With Walt, Part 2

I wrote about With Walt Whitman in Camden the other day, forgetting Guy Davenport’s thoughts on the subject. When Gary Schmidgall, a Whitman biographer, published a selection from the original nine-volume, 5,400-page edition of Whitman’s 1,458 conversations with Horace Traubel, Davenport reviewed it for Harper’s Magazine. The review was later collected in The Death of Picasso, the last book he published before his death on Jan. 4, 2005.

Davenport never merely reviewed a book in the conventional sense. The book under consideration was a pretext for an extended, discursive, immensely learned meditation on whatever subjects had captured his fancy. He was our premiere essayist, rivaled only by Cynthia Ozick. Even when he wrote of people or things that held little interest for me (Charles Olson, J.R.R. Tolkien), he earned my interest.

In the Whitman review, he paints the context of Whitman’s final years – ill health, poverty, growing fame and adulation mingled with obscurity and scandal – and gives us the shamefully protracted publishing history of the Whitman/Traubel corpus. He notes that the 14 volumes of Thoreau’s journals were not published until 44 years after his death, while The Dispersal of Seeds (an indispensable “new” book from Thoreau) had to wait 130 years. Davenport describes his own difficulty in purchasing all of the volumes, then adds, winningly:

“A long book must become a habit, a kind of ritual (and reward) away from the day’s other demands. A bedtime book, as it turned out: as many pages an evening as kept my attention.”

Davenport describes the room where Whitman sat in the little house on Mickle Street, in Camden, N.J. The floor is “ankle-deep in letters manuscripts, newspapers, and books.” From the mess, Traubel randomly salvages letters from Emerson and Tennyson. Twice, the heap caught fire. Besides being a scholar, Davenport knows how to tell a story. Traubel he describes as “a thirty-year-old autodidact, school dropout, and ardent Socialist. After the Whitman years he became a newspaper editor and third-rate poet.”

Davenport deftly deals with the question of homosexuality: “That Whitman was aesthetically and erotically pleased by young males is no longer disputed.”

Regarding some of the older Whitman’s racist jibes and theories, Davenport is equally deft: “Idle and relaxed conversation is not a diplomatic telegram. The `scholars’ who read authors’ private mail – who hold up `the real Larkin,’ for instance, as disgraced and exposed – disgrace only themselves. Walt’s standing as a prophet of democracy cannot be diminished by an old man’s obiter dicta on evenings by the stove.”

Note the “Walt.” Throughout this posting, I have wished to write “Guy,” not “Davenport.” I had a small, highly valued acquaintance with Guy. I interviewed him by telephone in the summer of 1988, in connection with a story I was writing about Paul Metcalf, a writer and the great-grandson of Herman Melville. Metcalf’s best book, Genoa, appeared in 1965 and received two reviews – one by Guy, the other by William H. Gass. Both loved it. In our first conversation, after I identified myself as a reporter for the newspaper in Albany, N.Y., Davenport mentioned he had been reading Francis Parkman’s description of the Indian massacre at Schenectady. What was the city like today?

I quickly wrote him a fan letter, and Guy as quickly replied – correcting my spelling of Edgar “Allen” Poe and a sloppy reference I had made to Goethe. Coming from Guy, what in another professor might come across as bullying pedantry felt like knowledge shared. I knew he wasn’t scoring cheap points; he wanted me to know some of what he knew, and this communion of knowledge, not merely with his students at the University of Kentucky, gave him immense, quiet pleasure.

We corresponded sporadically for several years, and I am even more grateful for this exchange now than I was then, having learned of the immense number of people with whom he exchanged letters. In June of 1990, a friend and I took an open-ended trip across the Midwest, starting from upstate New York. We camped outside Lexington, Ky., and the next morning I visited Guy at his home at 621 Sayre Ave. He was pleased with a review I had written of his latest book, A Balthus Notebook. We spoke of Montaigne, Robert Burton and Kafka. He showed me a painting he had made of Gertrude Stein. I told him that the night before, while doing laundry at the campground, I had been reading the hefty, black Library of America edition of Whitman. A teenage boy approached, asked to see the book, I obliged, and he said, “We have a book, too, you know – The Book of Mormon.” Guy laughed until he wept.

We talked for several hours, and I wish I had had the foresight of Traubel and kept better notes. I do have the two books I brought along for Guy to inscribe – The Geography of the Imagination and Apples and Pears. In the former, in his fine draftsman’s hand, he wrote “For Patrick Kurp, Lexington, 18 June 1990.” We were talking so much, he forgot to sign his name and I didn’t notice until I was back in the car. I’ve regretted that for almost 16 years, but since his death the absence of his name seems appropriate.

In the Harper’s review, his description of Walt’s 70th birthday party is a hoot. Letters from William Dean Howells and other worthies were read aloud. The one from Mark Twain congratulated the poet on having lived long enough to witness many “great births,” including “the amazing, infinitely varied and innumerable products of coal-tar.” I think of Guy as among the best teachers I have ever had.