With Walt Whitman in Camden, Durham, Leningrad, and Elsewhere

Camden, New Jersey, was a hell of a place for Walt Whitman to end up. Not too long ago, the city-broke for decades, with no tax base to speak of-fired its entire police force. Even in its heyday, perhaps when the Good Gray, crippled from his hospital work in Washington, first went there, Camden was a working-class city, located in the shadow of Philadelphia, across the Delaware River. As Roger Asselineau describes it in his splendid biography of the poet, "Mickle Street [where the poet bought a home in 1884] was undoubtedly democratic, but extremely ugly. There was the noise of trains which passed on the nearby track and frequently the air brought the odor of a neighboring fertilizer fac- tory. . . ."1 Camden had once been a thriving industrial base, but today nearly one in five of its residents is out of work. According to the New York Times article of September 2012 that reported the dismissal of the police force, "Broadway, once the main shopping strip, is now a canyon of abandoned buildings."2 There is no mention of Whitman in this article - only a reference to the "W hitman Park neighborhood," which is closer to Harleigh Cemetery, where the poet is buried, than it is to Mickle Street, where he lived.Imagine, the city where Walt Whitman spent the last decade of his life, now in shambles! You'd think the mere spirit of the Poet of Democ- racy, still lingering overhead, would somehow uplift this urban inferno of crime and illicit drugs. The poet's name is still all over the city. Besides the Whitman Park neighborhood, there is Whitman Avenue, his elabo- rate tomb in Harleigh, and a little area near his house, never altogether finished, called "Poet's Park." Asselineau wrote in his biography that the idea for the book came to him "during the gloomiest years of the German Occupation of France." Roger, who had worked for the French Underground and been captured by the Germans and sentenced to death, wrote: "Nothing could have been more natural at that time, when every Frenchman was a prisoner in his own country, than to try to escape from that world of concentration camps into the vast spaces of Whit- man's universe where all is liberty and promise of happiness."3 Today, the "occupation" of grief and hopelessness has descended on Camden.I first visited Camden in the summer of 1975. Even then it was almost in complete decline. I had recently completed my Ph.D. at Duke University and was teaching at Texas A&M University. That year my edition of The Civil War Letters of George Washington Whitman appeared. It was the same summer that I visited Gertrude Traubel in her home at 6362 McCallum Street in Germantown, an extension of Philadelphia, where, incidentally, I was born. I'm not sure just when the Traubels moved from Camden to Germantown. It may have been shortly after Horace died in 1919. Evidently, Gertrude was born in Camden, in 1892, the year of Whitman's death. Her mother Anne Montgomerie Traubel, a beautiful woman, died in the Germantown house in 1954. On July 22, 1975, Gertrude inscribed my copy of volume 5 of her father's With Walt Whitman in Camden, which she had edited in 1964. I remember that I was driving our nearly brand new Volkswagen bus, and because the Germantown neighborhood struck me as somewhat run-down I worried about it while I sat with Miss Traubel in her front parlor.That summer I was continuing my Whitman studies, which would lead to Walt Whitman's Champion: William Douglas O'Connor (1978) and Emerson, Whitman, and the American Muse (1982). I had already met and befriended the Whitman collector Charles Feinberg, and it was he who got me an invitation to visit Gertrude Traubel (she had checked with him after I initially called for an appointment). By the time of my visit, only five volumes of the nine-volume With Walt Whitman in Camden had been published. She would edit the next one in 1982 with the help of William White, then the editor of the Walt Whitman Review. Gertrude died the following year. …