Go Feedback: BILLY O'CALLAGHANbeds down at Shakespeare and Company – the legendary Paris bookshop associated with Joyce and Hemmingway
SHAKESPEARE and Company, a rambling bookshop situated in Paris’s Latin Quarter and perched right on the banks of the Seine, has for decades remained devoted to a well-rubbed mantra: “Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.”
And so, writers come whistling in on the sweep of the river winds. They are known as “tumbleweeds” and arrive in droves to bask among the books, to spend some time scribbling inside these hallowed walls, to emit long trembling breaths as the vibe takes them, the sensory over- loading of history, of eternity.
Over a period of 60 years, guest estimates approach 50,000 at a casual count, pilgrims traipsing in to ask after a bed for the night, the week, the month. The way Burroughs did, and James Baldwin, Henry Miller, Ginsberg, Richard Wright, Lawrence Durrell, Gregory Corso and multitudes more. The way I do, on a bitterly cold January afternoon.
Of course, this is far more than just a bookshop. It is a kind of bibliophilic elysian fields, a doss-house for the widest-eyed dreamers, a living, functioning museum, a relic of a bygone era, a little Parisian corner against all odds preserving the beat and swing of the city’s Jazz Age zenith. Here is where the brilliant colours of myth and reality run together.
That the place as you see it now is not, in fact, the original shop does nothing to detract from its mystique. The first Shakespeare and Company, the one established by the venerable Sylvia Beach back in 1919, the one inextricably associated with that golden Lost Generation of Hemingway, Joyce, Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and so on, literati ad infinitum, was located in the 6th Arrondissement, at 12 rue de l'Odéon. Beach, who published Ulysseswhen the rest of the world could not turn its back quickly enough on Dublin's smiling, leering son, finally shut up shop in 1941 and took internment rather than sell her last remaining copy of Finnegan's Waketo a Nazi.
By the time of her death, 20 years later, the current incarnation of her vision had already opened its doors, housed in the granite bones of a 16th-century monastery, under the gently eccentric hand of George Whitman. Whitman inherited the name, and the ethos, and he opened up his home, shop and life to all comers, wishful thinkers and mighty alike.
Even now, in his late 90s, books are his passion. People too. A communist at heart, but more accurately an idealist, he has created a kind of sanctuary, a breathing space at the core of a rabid city, for writers, artists and freethinkers to nurture their gifts. Legend has been his reward.
Today, the torch has passed to George’s daughter, Sylvia, a sparkling, energetic soul who is determined to preserve her father’s vision. She has inherited a labyrinth. Downstairs is split unevenly in two. One side collects valuable antique volumes; the other, the main bookshop, deals in new and used stock.
Browsers can wander up the backstairs to the reading room, with its circling of benched cushion-seating and stunning array of books, to read away an afternoon. There is a piano, if you feel like playing; there is a typewriter, if the muse hits. The shop hosts readings, book and philosophy clubs here, runs workshops, shows films.
My room is cluttered with crates of books stocked to fill university orders as well as bookcases stuffed with old and older joys. On a bleak Parisian afternoon, it looks, feels and smells like every kind of heaven. And I am privileged to have a room, but they give priority to writers and I score not just a bed but a little living space where I can put in five, six hours of work on my novel.
If you are after anaemic cleanliness and wall-to-wall luxury, then you have turned the wrong corner. This is bohemian living, and a very rare kind of freedom. Everyone smiles here, not because they feel they should but because they can’t help themselves. Through the evening, the other tumbleweeds flit in and out, as do the staff, pausing for a minute or 10 to chat, to ask where I’m coming from, where I am going. They laugh a lot, spontaneously, and volunteer their own life stories, about what drew them from Texas, or California or Nova Scotia. There is a real sense of euphoria at being part of something that matters.
Then, at 11pm, the doors close, and a kind of stillness descends. The bed, small, narrow, laden in the sort of blankets well used by now to the likes of me, is tucked in beside a window with glass sporting a crude but impressively accurate whitewashed line-portrait of Virginia Woolf caught in mid-read. The view is pure gold bullion, showing out onto the close-in brooding chunk of Notre Dame’s night-lit cathedral.
And sometime in the smallest hours of morning, I settle down with Ulysses. Joyce talks the night away, in long rambling sentences that make little or no sense as they build, but which bloom like lightning once they hit their fullest stop. On towards dawn, in fact, until bleary-eyed and sloshed on happiness, it is time to drift away.
- Shakespeare and Company is not a hotel, but rooms (and beds) are available on an informal basis. Priority is given to writers, published or unpublished, and there is no charge for the accommodation, though sometimes guests are asked to work for an hour or two in the shop. Call 00-33-1432-54093 or see shake speareandcompany.com.