乔治·惠特曼-作家文人资助者.docVIP

乔治·惠特曼:作家文人资助者Shakespeare and Company was only part bookshop; it was also part library, part youth hostel and part cultural shrine. As Anas Nin1 recorded in her Paris diaries of the 1950s: “And there by the Seine was the bookshop... an Utrillo2 house, not too steady on its foundations, small windows, wrinkled shutters. And there was George Whitman, undernourished, bearded, a saint among his books, lending them, housing penniless friends upstairs, not eager to sell, in the back of the store, in a small overcrowded room, with a desk, a small stove. All those who come for books remain to talk, while George tries to write letters, to open his mail, order books. A tiny, unbelievable staircase, circular, leads to his bedroom, or the communal bedroom, where he expected Henry Miller3 and other visitors to stay.” The original Shakespeare and Company had been founded by Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate, early in the last century when Paris became the spiritual home of a group of expatriate writers including Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had been drawn to the city by its permissive ways and its cheap hotels, restaurants and bars.4 The shop became a place for English-speaking writers and intellectuals to meet their French counterparts. It became internationally famous in 1922 when Sylvia Beach published James Joyce’s Ulysses, after it had been condemned as obscene in Britain and America.5 But, following the Nazi occupation, Sylvia Beach closed the store. 1951 was the year that this legacy was carried on―George Whitman bought a bankrupt grocery at 37 rue de la Bcherie, on the Left Bank6 opposite Notre-Dame, and turned it into a library and bookstore. It was originally called “The Mistral” but in 1964, after Sylvia Beach?s death, Whitman renamed the shop as a sign of respect. Whitman?s “rag-and-bone shop of the heart” attracted a new generation of expatriate writers and literati, including Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller and L