My Two Uncles

       Here's a switch on the old routine that I rather like, delivered in Walt Whitman's house in Camden, New Jersey, on Walt Whitman Day -- May 5 -- 1976, at the annual homage to the good gray poet sponsored by the Camden branch campus of Rutgers University.

       My first problem this afternoon is that your guest speakers on Walt Whitman Day, normally and properly, should be either eminent American poets or scholars of classical American literature, both of whom will have had to come to some sort of professional terms with their great gray literary ancestor. Thus for example Professor Donald Davie, in a recent review of John Berryman's posthumously collected papers, says, "It cannot be denied that at some point in mid-career Berryman momentously shifted his stance toward his art and the experience his art fed upon. . . And the shift seems to have to do, not surprisingly, with that inescapable figure in every American poet's heritage, Walt Whitman."

       Professor Davie's own forthcoming book is a new critical study of Ezra Pound; as he wrote that sentence about John Berryman, he was perhaps remembering Pound's explicit reconciliation with his ancestor: the early poem called "A Pact":

              A PACT

       I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman --

       I have detested you long enough.

       I come to you as a grown child

       Who has had a pig-headed father;

       I am old enough now to make friends.

       It was you that broke the new wood,

       Now is a time for carving.

       We have one sap and one root --

       Let there be commerce between us.

       But me, I'm neither a poet nor a scholar of American literature. I have had no particular quarrel with Walt Whitman; therefore I feel no particular urge for atonement with him. The spiritual fathers I've had to make my own pacts with are mainly European. Indeed, Leslie Fiedler, in an early essay on my "historical" novel The Sot-Weed Factor, in the course of commending me for staying as it were in the Maryland marshes, made this remark: "Only such a European-oriented writer as Walt Whitman at his worst believes that to portray America one must encompass its imaginary vastness, its blurred totality." I agreed with Fiedler then; I still agree with him.

       In a moment I'll pay my respects to Walt Whitman in the only way I competently can: by reading to you a few leaves of my own grass, from a project that perhaps suffers from some Whitmanesque ambition. Before I do, though, I want to tell you a complicated story of my discovery of two artistic uncles, one figurative and one literal: a discovery prompted by that remark of Leslie Fiedler's.

       It is a curious remark, after all: to say of our archetypal American poet, "Only such a European-oriented writer as Walt Whitman at his worst. . ." etc. That epithet reminded me of me. My memory of Leaves of Grass was an undergraduate memory; I reread it and recognized some kinship after all. Whitman's project of going forward by going back, beyond the immediate European conventions of verse and their American imitations, to something older, looser, freer, more epical and rough -- there were surely some resemblances there to my project of returning to the inventors of the English novel for my long story of Ebenezer Cooke, the misfortunate poet laureate of Maryland, in order as it were to make an end run around Flaubert and the modernist novel. So I discovered in Walt Whitman not a lost father, for better or worse, but a kind of mislaid literary uncle, who seemed to me to ratify, after the fact -- benignly, avuncularly -- my own project.

       All right; that's simple enough. Now comes the complicated part.

       In 1873, in his fifty-fifth year, Walt Whitman suffered a partial paralytic stroke and retired from Washington here to Camden. Among his friends for the next number of years, here and across the river in Philadelphia, was a jolly circle of Businessmen, physicians, clergymen, and more or less professional artists and goodfellows organized by and around the studio of one Colonel John R. Johnston, himself an artist of sorts. Johnston lived at 434 Penn Street in Camden, one block from this lecture hall; his Philadelphia studio became such a popular hangout for the wits of the area that they formed a mock society -- after the model of the eighteenth-century Hartford Wits or the even older Tuesday Club of Annapolis, and all the earlier such mock orders in England and Europe, back at least to Plato's Symposium crowd. Colonel Johnston dubbed himself The Chief; there were a Lieutenant General, a Marshal, an Attorney General, a Commissary, a Surgeon General, a Chaplain, a Chief of Old Pensioners, and a Poet Laureate. Not surprisingly, the Poet Laureate of the Studio was Walt Whitman.

       They socialized; they drank; the artists drew serious or satiric drawings; the wits composed mock autobiographies, mock insults, mock book-reviews. All of it was pretty ponderous stuff, not nearly so witty as Joel Barlow's Hartford crowd or the minutes of the Annapolis Tuesday Club. Whitman's own contributions were rather straight: In 1880, at the peak of the group's flourishing, he was sixty, fatigued, in indifferent health, and preoccupied with what was to be the big 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass. That same year, Colonel Johnston and his "Chaplain" (T. D. Caulston) availed themselves of a new invention called the hectograph to duplicate the sketches and the autograph inscriptions of the group, and published them as a handsomely bound volume called "The Studio Souvenir of John R. Johnston, Artist, First & Only Edition, Published in Philadelphia, February, 1880." They ran off enough copies for each of the Studio's habitues: those chief officers aforementioned plus a group listed as "Attendants on the Chief & Staff, as follows: Noblemen, Princes, rich men's sons and millions expecting to be rich. . ." That last sounds like Whitman's democratic touch, doesn't it? Each copy -- the printing numbered about three dozen in all -- bore the owner's name stamped in gold.

       Here are a couple of Whitman's entries, in his hand:

Feb. 9 '80

       Loafing around for a couple of hours this fine sunny crispy day -- cross'd the Delaware -- walk'd up Chestnut St -- every thing lovely -- look'd in at my friend Col. Johnston's studio -- the sun shining bright, & I feeling all right

Walt Whitman

Camden N J

       At 434 Penn Street

              Sunday Evening

                     Feb 15th '80 --

       Another fresh, dear, social evening here, with Col. & Mrs. Johnston, & Ida, & John (an evening fine as I have had, over & over again for six years). Next summer early (May 31), I shall be 61 years old.

        -- I have just return'd from a four months' trip to the Rocky Mt's, and over the Great Plains, & through Colorado, Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, &c.

       Am well for me --

Walt Whitman

And a final one, undated, toward the end of the book:

       Nothing does me more good than to have a little shake up with the boys of the Studio.

Walt Whitman

       Now the plot thickens. One of those "boys" Whitman refers to happened to be a forty-year-old Baltimorean named James H. Wilson (I am reading from his copy; he is listed among the Attendants), who describes himself as being "in the steamboat Business." By 1908, twenty-eight years after The Studio Souvenir was published and sixteen years after Whitman's death, Wilson's copy was evidently floating around another sort of studio, a more serious one: the old Maryland Institute of Art on Mount Royal Avenue in Baltimore. That year, somehow, it came into the possession of a young sculpture student at the Institute named Herman Barth. After the manner of Colonel John Johnston and his friends, young Herman inscribed and dated the book with elaborate nineteenth-century flourishes and had many of his studio friends do the same. On some of the flyleaves, superimposed upon their signatures, they made Rorschach-style ink blots (Hermann Rorschach himself was twenty-four at the time, working in Switzerland, and hadn't yet developed his famous ink-blot test).

       I never met this uncle of mine -- my father's older brother and the only artist I know of among my ancestors. Herman Barth graduated from the Maryland Institute of Art, worked a few years in Baltimore as a stonecutter while practicing the art of sculpture, went to France in 1918 with the American Expeditionary Force, looked foward to visiting the Louvre (so says one of his last postcards Home), but died before he got there, in the great influenza pandemic of 1918/19, a dozen years before I was born. But I have thought about him a lot, this young sculptor sprung from the large family of a German immigrant tombstone-cutter, my grandfather, whose arrival in America coincided with the '81 edition of Leaves of Grass. I've wondered whether Uncle Herman would have "made it" as an artist, had he lived: whether he'd have outgrown the academic conventions of his time and gotten in on the ground floor of modernism, for example, or become just another master mason. And whether, in either case, he might have taught me useful things.

       Just about the time of Leslie Fiedler's review of The Sot-Weed Factor, when I was beginning to find my own way in my own medium, my father gave me some of my late uncle's effects: a few pieces of Beaux-Arts plaster statuary -- classical copies and imitations, student work -- and a couple of his books, including James Wilson's copy of John Johnston's Studio Souvenir, in which I found the Whitman holographs, my uncle's flourishing autographs and doodles, and those proto-Rorschach ink blots.

       Well. Jorge Luis Borges says in his essay on Kafka that every writer creates his own precursors. This is the opposite of Professor Harold Bloom's argument that great writers are as it were created by their precursors -- by their struggles against and pacts with their spiritual fathers. Borges also says, in an essay on Walt Whitman, that Whitman, who had no immediate precursors, invented himself: the colossal democrat, the Good Gray Poet who no doubt shared a few characteristics with the Camden invalid who bore his name, as Borges admits to sharing a few with the Argentine writer named Jorge Luis Borges.

       As for me, I didn't invent, nor was I invented by these two uncles, the figurative and the literal, whom I rediscovered together by this curious chain of coincidences; by whom I feel obscurely but benignly -- that is to say, avuncularly -- ratified; to whom I give this nephewlike wave of the hand.

       Now, for my second problem. . .

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