Working
from about seven to one or two in the afternoon, Carol has been 'cleaning house' since Sunday. You stopped for lunch
about an hour ago at Smashburgers, now she is on her walk at Rose Hill. You are
waiting at the Whitaker mausoleum under the oak and under threatening storm
clouds and distant thunder. This week is no less settled than last. - Amorella
1447 hours. We are being relatively calm going into this concept of
building a new house. If we do it will be the third one. We have no regrets on
the other two, if that's a good sign.
You looking for a sign from G-D telling you
it is time to move back to your original home town? - Amorella
1452 hours. Not really; we just don't want any omens (joking).
Would you joke with a real angel? - Amorella
1453 hours. I might.
Wouldn't that be a bit presumptuous? -
Amorella
1454 hours. That is a very good question. I don't know what the ethics
are in dealing with a real angel. I wouldn't know anyway -- what's the old
adage? -- "Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in
disguise."
You are home and found the quote through
Google on your iPhone. You choose this article because you first remember
seeing the quotation on the bookstore wall of Shakespeare & Company in
Paris.
** **
George Whitman, Paris Bookseller and Cultural Beacon, Is Dead at
98
By MARLISE SIMONS DEC. 14,
2011
PARIS — George Whitman, the American-born owner of Shakespeare
& Company, a fabled English-language bookstore on the Left Bank in Paris
and a magnet for writers, poets and tourists for close to 60 years, died on
Wednesday in his apartment above the store. He was 98.
He had not recovered from a stroke he suffered two months ago,
his daughter, Sylvia, said in announcing his death.
More than a distributor of books, Mr. Whitman saw himself as
patron of a literary haven, above all in the lean years after World War II, and
the heir to Sylvia Beach, the founder of the original Shakespeare &
Company, the celebrated haunt of Hemingway and James Joyce.
As Mr. Whitman put it, “I wanted a bookstore because the book
business is the business of life.”
Overlooking the Seine and facing the Cathedral of Notre-Dame,
the store, looking somewhat beat-up behind a Dickensian facade and spread over
three floors, has been an offbeat mix of open house and literary commune. For
decades Mr. Whitman provided food and makeshift beds to young aspiring
novelists or writing nomads, often letting them spend a night, a week, or even
months living among the crowded shelves and alcoves.
He welcomed visitors with large-print messages on the walls. “Be
not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise,” was one, which
he attributed to Yeats, although it was actually a variation on a biblical
passage. Next to a wishing well at the center of the store, a sign said: “Give
what you can, take what you need. George.” By his own estimate, he lodged some
40,000 people.
Mr. Whitman’s store, founded in 1951, has also been a favorite
stopover for established authors and poets to read from their work and sign
their books. Its visitors list reads like a Who’s Who of American, English,
French and Latin American literature: Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Samuel Beckett
and James Baldwin were frequent callers in the early days; other regulars
included Lawrence Durrell and the Beat writers William Burroughs, Allen
Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, all of them Mr. Whitman’s friends.
Another was the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The two met in
Paris in the late 1940s and discussed the importance of free-thinking
bookstores. Mr. Ferlinghetti went on to found what became a landmark bookshop
in its own right, City Lights, in San Francisco. Their bookstores would be
sister shops, the two men agreed.
Mr. Whitman’s beacon and enduring influence was Walt Whitman (no
relation), who also ran a bookstore, more than a century ago. In a pamphlet,
Mr. Whitman wrote that he felt a kinship with the poet. “Perhaps no man liked
so many things and disliked so few as Walt Whitman,” he wrote, “and I at least
aspire to the same modest attainment.”
George Whitman was born on Dec. 12, 1913, in East Orange, N.J.,
and grew up in Salem, Mass. His thirst for travel was awakened when his father,
a physics teacher, took the family to China for a sabbatical year at Nanking
University. After majoring in journalism at Boston University and graduating in
1935, Mr. Whitman began traveling in earnest, taking extended walking trips
across North America and through Central America while writing and exploring,
coming home only after getting bogged down in a swamp in Panama.
After enrolling at Harvard, he enlisted in the Army in 1941,
serving as a medic for several months at an outpost in Greenland.
Photo
George Whitman at Shakespeare & Company about 1980.
With the end of the war he resumed his travels, exploring Europe
before settling in Paris in 1946. There he used his G.I. Bill benefits to start
a small lending library in his windowless room in the Hotel de Suez near the
Sorbonne, where he studied for a time.
After moving his English language books to a kiosk, he opened
his store, first calling it Le Mistral. It was said to be named after the
Chilean poet Gabriella Mistral, whose work Mr. Whitman admired.
Mr. Whitman, who had called himself a frustrated novelist,
poured his energy into selling and lending books and moving in literary
circles.
How Le Mistral became Shakespeare & Company has been a
matter of some debate. Some accused Mr. Whitman of pilfering the name. But
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.”
“George was of course delighted,” Mr. Hart wrote.
Mr. Whitman adopted the name in 1964, to honor Ms. Beach on the
400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, the bookstore said. He named his
daughter, Sylvia Beach Whitman, born in 1981, after her.
Ms. Whitman, who now runs the store, is Mr. Whitman’s only
child. She said that while he had many romantic attachments, he was married
only once, and briefly, to her mother, Felicity Leng. He is also survived by a
younger brother, Carl.
For all the romanticism surrounding the bookstore, Mr. Whitman
went through difficult times. He was closed for a year, in 1967, for lack of a
proper license, but with the support of friends he continued lending books and
published the first issue of The Paris Magazine, which he called “the poor
man’s Paris Review,” a reference to the literary journal founded in 1953 by
George Plimpton and others. Mr. Whitman’s magazine carried work by Jean Paul
Sartre, Lawrence Durrell, Allen Ginsberg and Marguerite Duras.
It has come out only sporadically since then. A fire once
destroyed almost 5,000 volumes in the library above the store.
Mr. Whitman was famously frugal and expected the bibliophiles
residing in his store to work a few hours every day sorting and selling books.
Yet he also invited uncounted numbers of people for weekly tea parties to his
own apartment, or for late-night readings enriched with dumplings or pots of
Irish stew.
Some guests later described him as a kind and magnetic father
figure to needy souls but also as a man who could throw tantrums and preside
over the store’s residents, sometimes up to 20 people, like a moody and
unpredictable dictator.
Mr. Whitman had variously called himself a communist, a utopian
and a humanist. But he may have also been a romantic himself, at least
concerning his life’s work. “I may disappear leaving behind me no worldly
possessions — just a few old socks and love letters, “ he wrote in his last
years. Paraphrasing a line from Yeats, he added, “and my little Rag and Bone
Shop of the Heart.”
Correction: December 21, 2011
An obituary on Thursday about George Whitman, the longtime owner
of the Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris, referred incorrectly to a
quotation written on a wall of his store. The words “Be not inhospitable to
strangers, lest they be angels in disguise” are a variation on a passage from
the Bible; although Mr. Whitman himself attributed them to the poet W.B. Yeats,
they were not written by Yeats.
Selected and edited from New York
Times dot com
** **
1527
hours. I notice the words are not by Yeats. -- I found it is written in Hebrews 13:2 (KJV):
"Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for
thereby some have entertained angels unawares."
Obviously
the original intends a different meaning than the variation.
“Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in
disguise”
Such it is in the real world, boy. The strangers may have
entertained angels unawares. - Amorella
1549 hours. I like the biblical
quotation better because I would never expect a friend or stranger to be an
actual angel, but hey, William Blake the artist may have been visited by one.
Post.
- Amorella
You had a Graeter's kid's cup for
supper as did Carol; she also made a thin bread cheese sandwich. Carol is watering
sections of the front yard you are recouping from the day. You did do your
exercises this morning, the first time in more than a week. - Amorella
2010 hours. It is difficult
focusing on angelic aspects in the real world when you are debating if and when
you are going to move back to the Westerville area.
You have your practical side. Post. -
Amorella
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