On the Passing of Jim Haynes
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| Jim Haynes outside of Edinburgh Theater, August 1992 . Photo by Crauford Tait |
The first person from my past to leave the earth this year, that I know of, was Jim Haynes, who passed away on January 6th, 2021 at the age of 87. Jim did many things in his life and the Guardian, in his obituary, described him very well as, “someone who made extraordinary things happen.”
One of the many things he was known for was the Sunday dinners he gave in Paris, where he lived beginning in 1969. It is not an exaggeration to say that everyone was invited, because that was true. I went to many of those dinners with Charles Henri Ford whenever we were in Paris, and they were always crowded with people of all kinds. The invitations were spread by word of mouth among friends and their friends, and Jim knew many, many people.
He was a Southerner like Charles, born in Louisiana, but in the 1950s he went to Edinburgh, where he founded the first paperback bookshop in the UK, co-founded the Traverse theatre, and organized the first Edinburgh international book festivals, where he featured such writers as Mary McCarthy and William Burroughs, among lots of others, some of whom I was lucky enough to get to know.
In Paris he operated a little publishing enterprise called Handshake Editions, and it was through his press that Charles and I published two volumes of a book project we did together called Handshake From Heaven.
The books were spiral-bound, using Xerox and photocopies, and one volume included work by Charles, myself, and by another Nepalese artist named Reepak Shakya. The other one was work by just Charles and me. I was doing a lot of street photography then, and I put a lot of it into those books.
I always enjoyed Jim Haynes’s Sunday dinners when we went. He would provide the food, and everyone who came knew to bring wine. In a lot of ways those evenings reminded me of the early days in SoHo, in New York, when Charles and I would go to all the gallery openings. Those were big social events as much as anything, and there would always be food. Something else I remember about Jim Haynes was that when Charles and I both needed to see a dentist in Paris, he told us that when it came to dentists he preferred women to men, because women’s hands felt so much softer than a man’s did, tinkering around in your mouth. He recommended someone, and after going to her to for my dental work, I agreed with Jim completely.
I’m glad to have spent so many entertaining hours in your company, Jim. Bon Voyage and bon appetite wherever you end up.
Jim Haynes
1933-2021
- Indra Tamang
February 10th, 2021
Copyright © Indra Tamang 2021, all rights reserved.
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