This
third issue of the electronic Mickle Street Review sports a new design that pays homage to Whitman’s
famous messiness—a messiness remarked on occasionally by his
friend, Horace Traubel, about whom this issue revolves.
The
revised format is largely the work of our new managing editor,
Jesse Merandy, whose expertise has transformed the journal
into one that is more fun to read and explore.
On this revamped site, under “Archives,” we will be
offering the full run of the print series of MSR
(1979-1991); we begin that project, naturally enough, with
the first issue. MSR
continues in the tradition of that series, but with this difference:
we are dedicated to fanning out from Whitman and his specific
cultures to American culture more broadly in an electronic
environment that has changed, and is changing, the way we
view text, and even the very nature of text.
***
In
his review
of volumes 8 and 9 of With
Walt Whitman in Camden, Traubel’s detailed
recording of Whitman’s daily life in 1891, Richard Poirier
makes much of the disarray that defined Whitman’s Mickle Street
home:
This
… is a man who is content to leave what he has done
in life in some natural state of ‘mess,’ as represented
by the random assortment of papers on the floor of his
sickroom. The mess is a visible rejection of any proprietary
claims that may be made on his life or his work by housekeepers
or critics—versions, he would suppose, of the same thing. ‘There is all sorts of debris scattered about—bits
of manuscript, letters, newspapers, books,’ Traubel
writes of Whitman’s room early on in the first volume.
‘Near by his elbow towards the window a wastebasketful
of such stuff.’ For Whitman it isn’t a mess at all, but a way
of assembling things so that he can exert maximum control
over them, much as he asserts his authority over Leaves, by claiming he is mystified, while explicators, who order
it and sort it out, are not. |
As
Poirier further states in his review, “The mess functions
as an archive for both of them,” that is, for both Whitman
and Traubel. And it is this notion of the archive as palimpsest
that I find particularly suggestive. The “debricity” of Whitman’s room functions as a metaphor not only
for America, then, but also for the interwovenness of text
in cyberspace, the ways in which texts come together and underwrite
each other, with the control over assemblage (ultimate authority)
left in the hands of the reader, not the poet, in this case.
The
contents of this issue of MSR are more orderly in their layout than the model of hypertext-as-mess
would suggest, but they do point the reader in mutlifarious
directions—to other pieces in this issue, deeper into the
history of this journal, and to texts elsewhere, both on and
off the web. The scholarly articles, poems, feature pieces,
retrieved documents, and reviews presented here take up important
matters relating not only to Whitman and Traubel and their
legacies but to enduring motifs and cultural forms in American
life during their day and beyond: the nature of conversation
and friendship; the performance of identity; the relation
between form and function in art; the ontology of storage
and assemblage; the dialectics of discipleship; the politics
of labor in the industrial age.
***
Traubel
is a crossroads, and Ed Folsom’s biographical
sketch of him
is a very useful summary and reminder of that man’s cultural
intersections and achievements.
Like Walt, Traubel was in touch with many of the most
prominent movements and ideological debates of his day, and
an outspoken participant in quite a few of them. In his monthly publication the Conservator he runs the gamut, from animal
rights to women’s rights; he was a prominent figure in both
the arts and crafts movement and the ethical culture movement. His socialist politics put him in dialogue with a vast array of
cultural figures, including Camden’s own Mother Bloor, Eugene
Debs, and Upton Sinclair, and his deep commitment to social
justice tinges almost all of his writings, not to mention
his discussions with, and proddings of, Walt.
It
is up to this issue to lay out some of the pieces of his puzzle;
it is up to the reader to begin the enjoyable work of fitting
them together.
Tyler
Hoffman
(Many
thanks to Jesse Merandy and Evan Roskos for their work on
this issue.)