Shakespeare & Company
Updated: Aug 31
After spending long hours in the university library, I begin to feel tired. It is getting dark. I pick up my coffee from Café Strada and start walking under a light drizzle. The weather is cool, but as I walk, I take great pleasure in the weariness that comes from having worked for long hours. The warmth of the coffee warms my hand.
The smells coming from the shops I pass whet my appetite. As I am walking past one of them, I stop to avoid colliding with a few students who suddenly come out of the shop; I look up. The smells coming from inside this particular shop whet my appetite in an entirely different way. Without hesitation, I step inside.
The dusty smell of aged straw-coloured paper mingles with the scent of the old wooden floor. Books are everywhere. Shelves cover all the walls. A middle-aged woman walks around with a list in her hand, climbs a ladder and places books on the shelves. She also sorts some books beside the cash register and says something to the young man standing behind it. The place has a wonderfully warm atmosphere, somewhere between a home, a library and a bookshop. I become a regular. The bookshop’s unpretentious, slightly ramshackle atmosphere fits perfectly with the culture of Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley.
James Joyce is presented to the reader differently here. I do not understand why, and at this point I have no idea what I am going to discover after entering that shop. The sign at the entrance to the bookshop bears the names of several cities: Paris, Bogota, Berkeley, ...
I am in Paris for New Year’s Eve, as 1996 turns into 1997. These are the first days of my new life in Geneva. A three-and-a-half-hour train journey takes me straight to Paris. Europe is experiencing a bitterly cold winter. Everything is frozen. People hurry through the streets, looking for somewhere warm to take shelter.
On Boulevard Saint-Michel, the frozen water of the street fountain in front of the grand entrance to the Jardin du Luxembourg is astonishing. The water has frozen into blocks of ice in the very shapes it assumed while flowing. I keep walking, disregarding the cold yet feeling it all the same. I pass Notre-Dame. By now, I need to find an excuse to go inside somewhere and warm myself. For a moment, a shop with books displayed outside catches my attention. I see its yellow sign and the names of cities written on it. The words on the sign surprise me: Shakespeare & Company. Just as I did in Berkeley, I immediately step inside.
Once we begin talking, I learn that the man walking around, sorting books and placing them on the shelves is called George. At that moment, the only thought in my mind is that I have discovered the Paris branch of the bookshop that had added colour to my life in Berkeley. Later, however, I realise that I was wrong.
George opened the bookstore in 1951. He named it after Sylvia Beach, who had previously owned the bookstore under the name Shakespeare & Company . I pick up a few books and leaf through their pages. Why, when I was in Berkeley, had I never gone looking for the bookshop whose sign said Paris, only to stumble upon it by chance? I am annoyed with myself, but never mind. At least I have found it.
People who reached adulthood during the years of the First World War are described in some parts of the world as the “Lost Generation.” The reason for the word “lost” is that the devastating effects of the war years on human life left this generation without direction or purpose. There is, however, a particular context in which the expression “Lost Generation” acquired a specific meaning in literature. It is used especially to describe a group of American writers who lived in Paris during the 1920s.
The day after discovering Shakespeare & Company in Paris, I return to the shop. George is there again. I learn that his home is also on the floor above the bookshop. Our conversation goes deeper than it had the previous day. When he sees that I have come two days in succession, he notices my interest and begins telling me the history of the bookshop in greater detail. The more I listen, the more I enjoy what George has to tell me. What I hear that day gives me one of the most unforgettable conversations of my life.
I buy two books telling the story of Shakespeare & Company, one of them written by Sylvia Beach. I read them over the following days and combine what I read with what George has told me. Thanks to George, it is almost as though I am living what I have learned.
Sylvia Beach was the first person to open a bookshop in Paris under the name Shakespeare & Company. The year was 1919. Shakespeare & Company became a regular gathering place for the literary figures known as the Lost Generation. Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, André Gide, Paul Valéry, F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce were among those who would spend hours immersed in conversation at Sylvia Beach’s bookshop. But when James Joyce’s Ulysses was published by Shakespeare & Company in 1922, the names James Joyce and Shakespeare & Company became inseparable.
Paris was occupied by the Germans, and Shakespeare & Company closed in 1941. Sylvia Beach was also arrested by the Germans for a period in 1943.
George opened what is today Shakespeare & Company under the name Le Mistral in 1951. George was also a close friend of Sylvia Beach and belonged to the circle surrounding her.
There was another person who completed his doctorate at the University of Paris in 1951 and was a close friend of George: Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He, too, was American.
During my Berkeley days, I would frequently go to the Italian neighbourhood of North Beach in San Francisco. I would never return to Berkeley without visiting City Lights Bookstore. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, like George, was an elderly man who was always sitting in the bookshop. I would talk to him every time I went there. The conversations I had begun without knowing who he was took on an entirely different meaning once I discovered his identity.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti had told me about the days he spent with members of the Beat movement such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Lucien Carr. Although he did not accept that he himself was a member of the Beat movement, there was a strong perception that he was part of it. Magazines of the period even claimed that, in the placid world of the 1950s, the Beat movement was the only thing generating any excitement. San Francisco and Beat America were almost perceived as another country with a people of their own.
I had a book containing interviews with representatives of the Beat movement. Lawrence Ferlinghetti was among those interviewed. I read the book with enormous pleasure, feeling Berkeley, San Francisco and Paris all at once. I had not yet discovered Shakespeare & Company, but it was exciting to talk to someone who could almost be regarded as a member of a movement that had become part of world literature.
After I began talking with George in Paris and started reading about Shakespeare & Company, I learned that George and Lawrence Ferlinghetti had met around the time George opened Le Mistral. Then I learned that George was George Whitman. The George Whitman I had read about, but whose life story I had never known. City Lights in San Francisco, Shakespeare & Company in Berkeley and Shakespeare & Company in Paris opened an extraordinary window for me. Both through reading and through conversations with people who had witnessed history and had themselves been part of literary movements.
When you go to Paris, you discover Victor Hugo. When you walk through the streets of Le Marais, the air you breathe seems saturated with Parisian aristocracy. You want to feel Quasimodo or Napoleon, but to experience, through such coincidences, such a profound sense of the Lost Generation that once lived in Paris opens another window onto perspective and memory.
George Whitman renamed Le Mistral Shakespeare & Company in 1964 in memory of Sylvia Beach. Sylvia Beach had died in Paris in 1962.
In 2011, I picked up a copy of The International Herald Tribune. I was browsing through its pages when a photograph of George Whitman caught my eye. Beside the photograph were the story of his life and the news of his death.
For various reasons, I returned to Paris on later occasions, and I always made sure to stop by Shakespeare & Company. Today, Shakespeare & Company is kept alive by a woman. Her name is Sylvia Beach Whitman.
She is George Whitman’s daughter.
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