VanGogh’s olive trees
Authenticity, the mother of Artisanal and Craft, is still having a moment.
There’s good authentic and not so good. Sometimes living authentically means cleaning up dog barf. Good authentic is satisfying, joyful, sometimes even thrilling – a word I rarely use without sarcasm. Good authentic is why I love museums. The sensation of standing close enough to touch the connective tissue between me and the most amazing people in history. I sat on Thomas Jefferson’s pew at Christ Church in Philadelphia. I saw Van Gogh’s paint palette and could imagine it in his hand as he sat among the olive trees in my favorite painting. When my own brilliant child was about six years old, I stood in a little French local history museum in front of a toddler-sized footprint preserved in an ancient Roman clay floor tile and felt instantly connected to the parents who, 2,000 years before, made that memento of their joy.
I have mentioned once or twice in prior blog posts that the best bookstore ever was the original Shakespeare and Company in Paris. Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate, used a subsidy from her family to open the English language bookstore 100 years ago, in November 1919. Sylvia was a feisty lesbian who wasn’t about to be married off to some respectable man, so sending her to Paris with enough money to stay awhile probably seemed like a good idea to her mother and Presbyterian minister father.
Sylvia in her upstairs apartment with the contents of Shakespeare and Company. This was taken after her time in a Nazi internment camp. Note the in-your-face-Nazi-scum American flag hanging up outside. Badass.
Paris between the wars was a cheap place to live and drew writers, artists, and musicians like Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Picasso, Dali, Cole Porter, and Josephine Baker. Her shop became the writers’ clubhouse and Sylvia was the mother figure who took them in, gave them a meal or a few francs, and let them crash on her couch. She sold their books, built a lending library, and collected mail for itinerant writers. She was Joyce’s publisher when his work was too obscene for any other publisher to touch. According to legend, when she refused to sell a Nazi her last copy of Finnegan’s Wake during the Occupation, he threatened to shut her down, so that night she moved her books, light fixtures, everything, to her attic apartment and had the sign painted over. In return, the Germans sent her to an internment camp for six months. Hemingway talks about her with reverence in A Moveable Feast. Rebecca West thought she was a snob. Whatever. Sylvia was a badass.
I am not generally a collector of things but a year or two ago I started collecting books that had been part of the Shakespeare and Company lending library. The reason I chose to collect these particular books is because of what Michael Witmore, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, calls “the shiver of proximity. The sense that a living person or a community is nearby.” Author Walter Benjamin calls it the “aura” of original things (art, in his case) that can’t be replicated in photos. “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: Its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” When I have a book in my hands that was touched by Sylvia herself, and in the hands or just the same room with the authors and painters and musicians in Paris during those glory days, that history becomes mine too. The place is gone, but I have a tangible piece of it in my hands.
This is in the back of each of my Shakespeare and Company books.
You may be aware that there is still a Shakespeare and Company in Paris. Sylvia’s store never reopened, but she gave her blessing to a fanboy, George Whitman, to rename his bookstore Shakespeare and Company. He waited until after her death to change the name. His store attracted a new generation of authors – the Beats, Richard Wright, and others. Whitman’s daughter Sylvia (not a coincidence) now owns the store. I’ve made several trips to Paris, walked past it, but I can’t bring myself to go in. It’s not the real one.
What’s a place that feels authentic to you? Or that makes you feel like your most authentic self? Do stories give you the same vibe of proximity that a physical piece of history does? Next time I’ll write about what we lose when authentic places disappear. I’d like to hear your thoughts about it.
Bonus material:
The Michael Witmore quote comes from a New Yorker article about getting DNA samples from old books. It’s absolutely fascinating and highly recommended. The Folger website’s much shorter article about the project is in the library’s link above.
Chez Bricktop in Paris
If you have an hour to spare, this podcast from Radiolab – which, coincidentally, came out the day I finished writing this post – talks about the importance of things in our lives, both those in proximity to historical people or places and those that represent our own experiences. Host Robert Krulwich sees magic in almost everything, while his wife doesn’t connect through things. I’m in the middle. The connection to history is a thrill, but I don’t save things like ticket stubs or greeting cards, because those experiences and feelings are in my head. I don’t need the physical reminder. What about you?
Sylvia’s contemporary in Paris, vaudeville singer and dancer Ada “Bricktop” Smith, helped introduce Parisians to jazz. She smoked cigars and owned Chez Bricktop, a jazz club that was like Shakespeare and Company for musicians. Fitzgerald mentions Chez Bricktop in one of his stories. Cole Porter wrote Miss Otis Regrets for her. Django Rinehardt performed regularly at Bricktop with the Hot Club Quintent and wrote a song called Brick Top. The Hot Club Quintent was broadcast live from Chez Bricktop on CBS radio in 1938 – listening to the recording gives me the shiver of proximity too. And here is the divine Miss Bricktop in 1970 singing St. Louis Blues.
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Wishing you a happy new year!