Shakespeare&Co.

George Whitman, owner of the left bank Paris bookstore called Shakespeare&Co., died three weeks ago. He was 98. I heard about it through one of the many American/French blogs I subscribe to, and felt an unexpected twinge of sadness.

I moved to Paris in the summer of 1975, to begin a year long course in French at the Sorbonne. I knew two people there; a French friend of my mother’s, named Michelle, and her daughter, Emily, who was a couple of years younger than I. Michelle helped me find a teeny studio apartment on the edge of Paris, that had a four foot corner kitchenette with a two-burner hot plate, a mini fridge, a sink and an odd contraption similar to an oven but … not quite. The two most significant plusses were the floor to ceiling windows (huge plus in a city as grey as Paris), and a bathtub.

Like all expats, short-termers or long, I eventually found my way to this musty, dusty bookstore a half block off the Seine and just across the river from Notre Dame. There were piles of cheap books outside, a boon to the poor student population, and floor to ceiling stacks of “literature” inside: an amazing mix of low and highbrow, practical and spiritual, art books, cook books, endless books for everybody.

 

I was in school full time Monday through Friday, but I began to hang out there on weekends. In part because I was lonely and hoped to find friends, and in part because I felt cool to be hanging in a place so many cool people had hung out in. I was in the in-crowd, if only in my mind. Then, miracle of miracles, George hired me to work weekend afternoons. Naturally that cemented my place in the in-crowd, and couldn’t be denied. All of us stuffed the back pockets of our ratty jeans with copies of any Hermann Hesse book, Hemmingway’s A Moveable Feast (obviously) and Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, and felt – as every generation who’s visited this little store – as though we invented being poor and cool in Paris.

 

A saxophone player named Theo, lots and lots older than I, began to court me, and his attentions were most flattering. He’d known a lot of musicians in Paris, along with a couple of fringe beat poets, and one day he took me to meet Gregory Corso, the youngest of the true beat poets, and beloved by Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs. So, really, how cool was that? How cool was I?

Theo and I hung out together until the night I accidentally played a Big Brother and the Holding Company record (the record player I owned was such a piece of crap that I had to balance a one-franc piece on the needle to make it play). Turns out Theo – who was black – had a real problem with white chicks thinking themselves blues singers, and there was nobody but me there on which to express his anti-Janis fury. Once I pried his fingers from around my neck, I suggested we not see each other again. Funny how being strangled matures one; I then became a lot more careful.

Then I met John K., an American Irish Catholic, who was just a little older than I, and gorgeous, with JFK looks and lots of unruly hair. John was a good man, and so full of religious guilt that we didn’t enjoy a completely satisfying physical relationship. But I will never forget him, because one night, way past midnight, he got down on one knee and sang Oh Danny Boy to me at the Palmier Fountain in the Place du Châtelet. He had a beautiful voice and I’d have been completely seduced ‘cept he really wasn’t in a position to do anything about it. I’ve always been a sucker for men who make music.

One Sunday afternoon at Shakespeare&Co., I met Greg H., a Canadian who was living with an intimidatingly fabulous model in fairly luxe digs, but who was perpetually heartbroken by her rambling ways. Greg had been living in Paris for several years at that point, and he had a true circle of friends, into which he generously invited me. We were all poor, working under the table since none of us had papers, and one night he picked up a bartending gig at the Canadian Cultural Center, for the opening night of a photography exhibition. Naturally he invited all of us, since there would be free food and drink, but we had to behave, and act as though we were devotees of the medium, so he wouldn’t get in trouble and lose that lovely connection.

I’m not clear now on how well we behaved (there was that one exceedingly indiscreet question I posed to a small group of Jesuit priests), but none of us were asked to leave, and when we finally did leave – a group of about eight - it was quite late and we were all a little unsteady, so we pooled our few sous and rented a hotel room nearby. Greg and a friend of his went into reserve the room, counting out the charge in loose change and five franc notes, and one by one, we each snuck in, so management wouldn’t know how many people would be occupying the tiny space. It was an old hotel, bathroom down the hall, and a small sink within the room itself. At one point in the night, one of the drunken members of the group decided not to bother with the walk down the hall, and tried to pee in the sink, which promptly fell from the wall.

We tiptoed out at dawn, before anybody noticed the mangled plumbing, but I left with Terry L., who, two years later in a down-at-the-heels pensione in Rome, asked me to marry him...which I did. 

 

Terry worked for a French theatrical company, building sets, and had a circle of French friends. This was as scary as hell, since going to school to learn French, reading it, doing homework and conjugating verbs is one thing; to sit in bars with real live French people shooting the shit, drinking cheap red plonk until all hours, is completely another. My French improved fast!

Summer arrived and I returned to the states for a couple of months, leaving my studio to Terry to sublet. When I returned, he just stayed, which felt completely natural, and we spent the next twenty-four years together. I finally had friends. It had taken a year, but I was now surrounded by a warm-hearted group of American and Canadian expats, and a clever, mercurial bunch of French actors.

Terry and I set up housekeeping, and it seemed that I was going to have to entertain his friends. Only one other couple could fit in that space at a time, and only if their knees were young enough to sit cross-legged on the floor, but it became clear that I was going to have to produce food. Good food. Good food for French eaters.

Overwhelmed, I headed back to Shakespeare&Co one day, and picked up a paperback copy of The Joy of Cooking and the two daunting volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. One Christmas, years and years later, when we were back living in the states, Terry gave me new hardback editions of both, so I threw out the old ones that had been randomly scattering pages for years.

 

 

I hadn’t thought about those cook books until I heard George had died. I so wish I had kept them.

Credit for the photograph of the exterior of Shakespeare&Co. to Laertes (Jon Hurd) and flickr.

Credit for the photograph of the interior of Shakespeare&Co. to Jonbeebe, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Credit for the Palmier Fountain to R.F. Rumbao.

Comments

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Loved every word of it!