Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co. Book

[I'm going to join the uncool kids who gave this five stars, realizing, of course, my credibility as a reviewer likely will take a huge unrecoverable hit from the cool kids who gave it fewer, for whom, I suspect, giving any book the full five stars would mark them as forgettably naive.]

After 44 years I still don't know what it was about me George Whitman didn't like, if anything. It might have been my haircut. He might have thought I was a CIA agent. I was an American on leave from the Army and Whitman's Communist convictions were causing him official problems in the mid-1960s. The French government even shut him down for a while in 1968 accusing him of housing Communists during the May student riots in Paris, which he was.

I met him in May 1966. We were never introduced, but I spoke with him one time at the front desk of his bookstore. Our conversation went something like this: "Excuse me, do you have anything by Rousseau?" I had to repeat this once or twice, as Whitman seemed absorbed by something, either something on his desk or in his mind. Eventually he turned his head, barely enough to look at me. His face conveyed annoyance, if not incipient contempt.

"What did you say?" From the loaded indifference in his voice he might have been on the verge of telling me to get the hell out of his sight. I repeated my question. My mistake, I soon learned, was in mispronouncing "Rousseau," probably misplacing the accent or even dragging the esses to sound like zees. He made me repeat my blunder another time or two before correcting me, his voice now curled in a sneer. When I nodded yes, he growled no, stared hard at me a moment longer and then turned back to whatever had been occupying his attention.

What surely clinched the unfavorable impression he'd evidently already formed of me was the book I finally purchased. It was a paperback copy of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. Not a bad choice for a detective novel, but, as I was to learn just the other day, Whitman has a low opinion of the genre. Other than to take my money and put the famous Shakespeare and Co. stamp in my purchased books, he never bothered to even glance at me again on my numerous successive visits his store.

Stationed in West Germany I'd saved up my leave time and spent it all in Paris - two or three weeks. A friend who had just returned from the City of Light raved about the famous bookstore on the Left Bank facing Notre Dame. It was named after the literary hangout for Lost Generation expatriots in the 1920s and '30s run by Sylvia Beach. Her store had achieved international acclaim for publishing James Joyce's Ulysses and was personally liberated from the Nazis by Ernest Hemingway. Whitman's successor to the legendary Beach bookstore, in a different location, had won recognition by a new generation of young literati, with luminaries such as Ginsberg, Corso, Kerouac and Ferlinghetti frequenting the place, sleeping, writing and working there occasionally and giving readings. Whitman published Ginsberg's Howl, when no one else would touch the cutting-edge poem that became an anthem for the Beat Generation.

During his sojourn in Paris my literary Army buddy had gotten to know a young writer Whitman befriended after learning the man was sleeping under a bridge over the Seine. The writer was now living and writing at the bookstore. Sounded like my kind of place. Even after the cold reception I got from Whitman, I couldn't stay away, seduced by its exotic ambience.

I have been seduced anew by Jeremy Mercer's charming memoir of the months he spent in Paris in 1999 living at Shakespeare and Co. Mercer ended up at the bookstore after fleeing to Paris from Ottawa where he'd been a crime reporter and had seriously pissed off an ex-convict who vowed revenge. Mercer's book, Time Was Soft There, brought back memories and dreams from my time in Paris and shed some light on the personality of George Whitman, the man I'd annoyed or worried more than four decades earlier.

Whitman, it seems, continued throughout the years to be suspicious of Americans, considering anyone he didn't know to be a potential CIA agent. He's a moody man and can be grumpy and hostile without warning, and he loathes detective mysteries.

A Google search indicates Whitman is pushing 100 years of age but is still kicking, although he has turned over the Shakespeare and Co. keys to his daughter, Sylvia.

I still have and periodically re-read the copy of Hammett's book I bought from Whitman, but I'm not certain I yet know the correct pronunciation of "Rousseau."