Time Was Soft There by Jeremy Mercer
After fleeing Canada for Paris in 1999, crime reporter Jeremy Mercer has no clear idea of where to go with his life. A casual stop at the legendary Shakespeare & Co. bookstore proves to be the beginning of a life-changing experience, which Mercer documents in Time Was Soft There.
Modeled after Sylvia Beach’s original bookstore of the same name, which closed during World War II, George Whitman’s Shakespeare & Co. bookstore in the Left Bank neighborhood of Paris has been a haven for poor artists and writers to live and work for over 40 years. Just as Beach’s store attracted such literary legends as Hemingway and Joyce, over the years guests to Whitman’s store have included Richard Wright, Allen Ginsburg, and Anais Nïn. Whitman, now 93, is officially retired, but still remains active in running the store.
Even though its literary heyday was in the 1960s, Whitman’s store remains a refuge for “lost souls and poor writers.” Fitting this definition, Mercer goes on to live at Shakespeare & Co. for several months. His stay is a tale of the bohemian lifestyle—roaming Paris, writing, bumming food and the occasional odd job. Mercer provides colorful descriptions of his developing relationship with Whitman and the myriad characters that come and go from the bookstore. Using a crime writer analogy to describe his days, Mercer contrasts the prison expression of “hard time” with the “soft time” of bookstore life: “time that went easily, time that was a pleasure to do. Time at Shakespeare & Co. was as soft as anything I’d ever felt.”
Even though Mercer remembers his days lyrically and favorably, he doesn’t lapse into romanticism or idealism. The descriptions of Mercer’s idyllic way of life are balanced with the not-so-utopian realities of bookstore life: rivalries with other writers, infrequent showers, and guests who take advantage of Whitman’s philosophy of “give what you can, take what you need.”
Mercer’s memoir is an intriguing read for any bibliophile or aspiring writer. Reading it offers a glimpse of the magic Shakespeare & Co. has brought to those who’ve been a part of it. While Mercer acknowledges that the store has changed over the years with increased tourism and changes in the neighborhood, he celebrates the store’s idealistic spirit and shows that it still continues today.
Responses to this article
Bonus Articles
Every Morpheme Counts: The Sam Lipsyte Interview
Lipsyte: Well these were the famous classes that he taught and others have written about it. He would kind of perform an amazing monologue for hours that would be a work of art in and of itself, in the way it was constructed in real time and kept pulling threads through and weaving all these elements together, but the content of it would be reflections on writing and art and what it is to be an artist and how one should approach the page. And then at the end of that—and that could go for four or five hours—at the end of that, he would call on students to read from whatever it was they were working on, but normally you wouldn't get too far, because he would stop you probably within a sentence or two and point out all that was false in what you had perpetrated.
PROPOSAL FOR TALK ON “GRANTS, PROPOSALS, AND QUERIES,” TO BE DELIVERED AT THE 2010 AWP CONFERENCE, THURSDAY, APRIL 8, COLORADO CONVENTION CENTER, STREET LEVEL, ROOM 203, 9:00 AM
In the brief essay that J.C. Hallman will deliver at a panel discussion at the 2010 AWP Conference in Denver, Hallman will offer up his own insights as to the nature of this admittedly flawed practice. The essay will be, to some extent, experimental. It will have a self-referential quality, it will aspire to innovation, indeed it will even be accurate to describe it as "meta-," but of course Hallman will use none of these terms, though he would like to. Book proposals are not places for words like innovation and experimentation. Instead, Hallman's essay will be "quirky and fun."
Lectures from the Argentine Master: Seven Nights by Jorge Luis Borges
Seven Nights Jorge Luis Borges (trans. Eliot Weinberger). New Directions. $12.95, 128pp. In Seven Nights, the recently re-released collection of lectures-turned-essays originally given in Buenos Aires in 1977, Borges does not discuss the phenomenon of déjà vu. He does, however, speak at great length about nightmares and dreams, which he describes as “a kind of modest [...]
The So-Called Other Europe: Best European Fiction 2010 edited by Aleksandar Hemon
Best European Fiction 2010 edited by Aleksandar Hemon, preface by Zadie Smith. Dalkey Archive Press.448 pp, $15.95. “The great pest of speech is frequency of translation,” Samuel Johnson once wrote, in the preface to his iconic Dictionary of the English Language: No book was ever turned from one language into another without imparting something of its native [...]
Field Guides to Elsewhere: How We Read Languages We Don’t Read
“There are, of course, newspapers to keep responsible Americans up to date when trouble looms, and public television or even the History Channel to inform us about the occasional historic battle or archaeological discovery or civil war. What else do we need?” Claudia Roth Pierpont frames her essay on the contemporary Arabic novel, published in [...]
Spring 2006
Table of Contents for Issue 3
The Constant Conversation
More from the NBCC Awards
With jokes from Joyce Carol Oates and "wild imaginings" from 92-year-old winner Diana Athill -- not to mention talk of a sequel from "Wolf Hall" author Hilary Mantel -- this year's NBCC Awards were noteworthy for their celebration of literature by women.
Broom of the System Gets Cover Makeover, Plus One Cover I Love and One I Hate
DFW's latest cover makeover, plus a great-looking cover and a really not-so-great-looking cover.
Rereading Wallace Stevens
Since buying The Selected Poems of Wallace Stevens at City Lights, I’ve been rereading many Stevens poems and trying to understand it from a more mature perspective. Last time I read a vast amount of Stevens was when I was 22 for a class on Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Yeats, and Marianne Moore. With fifteen years [...]
Best Translated Book Award 2010
The 2010 Best Translated Book Awards were announced last night at Idlewild Books, Manhattan. The Confessions of Noa Weber by Gail Hareven, translated by Dalya Bilu won the fiction award, and the poetry award went to Elena Fanailova for The Russian Version, translated from the Russian by Genya Turovskaya and Stephanie Sandler. Check out the [...]
NBCCA
The National Book Critics Circle Award is announcing their winners tonight. The diversity of their nominations, from the better known (such as Hilary Mantel and Mary Karr) to the less mainstream (such as Rachel Zucker and Eula Biss), makes the blog entries on the nominees an interesting read. I added Stephen Burt’s Close Calls with [...]
Different Ways of Translating al-Khamissi
Translator Jonathan Wright said last night that he felt, for the English-language reader, "religious references [in Arabic literature] are in general problematic."
Dear Camera: Bees and Poems. “An accidental molting”
Poems and Paintings by Salena Gerdes and Joseph P. Wood in the newest issue of Dear Camera
Norwegian Wood Film Adaptation
Haruki Murakami’s breakout novel, Norwegian Wood, is being made to a film. But wait! There’s more! It’s being scored by Radiohead.
Out of Print, Out of Mind
To mark the one-year anniversary of his outstanding literary webzine, The Second Pass, editor John Williams asked a whole bunch of reading folks to wax on about their favorite OP titles.
“It is one of the hardest days of the year to bear. Truly a memorable 10th of March,” or, Time travel with Thoreau
Despite Eliot's oft-quoted line about April, we all know that March is really the cruelest month, refusing to set us free of winter's bleakness even as it tantalizes us with hints of spring. This year however, Thoreau's journals in hand, I've decided to choose my own March.
blog advertising is good for you
Bonus Articles
Every Morpheme Counts: The Sam Lipsyte Interview
Lipsyte: Well these were the famous classes that he taught and others have written about it. He would kind of perform an amazing monologue for hours that would be a work of art in and of itself, in the way it was constructed in real time and kept pulling threads through and weaving all these elements together, but the content of it would be reflections on writing and art and what it is to be an artist and how one should approach the page. And then at the end of that—and that could go for four or five hours—at the end of that, he would call on students to read from whatever it was they were working on, but normally you wouldn't get too far, because he would stop you probably within a sentence or two and point out all that was false in what you had perpetrated.
PROPOSAL FOR TALK ON “GRANTS, PROPOSALS, AND QUERIES,” TO BE DELIVERED AT THE 2010 AWP CONFERENCE, THURSDAY, APRIL 8, COLORADO CONVENTION CENTER, STREET LEVEL, ROOM 203, 9:00 AM
In the brief essay that J.C. Hallman will deliver at a panel discussion at the 2010 AWP Conference in Denver, Hallman will offer up his own insights as to the nature of this admittedly flawed practice. The essay will be, to some extent, experimental. It will have a self-referential quality, it will aspire to innovation, indeed it will even be accurate to describe it as "meta-," but of course Hallman will use none of these terms, though he would like to. Book proposals are not places for words like innovation and experimentation. Instead, Hallman's essay will be "quirky and fun."
Lectures from the Argentine Master: Seven Nights by Jorge Luis Borges
Seven Nights Jorge Luis Borges (trans. Eliot Weinberger). New Directions. $12.95, 128pp. In Seven Nights, the recently re-released collection of lectures-turned-essays originally given in Buenos Aires in 1977, Borges does not discuss the phenomenon of déjà vu. He does, however, speak at great length about nightmares and dreams, which he describes as “a kind of modest [...]
The So-Called Other Europe: Best European Fiction 2010 edited by Aleksandar Hemon
Best European Fiction 2010 edited by Aleksandar Hemon, preface by Zadie Smith. Dalkey Archive Press.448 pp, $15.95. “The great pest of speech is frequency of translation,” Samuel Johnson once wrote, in the preface to his iconic Dictionary of the English Language: No book was ever turned from one language into another without imparting something of its native [...]
Field Guides to Elsewhere: How We Read Languages We Don’t Read
“There are, of course, newspapers to keep responsible Americans up to date when trouble looms, and public television or even the History Channel to inform us about the occasional historic battle or archaeological discovery or civil war. What else do we need?” Claudia Roth Pierpont frames her essay on the contemporary Arabic novel, published in [...]
Why help us? Read our Support page.
Help sustain indie lit coverage. Subscribe for just $1 per month.
No amount is too small.
Books By Contributors
about
© 2008 Scott EspositoTQC is a proud member of the Council of Literary Magazines and PressesDesign by SoroDesign