Poet on the Levee: Walt Whitman’s New Orleans
Walt Whitman (1819-1892), age 35, frontispiece to Leaves of Grass, Fulton St., Brooklyn, N.Y., 1855, steel engraving by Samuel Hollyer from a lost daguerreotype by Gabriel Harrison, detail.
In this new book, amble through 1850s New Orleans with an itinerant journalist who would become one of the country’s most beloved poets.
— by John Sledge
On the morning of January 15, 1887, a Camden, N.J., postman delivered a short letter to Walt Whitman from the editors of the New Orleans Picayune. “We have been informed that when you were younger and less famous than now,” it read, “you were in New Orleans and perhaps have helped on the Picayune.”
The paper was celebrating its 50th anniversary, the missive continued, and would be honored if he would share “in writing (verse or prose)” his memories of those early days. Whitman graciously responded that he had indeed worked in the Crescent City, but for a different paper, though he knew the Picayune’s people well. Nonetheless, he was delighted to share a few reminiscences of his riverside rambles and French Quarter forays, during what had been an altogether “pleasant” sojourn.
Whitman’s New Orleans period was short but productive. His three-month stint at a start-up paper known as the Daily Crescent yielded dozens of short sketches, reviews, and commentaries, many of them very funny. Walt Whitman’s New Orleans: Sidewalk Sketches and Newspaper Rambles (LSU, $29.95 hardcover) culls the best of this rich material. Intelligently edited by Stefan Schöberlein, assistant professor of English and director of digital humanities at Marshall University, the volume focuses on the pieces that deal most directly with the city’s people and culture. The organization, format, and design are attractive and include period drawings, a map, appendices, notes, and an index.
Whitman arrived in New Orleans with his 14-year-old brother, Jeff, in late February 1848. He later said he made the decision to go “on a whim,” but Schöberlein suspects a little more maneuvering was involved. Whitman met the owners of the new paper in Gotham and agreed to join their enterprise.
Bird’s eye view of New Orleans in 1851, just a few years after Whitman’s time in the city. By John Bachman, Library of Congress
He was only 28, but already had experience as a schoolteacher and a Brooklyn newspaper editor. It was his first time out of New York, but as Schöberlein explains, he was “no country bumpkin” but rather a “towering figure with prematurely graying hair,” polished or street-tough as occasion required. In his new job, he served as “exchange editor,” which meant that he shouldered a great deal of the writing, while young Jeff hauled the mail, ran copy, and handled general office tasks.
Character types especially fascinated Whitman, and he wrote witty and occasionally poignant little pieces highlighting various ones he encountered. Many would have been familiar in any southwestern American city of the time, like the dandy whose hair was done “to a turn” or the swaggering river man “who would rather shoot a man than pay him what he owed him.”
Others were distinctively of New Orleans, like the oyster vendor with his “harmonious ditty in accents” and “Miss Dusky Grisette,” a multi-racial young woman who peddled flowers by day and sexual favors by night outside the St. Charles Hotel. “She sells her flowers,” Whitman informed his readers, “and barters off sweet looks for sweeter money.” He doubted that these were her only labors, and he mused that she probably also sold “bad coffee at a picayune a cup” to rough draymen and helped her mother “with hearty good will” at the wash tubs.
Wood engraving of Orleans Street in the French Quarter, late 1840s, when Whitman frequented the neighborhood. Library of Congress
Whitman also described notable events he happened to witness, including a St. Patrick’s Day celebration, a Terpsichore Ball, an election, a Mardi Gras parade, and an attempted balloon flight by one Madame Renard at St. Charles and Poydras Streets. Of the latter event, Whitman wrote that hundreds gathered to watch the “lady aëronaut” ascend. Attired in “a black velvet cap trimmed with ostrich feathers,” a blue bodice “á la militaire,” white pantaloons, and a scarlet “kirtle,” she paraded about the balloon “with the air of a conqueress.” Unfortunately, the balloon “busted” when the basket was attached and fluttered to earth.
“The lady in question consequently did not go up,” Whitman wrote, “but, certes, her temper did not go down.”
A subsequent attempt the following day failed when the balloon crashed before she could board the basket, and the crowd, feeling cheated, seized the bright bag and ripped it to shreds.
“For a time,” Whitman observed, “Poydras street, from St. Charles to New Levee Streets, looked like a flower garden, so numerous were the red, green, blue, and yellow fragments of the destroyed balloon.”
The French Quarter thoroughly charmed Whitman. Unfortunately, his lack of French and Spanish prevented him from getting to know its singular inhabitants. Still, he walked to the Cathedral every Sunday and thoughtfully wandered the byways. The animated levees thrilled him, and he gloried in the "diagonally wedg'd-in boats, the stevedores, the piles of cotton," and the tangled mix of "carts, mules, negroes, etc."
New Orleans riverfront, late 1840s, detail from painting by unknown artist, Creative Commons
Jeff was less enthusiastic at first, as revealed in one of his letters included in the appendix. "Mother, I never wanted your cleanliness so much before as I did at our first boarding house," he wrote home. "You could not only see the dirt, but you could taste it, and you had to, too, if you ate anything at all." They soon relocated and his attitude improved.
Schöberlein writes that Whitman had at least one romantic male relationship in New Orleans, and in the book's back matter he presents the “controversial ‘Calamus Leaves’” poem as supporting evidence. Portions of this work appeared in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, but the full work did not appear in Whitman’s lifetime.
“I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,” it reads in part, “All alone stood it, and the moss hung down from the branches,/ Without any companion it grew there, glistening out with joyous leaves of dark green,/ And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself... .”
Moved, the poet breaks off a twig, twines it with some Spanish moss, and takes it to his rooms where he keeps it as a “curious token—it makes me think of manly love.” The live oak can flourish by itself “without a friend, a lover near,” but the poet knows that he cannot.
The Walt Whitman that emerges from this collection is large-minded, humorous, and alert to every sensation. New Orleans clearly intrigued him, and he made the most of his short residence there. For those accustomed to thinking of him solely as a versifier, his prose pieces included here will likely come as a delightful surprise. No connoisseur of the old river city or the “good gray poet” should miss this volume.
Faulkner House Books in the French Quarter
Walt Whitman's New Orleans
Sidewalk Sketches and Newspaper Rambles
edited, with an introduction, by Stefan Schöberlein, LSU Press, 2022
