I once spent a few weeks as George Whitman’s guest in his bookshop opposite Notre Dame in Paris. Today I heard of his death on the news. I’ve mentioned him three times on this blog: in May 2008, May 2009 and Feb 2011*. It has always been difficult to write about the man himself, for I never understood him. Watching the excellent documentary embedded below, I get it at last. The man I encountered, who never seemed to reveal himself, was precisely the man everyone else saw, the man you can see for yourself as he was in 2003. The only difference was that I met him in May 1962, when he was 49, looking more or less like the picture alongside. His shop wasn’t called Shakespeare & Co then. The sign above simply said Librairie Mistral. He slept in the front room on the first floor, usually with his current girlfriend. (She had a tiny flat of her own, on the nearby Île de la Cité. She hired me to paint its walls.) Like everywhere else in the building, George’s bedroom was lined with books and became part of the shop as soon as we opened in the morning. The narrow passage to reach it doubled as the kitchen, whose hygiene standard was no better than as shown in the movie. On the same passage was the toilet, (a hole-in-the floor squat kind) which also doubled as the shower; both functions lightly curtained off. My own assigned task, in return for the free bed provided to writers-in-residence, was to clean up after his Alsatian dog. It would be left in the shop overnight to languish on the tiled ground floor, using that time and space to do what a dog normally does only when taken for a walk. I had to make the place clean and sweet with mop and bucket before the shop opened, regretting that any books stacked in corners on the floor ran the risk of getting a little soggy and stained.
George Whitman in old age
Who was George? A remote man who trustingly invited strangers to live with him, a generous miser, a kindly bully, morosely gregarious, indulgently intolerant; a clown who lived his entire life in public: what you saw was apparently the whole man. He and the bookshop were one. The bookshop was his entire world, But it was also the wider world as it could conceivably become. George was the embodiment of Ubuntu. (I’ve fallen in love with this concept having, for technical reasons, abandoned Windows on my old computer and tentatively embraced Ubuntu—the operating system—, which operates on Whitmanesque principles too. Even down to the mopping-up, but that’s probably because I haven’t got it house-trained yet.)
I only realised this morning that George Whitman must have been the inspiration for Dylan Moran’s hero Bernard Black in the comedy series Black Books. There are lots of clips on YouTube but living in the UK I’m barred from viewing them (Channel 4 copyright). So I’ve made a short video myself, playing back the DVD at home. Bernard is nothing like George, but the homage is there, nonetheless.
* Also this post.
a wayfarer’s notes 
He sounds like a strange and interesting man. The world is a smaller and less interesting place without him in it.
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“A remote man who trustingly invited strangers to live with him” a wonderfully telling statement. I get a definite sense of the sort of person you're talking about.
I'm also curious about this part: “My own assigned task, in return for the free bed provided to writers-in-residence, was to clean up after his Alsatian dog.” Somehow I've gotten the impression along the way from things you've said in the past, that you came to writing late, as a humble amateur. Of course, the quality and skill behind your writing belies that claim at every turn, so I've either fallen victim to your modesty or my own misunderstanding of things.
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Ah, you noticed. You see to cut a long story short I had spent the previous night under the Pont Neuf in a sleeping bag, but it wasn’t a good idea because I was rudely awakened next morning by a policeman who poked his rifle at me. So then my friend Alexander, a man with a serious past, informed me of Whitman’s bookshop and his offer which sounded too good to be true. “But … I am not a writer!” I replied, in innocent honesty. He looked me in the eye, and suggested I could very quickly start being one. So when I went to see George, I had manufactured a story that I was writing a book on Zen Buddhism. He took me on, no questions asked. I got to sleep in the room which was also in the evenings the editorial office of a famous magazine called “Two Cities”. The editor was an African. I can’t remember what the other city was.
I said “no questions asked” but that’s not true. I’d had so many answers prepared at the brief initial interview, but it wasn’t till several weeks later that he asked me out of the blue,why “everyone” was writing books on Zen and no one was writing about Mahayana Buddhism. I couldn’t decide if he was being suspicious or what.
Anyhow, in 1997 I took the younger kids to Disneyland Paris and took the opportunity to go and see George. There he was still at the till, as if nothing of significance had happened in his life over the last 35 years. When I confessed my falsehood he looked so concerned that I had to invent myself a new writing career, compounding the sin. It’s too late now to tell him I’ve become a blogger.
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I watched nearly fifteen minutes of the film and see just what you mean. His wasn't the kind of lifestyle I'd choose for my own but his bookshop home looked remarkably comfortable considering the circumstances. One can only imagine how many fascinating people he met over the course of 70 (?) years spent there, never mind the events he witnessed.
In 1965 I went to Paris with a friend to help her find an apartment – the place we found was on the Ile de la Cite. Then she went off to her new job at UNESCO while I found a small hotel where I lived for the next few months. I loved the book stalls on the west bank but I'm sure I never ran into George. You were most lucky.
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Vincent,
Thank you for this post. It's very interesting because of your experience. I also watched the videos.
I passed by the bookstore a few times, but I never went in. It looked closed the last time I saw it. I was staying at an old red brick hotel called Esmeralda which was across from Notre Dame. Although the hotel wasn't dirty, I could feel the place and staircase in the video because of that experience. I tend to get bug bites, and the video reminded me of the bug bite I had there.
This made me think of one Japanese woman who was a little bit like Whitman. She was the second wife of the pioneer modern dancer in Japan. After her husband died, she used to live with a chicken in the front room of their ballet school. One memory leads to another in my head. I might write about that someday.
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There's a hotel across from Notre Dame called Esmeralda? Well, that's certainly appropriate.
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Bryan,
I just checked the internet. It said it is older than Notre Dame! The store front had much more character than it appeared on the photos in their Web site. A friend of mine had their honeymoon there and recommended me.
After a visit to my high-school art teacher's home in East of Paris, he was interested in seeing Hotel Esmeralda. So he came to the hotel to check it out. The price of lodging was reasonable, and he said the room upstairs was ideal for his work. I don't know if he actually painted Notre Dame afterward from the hotel. But he is successful professional artist married to a French woman.
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http://www.hotel-esmeralda.fr/histoire.php?lg=en
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A friend of mine told me that George was a Communist. Any experiences or thoughts on that? Not like it really matters, I'm just curious.
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If by communist you mean being a member of a communist party, I’d say definitely not. I could well imagine him having called himself a communist in his youth, in the days when it could have meant something close to anti-fascist.
Anarchist would be nearer the mark, but I cannot see him as an activist in any way.
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I hope you will write about that woman, Keiko/
Yes Susan it was a comfortable home. I don’t know why my little piece seemed to focus on squalor. It wasn’t the main thing at all! Ever since my sojourn there, I’ve thought that the best way to decorate a house is with books, floor to ceiling.
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I brought at least 10 big cases of books with me when we moved here from Portland, OR last year; I can't tell you how much I regret having left twice as many behind. I'd love to decorate a house with them too.. as well as the reading lamps, comfy chairs, and a nice carpet or two.
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Yes, and I suppose if you keep on moving you will always be shedding books as you go. But then there is the joy of acquiring more. In my little Victorian cottage I’ve had to find ingenious ways to store them, as you can see from a picture here.
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Just as a side note… you might go here http://bookshelfporn.com/ and check it out. It's not, repeat NOT porn in the traditional sense. But if you love books the way I do it will make you drool just the same…
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Rev, Google has a spam filter designed expressly to trap suggestions like the one you just made. I’m glad it had the good sense not to trash your comment. I shall go and check … drooling already.
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I have bought more books (all hardbacks. mostly secondhand) since buying a Kindle than ever before. But the Kindle is sometimes handy. I have The Brothers Karamazov in a fine edition but the spine is too stiff and the print too small. That's an example of where the Kindle comes handy. I can download the same translation from Gutenberg and read in comfort on the Kindle; which is also handy for its dictionary, checking blogs lying in bed, and reading any important long document away from the computer.
Rev, shall we compare notes on the drooling? I don’t know if I love books the way you do but most of the bookshelf porn on that site seemed to assume I would get my kicks from quantity. Whereas I get most excited by books of a certain vintage – 1920s and 30s; especially when they are not classified at all, but all mixed up.
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Thanks for your Xmas card.
I'm pleased you are still enjoying your blogging.
I am keeping reasonably well and leading an even quieter life than usual.
I wish you the best for Xmas.
Rob
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