“A stroll from rue de l’Odéon, Les Deux Magots or the Luxembourg Gardens, the hanging sign reads Village Voice: Anglo-American Bookshop. The narrow door and window frames are painted Greek island blue. . . . Lingering a while in front of the window display, you’ll want to dive inside, into an ocean of story.”1
—hazel rowley
When I returned to France at the end of 1979, contrary to my expectations, the country had not changed much. Living in different continents, in widely different capacities as I had done, was not seen as a sign of curiosity, let alone entrepreneurial spirit. Rather, it was labeled sheer instability. I quickly realized I would have to reinvent my life by inventing my own job.
One day, as I was browsing in a bookstore, recalling the stimulating literary gatherings at Kramerbooks & Afterwords in D.C., and Three Lives in New York, the idea of opening my own bookshop crossed my mind, but of course it was a mere fantasy: I didn’t have the capital to undertake such an endeavor. Yet the thought was a nagging one, and I finally mentioned it in passing to friends and close family who, to my surprise, reacted positively. Encouraged, I set out to work on this project by first enrolling in a professional school for booksellers, all the while looking for funds and a promising location.
From the start, I knew that the bookshop had to be in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in the sixth arrondissement, the postwar sanctuary of existentialism though no longer, as author Edmund White ironically remarked, “the Intelligence Central for the whole world, as it once claimed to be.”2 Nevertheless, it was the prestigious “Golden Triangle” of the major French publishing houses and famous bookstores and, with the Sorbonne at the end of the boulevard Saint-Germain, it still flaunted an air of heady bohemia. Its legendary literary cafés continued to attract tourists from all over the world, and luxury boutiques—traditionally found on the Right Bank—were slowly crossing over the Seine to the Left Bank, setting up shops and bringing a lively international crowd to the neighborhood.
I had already visited a number of sites when I stumbled upon a “To Let” sign at number 6, rue Princesse, a quiet narrow street just off the busy boulevard Saint-Germain. The place was in a sorry state of disrepair, abandoned by a restaurant owner who had fled abroad, in the hope of outdistancing President Mitterrand’s new socialist policies that had brought so-called “leftists to dance in the streets and French capitalists to leave the country.”3
A close acquaintance of mine expressed an interest in buying the two-story location with the specific purpose of renting it out as a future bookshop. The owner at that time, Madame Grès, a leading figure in French haute couture, and seemingly relieved by my friend’s offer, agreed to sell it and received us in her imposing office overlooking the Place Vendôme. A gracious woman with a commanding presence, Madame wore a distinctive pearl-gray silk turban wrapped around her head, reminiscent of her signature draped gowns. The dignified document signed that day of September 1981 was to be the breakthrough moment that would turn the hoped-for bookstore into reality.
The space had excellent potential, according to my brother, an architect, who had already reworked it in his imagination, but its strong point was its location: tucked between two historical churches—Saint-Germain-des-Prés with its sober Romanesque architecture and the Baroque mammoth of Saint-Sulpice. The rue Princesse also stood at the center of a magical circle of American literary landmarks that conjured up the names of famous writers who had made Paris their home and epicenter of their very lives: the rue Cardinal Lemoine was once the address of a young Ernest Hemingway; on the rue de l’Odéon, Sylvia Beach had presided over her mythical bookshop Shakespeare and Company; around the corner from the Luxembourg Gardens, the rue Fleurus had been the home of Gertrude Stein’s salon, that “charmed circle”4 of global writers and artists, while Natalie Clifford Barney, the muse of the rue Jacob, gathered into her Temple of Friendship the many talented American women who had crossed the Atlantic in search of freedom and self-expression.
In the 1950s, Richard Wright lived on the rue Monsieur-le-Prince and, two streets away, the Café Tournon became his headquarters where, together with his African American friends, all expatriates like him, he used to engage in heated debates. In the 1960s, Henry Miller had briefly stayed at 4 rue Princesse, next door to our future bookstore, and closer to la Place Saint-Michel, Allen Ginsberg and his Beat friends hung out in a small, seedy hotel on the rue Gît-le-Cœur. All boded well for us, as the Village Voice was to be within walking distance of these streets, peopled with these invisible presences.
Compared to these prestigious landmarks, the rue Princesse looked like a modest village street. Built upon the ruins of a royal mansion, it became the rue Révolution before recovering its original name under Napoleon I. Yet la rue Princesse had nothing princely about it: its sixteenth- and seventeenth-century buildings were plain looking, and the walls of my future bookshop were not even straight. However, just across from number 6, the Bordas Gallery continued to display the stone on which Picasso, Chagall, Miró, and other artists had printed their lithographs. A few doors up, the exclusive night club Chez Castel would welcome both Parisian and international jetsetters, offering early risers the eerie spectacle of glamorous stars tipsily searching for their chauffeur-driven limousines after a long “Nuit Princesse” party.5
Designed by my brother, the two-story bookstore-cum-café and gallery with its decor of light wood and old beams painted pastel blue looked like a high loft, where “its unusual atmosphere encompassing bookstore, café, and art welcome customers who, at the immaculate blond wood tables, nurse their cappuccinos and espressos while engaged in conversation or scribbling in wire notebooks.”6
Given its cool look and its ambience of intellectual bohemia, it came naturally to me to call the bookstore the “Village Voice Bookshop,” harkening back to the emblematic newsweekly the Village Voice, born in downtown Manhattan in 1955. As a precious alternative source of information during my American years on the politics of the time (Vietnam and protest movements) and vanguard arts, it was an indispensable guide to my New York weekends. And there was the added lure of its no-holds-barred classified ads. I couldn’t imagine a better choice for the kind of place I had in mind. We contacted the Village Voice office, and within three days, its legal department gave us the green light to use its name “exclusively for a bookshop.”
In response to our invitation to its official opening in October 1982, the newsweekly sent us a number of mementos, including the traditional blue aprons of its town criers, together with cartoons and among them, a Gallic rooster perched on top of the Eiffel Tower with its “cocorico” announcing the opening of the Paris Village Voice. These charmingly inventive wishes for success really made for a warm welcome. In the years to come, from time to time, a couple of their jazz critics would burst into the bookshop with a resounding “Hi everyone, Nous voilà!” to check if the store was honoring its appellation. After a look around and a few joking asides, they would leave, ready to pursue other Parisian adventures, satisfied that their own Village Voice7 was popular and selling well in its aptly named new home. A few months after its opening, this “new home of American expats,” started to spark the curiosity of the French, and mostly the Anglophone press. In fact, the former wondered if it made sense to open yet another English-language bookshop in a city with more than half a dozen. On the other hand, the Anglophone press welcomed this new venture, seeing it in the continuum of the rich and memorable tradition of expatriate writers in the Paris of the interwar years. Indeed, these same writers had launched the rich and varied literature of the twentieth century.
In the following chapters, we will listen to such numerous and talented expatriate and visiting writers who gravitated to the Village Voice Bookshop, delighting us with lively and memorable readings from their most emblematic works. All questions are asked by members of the audience, unless specified otherwise.
Odile with Shari Benstock. © C. Deudon