Whitmania

Yippee! Kenneth Price of the University of Nebraska/Lincoln has with some slick sleuthing discovered almost 3,000 documents hand written by Walt Whitman whilst he was a scribe in the U.S. Attorney General’s Office. Ed Folsom of the University of Iowa predicts these documents will be most valuable in deepening our understanding of Walt’s greatest prose piece, “Democratic Vistas” (1871), But they will also give us more access to his work during Reconstruction.

Price promises the first 2,000 will be free online by September 2011, the balance next year. This is all very exciting to me personally since my first Am Lit professor, C.Carroll Hollis, University of Detroit (1949) made a literary career of his friendship with Detroit businessman Charles Feinberg, arguably the greatest ever Whitman collector.

Carroll wangled that collection (and himself) into the Library of Congress, proceeding after to a great career at the University of North Carolina, then the hottest spot in American Studies. (In 1983, I honored my mentor by reviewing his then new classic interpretation of WW’s rhetorical style in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat: I had just fled Academe to freelance.)

And of course the Philly connections are numerous. Walt had a stroke in 1873 which had him move to Camden where he spent the rest of his life with his mother and brother George Washington Whitman. Alas, a century later, after a painful divorce in 1970 I was courting a certain Alice for her birthday (the day before Walt’s on 31 May) in Cape May. Driving back home she casually asked me if I had ever visited his mausoleum in Harleigh Cemetery, Camden.

I shamefully blushed NOT YET. (She was a sociology major!) Overcoming my embarrassment I made the most dangerous U turn in American history on the ramp to the Walt Whitman Bridge—taking her directly and humbly to Harleigh. We were stunned to see the 1891 construction was falling apart. (Cruel critics chide Walt for ranting too loudly to the masons during this least creative phase of his muse.)

But all was not lost. By a remarkable American Providence, the National Council of English was holding its moveable annual convention in Philly. I begged the Executive Committee to let me prowl the convention aisles with billboard ads (Front: Save Walt’s Vault; Back: A Buck for the Bard’s Bones). They gave me a skeptical GO FOR IT, if I promised to drop that horrible rhetoric. I collected almost $900 from the normally tight-fisted English teachers, and the masons got back to work

On the dedication of his renewed grave in 1974, we held a Graveyard Party with local poets like Daniel Hoffman and C.K.Williams airing their muses in his honor. The day before the Party I was addressing Emily Dickinson postcards to persuade the poets to gather while Buckminster Fuller was delivering the Beaver College commencement speech. As we marched off the dais together, he asked me what I’d been doing while he orated!

I flashed an Emilygram at him. He sighed lovingly at her image and the next day in my faculty mailbox there was a $100 Fuller check with an apology for not coming. I immediately went out and bought nine (for the Muses) bottles of Great Western champagne (no French stuff today!) And our live broadcast on “All Things Considered” was enlivened further by Beaver Music Chair Bill Fabrizio’s original jazz suite, “Perhaps Luckier” (Walt’s guess about Death!). Carmen Gaspero’s guitar was never hotter!

There was more Whitmania: I published for all the Beaver students 1974 a “Wake Up To Whitman” pictorial calendar which was my first essay in International English—getting fond permissions from foreign Whitman buffs like Chinua Acheba and John Betjeman. The Whitman boom continues unabated: Just out is former Philly C.K. Williams’s “On Whitman” (Princeton,2010.) Reading it reminded me of that surge in Whitmania powered by Stephen Berg’s “American Poetry Review”. I was pleased to observe that he’s now a U of the Arts faculty member, along with Bruce Schimmel tutoring students on audiovisual ploys. Walt would be proud, and, increasingly, very lucky.