Read Online Paris Times Eight by Deirdre Kelly - Free Book Online Page B

down her shop for good, hiding her books in a vacant upstairs apartment at 12 Rue de l’Odéon. Hemingway, it is said, personally “liberated” the bookstore in 1944 , but it never reopened. Instead, some twenty years later George Whitman, another American expat who had been in Paris since the end of the Second World War, resurrected it in name only, in 1966 renaming his Le Mistral bookstore after Beach’s in tribute to all she had done for modern literature.
    No one seemed to mind the lack of authenticity. This shrine of a shrine, housed in a tiny building with small windows and rickety shutters on the Quai de Montebello—what Anaïs Nin once described as a Utrillo house, weak of foundations—is a sanctuary of thought and literary aspirations, a throwback to a lost time. I was reminded of this the minute I met Whitman.
    When I arrived at his shop, suitcase in hand, he was on the floor rummaging through cardboard boxes of paperbacks. There was little of the whiff of legend about him. He was thin, gray-haired, his face the color of porridge, his eyes beady, his fingers long and dirty. One of the first things he said to me as I introduced myself was that he was one of the illegitimate children of the great American poet Walt Whitman, hence the name. I tried imagining him as the love child of the great poet.
    He then told me that, at nearly seventy years of age, he had recently become a father himself. His daughter was the offspring of his relationship with a woman about forty years his junior. “Met her here,” he said, his voice hoarse and crackling. “Like I’m meeting you.” He had called the baby Sylvia, after Sylvia Beach, of course.
    This was a place dedicated to a memory of Paris as la bohème, and accordingly Whitman had two requirements for potential lodgers: you had to be an artist and you had to be living hand to mouth. I was an undergrad, but a published undergrad, my poems in the overwrought style of T.S. Eliot having made it into some of my university’s literary publications, so I coolly told him that I was a poet and therefore an artist (check). I assured him I was penniless—it was why I was bed-hopping in Paris, in search of cheap accommodation (check again). I said that come fall, I would be moving permanently to Paris to begin my life as a writer at an English-language magazine. I was certain of it (double check).
    â€œOkay, you can stay. But you have to earn your keep. Everyone here either works in the bookstore or cleans up. You can clean up. Starting tomorrow. I’ll show you your bed.”
    We walked together past a dry wishing well at the center of the store, into which some backpacking tourists were throwing coins. “Live for Humanity” was carved at its base. We continued to the back, past bookshelves yielding to the weight of novels, biographies, cookbooks, art histories, and children’s stories crammed together with no apparent system of organization, and soon stumbled upon a hidden circular staircase that Whitman told me led to the communal bedrooms upstairs. It bore another slogan: “Be Not Inhospitable to Strangers Lest They Be Angels in Disguise.”
    I later learned that Whitman had been the original hippie. After pursuing Latin American studies at Harvard, he had dropped out and gone on a seven-year odyssey through Central America. The hospitality he received as a longhaired stranger among the poor shaped how he in turn treated strangers like me with an unquestioning generosity.
    He caught me staring.
    â€œI have always been a communist,” he bellowed. “Like Christ. Like my father.” I assumed he meant Walt.
    â€œI believe in the religion of art. The rule of freedom. It’s why I left America. The puritan work ethic, the need to succeed, to be rich, richer than the next guy. But you don’t just earn your living in this life. You live your life.”
    We climbed the stairs and entered a