Bookshop Survives Storm : Chatterton’s Lovers Help Celebrate Its Reopening

Chatterton’s Bookshop (est. 1972) was celebrating its survival. Neither flood nor Judith Krantz nor the proliferation of the discount temples of pop literature had closed its doors forever.

It was Sunday afternoon and a salon of sorts was under way at Chatterton’s, a literary landmark tucked in between the Los Feliz Theater (where “The Gods Must Be Crazy” is currently billed among attractions coming “sooner or later”) and a liquor store and sharing the 1800 block of Vermont Avenue with a Thai restaurant and a surgical supply house.

Celebrating Reopening

Chatterton’s was celebrating its reopening with wine and cheese for perhaps 500 loyalists who, together with the late Anais Nin, a pre-teen Jodie Foster and assorted poets and writers, both published and hopeful, have browsed its shelves through the years in search of the classic, the occult and the obscure.

There have been some shaky times for Chatterton’s in this age of books on tape, books on thinning one’s thighs or fattening one’s ego--and books on discount. As if that weren’t enough, nature conspired against Chatterton’s, sending down a massive spring rain that arrived right after the roof had been removed for the building’s earthquake-proofing, destroyed a third of the inventory and forced sporadic shutdowns while Chatterton’s finished the job nature started and overhauled the interior.

But last Sunday, above the strains of classical music, beneath the air-conditioning ducts that were flaunted, rather than disguised (Chatterton’s never before had such a luxury), the literati came to talk about poetry and politics and Jung and Proust. And about Chatterton’s.

Poet From Ocean Park

“How can you be against something called Chatterton’s?” asked Steve Richmond, a poet from Ocean Park. Richmond was sipping wine and engaged in spirited debate on the merits of poetry readings (as opposed to poetry reading) with two other poets in front of a shelf displaying picture books of Madonna, Culture Club and Bruce Springsteen.

Richmond’s denunciation of poetry readings as “superficial, theatrical” was challenged by Julia Stein, who had just bought a copy of Richmond’s poetry, “Red Work/Black Widow” (Duck Down Press, Missoula, Mont.) and was asking for an autograph. (For the record, Chatterton’s also carries Stein’s book of poetry, “Under the Ladder to Heaven.”) “That’s highly debatable,” Stein countered, “It’s a discipline. Poetry originally was oral.”

Richmond was becoming more adamant: “The poem belongs on a page, where it can be read in Turkey or Liverpool or in San Pedro, especially San Pedro. Let the poets write and the actors act.”

Michael Dalberg, a poet-carpenter who had joined in the conversation, suggested that to a degree the debate might be academic: “Most of the performing poets choose to go into rock music because that’s where the money is.”

This, then, is Chatterton’s, a place that longtime patron Lester Ehrlichman, 80, described as a “browsing meadow.”

It seems altogether fitting that the bookshop is named Chatterton’s--no, no, not Chatterley--for a doomed young 18th-Century English poet, Thomas Chatterton, with whom proprietor William (Koki) Iwamoto, 37, was smitten while an undergraduate at UCLA. “A brilliant poet,” Iwamoto said, “a hero for the Romantics.”

For the uninitiated, Chatterton, the posthumous son of a poor Bristol schoolmaster, snuffed out his own life at the age of 17, downing a glass of arsenic and water in a pitiful garret room in London in 1770. Penniless, starving and tormented by feelings of failure, he died virtually without notice. But the Romantic Age was just around the corner and the poet prodigy was destined to become a cult figure embodying the elements of tragic youth and neglected genius so beloved by the Romantic poets such as Shelley, Keats and Coleridge.

“We bought some things at Crown they didn’t have here at Christmastime,” Lester Ehrlichman confided. “But that’s not the kind of reading we do. We don’t read best sellers.”

Ehrlichman, a Los Feliz resident who described himself as a retired typesetter and “an anthologized poet, which means I’ll be immortalized for at least five years,” said he has been coming to Chatterton’s “since they opened the door.” For himself, he buys “the radical trash, which I bring back and resell, and translations from the French, like Proust. I grew up on Proust.” For his wife, he buys anything and everything by Virginia Woolf. (New Woolf editions are put aside for her by Iwamoto.)

“I think the uniqueness of this store,” Ehrlichman said, “is that the owner is a reader first and a businessman second. You can get things here nobody else has heard of.”

“It’s family,” said Arnie Sherwood, an urban planner who lives in the neighborhood. “It’s got the right Gemuetlichkeit. “ Often, he said, the staff will recommend books but “if you don’t like it, you can bring it back.”

Visits by Celebrities

Bill Wead has moved to Vancouver, where he is president of a small publishing house, but he was once a “regular.” He was recalling that “Jodie Foster used to come in when she was 11 or 12 and ask for Sartre. I’ve been in here when Vanessa Redgrave walked in, Julie Christie. Jackson Browne used to come hauling in here Saturday night at 10:30--the store closed at 11--and say, ‘I’ve got to cash a check. I’ve got a date.’ ”

For many of the patrons, Wead said, Chatterton’s was a stop on a weekend-evening outing that would begin with dinner around the corner at the Tepparod, a Thai restaurant. Chatterton’s was a pleasant place to kill time until the start of the film at the theater next door. Wead was marveling at Chatterton’s survival. He remembered the death of two other independents, the Westwood Book Store, which folded in 1983 despite a valiant attempt by the patrons to save it with a foundation and a lend-lease library, and Papa Bach in West Los Angeles, which followed suit in 1984.

“Chatterton’s always gave great encouragement to literary people who weren’t on the best-seller list who had something to offer,” said Holly Prado, whose novel, “Gardens,” which is “about creative people in Los Angeles,” will be published this year. “I remember when this used to be a hardware store. Suddenly it wasn’t a hardware store anymore, it was a bookstore. I walked in and said, ‘Hi, I’m a poet. May I have a reading here?’ ”

Books on Current Interest

Pat Li, an actress who lives in Burbank, was attending her second Chatterton’s opening; she had been there in September, 1972. She noted, “As Koki’s interests develop and change, he brings in books about his current interest. Right now he’s interested in macrobiotics. He used to be very interested in poetry so he carries an extraordinary amount of poetry. I like cooking. I still nose through every cookbook.”

“It’s the best bookstore in Los Angeles,” said Josette Bryson, who teaches philosophy at UCLA. “This bookstore generates a lot of culture.” She and her friend, Patricia Barlow, an adult school coordinator for the city schools, once teamed to teach an evening French class at Chatterton’s.

Clayton Eshleman, a poet and editor of Sulphur, a literary magazine, lives in West Los Angeles but does his book-buying, out of loyalty, at Chatterton’s, which stocks his poetry. “These stores are an endangered species,” he said, and if they go under “we’ll be relegated to mail sales.”

The chain stores, he noted, are not going to fill up their shelves with books such as his “that will sell an edition of 2,000 over three years.”

It’s not that Chatterton’s is stuffy. The used book shelves offer an eclectic mix from Judith Krantz’s “Princess Daisy” to Theodore White’s “The Making of the President 1980.” And a modest volume of best sellers are offered up along with Brecht and Henry Miller and Jean Genet.

Webster Buck, a self-described “60-year-old wreck with an insatiable curiosity about things,” has been coming to Chatterton’s for all of its 13 years. He reads everything, he said, adding, “Koki has even got me started reading some Japanese classics.”

“I’ve lived in this neighborhood since 1933,” he said. “I was one of those kids contracted to Paramount for the Bobby Breen pictures (a series of ‘30s films starring child actor-singer Breen). When you lived here, that was where you found work in tough times.” Among his reading interests are theater and dance. As a schoolboy, he said, his punishment for a childish prank was to take ballet lessons after school with the girls. That led to a career in dance and stage management.

‘Perfect Place to Be’

The open house was a homecoming for Don Opper, an actor (Max 404 in “Android”) and writer who worked at Chatterton’s its first seven years. “Koki and I were the only ones here then,” he said. “It was great because no one ever came in. I could read all the time. I never did anything. I did talk to a lot of people and I think that’s why they came back.”

Working at Chatterton’s, Opper said, “was sort of an education. It was a perfect place to be if you were going to be a writer. And I could look at all the girlie magazines without buying them.”

Once, when Jane Fonda was shooting a film down the street, Opper said he went over and brought her into the bookstore. And he remembers Sarah Miles coming in.

Paul Vangelisti, a poet and a Chatterton’s devotee who teaches American literature at Otis Art Institute, looks on the bookshop as an oasis in a rather barren literary desert. “I tell my students about a book,” he said, “and they get all enthused and then they can’t find the book. You can be 90% sure Koki will have it.”

Vangelisti recalled sending one of his women students out to get a copy of Sappho (a Greek lyric poetess, circa 600 B.C.), “not exactly your latest feminist poet, right? She called every bookstore in town. They had it here, one copy.”

Small wonder, he said, “students don’t know who Sappho is. They don’t know who Homer is. Where are young writers going to read?”

Accepted Behavior

Vangelisti, who grew up in San Francisco with its renowned bookshops such as City Lights, doesn’t understand the pattern of demise of the non-chain stores in Los Angeles. In San Francisco, he noted, it is not unusual to see a yuppie sitting at a cafe reading Stendahl, “and taking notes.” Mused Vangelisti, removing his sunglasses, “It’s an accepted form of behavior, like sunglasses in the afternoon are in Southern California.”

Margaret Dryden has been a Chatterton’s employee since, well, since “I don’t know. I’m bad at days, perhaps 10 years. My son (Josh, 16) works here now part-time. Everybody here’s connected” and the staff reflects a “fusion” of performing and non-performing arts.

Dryden believes in Chatterton’s, just as she believes strongly “in the necessity of any and all books as documents. They represent us, all of humanity, whether we agree or disagree. We do believe here that everything should be allowed. The philosophy is one of true free speech.” She laughed and noted that the store carries works by Vaneglisti, her former husband, and said, “You see how open we must be.”

People come not only from throughout the county, Dryden said, but the store attracts foreign visitors passing through. “We’ve had real arguments here,” she said, “real literary squabbles. It’s amusing that way.”

At Chatterton’s, Dryden said, special orders are not a headache or an extra-cost service. “We love to do it,” she said, “it’s a way of introducing ourselves to the material.” And, she added, in the case of the university presses, “It allows them to continue publishing.”

‘Nobody Manages’

Despite her longevity, she said, she is not the store manager. “Nobody manages,” she explained. “We all do different things at different times. As Katharine Hepburn says in ‘Lion in Winter,’ all families have their ups and downs. We find that some people are better at things at times than others. This is probably one of the last places where one operates as a person. Your personal life is also part of your work life. That’s why I’m still here.

“That attitude also goes toward our customers. There are people who can’t afford books and we hold them for them. We prefer that they get them.” Customers, she said, are very important to Chatterton’s “because they are experts in different fields. They let us know what we ought to have and they chide us when we don’t have it.”

To understand Chatterton’s is, perhaps, to know a little more about the poet for whom it was named and the man who chose that name for his bookshop. First, the legend of Thomas Chatterton, whose poetry is all but forgotten but whose mystique lives on in book, verse, a French play, an opera and a painting, Henry Wallis’s “Chatterton,” which hangs in London’s Tate Gallery.

A precocious child whose formal education ended at 14 when he was indentured to an attorney in Bristol, Chatterton was born within the bells’ ring of the gothic Church of St. Mary Redcliffe, where he used to lie in the cemetery, propped against a tombstone, reading.

The lad’s father had been a friend of the church and, being poor and thrifty, had asked permission to take home some old records and parchments that were going to be tossed out during a church housecleaning. They made good book covers and, after the elder Chatterton died, his wife used them as fire-starters.

That practice stopped when young Thomas discovered the documents, with which he became obsessed, spending hours studying, and copying, them. By the time the celebration of 1768, marking the opening of New Bridge in Bristol, rolled around, Chatterton was in a position to offer to the local newspaper for publication a colorful, and detailed, account of the opening of the old bridge in the Middle Ages, an account taken “from an old manuscript.”

Pseudo-Antique Poetry

It was a forgery, but the people of Bristol weren’t terribly sophisticated and many were quite taken in by the phony Medieval writings and mock heraldic drawings that Chatterton started turning out with his inks, charcoal and ocher.

Chatterton was, in fact, a very good poet, but he reasoned that no one would take seriously the work of a teen-ager so he chose to be a forger, writing flowery poetry in the language of the Middle Ages.

Publication of a few political commentaries in London newspapers encouraged Chatterton to move to London, where his poverty and despair led to his suicide at 17.

“Historically speaking, I’ve been pretty much always an Anglophile,” said Chatterton’s proprietor, Koki Iwamoto. “Somehow his short life had very specific meaning to my life, a sense of things not lasting a long time, things moving on.”

Former Hippie Trappings

The store itself, he said, “is not anything like it used to be back in ‘72, your local hippie bookstore with incense, the Free Press, the whole bit, with emphasis on the drug culture, Eastern philosophy, poetry and Jack Kerouac.”

Today, he said, all of those have “gone by the wayside, although strangely enough there’s a resurgence of interest in Eastern philosophy and poetry.” He sees a new interest, too, in the contemporary Latin American writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in Lawrence Durrell, and in the women writers--Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Grace Paley.

As a place dedicated to offering literature, as well as books, he acknowledged, “We’ve seen our ups and downs.” The best years were ’78 and ‘79; the doldrums were the last five years, a fact he attributes largely to the ill-fated opening of a second store, in Pasadena, in 1979 (since closed).

Iwamoto, a one-time pre-med student at UCLA who was “weaned on Papa Bach” (where he worked as an undergraduate), opened Chatterton’s in 1972 “on a shoestring.” The idea, he said, was to generate income enough to buy time to write poetry, “but the bookstore took over.”

Today, his passion for poetry has been dampened by his discovery of macrobiotics and Zen Buddhism and the bookshelves reflect these interests. But the inventory of perhaps 30,000 titles is also strong on fiction, psychology, philosophy.

Iwamoto acknowledged it’s been “a hard haul,” what with the chains and discount stores “taking away our bread-and-butter items, the Sidney Sheldons, whatever, which normally paid our rent. There’s no way to compete against that.

“It’s hard to ask for somebody’s loyalty when they can buy the same book at Crown for 35% less. People say, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ I tell them to go to Crown because it’s a tremendous deal. But when they’re interested in buying a book by (D.T.) Susuki on Zen I hope they will come to us. That is our saving grace.”

Browsing Encouraged

Chatterton’s has woebegone file cabinets, exposed brick walls and a staff of five, most of whom are long timers. It is a place where, Iwamoto said, “Browsing is absolutely encouraged.” One thing it does not have is hordes of young customers. “Our customers,” he said, “are primarily older or baby boom people. The baby boomers are coming back again” after time out from buying books to finance babies and make mortgage payments. “The young generation is not very literate. That’s too bad.”

But then, the young probably don’t know about Thomas Chatterton and may not know much about John Keats and would be hard pressed to warm to Keats’ poetic tribute to Chatterton (1815):

“O Chatterton! How very sad thy fate!

Dear child of sorrow--son of misery!

How soon the film of death obscur’d that eye,

Whence Genius mildly flash’d, and high debate . . . “