While perhaps less commonly admired than the art and artists they become renowned for, the allure of these great dwellings is not a new concept. For as long as we’ve known artists and artisans, society women, and the underdogs of the art world, there has been infatuation over the complex dynamics of their shabby sanctuaries. A single bedroom on the third floor, silver-lined walls, a trundle bed under a bookshelf, or a standing Saturday salon: the common motif between the diverse parameters of what constitutes a safe haven to the artist is what’s worth noticing; the idea that these places—whether to visit or to stay in—offered something important to the artist’s process, practice, and self, something the artist could not experience or access otherwise. A compulsion that drew Patti Smith and Bob Dylan to the Chelsea, Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso to Gertrude Stein’s home, and F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce to Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company. Artists in search of refuge, sure, but maybe more importantly in search of inclusion, understanding, debate, and challenge; in search of a world that made sense to them, a world more similar to and with more tolerance for the one they saw.

Gertrude Stein once said, ‘Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense’, so perhaps the goal was never to escape, but rather to return to the self, to others like the self, or, in the very least, to be surrounded by those who understood the self, who made sense to the self. A mentor and furious art collector, Stein provided the attendees of her Saturday night salons with a different kind a refuge. She was a collector, yes, but in her home— amid the Matisses and the Picassos that crowded the wall space at 27 rue de Fleurus—it would become clear that her foresight was of equal regard. Rather than granting a rest in the literal sense, entry into the Stein salon offered validation, but also a variance to the typical landscape, a place to converse through art, to say more with less, but perhaps also a bestowal of the authority to say it more directly and confidently. While it could be assumed that the attendees of the Stein salon were in continuous rotation, we can gather its agenda remained the same: to create art language and gather its native speakers.

In a similar, albeit more inclusive, approach, George Whitman endeavoured to grow and to hear a heartbeat from the bones of a simple bookstore. The original Shakespeare and Company was founded by Sylvia Beach in 1919. In 1951, George Whitman opened the doors of the one that still operates today, under its original name, Le Mistral. Later, in 1964, after Beach's death but with her blessing, and on the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth, Whitman renamed his store Shakespeare and Company, which he described as a novel in three words. ‘I created this bookstore like a man would write a novel, building each room like a chapter,’ he said, ‘and I like people to open the door the way they open a book, a book that leads into a magic world in their imaginations.’ 

If Beach’s Shakespeare and Company was as much a lending library, bank, post office, and publishing house as it was bookstore, then Whitman’s was most certainly also considered an informal lounge room. Both became focal points of literary culture, attracting the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Man Ray, or Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Anaïs Nin, respectively, but it was Whitman who declared his establishment a ‘socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore’.

He ran the hotel like a bohemian sanctuary.

Here, Whitman hosted readings and dinner parties, while also opening his doors to generations of rootless writers who arrived on the doorstep unannounced. While Whitman slept in a small apartment above the store, these writers, or Tumbleweeds as he affectionately called them, would sleep below in the store on cots stacked beneath and between the bookshelves. In an offering of literal (and literary) sanctuary, they were invited to stay for free, in return for helping around the shop, agreeing to read a book a day, and writing a one-page autobiography for the shop’s archives. An estimated 30,000 people have stayed at the shop since it opened in 1951. ‘Be not inhospitable to strangers,’ it says still on the shop wall, ‘lest they be angels in disguise.’ A purveyor of art and good faith, Whitman created a community, a space dedicated to those who have written and those who wish to write.

Places like this became structures of both artistic sacrifice and growth; places where, at the time, art was perhaps the only thing on the menu. They housed these artists, and their people, at the beginning of their journey, during crucial times of growth, before the burden or glory of fame arrived, before recognition and remuneration were even a possibility, and in some cases before they were even brave enough to consider themselves artists at all.

***

On my most recent visit to Shakespeare and Company, there was a line forming out the door. In the courtyard at the front, under the forest green and yellow awning, people were idling, indulgently flicking through the pages of the books in the stands, the stands in the courtyard at the front, and while they read, both nothing and everything seemed to change. Locals and tourists continued to walk past, waiters at the cafe next door continued to take orders, someone sat on the garden bed writing in a journal, and a young woman played three songs on the cello. Those people reading, though, with their heads down and books opened, were motionless. In the physical sense, they were paused, on loop, hunched over the pages, suspended above the words, but in their imaginations, everything expanded, as stories unfolded behind their eyes.

Inside there was, as promised, all the indicators of an informal lounge room: reading chairs and lounge chairs, beds that tucked under bookshelves, top-level windows that opened inwards, and the suggestion that a particular corner belonged to a particular cat. There was a wishing well and the repeated press and thud as the cashier stamped the first page of the books that had just been purchased. People whispered as they shuffled around each other, and others stood stationary, physically motionless, but momentarily transported, lost within another version of the present, perhaps gliding past some of their comrades who were paused outside, the ones also adrift within their own realms of oblivion.

The walls and the stairs were equally as crowed as both the foot traffic and the shelves. Among signs that read ‘Open door, open books, open mind, open heart’ and ‘I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being’, there were framed pictures of Beach and of Whitman and of the store throughout its history. There was a sign with the store’s slogan and others with similar such sentiments, and there was also a typed list that detailed Elmore Leonard’s ten rules of writing. But perhaps most importantly, there were the signs that pragmatically protected the realm. ‘No Photos.’  ‘Please No Pictures.’ Signs that, by their very nature, encouraged the complete abandonment of reality; signs that advocated for the immersion and encouraged the tunnel vision. Signs that allowed you to get lost within the utopia. Signs that promised a rest.  

Before I visited Shakespeare and Company in person, the idea of it alone was enough to take solace in, enough to sustain the message and the impact and the importance of its philosophy. At places like the Factory and the Chelsea and Stein’s salon and Shakespeare and Company, you were allowed to struggle. There was the understanding that most of the patrons were poor and perhaps hungry, unknown and unrecognisable. But there was also the understanding that in these places they found ways to belong, to create, and to continue their work. While the era and the technology may be different today from when Smith walked the Chelsea or Hemingway visited Gertrude Stein’s on a Saturday evening, it seems that to truly honour these places of refuge—these places that allow one to collectively experience a movement—and to protect them and their mission, we must first give ourselves over. Experience something with those who are in the same place as us and those who are there metaphorically, present only through the notes they left taped to the walls and the dusty memories we’ve learnt to take comfort in—the ones folded neatly into the corners of a store or the spine of a book or a hotel lobby or maybe just in our minds. For these great establishments existed to allow art and artists to exist. They allowed for new ideas to become integrated into society and provided a place of rest, both for the artists and for those who would later come to experience their art.

 And while some of these places, like the Hotel Chelsea and like Stein’s on a Saturday, are no longer viable or realistic for refuge or for rest, their legacy remains, relentlessly transforming the physical sense and leaving in their wake a path for the places of the future that will defend and honour the same unrelenting message: create something that lasts forever, or experience something that’s daring to.

fin.