Eleanor Beardsley reported yesterday on the NPR program All Things Considered and Marlise Simons reported the previous day in The New York Times that George Whitman, founder of the bookshop Shakespeare & Company, located across the Seine River from the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, died at the age of ninety-eight. Whitman died in his apartment above the bookshop in the Latin Quarter of Paris.
Shakespeare & Company is a cultural magnet for English-speaking writers and other artists in Paris. It is a bookshop that also operates as a fee-based lending library. Whitman would allow published writers to sleep in the store in return for a few hours of work in the store per day. His famous customers and friends included Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Samuel Beckett and James Baldwin, Lawrence Durrell, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso.
He named his bookshop in honor of a bookshop of the same name that Sylvia Beach (1887-1962) had operated in Paris between 1919 and the German occupation of Paris during World War II. It had been a home away from home for American and other English-speaking expatriates in the City of Light.
In 1922, she had published James Joyce’s Ulysses and counted him amongst her wide circle of literary friends that also included Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The original Shakespeare & Company was a lending library as well as a bookshop, as Ms. Beach lent out books for a small fee as well as sold them.
Hemingway paid tribute to her in A Movable Feast.Her memoir Shakespeare & Company was published in 1959. Noel Riley Fitch’s biography Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation was published in 1983. Last year, Columbia University Press published The Letters of Sylvia Beach, edited by Keri Walsh.
A New Jersey native, Whitman was the son of a professor who took the family to China while on sabbatical in 1925. The father spent that time in part teaching at Nanking University. Whitman graduated from Boston University with a journalism degree in 1936 and went on walking tours of North and Central America and came home after getting bogged down in a Panamanian swamp. He enrolled at Harvard and in 1941 enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War II, serving as a medic in Greenland.
When the war ended, he explored Europe and settled in Paris in 1946. He used his college benefits under the G.I. Bill to study for a time at the Sorbonne. Near that very prestigious school, he opened a lending library in his windowless hotel room in the Hotel de Suez. He opened his first bookshop in a kiosk and called it Le Mistral in honor of the Chilean poetessGabriella Mistral. According to Shakespeare & Company, Whitman renamed his business Shakespeare & Company in 1964 to honor Sylvia Beach on the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth.
There are people who accused him of stealing the name of Sylvia Beach’s defunct bookshop, in effect appropriating her legacy, “But,” Ms. Simons reports, “Clive Hart, a Joyce scholar, wrote in a recent e-mail that he attended a gathering in 1958 in which Sylvia Beach ‘announced that she would like to offer George the old name of Shakespeare & Company.’” When his daughter was born in 1981, he named her Sylvia Beach Whitman.
Whitman had many affairs, but married only once, according to Sylvia Beach Whitman, when he was briefly married to her mother, Felicity Leng. One of the many challenges he faced over the years was being forced to close the shop for a year in 1967 because he lacked a proper license.
During that time, he continued to lend out books and began publication of The Paris Magazine. Another setback occurred when approximately 5,000 volumes in the library above the bookshop were consumed in a fire.
Gerry Hadden had previously profiled Whitman in 2007 for The World, which is produced by PRI (Public Radio International), the BBC World Service, and WGBH-FM. [The latter is the NPR station in Boston and sister to the WGBH-TV station, which is Boston’s PBS station.] The World is broadcast on NPR. Whitman had hoped to operate the store until he turned 100, but in 2004 passed along management of the shop to his daughter, Sylvia, who was then twenty-two years old.
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