Interview from The Literary Review
George and Sylvia from Kilometer Zero
George Whitman / Sylvia Whitman
DA: Sylvia, did you ever imagine that one day you would find yourself at the helm of the most celebrated English-language bookshop in the world?
Sylvia: It was always my father’s idea—ever since I was about eight.
George: You were playing store here when you were seven years old, serving iced tea and taking a few centimes for it. We’re still playing store, aren’t we?
DA: George, you’ve always lived above the shop. Sylvia, do you live in the bookshop as well?
Sylvia: I live on the third floor of the shop constantly surrounded by books and people. It’s wonderful, but being surrounded by so many things to read all the time I feel like I don’t know anything. There’s so much to read and so much to know, it’s suffocating.
DA: This store, let alone Paris’s literary past, is riddled with myth and rumor. The original Shakespeare & Co. was at 12 rue de l’Odeon, for example, and not here. Hearsay has it, George, that you’re related to Walt Whitman, the poet, although he died in 1883. Some of us know that your dad was in fact Walt Whitman, but the author of scientific books, not the poet, although there are few souls on earth today more Whitmanian in spirit than you. Let’s get the history right and sort out the truth. George, how did you end up in Paris?
George: Well, I came to Paris in 1946 and stayed on. I got a little diplôme from the Sorbonne in “Civilisation.” My hotel room was filled with books from floor to ceiling. Wherever I went I collected books. I started a little lending library for American gis who had stayed on in Paris. I finally decided I’d open a bookstore here to make room for all my books. I spent $500 to buy this shop. Now it’s worth five million. I combined three shops and three apartments and created a little socialist utopia that calls itself a bookstore. At first it was called Le Mistral. After Sylvia Beach, the founder of the first Shakespeare & Company bookstore, died in the ’60s, I changed the name to Shakespeare & Company in her honor.
DA: And you named your daughter Sylvia too. How did you go about telling your story and the store’s story to your daughter? She’s the living legacy of this enterprise.
George: I didn’t tell her the story, actually. She learned it on her own. Sometimes though I commune with Sylvia Beach. She was just an ordinary person like us.
Sylvia: With a love of books.
George: She invented the name—and just the three words say everything. An admirable thing. And I often think that she’d be happy if she could see that there is this little girl named after her, Sylvia Beach Whitman, living and thriving in Paris.
DA: Let me get this straight, you commune with the late Sylvia Beach?
George: Well, I just congratulate her.
Sylvia: I’m reading a lot about her in Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation and I’m so pleased to be named after her. She definitely is a role model for anybody in the bookselling world.
DA: Your mother in England has written to me with another version of the story, that you had to be named after a saint, and being baptized a Catholic, she chose “the least objectionable of your Dad’s suggestions,” Sylvia, after St. Sylvia, the mother of Pope St. Gregory the Great, born c. 515 and noted for her great piety, great beauty and blue eyes, and gracious and animated expression. She is also the patron saint of pregnant women and is prayed to for a safe delivery!
George: That was the only name. And now she’s going to become known in the future the way Colette was known—in one word. Just Sylvia, the most beautiful name a woman could have.
DA: So your mom was okay with calling you Sylvia Beach?
Sylvia: I think so, yes.
George: She wanted to call her Emily.
DA: After Dickinson, I suppose?
George: No—after her grandmother.
DA: Sylvia, it sounds like it was a complicated beginning. Your life began right here in this store, right?
George: Actually, right in that hotel over there.
Sylvia: Yeah, Hotel Dieppe.
George: Proust’s father used to work there.
DA: Amazing. That’s what’s so remarkable about Paris. Literary history drips from everything. I used to live steps from the apartment house where Flaubert penned Madame Bovary. So that’s how it all began.
George: Who knows how it’s all going to end.
DA: Sylvia Beach was single-handedly responsible for the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Do you see yourself moving into the publishing realm as well, helping to discover writers who slave over hard-to-publish literary fiction?
Sylvia: My father and I really want to set up our publishing program soon.
George: We’ve had a lot of remarkable writers working on our staff. A recent one was Karl Orendt, who published 30 or 40 books, many about the Lost Generation and the expat writers between the World Wars. Now that we’re well established we want to publish books as well. To date I’ve published several books, but only about the bookstore, like the little volume The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, which comes from a poem by Yeats. It always stayed in my mind. I think it’s a beautiful expression. I didn’t think life would turn out this way. I thought I’d be a vagabond. And I was a hobo. I crossed the United States on a dime. Never liked hanging on to too much money. I’m an ex-hobo now and have become a petit bourgeois business person.
DA: With a good sense of irony.
George: I’ve risen in the world slightly. Let me share a passage from my little book with you.
I once expected to spend seven years walking around the world on foot. I walked from Mexico to Panama where the road ended before an almost uninhabited swamp called the Choco Colombiano. Even today there is no road. Perhaps it is time for me to resume my wanderings where I left off as a tropical tramp in the slums of Panama—the only white man in a black neighborhood. Perhaps like Ambrose Bierce who disappeared in the desert of Sonora I also may disappear. But after being involved in all mankind it is hard to come to terms with oblivion—not to see hundreds of millions of Chinese with college diplomas come aboard the locomotive of history—not to know if someone has solved the riddle of the universe that baffled Einstein in his futile efforts to make space, time, gravitation and electromagnetism fall into place in a unified field theory—never to witness the day foreseen by Tennyson “when the war-drums throb no longer and the battle-flags are furled, in the parliament of man, the federation of the world.”
I may disappear leaving behind me no worldly possessions—just a few old socks and love letters, and my windows overlooking Notre Dame for all of you to enjoy, and my little Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart whose motto is, “Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.” I may disappear leaving no forwarding address, but for all you know I may still be walking among you on my vagabond journey around the world.
DA: Thank you. Hearing that, the world must seem like a disappointing place to you now?
George: No. I wake up excited about what’s going to happen every day in this bookstore. There are so many things to do. So many things to read. It’s absolutely like a fairy tale.
DA: Let’s talk more about the store. Any idea how many books you have here?
Sylvia: Maybe 100,000.
George: Sometimes we get huge shipments of 5,000 at a time. Sometimes we buy a man’s whole library. There tends to be around 60,000 books on three floors.
DA: Do you know how many people visit the shop?
George: About 1,000 a day.
Sylvia: In the summer.
George: I’m against the idea of publicizing the shop. We’ll have problems with the police. They’ll say it’s a fire hazard—too many people. We’ll have to kick people out.
DA: How many writers have you given a bed to over the years?
George: Bona fide writers?
DA: You’ve always given people the benefit of the doubt. If you were willing to pick up the broom for a few minutes in the morning you would be offered a place to sleep. Are there any people who’ve frequented the shop that are particularly significant? I remember meeting Lawrence Durrell in the shop—not that he had to sweep up. Now at 90 years old, who do you think are the people who won’t fade?
George: Well, there’s a little girl here who is my protégée, a good friend of my daughter’s. She’s living with us now. In my old age I tend to appreciate the simple things in life. I don’t talk about literary figures very much. Her smile is worth a thousand books. I don’t like to exaggerate, but her smile is a very moving experience. I’d rather talk about simple things than celebrities. But of course I think books are the most incredible instruments of knowledge that exist in the world. I was sorry to hear when Noam Chomsky mentioned recently that many libraries are empty in America. People aren’t reading books. Some libraries are closing down or charging money like the American Library in Paris. We have a library here. People can take out four books for four weeks free of charge. Our fiction library is totally free.
DA: How do you juggle your egalitarian ideal with the fact that you must run the shop as a business? With so many independent stores closing in America and the social charges being so high in France, how do you do it?
Sylvia: That’s our secret.
George: People have nostalgia for a place like this. There is no place like this in the whole world. People say they feel so much at home. People say that this is the first place in Paris that is what they expected to find. It’s so homey. Everything has gotten standardized, globalized—with McDonalds everywhere. When I opened the bookstore this part of Paris was a slum. Right at Kilometer Zero in the heart of France, it was a slum. Little grocery shops. Little thread and needle shops. Little bakeries. Lots of wine shops.
DA: So what about Paris continues to impress you?
George: How many cities in America, let alone India, wash the streets every day like they do in Paris? They are very proud of their city and you have to respect that. And this part of Paris every year gets more beautiful. They change the flowers in front of my shop and it’s beautiful. The street is like my yard.
DA: You were born in Salem, Massachusetts. Have you been back?
George: Sylvia Beach did some thing that many expats never did. She mastered French. She was a good linguist with pretty good Spanish and Italian. And she had a lot of French friends. She started her bookstore and it took 22 years before she was able to return to America. I think it has been about that much time too since I’ve been back. Fortunately, I’ve been invited to visit Boston this summer. There is a man in Cape Cod—one of my favorite parts of America—who says I can sleep on his boat and we can sail up to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia to visit a friend of mine who became a millionaire, who sold 24 fishing trawlers to South America when the seas were being overfished and he couldn’t make a living fishing for scallops anymore. So he came to Paris for a month’s holiday. On the first day he came into my bookstore and he went upstairs and he spent a whole month reading. The first writer he met was Lawrence Durrell. So, on my first holiday in many years my friend on Cape Cod is going to take me up to Nova Scotia to visit him. Thanks to my daughter I can now get away.
DA: Changing subjects, you’ve always been a great supporter of literary and cultural events and you have supported the first “Lost, Beat, New Generations in Parisian Literary Traditions” festival that occurred here from June 9-16, 2003. What was the impetus for the festival?
George: My daughter was in charge of that. I’ll let her answer that. (George steps out.)
Sylvia: I studied history at the University College in London and I’m fascinated by it. There is so much history that’s connected with this shop, and at the moment it felt like there was a vacuum, there wasn’t anything exciting going on. So it seemed like a good moment to pull together the three generations of writers. It ended on Bloomsday.
DA: You’re walking around with the history of 20th-century literature written in your passport. It must be exciting to be connected to this literary tradition, but is it also a burden for you?
Sylvia: I wouldn’t describe it as a burden, but I’m very aware of the responsibility I hold on my shoulders and how important it is that I go in the right direction and continue the expat tradition. Sometimes I worry—can I actually do this right? Am I capable? I’m 21 now and I’ve already learned so much about literature.
DA: What are the greatest challenges of operating this store? It must be a difficult thing, to be open from noon to midnight every day. A strange life. Sylvia: Every day with a thousand people coming into the shop, I think the biggest challenge is the things that make the store so unique. You have people staying here as well as it being a bookshop, so the organizational side is tough. There must be 12 or 15 places to sleep in the shop. I find people everywhere.
DA: Your dad has always been a goodhearted soul. He has a tendency to invite people to stay before he knows what kind of person they are. It doesn’t always work out, does it?
Sylvia: Obviously, with that much trust just given out to people, there are occasional problems, but it’s surprising how rarely those problems come up. People are overwhelmed with the amount that Dad trusts them.
DA: The cash box regularly seemed to disappear but your dad seems to live with that.
Sylvia: Yeah, he doesn’t seem to be bothered . . . but that’s one of the things I’m trying to fix. I’m working on the shop having more organization—having a phone, things like that—while not imposing the sort of organization that other shops have, electronic surveillance, scanners of bar codes, etc. The way that our store is run now allows it to maintain the charm it has always had.
DA: Without being too lugubrious, you must think about what’s going to happen after he’s gone.
Sylvia: Yes, that is something that we’re trying to discuss together, but it’s a sensitive topic. It’s very difficult to do that.
DA: He’s so alive. Did he ever mention if he’d like to end up at a special place like Pere-Lachaise with Oscar Wilde and Chopin and Gertrude Stein?
Sylvia: No, but like he always says one day he’ll just disappear. And he’ll always be around in spirit. He threatens me: “I’ll disappear, but I’ll always be looking over your shoulder—so don’t change anything!”
DA: Does George Whitman have email?
Sylvia: No, but he does like to receive emails. He likes me to print them out and then he reads them in bed—but you’ll never find him logging on.
(George returns).
George: You’re invited to an early dinner. Baked beans.
DA: I was going to ask you before where you got your culinary acumen. I remember the first time I came in here you had just made Welsh rarebit for everyone. Do you think there’s any relationship between your vitality, rigor, and virility, and what you eat? I remember you eating slabs of good Danish butter.
George: Maybe that’s the secret.
DA: Let’s be frank. You were not a spring chicken when you brought Sylvia into the world.
George: Oh, my. Who knows Sylvia might just have a sister someday.
(Sylvia laughs).
Sylvia: Actually, I sometimes think that I may have a secret sister in Mexico or Panama or Iceland.
George: Do stay for dinner.
