the times | Saturday November 14 2020 2GM 3
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Bernie Taupin has been hailed as one of
the greatest lyricists in popular music.
However, if anyone should try to look
for meaning in the words of the man
who wrote Candle in the Wind, they
would be wasting their time.
Who says so? Taupin himself,
according to his former bandmate.
Taupin, 74, has written lyrics for
Elton John since 1967 after he answered
an advert placed in the New Musical
Express. Some of their biggest hits in-
clude Rocket Man, Tiny Dancer and
and I said, ‘you know, does any of this
make any sense to you?’
“And he said ‘no — it’s a lot of
bollocks’.”
Cregan, who has worked closely with
Rod Stewart, said: “The way we workedA home on the Left Bank
Shakespeare and Company was
founded in 1919, at 8 Rue Dupuytren,
by Sylvia Beach, the young
American who was inspired by the
nearby bookshop La Maison des
Amis des Livres. She moved in 1922
to larger premises at 12 Rue de
l'Odéon, again on the Left Bank.
The shop attracted the
community of expatriate writers and
artists who became known as the
Lost Generation, including Ernest
Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. The
publication of Ulysses by James
Joyce under an imprint bearing the
shop’s name, in February 1922,
cemented its literary fame.
During the 1930s, Beach catered
increasingly to French intellectuals,
such as André Gide, supplying
English books and magazines such
as Moby-Dick to the latest issues of
The New Yorker. Beach shut up shop
in 1941 when the Nazis invaded.
In 1964 an English bookstore
called Le Mistral, opened after the
war by George Whitman, an
American ex-serviceman, was
renamed Shakespeare and
Company in Beach’s honour.
The shop at 37 Rue de la Bûcherie
became a focus for Beat Generation
writers of the 1950s, including Allen
Ginsberg and William S Burroughs.The Shakespeare and Company bookshop was named after the original, which closed in 1941 during German occupationALAMYMartha Gellhorn. Spender, Gellhorn
and Hemingway had all recently been
in civil-war Spain. Spender said that,
when Inez ordered sweetbread rather
than steak and wouldn’t drink, He-
mingway said: “Your wife is yellow...
Marty was like that, and do you know
what I did? Used to take her to the
morgue in Madrid every morning
before breakfast”. Gellhorn denied that
the lunch took place.
Although the shop was symbolically
“liberated” by Hemingway, arriving
with Allied forces in 1944, it did not re-
open and the store of the same name in
Paris today was renamed in Beach’s
honour in the 1960s.
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, professor
of English literature at Oxford Univers-
ity, said it was striking that some au-
thors became “obsessed” with other
writers for weeks or months, adding
that Hemingway “returned to the nov-
els of Turgenev like an addict in search
of his next fix”.
The team at Princeton behind the
Shakespeare and Company project said
that, although the original records had
been accessed by a small number of re-
searchers, the new searchable database
added new material to fill in the gaps
where details of books were incom-
plete.
Joshua Kotin, director of the project,
added that he hoped it would also en-
courage visitors to discover authors
who were read by enduring names but
have themselves been forgotten.It was the Left Bank bookshop and
lending library at the heart of literary
life in interwar Paris and was frequent-
ed by everyone from Ernest Heming-
way to Simone de Beauvoir.
Now new analysis by The Times of
the digitised records of Shakespeare
and Company has revealed the literary
love affairs of some of the 20th
century’s most famous authors.
The database of 38,000 records,
created by researchers at Princeton
University shows that Hemingway bor-
rowed books about the ego and genius,
while his mentor Gertrude Stein in-
dulged a taste for “poisonously sala-
cious” fiction and James Joyce read
widely and returned books years after
they were due back. He also bought 20
copies of his own Ulysses.
The English language bookstore was
opened by Baltimore-born Sylvia
Beach in 1919 and quickly became a
thriving centre for the expatriates of the
“Lost Generation” and their bohemian
circle. During the 1930s, it attracted a
growing number of French intellectu-
als, including de Beauvoir and
André Gide. It was pre-emptive-
ly closed by Beach in 1941, dur-
ing the German occupation,
after she refused to sell her last
copy of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
to a German officer.
Its archive reveals that He-
mingway, the American First
World War veteran and author
who was famously sure of his
own talents, borrowed Egoists,
a Book of Supermen by James
Huneker, which profiles
figures such as Stendhal and
Nietzsche and dismisses modesty as “a
virtue of the mediocre”.
The archive also suggests that he
may have brought Pauline Pfeiffer,
Literary giants
on lookout for
sex, supermen
and self-worship
his future second wife, to the shop on
January 19, 1926, prompting the Shake-
speare and Company Project research-
ers at Princeton to “wonder whether
the two were already having their affair
and if Hadley [Hemingway’s first wife]
knew about it or not”.
As well as books about genius, He-
mingway sampled pulp detective fic-
tion, borrowing Jonathan Latimer’s The
Dead Don’t Care, which depicts a private
detective whose interests in liquor and
women Hemingway shared.
Joyce, the Irish author of Ulysses —
which was published by Beach under
the Shakespeare and Company imprint
— was also not renowned for his mod-
esty, so it is perhaps unsurprising that
he purchased 20 copies of his own
books. His borrowing also encom-
passed books from the complete works
of Chaucer to Wireless Possibilities, a
1924 book by AM Low predicting rapid
advances in wireless technology in
fields from business to warfare.
Punctuality doesn’t appear to have
been Joyce’s strong point — he re-
turned seven books that he borrowed in
the mid-1920s as late as 1931.
Stein, a longtime fixture of Paris’s in-
tellectual circles, who lived openly in a
lesbian relationship, had a taste for sen-
sation. She borrowed Alec Waugh’s
novel The Loom of Youth, which caused
a scandal with its descriptions of public
school homosexuality. She also read
Edith Maude Hull’s The Sheik, which
had then recently been adapted as afilm with Rudolph Valentino in the title
role. It depicts an upper-class English
girl falling in love with her abductor
and rapist. The book was condemned in
the Literary Review as “poisonously sa-
lacious”.
The shop didn’t only deal in books. In
July 1937 the English poet Stephen
Spender dropped into the bookshop to
purchase The Dream and Lie of Franco,
a series of etchings by Picasso satirising
the nationalist generalissimo.
He later claimed in The Paris Review
that on this visit to the city he and his
wife, Inez, had lunch with Hemingway
and Hemingway’s future third wife,styas“““““aao
iit
tth
w t e o S tDon’t bother looking for meaning in my lyrics, says Elton sidekick
Your Song. He has made tens of millions
of pounds and been inducted with his
writing colleague into the Songwriters
Hall of Fame in 1992.
While his songs have been hailed by
fans and fellow writers alike — the
great American songwriter Jimmy
Webb spoke of Taupin’s “razor sharp
lyrics about relationships and living on
the edge of life both in good and bad
times” — he says there is often no real
meaning to them.
Jim Cregan, the guitarist who formed
a band with Taupin in the 1990s called
Farm Dogs, said he had told Taupinthat his lyrics were being studied by
students who were trying to discover
their meaning.
Taupin was unimpressed.
Describing the lyricist as “a very old
mate of mine” Cregan told the Stars
Cars Guitars podcast: “There is a course
in one of the universities in America. It
might be one of the prestigious ones
like Harvard, where you can study
Bernie Taupin’s lyrics, as a kind of
literature thing.
“And they do this kind of thesis on
what he meant by this and that and I
remember talking to Bernie about thishe would come in with half a dozen sets
of lyrics and give them to us. I’d start to
put his lyrics to melody, and this is how
we wrote, we always wrote with the
lyrics first.
“We did this one song called
Cinderella 67 and we made quite a nice
song out of it. And I said to him
afterwards so, ‘the significance of Cin-
derella 67 — what’s all that about?’ He
said ‘well, you wouldn’t want to call it
Cinderella 41 would you?’ And I said ‘no
I suppose I wouldn’t’.
“And that was the only reason — it
sounded nice.”Valentine Low Bernie Taupin has
been writing songs
with Elton John
since 1967
Bookshop records shed
light on Hemingway,
Joyce and Stein, write
Rosa Ellis, Mark Bridge
and James Marriott
Ernest Hemingway and
Simone de Beauvoir would
regularly take out books