A Mensch for the Ages

Walt Whitman has meant a great deal to me, personally and professionally, over the past fifty years. So the Inquirer editorial (April 4, 1992) about the paradox of Whitman’s Godforsaken Camden deserves a rejoinder. For its ignorance reflects the very lack of contact with our heritage that the editorial presumes to cluck about. For a start, the aimless speculation about why Whitman would choose such a déclassé place to reside betrays the editorial writer’s ignorance about two easily verifiable facts.

First, Camden was more bucolic, less of a mess than Philly in the late nineteenth century, partly because the Delaware River (before the Benjamin Franklin and Walt Whitman Bridges were built in the late 1920’s and 30’s) buffered Camden from the worst excesses of rampant Philadelphia industrialism. If you look at N.C. Packard’s pen and ink drawing of the Mickle Street house in the 1880’s (it’s on view at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library as part of a splendid centennial tribute), the positive boskiness of the milieu is overpowering. Two grand maples screen the house (which has only one adjoining companion on the street) and a horse trough inscribed with the letters W.W. remind you that the automobile had not yet had its brutal way with Camden.

It is also instructive to remember that the industrial tycoons whose operations messed up Philly daily in ugly effluents of one kind or another had started taking the suburban option to spend the night in the woods of the Main Line. Main Line, remember refers to the railroad right of way between Philly and Pittsburgh. It is asking too much for editorial writers on a newspaper that let Bartle and Steele spend two years working up their bromides over the changed rules of American industrialism to demand that before a centennial commentary the editorial writer do a little research to avoid the more egregious of anachronisms.

The second appalling defect of the inky editorial is its blithe ignorance of the obvious reason Walt moved to Camden. He had a stroke, and sought the succor of his brother George. Perhaps by the bicentennial of Walt’s death, inky editorial writers will not make blunders that would get a cub reporter sacked. Still, the paradox remains of Godforsakenness of our Camden, not Whitman’s.

The short answer is that Camden (and much of the rest of America, even the superficially richest parts) is in a Godforsaken condition because the American people have forsaken their greatest poet for over a century themselves. I used to tell my American Literature students that a country which does not read (and metabolize) its greatest writers slowly, but nonetheless inexorably, loses its mind.

Most Americans are emotionally and intellectually infantile because they are blissfully ignorant of what their greatest thinkers and artists have made of this country’s experiences. I also used to tell them that Americans have diminished their souls by choosing the Lesser Walt (Disney) instead of the Greater Walt (Whitman).

In 1973, the centennial of the year Whitman had his stroke and came to Camden, my girl and I were driving back from the Shore where we had just celebrated her birthday, on the 30th of May. It was May 31, and I told her she must be close in spirit to Walt, having been born the day before him. She asked me what the mausoleum (allegedly cribbed from some William Blake drawings) looked like. I had to shamefacedly admit I had never looked at it, or even for it.

Right then and there we turned off the ramp to the Walt Whitman Bridge and sought out his final resting place. You’d be amused, if not depressed, to learn how few Camden natives could guide us to Harleigh Cemetery. (To most Delaware Valleyans, Whitman is a good box of candy—or a fast way to the Shore. No way was he a poet who shaped their lives and characters.) Penn poet Dan Hoffman has written an excellent poem about such shocking ignorance, “On Crossing Walt Whitman Bridge.” But then most Americans, including I suspect Inquirer editors, don’t read Walt’s poetic heirs either. (It shows in their editorials!)

What she and I found that centennial birthday was depressing indeed. The noble structure was in a state of terminal decline. The grouting was shredding away due to total neglect. It was a disgusting mess. Completely neglected like the works he left us.

But by what we American Literature specialists call a “Remarkable Providence,” the National Council of Teachers of English was holding its annual convention in Philly that Thanksgiving. I wrote the Executive Committee and asked them if I could ply the aisles of the Convention Center with sandwich boards imploring the English teachers of America to kick in with slogans like “A Buck for the Bard’s Bones” or “Save Walt’s Vault.”  They replied that if I abandoned the sleazy rhetoric, I could indeed go abegging for our bard. The teachers pitched in to a total of $838.

Buckminster Fuller, after giving the Commencement address at Beaver College the next spring, somehow through a serendipitous foul up in marching orders ending up leading the procession out of the lawn tent with me in arm instead of the President of the College. I had been whiling away the longueurs of the ceremonies by addressing Emilygrams (postcards I had had printed displaying the only known visage of Walt’s peer) to the poets of the region inviting them to the rededication of the mausoleum on his birthday in 1974.

I flashed an Emily at him, asking him if he recognized the person. “Sweet Emily,” he exclaimed fondly. Apprised of their purpose, he sent me a check the next day for $100. “Buckminster’s Bucks for the Bard’s Bones,” I replied in a thank you note. (Heh, I’m not going to let even the NCTE Executive Committee trash a perfectly pert slogan of mine, eh. Especially not them, come to think of it.)

I shall never forget the birthday party we had at the rededication. Local poets read their newly minted homages to their spiritual mentor. Local amateurs of Walt read their favorite passages from “Leaves of Grass.” Bill Frabizio, chairman of Beaver’s music department, and a mean man on the flugelhorn, composed a jazz suite for the occasion, “Perhaps Far Luckier,” alluding to the passage in LOG that speculates about death’s being far luckier than our Calvinistic forebears imagined—after all, the physical side at least of all of us mortals ends up as leaves of grass—for eternity. A nice assignment. National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” carried it. I had bought nine (for the Muses) bottles of champagne—Great Western, not some fancy old French stuffs and pink—for his sexual preference.

Alas, it did its bubbly work too well but not wisely. For when we pour a ritual libation on a lilac bush we planted to honor his great elegy to Abraham Lincoln, it killed the bush. I hear the ceremony continues on his birthday each May 31st. I have been traveling so widely since I wrote a letter of early retirement to the Dean in 1982—on Walt’s Birthday, natch—that I’m never here on May 31. I have never regretted the move which Walt gave me the courage to make.

The first thing I did upon retiring was to go to Shanghai to study Mandarin. When I dropped in on the editors of “Chinese Literature” in Beijing, they wanted to talk about Whitman when they learned I was from Philly. “Had I ever been to the tomb?” they asked me eagerly. “What was it like?” The pathetic truth about Disneyfied America is that the world’s writers love Walt deeply, but he is an outcast in his own land.

The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda loved to tell about how he was, at age fifteen, rummaging through a used book store in Santiago when he came across a book with a strange title, “Leaves of Grass,” deciding on the spot to become a poet—concocting that name to signify his new status as homo poeticus. And the great American architect Louis Sullivan had a similar Saul on the road to Damascus epiphany over Walt in a bookstore in Chicago. He vowed his life was never the same again. Reading Walt has led to miracles enough to stagger sextillion of infidels, or 250 million Americans, if only they would try him.

How many more centuries will pass before the average American takes the laureate of the Common Man to his heart? (Not while he’s in a U.S. Postal booth decided which Elvis Presley stamp to choose.) Until he does, we will continue to generate other Camdens like East St. Louis, Newark, N.J., Oakland, California—and North Philly. For the wastelands of Camden begin in deadened Disneyfied hearts. Ghost towns, dust bowls, and rotting center cities are outward signs of an inner American gracelessness.

Urban renewal is just Band Aids—which appeal to the Poverty Industry Burrowcrats for the pelf involved in its Sisyphean routines for themselves. Urbane renewal is what we must hunger for, and that seachange begins in hearts leavened by the great fraternal spirit Walt so lovingly expressed. It’s worse than nothing to do a fatuous Uriah Heap number once every hundred years. American will commence to heal each others hurts when they begin to appreciate lines like “The hinge of the hand puts to scorn all machinery” or “Mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillion of infidels.”

Such a spiritual awakening will not be easy. Last month, on a trip to Mexico with fifty or so over-fifties on a Grand Circle Tour, when our tour guide announced from the front of the bus that Mike Tyson had just been found guilty, they cheered with joy. These retired upper middle class professionals. Imagine. Cheered with joy. That’s the heartlessness that makes a muddle of our neglected heritage of Jefferson, Franklin, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR. They cheered with joy at Tyson’s conviction. I discreetly enquired over the course of our three week tour what they thought of Whitman. Whitman? Who? Is that certified crazy or what? The median Joe and Jill American has for decades abandoned our best and brightest traditions for an orgy of complacent consumerism. It shows.

And, of course, it’s not enough just to read Walt. You must let him shape your lives and values. When the questions of naming the Walt Whitman Bridge came up, the Roman Catholic bishop of Camden went ballistic about naming a public structure after a notorious homosexual. (It was a matter of indifference to me since after all the bridge was replacing the Camden ferry.) But that pre-Vatican II spirit of narrowness accounts not a little for Walt’s low repute in the DelVal. We are after all nominally a very Catholic river valley.

This condition is in any case not cast in concrete—the best tribute I’ve read in the wake of this Centennial has been that of Catholic peace activist Colman McCarthy in the Washington Post. We need a new brand of McCarthyism that translates Walt’s visionary idealism about a potentially great democracy into practical programs for fighting against violence as a solution for human and national problems, for protecting the Earth Walt taught us how to love, and for loving one another.

Walt was what Emerson called a “divine literatus,” a secular priest if you will. We’d better start believing and acting upon not only the original Gospel but Walt’s as well. If we don’t, the whole country will become a Camden of the spirit. That would make Walt infinitely sad. As it does me.

But as we say in Barnum’s America, we pays our money, and we makes our choices—the inferior Walt Disney or the superior Walt Whitman. The former, merely a glib entertainer, a court jester for the common man. The latter, our sadly forsaken Walt, is a mensch for the ages.