cabmen. Just say in the most natural tone: when I was in Paris, boul’ Mich’, I used to. Yes, used to carry punched tickets to prove an alibi if they arrested you for murder somewhere. Justice. On the night of the seventeenth of February 1904 the prisoner was seen by two witnesses. Other fellow did it: other me. Hat, tie, overcoat, nose. Lui, c’est moi. You seem to have enjoyed yourself.”

Scenes from a Paris night, in the key of A

Badaude has outdone herself.  Here, she has immortalized the Five Dials launch party in one of her trademark sketches-- shunning all vowels except the letter A.  Why do such a thing? Because the reading included a brilliant almost-Oulipian poem by the not-Oulipian Joe Dunthorne, in which he used only the vowel I. On which, more later. For now, enjoy the drawing, and check out Badaude's account of the evening.

Can you spot me and Coquette? And Badaude? (hint: she's wearing Isabel Marant) And Sylvia and George Whitman?

In Paris this week

Well, I'm back from Hong Kong, and back to being a literary girl about town. (Which is kind of a contradiction in terms. I don't actually get around that much because mostly I am in my apartment, reading.)  This is a busy week! Let me tell you about it.

Last night I headed up to Belleville with Elisabeth for the semi-monthly Spoken Word poetry happening.  It was only my second time going, but I really like the atmosphere there-- part Beat, part bobo, with a dash of dada.  The series' host and founder, David Barnes, rules the stage in a top hat and, lately, arm cast.  The game goes like this: you read for 5 minutes.  Or you sing. Or you chant. But you only have 5 minutes, and the most dynamic your performance, the better. (It's an open mike format, and unfortunately, you do get a few mumblers and lacklusters mixed in with your dynamos.)

For writers who are also performers,  it's really a great forum. For those of us less dramatically-inclined*, there's beer on hand and the prospect of seeing some really special performances.

(*In fact I am super dramatically-inclined, just not when I'm myself. Give me a role in a play, however, and I'll tear up the scenery.)

*

So that was last night.  Now, tomorrow night is going to be really something: Opium Magazine are bringing their Literary Death Match to Paris! The always effervescent Todd Zuniga will be MCing--in French-- with the magazine's European editor, Kevin Dolgin.  Again, there's a game, and here's how it goes: four writers read their best stuff.  Three judges assess their performances on the basis of literary merit, originality, and panache. Hilarity ensues, or so I'm told.

Jean Hannah Edelstein summarized the buzz when LDM came to London:

The Literary Death Match is the brainchild of Todd Zuniga, the affable editor of Opium, an American literary magazine now (despite the bad odds of print) going strong in its eighth year. (Full disclosure: Zuniga is a friend of a close friend, although this week was the first time I met him.) Launched in New York, but now a key event on the cultural calendar in several American cities (last night was the European debut), the Death Match runs in three rounds, like a sort of manic, jolly, literary talent competition mixed with a bit of a game of chance.

The writers on trial tomorrow night are Frédéric Beigbeder (sigh), Philippe Jaenada, Max Monnehay, and Mohamed Razane.  The judges are David Foenkinos (whose latest novel, La Délicatesse, is the only author of la rentrée to see his book nominated for four different awards, including the Goncourt and the Femina), Yorgos Archimandritis, and a person called Bo.

Trust me, if you are any kind of literary-type person and you live in Paris and you like to think of yourself as savvy and with-it, you will not want to miss this event.

When: Wednesday, September 23; Doors at 7:00, show at 8:00 p.m. (sharp) 
Where: Le Reservoir: 16, rue de la Forge Royale, Paris 11.  Remember that you can have dinner at Le Reservoir.  For reservations call 0143563960
Cost: €10

*

Then on Friday night, issue #8 of the London-based online literary magazine Five Dials is having a launch party at Shakespeare and Company. What's so special about issue #8? Why, it's an issue dedicated solely to Paris! And in it you will find the work of an illustrious group of writers on the City of Light: Ali Smith, Albert Camus, Susan Sontag, Badaude, and Lauren Elkin.

Yes, you read that right! I have a piece on the bookselling scene in Paris, and I will be sure to link to it when it goes live. But that will not happen until 11 pm Paris time on Friday evening! So come on down to Shakespeare and Co and be there when the editors, Craig Taylor and Simon Prosser, hit send.  There'll also be readings from Steve Toltz and Joe Dunthorne. I guess they're in it too, or something. 

Friday September 25th, 7 pm

Shakespeare and Company

38 rue de la Bûcherie, 75005

my maybe best birthday ever

Saturday was my 30th birthday, and Paris cooked up the most wonderful surprises for me.  Beshert, you say in Yiddish when something is meant to be.  Generally people are referring to your spouse when they say this.  But for me, I think it might be Paris. Paris and I are beshert. (Don't tell N. We're beshert too. But in a more human sense of the term.)

Since Thursday I had been doing the Faber Academy writing seminar with Tobias Hill and Jeanette Winterson at Shakespeare & Company. My new friend and colleague Elizabeth blogged all about it here and here (with photos. Loads more photos here).  By Saturday, we were all fast friends, and when I arrived in the morning I was greeted with flowers, a gift, a card-- and everyone's good wishes. Somehow I had assumed a birthday would be a minor event, to be passed over in favor of the main event: writing.  But I forgot that writers are often large-hearted, sensitive people, and for the entire day, I was showered with attention. It was as if I had made my bat mitzvah. (Which I never did. So this was nice.)

By evening, following a rousing session with Jeanette on verbs, we retired from the upstairs library to the front porch of the bookshop.  A cake from Eric Kayser emerged and Jeanette Winterson popped open five bottles of champagne and started pouring. On cue, the bells of Notre Dame, directly across the river from the shop, began to ring. It was my birthday, so I rambled to Jeanette about my dissertation.  Because it was my birthday, she listened politely.

After champagne and cake it was off to an group dinner at La Coupole, where thirty of us (writers, teachers, spouses, & friends) gorged ourselves on chevre, oysters, pavé, and quenelle de brochet. I had to leave before dessert as I had organized a party at Au Rendez-vous des amis in Montmartre at 9 pm and it was 9:30 when I looked up from my pavé to my watch-- let's just say I ran out at full tilt leaving a lot of confused people behind me.*

It was a straight shot on the 12, so I sat and tried not to stress as we ticked off stop after stop, Madeleine, St Lazare, St Georges... When we stopped at Notre Dame de Lorette I caught the eye of a young guy on the platform. He darted up to me, jumped into the car, blew me a kiss, and ran off.  I blushed and consulted my iPod, trying to avoid the stares of the other passengers. "It's my birthday," I wanted to explain. "That's why I'm glowing and that's why I'm wearing red lipstick and that's why that guy just blew me a kiss. Ca se voit."

I made it to the bar and rounded up the gang.  It was too hot in the bar, so we stood out on the sidewalk, enjoying the balmy October weather.  People arrived a few at a time. Anna brought cookies. Sophie took pictures. Rob was in from the Southwest. Meg brought her mystery man. Jacques came and proved he's not only N's friend. The mommies came too: Cath let the hubby watch the Tadpole. Abby got a babysitter.  Alice parted from Emma for her first evening out. And because we're beshert, Paris arranged for a spectacular round of fireworks, just for me.

Ok, and for 104. But for me too.

So merci, merci, et encore merci. Je n'aurais jamais su attendre à tout ça et vous êtes tous des anges. Merci et bon anniversaire à tout le monde!

*Many of whom were not confused at all about why I couldn't make it to the last day of class on Sunday. I can party like a rock star, but I get hung over like... a lightweight.