What a Wonderful Way to Die

Our friend George Whitman died Wednesday.

The legendary, incredibly hospitable, and sometimes famously irascible proprietor of the latest incarnation of the Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company was 98. We've shared our love of the bookstore here on Paris Play twice before.

In these latter years, George had turned over the operations of the store to his supremely competent, beautiful, and equally hospitable daughter, Sylvia Beach Whitman, who expands on her father's gifts by running the bookstore as a business, too, which wasn't really in George's nature.

Here's what we mean: Richard had the pleasure of being George's guest at his "Tumbleweed Hotel," a few times during the eighties, which sometimes entailed running the cash box while George stepped out. George was a wonderful, trusting soul, but Richard suspects that many of the other vagabonds who also found themselves in the position of watching the store may not have been as scrupulously honest.

George estimated that he put up more than 40,000 travelers at the bookstore over the years. In exchange for a bed, George asked them to work an hour or two a day, write a short autobiography and read a book a day.

In a video made by Book TV C-Span 2 in 2002 (when George was 90 years old and Sylvia was 21), the interviewer asked him about Sylvia:

Is she the only child you have?

George: In a way she's the only one. In another way, I have thousands of children all over the world.

Interviewer: She came a little late for you, didn't she?

George: Not for me. I'm just beginning to live. When I'm 100 years old, come and interview me again, I'll tell you some more interesting stories.

His friends recalled that George also had the habit of slipping large denomination franc notes into books as bookmarks, then reshelving them and forgetting where he put them. Since George ran Shakespeare as a lending library, too, people would report finding 50,000 franc bills, which George would pocket, saying, "Oh, I wondered where that went." He was a great lover and patron of literature, and counted among his friends many of the greatest writers of the 20th Century, among them Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, James Baldwin, Lawrence Durrell, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg and Wiliam Burroughs.

Willis Barnstone read at Shakespeare in August

I met George in the nineties when Richard and I began traveling to Paris together. In his mid-eighties, he was lean and raffishly bohemian, and had the aura of a Merlin. As Sylvia said about her father in the 2005 video, Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man, "For me, he's more of a very eccentric wizard."

There are many fine obituaries out there with all of the pertinent "facts," how George was given the mantle and bookstore name by Sylvia Beach, who began the store in November 1919 (and closed it in December 1941 after threats from the occupying Nazis), and who first published James Joyce's Ulysses; how George and his friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights in San Francisco began their "sister stores" in the early 1950's, etc.; but what moved me was the way his death so beautifully mirrored his life. Sylvia was quoted in the 2002 Book TV interview, "People ask me what is his secret. I think it's that he's surrounded by books, which is his passion. And also surrounded by young people, so it kind of keeps him alive. He's got a buzz for life and so he's--I find him quite inspiring that way."

George Whitman died as he lived, above the bookstore in his tiny apartment facing the Seine and Notre Dame, in a 17th Century building that had once housed the monks of Notre Dame. He died surrounded by books, with his daughter, friends and his dog and cat by his side.

We walked by Thursday to bring Sylvia Whitman a bouquet of roses, and found the store closed, and dozens of people with the same impulse, creating a shrine of flowers, candles, and notes that we all hoped would withstand the near-freezing Paris wind.

George will be buried at Pere-Lachaise, our favorite cemetery, where Balzac, Proust, Oscar Wilde and Apollinaire rest, so we will visit him there, and will continue to greet his spirit at least weekly at Shakespeare, the fiercely independent and magical bookstore where we buy our books. 

 

The Greek Gods and Goddesses Consider Proust

“A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the sequence of the hours, the order of the years and worlds. He consults them instinctively as he wakes and reads in a second the point on the earth he occupies, the time that has elapsed before his waking; but their ranks can be mixed up, broken.”

     —Part 1, Combray, “Swann’s Way,” Marcel Proust

Hestia: Proust’s home:

I am standing before the walls of his recreated bedroom.

It’s a facsimile, I know, but the walls are lined with the same material.

I have known this story for years, but it’s the thing that moves me, that opens the door to my soul.

Look at this harsh desk—lacquered black, uninviting. But the narrow brass bed with its dusky blue spread—this is where he wrote most of À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, lying down, late at night, the cork preventing the light and the sounds and dust of Boulevard Haussmann from intruding upon the unwinding of memory. 

A friend of his, the writer, Countess Anna de Noailles, suggested lining the room with cork.

I search all over Paris for the café in which I can write. But what I really want is a cork-lined room, where I won’t need a fan to block out the sounds of neighbors.

Did any writer who ever lived create a better shell to protect his delicate sensitivity? Like a hermit crab.

Artemis:

Marcel Proust, whose Sun in Cancer in his natal horoscope is reflected in his deep ties to his mother, memory and nature. Has any writer ever written so many lush metaphors about flowers and trees?

“It was in the Month of Mary that I remember beginning to be fond of hawthorns. Not only were they in the church, which was so holy but which we had the right to enter, they were put up on the altar itself, inseparable from the mysteries in whose celebration they took part, their branches running out among the candles and holy vessels, attached horizontally to one another in a festive preparation and made even lovelier by the festoons of their foliage, on which were scattered in profusion, as on a bridal train, little bunches of buds of a dazzling whiteness. But, though I dared not do more than steal a glance at them, I felt that the ceremonious preparations were alive and that it was nature herself who, by carving those indentations in the leaves, by adding the supreme ornament of those white buds, had made the decorations worthy of what was at once a popular festivity and a mystical celebration. Higher up, their corollas opened here and there with a careless grace, still holding so casually, like a last and vaporous adornment, the bouquets of stamens, delicate as gossamer, which clouded them entirely, that in following, in trying to mime deep inside myself the motion of their flowering, I imagined it as the quick and thoughtless movement of the head, with coquettish glance and contracted eyes, of a young girl in white, dreamy and alive.”

            —Part One, Combray, “Swann in Love”

Hermes:

I am in the midst of the great adventure of reading Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, nearly finished with Lydia Davis’s translation of Volume One, Swann’s Way.

“What ravishes me is his metaphors,” I say to Helen.

“Ah, yes,” she says. “I returned to Proust when America invaded Iraq. An antidote. Before that, I’d never made it through more than 40 pages.”

“Same with me. Ouch!” I say as the acupuncture needle pierces my thigh. “But this time I’m finally ready for him.”

“I read ten pages a day,” she says. “And got through about 1,000 pages.” She finishes with two needles near my ankles. “What stayed with me is his definition of genius: ‘to transpose and transform.’ It sounds trivial to use this as an example, but I thought of that watching a documentary on Coco Chanel. Do you know where she got the idea of those boxy jackets with trim?”

“Let me guess. From military jackets?”

“No. From a bellboy in front of an Austrian hotel where she was staying. He wore a little Tyrolean jacket.”

“That’s it! She transposed and transformed the design.”

She leaves me to float down the river of meditation.

I think of the dinner the night before on our friends’ boat on the Seine, of the meal Jeannette created for the seven of us.

Daedalus: the craftsman:

This perspective, this genre, close first person, subjective stream of consciousness, stories in poetic prose, memories of the artist’s life: this is it for me. Memories told through the senses, things, the real.

The tug back to writing fiction, reading Proust.

Yet wanting to continue writing about the present.

How to braid the past and the present? What to call these pieces, bits, threads?

“When all of that was finished, there came a work of art composed expressly for us, but more particularly dedicated to my father who was so fond of it, a chocolate custard, the product of Francoise’s personal inspiration and attention, ephemeral and light as an occasional piece into which she put all her talent. If anyone had refused to taste it, saying: “I’m finished, I’m not hungry any more,” that person would immediately have been relegated to the rank of those barbarians who, even in a gift an artist makes them of one of his works, scrutinize its weight and its material when the only things of value in it are its intention and its signature. To leave even a single drop of it on the plate would have been to display the same impoliteness as to stand up before the end of a piece under the very nose of the composer.”

            --Part One, Combray, in “Swann’s Way” 

Ares: Proust’s possessions:

In Proust’s room at the Musée Carnavalet, the following furniture and objects are gathered from the three successive homes he held in Paris after the death of his parents: 102 Boulevard Haussmann (December 1906-June 1919):

8 bis, rue Laurent Pichat (July-September 1919);

44, rue Hamelin (October 1919-16 November 1922). 

Lit (bed)

Bureau (desk)

Bibliothèque (library)

Chaise longue (chaise lounge)

Tapis (rug)

Portrait du docteur Adrien Proust, père de l'écrivain, par Louise Brouardel (portrait of Doctor Adrien Proust, father of the writer)

Plaque de jade, cadeau de la comtesse de Nouailles (jade plaque, gift of the countess of N.)

Glace à main (hand mirror)

Brosse avec monogramme en argent (brush with silver monogram)

Épingle de cravate, en or et corail, par Cartier (gold and coral tie pin)

Plateau en métal argenté (silver metal tray)

Canne, cadeau du marquis d’Albuféra (cane, gift of marquis d’Albuféra)

Pelisse en loutre (exposée occasionellement) (an otter fur coat (occasionally displayed))

            --Don de M. Jacques Guérin, 1973

Fauteuil (chair)

Paravent (screen)

Table de chevet (bedside table) 

Table de nuit à abattants (bedside table with flaps) 

Lampe (lamp)

Miroir (mirror)

Essuie-plumes en laiton (brass feather duster)

Plumier en palissandre (rosewood pencil box) 

Encrier (inkwell)

Montre gousset (pocket watch) 

Épingle de cravate ornie d’une perle (tie pin with a pearl)

Agenda, cadeau de Mme Straus (calendar, gift of M. S.)

Brosse de toilette en ivoire (ivory clothing brush)

Brosse à chapeau en ébène (ebony hat brush)

Brosse à chapeau en palissandre (rosewood cap brush)

Chausse-pied en ivoire (ivory shoe horn)

“L’Offrande à L’Amour” groupe en porcelaine de Meissen, d’ après Fragonard

            --Don de Mme Odile Gerandan, en souvenir de Céleste Albaret, sa mère

But it is not until I visit the Musée Carnavalet a second time that I see the objects that mean the most to me: a stack of notebooks on the shelves of the bedside table, medium size with lightweight cardboard covers, like the ones that Moleskin makes. They are probably facsimiles, but I instantly know that I’ll settle on this size, this kind, after all my experiments with writing notebooks.

Athena:

After his parents died, Proust withdrew more and more from the world. He was enabled to do so because of his inherited wealth, what Virginia Woolf advised writers to have: a room of one’s own and 500 pounds a year.

“What is meant by 'reality'? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable--now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech--and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates. Now the writer, as I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us. So at least I infer from reading LEAR or EMMA or LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU. For the reading of these books seems to perform a curious couching operation on the senses; one sees more intensely afterwards; the world seems bared of its covering and given an intenser life. Those are the enviable people who live at enmity with unreality; and those are the pitiable who are knocked on the head by the thing done without knowing or caring. So that when I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not.”

            —Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own”

Dionysus:

Proust on being possessed by erotic love: 

“Swann remained there, disconsolate, embarrassed and yet happy, with this envelope which Odette had handed over to him quite fearlessly, so absolute was her confidence in his discretion, but through the transparent glazing of which was revealed to him, along with the secret of an incident which he would never have believed it possible to discover, a little of Odette’s life, as in a narrow illuminated section cut directly out of the unknown. Then his jealousy had an independent, selfish vitality, voracious for anything that would feed it, even at Swann’s own expense. Now it had something to feed on and Swann was going to be able to begin worrying each day over the visitors Odette might have received at about five o’clock, and begin trying to learn where Forcheville had been at that hour…. His jealousy, like an octopus that casts a first, then a second, then a third mooring, attached itself solidly first to that time, five o’clock in the afternoon, then to another, then to yet another.”

            —Part Two, Swann in Love, “Swann’s Way”

Aphrodite:

Proust as (literary) aphrodisiac:

"Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation that he procures--there's something sexual in it--that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can't write like that.... How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped--and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp."

            --Virginia Woolf (before she wrote Mrs. Dalloway)

Demeter:

Proust, whose health was delicate most of his life. In the room at the Carnavalet, his silver metal tray is powdered white from the medicine he took for his asthma.

Apollo:

Proust, who circulated in the fashionable Paris salons of the early twentieth century, before retiring from social life to write during most of his waking hours the last fifteen years of his life.

What an unerring eye he has for the snobbery, falsities and malice of the hostesses, courtesans and aristocratic gentlemen of his social circles.

“It was after dinner at the Verdurins’. Either because Forcheville, feeling that Saniette, his brother-in-law, was not in favor in their house, wanted to use him as a whipping boy and shine in front of them at his expense, or because he had been irritated by a clumsy remark which Saniette had just made to him and which, in fact, had gone unnoticed by those present, who were not aware of the unpleasant allusion it might contain quite contrary to the intentions of the one who had uttered it without any malice, or finally because he had been looking for an opportunity to induce them to banish from the house someone who was too well acquainted with him and whom he knew to be so refined that he felt embarrassed at certain moments merely by his presence, Forcheville answered this clumsy remark of Saniette’s with such coarseness, hurling insults at him, and emboldened, as he shouted, by Saniette’s pain, his dismay, his entreaties, that the wretched man, after asking Mme. Verdurin if he ought to stay, and receiving no answer, had left the house stammering, tears in his eyes. Odette had watched this scene impassively, but when the door closed on Saniette, lowering as it were by several notches her face’s habitual expression, so as to be able to find herself, in her baseness, on an equal footing with Forcheville, she had put a sparkle in her eyes with a sly smile of congratulations for the audacity he had shown, of mockery for the man who had been its victim; she had cast him a glance of complicity in evil which was so clearly intended to say: “That finished him off, or I’m very much mistaken. Did you see how pathetic he looked? He was actually crying,” that Forcheville, when his eyes met that glance, sobering in a moment from the anger or simulation of anger which still warmed him, smiled and answered:

            “He needed only to be friendly, and he would still be here. A good rebuke does a man no harm at any age.””

            —Part Two, Swann in Love, “Swann’s Way”

  

Zeus:

Like most great geniuses, Proust had profound mystical vision. I think of William Blake, of W. B. Yeats, of Albert Einstein, who said, “We can only draw lines after Him.” 

“I find the Celtic belief very reasonable, that the souls of those we have lost are held captive in some inferior creature, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, effectively lost to us until the day, which for many never comes, when we happen to pass close to the tree, come into possession of the object that is their prison. Then they quiver, they call out to us, and as soon as we have recognized them, the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and they return to live with us."

“It is the same with our past. It is a waste of effort for us to try to summon it, all the exertions of our intelligence are useless. The past is hidden outside the realm of our intelligence and beyond its reach, in some material object (in the sensation that this material object would give us) which we do not suspect. It depends on chance whether we encounter this object before we die, or do not encounter it.” 

            —Part 1, Combray, “Swann’s Way”

Hermes:

“The real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”

            --Marcel Proust

Sex and Surrealism, America and France

Life is surreal. Oh yes, it is.

In a state close to dream last night, I finished Henry Miller’s “Quiet Days in Clichy,” his alter-ego, Joey’s, rambunctious accounts of sex with prostitutes and a 15-year-old girl whom his equally goatish roommate, Carl, picks up wandering the streets of Paris.

Joey comes home one night to find Carl with Colette, whose virginity he has just plucked from her as casually as the god, Hades, plucked the girl, Kore, from a meadow (where she was herself plucking flowers), and took her down into the underworld with him.

The homeless girl turns out to be so sexually ravenous that Carl begs Joey to help him sate her appetite on nights when Carl is away at work in a newspaper office.

But Colette, whom the two men agree is “dumb,” is not Joey’s type. He prefers women who have something interesting to say. Besides, they could be thrown in jail for having sex with a minor. (Though sex is legal in France at the age of 15, or at least is today, the two men at first believe that the girl is 14.)

Joey begs Carl to find Colette something to wear beside the transparent Japanese shift he’s provided for her, or he may find himself raping the girl against his will.

One day, Colette disappears. The next day at noon, when Carl and Joey are both home, someone knocks on the door. It’s the police, with the girl’s parents.

The mother is so beautiful that both men wish they’d found her first. “The mother!” says Carl later. “Did you have a good look at her? She was not only beautiful, she was divine.” But the mother is mostly quiet while the police and the father, who looks like a barrister, question the two men about the girl’s missing watch.

When the mother examines a stack of books on Carl’s work table, Faust, Blake, Lawrence, Shakespeare—good literature—and hands the last volume of Proust’s great work to her husband, the man looks at Carl with new eyes. Carl then discusses the essay he’s writing on the relation between Proust’s metaphysical vision and the occult tradition, and Joey is revealed to be a famous writer. The attitude of the parents changes from accusatory to respectful.

(This was first written in New York City in 1940, and rewritten in Big Sur in 1956.)

It is fascinating to read this account of untrammeled male sexuality by an American artist, a writer, in Paris, pre-Women’s Liberation.

The only woman in Henry’s accounts of his sexual adventures who seems offended by what some might see as insensitivity to a woman’s inner life is a beautiful young Danish woman. But that’s after she and Joey and Carl and an acrobat named Corinne have a four-way sexual romp after dinner at the men’s apartment.

Those Viking babes can be so difficult!

                                                *

The next morning, Marley and I read The New York Times over breakfast. The big news: Anthony D. Weiner (really, that’s his name?) was caught sending snapshots of parts of his body to various young women over the Internet. He had excellent pecs that must have taken many hours over many months at the gym to develop, so you can hardly blame him for wanting to show them off.

I didn’t get the opportunity to see the shot of him in his boxers, though it seems to me that he might be confusing what turns women on with men’s love of viewing body parts. But what do I know?

What knocked me out was the photo of him in bed with… Marley! Really. It was our cat, white with fawn ears, sleeping soundly beside him, so I knew immediately that Anthony, though not, perhaps, a man of good judgment, was certainly a man of good taste.

(A little aside here: Richard came home the other day from l’Alliance Francaise and told me that his French teacher had informed the class that they must not pronounce the “t” at the end of “chat,” when referring to a cat. Just as in English, in French, a pussy may refer to a cat. Or it may refer to a woman.)

Anthony, too, uses the two words interchangeably, calling this photo, “Me and the pussys.”  

But then I read that not only is Anthony married, but he’s been married less than a year. His wife happens to be a personal aide to Hillary Clinton, which perhaps suggested to Anthony that if Hillary accepted Bill’s indiscretions, her aide might do the same for him.

Furthermore, Anthony seemed a likely candidate to replace Michael Bloomberg, the current mayor of NYC. And those political hopes, it seems, have now been extinguished.

I watched a video in which Anthony confessed that yes, he had sent texts of photos of his body, along with flirtatious messages to several young women on the Internet. At several points he broke down in tears.

What has happened in our world between Henry Miller’s lusty joyous relish of sex with prostitutes, 15-year-olds and indignant Danish beauties (who nevertheless, surrender to his desires), and the sexual scandals that have erupted lately in the news?

The contrast between these two New Yorkers, Henry Miller and Anthony Weiner, seems to me to be utterly surreal.

Perhaps it’s the difference between what is permitted an artist (or rather, what an artist permits himself to do) and a politician.

Perhaps it’s a difference in space, of geography, between France and the U.S.A. (The parents of the 15-year-old shifted their attitude entirely when they learned that they were addressing a famous writer. Writers are that deeply respected in France.)

Perhaps it’s a difference in time, that certain changes that occurred in the 1960s—the birth control pill, sexual freedom, books such as Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” and Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” and the rise of feminism—changed what women accept, and thus, what the culture condones.

However, I think another element is at play here.

There was a brief time in history in which one generation (in America, at least) was free to experiment and live out our sexual fantasies completely. There was a period after the birth control pill and before AIDS, when men and women could live as freely as they chose without fear of getting pregnant or catching a deadly disease.

Not everyone participated. But those of us who did had a rocking good time.

And listening to Anthony Weiner talk, I thought, Poor guy, he just wasn’t born at the right time. He didn’t get to live out his sexual fantasies before getting married, and this can be a big problem for highly-sexed (but repressed) people.

Artists and libertines have been sexually expressive at all times in history. But for other folks, who are socially or religiously programmed, sex may be a guilty pleasure that must be alternately repressed or furtively engaged in.

 

And yet, it’s the very essence of the life force. As the philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, said, “The degree and kind of a man's sexuality reach up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit.” 

In Henry Miller’s writing, he often gives the impression that he’s oblivious to the effect he’s having on the women with whom he has sex, whereas Anthony Weiner’s tears of regret at hurting his wife (as well as his more political concern about disappointing his constituents) seemed to me to be genuine.

This seems like a cultural advance, a man caring (at least in retrospect) about his effect on the woman to whom he’s married.

Yet all that magnificent lusty life force that Henry had! What I love about Henry Miller, what Nietzsche himself would have admired, was the way that Miller’s sexuality and spirit were not divided. It was all of one piece, in all its lustiness as well as crudeness and lack of sensitivity.

What seems sad to me about Anthony Weiner is how divided his spirit is from his sexuality. That seems to be the inheritance of Judeo-Christianity—the body divided from the spirit. And what a sad and tortured story that creates.

 

The Numinosity of Things

Celestine

Great wars of liberation are being fought all across North Africa and the Middle East. Lesser wars of liberation are being fought in France, too. Here in the fifth arrondissement of Paris, we battled the forces of French bureaucracy to liberate our household goods from Le Havre customs.

We valued most of the fifty boxes at $50 each. Many contained books, writing supplies and journals. Many contained art. How do you assign such things a dollar amount? Customs was suspicious. ALL were the same value? Were we smuggling precious objects to sell in France, without declaring them, so we didn’t have to pay taxes? Or forbidden items?

The struggle to release our stuff took forty e-mails, twenty phone calls, 300 euros and three weeks, but we triumphed.

One week ago, the boxes were delivered to our door. The man who drove the truck three hours from Le Havre carried some of the boxes down to our cave[1], most of the boxes to our apartment, and with the help of a Romanian worker named Christian, he carried my maternal grandmother’s heavy wooden trunk up five flights of stairs, since it wouldn’t fit in the ascenseur.[2]

The truck driver, a shy, florid man in his 50s, who looked as if his favorite pastime was eating, seemed ready to pass out as he entered our living room. Christian, younger and fit, was smiling, unfazed.

The driver accepted a glass of water, but would not take a tip.

Christian stayed all afternoon, helping us slice open boxes with sculptures and paintings inside. He broke down the cardboard boxes for recycling, while we greeted beloved works of art as if they were old friends who’d made a long journey across the country by covered wagon, then a voyage by slow ship across the Atlantic, only to be held unlawfully in jail for nearly a month.

Are objects alive? Of course. How else to explain the numinous quality, the spell cast on us, by the things we unpacked?

These things spoke to us! They told us stories. Sometimes one would break into song.

Time or space won’t allow me to tell you every single story we heard in the several days of unpacking, but here are a dozen:

1) The trunk. The big, round-backed, dark brown wooden trunk belonged to my Norwegian-American maternal grandmother, Esther Moe Heimark. Esther was a poet and playwright who also bought antiques, which she sold in the small Minnesota town where she lived with my grandfather, Julius, and their three children. This trunk is the perfect size to contain the following:

i) My grandfather’s accounts of his parents crossing the United States by covered wagon, farm life in Minnesota, and leaving the farm to become a doctor.

ii) Copies of my uncle Jack’s Heimark family history, with photos.

iii) Genealogical books about my Kitchell family ancestors, Puritans who fled religious persecution in Kent and Surrey, England, and arrived in Guilford, Connecticut in 1639.

iv) My own oral history interviews with my parents, transcribed and bound as a gift to my family. How strange and heart-breaking to read it and hear how lucid my father was, just a year or so before his dementia began.

 2) A bentwood chair, also of dark wood, from my grandmother Kitchell’s apartment in the Sequoias assisted living apartments in San Francisco, where I and my cousins Kit, Mark, Liza and Hank visited her often in the two years before she died. She was always warm and nonjudgmental towards my then-boyfriend, Gary, a wild and wooly bohemian painter. An American blueblood herself, I never saw one instance of snobbery from her.

3) Dana Point, a painting that Gary painted, shortly after we left the schooner, The Flying Cloud. We had lived on it for two years, renovating it to go around the world. The painting has three levels: landscape, woman’s body and bird. It is surreal, like the work of Salvador Dali.

4) Celestine, a papier mâché bear and two tree branches that my sculptor sister, Jane, made to honor our father. I first saw it in her art studio in Boulder, and bought it half a year before her nearly sold-out art show at my brother, Jon's, and his wife, Leatrice’s, art gallery in Phoenix, Arizona. Celestine stands in the non-working fireplace of our living room, leaning forward eagerly, just as my father did in life.

5) The soft wool blanket with bears and men and women holding hands that my mother knitted and gave to me. I told her I repaired a couple of holes Marley had made in it while kneading me as I read in bed.

“Oh, that was the worst thing I ever knitted,” my mother said.

“But it’s beautiful!” I said.

“I mean, it was the most difficult of anything I ever made.” 

6) A painting by Kathleen Morris, Shrine for Couple #3, from my Santa Fe years when I earned a living as a traveling art dealer, which brought me to Los Angeles. I stayed in a suite at the Chateau Marmont in the late ‘80s, a very good time for selling art. I began to find the excitement of the city more appealing than living in the country in Santa Fe, and moved to Los Angeles in 1990. And there I met Richard.

7) Books by friends. Richard and I met at a 1994 poetry reading at a bookstore, Midnight Special. Later, with three friends, we started a poetry reading series at the Rose Café. It lasted three years, and exposed us to all the rich work of the poets of Los Angeles, and later, from other parts of the country and beyond.

8) The photo of Carolyn Kizer reading her poems at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. She was the first person to read at our series at the Rose Café, and became my poetry mentor and friend. Later, we bought the Paris apartment she and her architect husband, John Woodbridge, owned.

9) Prayers to the Muse, the cross that my sister, Jane, made for me when I received my M.F.A. in creative writing at Antioch University, Los Angeles. It is made of red leather book end papers and dry wall mud. Antioch gave me more friends than any other experience I’ve had in my life. Six of them joined me weekly for a fiction reading and editing circle at our house in Playa del Rey for years, which continues now with us Skyping between Los Angeles and Paris.

10) Charlie the marble. I opened a well-wrapped package and out tumbled Charlie. Charlie, a photographer, was married to my great friend, Polly, with whom I lived in two communes in Berkeley in the late ‘60s. Richard and I loved visiting Polly and Charlie in their warm, art-filled Berkeley home over the years. Charlie died several years ago after a liver transplant. A glass artist whose work Charlie photographed took his ashes and made 300 glass marbles out of them as gifts for his friends. Richard and I each have one, which we keep on our desks and play with. Richard wrote a sonnet to him. We talk to Charlie. He’s so pleased that Polly’s painting and sculpture are being shown in various galleries, well reviewed and selling well.

11) My sister, Jane, made a modern Kachina, The Minotaur, for Richard. He is a Taurus. It captures his Bull spirit, and now raises its arms in the goddess salute of ancient Crete in the nonworking fireplace in his office. (We were married in Crete, since our personal myth originates there.) The heavy stone at the base made it very difficult to ship to Paris. But we found an art packer, Jorgen, at Box Brothers in Santa Monica, who devised an ingenious way to keep the stone from breaking away from the papier mâché figure, and this totem figure arrived intact.

Page 113, The Red Book

12) C. G. Jung’s The Red Book. Richard and I saw a show at the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles of this magical book of mandalas that the great psychiatrist, C. G. Jung created as a vehicle for his own healing. This may be a universal method of healing; drawing a daily mandala was my way of healing, too. For my birthday last year, three of my siblings, Jon, Ann and Suki, gave me a book certificate. I bought this book with it. It is so numinous that I can’t read it yet. But at the right time, I will.

[1] Storage units in the cellar of the building for each apartment owner. The caves are ancient, eerie and cold. You can imagine Edgar Allen Poe setting one of his stories here.

[2] Elevator.

The People of the Book

From Rue Lagrange, we turn a corner.  Suddenly, Notre Dame looms like a great ship before us, directly across the Seine. We pass the Square Réne Viviani, named for a WWI-era French prime minister, but once the garden of l’Église St-Julien-le-Pauvre, where St Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Villon and Rabelais all prayed, in the 13^th, 14^th, 15^th and 16^th centuries.

 

Here we are at 27 Rue de la Bûcherie, in front of this odd little bookstore that is so numinous for us. Shakespeare’s portrait is painted twice on the wall outside. Two young Americans sit at a table outside intently chatting (I hear their accents as we pass).

Out here on the paving stones between the store and the Seine is where Richard read his poems one day in spring of 1997 when we were here on our honeymoon. In 2006, on an evening when we’d just arrived in Paris, the two of us read poems together in the small intimate room upstairs.

I remember the dazzling warmth of Sylvia Beach Whitman, who had just taken over ownership of the bookstore from her father, George Whitman. She was like a fairy, delicate, blond, and full of light. Though she seemed far too young to run a bookstore, it was clear she would be very good at it.

 

This year, we enter as if visiting an old friend in our home town—Paris is our home town now. It’s 8:30 p.m., and chances of Sylvia being here this late are slim. But there she is to the left of the door, small, blond, radiant as ever. We exchange greetings, chat.

I ask her about my gift certificate. She dashes back to her office in the antiquarian book room, and returns: here it is, converted from dollars to Euros. Six weeks I’ve waited, gathering a list of books, savoring the thought of spending the goodbye gift from my writers group in Los Angeles. It’s a hefty amount.

But first Richard and I must sniff around this rabbit warren of a bookstore—a warren for enchanted rabbits.  In the front of the store to the left of the cashier, are books about Paris and France. Here I find Ernest Hemingway’s The Moveable Feast. But no Montaigne.

Sylvia, all in black, leggings and a long sweater, searches through the section on France. While she is looking, I remember bookstores where I’ve worked: The Tides in Sausalito, California; Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Rizzoli Books in New York City. I think that in a former life I was—not the owner of a bookstore—but a bookstore itself.

 Sylvia says she’ll be right back. She thinks there is a volume of Montaigne on hold, and Voila! she returns with The Complete Essays.

I move on to the next room, the poetry section. I search for Dorianne Laux’s The Book of Men, and Susan Howe’s That This. No luck.

In the fiction section, I strike it rich. Here is Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita; Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea; Leonardo Sciascia’s The Wine Dark Sea, and Andre Breton’s Nadja.

And here are a few volumes of The Paris Review Interviews. I select Volume II, with interviews by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and Alice Munro.

In the France section, I find Paris Metro Tales, translated by Helen Constantine, and the recently published, How to Live; A Life of Montaigne In One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, by Sarah Bakewell.

I find Richard seated in the next room on a red theater seat, a huge book on the history of photography open on his lap.

“You pick a book that you want too.”

“No,” he says, “This is your gift. I don’t need to buy any more books.”

He is engrossed, which gives me time to sit on a ledge in the fiction section and read a bit from each book. Yes, the various recommendations from friends and book reviewers were all good.

A young black-haired couple speaking what sounds to me like Japanese stands nearby discussing choices of books.

Another couple in their 40s pokes through the France section speaking what might be Norwegian.

An Englishman talks with Lauren at the cashier's desk.

The sweet music of French is all around us.

At the counter, Lauren rings up my purchases, and asks me if I’d like my books stamped. Bien sûr! The stamp is a portrait of Shakespeare with the name of the bookstore and Kilometer Zero Paris in a ring around it.

I order Dorianne Laux’s latest and Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon. She hands me back my gift card. Half the credit amount still remains. Oh, how rich I feel!

In the window I notice a stuffed crow.

“….for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that, with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you…”

We walk out of Shakespeare & Company, in my right hand a big brown bag with nine books. Richard takes my left hand and chuckles, “You’re so happy with a stash of books.”

I send a thank you over the Seine, across France, sailing over the Atlantic Ocean, flying over the North American continent all the way to Los Angeles to Anna, Cassandra, Dawna, Diane, Jennifer, John and Jon. 

They—like Sylvia, like the authors she carries, like her father, like my mother who read to me as a child and is the greatest reader I know, like the voices already speaking to me from the big brown bag—are my tribe, the People of the Book.