Shakespeare and Company

Continuing on in re-reading A Moveable Feast, I've come to the chapter about Sylvia Beach and Shakespeare and Company...                          

Perhaps one of (and maybe the only one of) my biggest disappointments in Paris was discovering that the current Shakespeare and Company is not the original. Sylvia Beach's original store was on the rue de l'Odéon. This is the place where the expats came in the 20's and where Sylvia risked publishing Ulysses for James Joyce.

The original Shakespeare and Company - Sylvia and Hem are the last two on the right.

The store front is still there, but the original store was closed during WWII. The story is that Sylvia packed up and hid the entire store from the Nazis. 

The original facade.

In 1951, George Whitman opened the current store. Yep, he is a relative of Walt's. It sits right across the street from Notre Dame. After Sylvia's death he named the store Shakespeare and Company in her honor. 

Me by the current store.

The current store is the store of the beat generation and current writers, but it still retains the atmosphere that Hemingway described: "...this was a warm, cheerful place with...tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living. The photographs all looked like snapshots and even the dead writers looked as though they had really been alive...as high as the wall and stretching out into the back room which gave onto the inner court of the building, were shelves and shelves of the wealth of the library."

 Today the bookstore is run by Sylvia Beach Whitman, George's daughter...

The current Sylvia still meets with prospective writers and contributors

Happy Place.

Marshal Ney

"You are all a génération perdue...that's what you are," Miss Stein said. "All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation."

Statue of Marsal Ney next to the Cloiserie des Lilas

Continuing on with Hemingway in A Moveable Feast: "...as I was getting up to the Closerie des Lilas with the light on my old friend, the statue of Marshal Ney with his sword out and the shadows of the trees on the bronze, and he alone there and nobody behind him and what a fiasco he'd made of Wateroo, I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be and I stopped at the Lilas to keep the statue company and drank a cold beer before going home to the flat over the sawmill."

La Closerie des Lilas

Sitting by Hemingway's plaque at the Lilas bar

Location of where the sawmill/flat had been

Luxembourg

A segueway with advice on writing from Hemingway in his studio:

"It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I'd had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going...I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence."

Then, on to the Luxembourg Gardens ~ Hemingway would write about meeting Gertrude Stein in the gardens. I couldn't walk through them without thinking about that chance encounter and where it might have taken place.

"If I walked down by different streets to the Jardin du Luxembourg in the afternoon, I could walk through the gardens and then go to the Musée du Luxembourg where the great paintings were that have now mostly been transferred to the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume. I went there nearly every day...I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough..."

The Musée du Luxembourg - we went there to see the Chagall paintings. It is very near Scott and Zelda's apartment.

The Chagall paintings still inspire, even if the Cezannes have been moved! What florid, lurid inspiration - red skies, floating peasants, crescent moons - all indicative of a period of Russian history. The paintings are our photographs of how life was perceived in a time and place before technology made it available. Words do as well. I'm thankful for those who recorded it all for us - and that we can revisit them today.

All of this fits in perfectly with one of the sessions in our writing retreat. It was called the Ekphrasis exercise, and we practiced it while looking at the paintings at the Musée D'Orsay. The definition of Ekphrasis means "description" in Greek, and according to poetryfoundation.org,

“...an ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the 'action' of a painting or sculpture, the poet may amplify and expand its meaning. A notable example is 'Ode on a Grecian Urn,' in which the poet John Keats speculates on the identity of the lovers who appear to dance and play music, simultaneously frozen in time and in perpetual motion..."

We were to study a work of art that inspired us, write about it, and learn something from observation and even the style used by the artist. It was one of my favorite sessions. 

Feasting

I know there are more literary journeys left to make ~ many, many more. But I would be remiss if I didn't recognize that I have just come from one of the biggest, most marvelous yet ~ from the one that nearly every writer dreams of. I have come from my own writing retreat in Paris, the land of the moveable feast. I cannot thank the Left Bank Writer's Retreat enough for filling a week with incomparable magic. Every need and expectation were met, and we traveled through the cobblestone streets with utmost confidence in our experiences to come.

I am rereading A Moveable Feast by Earnest Hemingway now that I am home, and I will be filling this literary journey as I go along with the book - that way I can let it last longer myself. I can keep drinking from the fountain, supping from the cafes, and remembering the feel of the whole experience.

From the beginning of A Moveable Feast, Hemingway talks about "...the hotel where Verlaine died where I had a room on the top floor where I worked."

The plaque erroneously states that Hem lived here, but this was the locale of his studio. It is, however, where Verlaine died (another literary journey in and of itself).

"It was either six or eight flights up to the top floor and it was very cold and I knew how much it would cost for a bundle of small twigs...I went to the far side of the street to look up at the roof in the rain and see if any chimneys were going, and how the smoke blew. There was no smoke and I thought about how the chimney would be cold and might not draw and of the room possible filling with smoke, and the fuel wasted, and the money gone with it, and I walked on in the rain."

It seems apropos that the building now has a cafe on the bottom floor.

Hemingway goes on "down past the Lycée Henri Quartre and the ancient church of St.-Étienne-du-Mont and the windswept Place du Panthéon..."

Is it coincidence that Woody Allen used the stairs of the St.-Étienne-du-Mont in his film "Midnight in Paris" as the place where Gil Pender takes off in a Peugeot for his foray into the past? Maybe...but I don't think so.

To be continued...

Keats

Every so often, you need a sojourn. Sometimes you need to connect with something greater than yourself for inspiration. Keats is one of the romantic poets that seems simpler, sweeter, more apart than the others. I sought him out in Rome.

The house where he spent his last days sits by the Spanish steps. He had gone there to try to seek out a better climate than England's for his tuberculosis, but he did not survive.

The memorial is now referred to as the Keats-Shelley Memorial. Shelley also spent his last days in Italy.

As you enter the house, you wind around a staircase and go up and up until you reach the appointed door. You come out into a foyer, then enter a library filled with books and memorabilia. In typical romantic fashion, they have locks of the poets' hair and Keats's death mask.

In the room where Keats died, you can see the fireplace across from the bed that threw the shadow of Keats on the wall. The image was captured by Joseph Sevren as he kept watch.

There are flowers on the ceiling. Keats said he could "already see the flowers growing over him."

It was haunting to hear the sounds of the fountain and the people outside the open windows. With little to no cars outside, the sounds there today are very much the same as the ones Keats would've heard there.

Visit the Keats-Shelley Memorial's website...

And see "Bright Star's" trailer - a stunning film about the love of Keats and Fanny Brawne.