George Whitman with his daughter, Sylvia (named for Sylvia Beach)
Long ago, in a world preceding the European Union, the euro, and the tsunami of American students who go to Paris every semester for classes ranging from “Paris, Cinema City” to “French Political Life,” I was a pastry salesgirl in Versailles. I spent most of my days off in Paris, and when I needed a hit of American culture, I skipped over to Shakespeare and Company, the little bookstore facing Notre-Dame from the Left Bank.
Back then, Shakespeare was run by George Whitman, a one-time vagabond and consummate littérateur who had come to Paris after the Second World War to study at the Sorbonne. By the time I knew him, he’d come to look like a rather puckish Trotsky, with unkempt gray hair and goatee. “Knew him” is perhaps hyperbole. He noticed me, as he must have noticed others, browsing for hours in the bookshop. One day, without ceremony, he plucked my sleeve and asked, “Would you mind taking over the caisse? I’ve got to get some coffee.”
And so I sat myself down, facing outward toward the Seine and Notre-Dame, at the small desk that served as a checkout counter, with its moneybox in the drawer. There were no credit cards; we accepted travelers’ checks. Patrons would come up to me with a book, and I would examine the covers — front, back, outside, inside — for the French price. When I found it, I charged it and made change. When I found no price, I guessed at one. If someone wanted a receipt, I pulled out one of the bookshop’s frayed cards, wrote the price and “received” on the back, and signed my name. I felt like a complete fraud, but I also felt myself, briefly, caught up in a piece of history.
I thought, back then, that George had inherited Shakespeare and Company from the legendary Sylvia Beach, who founded it during the great period of literary flowering in 1920s Paris. Not true, as I later learned. George had his own enormous collection of books in Paris, most of which he lent out to anyone who asked, and when he opened his shop in a former Algerian grocery, it was originally called Le Mistral, after the violent wind of the Mediterranean. Only after Shakespeare and Company. had been shuttered for more than two decades was George persuaded to adopt the name.
I bought my first copy of Ulysses at George’s shop and read much of it there. Among the heavy stacks, I wrestled with Wyndham Lewis and Djuna Barnes. I discovered James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, such a far cry from the Baldwin of my imagination that I could not reconcile the two. Week after week I came back, hoping each time that George would ask me to mind the caisse and sometimes getting my wish.
I lived, then, in a one-room flat two doors down from the pastry shop on a street that ended in the Bassin de Neptune. I couldn’t accommodate the few friends who visited from the States, so I took them down to Shakespeare and Company, where they surrendered their passports to be registered as “hotel guests” by the préfecture. They pledged to read a book every night. Then they slept on one of the couches in the reading room above the bookshop, serviced by the Turkish toilet in the corner closet.
One night, having stayed too long in these quarters with a rather boring college buddy whom I was placing there, I had started back toward the Gare Montparnasse when I realized that the last train to Versailles had left. I stood for a moment on the rue Saint-Jacques in the warm, quiet August night. I could have gone back to the bookshop, but George had gone home for the night; all that remained were scruffy college students smoking weed and trying to say smart things about Sartre. The next train left at 5:45 a.m., plenty of time for me to catch a shower and show up in my black skirt and white blouse at the pastry shop. I slipped through the gates of the church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, curled up on the thin grass under a tree, and felt the air of Paris settle over me like a blanket.
George died six years ago, at the age of 98, astonishing for a man whom I remember with a cigarette more or less permanently dangling from his lips. Last month, when the box containing all my teaching materials was held up by customs, I went to Shakespeare and Company in the incessant rain visiting Paris this year. To get in, I had to stand in line with the drenched, giggling tourists. The book I needed (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by Gertrude Stein) was right there, in the well-organized “Jazz Age” section. The counter — facing in toward the shop now, rather than looking out at the cathedral — was staffed by a pair of cheerful young British people who swiped my credit card efficiently.
But yes, they said, people still sleep upstairs. And the shop was, still, selling lots and lots of books. I think George would be content.