Paris revisited

by Anaïs Nin

Genres: Memoir, France

27 pages, Unbound

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Writer and diarist, born in Paris to a Catalan father and a Danish mother, Anaïs Nin spent many of her early years with Cuban relatives. Later a naturalized American citizen, she lived and worked in Paris, New York and Los Angeles. Author of avant-garde novels in the French surrealistic style and collections of erotica, she is best known for her life and times in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volumes I-VII (1966-1980).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ana%C3%...

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I moved to Paris I was still writing regularly – that was pre-kids – and I arrived with romantic ideas of spending long afternoons sitting upstairs at Shakespeare & Company scribbling notes on a manuscript and soaking up the literary history. When I would complete this manuscript was not entirely clear to me, but I felt sure that I would complete one, and that I would scribble notes on it in Shakespeare & Company. So much so that I took an apartment about twenty seconds' walk away in the rue de la Huchette, a pedestrianised tourist street full of Greek restaurants (and immortalised, I discovered later, in Eliot Paul's excellent The Last Time I Saw Paris), where the bells from Notre-Dame woke me up every morning.

Unfortunately, I thought Shakespeare & Co too cramped with tourists to be useful as a bookshop, and although it was sometimes fun for a browse, I found I much preferred Village Voice in the 6e (now, sadly, out of business). The rotating crowd of twentysomething American hipsters that staffed Shakespeare & Co formed a protective clique that I found depressing – they were all ten years younger than me and had private jokes and adored David Foster Wallace. I may have invented that part, I actually can't remember anyone ever mentioning him, but it's the sort of thing you can imagine they all loved.

Anaïs Nin, in this chapbook rarity from '71, felt similarly about the habitués of what was then called the Mistral when she was there. I read passages like this with a shiver of recognition:

The young bohemian lying on the couch reading a book would not stop reading when another writer came in. I marveled at their insulation. Unlike Henry Miller, when they had cadged a meal, they did not rush to their room and write twenty pages in exultation. They sought drugs to help them dream, they had no appetite for life, no lust for women, they seemed insulated. They read like people waiting for a train, spectators. Xerox artists. Perhaps obsolete in a world of science. They brought expectations to Paris, but they contributed little fervor, no curiosity, no excitement of the blood.

Nin's text takes up just the first nineteen pages of this limited-edition re-release from 2011, after which there is a much longer and frankly more interesting essay from Karl Orend, the sometime manager of Shakespeare & Co. So this book ends up being more a tribute to the bookshop and its role as an expat literary hub than to the city as a whole.

Looming particularly large is the store's benign godfather, George Whitman, who founded the Mistral and later renamed it after Sylvia Beach's original Shakespeare & Company, which had published James Joyce among many others. George is described by Anaïs as ‘undernourished, bearded, a saint among his books, not eager to sell, lending books, housing penniless friends upstairs’. In the afterword, Orend expands on Whitman's importance, particularly for promoting the work of Nin, Henry Miller, and Lawrence Durrell, all of whom were and continue to be heavily represented in Shakespeare & Co., even during the times when Miller was banned.

Whitman always remembered Nin very fondly – according to Orend – and ‘championed her cause’ over the years as her qualities gradually emerged from the shadow of Miller and Durrell. The book ends with more than fifty pages of fascinating contemporary photographs of Nin, Whitman, Shakespeare & Co., Miller, et al. in Paris from the 1930s onwards.

A couple of years after I moved to Paris, George Whitman died, surrounded by books, at the age 98. He was still living in his little apartment above the bookshop. I was working as a Paris reporter by then, and I went over as soon as I heard, to see the shutters down on Shakespeare & Co and a few of the American volunteers starting to light candles outside. I asked if any of them wanted to say a few words about what he'd meant to them, but none of them wanted to talk to me.

[Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anaïs Nin is officially my favorite author. It didn’t take much convincing, having loved what I’ve read from her thus far, but this journal excerpt, “Paris Revisted”, sealed the deal.

She is thoughtful, writes beautifully, and is at the intersection of every one of my special interests.

[Savana Derby · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was too short. I wanted more. I felt connections clicking between me and her attachment to Paris. She takes my heavy emotions I feel towards the city and makes them poetry.

[Sabine Stenning · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lots of photos which are cute but sucks up to Paris writers and especially Shakespeare and Company. Recommended for Nin's writing but nothing else.