The Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris

When people die, we often remember them in superlatives. But long before George Whitman passed away on Wednesday, just two years short of completing a century, he evoked a plethora of adjectives.

He could be moody and irascible; eccentric and unpredictable. Yet above and beyond that, anyone who took refuge at Shakespeare and Company — that enchanting haven of books in Paris — always regarded him as the quirkiest and kindest man they ever knew.

Nestled on the Left Bank of the Seine, in the shadow of the majestic Notre Dame Cathedral and off the famous Place St Michel, Shakespeare and Company has a perfect location. But George was not into real estate and so location was not, was never, all. The three-storied, rickety old edifice seemed something out of a fairy tale — except it was not made of gingerbread but covered from toe to head in books of every size, shape and vintage.

Presiding over it all was George, a slight man with a wispy white beard and twinkling blue eyes, a cross between a wizard and an elf.

He did not just display books for sale. He offered a bed and a home and poetry sessions and tea parties. Most of all he gave young men and women who dreamed of being writers a sense of hope, an unstated encouragement. He gave them the time of day.

Sitting around the tattered carpets and decrepit sofas, and arguing over the writers we loved and hated, we often wondered what made George invite someone to stay. Of course, he knew all the famous writers who passed their way through Paris and invariably dropped in at Shakespeare’s from the time he started the bookshop in 1951. But it was not an exclusive zone for the rich and famous. If George took a fancy to a passing stranger, he offered him or her a home “in my book-lined apartment by the Seine”. After all, his famous motto, stuck up on the wall on the ground floor, was: “Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.”

I was no angel but one of the luckiest things that happened to me was stumbling into Shakespeare and Company on a summer’s day in 1980. My friend Kavita and I, walking along the Seine towards Notre Dame, suddenly spotted a heap of English books and began a bit of browsing.

Some angel must have been looking out for me for I picked up, without any forethought, a well-thumbed Dostoevsky. Before I could read the blurb, George — in a flowing dressing gown if I remember right — was by my side, beaming. “I am Prince Myshkin, I am the Idiot,” he cried, overjoyed that I had picked out one of his favourite books (and characters) of all time.

It may have been The Idiot or the strangeness of a young Indian girl — at a time when only Americans, Canadians and the occasional Briton haunted the bookshop — in Paris, but whatever the reason, George invited me to stay at Shakespeare’s “for as long” as I wanted. For free. Well, not quite free because he had two rules for all guests: we had to work one hour at the bookshop, and we had to leave behind our “autobiography”.

I was leaving Paris the next day but George’s offer was too exciting to miss. So a month later, I made my way back to Paris and headed straight to his bookshop cum library cum literary salon cum the best place on earth for an 18-year-old with a Hemingway fixation to be.

I soon discovered that most of us who had gathered there by chance — especially the north Americans — had been guided by the spirit of Hemingway who had made Paris an essential rite of passage for writers and bibliophiles. It was The Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s slim late-life memoir of his youthful days in Paris, that, subliminally perhaps, had drawn us to Shakespeare’s, I think.

That memoir mentions the original Shakespeare and Company, founded by Sylvia Beach, which published James Joyce’s Ulysses and was the meeting place of the writers of the 1920s — Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald and Joyce and Ford Maddox Ford and the rest of the cast that made up Gertrude Stein’s “lost generation”.

By 1980, Hemingway was already losing his sheen but even those who did not much care for his “outdated machismo” could not but help revel in the opening lines of the memoir which said, “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

We may not have known it back then but George would always be the chef who conjured up that feast for us, long after Hemingway and his world had disappeared, and Shakespeare’s would be — and remains — the signature dish of that banquet.

It drew me back to its fold the next summer. By then, George had married and had a baby daughter, who was named after Sylvia Beach. George remembered me from the previous year and I stayed again for several days, making a new set of friends some of whom have lasted — without the aid of Facebook or Twitter — to this day.

George, I recall, was often in a bad mood those days and set me tasks other than dusting the bookshelves or sitting at the front desk which we all loved to do. When he and his wife Felicity were busy, I was asked to babysit. Not particularly maternal by nature, I squirmed at having to change nappies but was glad of the experience when I became a mother some years down the line.

Nearly 30 years later, in 2009, I got the chance to visit Paris again and like a homing pigeon made my way to the quaint old mansion by the Seine. The place was still the same. It had not been pulled down to raise some chrome-and-glass monstrosity, and thanks to Sylvia and her boyfriend David who now run it, it was even more effervescent and lively than when Sylvia was a baby. And one room was entirely taken up with innumerable boxes filled with “autobiographies” of guests who had stayed there over six decades.

George was turning 95, and was frail and ailing and rarely came down from his apartment on the third floor — even though legions of Americans for whom he was a legend thronged the store to meet him.

I was lucky once again, for David took me up one evening to meet him. And I was overwhelmed when George recognised me and cried out, “Oh, my little Hindu girl from Bombay is back…” never mind that I was far from little and was from New Delhi.

In my extended stays at Shakespeare and Company, I never really had a conversation with George. I am not sure many people did. He flitted in and out of rooms, watching over us, perhaps listening in on us, and occasionally making a quip. But his presence was central to the warmth and generosity that breathed out of every book-laden alcove of that place, and his throwaway lines have always stayed with me.

He once asked me, “Do you know the greatest line Marx ever wrote?” As I stuttered “Workers of the world unite….” he cut me short with a “No, no, no, no, no…. Marx’s greatest line was, ‘Live for humanity’.”

I don’t know if George ever thought of himself as a Marxist. But of the many self-proclaimed Marxists I know, he is certainly the one who sought to live for humanity. When I look back to my days at his fascinating store in Paris, I realise it was there I learned that only two things really matter in life: books and friends. All else is ephemera.

Thank you, George.