Logophile

After reading about Shakespeare & Co. in The Paris Story by Ruth Reichl, I had to resume reading Books, Baguettes & Bedbugs, The Left Bank World of Shakespeare & Co. by Jeremy Mercer. Jeremy Mercer is one of the many writers who have found their way to Shakespeare and Company. I bought the book many years ago. Though the narratives are captivating, I just never got round to finish reading it. In summer 2009, I chanced upon the legendary bookshop when my family and I were on our way to lunch. As we had a prior lunch booking at a vegetarian restaurant some walking distance away, I did not get to go inside the bookshop at the time.We had since travelled to several other parts of France, I had not visited Paris again.

In Books, Baguettes & Bedbugs, Jeremy Mercer tells us how he has ended up staying at Shakespeare and Company bookshop (previously called Le Mistral)founded by George Whitman after leaving his life as a crime reporter in Canada. After receiving a threatening phone call from a thief whom he had an uneasy friendship with and then fallen out, he packs up his bags and on a whim, heads to Paris. With no friends, no job, and just as he is down, lost and running out of money, the thrill of escape from his life in Canada soon palls but, by chance, he happens upon the hidden bohemia at Shakespeare and Co and is taken in. The literary camaraderie is ever so thriving in the fairytale world of ‘Shakespeare and Co’.

The original ‘Shakespeare and Company’ in Paris was opened in 1919 by Sylvia Beach, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister in New Jersey. For two decades it was the haunt of literary greats, such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Bernard Shaw, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce. When no publisher would want to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses, Sylvia Beach published it under her shop imprint. The bookshop was situated on the left bank and it was forced to close in 1941.

In 1951 George Whitman, an American, started a bookshop called ‘Le Mistral’ on the Left Bank, with a similar free-thinking ethos. It had beds for those of a literary mindset who found themselves down on their luck and, in 1964, after Sylvia Beach passed, Whitman changed his bookshop’s name to ‘Shakespeare and Company’.

The bookshop became the principal meeting place for Beatnik poets, such as Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, through to Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell. Shakespeare and Company is now a famous bookshop, very much known in the world. Today the tradition continues.

In Books, Baguettes & Bedbugs Jeremy Mercer tells about his time at the bookshop, the curious people who came and went, the realities of being down and out in the ‘city of light’ and certainly his relationship with the fascinating octogenarian owner, George who believed a fairer world was possible. George was a romantic and his approach to love was ‘old-fashioned with childlike‘ in that ‘he was eternally captured by his romantic visions, and in all his years he was never able to build a mature relationship‘. At one point, George fell for Eve,a woman nearly seven decades his junior. Mercer writes that George did not do it for sex or for status as he had always believed in love.

Here is a snapshot of how Mercer describes the residency at the bookstore.

‘This all made the bookstore feel like a running sleepover party with revolving bedmates, but it also distorted one’s normal sense of human relations.I’d wake up to see a stranger getting dressed in front og me, and I learned to think nothing of it. I’d return to the bookstore after a coffee at Panis to find a new body drooling on my pillow, and I would just offer him another blanket .’

In Books, Baguettes & Bedbugs, Mercer shares with us fascinating anecdotes that are full of magical moments peppered with self-deprecating comments such as’ Always .well intentioned but never quite doing enough.’

He writes :

‘ Tom and I once had a long discussion about signs. I argued there was a message to be had in them, that one could determine one’s path by keeping an eye out for omens such as snarling dogs or smiling girls. Tom felt this was an internal process, that every minute of life was surrounded by a thousand potentially meaningful incidents and a person interpreted them as he or she was inclined. With my logic, if one was feeling nervous about an upcoming challenge and crossed paths with a snarling dog, it would be a sign to give up the endeavour;Tom would say that on the same corner as the snarling dog might be the girl, if one wasn’t so nervous of the dog, one would notice her smile and believe it to be a charmed day.’

It was the time for the author to leave Shakespeare & Co. when a German woman approached the author asking if he was looking for an apartment to rent temporarily. By then he had a bit of money left from his article on Ireland and that was enough to get him the apartment. It felt like destiny even when he found out Simon, a long time resident at the bookstore had specifically directed the woman to him because the latter had known of his desire to leave the bookstore.

For him to be able to afford his rent payments, he even’ fell into the luxury-goods business. The job involved Louis Vuitton handbags and a niche market that could only be filled by the likes of me – young, white, English-speaking, and financially distressed.‘

Amongst the things that Mercer had to do to earn some money aside from writing, he became one of the middlemen paid people to infiltrate the boutiques and buy Louis Vuitton bags on behalf the clientele for a raging black market. Jeremy Mercer has certainly had a life full of adventures. An awesome read!!

The residency policy that George Whitman set for staying at the bookshop is enticing and sounds idyllic in that you are required to read a book a day and do some writings. As romantic and fairytale like as it reads, staying at the bookshop, sleeping in cramped and cold beds surrounded by strangers will never be easy for me.Some years ago, my elder daughter and I had spent one night staying at BOOK AND BED TOKYO IKEBUKURO a dormitory style book hotel in Tokyo. It was certainly a quaint experience sleeping on a bookshelf bed surrounded by books.