The proprietor was an whispy-haired Bostonian named George Whitman, who claimed a Walt Whitman as a relative. One day, I repaired George's bicycle, which pleased him immensely, and he loaned it to me. Ah how wonderful to ride a bike once more, and especially in Paris! I rode down rue du Rivoli, around the Place de la Concorde, past the Tuileries, up the Champs Elysees, over the Seine, in front of les Invalides, down Boulevard St Germain, through the Latin Quarter and back to Shakespeare and Company. God, I felt like a bird. Walking around Paris had its charm, but when you have the wind in your face and breeze past the Louvre-what a sensation!

George was, as my friend Carmen Alejandro would say, �a trip.� He stayed up until the wee hours of the morning reading and rose around two or three in the afternoon. He very rarely answered a direct question about what luminaries had frequented his bookstore, but as you walked around with him, he pulled out a first edition of some work signed by the author or point out an autographed picture of some famous author who�d stopped by for a poetry reading on a Monday night. Once, he and I walked across the bridge to the Ile St. Louis to the far end of the island around the area where Baudelaire had lived. We rang the doorbell and after being admitted wound our way up a staircase to a doorway. Inside we were greeted by a friend of Georges�, a book reviewer for some august magazine (or was it the New York Times?) who showed us into his beautiful living room whose high windows looked out through the weeping willows and plane trees over the Seine. He was selling George a number of books he had received over the past year to review at a fraction of their cover price.

On another occasion, he dragged me out of bed at some ungodly hour and we took a cab to the American Church of Paris. Once a year they had a bazaar, and George scooped up as many used books as he could. On our trip we were lucky-someone had donated several hundred copies of National Geographic which his customers always snapped up.

Though in his 60s and looking kind of frail, the summer before I met him, he had hiked across South America, armed with a machete and little money. One night, he claimed, he stumbled sick out of the jungle into an Indian camp. The natives took him in and nursed him back to health. I mean �nursed� quite literally. A new Indian mother actually fed him her own milk! What an adventurer, I thought and I lapped it all up.

The people who frequented the bookstore fell into about three or four categories. First were the travelers-college students, mostly, on their junior year abroad-who had heard about Shakespeare�s free lodging and had come for a long weekend from London, Koln or Rome. A second group were the wannabe artists and intellectuals like myself, devotees of Hemingway, James Joyce or (in my case) Henry Miller. Among the third group were French and American inhabitants of Paris who had either a certain fondness for George or who came to get their monthly fix of English literature and keep their English up. Among the French, were a sweet old French lady who would sit behind the till and lecture to me about American racism and yell at George for creating an eyesore in front of the store. Another woman, named Colette, a cute tow-headed blonde of about 40 had a crush on George and used to cook for him. The fourth group were all the rest-piss artists, petty French criminals trying to rip the place off, and other seedy types.

Living there was a bit of an emotional roller coaster for me. Every Friday a new group of students would arrive, often quite cute girls, only to depart after a few days stay. I was constantly falling in love only to have my heart broken when they left. But nearly every night someone would be around to smoke cigarettes, drink wine, and stay up until the wee hours discussing philosophy, art, films, science, mathematics or literature. It was incredibly stimulating.

One day, I met a painter about my age named David Maes, who hailed from Canada. For some reason, he and I hit it off immediately and became close friends. He had chosen not to go to college in Montreal, opting instead to follow his bliss and come to Paris to paint. He lived in a small apartment on the Ile de la Cite and I visited him there once to view his works. He was teaching himself to paint in oils and produced huge, primitive oils of Parisian scenes-the man with the little wooden sail boats at the Jardins de Luxembourg, a view of the Ile de la Cite, or a sad scene of lovers parting at a train station. Soon after that, he left moved out of the apartment to stay in a building in the Marais, the medieval part of Paris which held a mix of Jews and North Africans and was where the new Centre Pompidou, or �Beauborg�, art museum had just opened. More of David later.

During my days at Shakespeare and Company, I continued to write prolifically, though nothing publishable. Instead, I focused on keeping up my correspondences-to my best friend, Thom Klem and my old girl friend, Kristi, who were living in my college town of Bloomington, Indiana. Thom was exploring his sexuality and poured his heart and soul out in his letters to me. He tried to convince me that homosexuality was a choice, a notion that has all but now been disproved. I believe wished we would become lovers. I told him that though I preferred the non-threatening and in general supportive environment that we had enjoyed among all our gay friends at college, deep down, I could not choose to be a homosexual. There was just some part of me that told me the physical part was just right out.

It�s sad rereading the letters I wrote to Thom during my stay in Paris. Sad because I still didn�t understand that he was in love with me. Sad that being from a conservative Catholic family, he probably was wracked with feeling of guilt. Had he known that homosexuality might be genetically determined, perhaps he would have felt less ashamed. As it was, when he did come out a few years later, he did so with a vengeance, making up for years of celibacy. That was in the early 1980s, and like many who were promiscuous during those days, he contracted AIDS and died in 1991.

Today�s piece comes from an album that either Thom or I discovered the semester before in a cutout bin of a record store in Bloomington. The album was entitled, �Antique Provencal Instruments-Trouvers and Troubadors.� The troubadours and trouveres were secular poets who arose in the south and north of France respectively starting in the 11th century. They were the first artists to write in the vernacular, that is the spoken language of the people instead of the official language of the educated, i.e., Latin. Their language eventually evolved into modern French, which is kind of interesting. You wonder if people were as upset about the �dumbing-down� of the language back then as people are today of things like Ebonics.

Gautier, who lived from 1177-1236, was a monk who and wrote Las, las� which is a short lament. It expresses the monk�s indignation at a robbery that took place in 1219, when thieves broke into a church and stole the relics of a one Saint Leocade. On the old Arion recording I own, this piece is performed on a psaltery, which belongs to the harp family. It consists of a small sound box over which strings have been stretched. When plucked, and sometimes bowed, it produces a haunting tone. I�m not sure it that is how it was originally scored, but this recording is quite affecting. Just the thing to have playing in your Walkman while roaming the streets of Paris.

Sorry No Biography

Sorry, couldn�t find the piece but here�s a link to another recording with some of Gautier�s work.

Enjoy

top