The Great George Whitman
Part 1
By William F. Hanna
This story begins and ends in the City of Light, with an unlikely stop in between. On Wednesday, December 14, 2011, the New York Times published the obituary of George Whitman, who had died that day in Paris. At 98-years old, it’s fair to say that he was one of the best-known booksellers in the world, made famous by Shakespeare and Company, the shop that he had owned and operated since 1951. A friend and confidante of some of the giants of twentieth-century literature, he was also known as a generous benefactor to hundreds of writers who struggled in anonymity. All of that made Shakespeare and Company a mandatory stop on a book lover’s tour of Paris. It remains so today, almost a decade after its proprietor’s death.
Although Whitman’s life as a bookseller had blossomed in Paris, it had begun under far less promising circumstances back during World War II. Born in New Jersey and raised in Salem, Massachusetts, Whitman was the son of a physics professor who had taken his family along to China for a year’s sabbatical at Nanking University. That experience broadened the boy’s horizon and changed his life. In 1935, after graduating from Boston University with a journalism degree, young Whitman hit the road, walking across North America and traveling as far south as Panama before returning to the States.
During a visit to San Francisco in October 1941, Whitman enlisted in the army. The country was still enjoying the last few months of peace before being pulled into the Second World War. Hoping that he might not be called up for some time, Whitman returned to Massachusetts and enrolled in Harvard University to study Latin American language and culture.
The army came knocking on Whitman’s door in the summer of 1942. At 30-years old he was several years older than the average G.I., and that may have had something to do with his being shipped to Greenland as a medical technician. He spent twenty-one months above of the Arctic Circle before receiving orders to report to the base hospital at Camp Myles Standish, in Taunton, Massachusetts.
Opened in October 1942, Camp Myles Standish was the principal staging area serving the Boston Port of Embarkation. The camp was the final stop for tens of thousands of servicemen and -women- as they prepared to leave for the European Theater of Operations. The entire population of Taunton at the time was approximately 43,000, a figure that the camp occasionally matched when several large military contingents were simultaneously preparing to ship overseas.
Private Whitman arrived in Taunton in July 1944, during one of the camp’s busiest periods. Just a month after the Normandy invasion, thousands of G.I.s were being rushed across the Atlantic to fight in what would prove to be the last — and bloodiest — year of the war against Germany. And even as some soldiers were leaving the camp for Europe, an ever-larger number were returning to Myles Standish after suffering grievous wounds in combat. While the camp’s 300-bed hospital prepared some of those for immediate transfer to medical facilities closer to their homes, other patients remained for longer periods until their conditions could be stabilized.
As an army medical technician, Whitman witnessed firsthand the physical and psychological toll that war exacted from those who fought it. An introspective man, he sometimes recorded his thoughts in a journal that he kept during these years. One night, for instance, during the winter of 1944–45, he wrote:
All through the noiseless nights, I watch over the sick in Ward 113. Outside our windows, snowflakes silently drift to the earth, while farther away men are killing and being killed in flaming cities, icy marshes, and tropical atolls. I believe in the value of every human being, whatever his accidents of birth and conviction. Even in disunity, all men are interdependent, and every city on earth is part of the whole.
While George was pondering humanity, one of the most popular pastimes enjoyed by the other soldiers stationed at Myles Standish was trying to wrangle a pass to get away from the base for a day or two. Boston and Providence beckoned like the Sodom and Gomorrah of old, and lucky was the soldier who found himself with a two-day pass.
While Whitman was apparently not bothered by those temptations, his journal offers insight into his real interest:
Tonight in the ward [he wrote], I made ice cream for the patients. After lights out, I put my books on the table and studied.
We can safely say that of all the soldiers at Camp Myles Standish, George Whitman was the most dedicated bibliophile. He loved books — all books — and made it his business to surround himself with as many as possible. While his army friends used their passes to enjoy Boston’s nightlife, he used his to take the bus into downtown Taunton, where he had rented a storefront and opened a bookstore.
The Taunton Book Lounge was located in a building still standing at 20 Broadway. He described it in his journal:
I recently opened a bookstore, the Taunton Book Lounge, modeled on the Paris salons that are the rendezvous of writers and book-lovers. It has roses in a Chinese vase, ivy vines hanging over the shelves, and leather-covered chairs in which to read or talk or watch the passing show. It is on the main street next to Taunton Green, and there are always crowds walking in front of the window from early morning until late at night. I stay open whenever possible until eleven p.m., when the two theaters down the block close their doors. I look over the pages of a book and watch the faces that move under the yellow street lamps, hoping that someone interesting will come through the door.
An army private trying to run a bookstore off base certainly encountered scheduling conflicts that would have endangered any business. Whitman, however, had help. More than twenty years later, in December 1967, George reminisced in a letter to his mother, Grace Whitman:
Do you remember when you helped run the bookstore at Taunton? It was fun during the Christmas rush when strangers . . . would timidly drift in to look for a little gift for their children and friends. And the funniest thing of all was that we combined selling books and Christmas trees — probably the only bookstore in America that ever did so.
By early winter 1946, the war was over, Camp Myles Standish had been deactivated and Whitman and his bookshop were gone from Taunton. Millions of ex-G.I.s were free to begin their lives anew. Farmers, factory workers, cowboys, and sailors set out for all parts of the country — and there was one prospective bookseller who dreamed of Paris.
George Whitman’s story will resume in the next edition of this blog.
Special thanks go to Krista Halverson, editor of Shakespeare and Company: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart (Paris, 2017), for her generosity in allowing us to quote from George Whitman’s journal, for supplying the text of George’s letter to his mother, and finally for permission to use the photographs of George and the Taunton Book Lounge.
For those readers who may be interested, below is the address for the Shakespeare and Company web page.
