Читать книгу The Beat Hotel - Barry Miles - Страница 10
Оглавление19, rue Git-le-Coeur
I view life as a fortuitous collaboration ascribable to the fact that one finds oneself in the right place at the right time. For us, the “right place” was the famous “Beat Hotel” in Paris, roughly from 1958 to 1963.
Brion Gysin, The Third Mind
In the 1950s the Left Bank, or Latin Quarter, was to Paris what Soho was to London, Greenwich Village was to New York, and North Beach was to San Francisco: an inexpensive central neighborhood where writers and artists could meet and spend their nights talking or drinking, where basic accommodation was cheap and the local people were tolerant of the antics of youth. The maze of small streets between the Blvd St. Germain and the river Seine housed dozens of small, low-priced residential hotels, home to many of the students from the nearby Sorbonne. The University of Paris was seven hundred years old and it was a long-established tradition for students to live in small hotels in the surrounding streets. There were also art students and models from the École des Beaux Arts on the quai Augustins as well as many established artists whose ateliers were tucked away in small courtyards and side streets, recognizable by their north-facing skylights. Bohemians and students lived side by side with a large working-class population of old-time city dwellers, the true Parisians who filled the food markets on the rue de Buci or the covered market at Mabillon each morning and returned home with their produce long before the young bohemians had even sipped the first coffee of the day.
Inexpensive and run-down, the area around the rue Saint Séverin was a traditional center for clochards—tramps, bums—who once had a street of their own, the rue de Brèvre, in the days when the area near Place Maubert was frequented by boatmen and tawsers. In the ’50s there were an estimated 10,000 such folk in Paris, both men and women, sleeping under bridges, on manhole covers in the public squares, wrapped in rags, warmed by the sewer heat, lying huddled against the exhaust vents of the Metro where the stale warm air was expelled.
The Latin Quarter was an area of dusty used bookshops, avant-garde art galleries, antiques shops, dealers in ethnological artifacts, and the tiny cramped offices of radical publishing houses and small presses specializing in experimental literature and the arts. Along the Seine the booksellers displayed tattered prints and well-thumbed books in boxes clamped to the river wall, which could be locked shut at night. All around the rue de Seine and Place St. Michel there were bookshops that featured titles in Surrealism, ’Pataphysics, medicine, the occult, alchemy, and Asian mysticism. These were sometimes hidden in courtyards or on the higher floors of buildings, known only to aficionados.
There were artists’ cafés, like the Palette, where one could meet a gallery owner to plan a show, hire a model, or buy drugs. There were dozens of inexpensive restaurants such as the Café des Arts on the rue de Seine where art students sat in rows on benches; there was just one fixed-price three-course menu, and all the red wine you could drink stood in liter flagons on the bare wooden refectory tables. One café, Chez Raton, was so small that the bread was kept in baskets hanging from ropes above the tables and you had to wind them down to get some. Chez Jean, in a passageway off Blvd St. Germain, was one of the few restaurants in Paris to still have sawdust on the floor. Sometimes a cellist or guitarist played there. It was full of tough characters but the bohemian crowd liked to gather there too, and an uneasy truce was maintained. There were many cheap Chinese, Vietnamese, and North African restaurants in the neighborhood, particularly around Place Maubert and the rue de la Huchette.
Each night Blvd St. Germain was the scene of the greatest promenade in Paris as people made their way from Place Maubert to Place St. Germain des Pres and back again, past the grand cafés: the Brasserie Lipp, the Café aux Deux Magots, the Café de Flore, filled with existentialists and wealthy tourists watching and being watched. Some promenaders would stop off at the Pergola just behind the Mabillon Metro station, which had a 500 fr menu and was open all night. It was the principal gathering place for male and female homosexuals. Some of the young men wore lipstick and powder, and some of the more masculine women dressed as men. The Pergola also attracted the late-night student crowd, including many residents from the Beat Hotel, two streets away.
The Beat Hotel was located at 9, rue Git-le-Coeur, a narrow medieval lane running down to the Seine from the rue St. Andre des Arts to the quai Augustins in the oldest part of the Latin Quarter. In the thirteenth century the street was called rue de Gilles-le-Queux or Guy-le-Queux (Guy the cuisinier, or cook). It was known also as rue Guy-le-Preux. Over the centuries this transformed into Git-le-Coeur, which Brion Gysin claimed was a pun on the street name made in the early seventeenth century by Henri IV, the first Bourbon King of France, whose mistress lived on the street. The King passed by one day and remarked “Ici git mon coeur” (“Here lies my heart”). Like many of Gysin’s stories, it is probably untrue, but it sounds just fine.
An alternate story, found in Nichol’s Guide to Paris, claims that the street name commemorates the murder of Etienne Marcel, Provost of the Merchants and one of the fathers of Paris. On the night of July 31, 1358, he was assassinated in this street by Jean Maillart, a mercenary in the pay of the Dauphin Charles; the word git means “lies,” as on a tombstone inscription: “ci-git,” or “here lies.”
As in many of the old lanes in this quarter, the buildings are four stories high, usually leaning out over the street on the ground floor, then sloping quite steeply back away from the street on the three higher floors. Numbers 5, 7, and 9 were built in the late sixteenth century, originally encompassing the mansion of Pierre Séguier, marquis d’O, which later belonged to the Due de Luynes, the uncle of Racine. In 1933 Monsieur and Madame M. L. Rachou, a provincial couple from Giverny, near Rouen, northwest of Paris, bought number 9 to run as a hotel. Brion Gysin, who became very friendly with Madame Rachou during the years he lived at the hotel, said that they had only the gérance, or management, of the hotel and did not own it, which is very probable as it is hard to imagine how the couple could have found the money to buy such a large building. Monsieur Rachou, acting as janitor and bellhop, was a huge, silent man, slow and patient with his guests. Madame was tiny and energetic, her short arms habitually folded over her pale blue housecoat with its round smocked collar—the sort that workingwomen wore throughout the nineteenth century, except on Sundays. She ran the small bistro on the ground floor and registered the guests.
The Rachous enjoyed the company of artists and writers and encouraged them to stay at the hotel. Madame Rachou would sometimes allow artists to pay with paintings, none of which she kept, not thinking for one moment that they would ever be valuable. Her affection for artists stemmed from her youth, when, at the age of twelve, she began working in a country inn at Giverny only a short walk from Monet’s studio. After a morning’s work on a series of paintings of grain sacks or haystacks, Monet would stroll down to the inn to have lunch with his old friend Camille Pissarro. Madame Rachou once asked Brion Gysin, “And what became of his son, the young M’sieu Pissarro?” Brion did not know but told her that there was a big retrospective of Pissarro’s paintings on at that very moment in Paris and offered to take her, but she was too busy with the hotel for such distractions.
Madame tended the bar and her name, J. B. Rachou, was painted on its glass door in the slanting calligraphic hand of an old-fashioned master sign painter. The Rachous never gave the hotel a name, preferring instead simply to label the entrances: above the left-hand door was a sign HOTEL and above the glass door and front of the café: CAFE VINS LIQUEURS, which was enough. For twenty-four years, through the Occupation and the hard months after Liberation, when food and fuel were even more scarce than they were under the Germans, they kept the hotel open, although the couple was barely able to make a living.
Then in September 1957, Monsieur Rachou was killed in an automobile accident in the town of St. Germain, just outside Paris. The Rachous had recently bought a secondhand Citröen DS, and Monsieur Rachou had driven out to the country to collect some friends and drive them back to the hotel for a Sunday lunch. In St. Germain a car had run into him at a crossing, killing him and seriously injuring his four friends. Madame Rachou was devastated but she had little choice but to carry on. A hotel, of course, cannot be neglected for more than a few days.
Because she was so small, Madame had to stand upon an upturned wine case behind the traditional zinc-topped bar in the bistro in order to serve. There were lace curtains at the wide glass window and several spindly aspidistra plants, their bladelike leaves always brown at the ends. The bistro had a cracked tiled floor with three marble-topped tables on slender cast-iron legs where she served breakfast of coffee and croissants. This was not included in the rent, it was not that sort of hotel; the 40 centimes for a coffee had to be paid on the spot.
She served large, inexpensive lunches of cassoulet or rabbit stew but after the death of her husband she no longer opened the dining room in the back except for occasional private parties for police lieutenants and other fonctionnaires. This was a class 13 hotel, the lowest on the scale, which meant it had to meet the minimum legal health and safety requirements and that was all. After the war, as part of the same clean-up of Paris that had closed the brothels, many of the small class 13 hotels in the neighborhood had been boarded up by the police for contravening long-ignored regulations. This was one of the reasons there were so many clochards on the streets. Madame Rachou, however, had been on good terms with the police since before the Occupation and intended to keep it that way.
She was a classic concierge. From her perch on the oversize wine box she could monitor her domain: the narrow hotel hallway to her right was visible through a paneled glass door and her back dining room, separated from the bar by a curtain, had a window facing the stairs that showed the legs of anyone coming in or out—ideal for grabbing the ankle of a welching lodger attempting to sneak out. Next to the hall doorway, facing the bar, was Madame’s control panel of electrical switches; the number of the corresponding room was identified by a small enamel plaque. Above each was a small flashlight bulb that glowed when the light in that room was turned on. Each room was supplied with 40 watts, just enough for a dim 25-watt lightbulb and a radio or record player. The electrical system was archaic: it was extremely sensitive and periodically plunged everyone into darkness if someone overloaded the circuit. When a bulb flared on her control panel Madame knew that someone was using an illicit hot plate and would rush upstairs to confront the offender. The power could be increased to 60 watts but naturally there was a small surcharge for this service. Rather than pay the extra, most residents cooked on small two-burner gas or oil stoves, which they’d bought themselves. The gas stoves ran on individual meters and Madame always seemed to choose the most inconvenient time to arrive in the company of the meter reader.
The forty-two rooms had no carpets or telephones. Some were very dark, as their windows looked out onto the stairwell inside the building and so received only indirect lighting from the grimy landing windows. The corridors sloped at strange angles and the floors creaked and groaned. The ancient wooden doors had a handle in the middle instead of the side. Each landing had a Turkish chiotte: a traditional hole-in-the-floor toilet with a raised footprint-shaped platform on either side upon which to position your feet while you squatted. Torn sheets of newspaper hung on a nail in lieu of toilet tissue, though many residents bought their own and carried it with them. There was a bath on the ground floor but advance notice had to be given so that the water for it could be heated. Naturally there was a small surcharge for this service. Brion Gysin maintained that if you put your head under the water in the bath, you could hear the gurgling of the Bièvre, the underground river that enters the Seine a few blocks east of the rue Git-le-Coeur, across from Notre Dame—a claim he enlarged upon in his novel The Last Museum. Like everything else in the building, the plumbing was ancient, and it was consequently subject to backups, clankings, fiercely loud vibrations, and leaks. There was radiator heat all week and hot water only on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
The curtains and bedspreads were washed and changed each spring, and the bed linen a little more frequently—in theory, at the beginning of each month. After the death of Monsieur Rachou, Madame employed a janitor, Monsieur Duprés, who occasionally wandered through the hotel with the apparent intention of cleaning the rooms and making the beds. He was often accompanied by a collection of small children and, like Madame, inevitably chose just the wrong moment to walk into a room. Some of the walls were very thin, little more than hardboard partitions, and sound traveled in mysterious ways, sometimes blaring from the waste pipe in the sink.
The front door was never locked or controlled, but Madame Rachou had an uncanny, almost clairvoyant knowledge of everything that went on both in the hotel and in the street outside. She could “hear” trouble—a strange footstep, an unusual creak—and was able to materialize at the door to protect her residents from creditors, con men, or occasional visits from the police. No matter what time of night, she would appear stone-faced in her white nightgown: “Monsieur? Que voulez-vous?” Not even the police were a match for Madame. In 1962, during the Algerian crisis, a spotty-faced young flic (cop) was on duty across the street, guarding the house of an ex–police chief on the OAS (Organisation Armée Secrète) death list who was expecting a bomb or assassin’s knife at any moment. The flic saw an attractive young American woman enter the hotel and followed her up to her room, whereupon Madame Rachou appeared and drove him from the hotel with a barrage of abuse, her tiny arms flapping and her blue-rinsed hair luminous in the dimly lit corridor.
Still, she could not control visits from the immigration inspectors. As William Burroughs has described: “The ‘police of foreigners,’ the immigration police made passport checks from time to time, always at eight in the morning, and would often take away some guest whose papers were not in order. The detainee would be back in a few hours, having paid—not a fine—but a tax, attendant on the application for a carte de sejour; though few had the time and patience to fulfill the complex bureaucratic regulations required to obtain this coveted document.” Most of them, including Burroughs, undertook the expedient of a brief trip to Brussels or Amsterdam every three months so that they could begin their three-month allowance afresh upon each reentrance of France.
The culture of bohemia is a very French one. In fact Henri Murger, author of Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, claimed that true bohemians could exist only in Paris. Britain was less tolerant of unorthodox behavior. London produced eccentrics and aesthetes but had no tradition of bohemian poverty. Byron and Shelley had found life easier on the continent in the nineteenth century. When he was released from the Beading jail, Oscar Wilde moved to Paris to live out his life.
The rue Git-le-Coeur has always had its bohemian residents. In 1930 Dorothy Wilde, Oscar’s wild niece, lived at number one, and Lord Gerard Vernon Wallop Lymington, ninth Earl of Portsmouth, used to have rooms high in the eaves of the same building, where, in the late 1920s, he used to smoke opium with Caresse and Harry Crosby. In the ’30s Brion Gysin lived in a beautiful apartment on the comer of the quai, never thinking he would return to the same street two decades later.
The rue Git-le-Coeur was also the setting for the famous arrest of e.e. cummings. At 3 A.M. on a July morning in 1923, John Dos Passos, Gilbert Seldes, and cummings were headed for “the Calvados joint on rue Git-le-Coeur.” When cummings paused to urinate against the wall, “a whole phalanx of gendarmes” materialized. He was arrested and taken to the police station on the quai Grandes-Augustins, where he was booked as "un Américain qui pisse,” and told to return the next morning for arraignment. Seldes telephoned his writer friend Paul Morand, the Ministre des Affaires Etrangères, who had the charges dropped, cummings was not informed of this development and he reported to the police station the next day. He was dismissed, but when he left the building he was confronted by a band of his friends carrying placards reading “Reprieve le Pisseur Américain.” cummings was profoundly moved by their solidarity until he learned that their protest was all an elaborate joke.
The Rachous’ hotel maintained the bohemian tradition of the quartier. There was a photographer in one of the attic rooms who had not spoken a word to anyone for two years, and an artist who had filled his room with straw. Among the whores, jazz musicians, and artists’ models were characters such as the giant man from French Guyana who could barely squeeze through the narrow corridors, and an imperious Indo-Chinese lady who always dressed in silk and had a bamboo curtain at her door. The first of the so-called beatniks came in 1956: a Swiss painter everyone called Jesus Christ. He wore his thick dark hair long, almost to his waist, and left his beard and mustache untrimmed. He wore flowing robes of dirty white cotton and went barefoot in sandals even in the bitter cold of the Paris winter. As he could not afford to buy canvas, he painted on the walls, and, in turn, the ceiling and floor of his second-floor room. Monsieur Rachou was unconcerned, as he believed the paint would discourage bugs.
Unlike the hundreds of other run-down hotels in Paris that offered the bare necessities, the Beat Hotel was exceptional in the way that Madame Rachou encouraged artists to reside there and allowed her guests the freedom to live exactly as they pleased. You could take anyone back to your room, boy or girl or group, provided that they signed the fiche guest register if they stayed overnight. The police insisted on this. In every other respect, the hotel was just as squalid and dirty as its neighbors. There were rats and mice, the rooms and stairs were filthy, the toilets stank, and the corridors reeked with stale cooking odors. The artist Jean-Jacques Lebel lived nearby on the rue de l’Hotel Colbert and often visited the American Beats there. “It very often smelled very bad in that place,” he recalled, “because a lot of people were cooking in their room, and there was Dixie Nimmo, who was a Jamaican fellow, he would cook with a lot of garlic and oil and stink up the whole place. And there were a few old French people who had been there since three centuries who would cook with a lot of grease and the place stank. . . . The rats were on the ground floor, not on the top floor, and it’s only when the Seine would come up that the rats would come up out of their holes. And when there’s junkies around there’s rats. It was a ghastly thing, an atmosphere a bit like the Naked Lunch.”
The first of the Rachous’ guests to gain celebrity was the African-American writer Chester Himes. His first story, “To What Red Hell,” was published in 1934 by Esquire when Himes was serving an eight-year term in the Ohio State Penitentiary for armed robbery. His first novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go, was published in 1945 to critical acclaim, but his follow-up, Lonely Crusade, was too brutally honest about the conditions under which black people were living in the United States and was not so well received. He arrived in Europe in 1953 and remained abroad, living mostly in Spain, until his death in 1984. His French translator, Marcel Duhamel, suggested that he try his hand at detective novels, which were very popular in France at the time. He created a pair of African-American Harlem detectives, Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, whose exploits over a series of eight novels made Himes a star in France, though he remained relatively unknown in his own country. It wasn’t until 1970, when director Ossie Davis made Himes’s 1965 book Cotton Comes to Harlem into a successful film, that Himes was brought to the greater attention of American audiences.
At first Himes experienced outright racism when he tried to find a hotel room in Paris. In his autobiography he described hotel-hunting in 1954: “The Hotel Welcome overlooking the Odéon, a favorite of the young white Americans, set the pattern. They said they couldn’t rent to noirs; their clients wouldn’t like it. The first nine hotels we tried turned us down because I was black. The majority of the proprietors unequivocally gave that as the reason.” Many of the Americans on the Left Bank had brought their prejudices with them and expected the hotels to operate with the same color bar that they were used to back in the States. Eventually Himes sent his young white girlfriend to a hotel that had already claimed to be complet. She was given a room and they moved in. He traveled in France and Europe and, on his return to Paris in the spring of 1956, he had the good fortune to encounter Madame Rachou. He moved into the hotel with his young German girlfriend, Marlene Behrens. It was one of the few hotels where a black man was able to live with a white woman, much less one half his age, without opprobrium.
They lived in the front on the second floor above the proprietors in a room equipped with a marble-topped dressing table, which doubled as both a kitchen and dining table complete with a gas ring. It was a small room almost filled by the bed but a giant battered armoire with a full-length mirror gave the room the illusion of space. It was here that Himes worked on portions of Mamie Mason, and it was here that he wrote The Five Cornered Square, which he finished on January 18, 1957. He completed A Jealous Man Can’t Win on May 3 of the same year. He was a fast worker. After M. Rachou’s death, Marlene spent a lot of time consoling Madame Rachou, sitting with her at the bar, sympathetically listening to her stories of the old days. She had been a child in Germany during the war and Madame’s stories about the German occupation of Paris were an education to her. Himes and Marlene left for Palma, Majorca, in October 1957, a few weeks before the first of the Beat Generation waiters moved in.
The new arrivals were never to know what the hotel had been like with the solid presence of Monsieur Rachou or that Madame Rachou was broken-hearted. She continued with her life, but now she relied more heavily on her guests for companionship, treating them as a substitute family. In the evening she would sit talking endlessly to her tenants over cups of watery espresso, Mirtaud the hotel cat curled on her lap, until the bar closed at 10:30 and she pulled down the iron shutters.
With the arrival of the Beats that October, the hotel entered another phase, and for about the next six years it was home to a sustained burst of creative activity equal to that which they had achieved recently in San Francisco. There, the presence of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac had catalyzed the poetry scene, creating what came to be known as the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance—a loose grouping of poets including Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, Richard Brautigan, and others. (It was presumably named after the Harlem Renaissance, since there had been no previous literary movement in San Francisco.) A series of poetry readings, beginning with the now legendary Six Gallery reading on October 7, 1955, when Ginsberg first read “Howl,” brought the San Francisco poets to the attention of Richard Eberhardt, who wrote an important article on the scene for the New York Times. This, coupled with the fortuitous seizure of copies of Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems for obscenity, focused nationwide attention on the poets of the Bay City. More readings were organized, and coffee bars began to feature live poetry. Poets collaborated with jazz musicians in late-night clubs. Suddenly there was a vibrant, active literary scene, with Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookshop, publishers of the popular and prestigious Pocket Poets series, which included Ginsberg’s Howl, as its center.
Ginsberg, however, did not remain to bask in his fame. He returned to New York City and went from there to Tangier to assist William Burroughs with the manuscript that eventually became Naked Lunch. Just as Howl hit the mass media, Ginsberg was on his way to Paris to set up a new headquarters at the Beat Hotel, accompanied by his boyfriend Peter Orlovsky and poet Gregory Corso. The cheap rent and permissive atmosphere fostered a climate of freedom and creativity unfettered by financial concerns. As non–French speakers, they had no involvement with French culture and the issues of the day, nor were they restricted by rules with which the French lived, simply because they were ignorant of them. As Jean-Jacques Lebel put it, “They were on an island, isolated in this magic little paradise full of rats and bad smells. But it was paradisical because it gave them the green light to be themselves without having to confront America.” The Beat Hotel offered the freedom to be idle or to work with passionate intensity, to while away the day in cafés or to talk through the night. It was a place where ideas could be developed in a community removed from conventional morality in the manner of the residents of the famous Impasse du Doyenné, the first bohemian colony.
Close to where the Louvre pyramid now stands, in the corner of the Carrousel, was once a group of dilapidated buildings on a dead-end street where, in the 1830s, a miniature, self-contained bohemian colony existed in the ruins of the priory of Doyenné, a few arches and columns of which still remained standing. There Théophile Gautier, Gérard de Nerval, Arsène Houssaye, Edouard Ourliac, and many other writers and painters lived and worked, surrounded by Gothic furnishings, tapestries, and fabrics, looted during the Revolution, which could still be bought cheaply from curiosity shops. Nerval called the community la Bohème galante and wrote a book with this title describing their lives. Here Ourliac worked on Suzanne, the book that made his name. Gautier wrote Mademoiselle de Maupin, Houssaye wrote La Pécheresse, and Rogier illustrated Hoffmann’s Tales.
There was a strong strain of eroticism in these waiters’ works, which marked Gautier and his friends apart from other waiters and artists of the time, and at the Impasse du Doyenné, orgies were a popular entertainment. An orgy provides the theme for Gautier’s Les Jeunes France, in which a group of young men gets together to organize a colossal feast. There was one celebrated occasion when Gautier and his friends knelt before a woman and in complete darkness drank punch from human skulls. When they held a fancy dress ball in 1835, Camille Corot painted two large Provençal landscapes over the paneled walls of Nerval’s rooms. La Bohème galante attracted famous visitors such as Eugène Delacroix, Alexandre Dumas, and Petrus Borel, anxious not to be left out of the latest thing. This was the tradition that the rue Git-le-Coeur continued and, like l’Impasse du Doyenné, for a few- brief years the Beat Hotel was the center of the literary avant-garde.
Even though the hotel was cheap and the dollar strong, the tenant students anti writers had to get money from somewhere. One of the main forms of employment for impoverished Americans living on the Left Bank was writing pornography for Maurice Giroclias’s Olympia Press, an English-language publishing house producing books that would have been illegal if published in the United States or Britain.
About one third of the Traveller’s Companion series in Olympia’s catalog consisted of suppressed works of literature banned in Britain and America: Oscar Wilde’s Teleny; J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man; Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita; Jean Genet’s The Thief's Journal; Lawrence Durrell’s The Black Book; Henry Miller’s Sexus, Plexus, and The World of Sex; the Marquis de Sade’s Bedroom Philosophers, The 120 Days of Sodom, The Story of Juliette, and The Story of Justine; The Story of O by Dominique Aury (a.k.a. Pauline Réage); the Kama Sutra and John Cleland’s Fanny Hill. There were even a number of titles lacking in sex altogether, such as Raymond Queneau’s Zazie dans le Métro and Samuel Beckett’s Molloy and Watt. But to the visiting British and American tourists the distinctive green paperback wrappers of the Traveller’s Companion series represented “pornography,” and works of literature were snapped up indiscriminately and hidden away at the bottom of the suitcase alongside other Olympia titles like Sin for Breakfast, Until She Screams, and With Open Mouth.
Girodias referred to them as “DBs,” or dirty books, and would often announce titles that did not yet exist in his catalog. If enough orders came in for a title, then he would commission one of his writers to produce it. Throughout the ’50s and early ’60s, Olympia produced over a hundred DBs, virtually all written under pseudonyms by Americans, a great many of whom were in some way connected to the Beat Hotel.
When tourists got fed up with literature and wanted more DBs, Girodias thoughtfully provided several more imprints for them, which he called the Atlantic Library, Othello Books, the Ophelia Press, and Ophir Books, all of which published titles refreshingly untainted by literary merit. Of these the Ophelia Press was the most grand, with titles such as The Ordeal of the Rod, Iniquity, The English Governess, Under the Birch, Lust, Without Shame, The Whipping Club, and Whips Incorporated, which left the reader in no doubt as to the subject matter of the books. Many dozens of waiters were kept busy turning out DBs to suit all tastes.
The Left Bank’s primary outlet for these titles was the English-language bookshop the Librairie Anglaise, at 42 rue de Seine. It was owned by a beautiful, petite Frenchwoman named Gaït Frogé who loved American writing and American waiters. She was from Brittany and spoke English with a cultured British accent. The tiny shop was almost triangular, in a crooked sixteenth-century building at the intersection of the rue de Seine and the rue de l’Echaudé. The room was filled by a huge table that took up nearly the whole space, so it was very hard to walk around the shop. It was piled high with dusty self-published volumes of poetry and little literary magazines, a treasure trove for rare-book hunters.
Olympia Press books were Gaït’s specialty and were best-sellers in her shop, but she kept few of them on the shelves, just enough to let customers know she had them. She never bothered to lock the door at night even though the little green-covered Traveller’s Companion series and the more pornographic Ophelia Press editions were quite expensive and obvious targets for a shoplifter or nighttime thief. She kept most of them in a cupboard by the till, available upon request. The more literary Olympia titles, such as those Girodias published by William Burroughs, written during his years at the Beat Hotel, were often launched with publication parties at the shop, held in the tiny cave, the shop’s medieval barrel-vaulted basement, with candles in wine bottles and rather damp walls. Girodias paid for the wine and invitation cards. When Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler’s The Young and Evil was published by Olympia in June 1960 (though originally published in Paris in 1933 by Girodias’s father), Gaït did a special display of photographs of the authors and filled the window with copies of the book.
The shop was cramped and overcrowded, books piled on other books, posters for exhibitions and readings filling the door and window, empty wineglasses balanced on wobbly piles of cheap American paperback thrillers, two-year-old copies of Encounter magazine shelved next to the latest slim volume from a local poet. Gaït lived above the shop, and customers often found the till unattended and the store silent but for the vigorous squeaking of the bedsprings upstairs. When Burroughs moved to Paris in 1958 Gaït became one of his greatest supporters. In 1960, when Two Cities, the publisher of Minutes To Go, could not afford to pay the print bill of $300, she took over the project, paid the bill, and launched the book from her shop. She also released a spoken-word album called Call Me Burroughs, produced by Ian Sommerville, on which Bill read from Naked Lunch and other later texts, recorded in her cave.
There were many Americans and Britons visiting or living in Paris in the late 1950s and early ’60s, and they were well catered to by bookshops selling English-language titles. There was Stock on Place de Théâtre-Français; Brentano’s on Avenue de l’Opéra; the five branches of Flammarion: and on the rue de Rivoli, Galignani and, ten doors down the street, the strictly conservative W. H. Smith’s, where English tea was served. But all these sold mostly best-sellers and technical books to the large community of diplomatic and military residents; the younger literary and student crowds were catered to by the two English-language bookshops on the Left Bank, one of which was the Librairie Anglaise or English Bookshop (it was known by both equally). The other shop was the Mistral, at 37 rue de la Boucherie, another ancient building, situated across the Seine from Notre Dame and next door to the ruins of St.-Julien le Pauvre. Its proprietor, and consequently Gaït’s archrival, George Whitman, was American, but had been in France since 1946 when he came over to work resettling war orphans. He drifted into bookselling, and in 1951 he bought the Mistral building with money from an inheritance, transforming what had been an Arab grocery into a combination bookshop, youth hostel, and social club. Upstairs he had a reading room with beds where visiting writers and poets were welcome to stay, free of charge, for up to a week and, like the Librairie Anglaise, the shop was used as a meeting place and mail drop by many of the expatriate Americans. Competition between the two shops was intense. Frogé claimed that Whitman was working for the CIA—“How else can you explain his long absences from the shop?—and she claimed that Whitman told people that she took drugs.
The English Bookshop was the more “literary” of the two, and the only one to sell Olympia Press books. Despite impassioned pleas from Girodias and arguments from Olympia’s authors, Whitman refused to stock Olympia Press titles, perhaps fearing that he would encounter problems with the police. This was unlikely, as even Brentano’s stocked Olympia titles; they had a discreetly hidden shelf of Traveller’s Companions, and Americans always knew where it was. Many would enter the shop and head straight for it, ignoring all the other books.
The Mistral was much larger than the English Bookshop and had more room for poetry readings. The inhabitants of the Beat Hotel visited them both; they were about the same distance from the hotel. The Mistral was in the same direction as the Olympia Press and you could spend all day there, sitting around reading books, without George complaining, whereas the Librairie Anglaise was just a few doors from the Palette, on the comer of the rue de Seine and the rue Jacques-Callot, which in those days was a major hangout for drug dealers. Each excursion had its obvious advantages.
Many of the occupants of the Beat Hotel did not venture more than a few blocks from the rue Git-le-Coeur from one month to the next; virtually everything they needed was on hand. There were dozens of cheap restaurants within a few blocks and some of the residents had regular positions in them as guitar players or entertainers of some sort. The area was filled with jazz clubs and late-night cafés. The art college was two blocks away for those women in the hotel who worked as models, and most of the Americans who made their living street-selling the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune rarely strayed farther than Blvd St. Germain in their search for customers. Drugs were generally supplied to your door in the hotel, but were also easily obtainable from the Algerian and Moroccan cafés around the rue Saint Severin and from the Palette. The wonderful food market on the rue de Buci was a few minutes’ walk, and late-night shopping was available on the rue de la Huchette. Here there was a grocery called Ali Baba where people from the hotel could buy food up to 2 A.M. for a late meal; the fruit displayed outside was protected from passing thieves by string netting. To many of the residents, the area seemed like paradise.
