In the Wake of Whitman

One of my fondest serendipities stemmed from discovering in 1973 Whitman's mausoleum in Harleigh Cemetery in Camden was all but falling down. My girlfriend's birthday was May 30th, and we have driven to the shore at Cape May to celebrate. On the way back to Philly I mentioned that May 31st was Whitman's birthday, and she asked me if I had ever visited his grave. I had to admit, shamefacedly, that I hadn't yet, making a dangerous 180 degree turn on the approaches to the Walt Whitman Bridge, and heading straight for the cemetery.

What a let down. Camden, after all, was the most stressed city in New Jersey, like Newark across the river from New York City, and Oakland across the Bay from San Francisco. Minority dumps. But there was a special reason to find his grave's condition deplorable: It was the centennial of the stroke that made him move from Washington, D.C. to Camden, where he could live with his brother George Washington Whitman, and his aging mother.

But by what we Americanists call a remarkable Providence (like the mice eating only the Anglican prayer books in an eighteenth century New England Congregational church!), the National Council of Teachers of English was having its annual convention in Philadelphia. I wrote the Executive Committee for permission to carry sandwich boards up and down the aisles of the Convention Center emblazoned with mottoes contrived to open the tight fists of the English teachers: A BUCK FOR THE BARD or SAVE WALT’S VAULT: Bob Hogan replied that if I would can the sleazy rhetoric, I had a green light. So I set up in a booth, flogging my 1974 calendar WAKE UP TO WHITMAN!, a mini-anthology of testimonials to Walt's fructifying impact on American culture with fans as disparate as Louis Sullivan and Pablo Neruda.

I didn't sell many calendars, but I gave a lot away, and collected $828 from my English teaching colleagues, and arranged for the City of Camden to repair the mausoleum. Incidentally, it was a scandal at the time (1890) that Walt declaiming his worst late poetry at the masons may well have exacerbated the crisis to come. He had cribbed the design from William Blake and when the contemporary masons were finished repairing it, you could say its minute particulars had been saved!

So now we needed a Graveyard Party on his next birthday to rededicate it. Emilygrams (postcards with Emily Dickinson's only image) were dispatched to the Delaware Valleys poets and lovers of poetry. We asked the local to charge up their muses and come up with some new ones for the Old Man. The uncreative clods like me who merely loved the man's take on the world read their favorite passages (The hinge of the human hand puts to scorn all machinery/) or their favorite poem to Whitman. Mine remains Daniel Hoffman’s On Crossing Walt Whitman Bridge where we learn that there is a WW Hotel, a WW Package Liquor Store, etc, but few readers keeping alive his indigenous flame.

At that time I was doing arts reporting for National Public Radio, and they carried the ceremonies live. I bought nine (the number of the Muses) bottles of Great Western (Heh, none of that extraneous French bubbly for our American hero). And I brought a lilac bush to plant outside his mausoleum. Alas, our idea of pouring ritual libations on the fledgling bush during the party killed it as I discovered the following year upon making a snap inspection.

My colleague, Bill Fabrizio, chairman of the Beaver College Music department, a jazz composer, as well as Frank Sinatra's mandatory flugel horn accompanist when he sang at Atlantic City, created a jazz suite for the occasion, Perhaps Luckier, an allusion to Whitman's faith and hope that Death was not the dirge two centuries of Calvinism had drilled into the American subconscious. It was a swell party, worthy of its subject.