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2. Packing and Unpacking the First Leaves of Grass
- University of Nebraska Press
- Chapter
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B etween 1853 and 1855, as Whitman was creating his poetic selfhood in writing, piecing together an identity from notes and scraps of written and found language, Whitman moved no less than four times, taking with him not only his family, but also his notebooks, manuscript fragments, and the various texts that he drew upon in the making of the first Leaves of Grass. He began 1853 in a three-story house on Cumberland Street in Brooklyn, where he and his family had lived for eight months, having moved there in September 1852 from their residence at 106 Myrtle Avenue, where Whitman’s family had lived in the upper floors while he operated a small printing office and bookstore on the ground floor. The men in Whitman’s family were experienced carpenters and had built these two houses. They were set to benefit from the housing boom that had begun recently in south Brooklyn as a result of the successful draining of some formerly uninhabitable marshland. But with Whitman’s father, Walt Whitman Sr., quite ill and Packing and Unpacking the First Leaves of Grass packing and unpacking the first leaves of grass 49 Walt Jr. distracted by other interests, including his artistic ambitions, the Whitman family profited only a little from the growing Brooklyn economy, despite their carpentry skills and the real estate speculation that led to their many moves. They sold the house on Cumberland and relocated to a smaller one on the same street, where they lived until May 1854, when they moved to a home on Skillman Street.1 They lived on Skillman for a year until Whitman’s mother, with the help of her sons, purchased a new home on Ryerson (Whitman Sr. was by then paralyzed and bedridden), which was where Walt lived when the first Leaves of Grass was published. This last home—a plain, blocky house three windows wide—is the only one that has survived. Its address is 99 Ryerson Street, an unremarkable building still standing in the Brooklyn neighborhood now known as Clinton Hill.2 Having grown up with a father who was a kind of traveling carpenter , Whitman had moved many times as a boy, so he was probably used to a life on the go. Still the intensely nomadic lifestyle he lived while composing his first major poems must have left its mark. Today, of course, we can move thousands of files and entire libraries in a laptop computer. Whitman seems to have used wooden trunks.3 Using these, and probably some twine and crates, he would have gathered, bundled, packed, and unpacked every bound and unbound page he had accumulated as a writer almost continually while composing his poems. In one sense Whitman’s notebooks were the primary textual structures that he used to order and revise the language that was evolving toward the first Leaves. In a larger sense, though, it was the four houses he inhabited during this two-year span—and the packed bundles he moved with—that must have been the overriding containers for his early poetic thought. Although we don’t know much about what Whitman’s rooms looked like at this time, it seems likely that all the packing and unpacking he did would have resulted [44.220.41.140] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:39 GMT) packing and unpacking the first leaves of grass 50 in something like the chaotic jumble of notes and drafts that we know he lived amid later. The pictures we have of him in his room in Camden, New Jersey, show the poet ankle-deep in paper, which he liked to think of as a sea, telling distressed friends that whatever he needed “surfaced eventually” (see figure 10).4 In fact the papers he FIG 10. Whitman among his manuscripts. Whitman Archive, Library of Congress, Washington dc (121). packing and unpacking the first leaves of grass 51 needed did seem to eventually turn up; he once became furious when his well-intentioned housekeeper tidied up his mess, telling her that “he had left everything exactly as he wished it to remain.”5 Whitman claimed that his room was “not so much a mess as it look[ed]” and that “the disorder [was] more suspected than real.”6 So finding order in what appeared to be chaos was a skill Whitman seems to have possessed , and it was one he put to use not only with his rooms, but with his notebooks and manuscripts as...