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Reaching through me, through others through me, through all at last, our brothers, A hand to the future. The “telegram of love and greeting, signed by forty persons,” that was sent to Traubel from the Hotel Brevoort to Camden was thus extraordinarily well deserved. Exactly two months before he died, Walt Whitman rose suddenly from his pillow and, according to Traubel, spoke solemnly of Leaves, “as if with the air of a charge and farewell” (W9:389). As the eloquent outburst subsided, the old man added, “I loved it! — oh! so much! — and now an end! But the book, Horace: there are things resting on you, too, to fulfill — many things — many — many. Keep a firm hand — stand on your own feet. Long have I kept my road —made my road: long, long! Now I am at bay — the last mile is driven: but the book — the book is safe!” The charge was brilliantly fulfilled. By the time the last mile was driven on Traubel’s own self-made road, Leaves of Grass was not merely “safe” but well on its way to becoming impregnable — the supreme document of American poetry.20 The Conservator played a crucial role in this achievement. notes 1. Prose Works 1892, ed. Floyd Stovall (NYU Press, 1964), 2:415. Traubel changed “Godlike” to “godlike.” 2. The run to which I refer is in the Henry E. Huntington Library at San Marino, California. It is not only complete, but it also was unread in the half century it has resided there. The pages of almost every issue had to be cut. The library’s accession card reveals that the run came as a gift in November 1954 from “Charles E. Fienberg [sic] in memory of Horace & Anne Montgomerie Traubel.” It is plausible to assume that the great Detroit Whitman collector came to possess the set through Traubel’s daughter, Gertrude, whom he encouraged and assisted in her editorial efforts to follow up,decadeslater,withthefourthvolumeofWWCthatappearedin1953(sheeditedthe fifth volume, which appeared in 1964). She and Feinberg are listed by the Library of Congress as having made joint gifts to its massive Whitman holdings over many years, beginning in 1955. Another likely hint of the source of the run appears in the March 1916Conservator,whichofferedprepublicationpassagesfromDavidKarsner’s1919biography of Traubel. Here Karsner recorded a visit to the journal’s editorial office, where “huge, dust-covered piles and boxes of back numbers of his publication” were visible (27:119; see the full quotation on xxxix). It is appealing to assume the Huntington run was once a part of this Chestnut Street chaos. I have also consulted a complete liv Tonic Emanation run of the Conservator in the Alexander Library at Rutgers University, also a gift from the Feinberg Foundation “in memory of Horace and Anne Montgomerie Traubel.” The locations of other complete, or nearly complete, runs are given in appendix 2. 3. Dr. William Innes Homer, one of Gertrude Traubel’s three executors and the grandson of the Conservator’s longtime printer, William T. Innes III, notes this pronunciation in “Gertrude Traubel: Keeper of the Flame” Mickle Street Review 16 (online). 4. For this information and a few other details elsewhere, I am drawing from an unpublished eighteen-page typescript introduction (circa 1980) for a proposed retrospective on the Conservator that never came to fruition. The author, Joseph Niver Sr., was a close friend of Gertrude Traubel’s (and an executor for her). A copy of the introduction was kindly provided to me by Dr. Homer. The introduction is also in Niver’s papers, deposited in the Special Collections of the University of Iowa Library. Niver’s manuscript notably quotes from the text of an unpublished speech (now in the Library of Congress) given by Gertrude Traubel at a 1929 memorial to her father, in which Anne Traubel is given credit for suggesting the WWC project: “At the time Papa was courting my mother he used to call on her in the evenings after spending some time with Whitman. . . . ‘Why don’t you keep a record of these days with Walt instead of that list of books?’ For Papa had a little red notebook that he carried in his pocket in which he listed the books and the magazine and newspaper articles he had read. Mother recognized the value of the reading but knew that the listing was pale and lifeless compared to the vivid hours with Whitman. And soon Papa began to spend the first half-hour of his...

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