Shakespeare and Company

Paris for me will always be a haunted city.  Ghosts linger in the streets and behind gauzy living room curtains.  There are narrow streets lined with buildings and cafes.  But this is a city with so much depth.  It invites one to pay attention, to see the ghosts in plain sight.  My regret is that I have yet to experience Paris alone.  Only then can one absorb the history, the shadows.  I have experienced Paris only when accompanied by a large group of students.  I’ve missed the subtle nuances of light and sound while focused on whether or not we forgot someone at the Louvre.  As we boarded the plane for home, it was I who wished to be lost and left behind.

So to say that I enjoyed reading Shakespeare and Company, Paris:  A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart, edited by Krista Halvorson, would be an immense understatement.  I was enraptured with the book, a collection of journal entries, letters, reflections, history and pictures, lots and lots of pictures.  I studied each and every photograph like an ancient manuscript.  I soaked up the interiors and the street life of this old book shop nestled across from the Cathedral of Notre Dame.  I missed visiting this landmark in person on my travels with students—why?  I must have walked by it several times as Notre Dame is on literally every trip itinerary.  Keeping up with teenagers is simply too overwhelming.  So alas, I have never set foot inside the beloved institution, and that is something I will have to live with until I can rectify the situation in the future.

The story of the shop is well-known.  In 1919, Sylvia Beach, an American in Paris, decided to open a book shop.  Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and all the other ex-pats stopped in to read and browse along with many other writers and artists.  The Nazis forced Beach to close during the Occupation, but after the war, another American, George Whitman, a distant relative of Walt Whitman, relaunched the shop at its current location.  This was 1951, and the world was coming back to life again after that bloody and tragic world conflict.  The location, 37 rue de la Bucherie, is there waiting for the next round of book lovers making a pilgrimage to Paris.  George Whitman’s daughter, Sylvia, named for the original owner of the book shop, is now in charge.  George died in 2011.  Sylvia keeps her father’s tradition of leaving the door open for visitors—they can shop and browse, but also sleep among the books and partake of the store soup pot.  Shakespeare and Company is an institution, a chapel dedicated to the religion of the book.  All are welcome.

The writers, artists and readers who choose to bunk between the shelves and around the books are called “tumbleweeds,” a term George coined during his days.  He let thousands of people stay over the years if they would agree to help out for a few hours in the shop, write a one-page biography to leave behind in the files of the store, and read one book per day.

The book about the book shop begins with selections from George’s journal when he was a younger man traveling the world.  He is a wise and poetic writer, although he definitely classifies himself as a reader first.  And like every bibliophile, he is interested in everything—astronomy, history, mythology, fiction, poetry.  Sciences to humanities, George absorbed it all.

“There are so many great books in the world,” he writes, “all of them islands in the infinity of man’s ignorance.”  In his journal, George sees himself as a traveler, a human being in perpetual motion.  “A vagabond lives and dies many times and is reincarnated into new worlds,” he says.  This sounds like an excellent credo for a full life, and George Whitman had a very full and colorful life.

The book also includes memoirs from some of the tumbleweeds.  Winslow Eliot speaks of a mystical encounter with a wise stranger in a corner of the shop—not George Whitman, evidently.  After a discussion about science, philosophy, literature, the man said, “What is essential is how you respond to any of life’s challenges.  Whether you are fortunate or unlucky, whether you decided to wage a battle or to stay home and raise children—whatever your life is like, it’s responding to it with dignity and love that matters.  And then to write about it from your heart.”  This, of course, is the noble job description of any writer or artist.

In his later years, George’s eccentricities began to interfere with the health of the shop, so George’s daughter, Sylvia and her partner took over the day to day running of the business and shepherding the expansion projects into nearby spaces and apartments as they became available to be remodeled.  George still puttered around, still offered pungent analysis of his twenty-first century customers.  “I’m tired of people saying they don’t have time to read,” said this patron saint of books and reading.  “I don’t have time to do anything else!”  George Whitman would probably not have much use for social media, unless it helped him put more books into readers’ hands.

We have lost the communal civil society of the neighborhood book shop, and frankly, the internet is a poor substitute.  What great ideas could be conveyed in 140 characters?  We have become skimmers and speed demons when it comes to consuming texts online.  We want to cut to the chase and absorb wisdom by osmosis rather than by deep reading and thinking.  America as a reading culture seems misidentified as well.  Maybe Shakespeare and Company is a phenomenon that could only have happened in the intellectual dream-life of Paris.  In France, they put philosophers on television for public discourse.  But I could be underselling American life and thought.  We are a country founded on a strong and prevalent work ethic, but I for one would give up my right arm to have a Shakespeare and Company in my neighborhood.  The only shop even close to that was Dutton’s and they disappeared long ago.  If only we could be so blessed and lucky to have a book shop with the likes of George Whitman and Sylvia Beach down the street.  For now, we must make due with a pilgrimage to the book shop across from the gargoyles and the Seine and feed some euros into the cash register to keep the dream alive.  And we can buy this book.

The Teenage Writings of Jane Austen

Recently, in an effort to save a few bucks, I decided to close out my storage unit at one of the those chain places.  I had a hazy recollection of what was inside my unit having last been there a year ago.  I sorted through boxes of books, reboxed those I wished to take home with me and prepared the rest to be donated to a local charity.  I also had several boxes of manuscripts and notebooks which I put into their own stack to take back to my now very crowded apartment.  Inside, I rediscovered almost fifty volumes of journal writing, with many more notebooks un-numbered but dated.

I thought this would be a treasure trove.  Finally, with all my journals in one place, I could study them to see my thinking patterns over the years and to mine them for possible essays in the future.  This could be the key to a decent memoir.

I was deeply disappointed.

Let’s just say that I realized how much I repeat myself.  How interesting can it be to see entry after entry bemoaning the lack of time to write, the discouragement, the disappointment, the rejection.  Sure, there were glimpses of life in my description of what was happening then, snippets of events and special days, but the majority was just the daily drudgery of being a reader, a writer, and a teacher.  The notebooks were full of my own manic mood swings, mostly to the darker side.

There are good journal-writers around.  Anais Nin, Susan Sontag, and the recently published compendium of David Sedaris' work gathered over the years from 1977 to 2002, to name just a few.  I have always been a sucker for writers’ and artists’ diaries; they offer, in the best case scenario, the inside scoop on how a book or article came to be, or what it was like to live through a significant time.  Don’t we all live in significant times?  More often, though, I encounter what I saw on the pages of my own notebooks:  the complaining and whining of a poor writer or artist.  It is too late now to end this hobby; I love reading writers’ journals and always will.

So it was with great interest that I opened a recent publication of Oxford University consisting of three early notebooks from a teenage Jane Austen that contained some stories and outlines demonstrating her extraordinary ability only beginning to surface.  Austen was a voracious reader of all kinds of writing from the staid to the pulpy, a greedy omnivore of anything she could get her hands and eyes on.  In fact, she decorated and arranged her notebooks in the publishing style of the day, the editors of Jane Austen:  Teenage Writings (Oxford University Press, 2017) tell us.  Kathryn Sutherland and Freya Johnstone have done an excellent job compiling the book from those initial three notebooks stored in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (Volume the First) and the British Library in London (Volumes 2 and 3).  This girl had her eye set on a goal and her talent is obvious from the beginning.

When she began the notebooks in her eleventh and twelfth year, around 1786, Jane was already a precocious reader, and of course reading in those days was primary entertainment on a cold winter’s night.  People gathered for what the editors call “sociable reading,” which was more of a performance of the work than a traditional reading aloud.  Clearly, Jane was after positive affirmation for her writing, and the notebooks show her development as a novelist as she experimented with story, character, scene, and tension.  What is also clear here is her sense of humor, namely a sharp wit and gift for observation, which is evident in several selections.  The stories are really outlines; some chapters are barely given a sentence of development.  She was simply trying out techniques she had learned from her own reading of novels, and that is what makes this volume so interesting to Austen fans and scholars.

Austen practiced her craft throughout her life, often for the private amusement of her family.  Her nephews and nieces inherited these notebooks and using their aunt’s words as a jumping off point, actually continued some of the notebook stories in their own hand.  This made the editors’ job critical to determining what was written by Austen and what was added later by another family member.  In many cases, the plots and characters function as a primitive fan fiction that we see on the internet today.

Austen’s work here is also rendered much as it was found, with spelling and grammar errors.  This was the time of Samuel Johnson, and dictionaries and regular spellings were largely absent from publishing.  People were left to spell phonetically and creatively before standardization kicked in as we see today.  This adds the hint of a child’s work to the book, but the adult Jane is there, too.

For Jane Austen fans, this book is necessary and worth acquiring.  If one has read some of her work before, or has yet to experience this gifted writer, the novels are really Austen at her finest.  Notebooks are for trying out things—characters, lifestyles, themes, symbols.  Journals are for practice, and therefore, some should never see the light of publication.  Although authors throughout history have had their papers burned when they are gone, we are in the age of the digital archive now, and writers often donate large caches of their papers to libraries for the benefit of researchers.  However, could something in those archives actually damage a writer’s reputation?  In every case, the interest in what is going on in a writer’s mind or within her labyrinthine ruminations often reveal a mode of thinking, a way of seeing the world.  Therein lies the value of writers’ notebooks.

In studying her teenage writings, we see the roots of the major English novelist we have come to love in Jane Austen.  However, for most fans, having the novels is enough, leaving the fragments and early musings to scholars to study and parse.