The Shakespeare & Co bookshop in Paris is quite well known, these days. The colourful shop sign is visible from near Notre Dame so lots of tourists have seen it and maybe even wandered inside to satisfy curiosity. I don’t think it has changed much since this time last century. The daughter of the owner who occupied it when I was there, is still running it today. He’s in the photo below.
The arrangement with the table and the walls of shelves and piles on the floor are exactly as I remember, but that’s because the picture was taken in the 1970s so it would be right.
Back in the day, I think it was Joe who introduced me. He said that even if you don’t have any money for books, you still can have a sit down and a cup of tea. The owner is friendly once he gets to know you, and has even helped some new arrivals to the city to find somewhere to sleep.
The books are nearly all US editions of English language books. So printed on cheap paper that yellows quickly, and using typefaces that are slightly harder to read. I didn’t care because I was voraciously following a trail, book by book, trying to find the source of meaning. More than just a shop, it acted as a sort of community space for English speaking people in Paris, as long as they have some interest in the literature as well.
For me it all started when a friend I was working with for a time passed on a book to me that he had just finished with. “You should read this, it’s so true, and clever”. Breakfast of Champions. The cover wouldn’t have attracted me, but I became so absorbed in reading it that once I stayed sat on the metro after the train had gone right to the end of the line. I was completely oblivious that it had emptied of everyone except myself, and then set off past the end and into the tunnels where passengers never go. The train stopped in the dark and a driver came round and asked me why I hadn’t disembarked. “You’re not allowed to do this.” he admonished. “Interdit”. I wondered what on earth would happen. Well, we swung round in a big loop and re-entered the system as a south-bound train so nothing terrible, but it was an adventure. Bit like riding on a paternoster! Anyway, I got used to having a book to read on boring journeys and started to acquire more of them.
As you may recall, I gave up piano lessons and taught myself guitar. I also walked out on school before A levels and now it seems I was continuing some kind of self guided pathway of literature study. I didn’t like school much, but I loved some of the books I was introduced to there. Like millions of people since, we had to study Animal Farm and 1984 by George Orwell. I had my own take on what they meant, but then also Homage to Catalonia and Keep The Aspidistra Flying.
I was consuming the work of Kurt Vonnegut Junior which gave me immense pleasure at the same time as reading through the complete Orwell including the essays and letters. These lead me to other significant books and authors, sometimes situated in Paris or having passed through like Henry Miller and other Americans. Before I left home I had been given a copy of Hermann Hesse’s Siddartha by someone who found it deeply inspiring. I think I may have had it with me, and read it in one of my little hotel rooms. I was certainly susceptible to that kind of transformational storytelling but without linking it directly with McTell’s over long “The Ferryman” song nor with Buddhism as a calling. Allan W Watts came along for the ride, ever since asking the question “Why is a mouse when it spins?” and from him, it’s a short hop to the realm of R.D Laing and those funny little books of Knots.
By this time in the unheated flat in winter I was waking up in the morning, making myself a bowl of black coffee and going straight back to bed with a book and not getting out of there until midday.
Having followed lots of TV programmes in French I though I would try reading Alexandre Dumas and Jean Paul Sartre in original version. This made Nadia angry for some reason. I was acting out of character, for her.
It was hard going but I ploughed on and then read Leonard Cohen “The Favourite Game” in french because I loved his songs and being Canadian, I thought he’d written it but it turned out to have been translated from English and I didn’t quite get to the end.
Grumpy
Having enjoyed the complete novels of Herman Hesse, culminating in the magnificent “Glass Bead Game” I read his autobiography and became disillusioned with the man himself. George Orwell’s essays and letters are brilliant but he does get a bit grumpy and miserable at the end of his life, unfortunately due to chronic illness and lingering pain. Great writers can conjure up beautiful creations depicting amazing and sublime worlds but their own lives can be rather mundane and deflating. They can spend years of their lives holed up indoors somewhere just trying to write, after all.
Some of my friends were into Carlos Casteneda and his mystical tales of peyote induced magic. These stories had passed into folklore in some circles, as a guide to how you can learn to do astral flying and with enough enlightenment, become invisible. After a while I thought “Hang on a minute, these are just stories, novels. He’s making it all up. You’re not meant to actually believe it!“ There was a little house in a street due for demolition where we would discuss and debate alternative world views long into the night.
I reached a point when I’d almost stopped going out busking very often or anywhere else, and was living far too much up in my own head.
This wasn’t good and things started to crack.
Was I living in a Time Warp? That wasn’t fun any more, starting to get slightly scary.
But human bodies and spirits mostly know how to heal themselves and there comes a point where the old hedge laying song takes over:
“I’d sooner go hedging than read in a book,
For more you get thinking the darker things look;
Since study and weeping are hard on the eyes,
I’d sooner lay blackthorn than learn to be wise.”
I hope some of you enjoyed this episode. Do talk to me, please:
Happy Easter everybody,
I have some time off, well still writing playscript, and my next gig is towards the end of these holidays:
Saturday April 6th 7-9pm
The Sun Inn, Calbourne
Please come along and support if you possibly can, we never know how long some of these great little music venues are going to last these days.
Andy
Carlos Castaneda - I knew it was bollocks.
I had so many arguments about Castaneda. I even knew someone who got himself a flying hat. Seriously 🤷♀️