Village voices, p.1
Village Voices, page 1
Copyright © 2024 Odile Hellier
Select excerpts of the work of C. K. Williams, Marilyn Hacker, W. S. Merwin, Raymond Carver, Tess Gallagher, and André Aciman reprinted by permission of the authors and/or their respective estates.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
seven stories press
140 Watts Street, New York, NY 10013
www.sevenstories.com
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: Hellier, Odile, author.
Title: Village voices : a memoir of the Village Voice Bookshop, Paris, 1982-2012 / Odile Hellier.
Description: New York : Seven Stories Press, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2024013703 | ISBN 9781644213797 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781644213803 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Village Voice Bookshop (Paris, France) | Hellier, Odile. | Bookstores--Paris--France. | Booksellers and bookselling--Paris--France. | Expatriate authors--Paris--France. | Paris (France)--Intellectual life--20th century.
Classification: LCC Z310.6.P37 H45 2024 | DDC 381/.450020944361--dc23/eng/20240710 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024013703
College professors and high school and middle school teachers may order free examination copies of Seven Stories Press titles. Visit https://www.sevenstories.com/pg/resources-academics or email academic@sevenstories.com.
Printed in the United States of America
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Gloria, who made it happen.
With gratitude and love.
Finishing touches. © Martine Lafon
contents
Foreword
Prologue
Introduction
part one
“Paris, Paris, Above All, Paris!”
1 It Takes a Village: A Time and a Place
2 The Lost and Found Generation: Paris Was a Woman
Noël Riley Fitch, Shari Benstock, Joan Schenkar
3 The Third Wave of American Expatriates and Literary Magazines
John Strand, Kathy Acker, Eduard Limonov, Ricardo Mosner, Carol Pratl, David Applefield, Edouard Roditi, Jim Haynes
4 Black America in Paris: Updating the Myth “Remember Me”: The Legacies of James Baldwin and Richard Wright
Gordon Heath, Julia Wright, Ernest Gaines, James Emanuel, Jake Lamar
5 Emergence of a Literary Force:
To Each Writer Their Own Paris
Diane Johnson, Steven Barclay, David Downie, David Sedaris, Edmund White
The Cultural Divide
Diane Johnson, Adam Gopnik, Edmund White, René de Ceccatty
6 From Home to Paris and Elsewhere: Irish Writers at the Village Voice Bookshop
Tributes to James Joyce and Samuel Beckett
Željko Ivanjek, John Calder, Anne Atik
Living in Words to Tell the World
Harry Clifton, Deirdre Madden
7 Varieties of Exile: Two Canadian Parisians
Nancy Huston, Mavis Gallant
8 Dark Times: An Anglo-American Focus on the Vichy Regime
Raymond Federman, Carmen Callil, Alan Riding, Alice Kaplan on Louis Guilloux
Intermezzo: One Decade Ends, a New One Begins
part two
A Literary Journey across the United States
9 An Era of Hope Leading to Disillusionment
Julian Beck, Judith Malina, Allen Ginsberg, Jayne Cortez, Andrei Voznesensky, Kazuko Shiraishi, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Hubert Selby Jr., William H. Gass, William Gaddis, Don DeLillo
10 Bright Lights and Twilights
Jay McInerney, Jerome Charyn, Richard Price, James Ellroy
11 Highways and Byways
Barry Gifford, David Payne, John Biguenet, Terry Tempest Williams
12 Spectacular Sceneries, Ordinary Lives: American Writers Reel In the French Imagination
Jim Harrison, Raymond Carver, Jonathan Raban, Richard Ford, Russell Banks
13 Four Remarkable Women Breaking from Convention
Hazel Rowley, Grace Paley, Adrienne Rich, Susan Sontag
14 Native American Renaissance: Storytelling as Repossession
James Welch, Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, David Treuer
15 “Me and you . . . we need some kind of tomorrow.” Open Wounds in African American Literature
Jake Lamar, John Edgar Wideman, Paule Marshall, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Jayne Cortez, Sapphire, Toni Morrison
16 Shadow Lands: The Here and There in American Stories of Exile
André Aciman, Amy Tan, Jamaica Kincaid, Dinaw Mengestu, Junot Díaz, Azar Nafisi
17 Memories of Silenced Lives The Holocaust: Naming the Inexpressible
Gwen Edelman, Gitta Sereny, Cynthia Ozick, Art Spiegelman, Nicole Krauss, Daniel Mendelsohn
Intermezzo: The Twenty-First Century Is upon Us
Adam Zagajewski, Jacques Derrida
part three
Rounding Out Shakespeare’s Stage: Commonwealth Literatures
18 Expanding Horizons: British Literature in Pursuit of Renewal
David Lodge, A. S. Byatt
19 In the Footsteps of Salman Rushdie:
Life Stories from the Indian Subcontinent
Hanif Kureishi, Abha Dawesar, Tarun Tejpal
20 Reshaping South Africa: Moving Forward and out of Apartheid
Denis Hirson, Breyten Breytenbach, Mandla Langa, Damon Galgut
21 Australian Narratives: As Wide and Varied as the Country
Peter Carey, Tim Winton, Julia Leigh
22 Multilayered English Canadian Voices: Lingering Memories of Europe
Margaret Atwood, Jane Urquhart, Michael Ondaatje
part four
Closing Ceremonies
23 The Center Holds: Our Circle of Poets
Stephen Spender, Harry Mathews, Marilyn Hacker, Margo Berdeshevsky, Marie Ponsot, Kathleen Spivack, C. K. Williams, Ellen Hinsey, W. S. Merwin
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
foreword
I’ve been fascinated for a long time by the way the shape of the city can change one’s experience of it. When I first lived in Paris in 1957 when I was twenty, I knew no one, met no one, was very lonely, and the hotel I stayed in became my refuge and my sanctuary. When I went out, it was as though a string was attached to me, so my solitary wanderings through the streets, my quick visits to American Express to pick up my (usually nonexistent) mail, my trips to somewhere in the thirteenth to buy francs on the black market, were always brief excursions, never real voyages.
In the fifty years or so since then, I’ve lived in many neighborhoods in the city, and with each move the center of the city would shift, the shape of the whole alter, my access to it enlarge. There would always be various loci, the swimming pools where I exercised, the cafés I frequented, the museums I most often visited, and for the longest period in those years—this is the point I’ve been getting to—the Village Voice, and Odile.
This is what most struck me when I heard the sad news about the closing of our great bookstore, because when I left Paris with Catherine to move to the country, Paris had one single center for me—the Voice. When I come to the city now, it’s almost always the first place I go; when I’m to meet someone, it’s at the Voice; when literary friends who don’t know Paris arrive, I tell them about the Voice, so that they, too, will have a firm center to their experience of the city.
I don’t want this keepsake for Odile to be too much of a lament, though I suppose it will at least partly have to be that. So many years now since the day I wandered into what at first seemed as much a tearoom as a bookstore, and became part of a lively and growing community of resident readers and of visitors, of writers who live in the city, and writers passing through, who, as the Voice evolved into the singular bookstore it became, would read from their work in that wonderfully intimate upstairs room, in which each person in the audience seems a close friend. I’ve heard so many great writers up there, from Ray Carver, to Grace Paley, to Michael Ondaatje, to Mavis Gallant . . . on and on.
We each have our memories of those splendid evenings, so I think I should stop here, because this has surely now become a lament, not so much for the past as for the sad future which will have this benevolent home place missing from it.
Instead, I’ll offer warm thanks to Odile, for all the years we did have of a bookstore, the brilliant and passionate selection of books which matched any I’ve known anywhere, and forever welcoming, ever warm, ever enthusiastic presence . . .
—c. k. williams
Farewell Day
Paris, June 16, 2012
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 idea
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.
Announcement of the official opening of the Village Voice Bookshop,
October 1982. © Le Prince Esspé
______________
* All these quoted snippets are from the farewell guest book.
* Originally the title of an “illuminated and illuminating” medieval manuscript, here this expression refers to The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier, translated and presented by Richard McDougall in The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier: An Intimate Portrait of the Literary and Artistic Life in Paris between the Wars (New York: Scribner’s, 1976).
introduction
I was forty years old when I opened the Village Voice Bookshop in July 1982. Oddly enough, at no moment in my previous careers did I consider selling books as a plausible profession. This surprising leap of faith would undoubtedly put me out on a limb once again. But hadn’t I always listened to my instincts and taken the road not traveled when it came to choosing one direction over another in my earlier adult life? What mattered to me was the feeling that I was going forward, even tentatively, just out of reach of some elusive, ever-beckoning elsewhere.
In the immediate postwar years, children’s books were rare, yet there were plenty of stories floating around, and I enjoyed eavesdropping on adult conversations that intrigued me and teased my imagination. Recalling my early childhood, I see myself and my younger brother exploring our large garden in Nancy, my mother’s native city, or running through fields and farmlands during our summers in Brittany.
I was nine years old when we moved from Nancy to Saint-Brieuc, settling permanently in this small but lively port city on the northern coast of Brittany. We lived two steps away from our public high school, named after the author Ernest Renan, also close to the picturesque cemetery overlooking two valleys and the sea in the distance where Albert Camus’s father was buried. He was not even a year old when his father was killed in 1914 at the start of the First World War. Forty years later, accompanied by his friend, the writer Louis Guilloux, a native of our city, Camus visited his father’s grave. In his posthumously published last novel, Le premier homme, the author recalls how shaken he was at discovering his father’s birth date inscribed on his tombstone, realizing that the man lying in this grave was younger than his own son.
Mostly attracted to nature and outdoor activities as a child, I turned to music and dance in my adolescence, but it was books that truly filled my life. I never sought out stories written primarily for a young adult audience; rather, I was fond of documentaries shown in our ciné-club, and I dreamed about exotic ways of journeying in the real world. In my quest to live a life more intense than my own and even become another person, I read the books we had at home, mainly twentieth-century contemporary French authors. Among my favorites: Alain-Fournier’s Le grand Meaulnes, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, Vercors’s The Silence of the Sea, and Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. Jean-Paul Sartre’s La nausée put a name on what I felt to be my own existential malaise while Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiographical writings strengthened my resolve to be free, independent, and travel the world.
One day during my last year of high school, I had an unlikely encounter with a woman named Natacha that changed the course of my studies and the future I had envisioned. Born in Russia, Natacha had grown up amid the circles of the Russian immigration in Paris in the twenties and thirties. Perhaps intrigued by my curiosity, she offered to teach me her native tongue.
The Russian language was totally alien to me and not even taught in our public high school; however, as ancient Greek was part of my lycée curriculum, the Russian alphabet already seemed fairly familiar. On Saturday afternoons, I would walk across town to get to her place, excited by the prospect of learning her language by reading excerpts from Russian classics she had carefully chosen for our session. She would receive me in her living room gloriously walled in by shelves of books by Pushkin, Gogol, and the like, and we would sit at her table facing the bow window with a cup of hot tea, ready to dive into another world. Encouraged by her and the promise of the unknown, I decided to take up advanced Russian studies at the University of Rennes. Our Saturday afternoon ritual continued, and before long, I was speaking Natacha’s language.
In 1962, Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in the literary review Novy Mir—the first hint of Stalin’s gulags in postwar Soviet literature. It was a breakthrough moment that generated hope for a further easing of censorship. Khrushchev’s relative relaxation of repressive measures had made it possible for Natacha to trace family members left behind in Moscow more than thirty years beforehand. They became a surrogate family for me when I was completing my junior year abroad at the Moscow State University (1964–1965), inviting me to spend my weekends with them, a rare opportunity for a foreign student to experience their daily life from the inside.
