A LETTER WRITTEN IN CAMDEN ON THE TWENTY-SEVENTH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS DEATH

By GUIDO BRUNO

Dear Walt Whitman:

To-day is the 27th anniversary of your death. I came here to worship at your shrine. I am a European, you must know, and reverence of our great writers and artists is bred in us, is part of our early training. We love to visit the houses where genius lived, to see with our own eyes the places our great men loved. Camden hasn't changed much since you left. The people among whom you lived are to-day the same as they were then: petty, mean, vain, unforgiving. Your friends are few just as in the olden days. Let me tell you about it.

It never entered my mind to make sure of the street number of your old residence. "Any child on the street will direct me," I thought, "to Whitman's house." Getting off the ferry, the same ferry on which you loved to ride back and forth, in spring and autumn, I asked a policeman how to get to your house. "The Whitman House?" he repeated; "it's somewhere out of the way, I'm sure. You had better stop in the Ridgely House. That's the best place in town." He knew nothing of you and thought I was looking for a hotel. A druggist at the nearby corner knew about you. "William Kettler used to be a great friend of his," he told me. "He'll tell you all about him." And he gave me Mr. Kettler's address. Mr. Kettler still lives on North Street, and has become chief city librarian lately. He's very deaf, but extremely kind and friendly. He was in the midst of moving. Mrs. Kettler is ill, you must know, and they will live on the shore for the rest of the season.

"This Whitman cult makes me sick," he commenced. "Who was Whitman anyway? A poet? I dare say that there are hundreds of magazine writers to-day as there were during his lifetime, who write just as good verse as he did. And his prose is abominable. His writings are not fit to be read in a respectable home. They corrupt the mind and are dangerous to the morals. We knew him well, we saw him daily and his disgraceful way of living was open town talk.

"I was a newspaper man and associated with the old Camden Post at the time of Bonsall, when Whitman used to come to see us almost daily. Bonsall used to be a friend of his and did him a great many good turns. But Whitman was an ingrate.

"Shall I tell you what we respectable citizens of Camden think of him? I don't mean the young generation, but the people who actually knew him. It doesn't sound nice to speak badly about dead people. But we knew him as an incorrigible beggar who lived very immorally ... an old loafer.

"Why, only a few months ago, one of the most prominent citizens of our town, John J. Russ, the great real estate dealer, objected to Whitman's name on the Honor Tablet of our new library. Judge Howard Carrot of Merchantville could tell you how that old scoundrel got people into trouble, and if the case had come into court, the scandal would have been so great, that the Judge decided to dispose of it privately.

"I remember, several years after the Civil War, Whitman's last visit to the Camden Post. Mr. Bonsall, the chief editor, myself and Whitman were chatting in the office. There was a very young reporter in the room. Mr. Whitman insisted on telling us one of his filthy stories. He knew many of them and would tell them without discriminating who was present. Filth seemed to be always on his mind. Mr. Bonsall was shocked. And I remember distinctly what he told him, before turning him out of the office. 'Look here, Whitman,' he said, 'why don't you become a useful citizen, like every one of us? You never did anything decent and worthy of an American citizen. While we took up our guns and went out to fight the enemy, you stalked about hospitals, posing as a philanthropist. Later on, we returned to civilian life, hunting jobs and pensions, trying to earn a livelihood, while you were preaching Humanitarian principles and talking against the cruelties of warfare on Union Square. Now, while we are chained to our jobs, you are writing pornographic pieces that no self-respecting publisher would print, and loaf about most of the time, corrupting our young folk. I will not tolerate loose talk in these offices, therefore, get out and never let me see you again.'"

"But haven't you said," I interjected, "that Mr. Bonsall was a friend of Whitman?"

"They used to be friends," cried Mr. Kettler, "until that treacherous business of the poem came up. Whitman was getting up a little book of poems. Mr. Bonsall, who, in my estimation, was not only an excellent man and writer, but also a poet of no mean ability, sent in a contribution. This particular poem was very beautiful. It was the only one that Whitman did not print. Ever since Mr. Bonsall and myself had not much use for Whitman, who stabbed his friends in the back at the first opportunity."

"Hurt vanity," I thought. How small this man Kettler seemed to me with his petty grievances. Forty years have passed and he couldn't forget your refusal of a poem.

"But what is the worst," Mr. Kettler continued, "Whitman has spoiled the life of Horace Traubel. What an excellent young man he used to be, the son of an honored, upright citizen. Traubel got obsessed with Whitman's greatness. He devoted his whole life to Whitman. He took Whitman's morals for his own standard." And Mr. Kettler proceeded to tell about Traubel's private life. Some stories a policeman's wife, Traubel's next door neighbor, had told him.

Does all this amuse you, Walt Whitman?

The frame-house where you lived is in a dreadful condition. An Italian family is living there. A taxi driver, Thomas Skymer. He has three children and four boarders. The boarders have children, too. A litter of young ones are playing in your back yard, around the broken well. Your front room, where you used to sit near the window and entertain your visitors, is a living and dining room combined. Not even a picture of yours is in this room. Over the mantel hangs a cheap chromo of the Italian King. One of the little boys knew your name. "Do you want to see where the old guy died?" he asked, and led me into the back room on the same floor. There was a big bed there. I never saw a bigger one in my life. "We all sleep in it," said the boy.

I know, Walt Whitman, you are shrugging your shoulders, smiling indifferently. What does it matter to you who is sleeping now in the room where you died, who is living now in the house where you lived, loved and sang? But my heart cramped and ached. The poverty, the bad odor, the utter irreverence! This Italian pays $10 a month rent. The neighborhood is run down, and the property could be easily bought for a few thousand dollars. Is this how the greatest nation honors its greatest literary genius?

Your enthusiastic young physician, Dr. Alexander McAlister, has grown a bit old, but not in spirit. He took me up to his library and here, as well as in his heart, you have found your sanctuary.

"I loved Walt Whitman," Dr. McAlister said, "ever since I was a student in the medical school, and met the old gentleman regularly on the street. We talked occasionally; once he asked me to his house, later on, after my graduation, I had occasion to render him professional services, and for all the years, until Whitman's death, I called on him at least once a day. He was the most clean-minded and kind man I have ever met. I never heard him utter an obscene word. The magnificent personality of Walt Whitman and his general comradeship, inspired by his ingrained feelings and intuitive beliefs concerning the destiny of America, must certainly have impressed all who met him long before he was known as a poet. He lived a life so broad and noble that it will be more studied and emulated, and will sink deeper and deeper into the heart. The social, human world, through his aid, will reach a level hitherto unattained. The new life which he preached has not been even dreamed of yet, has not become yet an object of aspiration to us Americans. He has set the spark to the prepared fuel, the living glow has crept deeply into the dormant mass; even now tongues of flame begin to shoot forth. The longer Whitman is dead the better he will be known. He seems to me the typical American, the typical modern, the source and centre of a new, spiritual aspiration, saner and manlier than any heretofore. Whitman thought that man has within him the element of the Divine, and that this element was capable of indefinite growth and expansion.

"He was the most democratic man that ever lived. Everybody was welcome to his house, everybody his equal, he was everybody's friend. He had many enemies, but also many friends. He thought Ingersoll his best friend. Dr. Longaker and Horace Traubel were almost always present, especially during the last years of his life. Once in a while they got on his nerves because they continually carried paper and pencil, writing down every word he said. Let me tell you a few incidents of his last illness. They all expected him to die. Traubel and Dr. Longaker were constantly in the hall outside of the sick room, eager to catch every one of Whitman's words. Warren Fritzinger, his nurse, was with him.

"'Are those damn fools out there this afternoon?' he remarked when his condition became very weak and the rustling of papers in the hall seemed to annoy him.

"The day before he died I came in the morning and asked him, 'How do you feel?'

"'Well, Doctor,' he answered, 'I am tired of this dreadful monotony of waiting. I am tired of the sword of Damocles suspended over my head.'"

Would it interest you, Walt Whitman, to know about your last minutes on earth, when you lay unconscious in a coma? Dr. McAlister described them to me. "His end was peaceful. He died at 6:43 P. M. At 4:30 he called Mrs. Davis and requested to be shifted from the position he was lying in. The nurse was sent for, and later on they sent me a message. When I reached his bedside, he was lying on his right side, his pulse was very weak and his respiration correspondingly so. I asked him if he suffered pain and if I could do anything for him. He smiled kindly and murmured low. He lay quietly for some time with closed eyes. A little after 5 his eyes opened for a moment, his lips moved slightly, and he succeeded in whispering: 'Warry, Shift.' Warry was his nurse, and these were the last words of Whitman. Then the end came. I bent over him to detect the last sign of the fleeting life. His heart continued to pulsate for fully fifty minutes after he ceased breathing."

Dr. McAlister was a great friend of yours, Walt Whitman, and I feel that you are with him every minute of his life. He showed me letters from your old nurse, Mrs. Keller, who wrote a few articles about you. He treasures the books you inscribed for him, your pictures hang on his walls and he especially loves the little plaster cast you gave him.

Of course, you know that an autopsy was performed shortly after your death. May I tell you about your brain, which is at present in the possession of the Anthropometric Society? I believe it is an honor to have one's brains placed in this society's museum, because this society has been organized for the express purpose of studying high-type brains. The cause of your death was pleurisy of your left side and consumption of the right lung. You had a fatty liver, and a large gall stone in the gall bladder. The good doctors marvelled that you could have carried on respiration for so long a time with the limited amount of useful lung tissue. They ascribed it largely to that indomitable energy "which was so characteristic of everything pertaining to the life of Walt Whitman." They said in their official report that any other man would have died much earlier with one-half of the pathological changes which existed in your body.

In the late afternoon while the sun was setting over an ideal spring day, I walked out to the Harleigh Cemetery, where you built for yourself that magnificent tomb. How wise you were, Walt Whitman, to supervise the cutting of the stones, to watch the workmen while they were preparing your grave. What a beautiful spot you chose for your last resting place. The lake lay still in the warm evening air, the willows swayed gently as if patted by unseen hands. An old working-man, about to leave the cemetery, showed me the spot where you used to sit and watch them work. He told me how you wrote "pieces" on scraps of paper that you borrowed here and there, and how you read them to the stonecutters, who were building your tomb. I asked for the key. They keep it locked lately. I opened the heavy granite door, and stood for quite a while in the semi-darkness of your little house. I thought of you lying there on your bier, peaceful, indifferent, kind. Then I thought of the other monument you had built in words, a temple not made with hands, builded for eternity.

Always self-sufficing, walking your own path towards your own goal. No legend tells of you, of your life or achievement. You live in the hearts of thousands of Americans. Soon, very soon, perhaps, your name and America will be synonymous. Walt Whitman, we here on earth are awakening to your ideals of America.

Affectionately yours,
Guido Bruno