In most of us I think writing gets to be a disease,” Walt Whitman once said to his friend Horace Traubel. “We scribble, scribble, scribble—eternally scribble: God looks on—it turns his stomach: and while we scribble we neglect life.” Yet during the last four years of his life, from 1888 to 1892, the poet allowed Traubel’s scribbling—even appeared to approve of it. A writer, editor and journalist who served as Whitman’s dogsbody when the elderly poet was crippled and failing, Traubel dropped by his Camden, N.J., home once, twice, sometimes four times a day and wrote down everything—from Whitman’s most casual utterances to a record of his digestive illnesses, from the arrival of a letter to the gift of a bag of sickle pears.
Boswell’s famously exhaustive record of Samuel Johnson shrivels before Traubel’s magnum opus. By the time the transcription of his cramped, unreadable, self-invented shorthand was completed—partly by Traubel, then by his family and others who finally finished it in 1996—it ran to 5,000 pages published in nine volumes.
Gary Schmidgall, a Whitman biographer and professor of English at Hunter College, City University of New York, calls the Traubel record “probably the most astonishing oral history project in American letters.” The assessment is modest: it may be the largest body of primary material on any writer—ever.
And there’s the rub. “For a biographer, reading the whole damn thing was obligatory,” says Schmidgall, ’67, PhD ’74. “There are even many Whitman scholars who admit that they have never plopped down and tackled the whole thing.” Yet it was clear to him that “there were absolutely wonderful insights scattered through its general mundanity.” So he piggybacked on a century of efforts and distilled the nine volumes into one, Intimate with Walt (University of Iowa Press, 2001).
Some Whitman scholars are grateful. “Even as someone very familiar with Traubel’s work, I was a bit stunned to see how powerful Whitman’s late comments could be and how this power could be sustained over the 300 pages of Schmidgall’s manuscript,” says Ed Folsom, a University of Iowa professor, in an interview. “It will surprise people who have dismissed—or have heard others dismiss—Traubel’s work as a kind of grab bag of half-senile Whitman comments. Schmidgall reveals Whitman in his last years to have a very sharp mind [with] remarkably intelligent, passionate and illuminating things to say about just about any topic we can think of.” (For examples, see sidebar.)
On a recent visit to San Francisco, Schmidgall talked about the history behind his new book and about his attraction to Whitman.
Understandably, the mammoth task of transcription flagged after Traubel’s death in 1919. Over the years, the work was taken up by his wife, then his daughter, and William White, a scholar who transcribed Vol. 5. But the record of Whitman’s final days remained in archival boxes at the Library of Congress, largely unread. The neglect was explicable: the published volumes were out of print and largely unavailable—and who would publish Vols. 7, 8 and 9 of an out-of-print series launched decades before?
Then, in the 1990s, Bay Area editors Jeanne Chapman and Robert MacIsaac transcribed the final three volumes, and the last two were published together by W.L. Bentley Rare Books in 1996. The final volumes were respectfully reviewed in the London Review of Books, and well-known Whitman biographer Jerome Loving wrote that they “provide information which will outdate every currently published biography of the poet.”
For Schmidgall, researching his Whitman biography, the biggest surprise in the Traubel material was “how pungent in expressing his dislikes, and capable of gimlet-eyed scorn, Whitman was—and also discovering his wry sense of humor. It was widely thought in his day that he lacked a sense of humor—a theory that Leaves of Grass, some might say, makes thoroughly plausible!”
The Renaissance was Schmidgall’s former specialty, but he was drawn to Whitman, he says, during “a midlife crisis with Shakespeare.” He had already written Shakespeare and the Courtly Aesthetic (1981), Shakespeare and the Poet’s Life (1990) and Shakespeare and Opera (1990) when he learned to his pleasure that despite Whitman’s reputation as the bohemian bard, he was mad about opera—one of several affinities the poet and the scholar share.
Schmidgall’s soft-spoken intensity and earnestness belie an intellectual feistiness and a sharp, lampooning sense of humor. He makes it clear he has limited tolerance for what he considers the prudishness of much Whitman scholarship. Schmidgall is gay—and so, he insists, was Whitman. That’s hardly a revelation, but he says some scholars can’t reconcile that with their image of America’s greatest bard.
“I got seriously miffed at [his] preceding biographers. They seemed so clueless about Whitman’s sexuality,” says Schmidgall. “How can you read some passages in Leaves of Grass and say with a straight face that he never had gay sex? When I set out to show this, the hand-wringing was intense.”
Schmidgall aired his views in Walt Whitman: A Gay Life (Penguin Putnam, 1998). The controversial book’s scholarship is laced with Schmidgall’s own memoirs of growing up gay. With that and his earlier The Stranger Wilde: Interpreting Oscar (1994), says Schmidgall, “My scholarship has come out of the closet.”
Critics took aim at the Whitman biography. Renée Tursi wrote in the New York Times Book Review: “The irrelevance of Whitman’s sexual activity to what his images, meter and line all served to affirm is dismayingly lost on Schmidgall. . . .”
“Having published seven books, I have to say this is the single most flabbergasting sentence I have ever encountered in a review!” Schmidgall says with exasperation. His response, never published by the New York Times but posted by Schmidgall on Amazon.com, was scalding: “Some things at the Times—and in the world—will never change. In this case, homophobic denial. I tend to find Whitman’s own opinions preferable to Ms. Tursi’s. He called sex ‘always imminent . . . the root of roots: the life below the life!’ He called sex the ‘most sensitive spot’ in Leaves, and he said it was sex in the early editions that ‘excited the roundest opposition, the sharpest venom, [and] unintermitted slander.’”
However, Schmidgall earned bouquets as well as bruises for the biography, including accolades from Folsom: “He is an elegant writer and a careful scholar, and his ‘gay biography’ of Whitman is something I had for many years hoped would be written. We had already had biographies of Whitman that assumed he was heterosexual, and biographies that assumed he was homoerotic but not homosexual, and biographies that assumed he was asexual. It seemed time to see what Whitman would look like if we constellated the facts of his life around the assumption that he was actively homosexual. Schmidgall has done that more effectively than anyone else.”
He’s done something else now: restored Whitman’s voice to us in a trade edition. As Folsom says, “It’s like being given the opportunity to sit down in our living rooms for a few evenings with Walt Whitman and hear him answer exactly the kinds of questions we would want to pose to him. To our surprise, we find the old poet to be smart and charming and responsive and even funny—not at all the tired icon we expected to meet.”
Recently, Schmidgall has turned his considerable critical faculties to the Roman poet Martial. A few of his translations of Martial’s epigrams appeared in the journal Poetry (April 2001), and he is negotiating publication of The Martial Art—adding another eccentric, acerbic voice to his unconventional collection of biographies, memoirs, criticism and translations.
Cynthia Haven writes regularly about arts and letters for Stanford.
