We never considered that Cornell was as ignorant of Pergolesi’s dog as we. In Samuel Butler II’s Notebooks there is this instructive entry: “Zeffirino Carestia, a sculptor, told me we had a great sculptor in England named Simpson. I demurred, and asked about his work. It seemed he had made a monument to Nelson in Westminster Abbey. Of course I saw he meant Stevens, who made a monument to Wellington in St. Paul’s. I cross-questioned him and found I was right.”
We are never so certain of our knowledge as when we’re dead wrong. The assurance with which Chaucer included Alcibiades in a list of beautiful women and with which Keats embedded the wrong discoverer of the Pacific in an immortal sonnet should be a lesson to us all.
Ignorance achieves wonders. The current Encyclopaedia Britannica informs us that Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle is a novel (it is a book of essays), that Eudora Welty wrote Clock without Hands (by Carson McCullers), and that the photograph of Jules Verne accompanying the entry about him is of a Yellow-Headed Titmouse (Auriparus flaviceps). The New York Review of Books once referred to The Petrarch Papers of Dickens and a nodding proofreader for the TLS once let Margery Allingham create a detective named Albert Camus.
Vagueness has vernacular charm. A footnote in a Shaker hymnal identifies George Washington as “one of our first presidents.”
Cornell when he had his tizzy about Pergolesi’s dog was beyond vagueness and into the certainty of the dead wrong. Sooner or later I was bound to luck onto the right person, who, as it turned out, was wise to Cornell’s waywardness with bits of trivia. This was John Bernard Myers, art critic and dealer. What Cornell meant, he felt sure, was Borgese’s dog. I looked as blank as Brakhage had on the previous, fatal occasion. What! Not know Borgese’s dog!
Elisabeth Mann Borgese, daughter of Thomas, professor of political science at Dalhousie University, the distinguished ecologist and conservationist, had trained a dog in the 1940s to type answers to questions on a special machine that fitted its paws. The success of this undertaking is still dubious in scientific circles, but the spectacle it made at the keyboard of its machine stuck in Joseph Cornell’s mind as one of the events of the century, and he supposed that all well-informed people were familiar with it. La Borgese’s accomplished beast’s habit of typing BAD DOG when it had flubbed a right answer had brought tears to his eyes. He had a dossier of clippings about all this, and despite its sea-change in his transforming imagination, had no qualms about dismissing people tediously ignorant of such wonderful things.
HORACE AND WALT IN CAMDEN
Intimate with Walt: Selections from Whitman’s Conversations
with Horace Traubel, 1888–1892, edited by Gary Schmidgall.
On Wednesday the twenty-eighth of March 1888, the twenty-nine-year-old Horace Traubel began taking down in shorthand what Walt Whitman had to say in the poet’s upstairs bedroom on Mickle Street in Camden, New Jersey. “At Walt’s this evening. Called my attention to an old letter in the Philadelphia Press describing a visit to Emerson with Louisa Alcott, and Emerson’s senility.” Whitman was sixty-nine, not yet wholly housebound. Traubel wrote up his visit within an hour of leaving the house. He kept to this routine until March 26, 1892, on which day Whitman died at sunset. His last word was “shift,” a request to be turned on his water bed. An inflammation of the pleural membrane made it too painful for him to lie in one position for more than a few minutes.
Horace Traubel published the first volume of these daily conversations as With Walt Whitman in Camden in 1906. A second volume came out, with a different publisher, in 1908; a third, with yet another, in 1914. Traubel died in 1919 (an even one hundred years after Whitman’s birth—his last words: “Walt says come on, come on”). It took thirty-four years for the fourth volume to be published, in a preposterously small number of copies, by the University of Pennsylvania Press. This is an all but unobtainable book, and very expensive. Volume 5, edited by Horace’s daughter, Gertrude, was published in 1964 by Southern Illinois University Press. Over the next thirty years, the same press brought out Volumes 6 and 7. Only within the last five years have Volumes 8 and 9 (the last two) been published by W. L. Bentley Rare Books. (This undertaking was financed by the Fellowship of Friends, a California “cultural organization” whose leader has been lively enough in his pursuit of Whitman’s ideals to provoke a lawsuit.) Ninety years and six different publishers for the conversation of our greatest poet to get into print!
Each volume runs to around 600 pages; that’s 5,400 pages for the nine volumes. Thoreau’s journals—fourteen volumes—were published only forty-four years after his death, though his The Dispersion of Seeds had to wait 130 years. Montaigne’s travel journal lay in a trunk for several centuries.
The old Tolstoy was a great talker; people came from all over to hear him. “Yes,” said his son to one of them, “but you don’t have to hear him every day.” We know Blake through Crabb Robinson, and Tennyson (who liked to read all of “Maud” to his captive visitors) through a generation of young writers. Goethe’s Johann Peter Eckermann, Samuel Johnson’s Boswell, Ben Jonson’s Laird of Hawthornden: to all of these interlocutors we are grateful for leaving a record. There are people remembered only for their talk: the infinitely witty Sydney Smith, the champion gossip Samuel “Breakfast” Rogers; and, to a substantial degree, Coleridge and Oscar Wilde.
But four years of Walt Whitman, 1,458 evenings by the stove at 328 Mickle Street? I acquired the first three volumes of Traubel in 1961 and found that they made good reading. When Volume 5 came out in 1964, I decided to read Traubel right through—but needed Volume 4, which I hadn’t known existed. Finding it took a while. In fact, 6 through 9 were published before I tracked down 4 (and paid and arm and a leg for it—the motherly bookseller in Santa Monica who sold it to me said, “You and the Library of Congress are now the only people who have all nine volumes”). So the elusive 4 ended up being the last that I read. A long book must become a habit, a kind of ritual (and reward) away from the day’s other demands. A bedtime book, as it turned out: as many pages an evening as kept my attention.
Whitman’s room became a little theater for two actors. The house is small. The windows remain closed (there is a fertilizer factory close by). Walt’s old bones love heat: the potbellied iron stove is kept glowing. Walt is in his rocking chair with a wolf hide for a cushion. What catches the eye is the floor—ankle-deep in letters, manuscripts, newspapers, and books. Mice, too. Beside the rocker is Walt’s “medicine,” a bottle of bourbon regularly replenished by Thomas Biggs Harned, one of Walt’s extended family of friends. This littered floor, which always gave first-time visitors, especially women, a jolt, is a rare kind of housekeeping that psychology has no word for, as far as I know. My bachelor uncle, Broadus Dewey Davenport, kept house so (and was furious when a niece and I cleaned it up when he was in the hospital for a week). I have seen it in Charlie Mingus’s New York apartment: a thousand opened Campbell’s soup cans covering the whole living-room floor, with a space cleared for three chairs and Charlie’s collection of Debussy recordings. And, for history’s sake, in an undergraduate’s room in Adams House at Harvard.
Whitman’s midden contained wonderful things, and Horace was always finding letters from Emerson and Tennyson in it, from the pre-Raphaelite William Michael Rossetti or the poet and early proponent of gay-acceptance Edward Carpenter. Walt claimed to be able to find letters and manuscripts in it, but this was an idle boast. Twice sparks from the stove set fire to it. Yet Whitman himself bathed daily and was finicky about clean linen. Many remarked on how sweet he smelled. He neither smoked nor chewed tobacco. His patriarchal beard was always clean and neatly fluffed.
Horace usually found him reading Walter Scott or George Sand, both favorites, or newspapers. Following a comradely kiss, Walt swapped news. A good day would be one with a letter from Maurice Bucke, the London, Ontario, doctor whose insane asylum Whitman had visited. (There’s an interesting film about this visit, Beautiful Dreamers, with Rip Torn as Walt.) There were visitors
to be told about: total strangers who disapproved of Leaves of Grass (at whom Walt would smile placidly, saying nothing), autograph seekers, old friends, neighbors, and, once, a “beautiful boy” who stared for a while and left in silence.
Horace and Walt met when Horace, fifteen, was carrying home a stack of library books. Walt, who knew no strangers, wondered aloud to Horace if a boy his age ought to read quite so many books, or to carry such a load that way. Their paths kept crossing. On the Camden ferry, a passenger asked the adolescent Horace, “Say, bubby, is that Walt Whitman the man who writes the dirty novels?”
“Yep!” said Horace happily. “That’s him.”
Once the evenings began, Horace gradually slipped into being Whitman’s liaison with the world. He knew where to buy the broad steel-nibbed pens Whitman fancied. In the war you “wrote big” and clearly, to be read by lantern light in a tent.
Walt’s Quaker clothes and hat were made—reluctantly—by a Philadelphia tailor; his stationery was cut to specifications. Horace learned how to handle such details. There were proofs to be fetched and returned (when Walt could be persuaded to correct them). Horace’s father, a German lithographer in Camden, translated the letters Walt received in German and French. Horace fell into correspondence with Walt’s English admirers. Being Whitman’s confidant, secretary, and errand boy was obviously gratifying to a thirty-year-old autodidact, school dropout, and ardent Socialist. After the Whitman years he became a newspaper editor and third-rate poet.
A biographer of Whitman, Gary Schmidgall, has now made a digest of Traubel: Intimate with Walt: Selections from Whitman’s Conversations with Horace Traubel, 1888–1892. He does not lift out excerpts, as one might expect, but tells us what Traubel said, what Walt said, with his own narrative and commentary. The large part of this condensation, however, is Walt verbatim. Schmidgall has categorized his selection: “Peeves,” “Famous Authors,” and so on. The decision is an odd one: between reading Traubel whole and savoring choice excerpts there’s scant middle ground. One could, of course, make an anthology of whole evenings, with concise narrative bridges. The texture would be different all three ways.
Now that we have, after almost a century, Traubel’s complete conversations with Whitman in Camden, and Schmidgall’s selections arranged topically, is there any point in comparing them? Their difference is grandly obvious. For two hundred years people have exchanged in conversation their favorite ripostes of Samuel Johnson as recorded by Boswell. But reading Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1785) and the Life (1791) is an experience. Reading Schmidgall’s book is entertaining and informing, but it lacks (again, obviously) the tone and texture of the original.
There is a kind of plot, thoroughly Proustian (or Sternesque), to Traubel whole. On fourteen nights Walt promised to divulge a “great secret,” deferring it to “some day—the right day.” He never does. When Traubel presses him, he is “not in the mood to talk.” Was the secret Walt’s imaginary children—some black, some white—the number of which changed every time the subject came up?
“No boys, no Leaves of Grass.” That Whitman was aesthetically and erotically pleased by young males is no longer disputed. Academic snoops looking for “the real Whitman” beyond the poetry have been thwarted at every turn. The word “homosexual” was coined, illiterately, by a German psychologist and introduced into English the year Whitman died. Whitman’s word would have been “pathic.” He repeatedly insisted to British enthusiasts for pederasty (John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter, the “college” of boy-fanciers at Bolton, others) that he was thoroughly heterosexual and polyphiloprogenitive. That males should be democratically “adhesive” and “amative” was a dimension of his vision of the new civilization he longed for America to have.
Edith Wharton wrote a brilliant story about Whitman’s love of boys as the generator of his nursing the wounded in the Civil War, as well as of his poetry: “The Spark” in Old New York. A veteran of the war comes across Leaves of Grass on a library table. He remembers Whitman from the field hospitals—the kind Quaker nurse who wrote letters home for the incapacitated, who brought bouquets of dandelions and violets, tobacco, candy, pencils, writing paper and envelopes. Having forgotten his name, the veteran recognizes Walt from the frontispiece. The narrator of the story tells him. “Yes; that’s it. Old Walt—that was what all the fellows used to call him. He was a great chap; I’ll never forget him.—I rather wish, though … you hadn’t told me that he wrote all that rubbish.”
The Traubel volumes are full of statements Whitman’s biographers have a hard time knowing what to do with. David S. Reynolds alone, in his superb Walt Whitman’s America, has really tried to come to grips with the poet’s ideas about race and slavery, which were multitudinous and contradictory. “The nigger, like the Injun, will be eliminated: it is the law of races, history, whatnot,” Whitman told Traubel one evening. As an opinion, this is appalling. The question becomes, how important is it? Idle and relaxed conversation is not a diplomatic telegram. The “scholars” who read authors’ private mail—who hold up “the real Larkin,” for instance, as disgraced and exposed—disgrace only themselves. Walt’s standing as a prophet of democracy cannot be diminished by an old man’s obiter dicta on evenings by the stove.
Knowing Whitman is knowing his poetry, and it’s a rare reader who knows Leaves of Grass, a ninety-five-page book that came out in 1855, on the Fourth of July—price, two dollars—and that grew over the years, revision after revision, into a 574-page “deathbed edition.” A “book of fragments,” he told Traubel. It is, in baldest definition, Whitman’s Collected Poems. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley’s comprehensive edition (Norton, 1965) adds sixty-five pages of uncollected poems and manuscript drafts. Every edition in Whitman’s lifetime subtracted and added. It is a book that was worked on for forty-five years, beginning as notes when Whitman was editor of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
Leaves of Grass begins with the pre-Socratic (Heraclitean) observation that we’re all made of identical atoms and are therefore materially the same. “Song of One’s Self” the title should be. Whitman is not peddling a boastful confession; he is writing a script for readers to recite. We are each of us a self, unique and individual. It was this sense of “Song of Myself” that caused Sojourner Truth to exclaim at a recital, “Who wrote that? Never mind the man’s name—it was God who wrote it!”
“Grass nowhere out of place,” Ezra Pound quotes a Chinese philosopher as saying. Grass goes way back, and ranges in size from lawn grass to bamboo. At some unknown time millennia ago mankind discovered that the seeds of certain grasses could be ground into flour to make bread: “civilization” began. Nomadic hunters settled in villages. The oldest breakfast is porridge. Ancient Greeks understood grain to be the gift of a goddess (Demeter, the Roman Ceres). The primitive cook kept a batch of dough going. If you had a squirrel or rabbit to stew up, fine. Pizza remains das Uressen, the primordial meal: bread with topping according to the day’s catch.
In naming his book, Whitman chose the most universal object imaginable, one synonymous with both nature and civilization. Critics complained that grass has blades. But apart from the double meaning the poet intended (the leaves were also the pages of his book) he was botanically correct: grass has leaves, which we call “blades.” There may even be a bit of etymological protest in Whitman’s choice. Our “blade” of grass most likely does not come from blatt, German for “leaf,” since Old English already has “léaf” as the primary word. “It would almost seem then,” the OED tells us, “that the modern ‘blade’ of grass or corn is a later re-transfer from ‘sword-blade.’” By taking the object away from metaphor and returning it to its original name, Whitman made a title worthy of his great book, a line of which is, “Haply the swords I know may there indeed be turn’d to reaping-tools.”
World poetry has nothing to place beside “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” or “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (Whitman�
��s reply to Poe’s “The Raven”) and no analogue at all for “Song of Myself.” A selected, culled, and exclusive Leaves of Grass makes more sense than a selected Traubel. Perhaps only Proust’s latter days were as absorbed in his novel as Whitman’s were by the “deathbed edition” of Leaves. Typography, paper, balance of poems, binding, cost, punctuation (at which Traubel was a whiz and a pedant). Walt kept a big dictionary beside the rocker, constantly curious about words.
There is comedy too, in Traubel: the elaborate preparations for getting Walt into his wheelchair for an afternoon’s outing to see boys “playing base” down the street, the visitors that the housekeeper Mary Davis screened downstairs (no reporters, no preachers), and Whitman’s curiosity about the technological revolution in which he lived. “Horace, this telephone thing, can you really hear the fellow on the other end?” He never wholly understood half-tone engravings of photographs in magazines and newspapers. He could be foul-mouthed about politicians. Horace was a Marxist; Whitman “liked rich people.”
Traubel and newspapers were Walt’s only contacts with the world beyond Mickle Street. And the mail. Should one invite Grover Cleveland and Leo Tolstoy to the seventieth birthday party? Tom Eakins? Andrew Carnegie?
This birthday party is like one of the great salon pieces in Proust, or the wide-screen deployment of a hundred characters in War and Peace. Traubel engineers it all: getting Walt by carriage over to Morgan’s Hall, in Quaker gray and black. Policemen lift Walt and carry him upstairs to the hall. The crowd stands as his male nurse wheels him to the center table (a brass band playing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”). But halfway to his table, a black woman, a cook from the kitchen, appears. Walt (understood to be an invalid wheelchair-bound) stands. The cook mentions her husband’s name: Walt had nursed him in one of the unimaginably horrible hospitals of amputees and the dying.
The Death of Picasso Page 25