Melvillainy in Paris

Abstract

Melvillainy in Paris Christopher Rice Click for larger view View full resolution Christopher Rice. Photo courtesy of Christopher Rice. I had only been to Paris once before. I arrived then around dusk during La Fête de la Musique on the heels of a rainy night spent outside at Stonehenge— spent inside Stonehenge, aw ake w ith strange revelers— for the solstice. Both celebrations seem ed to mark something that arrives w ith the [End Page 103] height of the sun, yet both w ere stum bled upon, sort of accidental festivals, for me. I remember the face of a kind Parisian who read the drow sy confusion of my own, as the metro teemed with its musical crowd; I remember him generously handing me a ticket and guiding me as I set out to meet a friend from Nova Scotia who had been working at Shakespeare and Company. I remember, after very little sleep, being revived by the sounds and laughter and movement everywhere, imagining that this was simply how Paris must behave most summer nights. Thus, it was with some surprise, and even a glow of nostalgia perhaps, that I discovered I had arrived again—this time for “Melville’s Energies”—in the midst of La Fête de la Musique. After greetings with my remarkable host (remarked upon at some length below), and an indulgent nap, I wandered through the streets near my new quarters by Jardin des Plantes, hugging close to the park’s sides at first as if the immensity lying beyond them threatened to envelop me—or anything drifting out too far. Before long, I gravitated towards some Cuban music and grabbed a bite, which felt more like a 3 a.m. snack by my internal clock. Then, I gathered myself and strolled towards the only Parisian haunt I knew, up towards Shakespeare and Company, where, over a decade ago, my friend Harriet arranged for me to stay on as a “tumbleweed,” a guest of the bookshop receiving lodging for light labor. I found the old shop late in the evening standing defiantly closed, watching over Notre-Dame across the Seine from its perch on the left bank, on a busy strip of downtown nightlife, on this first summer night of the season. Close to his ninety-fifth year, George Whitman was still the proprietor of Shakespeare and Company when I had been there. Being a tumbleweed in his shop meant sleeping on a dusty pullout mattress alongside the other nomads and outcasts who found themselves assisting with opening up, closing down, and working some short shift during the day. For me, this shift often consisted of the arduous task of walking George’s beloved dog “Kitty” around the Latin Quarter—not the sort of work I had signed up for exactly, and far from the best use of my talents under the circumstances, yet I executed such duties as though they constituted my highest vocation. The bookstore really was an institution in that way. In exchange for these labors, tumbleweeds lived rent-free and had our run of the bookshop late in the evenings, where sometimes I looked out at a large black-and-white image of Walt Whitman on the building’s west wall, wondering whether this was solely in token of George’s reverence for the poet or an elaborate attempt to establish some mythic lineage back to him. As I stood outside the dark shopfront now—studying a cigarette receptacle tallying votes between those backing “to be” and those favoring “not to be”—I looked up at the outline of someone smoking from the window above, drenched in the [End Page 104] balcony’s dusky glare, and from my tiny patch of gloom below, strewn amongst all the noise and carousing of the street, felt that i had been there—had looked out that window, too. Lodgings in Paris this time around were slightly more private, though similarly spartan at bottom. The quarters were advertised as cozy, compact, and “organized like a tiny ship.” Most reviews of the space tended to emphasize the host, or “superhost,” Bernadette, rather than the space itself. self-described as a “good, liberal French woman...