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In
February 1911, Horace Logo Traubel published a review of a new book
by Joseph Fort Newton titled Lincoln and Herndon.
William Henry Herndon (1818-1891), it will be recalled, was Lincoln’s
early friend, his law partner in Springfield, the manager of his campaign
against Stephen Douglas, and, much later, the author, with Jesse Weik,
of a three-volume biography, Herndon’s Lincoln: The True Story of
a Great Life, which appeared in 1889. Herndon’s strong emphasis on Lincoln’s personal
life proved highly controversial, humanizing Lincoln and subverting,
as it did, his already-mythic stature. The
new book evoked an extraordinary paean to Herndon, in which Traubel
played with the notion that “No man stands alone.
Every man has his setting. The
race is back of him....[N]obody is self made.
There are curious hands, mysterious souls, pushing him on, steadying
him to his course.” Further
on, Traubel observes, “There are background men and foreground men. There is a root to everything somewhere.
Who can say one sort of man is greater than another where both
are equally necessary? The trouble with the common judgment is that
it too often forgets the background men.
It sees only the men out in the light.”
And so Traubel praises Herndon: “Herndon was part of Lincoln’s
sky. The background people are often the best.
Often the most devoted. Often the surest. They are more inevitably on the spot in pinches. They give up everything for what the world
calls nothing.” The irony of
these admiring words, of course, is that they apply perfectly to the
superbly foregrounded Whitman and the happily backgrounded Traubel.
What Traubel says of Herndon— “He was always back of Lincoln. Always at his side. Always in his heart.”—exactly captures the
essence of his own relationship with Walt.
Traubel makes clear he is alive to the parallels: “Herndon wrote about Lincoln. He wrote the truth. He did for Lincoln what Walt Whitman alive told me to do about Walt Whitman. He included all the hells and damns. Then the worshipers got busy. They said Herndon lied. They said he betrayed his friend. They said he was jealous. O God! He loved Lincoln. Because he loved Lincoln he wrote the truth about Lincoln.... We now see Herndon was justified. How the resenters have disappeared. How Herndon has remained.” And
how Horace Traubel remained—this most devotedly industrious of Whitman’s
background men during his last years alive and during the first generation
after his death! In his review,
Traubel acknowledged William O’Connor as the Herndon of Whitman’s career:
“In his later days Walt Whitman was always saying to me: ‘Leaves
of Grass as it is would never have existed but for William O’Connor.’ I think Lincoln must be saying from the shades.
. .: ‘The Emancipation Proclamation as it is would never have existed
but for William Herndon.’” But
with the death of O’Connor in 1889, one finds it very easy to assert
that the mantle of chief background man for Whitman fell by rights to
Traubel. It was just the year before that the furious
note-taking began which would produce his well-known With Walt Whitman
in Camden (1906-1996), the most massive oral history project in
American letters. (Highlights
from its nine volumes were gathered by the present writer in Intimate
with Walt: Selections from Whitman’s Conversations with Horace Traubel
1888-1892, published in 2001 as the inaugural volume in the University
of Iowa Press Whitman Series.) Also
well known are the Whitman publishing projects supervised by Traubel
as one of the poet’s three literary executors, Thomas Harned and Dr.
Richard Maurice Bucke being the others.
Not
so familiar to Whitman lovers, aficionados, and scholars, however, is
another venue through which Traubel worked tirelessly to assure that
the Whitman legacy would remain before the eyes of posterity: a monthly
magazine, The Conservator, which he founded in 1890—its first
issues were eagerly and pleasurably devoured by Whitman—and edited for
the next thirty years. It was in issue #12 of the 21st
volume that the review of Lincoln and Herndon appeared (pp. 186-7.
Note: all subsequent citations will give first the number of
the volume, then the page number).
The Conservator was decidedly a one-man show, or rather,
one-family show: Traubel’s wife Anne Montgomerie became its associate
editor, and his daughter Gertrude later appeared on the masthead as
“associate worker.” Given how much of the contents were penned by “H.T.” or “T.”, it
is all too perfect timing that The Conservator—and Traubel—lasted
just long enough to celebrate the 1919 Whitman centennial. Just months later, Traubel died, and The Conservator was
no more. As the editor explained in his front-page “Greeting”
for the first issue, The Conservator originated in the desire
that Philadelphia’s Ethical Culture and liberal societies might get
“to know more of the intimate social and spiritual life of each other”
(1:1). Its instincts, which of course were thoroughly
and completely Traubel’s, were socialist, reformist, pro-union, pro-equal
rights for women, pro-union, and anti-monopolistic/anti-capitalist.
Its tastes in the arts were decidedly avantgarde; its idols were
the likes of Tolstoy, Hugo, Maeterlinck, Shaw, Wagner, Ibsen, and Rodin. For
the first three years The Conservator was just eight pages and
sold for five cents (fifty cents a year).
From 1893 until the end, it was sixteen pages, three of which
in later years were given over to advertisements. Though the pages of The Conservator addressed the widest range of political, economic, social, and cultural issues—if it resembles any current periodical, one would point, I think, to The New Republic—the spirit of Walt Whitman presides over all. Indeed, from March 1893 to the end, just under the front-page title, were to be found these words from Democratic Vistas: “Moral conscientiousness, crystalline, without flaw, not godlike only, entirely human, awes and enchants forever.” Not
only did The Conservator address the new and abiding problems
of “These States” and, increasingly, the world with palpably Whitmanesque
instincts. The journal also printed a remarkable trove
of articles, reviews, essays, notices, filler items, and advertising
that was specifically about Walt Whitman.
Sensing that The Conservator might shed considerable light
on the reception of Whitman in the first generation following his death,
I have recently had the good fortune to spend part of the last three
summers reading through a complete and pristine run of all 352 issues,
which is in the collection of the Huntington Library in San Marino,
California. This run, which I have reason to believe came
originally from Traubel’s editorial office at 1631 Chestnut Street in
Philadelphia, has rested in the Huntington for about fifty years, and
I am particularly eager to communicate my findings preliminarily because
this run had never been read before: the pages of nearly every issue
were uncut. I
am currently in the process of preparing an overview and analysis of
the extensive Whitmaniana in The Conservator.
This comes in several forms.
Most important by far are the approximately 150 articles on Whitman
topics. These articles are mostly
between 1,250 and 2,500 words but occasionally as much as 5,000 or 6,000
words (many of them appeared in from two to several monthly installments). Here is a brief sampling of the topics one
encounters: “Dutch Traits of Walt Whitman,” “Whitman’s Sexual Imagery,”
“Whitman and Tolstoy,” “Whitman’s Self-Reliance,” “Whitman’s Lack of
Humor,” “Walt Whitman in Germany,” “Whitman and Physique,” “What Walt
Whitman Means to the Negro,” “Whitman’s First Free Verse,” “Whitman’s
Significance as a Revolutionist,” and “Whitman and Socialism.”
Another
regular Whitman component was reviews and notices about editions of
Whitman, books on him, and articles in other periodicals and newspapers
concerning the poet. Sometimes
a long book controversy would wind through several issues, as with Bliss
Perry’s Walt Whitman: His Life and Work (1906), which was deeply
despised by Traubel and other Whitman partisans.
There was usually a substantial eruption of Whitman items in
the issue following the annual Whitman birthday celebrations on May
31, and throughout the year reports would be printed of events at Whitman
Fellowship meetings in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and elsewhere.
For about five years, from 1897 to 1902, there were forty-five
regular installments of a feature called “Recent Study and Criticism
of Whitman.” Many
items in The Conservator were either authored by or were about
such prominent members of the Whitman inner circle as Dr. Bucke, Harned,
John Burroughs, John Clifford, William Sloane Kennedy, J. W. Wallace,
and Francis Howard Williams. Occasionally,
as well, the three literary executors pulled some manuscript item out
the hoard and published it. Extracts
from Whitman’s writings pop up now and again, as do miscellaneous fillers
with some odd Whitman angle. Especially
droll and amusing are the highly incensed attacks on Whitman (and on
Traubel and The Conservator) that the editor did not shrink from
putting into the mix: when it came to criticism, Traubel’s skin was
just as thick as Whitman’s. Even the Whitman-related advertisements, which
latterly took up a full page or more, are a source of continuing interest. It
is impossible, of course, to do justice in this little introduction
to the panoramic Whitman materials in The Conservator. This will take much
more time and space elsewhere. Still,
it was impossible to resist the request of Tyler Hoffman that I gather
for readers of The Mickle Street Review a very small—but, I hope,
flavorful—sampling of some of my favorite trouvailles. They follow here, with my short introductory
comments. The date of the issue
is followed, in parentheses, by its volume number, then the page on
which an item commences.
Annex In
the November 1916 Conservator, Traubel published some “Passages
(not necessarily connected) from one chapter of a forthcoming book on
H.T.” (27:118). The reference
is to David Karsner’s biography, which would appear three years later.
The most amusing passage in this article is a description of Traubel’s
two-room editorial office on Chestnut Street: “There are huge, dust-covered
piles and boxes of back numbers of his publication, while stacks of faded
newspapers and magazines, together with a rather confused accumulation
of printed matter are strewn over the floor.”
Shades of the paper maelstrom at Mickle Street!
“Fastidious women especially are horrified at the apparent chaos
of Traubel’s quarters,” Karsner reports. I
draw attention to this item, however, for a more personal reason. In the course of my research on Whitman and
Traubel, I came upon the charming fact that David Karsner was such an
enthusiastic admirer of Walt that he and his wife named a daughter Walta
Whitman Karsner. Early in 2000,
through serendipitous email communication with an admirer of my books
on Whitman, I learned that Walta Whitman Karsner Ross was in fact still
living—with her husband in a care facility in Oakland, California. Recalling from the poem “As I sit at Karsners’ front window” that
Traubel was a presence in the family, I decided to pay Walta a visit in
hopes of garnering at least a child’s recollection of Traubel (but mainly,
in truth, simply to make a tenuous connection with the man, the last of
Traubel’s family, his daughter Gertrude, having died in 1983). On
August 15 of 2000, the visit took place. A witty and ebullient woman, Walta’s memory and mental condition
were, alas, not up to the specific questions I came armed with. My camera was more successful. A short time later, on November 8, I received
an email from my go-between friend informing me that Walta had died the
previous day. This
last summer of 2003, I was nearing the end of my perusal of the Conservator
run and came upon the Karsner excerpt.
You can imagine the lump that formed in my throat when I read the
following passage (27:119):
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