Of Tumbleweeds & Angels

Hi, I'm Vicky, I am an alcoholic. I live in London and am looking for a job.""Hi, I'm Vicky's friend. I am studying in Paris to be a clown." I had expected an international cabal of eccentrics, but this was almost too good to be true. A group of strangers from Sydney to New York, from Bucharest to Johannesburg, introducing themselves at a Sunday tea party in Paris that quickly lived up to its promise of a Mad Hatter's Party. Now it was my turn to introduce myself. I felt like saying I am Bandit Queen from India, but courage failed me, so I tamely said: "I have been a journalist for over two decades and have worked for Indian and American media organisations like Time and cnn. I am writing a book for Penguin."

I got a spontaneous applause. I guess my credentials were a little more impressive than a currently jobless alcoholic and a future clown. But it didn't really matter. In a matter of moments, we-a motley group of about 20 people of all shapes, sizes, ages and colour-were heatedly debating about how and why the presence of a television camera alters reality. It turned out to be one of the most stimulating discussions I have had in recent times.

All thanks to one man. George Whitman... an 88-year-old eccentric American in Paris, with unkempt hair and watery blue eyes, who holds these tea parties for friends and strangers every Sunday afternoon. His clothes are dishevelled, allegedly procured from the Salvation Army. He could be poor. Actually, he could be a multi-millionaire if he chose to sell his bookstore called "Shakespeare and Company" right across the Notre Dame Cathedral.

Thank God money means nothing to him. And thank God, books mean everything to him. In this crumbling building on the left bank of river Seine that was originally a 16th century monastery, walls sag with some 30,000 books-mostly English, but many Russian, French and German tomes. Amidst the jumble of new and second-hand books are some rare first editions of priceless books and some rarer manuscripts-including James Joyce's Ulysses.

George Whitman likes to say he is the illegitimate grandson of Walt Whitman. Nobody cares if it's true. It's a colourful legend of a colourful man who is carrying on the remarkable tradition of a bookstore that is a charming little bookstore and so much else... a library, a reading room, a coffee shop, a guest house, a salon, with its quaint "Blue Oyster Tea Room" and "Old Smoking Reading room". There are beds in several nooks where visitors can sit and read a book they cannot afford to buy. And there is a dry wishing well on a floor dark with age, in which a mound of coins gleam. It bears the sign: "Give what you can, take what you need".

George Whitman has modelled his shop on the original Shakespeare and Company, started in 1919 by a woman named Sylvia Beach, a bookstore that not only sold, but lent books to poor aspiring authors. Above all, it became the salon for the group of men and women in the 1920s that Gertrude Stein called the Lost Generation-James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Scott Fitzgerald. They drank wine, argued ceaselessly and wrote feverishly encouraged by Sylvia Beach, who published Ulysses when no publisher in Europe dared to. But during the German occupation of France in World War II, the Nazis closed down her bookstore. The Lost Generation in Paris disintegrated... going their different ways, losing themselves in authorship, alcohol or angst.

But then every Generation generates its own Lost Generation... perhaps not so brilliant, perhaps not so well-known. And they integrate in a loose, amorphous way on Sunday afternoons at Whitman's bookstore. They could be Anyone from Anywhere... students, musicians, authors, intellectuals, cranks who are Anonymous Champions of Free Spirit. They symbolise the immortal spirit that refuses to be chained by the trappings of Modern Life-by credit cards and mobile phones, by mean streets and fast tracks, by consumerism and globalisation. Free Spirit that has always illumined history, but in its present tense, must inevitably struggle for breath like a dandelion in the crack of a sidewalk-so vulnerable to the crush of Marching Modernity.

For these dandelions of today's Lost Generation, Whitman's bookstore is a garden and his Tumbleweed Hotel, a sanctuary. Above the bookstore, Whitman runs a 13-room hotel for free. Here he accommodates the young and aspiring, the homeless and penniless, the lost and yet driven souls of the world. His motto: "Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise." He may be charitable, but in his heart, he's a romantic. He describes his male guests as tumbleweeds drifting along his garden, but his female guests are angels in disguise. And he likes his angels with long hair and short skirts. Of course, he hates it if they ask him his age.

Many tumbleweeds and angels who drifted through Whitman's life remained just that-tumbleweeds and angels in his mind. But some did move on to become famous-tumbleweeds like Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell. And some of them have returned to discuss their work with a younger generation of tumbleweeds and angels. But has he ever written anything himself? "Only love letters," he says with a twinkle in his eye.

He started a bookstore for one simple reason-he didn't think anyone would give him a job. And perhaps therein lies a lesson for our self-confessed alcoholic Vicky... who wandered into this bookstore after the customary visits to all the magnificent landmarks of Paris. And for all alcoholic and non-alcoholic visitors to this enchanting city of museums, a stroll into Shakespeare and Company is a nostalgic journey into a living museum... that will all too soon become a relic.

(You can contact the author at anitapratap@journalist.com )