Village Voices

prologue

This desire for voice is physical: talk to me,
tell me a story.¹
—erica warner

Bloomsday, June 16, commemorates the multifaceted life in exile and internationally lauded modernism of the Irish writer James Joyce. On this day, in 2012, hundreds of friends, writers, and patrons gathered at the Village Voice Bookshop for a farewell to their “home away from home” as American expatriates affectionately called our bookshop. Crammed inside and spilling out onto the narrow rue Princesse, the festive crowd celebrated three decades of Anglophone literatures and kinship forged around books and author readings they remembered as “raucous fun” and “deeply personal” in “a place of words and ideas where literature was not just a pastime but the very stuff of life,” and “one felt oneself a guest rather than a customer.” Here was “a community of writers and readers,” and everyone had a story to tell, or to write down in the farewell guest book,^* to convey what the Village Voice had meant to them over the years.

Author events set the tempo of its life, and apart from a few exceptions, took place in that “intimate upstairs room where elbow to elbow, huddled in their chair,” regulars and visitors from different corners of the world engaged in spontaneous and informal exchanges with guest writers who gave them a unique opportunity to participate in a discussion of their recently published texts. It stands to reason that enthusiasts of these literary events expressed the hope that we would make the record of our readings available to them.

When the bookstore closed, my plan was to ensure the safety of our audio and videotapes in an archival foundation. Yet, before shipping them all off, I had to sort them out, that is, go through twenty years of obsolete-looking audio cassettes and ten more years of videotapes packed away in a plethora of boxes.

Fortunately, while listening to these recordings, I realized that, besides summoning up a good number of our shared moments, each tape revived its author’s specific voice, their work, and the special ambience of their reading that was a story in itself, a fragment of a whole. Brought together, they provided a vast and rich literary panorama wherein often starkly different worlds complemented one another.

It was inconceivable that such precious material be forgotten, or worse yet, relegated to relative oblivion. Each reading had to be restored within its own context and given in the author’s authentic voice, keeping in mind that this particular voice is their signature. Wary of the uninterrupted and sometimes deafening brouhaha of our digital era, I felt the need to revive our author readings through a somewhat selective but coherent narrative in the form of a collective written memoir that would modestly conjure up “the very rich hours”^* of the Village Voice Bookshop.

I have borrowed this expression from the literary memoirs of Adrienne Monnier, the owner of La Maison des Amis des Livres on the rue de l’Odéon, just across from Shakespeare and Company where Sylvia Beach boldly published James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922.

Through their dedication to literature, these partners made the rue de l’Odéon the buoyant interwar scene of a literary vanguard that attracted so many American, British, French, and other European writers and their readers.

Adrienne Monnier’s and Sylvia Beach’s respective and anecdotal memoirs are a mine of precious details that highlight their collaborative activities, including their friendships with many of the most innovative writers of the early twentieth century. Those writers came to their salon-bookshops to launch their works, engaging in debates around the current modernist trends in literature, the subtleties of translation, and other artistic pursuits of the audacious 1920s and ’30s.

In the same spirit, our Village Voice Bookshop was firmly rooted in its own epoch—a thirty-year transitional period that prompted our authors to question the past while fully embracing a new century with the promises and immense challenges of the societal, ecological, and geopolitical upheavals that now called for adequate expression.

Though conducted in English, our events came to life in a French-owned bookstore located in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés with its centuries-old stone buildings still bearing the imprint of prestigious French, American, and British writers from a historical past. The constant interplay between the two languages continued to enhance our lively question-and-answer sessions with its complex cultural and linguistic layering.

Hundreds of writers launched their works at the Village Voice, but for obvious reasons I could not give all of them their due here. It is my hope that everyone who read at our bookstore may find accents of their own voices in those of the authors who have been included in our chronicle of a specific time and place.