The Law of Jante: Scandinavian Anti-exceptionalism and the Wealth and Social Status Taboo

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Comparative politics, Creative Writing, Inter-ethnic relations, Literary & Linguistics, Regional politics
(Image: Scandinavian Standard)

Contemporary Scandinavian society is rich and appetising fodder for sociologists and behaviouralists. The peculiar strain of egalitarianism that runs through the Nordic countries manifests itself in a concept known as Jantelagen in Swedish or Janteloven in Danish and Norwegian⊡. The origin of the word ‘Janteloven’ comes from a 1933 satirical novel by a Danish-Norwegian writer Aksel Sandemose. A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks, set in a fictional Danish town called ‘Jante’, is “a thinly veiled roman à clef about his hometown Nykøbing Mors”, Denmark, in which he skewers the inhabitants for their foibles – “pettiness, envy, backbiting, gossip, inverted snobbery and small-mindedness” [‘The Law of Jante’, Michael Booth, Paris Review, ‪11-Feb-2015 ‬www.parisreview.org]. One small portion of En flyktning krysser sitt spor (the Norwegian title) is of lasting significance, the “Laws of Jante”⊞, the list of ten principles designed to put non-conformists in Nordic society in their place. Sandemose’s so-called ‘Laws’ draw on long and widely held, deeply engrained Scandinavian attitudes⊟.

The 10 Laws of Jante

A society devoid of exceptionalism and ‘oneupmanship’
Janteloven/Jantelagen is a concept which celebrates Nordic self-restraint, “stoic humbleness and modesty”. Any sense of individual superiority and ambition is actively discouraged, as is talking about one’s personal success. The Jante laws are cultural codes which eschew declarations of a self-congratulatory or immodest kind. Nordic “Jante-ism” offers no haven for those seeking to stand out from the crowd. The benefits for adherence, Scandinavians assert, are collective ones, good for the nation as a whole, resulting in enhanced quality of life, a contribution to the “GNP of happiness” enjoyed by its citizens⊠ [‘Jantelagen: The Law of Jante Explained’, Swedes in the States, 22-Feb-2021, www.swedesinthestates.com].

(Source: worldlife expectancy.com)

The Jante Law instructs on what citizens need to do to fit in to the community, but it has a punitive purpose too…if an individual fails to fit in, it provides a way of “socially stigmatising anyone who break the rules”. According to author Michael Booth, it affects the everyday choices Scandinavians make, what clothes you wear, what car you buy, etc [‘Forget hygge: The laws that really rule in Scandinavia’, (BBC Ideas video, 2018, www.bbc.co.uk].

“We are all equal!”

Swedish comparisons are odious: The taboo on money and status
Jantelagen is deeply rooted in the Swedish psyche, it is de rigeur for all stratum of society never to talk about one’s wealth or income. Jantelagen also prohibits people from boasting about their social status, firing off a warning shot to allay any notions they may harbour about climbing the social ladder (the codes act as a handbrake on citizens not getting above their station). The reinforcement of the appearance of an egalitarian society helps to keep the balance (ie, serving as a control mechanism, maintaining homogeneity and societal harmony). Stephen Trotter’s study of Janteloven in Norway concludes that it operates as a “form of structural censorship (where) symbolic power is exerted (in the task of) nation-building” [‘Breaking the law of Jante’, SR Trotter, Issue 23 Myth and Nation, www.gla.ac.uk].

(Source: mbastudies.com)

Anything north of average is a win!
The claimed benefits of “Jante-ism” has also been explained in terms of a state of decreased expectations – living by the ten rules installs a sense of average expectations from life, so anything that comes your way “above and beyond the average” will be a welcome bonus, value-adding to your existing store of happiness (Lindsay Dupuis)[‘The happiness of the Danes can easily be explained by 10 cultural rules’, Lila MacLellan, Quartz, 29-Sep-2016, www.qz.com].

Stockholm’s poshest precinct (Photo: Alxpin/Getty Images)

A Millennial challenge to the Law of Jante?
The fabric of Jantelagen in a society like Sweden remains firmly intact despite the reality of growing inequalities in income since the 1990s – the top 20% of workers in Sweden earn four times as much as the bottom 20% (OECD). There are some signs in the Scandinavian countries however that the fabric is coming under strain, especially from the changing expectations of the countries’ youth. The inexorable rise of social media presages a Millennial backlash against the Law of Jante… University of Bergen academic Cornelius Cappelen points to the pervasive influence of online platforms to effect behavioural change and undermine the Jante mindset, ie, bragging on Facebook, Instagram, Vlogging, etc, all promoting “rampant individualism” (Cappelin) [‘Law of Jante’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; ‘Jantelagen: Why Swedes won’t talk about wealth’, Maddy Savage, BBC, 18-Oct-2019, www.bbc.com].

(Photo: Sveriges Radio)

Exo-group influences
Aside from pushback from a social media-fuelled Scandinavian youth, challenges to the unspoken social norms of ”Jante-ism” may emerge from other sectors of society. Sweden is increasingly a migrant society, estimates put the proportion of Swedish citizens with a foreign background at around 25%…this growing diversity exposes the community to the influence of outside cultures, many of which have very different socio-cultural norms to the ‘native’ ones, such as the celebration of achievements, skills and talents of the individual (Savage).

Helsinki: Vanha kaupunki (Source: Multi Briefs)

🇩🇰 🇸🇪 🇳🇴 🇫🇮 🇮🇸

Sandemose’s stern image on a Norwegian jet

Endnote: TPS
Scandinavia’s Jante Law evokes similarities with other cultural phenomenons such as the (albeit less institutionalised) “Tall Poppy Syndrome”. This millennia-old cultural phenomenon—deriving from Ancient Greek and Roman sources—is conspicuously present in but by no means unique to the cultural ethos of Australia and New Zealand. Having freed themselves of the status of British colonies far away in the South-west Pacific, Australians and New Zealanders created through war and statehood a new and separate (mythic) identity for themselves as a ‘superior’ type of Briton…one in which “Jack was as good as his master”. This sustained myth of classlessness, sometimes described as a kind of “ideological egalitarianism down under”, was a conscious attempt to distance these “New Britons” from the rigid class system of the mother country.

͡°° ͡° ͡°° ͡° ͡°° ͡° ͡°° ͡° ͡°° ͡° ͡°° ͡° ͡°° ͡° ͡°° ͡° ͡°° ͡° ͡°° ͡° ͡°° ͡° ͡°° ͡°

⊡ Jante laki in Finnish and Jantelögin in Icelandic
⊞ a sort of mock “informal Scandinavian Ten Commandments” (Booth)
⊟ Sandemose himself by all accounts was hardly a model Nordic citizen, irritable of nature, of questionable morality and thoroughly unpleasant to family according to his granddaughter Iben, also a writer (Booth)
⊠ UN World Happiness Report (2018) ranked the top three countries, in order, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Previously in 2016 Denmark topped the world poll

Theatre of the Absurd: Anti-Realism, Anti-Language, Anti-Play?

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Creative Writing, Literary & Linguistics, Performing arts

A term you don’t hear much these days, even among the literati, is the Theatre of the Absurd. I first heard about this theatre genre in the Seventies, when I was introduced to the plays of Beckett and Pinter, and saw the film version of Ionesco’s play The Rhinceros. Even then the Theatre of the Absurd had a kind of Fifties/Sixties feel to it. So where did it come from? Well, we have drama critic and scholar Martin Esslin to thank for the expression. In the late Fifties Esslin drew the dots between the work of various, otherwise disparate and unconnected contemporary playwrights who shared a particular world view and a number of traits and preoccupations. Esslin circa 1960 wrote that these ‘Absurdist’ playwrights were attacking the “comfortable certainties of religious and political orthodoxy, shocking audiences out of their complacency, bringing them face to face with the harsh facts of the human situation”, ie, that it is essentially absurd.

The philosophical framework for Absurdism and the Theatre of the Absurd was laid by French Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus. In his 1942 essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ Camus defines the human condition as basically meaningless and therefore absurd, arguing that “humanity had to resign itself to recognizing that a fully satisfying rational explanation of the universe (in Camus-speak = “formless chaos) was beyond its reach; in that sense, the world must ultimately be seen as absurd” (Crabb). Once we accept this inevitability we can get on with life.

(Source: alchetron.com)

The emergence of a new theatre in the Fifties which staunchly rejected realism and whose calling card was the statement life is meaningless was a reaction to the atrocities and unimaginable inhumanity of the Second World War. Interestingly, Esslin, following Camus, did not feel that the message of the Absurdists—the profound state of despair of humankind—was reason to be pessimistic about the world. Accepting the “mysteries of existence”—that we live in an irrational and “hostile universe” (Camus’ term), for which there are “no easy solutions” leaves (you) with “a sense of freedom and relief” and “the laughter of liberation” (Esslin).

(Image: redbubble.com)

Theatre of the Absurd precursors
Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play Ubu Roi is often thought of as “proto-Theatre of the Absurd”…bizarre, controversial, revolutionary, paper-thin plot, scatological scatterings, the characters speak in staccato sentences, Ubu Roi also highly influenced the Dadaist art and literary movement which along with Surrealism took its turn in passing the anti-realism torch on to the Theatre of the Absurd. Dadaism like the Absurdist plays was a reaction in part to war (WWI in this case)…as one of its main exponents Tristan Tzara explained: ”if human logic can lead the world to global war then art should abandon all logic and sense“. Likewise, Surrealism’s desire to shock audiences and its descent into the world of human dreams also anticipates some of the preoccupations of the Theatre of the Absurd.

Ionesco (Image: David Levine/NY Review)

A theatre movement disassociated from its creators
Unlike Surrealism and other arts genres, the Theatre of the Absurd was not a conscious movement. Despite Esslin identifying the Parisian avant-garde as its centre and Beckett, Ionesco, Genet and Adamov the leading figures of the Absurdist movement, there was no organised school of playwrights who identified themselves as its practitioners. Some like Ionesco in fact strongly objected to the label, preferring in his case the term “Theatre of Derision” to delineate his work. The exponents of this form of theatre were loosely associated, each of the playwrights arrived independently at a similar style and a vision of the futility of human existence.

Beckett (Source: samuel beckettsociety.org)

A Revolutionary and subversive Theatre of the Absurd
Playwrights like Beckett and Ionesco were committed to exploring absurdism in all its manifestations – philosophical, dramaturgical, existential, emotional, a radical form of drama that pushed the boundaries of theatre to the extremes (Dickson)…it’s distinctive features and innovations subverting the established theatre of the day. The Theatre of the Absurd radically departs from traditional theatrical conventions…dispensing with the conventional narrative of the “well-made play” with a beginning, a middle and an end, plots are typically disorganised, often with a non-linear or cyclical approach (“ever diminishing concentric circles”), nothing happens or if it does, it’s in a unmotivated way. Mysteries go unresolved and order is not restored at the end. Characters have no clear identities and have a homogeneity to them (eg, The Rhinoceros), they are not consistent even interchangeable (eg, Genet’s The Maids), characters don’t develop and are devoid of motivation or purpose.

(Source/ Exeunt NYC)

Estragon: “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful”.

Externally waiting for Godot
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was one of the earliest and best known plays to be so designated, becoming an exemplar of Adsurdist theatre. It was controversially received when it premiered in 1953, later famously described by critic Vivian Mercer as “a play in which nothing happens, twice”. ‘Godot’ is a bleak tragi-comedy soaked in “existential despair”. The bleakness of the play is reinforced by the setting: no recognisable time or place❅, sparse set, minimally furnished. Stylistically the play is repetitive, open-ended almost empty of action but with snatches of vaudeville and philosophy. Characters utter illogical and circular dialogue while they wait…and wait for the title character (who never appears). Beckett’s later plays became more and more reductionist, language pared back towards “Endgame” silence.

Beckett’s ‘Endgame’ (Photo: New York Times)

The war on language
The breakdown of language is a preoccupation in Absurdist Theatre. In Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano language disintegrates rapidly, demonstrating it’s failure as a tool of communication. Nonsense dialogue, characters speaking in gibberish, absurdist dramas often abound in cliches, slogans and non-sequiturs. The plays of Ionesco and NF Simpson also specialise in satirising “the modern prostitution of language corrupted by salesmen and politicians”. Ionesco distinguished between the way he and Beckett assailed language: “Beckett destroys language with silence. I do it with too much language, with characters talking at random, and by inventing words“ (Interview, Paris Review, 1984).

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Source: LA Times)

Representing British colours in the Club de l’Absurde were Harold Pinter (The Dumb Waiter) and Tom Stoppard…the latter’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead involves a “Godot-esque” waiting game with a similar sense of anticlimax. ‘Ros’ and ‘Guil’, relocated from Hamlet, are interchangeable characters who pass the time engaging in philosophical musings and mind-numbing circular discourses with each other.

Camus, ‘godfather’ of Absurdist Theatre (Photo: The Telegraph, UK)

Footnote: Trans-Atlantic Absurdist
Although essentially a European movement, Esslin (less convincingly) includes American Edward Albee into the collection of Absurdist dramatists on the basis that his plays (eg, The Zoo Story) attack “America’s foundation of optimism”.

‘Zoo Story’ (Photo: Front Row Center)

———-———-———-
❅ a feature of Theatre of the Absurd plays is a sense of timelessness

💢💢💢

Bibliography:

Martin Esslin, Theatre of the Absurd (1961)

Jerome P. Crabb, ‘The Theatre of the Absurd’, Theatre Database, 2006, www.theatredatabase.com

‘Nonsense talk: Theatre of the Absurd’, Andrew Dickson, Discovering Literature: 20th century, 07-Sep-2017, www.bl.uk

‘Absurdity in Theater: Ubu Roi’, Nermin Büsra Kirisik, Artil, www.artilmagazine.com

‘Beckett, Ionesco and the Theater if the Absurd: Crash Course Theater #45′ (Video, 2018)

City Lights Bookshop: Shakespeare and Company’s “Symbiotic Sister”

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Creative Writing, Literary & Linguistics, Old technology, Popular Culture, Regional History, Social History, Society & Culture

In 1953, two years after George Whitman resurrected Sylvia Beach’s famed Shakespeare and Company in Paris, the bookshop that was to become its trans-Atlantic soul mate, City Lights, opened its doors in the North Beach area of San Francisco🄰.

(Photo: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)

Two landmark ‘indie’ bookshops
The story of Shakespeare and Company’s evolution into an legendary bookshop has been sketched in a previous blog piece: ‘Hanging Out at Shakespeare and Company’, 21-July-2021. On the other side of the Atlantic another distinctive stand-alone bookshop was staking it’s undeniable claim for iconic status in the world of independent booksellers.

A literary community
Lawrence Ferlinghetti envisaged City Lights as “a literary meeting place”—just like Whitman and Shakespeare and Company—a haven for aspiring writers to hangout and find creativity. A poet himself, Ferlinghetti attracted an emerging group of fiction writers and poets that coalesced into the “Best Generation”, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Gregory Corso. The Beat writers and poets found themselves a comfortable niche hanging out together in the basement reading room of City Lights.

(Image: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)

Not only that, Ferlinghetti was proactive in his support for the Beats’ budding careers by starting a publishing arm at City Lights, bringing to the public collections of poetry, offbeat and radical books ignored by the mainstream press. Ferlinghetti’s disavowal of the commercial mainstream saw him promote alternative newspapers and magazines as well (‘Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and founder of City Lights bookshop, dies aged 101’, Sian Cain, The Guardian, 23-Feb-2021, www.theguardian.com).

(Image: citylights.com)

Maverick bookseller 
City Lights was always an innovator in the bookselling biz. It arose with the onset of the paperback revolution, a wave that the San Fran bookshop happily rode. Hard covers were expensive so City Lights became the first all-paperback bookshop in the US (co-founder Paul Martin’s idea). The bookstore bucked the bookselling status quo – before City Lights came along readers could only buy paperbacks from drugstores, bus stations and newsstands (‘The Beat Generation in San Francisco’, Bill Morgan, www.citylights.com). Ferlinghetti’s store was a democratising force in US bookselling, City Lights’ paperbacks were cheap, all budgets could afford their quality pocket books. City Lights’ innovativeness extended to opening hours. Unlike the bulk of mainstream American bookshops who usually closed early in the Fifties, City Lights stayed open seven days a week and late into the night.

🔺 the ’emperor of City Lights

Bookshop outreach
The bookshop extended outreach activities to the local community. The store maintained a community bulletin board, disseminating info for the North Beach literary set, thus helping to foster the local counterculture community. Ferlinghetti also furnished the City Lights store with letter racks for itinerants who frequented the triangular storefront to collect their mail.

The ‘Howl’ episode
In 1956 Ferlinghetti published and distributed a poem by an unknown Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Police in an undercover sting operation confiscated Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’🄱 collection and arrested Ferlinghetti who was charged with selling “obscene material and corrupting America’s youth”. The subsequent trial became a cause celeb in the industry. The judge found that the publication had “redeeming social significance” and therefore was not obscene🄲. The trial publicity was great for Ginsberg’s poetry and for City Lights. ‘Howl’ became an underground best-seller and a symbol of both the counterculture and the Beat Generation🄳 (Morgan).

🔺 Ferlinghetti outside City Lights, 1950s

Political poetics
The character of City Lights reflected Ferlinghetti’s own political and social activism. The “philosophical anarchist” was a bulwark for left causes, eg, using the bookshop venue to host many sit-ins and protests against the Vietnam War (“books, not bombs”). Ferlinghetti believed that poetry was a social force capable of raising the consciousness of the people.

Ferlinghetti & Ginsberg (Source: SFist)
Precarious business model? 
Profitability was not City Lights’ raison d’être. Staying out of “the red” was a constant challenge. To stay afloat sometimes the publishing side needed to bail out the retail sales which was losing money and at other times it was vice versa (Cain). What didn’t help matters financial were the activities of shoplifting gangs in the Seventies which targeted the bookshop. And if it wasn’t them it was insiders like poet Gregory Corso helping himself liberally to the till (Morgan).

Whitman & Ferlinghetti (seated) in 2002 (Photo: Mary Duncan/Paris Writers Press)

Footnote: the extent to which Shakespeare and Co and City Lights can be called sister bookshops comes down largely to the personal visions of their founders Whitman and Ferlinghetti🄴 who were both lifelong book tragics🄵, “(sharing a) love of literature and poetry (and a) devotion and commitment to the power of words” (‘The Beats go on…’, Alix Sharkey, The Guardian, 02-Mar-2002, www.theguardian.com). For Whitman and Ferlinghetti however, the bookshop was more than a receptacle for selling books, it filled the roles of haven and incubator in nurturing new writers as well as a hub for the local literary community. Sister bookstores they may be but they are clearly not identical twins when it comes to the interiors and decors of the two bookshops…City Lights’ book displays are neatly-ordered and arranged whereas Shakespeare and Co is clutter central to the max!

City Lights (Photo: Literary Hub)

Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti, poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights. The New York born, Paris educated, bookseller and publisher, died on 22nd February 2021, aged 101.

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🄰 City Lights’ address, 261-271 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco 94133, places it technically within Chinatown but the store identifies with the adjoining precinct of North Beach

🄱 ‘Howl’, ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…’ was a thunderbolt against the conservative poetry establishment of Fifties America, the prototype for a new poetry which immersed itself in “wide-eyed truth-telling”

🄲 the basis of the acquittal was a precedent called on in later attempts to overturn bans on works like Tropic of Capricorn and Naked Lunch

🄳 although often associated with them, City Light’s publishing arm never confined itself to the beat writers, it also publishes the work of non-Beat luminaries like Charles Bukowski, Sam Shepard and Malcolm Lowry

🄴 strictly speaking Ferlinghetti wasn’t the founder of City Lights, that was sociology academic Paul D Martin but Ferlinghetti got into the business on the ground floor in 1953 and took sole charge of the bookshop within two years after Martin left

🄵 Whitman literally slept in a room in the store overflowing with books

Hanging Out at Shakespeare and Company: Modernist Literary Salon and Sanctuary for Aspiring Writers Rolled into one Parisian Bookshop

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Creative Writing, Literary & Linguistics, Old technology, Society & Culture

(Image: Aprendiz de Viajante)

Beach on the Seine
A must-visit in Paris for the literary and artistic set or even the mildly book-curious is the iconic “Shakespeare and Company” bookstore situated near the Latin Quarter and across from Notre Dame. It’s address is 37 rue de la Bûcherie 75005, V, but it wasn’t always there. Shakespeare & Co founder, American expat Sylvia Beach, started the legendary Left Bank bookshop at 8 rue Dupuytren in 1919. Within three years Beach moved the shop to the 6th Arrondissement at 12 rue de l’Odéan, across the street from La Masion des Amis des Livres owned by Beach’s future ‘bestie’ and amour Adrienne Monnier. This bookshop was the template Beach used for her own serious literature bookshop-cum-lending library.

𐅉 Ulysses – Joyce and Beach at Shakespeare & Co

Beach’s lifeline for Joyce’s untouchable manuscript
Beach is probably best remembered for giving James Joyce his big breakthrough in the literary world, publishing Ulysses in
1922 when nobody else would touch it…the abstruse, controversial novel went on to become a masterpiece of modern literature. Over time Shakespeare and Company acquired a more lasting fame as the hub of Anglo-American literary culture and modernism in Paris. Aspiring British, Irish and American writers, prompted by a post-WWI favourable pound and dollar exchange rate against the French franc, flocked to the creative milieu of Paris where they discovered the unique appeal of Beach’s Anglophone bookshop🄱 (The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses, Kevin Birmingham, 2014).

𐅉 Hemingway & Fitzgerald (www.pinterest.fr)

“The Lost Generation”
In the interwar years Beach’s bookshop became a haven for the Anglophone literati…habitués included the likes of TS Eliot and Ezra Pound, and the “Lost Generation” of American intellectuals, modernist writers and artists including Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Ford Maddox Ford, Man Ray, etc. Hemingway and other illustrious names belonged to the store’s lending library, borrowing books when they couldn’t afford to buy them. At the same time French intellectual writers such as Gidé and de Beauvoir also benefitted from Sylvia’s efforts to get their work better known in the US. The bookseller also gave crucial assistance to various avant-garde ‘little magazines’ in getting their publications off the ground by distributing their editions (Shakespeare and Co: The world’s most famous bookshop at 100‘, Cath Pound, BBC, 19-Nov-2019, www.bbc.com).

𐅉 a young George Whitman

Shakespeare and Company redux
In 1941 with occupied Paris under the Nazi swastika, the shop was closed down and Beach interned for a period after Sylvia refused to sell the last copy of Finnegan’s Wake to a German officer. The closure was permanent but the phoenix of Beach’s bookstore did rise again, reinvented by another American expat a decade later. In 1951 WWII veteran George Whitman opened a new, independent English-language bookshop – effectively “Shakespeare and Company Mach II“, though originally called Le Mistral. Later Sylvia Beach apparently anointed Whitman’s bookshop as the true and worthy successor to her original Shakespeare and Company (after Beach’s death in 1962 Whitman renamed the bookshop “Shakespeare and Company”) (‘Bookshop Shakespeare and Company. Paris’, by Els, www.flickr.com).

(Source: another mag.com)

“The Beat Generation”
Within a short time Whitman’s Mistral bookshop was fulfilling the same service to Paris-based Bohemians as Beach’s had for the Lost Generation of writers. Le Mistral, the second coming of “Shakespeare and Co”, became a mecca for a new literary generation in the Fifties, the ’Beat’ Generation and its writers including Allen Ginsberg, William S Burroughs and Greg Corso. Other English-language expats to frequent the bookshop at this time include Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell and Ray Bradbury (‘Shakespeare and a Company (Bookshop), Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org).

𐅉 Quote from medieval Persian poet Hafiz of Shiraz

Tumbleweed Hotel‘s quirky tariff
George Whitman maintained Sylvia Beach’s tradition of putting aspiring young writers up for the night (or several nights)…in return for a very basic cot or even a bench, the guests were required to work in the store, read a book and write a one-page autobiography🄲 (‘A Brief History of Shakespeare and Company, Paris’ Legendary Bookstore’, Alex Ledsom, Culture Trip, 26-Feb-2018, www.theculturetrip.com.

𐅉 Sylvia Whitman (Photo: nicethingspalomas.com)

Generation-and-a-half change
George Whitman died in 2011 at 98…the last 10 years of his life was a struggle of wills as the increasingly wildly eccentric George sought to push back against the attempts of his daughter Sylvia Beach Whitman🄳 to modernise the bookshop🄴. Since becoming sole proprietor, Sylvia has moved Shakespeare and Company forward with the times—web-based online transactions, modern accounting practices, the addition of a café, etc—but she still runs a lending library and a second-hand book section, hosts book launches and regular author readings by Zadie Smith, Martin Amis, etc in the shop (‘In a bookstore in Paris’, Bruce Handy, Vanity Fair, 21-Oct-2014, www.vanityfair.com).

(Photo: www.minute.net)

📚 📚 📚

Some takes by visitors on the physical layout of Whitman’s bookshop:

° “a Tardis – modest enough on the outside, a labyrinth on the inside” ~ Jeanette Winterson

° “Shakespeare and Company has the rambling lucidity of an unkempt boudoir” ~ Penny Watson, ‘A tale of two bookshops’ [SMH, Dec 1-2, 2007]

° “a literary octopus with an insatiable appetite for print, taking over the beat-up building … room by room, floor by floor, a veritable nest of books” ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti

📚 📚 📚

𐅉 Sylvia Beach (Source: ricorso.net)

 

Footnote: for the literary expatriates who frequented Shakespeare and Company, the bookshop served a number of purposes. It functioned as a sort of support network club where the expat writers could meet other members, could draw inspiration from its environs, they could read a wide range of quality literature including books banned in the US and UK, and they could write in its rooms🄵.The bookshop was a “sanctuary for progressive writers and a hub for innovative publishing” (Pound). Some of the expat artists and writers even used Beach’s bookshop as their postal box for receiving mail in Paris (Birmingham).

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🄰 Joyce ‘repaid’ Beach by later defecting to a new publisher at a time the bookseller was in a financial jam

🄱 Beach couldn’t however replicate the triumph of getting Ulysses into print with DH Lawrence’s controversial Lady Chatterley’s Lover 

🄲 the senior Whitman described these blow-in visitors as ’Tumbleweeds’, estimated to number around 30,000 since 1951

🄳 named in honour of the original Sylvia Beach

🄴 George was resistant to changing even one iota of the seemingly chaotic structure of the shop; he didn’t believe in phones or credit cards or computers (Handy)

🄵 Whitman gave the store’s rooms whimsical names like “Old Smoky Reading Room” and “Blue Oyster Tearoom”