Goodnight, George. Goodnight, Paris.

We don't "always have Paris." One of its brightest sparks has gone out. George Whitman, who walked to Panama in the 1930s (wonder if he knew my grandparents there?) and then spent 60 years in the even greater adventure of running a legendarily weird Left Bank bookshop--which brought new American writing to Paris and offered a free place to sleep to penniless aspiring writers from the world over--has died. The Times has a great obituary.

George gave me a place to sleep, under a scratchy wool blanket on the top bunk of a jerry-rigged bunkbed in the back of his apartment--which was on the top floor, high above his bookstore--because I was an aspiring writer and shared his love of the Russian language. He showed me how to get into the apartment when he wasn't there: just slip a phone card between the door and its frame to jimmy the lock. He had aspiring writers on this bunkbed, on red velveteen benches below his looming bookshelves, in sleeping bags on the stone floor of the Sylvia Beach Memorial Library. Upstairs writers slept on floors and furniture; downstairs, in the shop, cats slept on piles of books. He charged us nothing to live there. And on top of this deep generosity, he gave us even more: the gorgeous obligation of working an hour or two a day in the shop, and reading an entire book--whichever one we wanted, off the shelves--every single day. (He allowed two days if it was a particularly hefty tome.)

He was the most frugal person I ever met--teabags were reused for days on end, he never bought anything other than books and the bare minimum of food, and if the hotplate was off but still warm you were expected to cook (slooowly) on its diminishing heat rather than wasting valuable electricity by turning it back on. The night I met him he offered me a cup of tea; when I accepted he said, "In that case, would you mind doing about ten minutes' work in exchange for the tea?" The work turned out to be something I would have paid him for the privilege of doing: sorting through papers that included a note from Anais Nin; hanging a photo on a mirror and noticing, as I hung it, that the scribbled handwriting at the bottom ended in Allen Ginsberg's signature and explained that the photo was one Ginsberg had taken of Lawrence Ferlinghetti in San Francisco. I was twenty years old and all my heroes were either writers or characters in books. I almost blacked out in ecstasy.

When I lived there, on one wall of his apartment hung a huge black and white photograph of his daughter, Sylvia Beach Whitman. She was 7 or 8, I think--so about 68 years younger than him--and she was an elfish, weirdly lovely child with pale curly hair, her face the girl-child version of George's own. As he told me and many others, sighing and sad, her mother had taken her back to England so he never saw her anymore. He was afraid she was lost to him. I used to have daydreams of finding her when she grew up and bringing her back, reuniting them before he died.

Then in 2006 I was in Paris with friends and I took them to Shakespeare & Co. I'd heard somewhere vaguely that George's wish had come true: Sylvia had grown up and come back to Paris to help him run the bookstore. We were there talking to the cashier, asking if George was around--he was, but he was napping--when an elfish, weirdly lovely woman with curly blonde hair walked in. She was friendly and familiar with the cashier, she looked to be in her twenties, and she had an English accent.
"Hello," I said. "You must be Sylvia!"
She said, "How did you know?"