How to Save Literature | Memoir
Temporary Roots
George Whitman, that irascible old legend, held the flyer and read it carefully while I waited at the counter of Shakespeare and Company.
"So let me get this straight. You’re not charging any money for people to join your writers group?” he said finally. No, I answered. “Okay,” he said, “go ahead and post it for free.”
And that was how PariSalon4665 The International Writers Support Group began - with a notice soliciting for members on the bulletin board of the most famous American bookstore in Paris.
But let me backtrack. About a month earlier, my partner Michael and I had arrived in Paris. Years before we met in San Francisco, Michael had been, among other things, a Vietnam-era veteran, former commune leader and stage lighting designer. But soon after we became an item at the Eureka Theater I got pregnant, prompting him to chuck the bohemian life, cut his lovely long hair, grit his teeth, and move us to New York, where he took a low-level corporate job. As an accountant, yet. Domestic life had its pleasures but it was quiet. We lived in a sixth-floor walkup in a funky apartment building in the East Village inhabited mostly by struggling young artists and we had little money, not to mention a toddler son who demanded constant attention. After a few years of being disgusted by the disrepair and filth around us (this was the pre-Giuliani 80s) the last straw came when I took him to the swings across the street in Tompkins Square Park, where an interesting artifact on the ground caught his eye. “Oooh, mats dis?” he said. It was a syringe with blood still in it.
Well, that was it. I told Michael that for our kid’s sake we had to get out of New York, even if we had to go back to San Francisco, which is what we did. We stayed with friends until we could set ourselves up, Michael got another corporate job, and I temped and did the housewife bit. The search for Art and Culture ceased to be uppermost on our minds. San Francisco’s scene had grown pretty barren anyway.
But as our son grew I also grew restless and very cranky. I wasn’t writing anymore. I’d thought I’d lost the juice of my youth. I picked fights with Michael. He was exasperated.
“What the hell is it you want?” he yelled at me.
“I want us to go to Paris!” I wailed. We had talked about this through the years as a sort of pie-in-the-sky dream, that we go to Paris together to write our books.
“Okay,” he told me. “Just be patient. We’ll get to Paris.”
Well, it had taken eleven years more of Michael putting in time at a hateful job, but we’d finally made it. If we were starving for culture we were finally getting our fill of it, although the expensive tourist apartment we were staying in was eating through our savings, and the uncertainty of our sojourn wasn’t prompting Michael to hunker down and finish his novel. We’d have to decide soon whether to go back to the States, back to our apartment and our teenaged son, or proceed eastward to Prague, where living was cheaper and where I’d be able to find work as an ESL teacher.
We were sitting in an English bar in the Rambuteau area weighing our options, when I picked up the local expat magazine, the Paris Voice. Glancing through the classifieds, I saw an ad for a sublet in the 20th arrondissement for only 3,000 francs a month - roughly 450 US dollars.
Terrified that someone would snap up this incredible bargain before we did, I ran to the phone.
“Rap Here”
Although it has its share of cobblestone streets and mansard roofs, the 20th is not considered the most picturesque quartier of Paris. But with its immigrants, flea markets and Communists, it looked like home to us from the start. The sublet, on a winding sloppy street called rue des Grands Champs, was a one-room, ground-floor, TV-less flat that was leased by an artist named Perlmutter who came to Paris every summer to paint and returned to New York every winter to exhibit. We signed the papers for the place without any trouble, probably owing to the fact that no one else wanted it.
“If you’ve never been in Paris in winter before, I’d better warn you,” Perlmutter said, handing us the keys, “it gets pretty bleak. You can go three weeks without seeing the sun.”
“That’s okay, Michael and I will be nice and cozy here,” I said, grinning like an idiot. “We’ll be like Mimi and Rodolfo.”
“Or Scott and Zelda,” intoned Michael darkly, the realist in the family.
The first thing we did once we settled in was to arrange our writing areas and our writing schedule - remember, this was a one-room flat. The second thing we did was to scour all the English-language newspaper articles, listings, and ads we could find to learn what kind of expatriate literary community was out there - a much sorrier exercise. Of course reading the ads is not going to give you the whole picture of a place, but it does give you a good idea of its economic underpinnings. And to read all the ads for lectures, classes, salons, you’d think there was a big healthy world of English-language writers in Paris. Of course the thread that ran through all of them was that you had to pay for their company.
So where was the spontaneous comradeship? The conviviality of struggling artists? The fun? If Michael and I had wanted to pay for our fun we would have stayed in America.
I told Michael flat-out that it was all right for him - like Proust, he did his best writing in mental isolation and solitude - but I couldn’t work in a vacuum. I needed to be around other writers, the more varied their experiences and viewpoints the better. (Being a Filipina from Minneapolis, diversity has always stimulated me.) Okay, he shrugged, see if you can get some people to come over.
The next day, with what I see now as incredible naïveté, I went over to the cybercafe near Sorbonne Number Six and set up a website on Geocities (which assigned me the “address” geocities.com/paris/salon/4665) simply stating that we were forming an anglophone writers group in Paris and leaving a number for interested writers to call. When a week passed and no one called I was despondent. It was then Michael strongly advised me to go over and put an ad up at Shakespeare and Company. I was hesitant. I mean, the place was a holy shrine! True, it wasn’t the Shakespeare and Company of the 1920s, of James Joyce and Hemingway, but didn’t Sylvia Beach hand over the great legacy of expat literature to George Whitman, owner of the current place? And who was I to importune upon this living legend?
“He’s not a museum piece,” Michael said, rather testily. He told me what he knew, what almost everyone knew about Whitman and about his ongoing contributions to Literature - which included the Tumbleweed Hotel, the little area on the second floor where indigent writers in transit were allowed to sleep and work, free of charge. After running a commune himself, Michael must have felt a great sympathy.
“So it’s not like he’s living on some high plane, the guy’s been supporting writers almost all his life. I don’t think he’d mind if someone came along and offered to take some of that load. Anyway, that spot where the bulletin board is - every American in Paris passes by that bulletin board.”
“That’s great,” I said, “but we sure can’t offer anything like the Tumbleweed here.”
“No, but we can do like Gertrude Stein did. We can offer writers a steady place to meet each other, read their stuff aloud, and get some food and drink too.”
I started to get excited. Once Michael said “we”, I knew it could work.
So that’s how I ended up at the counter of Shakespeare and Company, with a small flyer advertising for members for what was still just called The Writers Support Group. By the end of the week we’d gotten a dozen calls.
Since we didn’t have a bell people could ring for our flat, and since I didn’t want to give every unknown prospect our door code, I used Perlmutter’s leftover art paper and made a sign for our window which overlooked the street, which said “Writers Support Group - Rap Here”. I still have the sign, in case we ever need it again.
We Few, We Happy Few
The trouble with having an open door policy that admitted any and all self-described writers was that we got a lot of lonesome tourists and travelers - one-shots, in other words. And although we did get to meet some bilingual French and the occasional Brit, our regular group, once it settled into its groove, became comprised solely of American expats.
But even so it had variety. There was Hillary, who planned revenge on her superiors simply by chronicling their uproarious diplomatic gobbledygook; Amy, who had a razor-sharp intelligence and homey Georgia accent, and wrote lurid thrillers; Lori, the academic who longed to set down on paper the sweeping drama of Arab and American immigrants in Paris; Victoria, the recent divorcee, whose new life included writing a mystery; Manda, the jazz star-cum-playwright who came over in the 70s and was gratified to find that one stereotype of the French was true - they do idolize black American singers; and last but not least, Bob Stoner, known as Stone, who came over in 1968 during the student revolution and stayed to write, produce, and direct plays and eventually run his own traveling theater.
Except for Amy, who joined in because Hillary brought her, everyone else came in cold. I can’t say any of us produced a major work, although among us we did finish short stories, essays, a couple of plays which we all read aloud, and some novels, including Michael’s. And we had a great deal of fun together. Also, Michael and I were learning a few things. We were learning how to listen better, and how to critique effectively, both during meetings and between meetings, when we copyedited members’ manuscripts (gratis, of course). And in sharing our own technical problems with the group, we were learning how to improve our own writing.
But just as importantly, we were learning what makes a writers support group work.
I wish our experience could have lasted longer, but after nine months in Paris it became necessary for us to return to the States. Stone vowed to try to keep the group going, but I wasn’t overly hopeful that every single one of our regulars would continue. As for being published or produced - well, that seemed even more unlikely. Being published or produced seemed such a faraway thing to all of us. But I’ve been proven at least partly wrong. Stone’s still writing and directing plays (in which Victoria acts) for his own traveling theatrical company, Vagatur, and Manda’s gone on writing for the stage. Last spring she had her first production, and in the audience were Stone and Victoria.
We all still email to each other, and whatever there is still of PariSalon4665 in Paris remains with them.
The Future is Now
Perlmutter hadn’t been kidding about the Parisian winters, they were dreary enough to make you turn existential. But there was one ray of brightness in late March - the International Book Fair. It was being held in a major convention center way on the other side of town on a cold drizzly day, but I didn’t care. I love book fairs and made up my mind to go. (Michael didn’t join me, he was out and about with our son, who’d come for a visit and was thrilled to be going to real bars with his old man.)
It was well worth it, and not just to witness the reverence thousands of ordinary Europeans were showing for the written word, or to delight in the vast display of books in multitudinous languages.
I got a glimpse of the future.
It was in the back, in the area marked “Technologie”. There, some American rep was giving a demonstration of Rocket Ebooks. Half a dozen computers were logged on to French and German ezines. A display from Adobe was proudly offering the latest release of their program that could create elaborate documents which could be sent through email - PDFs.
And smack in the center was the machine, a print-on-demand machine. It was amazing, just amazing - to watch an electronically-stored document (a book composed of nothing but air and ideas!) transformed into a book you could hold in your hands in couple of minutes.
I looked around me and had an epiphany: Here was the future of literature. To be able to write, to get your words out quickly and cheaply, without barriers, to as large an audience as you dared approach - this was going to be a true revolution.
And I was determined to be a part of it.
The Torch is Passed On, Sort Of
It’s been two and a half years since I went to that book fair. A couple weeks ago I got an email from Stone. He’d just finished a short book on the Islamic experience in post-9/11 Europe and wanted to know if I could help him find someone to publish him fast. Since leaving Paris, Michael and I had started PariSalon4665 up again in San Francisco, and this time it was an unqualified success. As well as the group that met regularly in our home, I had a website going, three literary ezines, an online newslist, and an email newsletter. My own stories were being published in other magazines and I’d also managed to publish a friend’s novella myself as an ebook, and find a small press to take on Michael’s novels (he’s written two more to date). They’re now available as paperbacks and ebooks. To top it off, the new group was about to come out with its own POD paperback anthology.
I gave the names of several publishers to Stone, and told him if he struck out with them I’d publish his book as a PDF ebook and offer it as a download on my website. Hearing from Stone was great, but it was making me nostalgic. I asked him how everyone from the old group was doing, of course, but I also asked him how Shakespeare and Company was doing too.
How’s George Whitman? I asked. You told me once you’ve known him since the 60s. Can you give me the real lowdown, is he the real heir to Sylvia Beach? What’ll happen to Shakespeare and Company when he’s gone?
This is what he wrote back:
George Whitman, that irascible old legend, held the flyer and read it carefully while I waited at the counter of Shakespeare and Company.
"So let me get this straight. You’re not charging any money for people to join your writers group?” he said finally. No, I answered. “Okay,” he said, “go ahead and post it for free.”
And that was how PariSalon4665 The International Writers Support Group began - with a notice soliciting for members on the bulletin board of the most famous American bookstore in Paris.
But let me backtrack. About a month earlier, my partner Michael and I had arrived in Paris. Years before we met in San Francisco, Michael had been, among other things, a Vietnam-era veteran, former commune leader and stage lighting designer. But soon after we became an item at the Eureka Theater I got pregnant, prompting him to chuck the bohemian life, cut his lovely long hair, grit his teeth, and move us to New York, where he took a low-level corporate job. As an accountant, yet. Domestic life had its pleasures but it was quiet. We lived in a sixth-floor walkup in a funky apartment building in the East Village inhabited mostly by struggling young artists and we had little money, not to mention a toddler son who demanded constant attention. After a few years of being disgusted by the disrepair and filth around us (this was the pre-Giuliani 80s) the last straw came when I took him to the swings across the street in Tompkins Square Park, where an interesting artifact on the ground caught his eye. “Oooh, mats dis?” he said. It was a syringe with blood still in it.
Well, that was it. I told Michael that for our kid’s sake we had to get out of New York, even if we had to go back to San Francisco, which is what we did. We stayed with friends until we could set ourselves up, Michael got another corporate job, and I temped and did the housewife bit. The search for Art and Culture ceased to be uppermost on our minds. San Francisco’s scene had grown pretty barren anyway.
But as our son grew I also grew restless and very cranky. I wasn’t writing anymore. I’d thought I’d lost the juice of my youth. I picked fights with Michael. He was exasperated.
“What the hell is it you want?” he yelled at me.
“I want us to go to Paris!” I wailed. We had talked about this through the years as a sort of pie-in-the-sky dream, that we go to Paris together to write our books.
“Okay,” he told me. “Just be patient. We’ll get to Paris.”
Well, it had taken eleven years more of Michael putting in time at a hateful job, but we’d finally made it. If we were starving for culture we were finally getting our fill of it, although the expensive tourist apartment we were staying in was eating through our savings, and the uncertainty of our sojourn wasn’t prompting Michael to hunker down and finish his novel. We’d have to decide soon whether to go back to the States, back to our apartment and our teenaged son, or proceed eastward to Prague, where living was cheaper and where I’d be able to find work as an ESL teacher.
We were sitting in an English bar in the Rambuteau area weighing our options, when I picked up the local expat magazine, the Paris Voice. Glancing through the classifieds, I saw an ad for a sublet in the 20th arrondissement for only 3,000 francs a month - roughly 450 US dollars.
Terrified that someone would snap up this incredible bargain before we did, I ran to the phone.
“Rap Here”
Although it has its share of cobblestone streets and mansard roofs, the 20th is not considered the most picturesque quartier of Paris. But with its immigrants, flea markets and Communists, it looked like home to us from the start. The sublet, on a winding sloppy street called rue des Grands Champs, was a one-room, ground-floor, TV-less flat that was leased by an artist named Perlmutter who came to Paris every summer to paint and returned to New York every winter to exhibit. We signed the papers for the place without any trouble, probably owing to the fact that no one else wanted it.
“If you’ve never been in Paris in winter before, I’d better warn you,” Perlmutter said, handing us the keys, “it gets pretty bleak. You can go three weeks without seeing the sun.”
“That’s okay, Michael and I will be nice and cozy here,” I said, grinning like an idiot. “We’ll be like Mimi and Rodolfo.”
“Or Scott and Zelda,” intoned Michael darkly, the realist in the family.
The first thing we did once we settled in was to arrange our writing areas and our writing schedule - remember, this was a one-room flat. The second thing we did was to scour all the English-language newspaper articles, listings, and ads we could find to learn what kind of expatriate literary community was out there - a much sorrier exercise. Of course reading the ads is not going to give you the whole picture of a place, but it does give you a good idea of its economic underpinnings. And to read all the ads for lectures, classes, salons, you’d think there was a big healthy world of English-language writers in Paris. Of course the thread that ran through all of them was that you had to pay for their company.
So where was the spontaneous comradeship? The conviviality of struggling artists? The fun? If Michael and I had wanted to pay for our fun we would have stayed in America.
I told Michael flat-out that it was all right for him - like Proust, he did his best writing in mental isolation and solitude - but I couldn’t work in a vacuum. I needed to be around other writers, the more varied their experiences and viewpoints the better. (Being a Filipina from Minneapolis, diversity has always stimulated me.) Okay, he shrugged, see if you can get some people to come over.
The next day, with what I see now as incredible naïveté, I went over to the cybercafe near Sorbonne Number Six and set up a website on Geocities (which assigned me the “address” geocities.com/paris/salon/4665) simply stating that we were forming an anglophone writers group in Paris and leaving a number for interested writers to call. When a week passed and no one called I was despondent. It was then Michael strongly advised me to go over and put an ad up at Shakespeare and Company. I was hesitant. I mean, the place was a holy shrine! True, it wasn’t the Shakespeare and Company of the 1920s, of James Joyce and Hemingway, but didn’t Sylvia Beach hand over the great legacy of expat literature to George Whitman, owner of the current place? And who was I to importune upon this living legend?
“He’s not a museum piece,” Michael said, rather testily. He told me what he knew, what almost everyone knew about Whitman and about his ongoing contributions to Literature - which included the Tumbleweed Hotel, the little area on the second floor where indigent writers in transit were allowed to sleep and work, free of charge. After running a commune himself, Michael must have felt a great sympathy.
“So it’s not like he’s living on some high plane, the guy’s been supporting writers almost all his life. I don’t think he’d mind if someone came along and offered to take some of that load. Anyway, that spot where the bulletin board is - every American in Paris passes by that bulletin board.”
“That’s great,” I said, “but we sure can’t offer anything like the Tumbleweed here.”
“No, but we can do like Gertrude Stein did. We can offer writers a steady place to meet each other, read their stuff aloud, and get some food and drink too.”
I started to get excited. Once Michael said “we”, I knew it could work.
So that’s how I ended up at the counter of Shakespeare and Company, with a small flyer advertising for members for what was still just called The Writers Support Group. By the end of the week we’d gotten a dozen calls.
Since we didn’t have a bell people could ring for our flat, and since I didn’t want to give every unknown prospect our door code, I used Perlmutter’s leftover art paper and made a sign for our window which overlooked the street, which said “Writers Support Group - Rap Here”. I still have the sign, in case we ever need it again.
We Few, We Happy Few
The trouble with having an open door policy that admitted any and all self-described writers was that we got a lot of lonesome tourists and travelers - one-shots, in other words. And although we did get to meet some bilingual French and the occasional Brit, our regular group, once it settled into its groove, became comprised solely of American expats.
But even so it had variety. There was Hillary, who planned revenge on her superiors simply by chronicling their uproarious diplomatic gobbledygook; Amy, who had a razor-sharp intelligence and homey Georgia accent, and wrote lurid thrillers; Lori, the academic who longed to set down on paper the sweeping drama of Arab and American immigrants in Paris; Victoria, the recent divorcee, whose new life included writing a mystery; Manda, the jazz star-cum-playwright who came over in the 70s and was gratified to find that one stereotype of the French was true - they do idolize black American singers; and last but not least, Bob Stoner, known as Stone, who came over in 1968 during the student revolution and stayed to write, produce, and direct plays and eventually run his own traveling theater.
Except for Amy, who joined in because Hillary brought her, everyone else came in cold. I can’t say any of us produced a major work, although among us we did finish short stories, essays, a couple of plays which we all read aloud, and some novels, including Michael’s. And we had a great deal of fun together. Also, Michael and I were learning a few things. We were learning how to listen better, and how to critique effectively, both during meetings and between meetings, when we copyedited members’ manuscripts (gratis, of course). And in sharing our own technical problems with the group, we were learning how to improve our own writing.
But just as importantly, we were learning what makes a writers support group work.
I wish our experience could have lasted longer, but after nine months in Paris it became necessary for us to return to the States. Stone vowed to try to keep the group going, but I wasn’t overly hopeful that every single one of our regulars would continue. As for being published or produced - well, that seemed even more unlikely. Being published or produced seemed such a faraway thing to all of us. But I’ve been proven at least partly wrong. Stone’s still writing and directing plays (in which Victoria acts) for his own traveling theatrical company, Vagatur, and Manda’s gone on writing for the stage. Last spring she had her first production, and in the audience were Stone and Victoria.
We all still email to each other, and whatever there is still of PariSalon4665 in Paris remains with them.
The Future is Now
Perlmutter hadn’t been kidding about the Parisian winters, they were dreary enough to make you turn existential. But there was one ray of brightness in late March - the International Book Fair. It was being held in a major convention center way on the other side of town on a cold drizzly day, but I didn’t care. I love book fairs and made up my mind to go. (Michael didn’t join me, he was out and about with our son, who’d come for a visit and was thrilled to be going to real bars with his old man.)
It was well worth it, and not just to witness the reverence thousands of ordinary Europeans were showing for the written word, or to delight in the vast display of books in multitudinous languages.
I got a glimpse of the future.
It was in the back, in the area marked “Technologie”. There, some American rep was giving a demonstration of Rocket Ebooks. Half a dozen computers were logged on to French and German ezines. A display from Adobe was proudly offering the latest release of their program that could create elaborate documents which could be sent through email - PDFs.
And smack in the center was the machine, a print-on-demand machine. It was amazing, just amazing - to watch an electronically-stored document (a book composed of nothing but air and ideas!) transformed into a book you could hold in your hands in couple of minutes.
I looked around me and had an epiphany: Here was the future of literature. To be able to write, to get your words out quickly and cheaply, without barriers, to as large an audience as you dared approach - this was going to be a true revolution.
And I was determined to be a part of it.
The Torch is Passed On, Sort Of
It’s been two and a half years since I went to that book fair. A couple weeks ago I got an email from Stone. He’d just finished a short book on the Islamic experience in post-9/11 Europe and wanted to know if I could help him find someone to publish him fast. Since leaving Paris, Michael and I had started PariSalon4665 up again in San Francisco, and this time it was an unqualified success. As well as the group that met regularly in our home, I had a website going, three literary ezines, an online newslist, and an email newsletter. My own stories were being published in other magazines and I’d also managed to publish a friend’s novella myself as an ebook, and find a small press to take on Michael’s novels (he’s written two more to date). They’re now available as paperbacks and ebooks. To top it off, the new group was about to come out with its own POD paperback anthology.
I gave the names of several publishers to Stone, and told him if he struck out with them I’d publish his book as a PDF ebook and offer it as a download on my website. Hearing from Stone was great, but it was making me nostalgic. I asked him how everyone from the old group was doing, of course, but I also asked him how Shakespeare and Company was doing too.
How’s George Whitman? I asked. You told me once you’ve known him since the 60s. Can you give me the real lowdown, is he the real heir to Sylvia Beach? What’ll happen to Shakespeare and Company when he’s gone?
This is what he wrote back:
George went to Paris after the war to meet Sylvia Beach, who he’d idolized for years. She let him work at the counter, but she never let him upstairs near the literary scene, that was all her domain, you know... Afterward he opened his own bookshop, the one you see now, and in the 50s and 60s he attracted very different writers from Sylvia’s - Lawence Durrell, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti... When Sylvia was dying, he visited her at her deathbed and got her permission to rename his shop after hers, Shakespeare and Company, to carry on the tradition, “pass on the torch”...
George’s group was always more fragmented than Sylvia’s but in my opinion they took more chances, stylistically and in their lives. As far as the business part of running a bookstore, Sylvia was way better. I don’t know who’s going to take over the shop when he’s gone. I think he’s always felt in her shadow. But George has a fine sense of literature - and if you’re trying to pass on a literary tradition, that’s the main thing.
By the way, thanks for all those addresses. I’m sending you the manuscript too... See if you can do anything with it...
Peace from Paris, Stone
July 2002
Originally published in The Best of PariSalon4665 Anthology (Brave New Books, 2002). Download a free PDF copy of the complete anthology here.
Cantara Christopher
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