Remembering George Whitman--We'll always have Paris

Photo by Simon Nofolk for The Telegraph

(I'm re-posting this from 6 years ago, because I just learned that my friend, award-winning author Nicholas Basbanes, and his wife Connie, are off to Paris, and I wanted to tell them of my experiences visiting "Shakespeare and Company" and George Whitman, who owned the store until his death in 2011.  It's now owned by his daughter. This post is one of my favorites, recalling the years when I was traveling as a single girl, not yet a crone.  I recommend that anyone who visits Paris visits the store on the Left Bank, with one of the most beautiful views in Paris.)

Today’s New York Times carried the obituary for George Whitman, who died yesterday, Dec. 14, in Paris in his apartment above his bookstore “Shakespeare and Company” at the age of 98. There was even a small photo of him on the Times’ front page saying “Heir to a Paris Legacy—George Whitman, owner and operator of the postwar Shakespeare & Company bookstore and a beacon, mentor and provider to generations of young writers.  Page B 17.”

I was immediately transported back to 1969, when, as a single “career girl” in my 20’s, I took two years off, quit my magazine job in New York and traveled, visiting friends from Vienna to Paris to Morocco to Rome and then settled into an editing job in London.

Like every writer of my generation (including Woody Allen) I harbored fantasies of being part of the Paris writers of the twenties, hanging out with the Fitzgeralds and the Hemingways.  I knew all about Sylvia Beach and her famous bookstore Shakespeare and Company, and I had heard it was now owned by a New England eccentric who was continuing Sylvia’s legacy and would offer food, board and books to anyone who wandered in off the street.

I was eager to write an article about him, but the first day I walked into the store, he refused to be interviewed.  When he finally did grudgingly agree to answer some questions, he mixed fantasy with fact, because he liked enhancing his legend.  He told me he was the “illegitimate grandson of Walt Whitman”, but the twinkle in his eye hinted that we both knew how unlikely it was that the poet left any progeny.

Looking today on Google for photos of George and his famous  bookstore on the Left Bank’s Rue de la Bucherie, facing Notre Dame, I discovered that dozens, maybe hundred of writers of my generation visited Shakespeare and Company and had experiences similar to mine and are now reminiscing on their blogs about the man who devoted nearly a century to carrying on Sylvia Beach’s store and her encouragement of writers.  (It's not the same physical store, but Sylvia  late in life gave George the right to use the name.) 

My article on George Whitman was eventually published in the April 1970 issue of the late, lamented Holiday Magazine. As I wrote in the lead, “Between the two world wars, a minister’s brown-eyed daughter named Sylvia Beach owned a famous bookstore called Shakespeare and Company on Paris’ Left Bank. She provided encouragement criticism and occasional handouts to struggling American writers …She published Joyce’s revolutionary Ulysses when no one in New York or London was willing to take the risk…Ernest Hemingway, in "A Moveable Feast", wrote about her:  ‘She had pretty legs and she was kind, cheerful and interested and loved to make jokes and gossip.  No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.’”

In the 1970 piece I chronicled the troubles Whitman had been having with the French Government, which had closed down the second floor of the store because he was using it as a free hostel for young people who wanted to crash there.  I quoted the sign in the window on the day I first entered the store:  “To Those Who Cherish Freedom, Practice Equality and Seek Justice –WELCOME.  We wish our guests to enter with the feeling they have inherited a book-lined apartment on the Seine which is all the more delightful because they share it with others.”

In the article I compared Whitman to “a modern Don Quixote.  He is the image of the knight of the woeful countenance—tall and painfully thin, with watery blue eyes in a doleful, hollow-cheeked face, unkempt red hair streaked with gray and a gray Van Dyke beard that juts out at the world like a defiant Brillo pad.”  (And that was 42 years ago, people, when I was very young and he was already an old man. Twelve years after I visited him the first time, George Whitman produced his only heir, a lovely blonde woman named Sylvia Beach Whitman, who has taken over the running of the store.)

 I found this photo of Whitman, posing with  his daughter Sylvia and  Bill Clinton on a blog  with the unlikely name of Palavrasqueoventoleva 

In “The Paris Magazine”, Whitman’s  attempt at a “poor man’s Paris Review” he wrote, “Why do people always come in and ask me is this your bookstore?  I consider it as much yours as mine ...Go ahead and kick off your shoes and lie in a bed and read…”

Here’s how I described my first meeting with him:   I was peering into the window when a bleary-eyed, bearded figure unlocked the door and, squinting at the sun, asked me what time it was. “Noon,” I replied.  “Come in and I’ll make us some coffee,” he said.

Soon I was drinking coffee at a table outside the door of the shop, gazing at what must be one of the most lovely views in Paris, while my host opened his mail.  I felt I should explain myself, but when I began he snapped, “No interrogations at this  time of the morning,” and went back to his mail.

Some  customers wandered in and he motioned me aside “I have some good news for you, dear.  I’m going to let you run the store while I take a shower.”  He handed me the cash box, warned me not to sell any books that didn’t have the price written on them and nailed up a “Black Power-White Power” poster on an outside wall.  Then he scrabbled around the messy desk looking for his soap, towel and a candle.  “To cut my hair.”  He lit the candle, ignited his hair, then beat out the flames with his hands, muttering,” Better than a haircut.”  Finally he donned a red-plaid sports jacket, leaped onto his bicycle and rode out the door to the public showers, leaving me with 25,000 second-hand books and the odor of burned hair.

 He never asked me my name and I never got a chance to ask his.

During the next seven hours, Whitman returned two times—just long enough to unload piles of books from the baskets of his bicycle. To my protests that I had to go, he’d mumble, “Lots of important errands to do, lots of people to see. Haven’t paid the tax on my bicycle.” And off he’d ride, red coat flapping behind him.  Meanwhile I sold about $150 worth of books in five languages and refused to sell what were worth about $100 more because they weren’t marked.  The most popular books that day were Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire, L’Anarchisme and anything by Ezra Pound.

By the time the sun was going down, I had been joined by two mini-skirted English girls who had run out of money, a starving French boy who wanted to sell his art books, a young American couple who couldn’t find the friends they were supposed to stay with, a fiery Frenchman with a broken leg who wanted to talk to Whitman about publishing his poetry, and Gerard, a soft-spoken American who had been on the road for seven years and was currently sweeping up the store in exchange for food.  Whitman himself popped in for a minute to say he was going to make potato salad—we must all stay for dinner—and he was just going to the grocery store. Much later, when he hadn’t returned, we raided the refrigerator, ate bread, sausages, cheese and yogurt on the table outside and watched shadows cover Notre Dame while the good bourgeoisie of the neighborhood looked at us with curiosity.  I handed the cash box to Gerard and set out on my Métro trip back to the Right Bank.”

Eventually, of course, I came back and eventually I got the chance to interview George.  One thing he said that I quoted in the article: “My favorite customers are seventeen-year-old girls.  I can’t think of anything more wonderful than  being seventeen and in Paris.  If a girl comes in on her seventeenth birthday, she can pick out any book she wants, free.”

That interview took place in 1969 when I was 28 years old, not seventeen.  When I turned 60 in 2001, I returned to Paris with my two daughters (both of them over 17 by then) and dropped by Shakespeare and Company to find it being tended by a young British schoolteacher.  She assured us that George was in fine health, reigning over his small kingdom as usual.  He just wasn’t in at the moment.

Now George is gone, but I suspect his ghost will still be sitting in the shadows of his dusty, overcrowded store which, according to the Times he called, paraphrasing Yeats,  “my little Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart.”

George Whitman lived a remarkable life.  I’m just sorry I never got a chance to thank him for one of my favorite Paris experiences.

R.I.P. George Whitman—We’ll Always Have Paris

Photo by Simon Nofolk for The Telegraph

Today’s New York Times carried the obituary for George Whitman, who died yesterday, Dec. 14, in Paris in his apartment above his bookstore “Shakespeare and Company” at the age of 98. There was even a small photo of him on the Times’ front page saying “Heir to a Paris Legacy—George Whitman, owner and operator of the postwar Shakespeare & Company bookstore and a beacon, mentor and provider to generations of young writers.  Page B 17.”

I was immediately transported back to 1969, when, as a single “career girl” in my 20’s, I took two years off, quit my magazine job in New York and traveled, visiting friends from Vienna to Paris to Morocco to Rome and then settled into an editing job in London.

Like every writer of my generation (including Woody Allen) I harbored fantasies of being part of the Paris writers of the twenties, hanging out with the Fitzgeralds and the Hemingways.  I knew all about Sylvia Beach and her famous bookstore Shakespeare and Company, and I had heard it was now owned by a New England eccentric who was continuing Sylvia’s legacy and would offer food, board and books to anyone who wandered in off the street.

I was eager to write an article about him, but the first day I walked into the store, he refused to be interviewed.  When he finally did grudgingly agree to answer some questions, he mixed fantasy with fact, because he liked enhancing his legend.  He told me he was the “illegitimate grandson of Walt Whitman”, but the twinkle in his eye hinted that we both knew how unlikely it was that the poet left any progeny.

Looking today on Google for photos of George and his famous  bookstore on the Left Bank’s Rue de la Bucherie, facing Notre Dame, I discovered that dozens, maybe hundred of writers of my generation visited Shakespeare and Company and had experiences similar to mine and are now reminiscing on their blogs about the man who devoted nearly a century to carrying on Sylvia Beach’s store and her encouragement of writers.  (It's not the same physical store, but Sylvia  late in life gave George the right to use the name.) 

My article on George Whitman was eventually published in the April 1970 issue of the late, lamented Holiday Magazine. As I wrote in the lead, “Between the two world wars, a minister’s brown-eyed daughter named Sylvia Beach owned a famous bookstore called Shakespeare and Company on Paris’ Left Bank. She provided encouragement criticism and occasional handouts to struggling American writers …She published Joyce’s revolutionary Ulysses when no one in New York or London was willing to take the risk…Ernest Hemingway, in "A Moveable Feast", wrote about her:  ‘She had pretty legs and she was kind, cheerful and interested and loved to make jokes and gossip.  No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.’”

In the 1970 piece I chronicled the troubles Whitman had been having with the French Government, which had closed down the second floor of the store because he was using it as a free hostel for young people who wanted to crash there.  I quoted the sign in the window on the day I first entered the store:  “To Those Who Cherish Freedom, Practice Equality and Seek Justice –WELCOME.  We wish our guests to enter with the feeling they have inherited a book-lined apartment on the Seine which is all the more delightful because they share it with others.”

In the article I compared Whitman to “a modern Don Quixote.  He is the image of the knight of the woeful countenance—tall and painfully thin, with watery blue eyes in a doleful, hollow-cheeked face, unkempt red hair streaked with gray and a gray Van Dyke beard that juts out at the world like a defiant Brillo pad.”  (And that was 42 years ago, people, when I was very young and he was already an old man. Twelve years after I visited him the first time, George Whitman produced his only heir, a lovely blonde woman named Sylvia Beach Whitman, who has taken over the running of the store.)

 I found this photo of Whitman, posing with  his daughter Sylvia and  Bill Clinton on a blog  with the unlikely name of Palavrasqueoventoleva 

In “The Paris Magazine”, Whitman’s  attempt at a “poor man’s Paris Review” he wrote, “Why do people always come in and ask me is this your bookstore?  I consider it as much yours as mine ...Go ahead and kick off your shoes and lie in a bed and read…”

Here’s how I described my first meeting with him:   I was peering into the window when a bleary-eyed, bearded figure unlocked the door and, squinting at the sun, asked me what time it was. “Noon,” I replied.  “Come in and I’ll make us some coffee,” he said.

Soon I was drinking coffee at a table outside the door of the shop, gazing at what must be one of the most lovely views in Paris, while my host opened his mail.  I felt I should explain myself, but when I began he snapped, “No interrogations at this  time of the morning,” and went back to his mail.

Some  customers wandered in and he motioned me aside “I have some good news for you, dear.  I’m going to let you run the store while I take a shower.”  He handed me the cash box, warned me not to sell any books that didn’t have the price written on them and nailed up a “Black Power-White Power” poster on an outside wall.  Then he scrabbled around the messy desk looking for his soap, towel and a candle.  “To cut my hair.”  He lit the candle, ignited his hair, then beat out the flames with his hands, muttering,” Better than a haircut.”  Finally he donned a red-plaid sports jacket, leaped onto his bicycle and rode out the door to the public showers, leaving me with 25,000 second-hand books and the odor of burned hair.

 He never asked me my name and I never got a chance to ask his.

During the next seven hours, Whitman returned two times—just long enough to unload piles of books from the baskets of his bicycle. To my protests that I had to go, he’d mumble, “Lots of important errands to do, lots of people to see. Haven’t paid the tax on my bicycle.” And off he’d ride, red coat flapping behind him.  Meanwhile I sold about $150 worth of books in five languages and refused to sell what were worth about $100 more because they weren’t marked.  The most popular books that day were Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire, L’Anarchisme and anything by Ezra Pound.

By the time the sun was going down, I had been joined by two mini-skirted English girls who had run out of money, a starving French boy who wanted to sell his art books, a young American couple who couldn’t find the friends they were supposed to stay with, a fiery Frenchman with a broken leg who wanted to talk to Whitman about publishing his poetry, and Gerard, a soft-spoken American who had been on the road for seven years and was currently sweeping up the store in exchange for food.  Whitman himself popped in for a minute to say he was going to make potato salad—we must all stay for dinner—and he was just going to the grocery store. Much later, when he hadn’t returned, we raided the refrigerator, ate bread, sausages, cheese and yogurt on the table outside and watched shadows cover Notre Dame while the good bourgeoisie of the neighborhood looked at us with curiosity.  I handed the cash box to Gerard and set out on my Métro trip back to the Right Bank.”

Eventually, of course, I came back and eventually I got the chance to interview George.  One thing he said that I quoted in the article: “My favorite customers are seventeen-year-old girls.  I can’t think of anything more wonderful than  being seventeen and in Paris.  If a girl comes in on her seventeenth birthday, she can pick out any book she wants, free.”

That interview took place in 1969 when I was 28 years old, not seventeen.  When I turned 60 in 2001, I returned to Paris with my two daughters (both of them over 17 by then) and dropped by Shakespeare and Company to find it being tended by a young British schoolteacher.  She assured us that George was in fine health, reigning over his small kingdom as usual.  He just wasn’t in at the moment.

Now George is gone, but I suspect his ghost will still be sitting in the shadows of his dusty, overcrowded store which, according to the Times he called, paraphrasing Yeats,  “my little Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart.”

George Whitman lived a remarkable life.  I’m just sorry I never got a chance to thank him for one of my favorite Paris experiences.

Degrees of Infidelity – Which is Worse?

(I wrote this two days ago before  Anthony Weiner confessed to his internet escapades, so have added a footnote about his now widely discussed  degree of evil at the end of this post.)

The other evening over dinner, while talking with my husband and a woman friend, after pondering such gentlemen as Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Edwards and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, I posed the (totally theoretical, you understand) question:  What is the worst kind of cheating husband?

I tossed out some (completely rhetorical, of course) examples: Is it worse to have your husband leave you for, say, another man, or the trusted baby sitter, or his secretary (whom you know) or a colleague whom you don’t know, or, maybe your best friend?

My husband immediately said the worst would be to have your husband leave you for a man, but my friend (who is on her third divorce) and I both instantly disagreed, saying that, no, that would be the least crushing kind of betrayal, because the wife can tell herself “It’s not that he’s leaving me because I’ve failed in some way.  He just has never acknowledged that he’s gay.  It’s completely NOT MY FAULT.”

Just for the sake of argument, I would like to propose the following ratings on my cad-o-meter, ranging from one to ten degrees of evil.

1.  One.. He leaves you for a man, having finally acknowledged that he’s gay.

2.  Two. He leaves you while insisting that there’s no other woman, but he just doesn’t love you any more. (This category may deserve to be higher up on the evil scale.  I think it also includes men who leave you because “You’re no fun any more” or because “You don’t turn me on any more.” And extra evil points for the ones who leave because “Ever since the kids came along, you don’t pay attention to ME any more.”)  Please discuss.

3.    Three. He cheats on you with an age-appropriate woman you’ve never met. (Extra evil points if she’s 20 years younger and/or looks just like you did 20 years ago.)

4.    Four. He cheats on you with a paid professional sex worker, (Extra evil points for exposing you to a possible S.T.D.)

5.    Five.  He cheats on you with an employee—his secretary, the videographer for his political campaign, an intern. (Extra evil points if said employee produces a child. Many extra evil points in any category if you happen to have a terminal illness.)

6.  Six.   He cheats on you with an employee who is like a member of the household: a babysitter, longtime housekeeper, teacher or nanny whom your children have come to love. (Hello there Robin Williams and Jude Law!)

7.  Seven.   He cheats on you with your best friend (who’s single.)

8.  Eight.  He cheats on you with your best friend who is married to his best friend and you have always gone on vacations together.  (Although Shania Twain made this situation work.)

9.   Nine.  He cheats on you with your sister.

10.Ten. He cheats on you with your daughter (who is not his daughter.) Hey there Woody Allen!

Beyond this category of cheating we move into areas  which are punishable by law, like incest and pederasty.   Let the courts and the police deal with these types of evil, hopefully by locking the perpetrator up for life.

But what is an appropriate punishment for the various degrees of cheating described above?  And what should a betrayed wife do if she doesn’t have the nerve or the money to hire a hit man to teach the cheater a lesson?

What kind of recompense would be enough to convince you to forgive him? (Like giving you fabulous alimony or getting you a very high post, say Secretary of State?)

How would you rate the various types of cheating on your cad-o-meter?

Breaking news update—now that Anthony Weiner has admitted that he has harassed women, willing and unwilling, with “sexting” on the internet (and in one  soon-to-be-classic slip of the  computer, sent to the general public an e-mail message and photo that he meant to be private), everyone is now discussing the following question: —is it really cheating if, as he claims, he has never laid eyes (or anything else) on these hapless women, (some of whom were more than willing to play his creepy game.)?

I think that on my cad-o-meter, he only gets  to be  .5 (half a point) because he didn’t really have sex with them.   But he has terminally destroyed his career and embarrassed his wife.   Now everyone is asking WHY he did it (my answer—he’s a narcissist who loves looking at himself).  So Anthony Weiner, in my opinion,  definitely gets a rating near the top on the dirty old man creep-o-meter.