The Spirit of the Coffee House

It was a pleasant café, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old water-proof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt had on the rack above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. Hemingway

Over thirty years ago I bought a book titled Coffee Houses of Europe. I don't know how I managed to save it all this time, since it is a large, heavy book, filled with beautiful color photographs of some of the most famous coffee houses in Europe. Really, it’s a coffee table book and apparently it has become quite a treasure.

I’ve also had a life-long interest in the coffee house culture and the spirit that it is said to engender. No doubt that’s because most of the cities I’ve lived in have not been blessed with coffee houses or its culture. But in those that I have visited in France and Italy, I’ve felt their warmth and congeniality.

In his Introduction to the photographic plates, the Hungarian-born writer George Mikes distinguishes between the classic coffee houses of Central Europe--Vienna, Budapest, Prague—from those of Lisbon, Paris and London. He calls the latter “places,” while those in Central Europe are “a way of life…a way of looking at the world by those who do not want to look at the world at all.”

While the distinction is untrue, the classic coffee house often becomes a habitual part of a “regular’s” daily life and for some, a place where most of the day is spent. “There were coffee houses for writers, journalists and artists, and these were the most famous, because their members were…”

Mikes must have a thing against the French because he asserts, The French simply use the cafes; they don’t live there.” He claims they actually go there to have a cup of coffee or meet a friend. That is contradicted by my brief experiences at the cafes around the Sorbonne. There I have observed lively conversations between students and their professors that have surely lasted more than the hour or so of my visit.

In The Great Good Place Ray Oldenburg writes, “The coffee house, however, was fundamentally a form of human association, a gratifying one, and the need for such a society can hardly be said to have disappeared.” This has been the case from their beginning in Istanbul, where the first coffeehouses were established during the sixteenth century.

A French observer described these early coffeehouses as settings where “…news is communicated and where those interested in politics criticize the government.” Games—chess, backgammon, checkers—were also played and writers of the days read their poems and stories. This tradition spread to England and the countries of Western and Central Europe during the following century. Again their central features were sociability marked by congeniality, conversation, and social equality.

The spirit of the classic European coffeehouse has all but vanished in this country. Instead, they have been transformed into solitary, monastery-like places of keyboards and screens. Where there was once a lively conversation, now there is silence. Where there was once a group of friends and colleagues gathered around a table, now there are solitary individuals. Where there was once writing notebooks, now there are laptop computers.

Malcolm Gladwell put this as well as anyone: “I like people around me; but I don’t want to talk to them.”

Coffee House Culture

The other day Starbucks announced it will now offer its customers a digital network providing free e-books, movies, and access to some sites you normally pay for such as The Wall Street Journal, as well as other gratis sites including The New York Times, USA Today, Apple's iTunes, etc. Of course, they are only accessible as long as you remain at Starbucks--presumably paying for drinks, pastries, sandwiches, etc. Starbucks also gets a share of anything sold on its in-store network.

So at Starbucks coffee houses you’ll be peering at your iPhone, listening to your iPod or reading on your computer. This is not Paris after all where you can buy a cup of coffee and stay at your favorite table all day working away on your masterpiece or coming up with the next big thing with your friends.

Whatever happened to those days of the coffee house culture? Do you remember them? Sitting around for hours dreaming up new ideas, talking about the latest new book, or new discovery in the lab? According to Steven Johnson in Where Good Ideas Come From, a great many came during those coffee house conversations.

Johnson believes good ideas don't come from a lone genius working alone in a laboratory or at his desk. Instead, they frequently come from interactions between your colleagues and intellectual friends. He points to the coffee houses of Europe during the Age of Enlightenment. "People would hang out in this intellectual hub and have these free-floating conversations about all these different interests and passions.”

He claims Benjamin Franklin’s Club of Honest Whigs that used to meet at the London Coffeehouse when he was in England would hash over ideas that were instrumental in Franklin’s thinking. Johnson writes, "There should be a plaque to commemorate that coffeehouse. It was really a tremendously generative space.”

In Where Good Ideas Come From he describe these coffee houses as 'liquid networks” where people from entirely different perspectives gather together to thrash out whatever was on their minds. He cites several examples:

• Eighteenth century English coffeehouse where everything from the science of electricity, to the insurance industry, to democracy itself was discussed

• Freud’s salon “where physicians, philosophers, and scientists gathered to help shape the emerging field of psychoanalysis”

• Those legendary Paris cafes where writers, poets, artists and architects laid the foundations of contemporary culture

• The Homebrew Computer Club in the 1970s where Johnson claims “a ragtag assemblage of amateur hobbyists, teenagers, digital entrepreneurs, and academic scientists managed to spark the personal computer revolution…”

The coffee house model of innovation has a certain romantic appeal to it. And yet I can’t help but be skeptical of the claims Johnson attaches to it. On the surface, of course, one imagines these were and continue to be settings for lively intellectual exchange. However, we have no independent record of what in fact was said during these exchanges. Nor does Johnson cite any evidence made by participants of the role they played in formulating their ideas.

I am not suggesting they aren’t sources of innovation. But what came first—the idea or the conversation? And if the idea came first, how was it further developed at the coffee house? Or if the conversation came first, what is the evidence for this claim?

A network can support a person’s ideas, can be a setting where they can be expressed, and where perhaps they are refined in the process. And they can motivate someone to continue their line of thinking or their research program. But do we have a record of any of this?

Perhaps I’m being pedantic. But those are the kinds of questions I always ask, especially given the importance Johnson attributes to the coffee house model of creativity. While it has enormous appeal and while the experience of being with your friends in those settings is often stimulating, I wonder if any of the innovations Johnson discusses in his book, were, in fact, “born” there. To be sure, they may have been discussed and perhaps clarified, but that is a different matter than origination.

Cafe Days

I am reading Rachel Cusk’s latest book, The Last Supper, about the three-month sojourn she and her family spent in Italy a while ago. It is one of those books that I do not want to end. She visits a café outside Rome. It is crowded and the people are engaged in lively conversation. I stop to recall the memorable café times in my life.

During lunch one day at the Bar Pasticceria Curatone in Florence, I observed a riotous display of friendship and camaraderie. A middle-aged man, sitting by my table on the terrace, was engaged in an animated conversation with the Bar's owner. Soon some old friends happened by and when they saw him, each one, in turn, seemed to explode with shouts of joy and delight, followed by spirited conversation. In time, others passed by who also recognized one or more of the assembled group. Jump for joy, long embraces, happy smiles, long tales of Where have you been? What have you been up to? How wonderful you look. Oh, let me show you the pictures of my baby. As if that wasn't enough, soon after that, I sat astonished as I observed a similar scene unfold at another table.

And then not so long ago I went to a café in Paris for afternoon tea. I went upstairs to have a drink. The café, near the Sorbonne, was filled with students and their professors conversing intensely about the latest intellectual crisis. The memory of that scene lingers.

I imagine a café, a literary café, where I can go at the end of each day. There are writers and readers. We talk about our work, the books we’ve read, the issues we are struggling with. We leave with a “See you tomorrow.” It is a Third Place, the concept discussed in Ray Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts and How They Get You Through the Day. He discusses the German beer gardens, the English pubs, French cafes and the American tavern.

The Third Place comes after the place you live and the place where you work. Oldenberg says it is a neutral ground, where the main activity is discussion. It is accessible and welcoming. There are “regulars” there, unassuming in appearance, offering the freedom to be yourself. It is a home away from home and being there is restorative.

He says that urban life increasingly fails to provide is a convenient and open-ended setting for socializing—where individuals can go without aim or arrangement and be greeted by people who know them and know how to enjoy a little time off. Oldenberg attributes much of the alienation, boredom, and stress of American life to the absence of such a Third Place to repair to when we wish. He says:

“The French, of course, have solved the problem of place. The Frenchman’s daily life sits firmly on a tripod consisting of home, place of work and another setting, where friends are engaged during the midday and evening apertif hours, if not earlier and later.”

I am sure there are such places in this country but I have never found one. I will keep looking, that is for sure.

I remember a blazing hot Sunday in a remote Tuscan village of Italy. No one is on the street. All of the stores are closed. The shutters of the surrounding apartment buildings are shut tight. I park my car in the single open square, get out, and am enveloped by the heat. It is startling. It is wonderful. I look for a place where I can get a drink. The local bar, which in Italy is also a place to get an expresso, a Panini, and cold drink is the only place that is open. The TV is on and a few old men are staring at it mutely. On the screen is a soccer game somewhere in Italy and the crowd is roaring. Otherwise, it is utterly silent in the café and on the street. And it is hot. It is perfect.