Celebrating the Centennial of Shakespeare and Company
Given dwindling
sales at independent bookstores, we should remember some legendary greats still
going strong: City Lights in San Francisco, both Strand and Scribner’s in
Manhattan, and Powell’s in Portland, Oregon, to name but a few. Another
legendary “American” bookshop can be found, interestingly enough, not between
our shores but at 37, rue de la Bûcherie in Paris. We’re talking, of course,
about the world-renowned Shakespeare and Company. Prominently situated across
the Seine from Notre-Dame, this institution has been drawing crowds for decades.
Big-name authors like James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and Henry Miller found
their way to this magical place crammed full of books in narrow passageways and
small rooms. How weird and wonderful…much like its creator, New Jersey-born
George Whitman. For the late bookseller has been variously described as
cantankerous and standoffish as well as charismatic and hospitable. So
welcoming was he over the years, in fact, that he offered lodging on the
premises to thousands of itinerant writers he termed Tumbleweeds. Poet and City
Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti, once called his friend Whitman “the most
eccentric man I ever met.”
The bookstore’s
history is not what you’d call conventional either. In 1951 Whitman established
the Left Bank shop as Le Mistral. But in 1964, he adopted its current name to
honor Shakespeare on his 400th birthday and another New Jerseyite who
had passed away two years earlier. Which brings us to the centennial part of
the story. You see, Whitman didn’t come up with the name Shakespeare and
Company. Full credit goes to Sylvia Beach. The minister’s daughter began her
love affair with the City of Light after spending three years there with her
family at the turn of the twentieth century. Returning in 1917 to study French
literature at the Sorbonne, she came across a bookstore/lending library owned
by Adrienne Monnier. Beach then decided to set up a similar shop dealing with avant-garde
American and British writings. Thus began a combined passion for books and for
each other which would last until Monnier’s death in 1955.
Monnier actually
discovered the former laundry at 8, rue Dupuytren where Beach first opened for
business on November 19, 1919. The warm, cheerful ambience Beach created at Shakespeare
and Company reflected her nurturing personality and attracted expat Americans and
French patrons alike— including writers like feminist Simone de Beauvoir and future
Nobelist André Gide. Eighteen months later, once great numbers of our
compatriots began flocking to Paris, Beach needed more room. So in May 1921 she
moved lock, stock, and barrel to 12, rue de l’Odéon, a two-minute walk away. American
“literary royalty”—the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, and Eliot—became
regulars at the bookstore. And not simply to buy books, mind you. The intellectual
center Beach created allowed authors to discuss literature, critique works, arrange
for typists, borrow money, and in some cases get their works printed. The prime
publication being Ulysses by James
Joyce. Considered obscene in the U.K. and the U.S. at the time, the novel found
its savior in Sylvia Beach. A kindhearted person, yes, but also an ardent
defender of great literature against what she called the “dark age” of
censorship. To bring Ulysses to light
in 1922, she took on the enormous responsibility of editing and publishing the 730-page
novel—serving at times as Joyce’s literary agent, banker, and secretary. Even performing
menial tasks for the author—to Monnier’s shock and displeasure.
But big problems
lay in the decades to follow. With the Depression, the unfavorable exchange
rate, and the threat of another war during the 1930s, Americans abandoned Paris
and the bookstore fell on hard times. Yet, Ms. Beach was so admired and
appreciated that Gide organized The Friends of Shakespeare and Company which
set up fundraising readings and annual subscriptions to help keep the shop
afloat. In 1941 when Beach wouldn’t sell a high-ranking Nazi officer her
personal copy of Finnegans Wake, he
threatened to have her books confiscated. That day she and friends moved the stock
up to an unoccupied third-floor apartment, a carpenter dismantled the bookshelves,
and a painter covered over the outdoor sign. During a roundup of Americans the
following year, Beach was imprisoned for a time with other women in the zoo of
the Bois de Boulogne before being sent to an internment camp in Alsace for six
months. Although she never reopened the bookstore after the war, a white plaque
on the rue de l’Odéon indicates the important history associated with the
building.
So the
next time you’re in the market for something to read, think of the woman one
critic called “the patron saint of independent bookstores” and her shop in the 6th
arrondissement of Paris. Happy 100th anniversary, Sylvia Beach.
Read more about Sylvia Beach and other famous expats in my recently published book--Pilgrimage to Paris: The Cheapo Snob's Guide to the City and the Americans Who Lived There.
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