`To Exalt the Present and the Real'

In November 1845, a decade before he published Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman wrote an article for Edgar Allan Poe's Broadway Journal about the Cheney Family Singers. They were the children of a Vermont preacher and specialized in what Whitman called “heart singing,” not “art singing.” The ballads they sang were sentimental and topical -- “The Soldier's Farewell” and “My Mother's Bible.” Their voices and wholesome appearance reminded Whitman of “health and fresh air in the country, at sunrise.” After their appearance at Niblo's Garden in New York City, Whitman wrote:

“Our gratification was inexpressible. This, said we in our heart, is the true method which must become popular in the United States – which must supplant the stale, second-hand, foreign method, with its flourishes, its ridiculous sentimentality, its anti-republican spirit, and its sycophantic influences, tainting the young taste of the Republic.”

Whitman, an opera lover, is echoing Emerson's call for an American art, adding a defensive jingoism typical of mid-19th-century American journalism. We'll never know what the Cheneys sounded like but based on Whitman's enthusiasm I think I heard echoes of their voices on Saturday. My 8-year-old and I are visiting my brother and his family in Cleveland, our home town. My brother is a picture framer and his shop recently moved into a former Winton automobile factory on the city's West Side. Sharing the building is Bill Scheele, an artist, photographer and once part of the management team for The Band. Bill showed us an album of unpublished photographs he and his brother took of The Band and Bob Dylan, and then his collection of Cleveland School paintings. Chief among them are the watercolors of Frank N. Wilcox (1887-1964), who was born in Cleveland and lived here most of his life. His subjects are the American West and scenes from Northeastern Ohio – canal locks, farms, an outdoor circus. Wilcox would have done a good job illustrating Winesburg, Ohio.

Next we visited an old friend, Gary Dumm, a cartoonist and longtime collaborator with Harvey Pekar, creator of American Splendor. Gary and I worked together at a bookstore in downtown Cleveland for just eight months in 1975, but he has remained one of the few people from my deep past who makes me smile just by thinking about him. For years I've enjoyed his success from a distance, so we resumed a conversation that was interrupted 33 years ago. That's when I thought of Whitman's call for an American art. Gary works unapologetically in comics, a form invented, like jazz and movies, in the United States. He remains indifferent to “high” and “low” culture distinctions, just as Wilcox painted the crowds at a circus – a setting where Whitman would have felt at home. In “Song of the Exposition” Whitman wrote:

“To exalt the present and the real,
To teach the average man the glory of his daily walk and trade...”