CAMPUS AND AREA
University Daily Kansan, February 20, 1984
Page 7
Whitman
continued from p. 1
Whitman, a central figure in 19th Century American Literature and a vastly influential figure for today's poets, was not merely a poet.
Beginning in 1847, as far as anyone knows, and probably until his death in 1892, he kept notes on virtually every aspect of his life.
IN THE LATE 1950s, eminent Whitman scholars, led by Gay Wilson Allen, author of the standard biography of Whitman, decided that a new edition of all of Whitman's writings that could be tracked down — poetry, prose works, fiction — should be collected, edited and published in as correct a form as possible.
To Grier, an associate professor of English at the University of Kansas who did his doctoral work on Whitman at the University of Pennsylvania, fell the task of the notebooks. His research was financed by grants from KU and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
"I WAS THE junior member of the team," says Grier, now 67, "and the notebooks were a messy job that none of the senior men wanted to handle. They wanted to do nice jobs like editing the poems, the printed prose and so on. The young man was delighted to have this opportunity to move into the big time."
"Notice we don't call it the complete Whitman," he says. "We call it the collected Whitman, because some stuff had been printed, but not very well printed, and the manuscript material was scattered all over the country."
He did move into the big time with his research, but a job that he thought he might be able to knock off in five years became a monumental task.
"Fortunately, the majority of it was in, say, a dozen places, but some had totally disappeared since 1902. So I wrote about 1,200 letters to various libraries and individual collectors trying to find out what they had."
BUT FINDING THE manuscripts
of the meaning of Grier's
geoholyte, archeology
The manuscripts had to be photographed, and Grier had to travel to the various holding places to compare the photographs to the originals.
Grier also ran into legibility problems.
"It wasn't that his handwriting was poor," he says. "It was partly the quality of the photograph, but also the fact that he revised so frequently.
"He'd line out and write over and
write in between and down the margin
on his side."
Once Grier obtained what he figured was a correct reading of the manuscripts, he had to sit down to transcribe it. He did this, showing Whitman's last intention
THEH CAME elaborate footnotes explaining additions and deletions, and headnotes telling where the manuscripts came from describing their physical appearance.
Such a physical description might read, for example, "White paper, 8-by-11, three lines, written in blue ink black, thick black pencil, red ink, and purple crayon."
And so off to the publisher, and then galley proofs to correct, and off to the publisher and back again with page proofs and more corrections.
Some of Grier's work was interesting; much of it was not.
He most enjoyed working with poetry
he began and was refined in the note-
bearer.
"Simply seeing some of the poems in their early versions, and just seeing how they grew. That's what kept me goined." he says.
"My favorite Whitman manuscript was a little bit, I suppose it was a manuscript about two by one, and it just has 'Banjo Poem' written on it. So obviously, he was thinking about writing a poem about a banjo.
GRIER MADE some interesting discoveries that help scholars understand Whitman and Whitman.
"In fact, he had a theory about what American opera should be. He thought that the orchestra should have banjos in it. This was the age of minstrelsy and so on. The banjo was an important instrument, and he identified it with American folk music, quite correctly as a matter of fact."
But not all of Whitman's notebooks contain poetry or intriguing bits of fiction.
"SOME OF THE notebooks are just like the little pocket notebooks everybody keeps," Grier says, "with just little memoranda to himself, the names of people he met, memoranda to look something up, a book he heard about that he wants to look at, where he can buy a brass bed, the address of a
The names, the endless names of the people Whitman met, were mostly of Indian origin.
"They all seemed to be, in the old fashioned word, roughneck types," Grier says. "Some of them had been in jail, some of them had run away from home; others called what Whitman very tactfully called 'the bad disease' — he was very prudish in his notebooks. You can almost hear him whispering it.
"He would sometimes take the trouble of copying the names from one notebook to another. I don't quite know why. Of course he was attracted to men. He was bisexual, but he wasn't a sexual athlete either, I'm pretty sure of that. I think he was just curious about people."
ANOTHER THING that made the work tedious was the fact that the notebooks were not really journals to write about. The only way the inner workings of Whitman's mind.
In fact, for the most part, they don't indicate that Whitman was a particularly deep thinker outside the realm of poetry.
"The great bulk of them show a rather ordinary, commonplace mind," Grier says. "But then you turn to these people." It's almost like two different people."
"Where did the poetry come from?" Grier asks. "If you have a genius like Einstein, it's very well to know the formulas, but what kind of man was it that produced this? Here I'm seeing the man distinctly in his shirt sleeves."
Even the commonplace can be of interest to scholars working on the menu.
"I HAVEN't reconstituted or remade the picture, but just by thousands of details, I've made a slightly better rounded picture."
Grier also came to understand how influential Whitman is among modern writers.
"When I ran into poets or other creative people, there was an inter-
Court affirms murder, rape verdicts
Ed Grier, KU associate professor of English, has spent the last 25 years working with manuscripts such as this 1847-48 version of "Song of Myself" while editing Walt Whitman's notebooks. The original manuscript was 3 inches by 5 inches.
was sufficient to support a finding of deliberation and premeditation. The severity of Ingham's injuries showed that he was fatally and intentionally, the court said.
The state's highest court also upheld the second-degree murder conviction of Timothy D. Pearson, found guilty of the stabbing death of Joyce Martin.
police in a laundromat restroom with the body of Naomi Elizabeth Inghram, who had been strangled with a scarf, cut on the head and beaten.
THE SUPREME COURT ruled that evidence showing Ingham first was assaulted in one portion of the laundromat and then taken to the restroom
But when Buiten told them he was Whitman, he was met with enthuma
esting result, because, when they're introduced to a professor they always say, "Hrump, how do you do. O Jesus, another dullard."
think they'd have given a damn, or Shakespeare. "
Rodney L. Brown was discovered by
ALTHOUGH MUCH of the work has been "a damn chore," and although he will receive no money for his labors, he feels satisfaction in what he has done.
"It's the satisfaction of doing the kind of job I entered the profession for," he says. "I came in to be a scholar. I'm a
"Whitman seemed to be kind of an open sesame with creative people," he says. "If I'd said Wordsworth, I don't
TOPEKA — The Kansas Supreme Court Saturday upheld the first-degree murder conviction of a man found guilty of killing a woman in a police homicide.
full professor now. If I hadn't done this,
I might be an underpaid senior
associate professor."
And Grier, who will retire at the end of this semester after 43 years at KU. $^{1}$
Bv. United Press International
"You bet. I have my afternoons to myself now. Now I'm going to loaf, read, see how much money I've got, see what inflation does to retirement."
¡HOLA!
La Asociacion de Estudiantes Latinoamericanos te invita a participar en las elecciones de la Junta Directiva. Hablaremos también sobre el Festival Internacional, fiestas, etc. Nos encontraremos en el Regionalist room, Kansas Union, el lunes 20 de Febrero a las 4:30 p.m.
NO FALTES!
DELTA DELTA DELTA SCHOLARSHIP AWARD
If you are an undergraduate woman enrolled at KU with a high degree of academic achievement and community service work, you could win a scholarship worth $534 (or one semester's tuition at KU). The winner of this scholarship would then be eligible to compete for the Zoe Gore Perrin National Scholarship worth $1,000!
Applications available at the Tri-Delta house or for more information, call 843-4610. Deadline is March 1, 1984.
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