With Walt

I have been skimming Vol. 8 of With Walt Whitman in Camden, the nine-volume transcription of Whitman’s conversation kept by Horace Traubel during the poet’s final, illness-plagued years. Like many others, Traubel was mesmerized by Whitman, surely among the most charismatic and likable men who ever lived. He visited the author of Leaves of Grass at his home in Camden, N.J., almost daily from the mid-1880s until Whitman's death in 1892. He started taking notes of their talks in March 1888, and transcribed them nightly. Traubel published three volumes of Whitman’s conversation before his own death in 1919. The final two volumes did not appear until 1996, more than a century after Traubel wrote them.

Whitman was an enthusiastic self-mythologizer and windbag. He anonymously reviewed his own books and wasn’t shy about advertising himself, years before Norman Mailer. He shamelessly turned Emerson’s private letter – the most famous private letter in American literature -- into a blurb: “I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.” In most other writers, such self-promotion -- “I celebrate myself,” indeed – would be offensive; in Whitman, it usually is charming.

Early in 1990, on the eve of his 90th birthday, I interviewed Harold Blodgett, a Whitman scholar and editor who had had just donated his papers to the Schaffer Library at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y. Blodgett lived alone in a small apartment and was a generous host, rather like Whitman himself. Unlike many academics, he never burned out, and remained enthusiastic about Whitman. From memory, in a quavering voice, he recited the opening lines of “Song of Myself.” He drove me through the icy streets to the Union College campus, where he escorted me to the library. In the special collections department, he opened a box containing the first edition of Leaves of Grass – a copy Whitman had printed himself, in Brooklyn, on July 4, 1855. Blodgett and a nervous librarian watched as I leafed through its pages. As an unexpected bonus, the librarian also let me open a first, powder-blue edition of Ulysses.

After Blodgett died, his daughter called me at the newspaper where I worked. She wanted to thank me for my visit and the story I had written. Her father, she said, had enjoyed my company and my excitement over Whitman. In fact, the pleasure was all mine. Not only had I held Whitman’s work in my hands – I had heard his words spoken by a man who knew them as well as anyone then alive. Blodgett was born less than a decade after Whitman’s death.

Here are some passages from Vol. 8 of Traubel, all from 1891:

Feb. 12: “[Gen. and President Ulysses S.] Grant hated show – liked to leave things unsaid, undone – liked to defy convention by going a simple way, his own.”

March 30: “Think of Jesus – outcast, anarchist, no family, free, despised, stoned – everything that is low and vile in the eye of the average. Then of the preachers in his name, swearing to the technique at 10,000 or 20,000 a year, living sumptuous lives. What are they to each other?”

April 5: “I ought to say now – as I always have said – that I care nothing for the public, yet in a sense care for it a good deal. The public has little to do with my acts, words, deeds. I long ago saw that if I was to do anything at all I must disregard the howling throng – must go my own road, flinging back no bitter retort, but declaring myself unalterably whatever happened.”

May 2: Traubel told him of a debate about the future of American literature he had witnessed the night before. One speaker declared that American poetry “would no doubt be built on some great English model.” When he heard this, Whitman exploded: “Damn the Professor! Damn the model! Build on hell! No, no, no – that is not what we are here for – that is not the future – that’s not Leaves of Grass – opposite to all that – opposite, antagonist – to fight it, if need be, to a bloody end – stands life, vitality, the elements. And on this must everything, everything that belongs to our future, appear, be justified. But how can anyone understand Leaves of Grass, the new genius, nature – the principles, if we may call them such, by which we came – except by knowing the certain background out of which Walt Whitman appeared? Here, Horace – here in Leaves of Grass – are 400, 430 pages, of let-fly. No art, no schemes, no fanciful, delicate, elegant constructiveness – but let-fly.”