A Review of
Shakespeare and Company, Paris:
A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart
Originally published in the
Rain Taxi Review of Books, Spring 2017
Shakespeare and Company, Paris:
A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart
Edited by Krista Halverson
Shakespeare and Company Paris, $34.95
Any
young writer who’s passed through Paris at any time over the past six decades
and didn’t stay at least a few nights at the English-language bookstore
Shakespeare and Company has simply not done Paris correctly. Founded in 1951 by
American expat George Whitman and evolving through a series of names and
incarnations until eventually being rechristened after the bookstore that first
published James Joyce’s Ulysses in
1922, Shakespeare and Company has housed more than thirty thousand writers and
wannabe writers as they explored the City of Lights at invaluable leisure, as
well as in considerable squalor. In exchange for free lodging in the upstairs
library’s makeshift bunks—or, in the high season, on the floor of the store
itself—George only asked for an hour or two of volunteer work per day, a
two-page autobiography for inclusion in his
vast files, and a commitment to reading one book for each night spent in his
sanctuary. Most Shakespeareans stayed for two or three nights, but many stayed
for weeks or months, and a few inmates remained in some guise or other for
years. George offered these accommodations as a form of forward payment for the
hospitality that he’d received in his early years of tramping all over globe,
and with his Left Bank bookstore’s Seine-side view of Notre-Dame cathedral he
gave more than half a century of writers an inestimable gift of time and space.
Virtually every one of his guests has written about the store in some form, and
now that George has passed away and the store has been taken over by his daughter,
Sylvia (who was named after the founder of the original Shakespeare and
Company, Sylvia Beach), an official history has finally appeared: Shakespeare and Company, Paris: A History of
the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart.
 |
| A Young George Whitman |
Edited by Shakespearean Krista Halverson,
this multifaceted and multi-genre history collects nearly a century of material
about George and his bookstore, including an account of Beach’s original
Shakespeare and Company, a selection of George’s early travel journals, clips
of newspaper and magazine articles about the man and his freeform Paris utopia,
narratives by scores of store denizens—including an introduction by Jeanette
Winterson—several exemplary (and often bizarre) volunteer bios, poems by some
of the more well-known store associates, excerpts from an unsurprisingly
diverse number of authors mentioning George and his store, and decades of
evocative and beautifully laid-out photographs. Threading it all together,
Halverson’s exceptionally well-researched and deftly crafted narrative paints a
portrait not just of George and his store, but of a city and a country and a
century, in rich and informed perspective. Many of the writers and publications
associated with the store over the decades have been notoriously shoddy, and
Halverson manages to capture the slapdash flavor of the place and its people
while transcending the first-draft quality of many of its past exemplars.
Perhaps a large part of this book’s gleaming polish can be attributed to the
influence of George’s daughter, Sylvia, who inherited the bookstore in 2011
when George passed away at the age of ninety-eight, and who brought it into the
twenty-first century while somehow managing to retain much of its original
bohemian integrity. Straddling several overlapping and contrasting worlds, this
book captures the madness and squalor of the place while being in no way
squalid itself, which is a seriously impressive feat.
 |
| Sylvia Whitman, her partner David Delannet, and editor Krista Halvorson |
The most valuable
part of this book for people who knew George is the selection of his early
travel journals, because it captures his mind and voice in a way that was
almost totally inaccessible to even most of his best friends. As the book’s
narrative mentions, George was not at all a conversationalist, and his
essentially solitary personality often seemed miles away from the store, even
as he stormed through its center. In fact, many Shakespeareans doubted that
this mad King Lear even knew anything about literature, often judging him by
the sub-literate Beat and wanna-Beat writers who abused his hospitality, and
it’s enlightening to see how extraordinarily well read and sophisticated and
intellectually resourceful he was—as well as how good a writer he was, his
early voice very quickly maturing in the most curious directions. If this book
serves its central character as well as he deserves, it will spawn a fuller
collection of his journals, as well as an in-depth biography. These pages are a
revelation, but they also seem like a preface to deeper volumes, because it
would be a tragedy to let this fascinating man fade away into mere cameo
appearances in books by the writers he hosted and inspired.
 |
| Sylvia and George Whitman |
That’s
not to say that this great man was also a really great guy. Halverson’s
narrative dances around his personality by referring to him as “irascible” and
“cantankerous” while illustrating with kid gloves a few slight shades of how
abusive he could be. For a more gloves-off portrait (that’s still entirely
loving and grateful), see Jeremy Mercer’s 2005 memoir Time Was Soft There. Clearly in the employ of Sylvia Whitman, who has
a deeply moving last word here in a heartrending afterword that more than makes
up for the book’s gentle circumlocutions, Halverson has her hands tied in what
she can convey in this history, but despite what got left on the editing-room
floor (or what was perhaps hidden from her), Halverson mirrors George’s complex
sophistication in how she juggles so much competing information and influence
to create a document that feels both so satisfyingly full and so tantalizingly
suggestive of what’s missing. Halverson is so adroit an editor and writer that for
readers who don’t know the bookstore’s ins and outs she only leaves one gaping
lacuna in the book’s surface: the relationship between George and his
daughter’s mother, who’s never named or described or even alluded to in this
book, even when narrating Sylvia’s unconventional upbringing. Like an
Old-Testament patriarch, George was nearly seventy when Sylvia was born, but
the girl’s mother is completely and conspicuously elided from these pages.
Nearly perfectly balancing her dual duties as hired editor and truth-telling
chronicler—and outshining any quibbling critique of her herculean efforts—Halverson
satisfies insider and outsider alike with this book, creating a work that
serves as a brilliant standalone history while simultaneously inspiring untold
future volumes. With so many thousands of writers in George Whitman’s prodigious
debt, surely this is not the end of his story.
—David Wiley
