Why “Shakespeare and Company” is the most important place in all Paris:
“They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris,” chuckled Sir Thomas…
“Really! And where do bad Americans go to when they die?” inquired the Duchess.
“They go to America,” murmured Lord Henry.-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
I thought I had been fairly thorough: I visited the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triumph, and Sacre Coeur. I gawked at the bells of Notre Dame, the windows in Saint Chapelle, and basked in the neon glow of the Moulin Rouge. The ten days of my visit, I feasted on endless pain aux raisin with cafe crème in streetside cafes, flailing hopelessly in french, enchanted with endless boulangeries, fromageries, and hordes of chinese tourists. I even got out of town for a day to see Versailles and Marie Antoinette’s “Petit Trianon”.
When I returned home, I recovered from my postpartum blues with a Lost Generation binge of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. I had been convinced I hated Hemingway’s icy prose and flimsy heroines until he exposed his soft underbelly in “A Moveable Feast”. That was when I first heard of Shakespeare and Co. and marked it down for a future visit.
“Shakespeare and Company” was a bookstore created by American Sylvia Beach on the Left Bank in 1919. Besides selling English language books, Sylvia loaned books to promising young authors. The store quickly became a central point for ex-pat writers like Ezra Pound, Hemingway, James Joyce, and Fitzgerald. When the war came, the shop closed in 1941. Despite Hemingway “personally liberating” the place after the war, it never reopened. In 1951, a friend of Sylvia’s, George Whitman opened his own bookshop called “Le Mistral” modeled after Shakespeare and Co, fulfilling the legacy of the bohemian cultural center. in 1958, Sylvia gave George usage of the name of her beloved shop, which is Shakespeare and Co today.
Since George’s death in 2011, Shakespeare and Company has been run by his daughter, Sylvia Whitman (named after Beach). Upstairs hides several small cots and beds, which are part of the shop’s informal “residency” program. Young artists and writers, “Tumbleweeds”, as they are called, are invited to stay in the shop for free, in return for helping out. An estimated 30,000 aspiring artists have stayed here since 1951
As a lover of books, I am also in love with bookstores, especially the used variety, with crammed-full dusty shelves, or the thoughtful type, full of esoteric titles hand-picked by artsy college students. This was more the latter than the former.
On entry, I was underwhelmed. This place had plenty of books, of course, and a little cafe next door. The downstairs was a madhouse of noisy tourists, wafting in and out, munching vegan coffee cake.
Upstairs it is quieter. Only perhaps 40% of nosy visitors wind their way up the narrow steps. There, one finds a spinnet and scraps of sheet music (always exciting to musicians like me.) There are several pillowed benches which double as cots and a few nooks with typewriters including one surrounded by post-it notes of poetry, pinned to the wall. My husband left me a note there himself and won’t tell me what it says “until next time”.
One typewriter sits alone by a small window, facing Notre Dame in all her glory.
Ignoring my usual haste to hurry in and out, I took a seat, moleskin notebook in hand, sketching the typewriter and jotting down a few lines.
I am an impatient traveler, always racing to explore the next corner, filling my days as if they are numbered, which of course, they are. But a day raced through goes no slower and the number of places visited does not increase their worth. This trip, I had disciplined myself with daily journaling to better remember each day, an attempt to hold more of the sand sifting between my fingers.
And as I sat, the magic began to happen. Like a butterfly, magic will not approach so readily if you are in a rush. But if you sit very still and pay close attention, you may get a glimpse out of the corner of your eye. You see, my husband was with me too, and he took a seat with a likely old tome to peruse as I journaled. And a homeless drunk came upstairs.
This disheveled creature had been wandering for some time, muttering to herself, bumping into selfie shooting tourists (“No pictures, please”), careening through the shelves on a mysterious errand of her own.
When this ivrogne sat next to Brian, muttering half to him, half to herself, I immediately put myself on guard. His french isn’t very good, you see, and I’m always on the alert to remove us from a bad situation. But when he gestured helplessly at her french, she switched to English, and they began a kind of dreamy conversation.
I couldn’t catch all of it, neither, I think, could Brian, as she kept lapsing in and out of her native language, but she spoke of loneliness and he listened, patiently. She asked him his favorite book. Then she spoke of how a novel can capture a place eternally, whether or not it ever really existed at all, and the comfort a book can bring in taking you along with it on a journey to somewhere safe, somewhere far and always comfortable. She spoke of her family, about regret, and alcoholism. With no perceptible change in emotion, she explained how drink will kill you. As she sat on the bench, the bottle in her shopping bag shattered with a melancholy tinkle. She didn’t notice.
As I sat there, I realized what the shop really meant, what it really stood for. Shakespeare and Co. is more than just another English bookstore, a tiny Anglo island in the Parisian sea. It’s more than another historical haunt of famous writers with a tiny placard on the wall, “Hemingway sat here”.
Shakespeare and Company represents the Foreigner’s dream of Paris. Like New York, the Big Apple, the Land of Golden Opportunity to immigrants, Paris has long been the promised land for artists, musicians, and writers, for the melancholy and the mad, the sparkling and the tarnished alike. New York is many things to many people, a gritty, filthy city of chaos and culture, but through the dream of the immigrant we glimpse what New York could be, what New York represents. In Shakespeare and Co., we see Paris as the dream of the foreigner, as it was a haven for the Lost.
Seated at the dusty typewriter, looking out that tiny window over Notre Dame, we too can see the most magical view of Paris: that of the heart.
For more information on “Shakespeare and Company”, their events, and inquiries on their residency programs, visit their website.