The Great George Whitman, Part 2
By William F. Hanna
(If you missed Part 1, you can find it here.)
George Whitman served at Camp Myles Standish and ran his Taunton bookstore until his army discharge in early 1946. In August of that year, he sailed for Paris, intending to work in a camp that cared for French orphans. When he found that the place had closed, he utilized assistance from the G.I. Bill to enroll at the Sorbonne, where he took courses in French history and culture. A few months after his arrival he used his university housing as a headquarters for a lending library he called the University City Book Counselors.
For Whitman and Paris, it was love at first sight. In the coming months he organized yet another lending library and in the process became friends with Richard Wright, the brilliant African American ex-pat whose writing and left-wing politics made him unwelcome in the U.S., and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the beat poet, essayist and publisher who in 1953 would open San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore. In such company, Whitman was in his element, writing, “I feel that I am in the heart of civilization.”
In addition to acquiring as many books as he could, Whitman also sold a French literary magazine in local Parisian cafés, giving him the opportunity to make the acquaintance of both aspiring and accomplished writers. All of this was directed toward his ultimate goal. “I live for the day when I’ll have a bookstore to embellish this workaday world,” he wrote, even as he was living in the city’s Latin Quarter on less than one dollar a day.
It was also during this period that Whitman met Sylvia Beach, the doyenne of the Parisian literati since the end of the First World War. In 1919 the New Jersey native opened Shakespeare and Company, a Paris bookstore that during the interwar years became a refuge for some of the early twentieth century’s greatest writers. Beach befriended the likes of André Gide, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound. It was she who published James Joyce’s Ulysses when no one else would take the risk, and she later claimed that her longtime friend Ernest Hemingway was her best customer. When the Germans overran France in 1940 Beach refused to leave the country and instead decided to ride out the occupation with her Parisian friends. After incurring the wrath of a German officer, however, she was forced to close the store and was packed off for a six-month stay at an internment camp in northeastern France. Following her release she spent the remainder of the war keeping a low profile and even though she quickly returned to prominence in postwar Paris, Shakespeare and Company never reopened.
George Whitman and Beach were friends by 1950 and it was in the spring of that year that the former Taunton bookseller was close to opening his own shop. The chance of working alongside Beach intrigued Whitman, and he told his journal: “There is a possibility that she would consent to go into business with me — although I’ve been avoiding offers of partnership, it would be an honor and a privilege to work with Sylvia Beach, should she decide to reopen Shakespeare and Company.”
That collaboration was never realized but Beach remained a presence in Whitman’s life for the next dozen years. In 1951, using savings and a small family inheritance, he purchased a dilapidated Arab market in downtown Paris, on the Rue de la Bucherie. This location, on the Left Bank of the Seine and with a spectacular view of Notre Dame cathedral, became the site of Le Mistral, the bookstore that would one day become a Parisian landmark.
Just as Hemingway had become Sylvia Beach’s best customer, so she became Whitman’s. In 1964, two years after her death, he changed the name of his shop to Shakespeare and Company in her memory, and almost twenty years later he named his only daughter Sylvia Beach Whitman. Remembering their friendship, Whitman wrote, “She often told me that mine was the kind of bookstore she liked. She gave me the impression that she thought of it as the spiritual successor to [her own] Shakespeare and Company.”
By the early 1960s Whitman had procured more than 20,000 volumes and had acquired a small gallery next door to the shop, where he not only sold books but also ran a lending library under the most liberal terms imaginable. He likewise continued his practice of welcoming those he called “Tumbleweeds,” writers — some unknown, others already famous — who stopped in to the shop for conversation, encouragement or a bowl of soup. If need be, Whitman let them live in one of the rooms upstairs until their circumstances allowed them to move on. In these days, all he asked was that they help around the shop, perhaps manning the cash register or shelving books.
The new Shakespeare and Company, like its predecessor under Beach, became a magnet for the most famous names in literature. Lawrence Durrell and James Jones were reliable visitors, as were Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and James Baldwin. The founders of The Paris Review, including Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton, were friends, as were several of the Beat Poets. Once, during the 1960s when the Paris city government suspended Whitman’s business license, Allen Ginsberg came to his defense. “He’s a saint, living on nothing, gives shelter to everybody,” wrote Ginsburg, himself a former Tumbleweed. “[He] helps young poets too, but he’s very poor. Somebody should do something for him. His only income came from books.” Although the license wasn’t restored for two years, Whitman kept the lending library and the reading rooms open, and his so-called “Tumbleweed Hotel” continued to welcome writers as well as other free spirits.
It was in the 1970s that Shakespeare and Company cemented its place as a Parisian institution. Writers, politicians and entertainers made it their business to visit the shop hoping for a brief conversation with its owner. Pablo Neruda, Doris Lessing and Howard Zinn talked with Whitman about their work, and Anaïs Nin became a close friend. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis visited, as did thousands of other book lovers from around the globe. Motion pictures were filmed inside the shop and it became the subject of newspaper and magazine articles. At least one wedding was performed there.
In the 1980s Whitman amended the rules governing the rooms upstairs. In order to be welcomed as a guest in the Tumbleweed Hotel, a visitor had to promise to work in the shop two hours a day, submit a brief biography with a photograph, “and read one book a day.” The biography and photograph had nothing to do with security — Whitman had an unshakeable faith in human nature. Rather it was because he wanted to remember his guests forever, just as some of them would remember him. Years after leaving the shop, one former Tumbleweed wrote: “Dear George, I have been meaning to write you for some time. To tell the truth, I came to your bookshop to see what I could hide away under my coat. Instead, I found myself sitting in your seat, minding the place while you went out. I could have stuffed my pockets and bags full with books and ‘ad it away a bit smartish like . . . It was one of life’s poems, meeting you, something which turned that ‘day to song’ instead of being another piece of bog paper.”
As the years passed, the bookstore expanded, both physically as Whitman purchased available apartments in the building, as well as intellectually with a busy calendar of literary events. Visiting authors read their work, discussion groups met and poetry and writing workshops were held. Occasionally, Shakespeare and Company also published books under its own logo. Whitman, ever the romantic idealist, once described his vision of the bookshop:
“This is my commune . . . Many anonymous hands have shaped the bookstore . . . A Shakespeare scholar from Kentucky made our desk. A Danish worker built the stairs. A multitude of transients excavated the cellars . . . I like to think the bookstore is part of an archipelago of utopias that stretch across the world from Costa Rica to Kathmandu . . . For miles along the Seine River, this is the only door that is open to strangers every day of the year from noon to midnight . . . Several million persons have walked in our door like tumbleweeds drifting in the wind, and then walked out, their innocence lost, as free citizens of the cosmos.”
George Whitman was 98-years old and a long way from Taunton when he died on December 14, 2011. For several years before his passing, his daughter, Sylvia, had handled the day-to-day operation of the bookstore, with her father close at hand. She modernized the shop — George had seen no reason for a telephone, let alone a computer — and today, thanks to her and her partner, David Delannet, it remains a premier stop on any tour of Paris. Its motto, established long ago by George Whitman, remains: Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.
Editor’s Note: Special thanks to Krista Halverson, editor of Shakespeare and Company: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart (Paris, 2017) for her generosity in letting us quote from the book as well as for use of the photographs that appear in this blog.
For those readers who may be interested, below is the address for the Shakespeare and Company web page: https://shakespeareandcompany.com
