English Bookshops and a Mexican Restaurant, Paris, 1990
I’m suffering from the would-be writer’s delusion of waiting for the muse to visit; hoping that the ghosts of Hemingway and Joyce will work their magic. I’m in Paris to check out the English book scene and am wondering if can get a job connected to it. I visit the city’s legendary Shakespeare and Company, an independent bookshop located in the fifth arrondissement, in Paris’s Left Bank. Its octogenarian owner George Whitman keeps the shop open late into the night and you can find work but only in exchange for accommodation. George thinks of his temporary tenants — ‘tumbleweeds’ — as budding writers; they are required to read a book a day as part of the deal which allows them to sleep in the shop among the shelves of books.
The original proprietor was Sylvia Beach and her shop was located at 12 rue de l’Odéon. The shop was frequented by artists of the ‘Lost Generation’, such as Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce. Shakespeare and Company, as well as its literary denizens, was repeatedly mentioned in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, a paperback which I automatically buy whenever I come across a copy out of a strange sense of loyalty to my memories of Paris, as well as those of Hemingway’s. Not that I remotely equate the two.
It was Sylvia Beach who first published Joyce’s book Ulysses in 1922. The book was subsequently banned in the United States and United Kingdom. The original Shakespeare and Company published several other editions of Ulysses under its imprint in later years. D. H. Lawrence wanted Sylvia Beach to published Lady Chatterley’s Lover, to hamper the circulation of an unauthorised edition doing the rounds in Paris. She refused Lawrence’s Lady, citing a lack of capital and time. She later wrote that it was ‘impossible to say that I wanted to be a one-book publisher, what could anybody offer after Ulysses?’
One morning eight years later, in March 2000, a lady strides through the doors of my shop in Montpellier to drop off a plastic bag bulging with books. ‘Cadeaux’ she shouts, before walking swiftly back out. Such donations aren’t that uncommon. In having a good clear out, people regularly come by to ‘dump’ their unwanted English books. I encourage the practice, as there are usually some books worth saving. This time the bag is stuffed with old textbooks of limited usefulness, but below them, nestling at the bottom of the bag, is a large, and unusual paperback.
Ulysses: Shakespeare and Company, 1924. Original cover (white with blue lettering). 4 page corrections bound in at rear of volume. 8th Printing. Original Blue wrappers.
It didn’t stay long in the shop, a dealer in Joyce taking it off my hands. I was going to write that the book returned to Ireland. But it didn’t, of course, as a physical object, hail from Dublin, although its characters did. Joyce’s thoughts were rarely in exile.
The sale’s proceeds of £400 were shared with my then business partner.
Back to Paris, and a gruff sounding George is explaining Tumbleweed Hotel’s modus operandi. He invites me to lunch but I make my excuses and leave. Oddly enough, I don’t feel that comfortable in the bookish atmosphere and being around so many bohemian types. I also realise that there is no paid work on offer.
I get a friendly reception in Tea and Tattered Pages, a retail concept I later adopt in Montpellier. But they say, almost apologetically, that there are no jobs going.
Abbey Bookshop, a small shop specialising in Canadian books and literature, certainly doesn’t raise any expectations either.
Nearby is another shop in the vicinity of the Sorbonne which I come across by accident. I recognise its name — Attica — and inside the shop its manager explains that it is the sister business, as it were, of the shop in Rue Folie Méricourt in the eleventh arrondissement, an establishment selling foreign language textbooks in the main and teaching aids.
David is decidedly foppish with his smart linen jacket and blond hair which he is forever sweeping back from his forehead. He is in his early thirties and articulate in English while retaining a strong French accent. Holding forth is a long-haired, dark complexioned American student called Jan. He talks intensely about the utilitarianism of the Red Indians and David is listening with a distracted air to stories of buffalo being forced off cliffs. (I think the conversation owes its origin to the imminent release of Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves.) In ascertaining that Jan is soon to return home, I sense there may be a job opportunity. I buy some books, including Money by Martin Amis, which is probably a subconscious choice, and end up staying a while since David is in chatty mood. He’s pleased to hear that I’m from London. He’s quite the anglophile and I soon learn that he used to live with an ‘East End girl’. I exaggerate my city boy credentials and get offered a couple of afternoons’ work a week.
David likes to play the generous host; his benevolence extending to books. The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron is one of his early gifts. It brilliantly recounts the author’s journey through the Middle East to Oxiana — the country of the Oxus, the ancient name for the river Amu Darya, which forms part of the border between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. It stirs the wanderlust. We travel to Chartres; our travelling ambitions not extending to buying a plane ticket to Kabul. We marvel at the Gothic architecture which years later will be a comforting sight on my travels between France and the UK. The immense cathedral is visible from miles away as you approach it by road through the surrounding flat fields of wheat. Within five minutes of the town’s historical heart is the camp-site Les bords de l’Eure, situated beside the gently flowing waters of the Eure — where I will regularly stay in years to come since it conveniently breaks up the journey between Montpellier and Bangor.
Ostensibly, I make sure that the books are arranged in alphabetical order. My real task, I suspect, is to alleviate David’s boredom. The shop isn’t that busy and the only regulars are a motley crew of characters, myself included, who rarely leave with purchased books. There is a tall Irish aristocrat who could be a character straight out of a J. P. Donleavy novel. Outspoken and on the wrong side of thirty, he is considerable older than his livewire Serbian girlfriend, whose outrageous ideas mix madness and brilliance. They are scathing in their opinion of George Whitman after spending eight years as ‘tumbleweeds’ before falling out with him. Whitman’s current head honcho is Karl. Ernest and intellectual, he is a much calmer presence. When he isn’t working at Shakespeare and Company, he is publishing books through his own press called Alyscamps. Serendipity runs through our lives and the book world is no exception. Karl publishes in 1994 A Dream in the Luxembourg by Richard Aldington with a preface by Lawrence Durrell. The following year Richard Adlington’s daughter walks into my shop. I know that many consider the central idea in John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation to be an urban myth. But my experiences suggest that its premise is plausible. That if a person is one step away from each person they know and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people they know, then everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on Earth.
Some sort of deal has been struck. George Whitman turns up at Attica with a couple of ‘tumbleweeds’ in tow (both American girl students) who each carry a large ‘mail’ sack. David exits the shop for a cigarette and George is soon shuffling around, nonchalantly pulling books, mostly paperbacks, from the shelves. He lets them fall to the floor and the girls obligingly bend down to pick them up. It is an astonishing sight. This bearded and elderly gentleman muttering to himself as he peruses the shelves, setting off mini avalanches of paper up and down the shop. He continues in this fashion until the girls protest at the weight of the bags.