Category Archives: Shakespeare & Co

On George Whitman, 1913-2011

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George
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

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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."

 

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And the winner is

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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

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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!

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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:

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

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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

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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

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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…

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…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

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Poster jw 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

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DSC_0014 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.