With Walt Whitman in Camden: A Digital Edition
Matt
Cohen, Editor
Travis Brown, Project Manager (U. of Texas at Austin)
Erica Fretwell, Senior Assistant Editor (Duke U.)
Pat Jagoda, Senior Assistant Editor (Duke U.)
Allison Dushane, Assistant Editor (Duke U.)
Bridget Finn, Research Assistant (Duke U.)
With Walt Whitman in Camden: An Electronic Edition is currently
funded by the Department of English and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.
Published parts of the project are available in the Disciples
section of the Walt Whitman Archive under "Horace
Traubel."
Horace Traubel (1858-1919) was one of the most important people
in Walt Whitman's life during the poet's final years. As Whitman's
health failed, he needed more help with daily tasks, and from the
mid-1880s, Traubel played many roles in Whitman's life -- from nurse
to secretary and from literary representative to close companion.
In 1888, Traubel began taking notes on his conversations with Whitman
and his visitors in Camden. Drawing on these notes and a host of
documents from Whitman's house, Traubel wrote With Walt Whitman
in Camden. Traubel died in 1919, having published three volumes,
leaving the work of editing his difficult-to-decipher drafts to
his wife and daughter, who in turn relinquished the work to future
editors. In the end it would take nine long volumes -- published
at intervals over the course of the entire twentieth century, with
different publishers -- to present Traubel's account of the last
four years of Whitman's life. With Walt Whitman in Camden
is significant for Whitman study -- historical, biographical, and
literary -- because of the depth and range of Whitman's discussions
about world culture and literature represented in them. Containing
a wealth of information in the form of letters, images, descriptions,
and transcribed conversations, Traubel's text tries to capture Whitman's
conversational voice near the end of a career that spanned most
of the nineteenth century. In conversations and letters, Whitman
and his friends and disciples discuss and critique a multitude of
issues, personalities, and institutions; Traubel's text is a complex,
tantalizing account of Whitman and his world.
The very complexity of the composition history of Traubel's text
makes it useful for researchers and theorists in literature and
the history of authorship and publishing. With Walt Whitman in
Camden presents fundamental questions about authority and textuality.
What was generated between Traubel's experience with Whitman, his
notes, the transcriptions of them, and the final printed book was
a complicated collaboration. One even hesitates to use that term:
did Whitman know they were "collaborating" -- that is,
was he clear on what Traubel was planning to do? What could it mean
for one to collaborate against one's will or without one's knowledge
(given that Whitman was not alive for the production of the published
work)? Traubel's project was controversial for some of those in
Whitman's circle of friends and allies, and has been for critics
since. (William Sloane Kennedy, for example, wrote that Whitman
would "probably have desired to have him privately shot if
he had known what he was going to do after his death.") These
issues gesture toward the broader question of how accurate Traubel
was in capturing Whitman's "voice." Critical opinions
have differed. Traubel says that Whitman asked him to "include
all the hells and damns," to depict Whitman in his full range
of expression, regardless of genteel literary convention. But are
the damns and hells in With Walt Whitman in Camden Whitman's
-- or are they Traubel's version of Whitman? The same could be said
of larger thematic concerns -- of Traubel's reports of their discussions
of politics, sexuality, or race, for example. This mysterious passage
between Traubel and Whitman, that always-difficult space of translation
and transformation, forms its own interest, and makes Traubel's
project a fascinating ground for research on its own terms.
While
offering rich opportunities for the study of American literary history,
With Walt Whitman in Camden is not easy to use. Given the
impediments facing students and researchers wishing to use the printed
Traubel volumes--especially their scarcity and their inadequate
indexing--the Walt Whitman
Archive is currently creating a digital edition of With
Walt Whitman in Camden. This edition will combine fully searchable
electronic text of the nine volumes with selected facsimile digital
images of the ephemera (letters and poetry drafts, for example)
that were reproduced in the original books. The edition will contain
an introduction to the series, by Matt Cohen, sketching out the
literary and material contexts from which Traubel's text emerged,
while giving a sense of the ways in which the use of Traubel's work
in Whitman study is both powerful and problematic.